Chapter Text
Hal would be the first person to stick up his hand and admit that, yeah, maybe his relationship with sleep was kind of complicated
It hadn’t always been like that. At seventeen, he had that awesome talent of face-planting into any available surface and staying out cold for twelve hours straight. Back then, his underdeveloped teenage brain was kind enough to shut the hell whenever he told it to, because it had been the brain of a kid with no real problems.
Now, he was almost forty. He was one of those sucky card-carrying adults with crows feet bunching up the corners of his eyes and a bunch of paperwork that implied extra responsibility in life. Like bills and stuff. Taxes, probably. And there was also that vague suspicion that he’d missed some kind of maturity update that everyone else received at twenty-five.
Also, he was a superhero. That didn’t help.
The ring was great for plenty of things, but it did nothing for the ass o’clock brain weasels that wanted to relitigate every dumb thing he’d said since middle school. Like that one time in seventh grade when he called Ms. Franklin mom. He’d carried the title of Mommy’s Boy for three weeks, right up until Tyler Hawkins threw up on the principals shoes and briefly became a local legend. Hal owed Tyler Hawkins a debt he could never repay.
The hero-specific anxiety was newer and a lot harder to laugh off. It lived in his chest like a little pilot light, similar to the feeling of someone who might have left the stove on. Only, the stove in this scenario was an entire alien civilisation, and the foreboding feeling was wondering if the peace treaty he’d so heroically brokered was actually going to work in the long run. Fun stuff like that.
It meant that sleep was the thing that happened to other people. In other beds, in quieter heads, in the skulls of well-adjusted individuals who had presumably resolved their seventh grade Freudian trauma. Hal mostly got the lying down portion, which would almost always end up with him hauling his ass outside for a midnight run.
This whole deal with sleep made Spooky’s big stupid rich boy bed genuinely one of the most disorienting experiences of his life.
He’d been sceptical at first. He was sceptical of Bruce's things on principle, because all of Bruce’s shit came wrapped up in old money. Hal was weird about old money. It was luxury that sorted plebeians like Hal in two specific camps: those with so much pride that excessive wealth physically repelled them unless they earned it themselves, and the helpless capitulators who’d fall over themselves to stick their noses right up the powdered asses of the one percent. Hal was categorically the former of the two.
The bed, though. The goddamn bed.
It was probably made of some proprietary Wayne Enterprises material, engineered at a molecular level by nerds who’d been told that their only goal was to make Hal Jordan feel like the hands of God were coming to cradle him specifically. Big meaty divine hands, the heavenly touch.
The whole thing was excessive. Though, it kind of made sense. Hal had come to realise that Spooky also had a complicated relationship with sleep.
Bruce had this insane habit of staying up for as long as physically possible. He’d continue to Batman his way through like at full operational capacity until his body unilaterally overruled him. Or at least until Alfred enforced a strict bedtime. Once either of those things happened, Bruce was essentially dead.
It had been a surprise, the first time Hal spent the full night with Bruce. Like, actually sleeping instead of marathon fucking for hours until one of them was kicked out. He’d tried to shake him awake three times before checking his pulse. It turned out the only reliable method to wake him were life-or-death emergencies, or if you called in the butler in for back up.
Hence the comfortable bed. If you’re going to be a maniac about your sleeping habits, then at least the bed was a good motivator to actually enforce a reasonable schedule.
Now that most of the kids were old enough to exist without a helicopter parent, Bruce was getting better at sleeping like a normal person. Usually on his off days from Batmanning, if at all. On those days, if Hal just so happened to be in Gotham, he got the pleasure of not only taking advantage of that big, beautiful, stupid bed, but doing it with his big, beautiful, stupid partner actually present and horizontal beside him.
He’d slept in this bed several times over the years he’d been in this thing with Bruce.
(Read: dating him. Hal was dating him. He and Spooks were in some kind of real ‘relationship’ conducted in the spaces between saving the world and their respective hangups about being ‘official’. That was the factual situation. He just didn't love to dwell on the label, because labels made things real, and Hal was empirically awful about real things.)
As a situation, it was honestly great. Spooky’s bed was so comprehensively comfortable that his body’s first response was this weird kind of mammalian gratitude. That specific spiritual shit that made him want to curl up like a beached manatee and bask until someone physically rolled him off.
And yeah, he also got to sleep beside the guy he was sort of in love with, which was good too. That was great. The guy he loved, sure.
But the bed, man. He’d put in some serious hours here. Sleeping. Relaxing. Convalescing. Sex. It was all about being able to lie down, shut himself off from the world entirely, and approach the closest thing to genuine nirvana available to the modern man.
Unless the dog stepped on his dick.
“—hhholySHIT—!”
The sound that came out of Hal was not one he’d be personally claiming. It was a sort of squawk that departed his body before he had any say in the matter, and he folded around the impact point the way any man would when his genetic legacy has been willfully crushed by ninety pounds of German Shepherd.
Beside him Bruce woke up the way Bruce always woke up when threatened, which was not the normal way people woke up.
He went from completely unconscious to vertical in less of the time it took for Hal to descend from whatever astral plane he’d been launched into. The Batman instinct snapped online like a circuit completed at the prospect of violence, and suddenly there was an elbow and a tactical bat-knife whirling towards the middle of the bed to neutralise the threat.
“Boof,” said Ace as he padded serenely over Hal’s midsection. He picked his way across the wreckage of Hal’s manhood, turned once in a slow circle, and inserted himself between them.
Bruce stared dumbly at the dog for a moment. The knife was still open in his hand, and his hair was doing something extraordinary. It got like that sometimes when he slept weird on his side. Hal would usually acknowledge it, if he wasn’t so distracted by the state of his balls.
When Spooky’s body computed that the situation was not, in fact, a situation, he folded the knife, tucked it back under his pillow, and dropped face first into the mattress.
“You’re in his spot,” he muttered into the sheets.
“Are you kidding me?” Hal wheezed. “He’s never had a spot in this bed.”
“Maybe you just didn’t notice.”
“Bruce. Baby. He broke my nuts.”
“And what do you want me to do about it?”
Hal made a wounded noise. “I don’t know,” he said. “Kiss ‘em better?”
Bruce lazily reached out and patted the sheets over Hal’s poor dick.
That’s what Hal got for expecting sympathy from a weirdo who probably had secret balls of steel. He was honestly briefly tempted to just knee him between the legs, just to share the pain. Especially since Bruce had already moved on with his life. He’d shucked an arm around Ace’s neck and rearranged himself into a position that left no ambiguity about the hierarchy in this bedroom.
Once upon a time, Hal had been so excited to learn that Bruce had dogs.
Ever since he was a kid, he’d always loved the little guys. Dogs got it. Dogs understood what mattered. They were so uncomplicated and approached life with an incredible enthusiasm that made everything else seem so small.
Life had screwed him over in his childhood dream of acquiring a dog for himself. Back when Dad was alive, his parents had been pretty strict on the whole No Pets thing. Jack had been allergic, and apparently Mom and Dad thought that Jack’s stupid sinuses were more important than Hal having a best friend. They had to make do with a single goldfish that went belly up after Hal’s phase of roller blading indoors led to disastrous, furniture-breaking results.
Then came the Air Force and living on base. His only canine experience had been the mangy one-eyed stray his CO would chase away from the mess (whereupon Hal would periodically lure back with promises of meats and tummy rubs).
After that, it had been temporary apartments with their no-pets policies. A brief stint with Carol who had been more of a cat person, and by the time he’d finally landed a place that’d theoretically permit a dog, he’d become Green Lantern. There was a fundamental cruelty of leaving a good boy alone in a Coast City one-bedroom while its owner flung himself into the outer reaches of the galaxy.
He’d heroically accepted his dogless fate, up until he started, like, officially dating Bruce and realised that came with a whole menagerie of animals (and kids). Cats, cows, and two big beautiful dogs.
Unfortunately, Ace hated him.
“He’s doing it again,” Hal said.
“Hm.”
“He’s glaring at me.”
“He’s not glaring at you.”
“He literally is.”
“Mmhmm.”
After over a decade of knowing each other, and a few years of being intimate, Hal knew exactly what the tone of mmhmm meant. This particularly one meant: I hear you. I love you. I do not give a single shit about what you’re talking about right now. Goodnight.
He sent Bruce a withering stare, on the reasonable grounds that Bruce was his partner and therefore contractually obligated to occasionally take his side. Or at minimum, he could open his eyes and acknowledge that his dog was conducting active psychological warfare against a guest.
Apparently, even just looking at Spooky was enough of a sin, because Ace immediately started growling. It wasn’t anything too menacing, really. Nothing like the holy-shit-this-dog’s-feral noise he’d make when faced with a real villain, but it was enough of a low rumbling that it made Hal freeze where he lay and consider the choices that led him into this bed.
“Good boy?” he tried.
“Rrrrr,” replied Ace, dickishly.
As if the growling wasn’t enough, the dog began to stretch himself out. It was one of those luxurious, asshole kind of stretches that started somewhere in his shoulders and moved throughout his entire body like a wave. It concluded, naturally, with both of his back paws digging directly into Hal’s ribs.
With the most deliberately shit-eating stare an old dog could muster, Ace began to tread.
“Are you serious?”
The dog’s hind paws were huge, and they were incredibly targeted. Hal wasn’t exactly a small guy. Sure, he wasn’t as built up as Spooky (because that asshole set an entirely different metric to be judged on), but he had a body that reflected a fairly dedicated relationship to the whole superhero gig he had going on. He was lean, he had core strength. And he currently had a disproportionately strong dog trying to push him out of the bed.
“There’s room enough for all of us,” he tried. “Look at this thing. It’s huge. We can share the damn bed.”
“Go back to sleep,” Bruce grumbled into Ace’s fur. He had progressed to spooning the dog at some point in the last thirty seconds. “It’s late.”
Hal glanced at the clock on the nightstand. “It’s six o’clock in the morning.”
“It’s early, then.”
“I’ll go back to sleep when the dog stops trying to assert dominance.”
“Leave the dog alone.”
The tactical problem was this: Ace, handsome boy that he was, was trained in whatever dog-jutsu Bruce had absorbed from the monk-guru-sensei powerhour. In the last five minutes, he’d already demonstrated a willingness to deploy ball-crushing tactics against hims without warning or remorse, and had managed to relocate Hal’s entire body at least four inches away from his original position in the bed.
“Let’s talk about this.”
The low growling didn’t stop, but it didn’t get worse either. For now, Hal was certain he wasn’t actually at risk of a Batdog mauling. Almost certain. Okay, it was around fifty-fifty.
“I’m not asking for a whole lot of real estate here. I’ll take the edge. Give me, like, a foot of space, and I’ll be so still you won’t even know I’m here. I’ll be so quiet for you, buddy. You won’t hear a thing.”
“You snore,” Bruce muttered, already three-quarters gone .
“Shut the hell up.” Hal kept his eyes on Ace. “You and me, we got off on the wrong foot, and I don't think that's what either of us wants long-term. I want us to be friends. I want to throw things for you. I want to give you pieces of my dinner even when I probably shouldn't. I have a lot to offer.”
He tested the waters by edging forward, just a fraction, just enough to reclaim maybe an inch of lost territory. In return, Ace’s rumble immediately climbed a register and Hal revised his fifty-fifty chance of mauling to sixty-forty instead.
“I will muzzle you,” he hissed. “Don’t test me.”
Try me, the dog said with his little doggy eyes. They were incredibly expressive, those eyes. Very pointed. Very Batman-esque.
While Hal was genuinely considering whether he was about to square up with a dog at six in the morning, Bruce’s arm moved. He didn’t lift his face, nor did he seem to have any conscious engagement with the situation. He did, however, have the wherewithal to reach out and close his hand gently around Ace’s snout.
The transformation was instantaneous and genuinely kind of offensive.
The growling stopped. The tail started up instead. It thump thump thumped against the mattress — and, because the dog was a dick, also against Hal’s kneecap. Like he wanted to make absolutely certain that Hal understood the current power structure.
Ace curled up deeper into Bruce’s embrace and gave Hal the most self-satisfied huff a dog could give. There was an insult laced in that soft doggy sigh.
“I see what you’re doing,” Hal said, very quietly. “You’re trying to bully me outta here. I get it.”
“Go to sleep, Hal.”
“I'm hanging on by a thread here, baby."
"Then sleep on the floor."
"Wow. Love you too." Ace’s paw found a particularly sensitive spot right between his ribs, and it took every scrap of willpower he possessed not to flinch and hand the dog a tactical victory. “I just want to be his friend. I have so much to give.”
“Mmhmm.”
“I’m serious,” he continued. “I’m great with dogs. Ask anyone. I had a whole plan. We were going to have a thing, me and him. I was going to be his favourite.” The dog kicked him harder.
Bruce grunted, which was probably the last coherent contribution he was going to make to this conversation for the foreseeable future.
“Boof,” Ace said instead.
Hal glared at him. “I’m still going to be your favourite,” he muttered.
Probably not his strongest closer, but it was all he had.
He held the dog's gaze for another three seconds. Ace blinked, slowly, in the way that cats did when they wanted you to know the contempt was intentional and that you were never going to win against them. Hal had not previously been aware that dogs could do this.
With a petulant huff that he felt was entirely justified given the circumstances, he turned over to face the wall — at the edge of the goddamn beautiful bed to which he had been exiled. A sliver of grey morning light was starting to make itself known at the edge of the curtains. If he was lucky, he could claw back a few more hours.
Ace pushed at his back the entire time.