Chapter Text
Clark woke in a puddle of sunshine on a bed that wasn’t his. Consciousness seemed to bring a wave of disoriented… pain? Clark didn’t have a lot of experience with pain beyond Kryptonite poisoning, but his mouth was fuzzy, his eyes itched, and his head felt stuffed with cotton. It felt like the way people described a hangover.
He sniffed, trying to clear the pressure behind his eyes, and inhaled the scent of mint and shampoo. Beside him, two hearts set an off-beat rhythm, and the rightness of the sound rang in the caverns of his chest.
Clark cracked one eye open. There was a child below his outstretched arm, face down and gently snoring, the boy’s limbs starfished across the bed. He was using Clark’s cape as a blanket. Clark didn’t recognize the child, but he felt the dawning certainty that the boy was his son.
“What…” Clark breathed. He felt like he should be freaking out, and his lack of concern was, itself, concerning.
He hadn’t had a son yesterday. Now he did. Which meant…
The night crashed through Clark’s memory and stripped him of all illusions of dignity.
Had he actually started… nesting? Oh, lord, he had bundled up the boy in his apartment, acting like an overprotective guard dog, even putting himself between Robin and Batman. He had growled at Batman – heck, he had kissed Batman!
Batman was going to kill him, and Clark was going to deserve it, and…
…and Bruce Wayne was Batman.
Bruce Wayne, who had kissed Clark like a man on fire, desperate and shaking, holding nothing back. He had kissed Clark and asked him to stay.
Steady certainty swept through Clark’s blood like sunlight. He looked up, away from the boy tucked beneath his chin, to find the other heartbeat he could hear. Bruce was sitting propped up against an absurd number of pillows and reading from a tablet. He glanced down at Clark after a moment, smiling like Batman.
“Returned to the land of the living?” Bruce didn’t bother to keep his voice down, and Clark shot a concerned look at Dick, who was still passed out between them.
“Nothing short of a siren can wake him in the mornings,” Bruce said, reaching down to ruffle the boy’s hair. “A parade could pass by the window and he’d still be snoring.”
“What…” Clark breathed, with no idea how to finish the question.
What happened to me?
What does Dick think about this?
What did I ever do to be worthy of being here, in what can only be your bed?
Bruce looked down at him and arched one eyebrow. His expression was infuriatingly smug, but he was just… so pretty in the mid-morning light. There was just enough ultraviolet to see the darker shades reflecting off of his cheekbones, trailing up his face, along his temples and into his hair. Bruce was wearing a sleeveless tank top, and Clark was able to follow the lines of colour down his neck and over the swell of his biceps, where they gently faded around his wrists.
“Something wrong?” Bruce asked. There was some hint of nervousness that Clark couldn’t place. He shook his head.
“I like your stripes,” Clark said without thinking. He blushed furiously as Bruce’s eyebrows rose.
“My… what?”
“Uh…” Clark was going to ask Diana to smack him in the head the second he got back to the League – his brain obviously needed a hard reset. “So, um… humans have stripes?” He sounded inane. He needed to stop talking. “They’re called Blaschko’s lines. I used to think… I didn’t realize I was the only one who could see them, until I… well, it was a very awkward date after I mentioned it. I know it’s weird, but I- it’s just… everyone has them.”
Bruce was staring at him with barely contained curiosity. “And you like mine?”
Clark’s face was on fire as he nodded. “Yes,” he said, “they’re… bold.”
Bruce hummed, as if this was a perfectly normal compliment.
“I think I’m still a little… off, after last night,” Clark admitted, squeezing his eyes closed.
“That’s unsurprising,” Bruce said. He reached out and ran a hand through Clark’s hair, playing with the curls for a moment. Clark pushed his head towards the sensation, preening like a cat in a sunbeam. “Do you feel… lucid?”
“Mmhm,” Clark hummed.
“Unconvincing,” Bruce said.
“I can recite the alphabet backwards if you want?”
Bruce snorted. “I’ll take your word for it. I’m…” he cleared his throat, and Clark felt as anxiety lit him from within. “I’m sorry, again, for not knowing.”
Last night, those words would have been enough to send Clark reeling, but now, with his arms wrapped around their son and tucked beneath the same blanket on Bruce’s bed… which actually had an inordinate number of blankets, now that Clark was looking. He rose up on one arm, glancing around the bed, and…
“…did I do this?” Clark asked.
Bruce looked around, taking in the soft mounds of comforters, the careful ring of pillows, and the intricately layered blankets, as if he was seeing them for the first time. Then he shrugged. “I helped a little,” he said.
“You did?”
Bruce nodded to the corner behind Clark’s head, and he turned to find the black mass of Batman’s cape shimmering with reflected ultraviolet. It had slipped under his cheek and over his hip during the night. If he tried, Clark could almost remember tender hands tucking it around his shoulders as he was falling asleep.
“You seemed to like it,” Bruce said, turning back to the tablet on his lap, “and everything I’ve read indicates that the addition of favoured clothing to the nest can help to reinforce a bond.”
“Bond?” Clark asked, perking up and looking over at Bruce, who just nodded back at him.
“A courtship bond,” he said, as if the words didn’t pull the breath from Clark’s lungs.
“And you… want that?” Clark asked. “You still want…” he trailed off as Bruce gave him the full force of his attention.
“Clark,” Bruce said, “I’m sorry that we skipped the First Asking, and the gift ceremonies, and every other ritual, because you deserved to be courted properly. And I’m sorry that you even have to consider whether or not I want this. But trust me when I say I could never, in my life, regret loving you.”
Clark’s mouth opened, but what came out was unintelligible, ending in a sputtered, “I- you… I… oh lord.” Bruce looked on, evidently amused by the lack of coherency. Eventually Clark managed to say, “You can really just… say it, that easily?”
“Yes,” Bruce said. “When I make a decision, I do not half-ass the execution.”
“No,” Clark muttered, “I suppose you don’t.” A quiet reverence passed through him as he looked up at Bruce. Clark stretched out his hand, careful not to jostle Dick – who was still, impossibly, asleep – and laid his fingers over Bruce’s wrist. The other man didn’t hesitate to weave their fingers together.
“I love you,” Clark said, and the newness of the words made him feel clumsy. “I love you,” he said again.
Bruce leaned down and pressed a kiss to his cheek, and it made his blood sing for all that it was chaste and sweet. “I love you, too,” Bruce whispered in his ear.
Clark’s eyes closed, just for a moment, as he held Bruce’s hand and felt the warmth of their cheeks pressed together, hearing the breathing of their son between them.
When he blinked them open, his eyes caught on Bruce’s tablet. It looked like he’d been trawling through the Kryptonian database again. Clark didn’t wonder why, after the night they’d had, but some of the titles seemed…
“What on Earth were you reading?” Clark asked
Bruce snorted and propped himself up. “The height of Kryptonian literature,” he said. He flicked through a few screens to the main file management page, then filtered for ‘last accessed’. The list was…
“Twice Courted, Once Loved?” Clark read, “Nesting with the Villain? The Scientist’s Baby? Bruce what the – is… wait, did you actually read That Time I was Reborn as the Tyrant’s Surprise Child and Helped him Court the Hero?”
“That one’s surprisingly good,” Bruce said.
“They sound like discount romance books.”
Bruce shrugged. “The translation matrix might need a bit of polish, but the plots and characters are solid. Completely different sensibilities, of course, and it took me a few books to catch the nuances of some of the romantic gestures – for example, did you know that the third of the Gifting ceremonies has almost the same cultural implications as the North American ideas around a loss of virginity? There was even a practice of pre-emptively giving ‘promise rings’ that correspond with the Third Gift.”
“I… did not know that,” Clark said, voice strangled.
“And yet, a courting pair are not considered to be in a monogamous courtship until after the Times of Solitude, so there’s a wealth of angst that comes from the lunar cycle between the Third Gift and the First Confinement. Honestly, Clark, you should read the passage where Tem-Hu is grieving his relationship with Pen-Ra because he believes she’s chosen another partner. A real tear-jerker.”
Clark looked up at the smug grin on Bruce’s face. “It made you cry?”
“No,” Bruce said, flashing a smile that was as sharp as it was fake, “but I’m emotionally repressed.”
“You actually like these books,” Clark said slowly. “You’re talking like it’s a joke, but… you’re enjoying them.”
The lightest of blushes poured heat into Bruce’s cheeks. “Maybe,” he said. “I like… seeing pieces of you in these characters. And, compared to what happens at the beginning of Who Raised the Night, your reaction to being pseudo-rejected was actually quite tame.”
“What happens in-”
“Murder-suicide.”
“Yikes,” Clark said.
Bruce nodded sagely. “It’s not my favourite, but it did finally give me a clue about what happens in the Ritual of the Eyes, so at least it wasn’t a total waste of time.”
Clark opened his mouth to say something that would spin out their banter, but Dick snorted in his sleep and then abruptly sat up. His hair was a riot of curls and frizz, flat along the side he’d been sleeping, and a line of drool ran down the corner of his mouth. He swiped a hand over his face with such weariness that Clark was certain the habit must have come from Bruce.
His heart leaped into his throat as Dick looked down at where Bruce and Clark were holding hands. Then he took hold of each wrist and yanked them apart.
The sting of rejection didn’t have time to settle on Clark’s shoulders before Dick turned to Bruce, pointed one wobbly finger, and said, “no corrupting my new dad.” Then he flipped forward into a summersault and stood, dragging his half-conscious body (and Clark’s cape) to the door. On his way out, Dick turned, pointed at his eyes with two fingers, and then jabbed them towards Bruce.
Clark and Bruce watched as the door swung slowly shut.
“I explained everything to him,” Bruce said, still staring at the closed door. “He’s pretty thrilled that he now has Superman for a father.”
“Hm,” Clark said, “but not thrilled that his dads are holding hands?”
“Cain instinct,” Bruce said easily, dipping down to kiss just below Clark’s ear. “More resources for him if he doesn’t have siblings.”
“I- ah, I don’t think he needs to worry about that, with us,” Clark said. He bared his throat without thinking, and one of Bruce’s hands cupped the back of his neck.
“Maybe,” Bruce whispered, “but don’t you want to test that theory?”
“Yes,” Clark said.
And they didn’t leave the nest for a very, very long time.