Fatigue is the Best Pillow

Bruce has dozed for ten minutes, may be twenty. Long enough for sweat to dry and the feverish heat of sex to fade, and enough that Clark has drifted off next to him, hands tucked against his face, hair in disarray against the sheets. He doesn't need to sleep, of course, but Bruce appreciates the solidarity even as he resents how easily Clark can punch out.

He is tired, always is, but it's the wrong kind of weariness. Physically exhausting himself generally works to knock him out cold; his best sleep is always after a long night of gruelling patrol. It switches him off at the mains and doesn't give his brain a chance to boot up the static of his memories. But with Clark and Diana on-side, there's not so much heavy lifting to do. He hasn't been coming home at dawn and dropping into a stone-cold stupor, and that's the real kicker. Instead, he lies in bed as his mind dredges up whatever bullshit it wants to torture him with that particular morning and keeps looping over and over and over, wearing him out but not letting him go.

(That's why Clark first came to him. He must have heard him tossing and turning a city away.)

Bruce sighs shallowly and closes his eyes again. Just a half-hour of peace. That's all he asks.

After three hundred and forty-seven futile seconds, he rolls out of bed, lets the dipped mattress up gently, throws on some sweats, and then goes to beat the living hell out of his punchbag.

"It's only just gone eight," Clark says, leaning in the carved-rock doorway to the Cave's gym. He scrubs his hair back, misbuttoned shirt riding up over his stomach, jeans slung low on his hips. He gives Bruce a sweetly bemused raise of his eyebrows, as if he hadn't come all over Bruce's chest only an hour ago.

Bruce lays a mean one-two into the bag, a dull thud-thud and rattle of chain. "Nowhere I have to be today," he says, shakes the impact out of his knuckles. "And I can't sleep."

"Bats in your belfry, huh," Clark says.

Bruce glances at him sharply, but there's nothing but sympathy on Clark's face. He batters at the bag a few more times rather than look at that, and welcomes the burn in the muscles of his arms.

"Hey. Come back to bed."

"And stare at the ceiling some more? No thanks."

"Well," Clark wraps one arm around the punchbag, stilling it. He drags his thumb over Bruce's sweat-slick collarbone. "I thought you might find a better way to wear yourself out."

He probably means to be seductive, but hits a note between awkward and goofy instead.

"Heh," Bruce says, huffing out the breath like it's a release valve. He tugs at Clark's shirt collar, bringing him in so he can feel that earnest mouth of his, the curve of his smile against Bruce's lips. "Or we could stay down here."

"Hmm."

It certainly doesn't take a genius to know when Clark is being accommodating, and he allows Bruce to manhandle him into position, hanging on the punchbag, hips tilted back. "Spread 'em," Bruce growls in his ear, and slaps Clark's hip when he gets laughter in response.

"You say that to all the boys?" Clark says, over his shoulder.

"Only the troublemakers." Bruce slides his hand over the broad expanse of Clark's shoulders, down the slabbed muscle of his back and then around his stomach, over the solid geometry of his abdomen. When he thumbs the button of Clark's fly, he's already half-hard, hot against Bruce's palm and stiffening quickly when Bruce squeezes him and lets go.

Clark makes a breathy sound and presses back, encouraging Bruce to slip his jeans down over his thighs. "Best behavior, then," he says, in a filthy murmur that has no right coming from that face. "Scout's honor."

Bruce drags two fingers over Clark's lips; he opens his mouth and takes them in. Clark sucks obediently, tongue working over them. He nips and scrapes with his teeth like he can glean all of Bruce's secrets from his fingerprints.

Bruce grunts and takes his hand away, leaning in to kiss Clark's ear as he works his slicked fingers inside. Clark sighs and trembles and Bruce can tell he is trying not to clench down on him; his thigh muscles are tight with restraint. (They don't do it this way often. Clark is adamant that it's a risk—always so conscious of his strength, and if only Bruce had known that, from the start—and so maybe there's an element of pity, amelioration for his rough morning, but Bruce still won't snub such a gift.)

"Bruce," Clark is saying, arms tense where he's gripping the punchbag. "Bruce…"

Between the adrenaline from his workout and the haziness of not enough sleep, Bruce realizes he's been at a disconnect from his body, something that comes slamming back into place with Clark's plaintive gasps. He is hard, straining in his sweatpants in a way that could qualify him to challenge Clark for the Man of Steel title. He licks his palm and strokes himself. "Is it enough?"

"Fine, it's fine," Clark says, "come on."

Bruce butts the head of his cock against Clark's ass, easing in slowly as though he might actually hurt the guy. There's a little too much friction but it feels good for now, satisfying in the same way that stitching up a wound is, or pulling out a splinter.

"Fuck," Bruce says, under his breath, and Clark arches his back at that, seating him completely inside. Bruce spreads his hand on the small of Clark's back and feels the interplay of muscles under his palm. He groans and slides himself halfway out only for Clark to push back onto his cock again.

"You'll never get any sleep at this rate."

"I'm just warming up." Bruce grabs his hips and gets deeper with a series of short thrusts that make the punchbag swing and Clark brace himself hard, muscles shuddering. There's something heady about taking Clark like this, to have the Superman gasping and vulnerable under him, and there's also something humbling about how quickly Clark has come to trust him. Bruce wonders sometimes why he thought the amiable farmboy was an act and not as much the heart of him as the cape is.

(Bruce tries not to think about the boot on his throat, the fear in his eyes at his sudden mortality.

He fails.)

He picks up a relentless pace, one hand tight enough on Clark's hip to leave bruises, if he ever bruised, the other curled into the hair at the nape of his neck. Clark's turned his head, pillowing his cheek against the canvas of the punchbag. Maybe he can smell the musk of Bruce's sweat there, or pinpricks of blood left in imprints of his knuckles. Either way his eyes are closed, mouth parted, a determined set to his brow as though he's concentrating on the pure sensation of it.

Bruce can't blame him; he's rapidly getting out of control, slamming into Clark just to hear the soft noises he makes, the way he bites at his lower lip. He presses his forehead against Clark's back, grinding deep, and his orgasm is like being suckerpunched, leaving him slumped over Clark's body and blinking away dark blots at the edge of his vision. He can feel his pulse thundering, and under it in counterpoint, Clark's steady, slow heartbeat.

He slides out, palms at the firm flesh of Clark's inner thigh, and gathers the slickness he's left there. When he touches Clark's cock, he groans and shifts and the punchbag creaks. Fragments of stone flake and scatter from the Cave ceiling where the bag chain is sunk into the bedrock.

"Steady," Bruce says, even as his own legs are in danger of dumping him on the floor. His endorphins are settling to a satisfying ebb, and maybe if he closed his eyes he could sleep for a while, but he'd just be skimming. He needs to be put out of commission.

He works at Clark's cock, rough twists of his hand over the head and slow, teasing strokes down its length. When he's close, read in the telltale tensing and relaxing of his body, Bruce backs off and leaves him hanging there.

"Oh, you are not," Clark says, and there's the spark, there's what Bruce is looking for. Clark wraps one arm around his waist, pulls flush and kisses him roughly, a hand grabbing his ass.

Bruce breaks the kiss to flash him his best worst obnoxious grin. The next thing he knows, he's flat on his back in the bedroom.

Bruce hits the mattress hard enough to bounce, the impact driving the air out of his lungs. Somewhere between punchbag and bed he's lost his clothes and Clark looms over him, startlingly blue eyes bright and intent and both hands pressing Bruce's shoulders against the sheets. Bruce feels himself tense instinctively. His heart pounds with a rush of adrenaline as though he's in danger. There are some things he can never get separated out quite right.

Clark raises his eyebrows in a silent question. Bruce realizes he can sense his elevated pulse—can probably hear it—and his throat tightens with something raw, momentarily overwhelmed by how attuned Clark is to him. It's a level of intimacy that is leaps beyond sex, and riding on that, a reminder that Clark exists outside of Bruce's mortal sphere, that he's not just another man like Bruce is.

It's easy to forget that, when he can brace his feet and use the strength in his thighs to turn Clark over, and Clark will pretend for him, will just roll with it and drop onto his back obediently.

Bruce straddles him, draws his hand over Clark's chest and tries to get his head straight again, to get back down to the physicality of it. Instead he wonders if Clark can hear his bones knit and his bruises heal, or if he can tell that the joints of his fingers have started aching on wet days. He is not a man who scares easily, so he doesn't know why that's so terrifying to him.

Then Clark nudges his hips upward in a brash, unsubtle reminder that's he's turned on, and that it's entirely Bruce's fault. "In your own time, old man," he says, grinning. "Unless you're having more fun daydreaming." He scuffs Bruce's chin with his thumb, the nail rasping across his stubble.

The dawn is breaking, early sun turning the lake's surface to light. It refracts into the lakehouse with a warm serenity. Bruce dips his head and lets himself smile a little. "I'm sorry," he says. "That was rude."

"An apology from Bruce Wayne. Maybe I'm the one dreaming."

Bruce rolls his eyes.

"Could I get it in writing? I want to frame it and put it on my desk."

"You've got a smart mouth on you, Kent."

Clark laughs, runs the palm of his hand over Bruce's hip. "So I've been told. But. Listen, Bruce, I know you're a guy who likes to keep his secrets. I understand that as well as you do, but if there's ever something you need to get off your chest, I'm also a good listener."

Bruce thinks about the vibration of his heartbeat, the grind of his bones, the ragged cut of his breath, speared on a nightmare. The sound pearls make striking a sidewalk. The sound a hero makes hitting the ground.

"I'm actually a big fan of not talking," Bruce says, and he knows he's edging into the persona, the caricature, but that's what it's there for. "Especially when I should be screwing."

"Then what's the hold up?" Clark asks, and tosses him a bottle of lube. Bruce catches it one-handed, slicks up his fingers and refuses to break eye contact while he works himself open and works himself down, taking Clark inside with the same kind of determination he approaches everything else.

Bruce rides him slow, working hard to feel the sweat break over his shoulders and forehead and the exertion pull at the muscles in his thighs and calves. He is mostly soft, still recovering from their gym session, but it doesn't diminish the pleasure he takes in this. Less of a distraction, if anything.

One of Clark's hand settles on gripping the inside of his thigh, the other rude against his chest, tracing the gnarl of an old scar and then brushing over his nipple. The stab of pleasure makes Bruce falter in his rhythm, and he grabs Clark's hand away so he can't do it again. He takes his other hand, too, before he can get any clever ideas, and pins his wrists above his head.

Clark grins up at him; he could break free as easy as breathing, but instead he wets his lips and groans and takes advantage of Bruce leaning over to gather some leverage. He thrusts hard enough to drive Bruce's forehead against his shoulder, taking control of the pace and making Bruce work to keep his balance.

Bruce's stubbled cheek rasps against Clark's collarbone and his breath is humid in the crook of his shoulder. He gets a little lost in it and doesn't remember when Clark got his hands free, but his palm is cupped at the nape of Bruce's neck, the other in the small of his back, holding Bruce steady as he grinds down on his cock.

All he can hear is the rattle of the bedframe, his own panting and Clark murmuring, "Good, you're so good." He wants to tell him how much that isn't true, but he can feel himself starting to come, still only half-hard and trapped between them, a shuddering orgasm that runs deeper and longer than his earlier release.

It's still not enough.

"Good," Clark says again. He slips out and maneuvers them so he's pressed to Bruce's back, still hard and hot against Bruce's skin but obviously willing to settle in for the morning. Bruce feels him kiss his shoulder.

"Not done yet," Bruce tells him, pushing off the deceptive haze that's telling him to sleep. If it's a soft and comfortable descent, then nightmares are sure to follow. He needs to keep going until he technically passes out. "And neither are you."

Bruce feels his muscles stiffening and the tightness of his skin under the drying sweat, so he rolls out of the bed and heads into the ensuite, ignoring the questioning noise Clark makes. He twists the shower on and stands under the initial blast of cold water, riding out the shock of it with his breath held and his eyes squeezed shut. Goosebumps shiver their way down his spine.

When he opens his eyes again, Clark is lingering in the doorway, unabashedly naked but smart enough to wait for Bruce to lift his chin in invitation. The water's heating up, beating onto Bruce's shoulders and the back of his neck, steam curling over the mirror and leaving condensation on the tiles. He turns his face into the shower jet and soaps up.

He senses Clark step in behind him and expects it when he reaches his hand around to drag through the lather on Bruce's stomach. Less so when he runs that hand down Bruce's back instead of cleaning himself up. Bruce tenses when Clark presses the pad of his thumb over an old bullet wound.

"I never really thought, before," he says. That's how he talks about it when he starts these monumentally unwelcome conversations. Always before, and Bruce can feel how deep a gulf that word is carving in him. Before, he was Clark Kent, who had a good job and a decent apartment and who was going to ask Lois Lane to marry him. An unfailingly human life, regardless of where he came from.

It doesn't matter how empty the casket is. The funeral was observed, the obituary published, the paperwork filed. To the world at large, Clark Kent is irrevocably dead.

Clark struggles with it. Bruce knows he goes to see Lois sometimes, maybe to hear someone who isn't Bruce or his mother call him 'Clark', as much as anything else. She seems to understand how unfeasible trying to continue their relationship would be, though. More so than Clark does. He always comes back hurt.

And if they do eventually manage to figure something out, it won't be any of Bruce's business.

Clark's thumb strokes over the criss-cross of white scars on Bruce's abdomen, over his ribs, his sternum, all the old stories on his skin. Bruce knows what's coming, something about physical pain and how it's no longer such an abstract; a strange existential hang-up over the fragility of skin and bone. He's really not in the mood for it, so he turns under Clark's hands and leans back, hooking his knee over Clark's hip.

"Here? Really?" Clark says, but he's lifting Bruce even as he says it, big hands under Bruce's ass, his expression more grateful than taken aback by whatever impracticality he finds in shower sex. Things are still slick; he slides in easily and Bruce bites back a groan, arches his back and braces his shoulders against the wet tile. He pulls Clark in further with his heels and allows himself one arm around Clark's neck, for balance.

The shower pelts Clark's hair flat, sleeking it to his skull, and he leans in for a moment to rest his forehead against Bruce's.

"Step it up," Bruce murmurs. "Come on—"

Clark hauls him up, practically crushing him against the wall with his first thrust. It forces a grunt out of him; Bruce is pretty sure he's going to have tile imprints on his back, but he's had stranger bruises in more embarrassing places.

"That's it." Bruce twists his fingers in Clark's wet hair so he can pull his head back and bite at his throat. Clark's response is to power into him just the right side of too rough, relentless and thorough and absolutely what Bruce has been craving.

Then Clark staggers, his face like he's been struck by lightning, thighs shaking as he presses up into Bruce's body. He loosens his grip enough that Bruce slides down onto him, taking his cock as deep as physically possible while he comes loud, long and messy. Bruce remembers, as he feels the hard pulse of Clark's cock inside of him, that he's kept him teetering through two rounds already and should probably have anticipated that. He yanks at his fistful of hair and growls in his ear, "Don't you dare stop."

Clark shifts his grip, face a touch pink. "Yes, sir," he groans, and picks up where he left off, rolling into Bruce with long, hard strokes, intense enough to make his teeth ache. He keeps it up for a frankly admirable span before he's soft enough that it becomes impossible. When he finally slips out he keeps Bruce pinned to the wall with a firm kiss and thick fingers pressed inside him, drawing out Bruce's orgasm with a patient hand.

Bruce's head swims; there are smudges in his peripheral vision. Clark's fingers are still inside him as he's lowered to the floor, but slide out as he finds his feet again, leaving gentle surges of pleasure in their wake. His come is slicked all over his thighs. "I need you," he tells Clark, barely keeping a grip on coherence in the midst of his endorphin haze. "Need you to lay me out."

Whatever sliver of sun had managed to escape the clouds at dawn has been snuffed out by the unrelenting monochrome of a nuclear winter. It doesn't make much difference to Bruce. The weather is often his ally but never his friend; this is just a different shade of gray for Gotham to wear.

Clark switches the privacy glass to opaque, casting the room into moody shadows. Bruce tracks him as he moves to the bed, hazy in the gathered half-light like he's a ghost—and in most ways he is exactly that, though unlike the rest of Bruce's ghosts, he doesn't seem to be here to punish him. Bruce feels the thread of sleep tug at him, entwined around that thought. It tightens quickly into chains at his wrists and a fist in his chest, demons raining from the sky.

He jerks back into full wakefulness, blood pounding, Clark's hand on his shoulder where he's half-risen from the mattress.

"Hey, it's alright," Clark murmurs. He moves his hand over Bruce's chest, over his jackhammering heart, and presses him down.

Bruce slides his breath out between his teeth in a long hiss. Clark's frowning, but it's not the face of a devastated, vengeful god. There's only concern in those unearthly bright eyes, so sincere that Bruce can barely stand it, but then Clark grins quickly, and presses a kiss to Bruce's collarbone, his sternum, his hip, and—

"How are you real," he mutters, as Clark's tongue presses flat against his inner thigh, followed by a nip of his teeth. Bruce figured he was just about done as far as getting hard was concerned, but Clark seems set on encouraging him to bend the rules of human physiology, first drawing Bruce into the heat of his mouth and then bolstering him with a slow slide out.

"Well," Clark says, licks his lips and rests his chin on Bruce's hip, brow creased. Bruce hopes he's not actually stopped to give his question serious thought. "That's a little existential."

Christ. "Clark," Bruce starts, but Clark's mouth is already on him again, and Bruce can see he's smiling as he nuzzles in, big hands on the inside of Bruce's thighs, fingers pressing hard, almost too hard, just hard enough.

Bruce's back arches, heels digging into the mattress as Clark sucks him, sharp flashes of sensation when he scrapes his teeth a little and the deep throb of blood rushing to his cock and to his face. His body is screaming at him, muscles trembling with the combined stress of the night's exertions, from prowling Gotham as Batman to the unabating tension of being Bruce Wayne; from calling the shots with Clark under him, to being here, at the mercy of a man who could crush him as easily as he smiles.

His legs tense, thighs turned to rock. His fingers find themselves in Clark's hair, but that means nothing when Clark pulls away at the brink to rest his chin on Bruce's hip again. "I mean, it's not like I'm special in that regard. How are any of us real?"

Bruce groans. He flings an arm over his face. "Clark."

"You did ask."

"And I've never been sorrier in my life."

Clark laughs, lazily runs his fingers along Bruce's cock, feather-light, cups his balls and then runs his tongue along his length, base to tip, dragging the orgasm out of him and leaving him shaking in relief, brain fuzzing out on a rush of pleasure and exhaustion that resolves into blissful, blissful nothing.

He's vaguely conscious of Clark crawling up beside him, touching his temple, the tip of his nose, his lips… and then Bruce is gone.

"Are you serious," Clark says, propped up on his elbow next to Bruce. "And you're asking me how I'm real." Bruce is splayed out on his back, arms flung against the headboard, mouth wide open as he sends out a snore loud enough to attract government attention. "Don't tell me you're drooling."