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Bruce Wayne has never had a friend before.
Sure, he's had “friends.”
People who speak fondly of him in interviews, who remember him from school in vague, softened fragments before his parents died and he turned into a shell of a child... He gets invited to parties still and he smiles for the cameras -strained though it is- and has Alfred send gifts to people who are expecting them.
But he’s never had a friend who knows him like Clark does.
“...You’re not gonna stab me with that pencil, are you?”
Clark’s voice cuts through the quiet, warm with something like amusement. He reaches out on instinct, fingers gently curling around Bruce’s pencil-wielding wrist, stilling him .
Bruce doesn’t even flinch. Clark touches him with a kind of familiarity that he's never experienced before and it's... nice. Clark's touch doesn't jolt him like the others' do. Doesn't make his skin grow cold or his shoulders tense. And Bruce would never admit it out loud, but some days he only feels human when Clark is touching him.
“It’s not a pencil,” Bruce says flatly. “It’s eyeliner.”
A beat.
“Besides,” Bruce adds, finally risking a glance at him. “I saw you swallow a bullet yesterday.”
Clark huffs out a laugh, sheepish. His hand drops back into his lap.
It isn’t lost on Bruce, the absurdity of this moment.
The two of them are sitting cross-legged in the middle of his bedroom floor. Makeup scattered between them: pencils, brushes, eyeshadow palettes all laid out in the open like a teenage girls' slumber party.
After his parents died, Bruce stopped going over to other kids’ houses for play dates, not that he’d really done it before to begin with. Parents tended not to react well to background checks, security details, or the quiet presence of surveillance vehicles idling down the street, just because their child wanted to spend an afternoon with the Wayne heir.
But now, looking at Clark with his knees bumping his, shoulders hunched forward so that Bruce doesn't have to strain to work, he thinks that maybe, if things had been different, it might have felt something like this.
Easy. Aimless. Quiet familiarity.
Bruce reaches forward, selecting a different pencil, something softer and easy to remove. He owns better products of course, heavier ones. Waterproof, smudge-proof and filled with metallic pigments to reflect like an animal in the dark. The kind he uses as Batman stains, leaving behind a faint, ghostly shadow on his skin even in the daylight.
'You're so punk rock,' Clark had said, gushing like a kid when he first saw Bruce remove the bat mask months ago. Apparently, he'd rocked out to Green Day and Papa Roach in middle school, sticking out like a sore thumb in a small country town that didn't hate -but didn't encourage- alternative lifestyles as much as Ma and Pa Kent did. 'Do you think you could give me a make over?'
“Hold still,” Bruce says.
And Clark does, eyes closed, leaning forward. His face all smooth and gentle. The way that Clark trusts is sometimes overwhelming to Bruce. He clears his throat. Clark cracks an eye open.
"You don't have to close your eyes." Bruce lifts his hand again and brings the eyeliner carefully to Clark’s waterline.
Clark goes cross-eyed trying to watch.
Bruce pauses. “Look up at the ceiling. Not at me.”
Clark winces and gives Bruce that sheepish grin he so often wears whenever Lois reports on the damages he's caused saving Metropolis.
"Sorry." Clark swallow. "It's hard not to look at you."
Bruce schools his expression with an unimpressed hum.
Love. Romance. Affection.
He turns the concepts over in his mind, distant and clinical. Sometimes, Bruce has a hard time determining which one of them is supposed to be the alien here.
Serotonin.
Dopamine.
Oxytocin.
Love was chemical reactions. Predictable, measurable. Love was a thing that clouds judgment, dulls instinct, rewrites a person’s sense of logic, of right and wrong. People do terrible things for love. People die for it. And Bruce knows the part of him that could hold and cultivate love, died in the gutter with his parents, years ago.
Clark loves easily.
He’s loved just as easily in return.
Bruce grimaces at the ache in his heart. “Just hold still.”
Clark does, unnaturally so, his gaze fixed on the ornamentation of the ceiling. He even holds his breath, his chest no longer rising and falling, and Bruce takes the opportunity to study him.
Bruce shifts closer, one hand coming up to steady Clark’s chin. Clark doesn’t react beyond a small exhale through his nose and a soft blink, like he’s settling into it.
“Relax,” Bruce says quietly. “You’re not about to be executed.”
Clark’s mouth twitches. “Feels high stakes to me.”
“It’s eyeliner.”
“Yeah.”
Bruce ignores that, angling Clark’s face toward the light. Up close, there’s too much to take in all at once. The clarity of his skin, the dimples and the ridiculous symmetry of his features. He's handsome in photos and on tv, but up close Clark is a different kind of beauty entirely.
Bruce presses the pencil lightly to Clark’s waterline.
Clark flinches.
Bruce stills immediately. “Clark," he sighs. "I said hold still.”
“I am- I am,” Clark insists, his voice going tight, eyes meeting Bruces'. “That’s just, the eye is very sensitive organ.”
“I’m aware of what an eye is, Clark.”
Clark huffs a quiet laugh, then clamps down on it, going rigid again.
Bruce waits a beat, watching for movement. When none comes, he tries again, this time slower, more deliberate. The line goes on smoother, dark pigment catching against the rim of Clark’s glittering eye. “There,” Bruce murmurs, finishing up. “I'm done. That wasn't so bad, was it?”
Clark grins, blinding. “How does it look?"
Bruce leans back slightly, assessing him. It’s uneven. A fleck of pigment is stuck in his lower lashes, but it suits Clark in a way that Bruce hadn’t anticipated.
He looks...
"There's a mirror in the bathroom."
Bruce says with a grunt, breaking his gaze away. He starts picking up the makeup tools, collecting them into a black pouch that'll sit beneath the bathroom sink until the next time Bruce Wayne decides to go out 'clubbing.'
"Go see for yourself."
Clark looks confused for a second, blinking at Bruce before nodding and heading into the en suite.
"Holy cow!" Clark's voice calls out. "I look so punk rock!"
And Bruce can't help but smile.