Buying the Farm

"It's the corn that gets to me the most," Clark said, elbows resting on the porch railing. "Is that a weird thing to say?"

"It's the least weird thing I've heard all week." Bruce sat himself on one of the many boxes stacked on the porch and watched the last removal van trundle its way off the Kent's property. The sun cast the last of its light at a golden angle, dousing the fields in warm tones. "Knee high by fourth of July, right?"

"That's how it goes." Clark laughed, low and soft. "Tends to do better than that, these days. But that's what made me realize I'd been deep sixed for a while. Here's the corn, up to my waist, and last time I looked it was November, you know?"

The last time Bruce had been in Kansas, it had been for a funeral, corn shorn down to stubble. "Feels like years ago," he said.

"Feels like a—just a heartbeat ago. Time is all wrong, still." Clark frowned, staring out at the horizon. Bruce may have spent months marinating in his own guilt, but to Clark, the wound was still fresh. He couldn't know how often Bruce had stood at Clark's monument like a mourner or a worshipper, determined to be neither but still inevitably both.

"About that," he said. He'd abandoned his coat and rolled up his shirt sleeves to help move Mrs. Kent—Martha, to help Martha—

(save Martha)

—move back home, and he shivered despite the warmth of the evening. Clark turned to rest his back against the railing and folded his arms. The final glimmer of sun haloed him; Bruce had to look away for a moment and do his best to appear altogether unperturbed by the lingering wonderment of his existence. He took a deep breath. Clark had been his sword of Damocles for so long, and when he'd finally crashed down on him and struck him through the heart, somehow Bruce hadn't been the one left dead and buried. There was no justice in that.

"I owe you an apology, Clark. Several apologies. Extremely lengthy apologies. I learned everything I could about Superman, and thought that he needed to die. Then, when he was dead, I learned a lot about Clark, and how little he deserved what I did to him."

That was an unprecedented amount of sharing, but Clark only shrugged. "It's okay," he said. "Nothing a little amateur necromancy couldn't fix."

For someone who'd been regarded as a somber, god-like figure, he sure had flippancy down to an art. It was inappropriately infuriating. "I'm trying to say that I'm sorry," Bruce said, bolstering his patience. "Please, could you—"

"I know what you're trying to say. How long is it going to take you to figure out that I've already forgiven you?"

Bruce sighed and passed a hand over his face. "No," he said. "It's not that easy."

"Sure it is. Things I believe in," Clark ticked his list off on his fingers as he spoke. "Truth, justice, forgiveness, journalistic integrity and home-made apple pie. Speaking of—will you stay for dinner?"

"Clark," Bruce said.

"Bruce." Clark pushed off from the porch railing and came to sit on the boxes next to him, unbearably earnest and altogether too close. "You brought me back. I'd consider us even for that alone, for what it meant to Ma, and what it's done for the world. But you went and got the farm back, too, so really, actually, I owe you one."

He looked at Bruce with calm intensity, pressed shoulder to shoulder, offering him a reprieve from the relentlessness of his regret. It was too much; he suddenly understood Clark's facetiousness.

So. "You're not the only one who can buy the farm with aplomb," he said.

"I can't believe you just said that to me," Clark said with such quiet hurt that Bruce's heart sank, but in the next moment his smile let loose. He nudged Bruce with his elbow. "That was a joke. Stop looking at me like your ice cream just fell out of its cone, you're breaking my heart."

Said so casually. Bruce dared himself and both lost and won. He reached out to press his hand over Clark's chest, to cover his heart and to feel it beat.

"What's it for, Bruce?" Clark said. "The guilt. What are you going to do with it?"

Bruce shook his head. How to explain that he didn't know how else to be? Clark's hand covered his and drew it away from his chest, but he didn't let go.

"I—" Bruce looked down at their clasped hands. "I have to get back to Gotham."

"Tonight?"

"Every night."

"It's where you go to feel worse about yourself. Take a night off."

"Clark, I—" This would be easier if Clark understood that Bruce Wayne was the embodiment of an emotionally unavailable man. It would be easier if that were the entire truth.

"Stay here tonight."

Clark was leaning in, his face turned to Bruce's—and Bruce, he was no stranger to the complexities of intimacy but found himself just a little bit honestly terrified nonetheless. He had made a flurry of bad decisions regarding Clark, shaped by his pragmatism perhaps, but bad decisions all the same. He didn't know if this one would be any kinder in the long run.

Could he become somebody who was receptive to this—this affection, and in turn, let his own feelings bear out? It seemed unlikely at this point. A perpetual vulnerability, deliberately introduced, ran counter to everything he'd taught himself to be. It would be like pressing a blade to his own throat.

But perhaps it was too late to worry about that. If he were to be honest with himself, he'd been holding it there from the moment they were introduced—in the disaster of Metropolis, the disaster of Lex's gala, the disaster of their fight. The long disaster of Clark's death, and now the disaster of his return.

Too late for damage control. No reason, then, that Bruce shouldn't listen to his sigh and the rustle of the corn and the steady drum of their hearts, catch Clark's face in both hands, and kiss him.