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Clark braced himself in the doorway of the house, watching as his Ma and Dick walked hand-in-little-hand through the pasture. Wind whispered through the tall chaff, humming in time with the songbirds as they made their way to roost. In the distance, dark clouds unfurled across the orange sky with a kind of slow ominousness only Kansas farmland could conjure. He knew it would storm that night and Clark thought somewhat guiltily about the clogged gutters he’d offered to fix for Ma last time he was in town and still hadn’t gotten around to. In the field, Ma laughed loud and high watching Dick cartwheel through the ruddy dirt. They were headed toward the barn where he’d offered to help her put the animals up before the storm could spook them. Clark closed his eyes to tune into them laughing together. Dick had flopped over into a mud puddle on accident and his Ma was soothing his bruised ego with the offer of a little pie after dinner.
The evening was sweet in spring and Clark could just about taste it. Sweet with Dick’s little giggles, the crisp greenery of the young corn stalks out in the field. The air had a slight tangy quality about it, probably early lightning brewing up in the cloud bank; even the sun, steadily being chased away by the approaching storm, had a particular flavor to its photons this time of year. And underneath it all, something warm and familiar on the back of his tongue, enough of it to make his mouth water.
Bruce. Leaning against the staircase, watching him.
Clark opened his eyes as Bruce’s hand came around his waist to tuck into the band of his blue jeans over his hip.
“He pulling his weight out there?” Bruce asked of Dick. He used his extra inch and a half on Clark to lay his cheek to the top of his head.
Clark cracked a lazy smile imagining Ma and Pa like this once, watching a little version of himself in his size-too-big galoshes skipping up to the barn for evening chores. He tipped his head back against Bruce’s shoulder. ”He would have done it anyway, you know. You didn’t have to ask him.”
The fingers in his jeans tightened, and Bruce used the leverage to spin a particularly weak-kneed Clark around to face him.
“I know he would have,” he replied as he pressed them that much closer. “I just wanted a minute alone with you.” Bruce murmured it into the line of Clark’s throat, the touch of his lips soft and toeing the line of chaste for the intimacy of the act. The arm that wasn’t tucked into Clark’s jeans slid around the small of his back, holding him there. Bruce swayed him, terribly off rhythm, to some static-filled Oldie filtering in from the kitchen clock-radio.
“He likes it here, I think,” Bruce told him. “And it’s good for him to be out in the countryside like this, away from the city.” It was a wonder he was able to get out as many words as he did with his lips working up Clark’s throat like that— teeth catching lightly at the thin, soft part where jaw became earlobe. Bruce’s cheeks were hot with blood that Clark could just about hear pumping through his capillaries over the thrum of his own heartbeat.
“S’good for you, too,” he mumbled into his mouth when they were finally kissing.
He grabbed Bruce around the waist and backed him out of the doorway, hands tangling in his black hair, seemingly of their own accord, as he opened his mouth for a slow, savoring kiss. Bruce took that for the invitation that it was. The fingers tucked into Clark’s jeans skimmed the sensitive skin of his belly, over his hipbone, anywhere he knew would make Clark squirm. He could feel Bruce’s smile against his mouth at the unintentional gasp that snuck past him. The shudder of muscle there that betrayed his attempt at stoicism.
Bruce had been in the kitchen all afternoon with Martha preparing dinner, seemingly until the heat of the house clung to him. Clark nosed his way to the pulse in Bruce’s throat, biting down just a bit. He smelled like fresh dinner rolls and Clark’s childhood home, soft and pliant from the few glasses of red they’d shared with his Ma. It was all just a bit too much and it muddled his mind. Clark supposed it was the closest to drunk his alien nervous system could get.
Clark dug his fingers into the smallest part of Bruce’s waist. Feeling an involuntary hitch in his breath, Clark shifted, pushed his broad palms into the tight back pockets of Bruce’s slacks. Bruce’s head tipped to the side allowing Clark better access to the long cord of muscle there, and he bit down on the good side of a bit too hard. The desperately soft noise that came after could have brought him to the floor if Bruce hadn’t been holding him upright by the nape of his neck.
Clark felt it down to his toes when Bruce’s knuckles dragged along his half hard cock, lighter than air— maybe even by accident— but undeniably there. He toyed with the button and fly of Clark’s jeans just long enough to get him the rest of the way there. Better yet, had him groaning at the half-palming, half-groping Bruce seemed to enjoy teasing him with.
In the distance, thunder rumbled, and Bruce kissed him long and languorous with a hand cradling the base of his skull, the way he’d always liked it. A nip to the bottom lip seemingly sealing his fate.
Somehow they’d ended up with Clark’s back pressed up against the bannister of the staircase, and he had to force himself to ease up before he added another thing to his Ma’s Honey-Do list. And if that hadn’t been bad enough, he just about fell through the staircase itself when Bruce’s hand slipped past the elastic band of his boxers, his fingers circling around him, right at the base of his cock. The slow drag of movement, the quick rabbiting of Bruce’s pulse in his wrist. Clark could feel the tendons of his hand flex on every stroke. Everything was a mess of a thousand textures and a hundred more sounds. The taste of the world shifted every other second. It always proved a precarious thing, trying not to immediately come in his jeans at the insane influx of sensory pleasure. He had to squeeze his eyes shut against the sudden rush of information.
”Ah, Jesus—“ Each stroke was hot, hot friction, aided by the thin slip of precome Bruce danced the pad of his thumb through on every lazy downstroke.
“God, look at that,” Bruce hummed against his temple. “Like a faucet.”
It was almost enough to embarrass him, the way Bruce spoke sometimes. Like he hadn’t even meant to say it out loud, but something about being with Clark like this, maybe even just because it was Clark, compelled him to. While the one hand worked away on his cock, the other skimmed along his ribs, up his shoulder blade and out to his elbow. He knew Bruce wouldn’t point it out to embarrass him. Just because he liked to see it— wanted Clark to see it, too. To feel it.
He fumbled around for Clark’s hand, the one not propping himself up against the bannister, and dragged it toward Clark’s cock. He liked it when Clark touched himself while they fucked, always encouraging Clark to show him what felt good. At first that embarrassed him a bit too, but like a lot of things Bruce did for him, Clark quickly came around to it. Bruce’s fingers folded over Clark’s pushing the tips of his middle and index finger through the slick precome along the tip.
“Bruce, I—“
Somewhere outside, gravel shifted under foot. Clark’s head snapped up toward the door. Rubber boots stomped closer and he could just about make out words without trying too hard. They were probably less than a minute from the porch. Dick and his Ma.
Bruce caught on instantly, probably able to hear them too. “Shit.”
He was already retracting his hands from Clark’s underwear and tucking him away instead. His head bounced off Clark’s shoulder in utter fatherly defeat as Clark fumbled to do up his fly as fast as his deft fingers could go without ripping the zipper off entirely and causing a bigger scene. It was not the first time Dick had interrupted the two on the verge of moving to the bedroom. Life with a kid was like that, never a moment alone, and Dick was a clinger, always hopping around in Bruce’s lap, over-excited and energetic. He’d taken to Clark quickly, proactively gluing himself to his hip.
Clark harvested every remaining ounce of self control to picture anything that might calm him down. Violent explosions and pooling blood, kryptonite poisoning, a steaming pile of kaiju guts. A gust of wind, cooled off the approaching storm, swept through the open window of the front room. It would be enough if Bruce just kept his eyes off of him for a while.
Dick’s calls of “B! B!” got louder as the pair cleared the wood steps to the porch, and then the screen door was slapping shut behind him as he bounded up to his father who had crossed the short distance to meet him by the door.
“B, look!” Dick was practically vibrating as he held up the old jam jar to his father’s face. Three little black insects flitted around inside, blinking from their behinds at odd intervals. “Mrs. Kent calls them ‘lightning bugs’!”
”And where is Mrs. Kent, Dickie?” Bruce asked him as he took the jar from the boy.
Dick’s eyes widened and he rushed to the door barely in time to hold it open for Martha. She gushed over his gentlemanly manners, his strength to battle the wind just to hold the door open for ‘such an old lady.’
“Oh, Clark, honey. What’s wrong? Do you need a glass of water?”
+++
That night they had bass for dinner, the ones Clark and Dick had fished out of Mr. Maynard’s pond. Bruce took over scrubbing dishes afterward, and they all sat down for icebox pie at the table while Martha shared a story about Clark as a boy, getting bit on the ass by their old donkey. Dick thought it was very funny that Martha called the donkey an ‘ass’ and giggled about it right up until he passed out in front of a movie on the couch still in his blue jeans and t-shirt.
It rained, just like Clark thought it would. Poured, even. Huge bolts of lightning cracked the sky open, and out of it came great crashes of thunder that had the picture frames on the walls rattling. Bruce thought it was incredible that Clark could tell a storm was coming from the taste of the air alone. He said it was something about the ion particles interacting, bending the air, but Clark told him his Pa could do the same thing, only he had always felt it in his knees.
When the house had gone quiet save for the beating sheets of rain and the rush over the clogged gutter Clark would deal with in the morning, he stripped Bruce from his linen slacks and spread him out in his childhood bedroom. The bed was too small for the both of them and the walls were probably too thin, but Clark and Bruce were good at compensating. They worked well that way.
Sometime later when they were halfway dressed again, Bruce asleep on Clark’s arm and Clark watching him drift through his own drooping eyes, he caught the creak of the stairs and the faint whine of the door hinge.
“B?” Dick whispered loudly. “B, are you awake?”
He picked his head up off the pillow and caught sight of the little boy swaying in the doorway, one hand still clutching the handle.
“What’s wrong, Dick?”
The kid toed the door frame trying desperately to avoid Clark’s eye. ”Nothing really,” he began, but then thunder rumbled a violent vibrato and the whole house shook like something was trying to break out of it from its foundations.
Dick jumped in the doorway, illuminated doubly by Clark’s vision and the bolt of lightning that shocked the night sky. His eyes were wider than fried eggs as he trembled in fear.
“Come on up, little man,” he called quietly to the terrified boy. For as brave as Clark knew he was, Dick practically threw himself across the room and into his arms.
The three of them squeezed in, Bruce dead asleep across Clark’s right side, Dick scrambling over their entwined legs to pile on top somewhere in the middle. Above them, the ceiling fan whirred, and in the next room over, Martha’s breath came in time with the clink of its dangling pull chain.
“You know,” Clark whispered, “when I was little I was scared of thunder, too.”
”M’not scared.” The reply was quick and decidedly sure.
“Oh, ‘course not.” Little knees dug into his stomach, probably into Bruce’s, too. “But then my Pa told me that thunder isn’t anything to be scared of. Just the angels bowling in heaven.” He smiled remembering this exact moment, but with himself in Dick’s shoes, his Pa’s in his.
“That’s silly, Clark.”
He smiled sleepily down to the little boy. “It is silly, isn’t it?”
”B says thunder is super hot air that explodes in the clouds. He says you do the same thing when you fly.”
And, well, he wasn’t not correct.
“G’night, Clark. Love you,” Dick mumbled into Clark’s t-shirt as he burrowed into his side next to Bruce. After that Dick was quiet, verging on sleep. He didn’t jump as high when the next bout of thunder rolled through.
And sure, Clark could fly and shoot lasers from his eyes and take a bullet from a Sig at point blank like it was nothing, but the contents of this little Kansas home were the only truly super things in Clark Kent’s life.