Work Text:
The detective, a Mr. Sherlock Holmes, was in the process of examining a word written in German by the murder victim when Bruce suddenly announced, “We need to go undercover.”
Kal-El emerged reluctantly from the world of the book, looking up. Bruce was sitting across the room at his kitchen table, the disassembled parts of a carburetor spread out in front of him; he hadn’t looked up when he’d spoken, but it was the first thing he’d said in over an hour. Resigning himself, Kal reached for the makeshift bookmark Bruce had given him to use - a receipt from the auto parts store - and asked, “Undercover?”
“Yeah. It’s our best bet to get the intel we need,” Bruce said. “We would go as reporters.”
Kal closed the book, running his fingers along its cracked and weathered spine. Nothing Bruce owned was new, but his books were probably his most well-loved possessions. He had stacks of them, on every available surface. There were detective stories like this one and some other fiction here and there. Mostly, though, there were textbooks. The textbooks came from all kinds of sources, too. Bruce claimed that anyone could write and publish a book here, and even the qualifications for publishing a textbook didn’t seem like the kind of high standard the Klerics required before something could be integrated into the Luminarium.
Kal liked the books. It was one of his favorite things about earth. Bruce had showed him an e-reader (the “e” stood for “electronic”, but it was still a fairly primitive tool compared to what they’d had on Krypton; pages still had to be turned manually, as the machine couldn’t detect when he’d finished reading the page, and only a few thousand books could be stored on one at a time), but Kal-El could tell Bruce preferred the printed copies too. Being able to hold something in his hand was grounding in a way few other things had ever been for him, even back home.
Kal kept the detective book in his hand now, its weight centering as he considered what Bruce was suggesting. “You want me to come too?” He asked. Usually when they worked cases together, Bruce did any reconnaissance that required interacting with other people by himself. His perspective was that Gothamites had a keen sense of when someone was not what they seemed; and, “Subtle you ain’t, Kal,” had been his final judgment on the matter.
Kal knew it was a skill to be able to trick people, but it wasn’t a skill he particularly wanted to develop. He had never liked playing the kinds of games that were required to fit in, even when everyone else was supposed to be wearing a mask too, and maybe one of the only nice things about how he lived now was the fact that he really didn’t have to pretend. There was no one to pretend for. Other than Sol, of course, who would have known better anyway.
“If you’re up for it,” Bruce said. Probably sensing Kal’s curious eyes on him, he continued, “I want to know how many people are actually involved in Luthor’s schemes, and how many of them are pawns. I’m pretty good at reading people, Kal, but you’re like a walking lie detector.”
Kal tilted his head. They didn’t have the concept of lie detectors on Krypton - the truth was what the Klerics said it was - but, “You said lie detectors are bad science,” he said.
Bruce looked up, his pleased grin sudden and bright. “Yeah, they’re shit,” he agreed. “But we’re not using it to bully people into confessions. Just listening to see if there’s more digging we should do. Hell, we’ll practically be real investigative journalists.”
Kal found himself smiling back, because it was impossible not to when Bruce looked like that. And also because the words tugged at something deep within him, something childish that he knew should have died with Krypton. But he’d always loved to write back home, even though it had been frowned upon. He’d hoped, when he’d released that story about the Klerics and their evil plan to leave Krypton to die, that it would give people an opportunity to do something. To escape, maybe. He still wasn’t sure it had had any positive effect. But he still believed that it could have.
Knowledge was power, and power had to be shared for it to be any good.
“You’re good to stick around for a few more days?” Bruce asked, returning to the car part puzzle before him. “I’ll need some time to get everything together.”
“Sure,” Kal agreed. He hadn’t yet figured out how to tell Bruce that he didn’t really have anywhere else to go anyway. After leaving the Kents, even trying to put down roots was a scary thought. He didn’t want more people getting hurt because of him. When he came to Gotham, which wasn't nearly as often as he would have liked, he usually stayed in whatever abandoned building was convenient, and visited Bruce's apartment was often as he thought he could get away with. “It’ll give me time to finish the book,” he added.
“And there are a lot more where that came from,” Bruce said immediately. “If you don’t like Holmes, I can dig up some Agatha Christie. You do strike me as a Miss Marple kind of guy.”
Kal didn’t know what that meant, exactly, but Bruce sounded like it was a good thing. He nodded, moving to open the book back up to its place.
And then paused, as a sound outside the apartment caught his attention. He tilted his head, listening. Then, with a smile, “One of your pups is here,” he said.
Bruce shifted in the chair, his expression gentling in a way that Kal caught only because he’d begun looking for it. It was what his face always did when one of the half-dozen or so children he looked out for as Bruce Wayne rather than Batman showed up at his door; and it was something Kal never got tired of. It made him look younger, more like the age he was supposed to be. And it made him look more like Bruce and less like Batman. Kal liked Batman, but he liked Bruce even more. There was a softness to Bruce that Batman couldn’t afford to have.
“Jason,” Bruce said, when the knock sounded on the door. Then, louder, “Come in.”
The doorknob rattled once and then turned, and then Jason Todd was standing there, in a beat-up sweatshirt with the hood pulled up around his face. His eyes tracked around the room with a familiar cautiousness, learned from living hard, halting briefly when they came to rest on Kal before they went on to Bruce. None of the kids really seemed to like Kal - with the possible exception of the oldest, Dick, who rarely came out of the shadows but always smiled on those rare occasions when he and Kal crossed paths - but they tolerated him, because he was in Bruce’s apartment, and that seemed to suggest a level of trust was due.
“Hi B,” Jason said, dropping his backpack onto the floor and coming over to the table. Bruce kicked out the chair opposite him, and Jason slid into it immediately, eyes already riveted on the car parts spread out in front of Bruce. “What are you working on?”
What Bruce was working on - and Kal should have been able to guess - was teaching. Jason sat with rapt attention as Bruce talked him through the finer details of the carburetor’s function and composition. Bruce was a good teacher: patient, calm, and very invested in making sure the student was interested in the lesson. He talked to Jason a lot about cars, but the other kids got lessons more suited to their interests.
Kal wasn’t particularly interested in cars, let alone all the complicated parts that made them run. But it was nice listening to Bruce talk, providing warm background noise as he turned back to his book. He had only made it a few more pages in, though, when he heard Jason taking advantage of a lull in Bruce’s lecture to whisper, “B, that’s not Sherlock Holmes, is it?”
Bruce knew, of course, that Kal could hear them, but he matched Jason’s volume anyway. “Yeah, Jay. Study in Scarlet.”
“You’re not going to let him take it with you, are you?” Jason asked, sounding scandalized.
“If he doesn’t finish it before he goes,” Bruce replied.
“But when he leaves, he’s gone for a really long time. Like a really long time,” Jason said. Kal didn’t think that was exactly true - he came to see Bruce at least once every other month, and he still feared that might be too often - but maybe that felt like longer to Jason. “What if he loses it?”
“He won’t,” Bruce reassured. He sounded like he wanted to laugh, but his voice dropped lower instead, to a conspiratorial-sounding whisper. “Besides, we have to make sure he finishes it. Kal hasn’t read any Sherlock Holmes before, Jay.”
“What?” Jason yelped, his voice rising to a level that Kal was pretty sure even another human would have heard. “He’s like a hundred years old! Is he from a different fucking planet or something?”
Kal felt a rush of fear run over him. It took every ounce of his self-control not to turn and look at Bruce; but Bruce’s heart hadn’t even skipped a beat. “Yes, Jason,” he said. “ Kansas .”
Kal had confided in Bruce once about the Kents and their farm in Kansas, and how it had, however briefly, felt like something that could have been a home to him. That Bruce had remembered those details and had them ready to weave into a backstory like that made Kal feel unexpectedly warm.
In response to Bruce’s words, meanwhile, Jason kicked him under the table. It was a quick, sharp kick, but Bruce just laughed and reached over to ruffle his hair, adding, “And watch your mouth.”
“You let a guy hang out here who literally calls himself Dick , B.”
“That is his name , Jason.”
“He lives on the street , Bruce. I think he could change his name if he wanted to.”
Hiding a smile, Kal turned back into the book. This was another reason he always made sure to come back here.
The banter almost made him feel at home again.
☀️
It took Bruce three days to get ready for the undercover work. In the meantime, Kal finished three Sherlock Holmes books, two Hercule Poirot books, and five Miss Marple books. Bruce had been right: he was a Miss Marple guy. The simple homespun detective struck a chord with him that the other lead detectives just had not.
He stayed in Bruce’s apartment for the most part during the day, but at night he flew to wherever he was needed, filling Sol in on his reading whenever the AI was active. Usually when they were flying, Sol also asked questions about Bruce, even though Kal had told him many times that Bruce wasn’t a threat. He didn’t put a stop to it, though, because the truth was that Kal liked talking about Bruce. And sometimes, while they flew, Sol would pull up news stories about sightings of the Batman and ask about some small detail or the other, and sometimes afterward, the sunstone dust would shape itself into a cape like Bruce’s, with its many layered bat wings. It was a private performance, really just for the two of them; Sol never did it when other people might see. Which was good, because Bruce, Kal was sure, would hate it if he ever caught wind of it. (He had so far been of the opinion that they should keep their work separate as far as the public was concerned, although he never seemed to mind working through cases together out of uniform; a connection like matching capes would not help with that.)
It was Sol who had told him that baby bats, the earth animal Bruce had developed his identity around, were called pups, inspiring the nickname Kal had given to the children who hung around Bruce. Bruce had smiled when Kal had first said it, a reflexive smile that he’d quickly swallowed, but one that Kal remembered in vivid detail. It meant that not only had Bruce understood Kal’s reference, but he’d also liked it.
The night before they were supposed to go undercover, instead of leaving the city to find trouble elsewhere, Kal went to the LexCorp building in Gotham. It was a new structure, but - unlike most of the other buildings in Gotham - it had been built by an entirely-outside company, not utilizing Bruce’s well-known and reliable crew. Gotham was not the kind of place people were known to commute to without a good reason, and Lex Luthor - who had made his fortune in a town called Metropolis, some ways away - was not known for honest dealings anyway. He wasn’t to Lazarus levels, not yet. But Kal didn’t want it to get that far, either.
He was supposed to be doing some preliminary recon, getting a firsthand lay of the land. Bruce had managed to get a copy of the architectural plans, but he thought there might be some off-the-book changes that they’d need to be prepared for, and he figured Kal was the best suited to scoping that kind of thing out.
Strangely enough, though, when Kal reached the building, he found he couldn’t see through it. He tried every angle, including from the sky, but his vision couldn’t seem to penetrate the exterior. Finally, hovering above the roof, he asked Sol, “What’s going on?”
Sol was quick to kick into gear. After running a diagnostic, he explained, “It seems that the building is lined with lead.”
“Lined with lead?” Kal felt something unpleasant knitting itself together in the pit of his stomach. “But that’s…”
“Yes. A weakness only Lazarus knew about before,” Sol agreed. “This is troubling, Kal-El. I think we should leave.”
“We don’t leave at the first sign of trouble,” Kal retorted, even though he had to fight off the shiver that ran down his spine at the thought of Lazarus being involved here. He wasn’t afraid of Lazarus, exactly, although his encounter with Ra’s al Ghul still set his teeth on edge when he thought about it. Lois was still with Lazarus, though, likely putting herself in constant danger but committed to the task of bringing it down from the inside. Kal helped when he could - when she let him - but it wasn’t often. And the thought of Lazarus coming here , to Gotham, to - to Bruce… well. He couldn’t allow that. “We can’t leave.”
He was braced for Sol to make some kind of a remark about his directive being to preserve Kal’s life as the last Kryptonian being the number one priority, so it caught him off-guard when Sol didn’t. Instead, he said, “You need to bring me with you inside, then. It’s imperative you have some backup, Kal-El.”
Since the spacesuit was pretty form-fitting, it wasn’t difficult to keep it on under his civilian clothes, especially since Kal preferred clothes that were a size too large anyway. He and Bruce hadn’t talked about it, but Kal couldn’t imagine it would be a problem. “Sure, Sol,” he said. “Help me locate Batman, okay?”
Thankfully, that task was relatively simple tonight: Batman was out, but had stopped to speak to some children on the street. This was his usual practice; he even kept little treats in his utility belt for them. Not candy, but granola bars and bottles of water. Kal stayed out of the way while Bruce finished his conversations with the kids and sent them on their way, only stepping out of the shadows when the kids were out of what he figured to be the average person’s line of sight.
Bruce, of course, always defied expectations. He didn’t betray any sign he hadn’t known Kal was there all along. “Find anything interesting?”
“The walls are lead,” Kal replied. “I couldn’t see through them.”
Bruce looked at him. His expression was obscured by the cowl, but the corners of his mouth were turned down just slightly, mind already engaged in the puzzle. Kal waited for Sol's warning chirp about giving away information like that so freely, but to his surprise, it didn’t come.
“Would anyone know that you can’t see through lead?” Bruce asked, after a few seconds.
“The Lazarus Corporation,” Kal said. “Other than that, no one I know of.”
“Lazarus,” Bruce repeated. His tone was troubled, dark. He had done some investigating into the company, when Kal had first told him about it, but since it had so far stayed out of Gotham, Kal knew it wasn’t really on his radar. Bruce didn’t have the ability to chase down problems or leads outside of his Gotham bubble, not really. First and foremost, because doing so would require him to leave Gotham unprotected, but Kal thought it also didn’t help that trying to do much traveling would stretch Bruce very thin, especially since he wouldn’t be working. In just the short couple of months he’d known Bruce, he’d seen him go into work with pretty severe injuries, like busted ribs. It was nothing Kal hadn’t seen before, though; miners worked with the same kind of desperation, reporting in for work even when it was causing them physical damage. Here and Krypton, life was the same. When work was the only way to live, people would come to work no matter what their situation. People sacrificed their bodies so their families could survive; it was just what they had to do.
But if Lazarus was coming here , things would change.
“Well,” Bruce said, drawing Kal’s attention back to him. “I understand if you want to back out now, Kal. I can go alone.”
“No!” Kal exclaimed. When Bruce tilted his face in his direction, expression skeptical under the cowl, Kal found himself very glad that blushing was one weakness that he seemed to have left behind on Krypton. He was sure he would be as red as the sunstone otherwise. Even though he couldn’t feel his face actually heating up, he felt the same squirmy feeling in his stomach that he’d always gotten as a kid while he’d turned red as a tomato. “No,” he said again, more controlled this time. “Lazarus is my fight. And I need to - if they’re expanding, if this Luthor guy has something to do with it, I need to know about that too.” When Bruce didn’t respond, he added awkwardly, “Besides, I’m your lie detecting equipment, remember?”
The smile on Bruce’s face was slight, which was the only type of smile he allowed himself when he was in uniform. But it was one that meant he was pleased and, to Kal, even that slight twitch of his lips was like watching the sun rise on Krypton. His heart thumped a little faster against his chest, he supposed at the memory of home, even though the connection was faint. It was hard to think of home, but it was - it was easy. To be with Bruce. A lot of the time. An ease that Kal had rarely felt, aside from when he was with his parents or with Krypto. The ease of being around family.
He wondered if, maybe, that was why Sol wasn’t objecting.
☀️
They got ready on the top floor of a building Bruce’s company had made.
Kal wasn’t exactly a known person in Gotham anyway, outside of Bruce’s apartment. But Sol was able to work his hair into a series of little curls, and Bruce had brought him a suit - one of his dad’s old ones, he’d said, his jaw a little tense but his expression otherwise blank - to put on over his close-fitting spacesuit.
Bruce had a more complicated disguise, which Kal didn’t fully understand. It took a lot of makeup, which Bruce said someone named Selina had taught him how to use to his advantage. (Dick, too, had apparently had some pointers about makeup, although Bruce explained dryly that most of Dick’s understanding of makeup came from clowns , so he couldn’t be taken too seriously.) When he was done, he looked completely different, though. He couldn’t hide his considerable bulk, but he’d gotten a suit about a size and a half too big, and he slouched his shoulders in such a way that he made himself significantly less imposing. It was a strange thing to see, but Kal supposed Bruce’s control over his body language was something important for remaining covert in his daily life too.
“Here,” Bruce said, as they reached the ground floor on their way out. Kal looked down to find Bruce extending a pair of glasses to him. “They were my mom’s readers. I replaced the lenses, so it shouldn’t give you any trouble.”
Kal took them and unfolded them. “Your mom won’t mind?” He asked tentatively. He had met Bruce’s mom once, shortly after he’d met Bruce; and she’d reminded Kal so much of his own mom that it had made his throat ache.
“She loses a pair of these every other week,” Bruce replied. “Don’t worry about it. She prefers the floral sets, anyway.”
This pair, by contrast, was plain brown. Kal slipped them on, pushing them up on his nose uncertainly. “How do I look?” He asked.
Bruce turned to look at him, then hesitated. It was just a second’s worth of hesitation, but for someone as deliberate about everything he did as Bruce was, it was still noticeable. But all he said was, “You look like a reporter, Kal.”
He’d made them fake IDs and credentials to go with their fake personas. Bruce was using Thomas Malone, and Kal’s said Calvin Kent. Bruce said it was easier to remember to respond to a fake name if it had some root in details from reality. Thomas had been the name of his father. Kent was - it was… a name that Kal wished could have meant more to him than it did. Their credentials marked them as interns at a newspaper from Metropolis called The Digital Planet, an online newspaper that had seen enormous growth over the past year after the success of a hard-hitting but anonymous submission about the Lazarus Corp. (Kal knew this to be Lois’s work - he’d read through it for her, a second set of eyes that was apparently a lot better at catching typos - but he couldn’t say that to Bruce, of course.)
Since then, most major companies had been reluctant to turn down requests by reporters from The Digital Planet. It seemed to be the overall consensus that it was better to have some control over the narrative than to find out about the narrative when it hit the internet. Their credentials were good, but if they really needed to, Kal already knew Sol could get into The Digital Planet website; the AI had done it for Lois, after all.
At the LexCorp doors, they were greeted by a receptionist whose heartbeat was steady and expression was bored. She directed them to seats in the lobby, assuring them that Mr. Luthor’s team would be along shortly to take them up to him, then returned to her desk, where she put in a pair of expensive-looking earbuds. It seemed like she was watching some kind of television show, a criminal procedural like the ones Bruce had told him never to watch. Bruce had very exacting opinions about what was and was not worth watching on the television; mostly, he liked to watch movies that for some reason didn’t have any color to them.
Kal tried to expand his senses beyond the room, but it quickly became apparent that the interior walls were also lined with lead. Other than the receptionist, all he could really hear was the steady thrum of Bruce’s heartbeat, which was at least a source of reassurance. Sol said human heartbeats were technically indistinguishable, but Kal would disagree. He knew Lois’s heartbeat; he listened for it often, almost constantly, wanting to make sure she was still alive and not in danger. She was beyond smart and beyond capable, and he knew she wouldn’t like it if she knew he worried about stuff like that, but he couldn’t help it. And if he heard her heartbeat hitch unexpectedly, he could be there right away. Within seconds. It was one of the reasons he had agreed to be okay with her staying with Lazarus.
Bruce’s heartbeat was different. Yeah, Kal did check in on him now and then, when he was away and wanted to make sure Bruce was still okay. But Bruce’s heart was calm and steady and even all the time, and it reminded him of home, of the peaceful afternoons spent exploring with his parents or working in the fields. Home and safe , those were the images he’d come to associate with Bruce’s heartbeat, and that had only made it all the easier to commit to memory.
While they waited, Bruce tapped impatiently away at his phone screen and Kal made handwritten notes about the architecture on a pad of yellow paper that Bruce had given him to bring when he’d found out Kal didn’t have a phone. “We’ll sell you as old-fashioned if anybody asks,” he’d said. Kal liked paper; if it had ever existed on Krypton, it had gone out of production long before Kal was born, undoubtedly considered unnecessary because of the digitization of all their records. But what was written in his own handwriting couldn’t be altered by a Kleric or an AI that thought they knew better. It was just his , even if the notes were unimportant.
It was about fifteen minutes before someone arrived to greet them. Tall, with long hair done up in a tight braid and twisted into a bun on the top of her head, the woman carried herself with the grace of someone deadly. Her expression was flat as she walked across the room towards them, but Kal could see the inquisitiveness of her gaze as she studied them.
“Hello,” she said, stepping into the waiting room. “I’m Mercy Graves, Mr. Luthor’s assistant. I’m here to give you the tour on his behalf. He’ll have time for a brief conference afterward.”
Bruce rose fluidly, stretching out one hand while the other tucked his phone away in his pocket. “Thomas Malone,” he said, in greeting. “And this is my partner, Calvin Kent. It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Graves.”
Kal fumbled to his feet after Bruce, still clutching the legal pad in one hand but making sure the other was available to shake hands once Bruce was done. “A pleasure,” he echoed nervously.
Ms. Graves looked like she was holding back an eye roll as she withdrew her hand again. “Mr. Luthor requests that you not take any photographs. I am capable of answering any questions you might have.” She turned, her heels clicking sharply on the floor. “Gentlemen, if you’ll follow me.”
The tour was clipped and to the point. The LexCorp building in Gotham was primarily designed as a research facility, with an eye towards helping to improve daily life for the people in Gotham immediately and then expanding outward on a broader scale to the rest of the country. Ms. Graves recited key talking points she clearly had memorized and did not let them linger in any one area of the building for more than a few seconds.
Somewhere around the thirteenth floor, Ms. Graves showed them into another waiting room. There was one door at the very end of the room, with a digital keypad next to it. “Mr. Luthor will be in to conclude this conversation in a moment,” she said, and left without waiting for a response.
“When did the conversation begin?” Bruce asked, under his breath. But he went and sat in one of the stiff-backed chairs, tugging his phone back out of his pocket as he did so. Under his breath, he asked, “You see anything?”
Kal shrugged, sitting down in the chair next to Bruce. He hadn’t. They had yet to pass a single wall that wasn’t lined in lead, so each new area had been as much a surprise to him as it had been to Bruce. He pulled out his notepad and pencil, planning to pick up where he left off in his description.
Only for Sol to chirp in his ear, alarmed. “Kal-El. Something is very wrong.”
Kal’s heart jumped. Sol didn’t usually intervene in situations like these unless he absolutely had to. “What?” he whispered back.
Sol didn’t answer verbally. Instead, there was a whir and a click of a lock disengaging, and then the door across the room from them opened, just a hair.
Bruce, of course, also noticed immediately. He glanced at the door, then at Kal, then back at the door.
And then shrugged, standing and putting his phone in his pocket. “What kind of reporters would we be if we didn’t take advantage of that ?” he asked.
“I need the readings from inside,” Sol prompted, when Kal hesitated. “We need to know.”
Bruce was already at the door before Kal found his feet, although it only took a few quick steps to cross the distance to join him. Even underneath the disguise, Kal could see the wicked delight in Bruce’s expression; he didn’t seem like he was trying to smother it. Rich fucks, he could almost hear Bruce saying, as he’d often said when talking about Lazarus or Luthor or any number of the villainous rich that plagued earth the way the Klerics had plagued Krypton. Whatever we can do to stick it to ‘em, Kal.
He pushed the door open and slipped inside; and Kal followed.
The lights immediately came on: bright, motion-activated fluorescents, harshly bathing their surroundings. Not that it really made it any easier to tell what their surroundings were , exactly. They were surrounded by empty, ceiling-to-floor glass tubes. Kal suspected that, to the human eye, they looked completely empty; but he could see left-behind molecules of green-colored goo, not completely scrubbed clean of the glass.
“Sol?” he murmured, uncertain. But Sol was silent.
Bruce reached out a hand and touched one of the tubes, his brow furrowed. “What do you think they’re using – ?”
He got no further. Through the still-open door, Kal could hear the sound of footsteps in the hall, rapidly approaching. “Luthor,” he whispered to Bruce, stepping back a half step towards the door.
Bruce caught his arm. “No,” he said. “He’ll see us.”
“He’s going to see us either way,” Kal argued, although he didn’t pull away. Bruce’s fingers had gone, as if on instinct, to his wrist, and each point of contact was a pinprick of heat against his skin, holding him in place in spite of his own instincts. Bruce’s skin was calloused, rough, worn; here, Kal’s skin was fresh and new, as if he had never worked a day in his life, and so there was something uniquely comforting about hands like Bruce’s. Hands that felt like home.
Bruce’s eyes flickered. “Plausible deniability,” he murmured.
And then he kissed him.
Still hung up on the feel of Bruce’s fingers against his skin, Kal was caught completely off-guard, but it was easy - much easier than he’d ever anticipated - to melt into the kiss. Bruce pushed him back, until he was up against the wall; Kal’s free hand, hovering nervously in the air, came down to cup the back of Bruce’s neck, pulling him in closer. At his touch, Bruce’s heartbeat ratcheted up several notches, tripping over itself. Kal’s tongue, of its own accord, prodded forward, which Bruce allowed, his mouth opening further to accommodate the exploration.
It was hard to hear anything over the roar in his head, but there was a sound - the clearing of a throat - and then Bruce was pulling back, away from him, his face a bright, realistic shade of red. Kal sagged against the wall, bereft at the sudden absence and unexpectedly fighting back the shimmer of heat that crept over his eyes. A Kryptonian curse he hadn’t been allowed to say back home floated through his mind, even as he pressed his eyes shut to give Sol a second to help him rein his powers back in. Emotion tended to be a trigger for his powers, and they hadn’t yet. Uh. Worked out this particular emotion.
“Gentlemen,” Lex Luthor said. “I trust you’ll understand why when I said Ms. Graves will be showing you out. Mercy, get me the number to The Planet when you’re done with them. Of all the…”
Kal opened his eyes again just in time to see a head full of red curls disappearing back out of the room, Luthor muttering out curses as he left.
Ms. Graves, meanwhile, raised a finely manicured eyebrow at them. “Gentlemen,” she said. Something like tempered amusement ran through her tone. “Let me show you the door, before Mr. Luthor suggests I introduce you to a window.”
☀️
As they’d agreed beforehand, they parted ways outside of the LexCorp building. Bruce had gone somewhere to shed his disguise; Kal had gone to the abandoned building where he was staying while in Gotham, leaving the suit in a crumbled heap on the floor in favor of a warm hoodie and a pair of jeans.
Sol, meanwhile, was cycling through the information gleaned from the computers while they’d been in LexCorp. Every time the AI showed back up to give Kal an update, it got worse. Kryptonian DNA in the tubes. And the only Kryptonian on earth - the only Kryptonian who was even still alive at all - was him, and it shouldn’t - there was no way for it to be his DNA. How could a company like LexCorp get his DNA?
Sol was unsure, but the AI had a lot of data to shift through. When Bruce had pushed him up against the wall, Sol had been close enough to briefly connect with the LexCorp servers even through the lead coating, hopefully undetected, and the information that had downloaded was considerable. Even with as high a processing rate as Sol had, it was going to take some time.
Kal tried to wait. Tried to be patient. He paced. He flipped through a few of the books Bruce had let him borrow. Listened for Lois, to make sure she was okay. Listened for Mrs. Kent, to make sure she was okay.
Listened to Bruce, to…
To.
To make sure he was okay.
Kal wasn’t an idiot. He understood what had happened: Bruce had seen a way out of their compromising situation and he had acted on it. It didn’t mean he had really wanted to kiss him like that. But there had been something in the thrum of his heartbeat that still - it still - when Kal had been listening to it, it had seemed -
It had seemed real.
With a confused sigh, Kal sank down onto the dilapidated couch that rested against one of the sagging walls, leaning back to stare through the holes in the ceiling. He couldn’t remember ever feeling like this before, even on Krypton; but he remembered his parents talking to him about this floaty feeling, the sense of rightness and warmth, like flying and not having to be afraid of the plummet.
He didn’t even notice he was floating up towards the ceiling until Sol’s wry voice cut on. “If you’re feeling this strongly about it, Kal-El, may I suggest you just go see him?”
Kal was grateful he couldn’t blush anymore, although he had the suspicion that Sol could probably tell that his body wanted to anyway. He straightened himself out mid-air, murmuring a, “Thanks,” that Sol acknowledged with a little beep, and flew.
Technically, their agreement had been to wait to meet until tonight, when they could catch up and compare notes. But Bruce was home now, and the call of his heartbeat reeled Kal in. He still made sure to take the standard precautions, landing out of sight, having Sol take a break from data processing to help him ensure no one around had noticed, and then walking the remaining several blocks to Bruce’s apartment, his hands stuffed low in his pockets.
Bruce’s apartment was down an alley that seemed to stay almost supernaturally dark, no matter the weather. Not that the weather was ever especially appealing in Gotham. Kal hesitated at the entrance to the alley. For him, the darkness was negligible; no one could hide from him anyway. But he tried not to be obvious about it, when he was… as close to a civilian as he could get. When he was visiting Bruce, who had a civilian identity to worry about. So he carefully didn’t acknowledge Dick, perched somewhere high above him in a makeshift nest, with his wide owlish eyes and his heartbeat so faint Kal could just barely hear it. He liked that the boy was often around to keep an eye out for Bruce anyway. It was important to him, that someone was there to have Bruce’s back even when he couldn’t.
He knocked.
The stutter of Bruce’s heartbeat inside the apartment was unsettling, but he forced himself to stay on the ground, outwardly as calm and settled as he could be. It took to the count of ten before Bruce pushed himself out of the chair and headed to the door; Kal could map the path he took by the sound of his footsteps. The slight creak of the door as Bruce rested a hand on it to look through the peek-hole, then the cut-off inhale: Bruce had seen him, and he knew he would hear. Kal almost stepped back, almost turned to go, but -
But then the door swung open, and Bruce was standing there: freshly showered, hair still wet, his face and posture his own again. Far from the kind of ill-fitting clothing he’d been wearing earlier, the sweats and tanktop Bruce had put on left very little to the imagination, and Kal wondered if he knew how gorgeous he was. And then wondered promptly had to fight back the urge to squirm. Where had that thought come from?
“Kal,” Bruce said. “You’re here sooner than I figured.” His eyes flicked briefly over Kal’s shoulder, towards Dick’s perch, and then he stepped back, holding the door open so Kal could come inside.
Kal stepped in. It took effort, with his nerves bouncing around like they were, not to float at all. When Bruce closed the door behind them, he blurted, “Bruce, I - ”
But at the same time, Bruce had begun to speak: “Kal, I - ”
They both cut off. After a few awkward seconds of silence, Bruce motioned for him to continue, but Kal said, “No, go ahead.”
Bruce drew in a breath, straightening and folded his hands behind his back.. “I wanted to apologize,” he said. “What happened earlier today was the result of poor planning, and it shouldn’t have happened.”
Kal’s throat felt unexpectedly tight. “The kiss?” he asked. Croaked, really.
Bruce nodded, eyes roaming away from his face. “I - yes. And I - I hope you’re okay with putting it behind us, Kal, because I… do… appreciate your friendship.”
A few long seconds stretched between them, painful and tight. Bruce was perfectly still and perfectly calm outwardly; it was only because Kal could hear the uneven rhythm of his heartbeat that he still felt some level of hope. “Do you…” he began cautiously. “... want to put it behind us?”
Bruce’s eyes finally came up, suddenly bright with inquisitiveness. “What?”
“No, because we can,” Kal said quickly, raising his hands. “It’s just - I mean, the way your heart sounded when we were up there, I thought - I guess I thought that… you sounded like it was maybe… not just… the result of poor planning?”
Bruce was studying him now. Confusion gave way to understanding, that blossomed across his face like a flower tilting up to greet the sun. “Would you want that to be true?” he asked.
Kal swallowed. His eyes darted down to Bruce’s lips, then back up.
Bruce stepped forward, into his space. “We’re probably still fucked with this LexCorp thing,” he said. But it was almost an afterthought. His gaze was trained on Kal’s lips.
“So we might as well get something out of it?” Kal murmured.
Bruce smiled, a brief, beautiful thing. “Yeah,” he said, his heartbeat steadying out in Kal’s ears - or maybe just sounding steadier, with his own heartbeat quickening like it was. “Something like that.”
Later, they’d have to work out the LexCorp stuff, and the information Sol would soon finish processing, and the sudden headline from The Digital Planet offering the opportunity to come in for a job interview to reporters Thomas Malone and Calvin Kent, who had apparently managed to piss off LexCorp so much that the head editor, Perry White, thought there just might be some benefit to having them on staff.
But all of that could wait, for now.
For now, Bruce was kissing him, slow and warm and tender and on purpose.
And nothing was more important than that.