Chapter Text
His hands are scarred, knuckles over-large; warm-yet-cold, smooth-yet-rough, calluses overlaying over each other. A warrior's hands, used to shifting his grip around the handles of a hundred different weapons. Sometimes they catch on Clark's smooth skin, and those blue-lightning eyes will turn upwards.
You're not very used to rough work, are you, he whispers into Clark's ear. His Punjabi is lilting, every syllable caressed before breathed over the nape of Clark's neck.
In the distant mountains of India, near the borders to Tibet, they move together in tandem. There is grass under Clark's hands, air caught in his throat. He has never felt the need to breathe as he does under this man, this stranger whose name he doesn't ask even now, when their bodies are fitting together like a hand in glove. Silk, the wolf-stranger has murmured. You feel like silk.
Clark is in this desolate, empty place looking for some kind of enlightenment. For some way in which he can make a difference with the ink of his pen instead of the inhuman strength of his body. He does not know why the stranger is here. His imagination gives a reason: to try to find out how to make a difference in this sprawl-wide world of theirs.
Later, panting, Clark takes those hands. He meets the tips of callused fingers with his tongue, and tastes sparks that burrows deep within him and seats itself into his nerves. He breathes in and locks the salt-scent of the stranger's skin there, and, somehow, that gives him strength to still his feet as he watches the man with blue-lightning eyes walk away.
Years later, he saw those hands again. There are more scars and calluses now, bracketed by oily shadows. But he knows them, and he finds himself laughing, tangling those fingers within his own and bringing them to his lips.
Salt and lightning.
Clark wraps him up in his red cape (making headlines, writing truths, all that his travels has taught him) before they rise upwards until cities disappear and they are surrounded only by wind.
His name is Bruce. His name is Batman. He's leaning against Clark now, his breath hot on his over-heated skin.
You make me believe in fairytales, he says. There are shadows in his voice.
Sinking his fingers beneath the cowl that seems woven from darkness itself, Clark lifts it off. He gives Bruce a smile. He hears the catch in his breath, the butterfly pinned at the back of his throat.
B, he says, a fat little letter that distills down to the core of the once-stranger and fills Clark's mouth entirely. You helped me learn to love when the lightning strikes.