On The Record
Superbat: Clark Kent x Bruce Wayne one shot
The tie was crooked.
Clark had fixed it three times in the elevator mirror and it was still crooked and he'd decided this was simply how the evening was going to go… slightly off, slightly wrong, the universe's way of telling him that sending him specifically to cover a Bruce Wayne gala was either Perry White's idea of efficiency or Perry White's idea of a joke.
He stepped out into the lobby of the Gotham Grand and pulled at his collar.
Fine. It was fine.
He was a professional. He had interviewed senators, foreign dignitaries, a sitting president, and on one memorable occasion a man who claimed to be from the future and was probably not but you never entirely ruled anything out in this line of work.
He could interview Bruce Wayne in a social setting without incident.
He absolutely could.
Lois had taken one look at the assignment and said "better you than me" in the tone she reserved for things she found either beneath her or inadvisable. Jimmy had immediately volunteered to come along for the photos, which meant Clark was currently navigating a Gotham gala with his most enthusiastic colleague trailing behind him like a golden retriever in a rented tuxedo.
"This place is incredible," Jimmy exclaimed, craning his neck at the chandelier. "How much do you think that thing costs?"
"More than either of us makes in a decade," Clark retorted, scanning the room.
"Do you think they'd notice if I—"
"Yes," Clark said preemptively.
Jimmy lowered his camera.
The room was the usual architecture of Gotham wealth — high ceilings, low lighting, the kind of flower arrangements that cost more than Clark's rent, and approximately two hundred people dressed in things Clark couldn't have named and couldn't have afforded. The Wayne Foundation banner stretched across the far wall above a display detailing the new pediatric research center that was, ostensibly, the reason everyone was here.
Clark found Bruce in under thirty seconds.
He always found Bruce in under thirty seconds. He told himself this was because Bruce Wayne was the kind of person a room organized itself around — which was true — and not for any other reason — which was less true — and moved on.
Bruce was near the bar, surrounded by the predictable constellation of Gotham's most photographed citizens, wearing a tuxedo that had clearly been fitted by someone whose entire career was fitting tuxedos, laughing at something a blonde woman in diamonds had said. He looked like a cologne advertisement. He looked like he had never worried about anything in his life.
Clark knew, because of certain advantages unavailable to his colleagues, that Bruce's resting heart rate was currently 62 BPM and that his eyes had mapped every exit, every face, and every potential threat vector in the room approximately eight minutes ago.
He looked like a cologne advertisement and he was also the most dangerous person in the building.
Clark straightened his tie, which was still crooked, and went to work.
The approach was the problem.
Not because Clark didn't know how to approach a subject — he did, he was good at this. People talked to Clark Kent in a way they didn't always talk to other journalists, something about him that read as safe and genuine because it was safe and genuine — but because approaching Bruce Wayne in this context required a specific calibration.
Professional. Appropriate distance. Minimal first-name basis.
He was still composing his opening line when Bruce looked up, across twenty feet of crowded gala, and found him immediately.
Clark held very still.
Bruce's eyes did the thing — the almost imperceptible shift, the real person underneath the persona surfacing for just a fraction of a second — and then something else moved across his expression, something that Clark recognized with a particular and specific sense of foreboding.
Bruce Wayne had just made a decision.
Clark did not yet know what the decision was.
He would know very shortly.
"Clark Kent."
Bruce said it like that — like a complete sentence, like a pleasant surprise, breaking away from the diamond woman mid-conversation with an ease that somehow didn't read as rude — and crossed toward him with his hand already extended and his smile doing the thing where it reached his eyes just enough to be convincing.
Clark shook his hand. "Mr. Wayne. Thank you for—"
"Bruce," Bruce corrected, warmly, with the particular emphasis of someone clarifying something that should have been obvious. "We've been through enough by now, don't you think?"
Clark's composure held. Barely. "Bruce. I was hoping to get a few minutes for the Planet, just a quote about the research center—"
"Of course." Bruce settled beside him rather than across from him, which was — a choice, spatially — and nodded toward the foundation display. "Walk with me?"
Clark walked with him.
From across the room, he was dimly aware of Jimmy raising his camera.
It started professionally.
Bruce talked about the pediatric center with genuine knowledge and actual passion — the real Bruce underneath the performance, the one who had quietly funded half of Gotham's social infrastructure and told no one. Clark wrote it down and asked good follow-up questions and it was, for approximately four minutes, a perfectly normal professional interaction.
Then a passing waiter offered champagne and Bruce took two glasses and handed one to Clark and said, "You look like you need this," with a look that was warm and amused and just slightly too familiar, and Clark accepted the glass because refusing it would have been stranger.
"Long week?" Clark asked, because deflection was a valid journalistic technique.
"Every week is a long week." Bruce looked at him over the rim of his glass. "You're one to talk. I saw the Intergang piece. That was yours?"
"Collaborative."
"The good parts were yours." He said it simply, without flourish, and Clark had just enough time to process that Bruce had read the Intergang piece before Bruce added: "You have a way of making people feel like they're being understood rather than interrogated. It's a rare quality."
Clark blinked. "That's—"
"A compliment," Bruce confirmed. "You can write it down if you like."
"I don't think Clark Kent is good at his job is the quote Perry is looking for."
Bruce smiled. The real one, briefly. "Probably not."
Clark was, at this point, functioning fine.
He had his quote. He had good material. He was about to wrap it up professionally and thank Bruce for his time and go find Jimmy and file the piece by morning and everything was going to be completely normal.
Then Catherine Ellsworth, heiress to the Ellsworth shipping fortune and a woman whose social confidence could have powered a small city, swept into their orbit and said: "Bruce, you've been hiding over here — oh." She noticed Clark. Looked him up and down with transparent interest. "And who is this?"
"Clark Kent," Bruce said. "Daily Planet."
"A reporter?" She smiled at Clark. "How does Bruce rate a handsome reporter?"
Clark opened his mouth.
"I requested him specifically," Bruce said.
Clark closed his mouth.
"Oh?" Catherine raised an eyebrow.
"I've found Clark to be remarkably thorough," Bruce said, with an entirely straight face, looking somewhere in the middle distance like he was making a professional observation. "Very dedicated. Real attention to detail."
"Is that so," Catherine said, now looking at Clark with significantly more interest than before.
"He asks excellent questions," Bruce continued, in the pleasant tone of a man who was enjoying himself enormously and concealing it well. "Very probing."
Clark's pen had stopped moving.
"I'm — just here for a quote," Clark said, at a pitch that was completely normal and professional.
"Of course you are," Catherine said kindly, and excused herself, and swept away.
Clark looked at Bruce.
Bruce looked back at him with an expression of complete innocence that Clark knew, with absolute certainty, was the single most performed thing Bruce Wayne had ever performed.
"Probing?" Clark asked, very quietly.
"It's a journalism term," Bruce stated dismissively.
"I know what it is—"
"Would you like another champagne?"
"I have a full glass."
"So you do." Bruce glanced at it pleasantly. "Shall we talk about the east wing funding structure? I think you'll find the donor breakdown quite interesting."
Clark, professionally, wrote down the donor breakdown.
Jimmy found him twenty minutes later wearing the expression of someone who had either witnessed something confusing or taken too many flash photos.
"Hey," Jimmy started, falling into step beside him. "So."
"Got a great quote," Clark interrupted. "Really good stuff on the research center. Perry's going to be happy."
"Yeah, that's — yeah, great." Jimmy glanced back toward where Bruce had been absorbed back into his social orbit. "Clark."
"Mm."
"Bruce Wayne just spent twenty minutes talking to you."
"I'm interviewing him, Jimmy, that's the assignment—"
"He touched your arm," Jimmy said, “Twice. I have photographic evidence."
Clark maintained his expression with some effort. "People are tactile in social settings."
"He fixed your tie."
Clark stopped walking.
"He — reached over," Jimmy recounted, with the careful precision of someone describing something they were still processing, "and just — adjusted your tie. While you were talking. Like it was completely normal. And you let him."
Clark had, in fact, been so caught off guard by it that he had stood completely still and said nothing, which in retrospect had not been his finest moment.
"He was being—" Clark started.
"And then," Jimmy continued, "he said something and you turned red."
"I didn't—"
"Clark. Man. I have a photo."
Lois was the real problem.
She'd arrived late, because Lois arrived late to things she considered beneath her and early to things she considered important, and she had been in the room for approximately eleven minutes before she appeared at Clark's elbow with her notepad and her expression and said: "Talk."
"Great quote," Clark said. "Really thorough—"
"Bruce Wayne knows your name," Lois stated with a raise brow.
"He knows a lot of names, he's very—"
"Your first name, Clark. He said Clark. I heard it from across the room." She looked at him steadily. "How do you know Bruce Wayne?"
Clark's mental filing system, which was extensive, cycled rapidly through several options.
The truth was obviously not available.
We met when I was investigating a weapons trafficker in Gotham and he appeared out of the shadows and nearly gave me a heart attack and somehow that became— no.
"I interviewed him," Clark offered, "Two years ago. Foundation piece."
"What foundation piece?"
"Literacy initiative. It ran in the Sunday supplement, Perry can pull the—"
"I remember that piece." Lois's eyes narrowed. "Henderson wrote that piece."
Clark's filing system hit a wall.
"I—" he started.
"Clark."
From somewhere to his left, with the specific timing that Clark was beginning to suspect was deliberate, Bruce Wayne all but materialized. Fresh glass of champagne, perfectly composed, wearing an expression of pleasant social ease that Clark now recognized as the highest-level performance Bruce was capable of.
"Ms. Lane." He extended his hand. "I don't think we've been formally introduced. I'm a great admirer of your work."
Lois shook his hand with professional composure, which meant she was pleased and wouldn't show it. "Lois Lane. You've been monopolizing my colleague."
"Guilty." Bruce glanced at Clark with an expression of warm familiarity that was exactly calibrated — not too much, not too little, the absolute ideal amount of we know each other without specifying the mechanism. "Clark and I go back a bit. He did some coverage on a community development initiative we ran — smaller piece, might not have made the main edition." Smooth. Easy. Not a flicker. "He gave us a fair write-up. I tend to remember people who do that."
Lois looked at Clark.
Clark looked at Lois.
"He remembered me," Clark confirmed, with the energy of a man building a raft out of available materials.
"Clearly," Lois said, in a tone that meant she was filing this away for later examination.
"I should get back," Bruce stated, already beginning the social pivot. "Clark—" and here he did it again, the hand on Clark's arm, brief and easy and completely unnecessary, "—good to see you. Send my best to Perry."
He moved away into the crowd.
Lois watched him go and turned back to Clark.
"He knows Perry's name," she observed.
"He's very well connected."
"He touched your arm."
"People are tactile—"
"Clark." Lois pointed her pen at him. "That man is flirting with you."
"He's— that's just how he is, he's like that with everyone, it's a persona—"
"He fixed your tie, Clark. Jimmy showed me the photo."
Clark looked up at the chandelier.
It was very expensive. Probably. He couldn't think about that right now.
"It was crooked," he deflected.
"It's still crooked," Lois said, not without sympathy, and went to find a better angle for her own story.
He found Bruce near the east stairwell at quarter to ten, in the narrow window between the end of the formal program and the beginning of the extended socializing portion, which was the only time in an event like this when Bruce Wayne could stand in a corridor for sixty seconds without generating comment.
"Community development initiative?" Clark asked.
"Small piece. It ran." Bruce leaned against the wall, and in the low light of the corridor the performance was dialed back considerably, the real topography of his expression more visible. "Henderson byline. Your name in the acknowledgments."
Clark stared at him. "I'm in the acknowledgments?"
"You provided a comment on sourcing methods. December, two years ago. It's documented." Something moved at the corner of his mouth. "I don't build cover stories from nothing."
"You could have warned me about— any of that."
"I made a judgment call."
"The tie, Bruce—"
"It was crooked."
"You could have said something—"
"I did something, which was faster." The corner of his mouth had developed into something that, on a less controlled face, would have been a full smile. "Your colleague Lane is very good."
"She's the best journalist I know." Clark rubbed the back of his neck. "She's going to keep pulling on this."
"The cover story will hold." Bruce straightened his cuffs, “It's solid documentation. She'll find the acknowledgment, find the initiative, find nothing anomalous, and move on to something more interesting."
"And if she doesn't?"
Bruce considered this with apparent serenity. "Then she doesn't. She can't print what she can't prove."
Clark looked at him for a moment. The sounds of the gala filtered down the corridor — laughter, music, the particular hum of two hundred people performing versions of themselves.
"You enjoyed that," Clark observed with a hint of exasperation.
Bruce said nothing.
"The whole—" Clark gestured vaguely. "Probing."
"It's a journalism term."
"You enjoyed it."
A pause. Bruce's expression did the thing it occasionally did — the brief, unguarded honesty, quickly recomposed but not before Clark had already seen it.
"You're very easy to fluster," Bruce retorted with a smirk, which was not a denial.
"That's—" Clark stopped and recalibrated. "That's not—"
"You went completely still when I fixed your tie." There was something in his voice that was almost fond, "Like a deer. It was remarkable."
"I was surprised," Clark deflected, with dignity.
"For approximately four seconds you forgot how to hold a pen."
"I was—"
"I watched you remember how to hold a pen, Clark. It was cute."
Clark, who could bend steel and had once talked down a man with a bomb and was by any reasonable metric not a person who should be flustered by anything, looked at Bruce Wayne in the low light of a gala corridor and said: "You are genuinely terrible."
Bruce grinned. The real one. The one that almost nobody got.
"You have everything you need for the piece?" he asked.
"Yes," Clark said, with great professionalism.
"Good." Bruce pushed off the wall and reassembled the performance around himself, the public face resettling like a coat being shrugged on, ready to go back out there and be Bruce Wayne for another two hours. "The tie, by the way."
"What about it."
"Still crooked." He straightened it — fingers efficient, quick, there and gone — and stepped back and looked at Clark with an expression that was perfectly bland and not remotely convincing. "There."
He walked back toward the main hall.
Clark stood in the corridor for a moment.
Looked down at his tie.
Straight, now.
He pressed his lips together very firmly and went to find Jimmy.
The piece ran Thursday. Thorough, fair, a genuinely good quote on pediatric research funding.
Lois read it over her coffee and said "solid" which was high praise and went back to her own work.
She did, Clark noticed, spend about ten minutes on her computer before closing whatever she'd been reading.
He didn't ask.
That evening his phone buzzed.
Tie looked better in the photos. - B
Clark stared at the message for longer than was strictly necessary.
The piece was good. You're welcome. - CK
The response came fast, for Bruce.
Dinner. Saturday. I'll send an address. Don't wear that tie.
Clark set his phone face-down on his desk.
Picked it up.
Looked at the message again.
Fine. But this time I'm asking the questions. - CK
Three minutes passed.
I'm counting on it.
Clark put his phone away.
He was smiling.
He didn't bother to stop.
