Chapter Text
It started with an early morning meeting of the Justice League. A very early morning meeting. Most of them had jobs (real, fake, or semi-public), and all of them had a life outside their costumes, so those rare morning meetings that Bruce was sometimes forced to organize were always set before dawn.
Clark didn’t much care about the early or late hours: he could go days without sleep even if he preferred to rest at night (he liked to dream, sue him). What he did mind, however, were the fifty-three PowerPoint slides that he was pretty sure Bruce had prepared last week regarding the incident with the octopus and the many reasons why, in his informed opinion, that kind of situation couldn’t repeat itself.
He could almost hear the tired, snarly voice of Batman going over the most insignificant of details on why things hadn’t run as smoothly as they could have.
It’s not that he disagreed with Bruce per se; he just… didn’t think that keeping the team in a conference room for three hours before dawn was a great idea for morale.
Especially since he was pretty sure Batman was already on a 42-hour sleep deprivation marathon.
Not that he was counting. He just happened to have been in Gotham the night before, and maybe the night before the last, and he was pretty sure Bruce Wayne had had a very full day in between (meetings, interviews, and a brief appearance at a charity event). And also, he knew Bruce, as much as the other man might not like that. So, 42 hours was a good estimate, in Clark’s opinion.
42 hours meant having a very irritable Batman to deal with. A Batman ready to growl out his opinions instead of just expressing them like a human being would.
So, Clark made the tactical and very sensible decision of buying Bruce a nice cup of coffee.
Yes, he could have heated up the coffee pot at the Hall, but he didn’t want to. He wanted to buy a very good, very expensive, very well-brewed mochaccino. Because Batman might very well drink his coffee black as the night, but Clark still remembered the day Bruce entered a coffee shop with him and Diana in civvies, hiding behind sunglasses instead of the Batman cowl, and ordered a sweet monstrosity of syrup and sugar and only a hint of coffee beans.
«What?!» Bruce had said that day, a ray of sunshine reflecting on his lenses, hiding his blue eyes.
«Nothing,» Clark had answered, only then realizing he was staring at the man and his ludicrous choice of beverage.
That was the very first time Clark had the distinct feeling he was seeing under the Batman’s mask, behind Bruce Wayne’s smiles and pleasantries, past the hard face of the Justice League’s fierce leader. Just Bruce, and the way he really liked to drink coffee.
For some reason, that idea left a warm, inescapable sensation in Clark’s guts that never really abandoned him again.
So, now he was buying Bruce something overly sugary and probably disgusting and hiding it in a paper cup very well closed with its lid. Very black coffee for the Black Bat of Gotham City.
«Could you please write a “B” on the cup?» He asked the tired barista, who was barely awake. «And… also. Yeah, no, may I have the marker, please?»
The woman passed it to him with the coffee cup in a silent, half-exhausted motion. Clark smiled.
Five minutes later he was putting the cup at the head of the conference table. He was the first one there, but not the first one to arrive at the Hall: he could hear Bruce’s strong heartbeat in a room close by. He didn’t go seek him out, imagining the coffee would not be well received if given directly.
While Clark considered Diana one of his friends, at this point, with Bruce, he found himself stuck in that liminal space between colleagues, friends, and once-enemies-that-wanted-to-kill-each-other-with-their-bare-hands kind of relationship. In short, he couldn’t really tell if Bruce liked him or if he simply put up with him for humanity’s sake.
For his part… Clark liked Bruce, even when he felt the strong need to punch him in the face. Which happened more often than he would have liked to admit.
Like right at that moment, in the middle of that atrocious meeting, while Bruce was engaging in a screaming match with Arthur, in the sense that while Arthur looked about ready to pick up the conference table and smash all the windows of the Hall with it, Bruce’s tone remained unnervingly calm, levelled and absolutely glacial. His eyes, Clark noticed, were unmoving, unnervingly blue, and focused almost to fixation.
«So, you can admit that you didn’t follow the plan,» Bruce was saying, his voice flattened to the point that he seemed almost indifferent. His clenched fists told another story altogether, though.
Arthur was red-faced, so unused to hiding his own emotions. «I’ll admit I did what I thought would be the best course of action in that situation! You can’t expect us to follow your plans blindly until the end!»
Bruce gave him a blank look. «You agreed to that plan. You were on board. Everybody here agreed.»
None moved. Most of them weren’t even looking at the two men fighting. Clark and Diana were the only ones that could get involved and were simply waiting for an opening. There was no time, though.
«It was in pain, alright?!» Arthur stood up with enough force to push his chair back several feet. «The creature was in pain, and I could feel it.» He paused for a moment, Clark’s eyes fixed on Bruce. «I don’t expect you to understand, Batman.» Arthur added, flat and without anymore fire in his words.
Bruce’s mouth opened just a fraction; he blinked a couple of times, faster than normal. Clark tried to focus on the heartbeats of the entire room, and the only ones that were still levelled were Diana’s and, unsurprisingly, Bruce’s.
«Alright,» he heard himself say. «Maybe we should take a break.»
The tension eased down. People stood up, Arthur stopped looking at Bruce with a murderous glare and went to pick up his chair, Diana nodded in Clark’s direction, and soon there was a line near the coffeepot; whispered conversations filled the unnatural silence, and… finally Bruce noticed the cup of coffee. Or, more plausibly, he made a show of noticing it just now, because they didn’t call Batman the “greatest detective in the world” without reasons, and a coffee cup was a pretty big clue to miss.
However, Clark was acutely aware of what Batman was seeing on that cup: a dotted “B.”, sure, but also the little bat silhouette he’d clumsily drawn there with the coffeeshop marker. He feigned indifference, looking down at the papers in front of him.
Bruce picked up the cup, checked it out with his clear blue eyes, unreadable. He took a sip, he stopped, he looked up at Clark, and Clark… when had he stopped checking his paperwork? He still held the folder in his hands, but he was definitely not looking at it anymore. Bruce took another sip, and his gaze didn’t leave Clark’s face for a few more seconds. Was there a smile at the corner of his mouth?
The rest of the meeting went on much smoother than expected.