Mod Headcanon: Bruce Wayne, Diana Prince, & Clark Kent (aka the World’s Finest)
(It’s no secret I’m not as big of a DC fan as I am of Marvel, so this is gonna be a mashup of various comics, movies, and animated shows, and a small headcanon plotline in the middle there.)
Bruce is AroAce and Trans
Clark is Queer and Nonbinary
Bruce Wayne is Gotham’s most notorious playboy. At least as far as the public is concerned, and Bruce is happy to let them believe it. The truth is unlikely to do any good for his, or the company’s, image. As a child, regardless of the wealth his parents left behind, and an endless number of suitors, of all classes and genders, being thrown at his feet, he preferred solitude to company, would rather pursue knowledge than courtship. He remained much the same through high school and college, until his ‘peers’ started to notice his lack of interest, and he learned to fake it just enough to keep the jackals in the press off his heels. Becoming the Bat was freeing in a way. He sacrificed very little during his training, less than other men had done, at least, and thrived without the expectations and judgment of Gotham’s High Society. He found it harder to keep up the mask of Bruce Wayne when he came back, and spent every party longing for moonlit rooftops. He was never fond of dancing, never liked what it alluded to, the forced intimacy and fumbling hands ever present reminders of desires he couldn’t reciprocate. As the Bat, though, he wasn’t beholden to the expectations of what a man should want or be, all people asked of him was justice, protection, a knight in shadowed armour. There was one like him, a Cat with expensive tastes, who feigned hunger the way he did, who saw right through his façade, left him with the knowledge that he wasn’t alone, and promised him a partner who wanted nothing beyond a dance.
He wasn’t thinking about optics when he adopted Dick, but having an heir put an end to the ever-increasing pressure from his contemporaries and the media to “think about his legacy”. Though children were never part of his original plan, he found that fatherhood suited him well, and for most of his children he was able to skip the unpleasant part of making the kid. He never resented or regretted Damian, but he never forgave Talia. She didn’t take no for an answer, and when he wouldn’t give her what she wanted, she took it. Clark and Diana learned very quickly not to press that particular subject.
Diana had always loved without regard to gender, though she never gave it much thought until she left Themyscira, because it was not something that was ever taboo. There were many things she found strange about humans, but the way they treated love with so much hatred she could never comprehend. The amazons knew of all kinds of love, and the most revered bond was that between sisters in arms: not just warriors who fought together, but those whose bond was so strong they fought as one. Diana longed for that connection, never found it in Themyscira, almost had it with Steve, and finally found it in Bruce and Clark.
Bruce especially reminded her of a fellow amazon she had once loved dearly, and thought she might share that warrior’s bond with. It was centuries before she left the island herself, and he had confessed to her that he’d never felt like the woman everyone mistook him for, and she could see how desperately he wanted to be free of the expectations others placed on him. She knew the feeling to a certain extent. So she helped him flee Themyscira, and still holds out hope she may one day find him here, in the world of man, and that he would understand her joy at having found that bond she had once looked for in him.
Growing up, Clark always felt a disconnect between the gender their Ma and Pa told them they were and the way they felt on the inside. When they learned of their heritage, they figured it must be an alien thing, which it was. Kind of. There was no exact human equivalent for the kryptonian concepts of gender, but some spelunking through google landed them with a few helpful words: nonbinary, xenogender, and singular they.
Clark had always thought everybody was pretty, but tried to ignore the feelings that would get a ‘boy’ living in rural Kansas into trouble. They did confide in Ma and Pa, who were amazing about it, but they didn’t feel like their parents would ever completely understand. The whole ‘actually an alien’ thing definitely helped explain the gender thing, but left them conflicted as to whether they found everybody pretty because their own gender was ‘different’ to everyone else’s, or if their gender and others’ didn’t factor into it at all. Eventually they settled on being just plain Queer and went on with their life.
Lois broke it off because, though she did love them, try as she might, she was straight, and she just couldn’t love them the way they loved her, seeing as she was only attracted to men, something they just weren’t. The two stayed friends, and eventually Lois was the one that gave them the final push to talk out their feelings with Diana and Bruce.
Their attraction to the two was another thing that they thought, at first, was another weird alien thing. They knew after the first meeting they found them both distractingly pretty, and after getting to know them, they could feel themself falling deeply in… something. It felt like love but they also knew that, try as they might, whatever this was was very much not romantic or sexual, and they had plenty of experience with what those felt like, this just… wasn’t that. It wasn’t until after another intensive round of googling that Clark found that what they were feeling was just as human as it was Kryptonian.
It was Clark who finally got the ball rolling, sat the other two down and confessed all they had been feeling and said, in no uncertain terms, what they wanted, the relationship they hoped to pursue. Diana was delighted to find that humans(and, evidently, Kryptonians) had a similar bond in their society to the one she was hoping for with the warriors near to her. Bruce was the hardest to convince, not because he didn’t reciprocate, he very much did, but because they couldn’t quite believe that they really only wanted a, what had Clark called it? A QPR with him and nothing… beyond that. Though he hadn’t said anything about it, Clark and Diana were quite sure now that Talia had not been the only one is Bruce’s life who struggled with the word “No.”
It took a while and a lot of reassuring, but Bruce eventually allowed himself to believe them, and agreed to what turned out to be, their opinion, at least, the World’s Finest QPR.
