Work Text:
At first, Bruce has no idea what he's listening to.
He isn't even paying particularly close attention. It's the end of a long, long day, the point at which he has to concede he can no longer accomplish anything particularly complex, but still finds himself unable to surrender to sleep. At times like these, he's developed a habit of visiting the ship—asking it to sample its archives, taking notes, categorizing, the better to come to an understanding of the breadth of information it possesses. Creating an index for his own use, one he doesn't have to ask the ship for but can search independently, could prove valuable.
And it's undemanding work. The ship's voice is calm, even, soothing. Its database isn't all mother boxes and Gods of Apokolips, war and doom and anti-life; it reads him excerpts of alien fiction, plays the music of long-dead worlds, constructs models and holograms of objects, people, and places that he will never see—that were ancient thousands of years ago, that are so far away now that it's impossible to know whether they still exist. None of them could ever have imagined that one day a human would be sitting here, on an obscure world barely even capable of space travel, learning their stories.
He can't retain all of it. He'd never be able to remember it. He usually asks the ship to give him a summary, project an image for him, or chant or sing or recite a few lines—enough to let it wash over him, and then he makes a note for himself, whatever strikes him as a salient keyword or category, and moves on to the next.
But this is—
"Stop," he says.
The ship falls silent.
"Repeat the last line."
"Repeating. And Tara-dar-em took her new wife to the ground where she would have them plant a garden, and the sun was warm, the soil rich; and they drove their hands deep and worked together in the heat of the day, laying seed after seed after seed—"
Christ. Bruce clears his throat.
It could be literal. Literal, and entirely innocent. But at the same time he hadn't precisely been wrong, to think his attention had been caught by something—suggestive, undeniably so, even when delivered in the ship's perfectly neutral tone.
"Are there additional mentions of the garden of Tara-dar-em, in this work?"
"Yes," the ship says.
"How many?"
"Twenty-four. This is a traditional Kryptonian mir-deval, with twenty-five stanzas, twenty escalating and four de-escalating, each of which include further descriptions."
"Escalating," Bruce repeats.
"A mir-deval's rhythm and content both accelerate, during its recitation," the ship says blandly, "until reaching the par-an—the artistic and dramatic 'peak'—in the twenty-first stanza, after which it is expected to slow in pace to its conclusion."
Bruce shuts his eyes. It's a perfectly reasonable description of the internal structure of a piece of fiction; the buildup of plot and conflict, the—
The climax, goddammit, and its resolution, and it isn't the ship's fault that Bruce is primed to recognize it as an equally good description of something else entirely.
"Recite two lines from the description in the fifth stanza," Bruce hears himself say.
"And beneath the hands of Jir-akit-ara who was her wife, the flowers of Tara-dar-em's garden swelled and bloomed, lush and full, and Jir-akit-ara bent her face to them and breathed deep their scent—"
"Stop," Bruce croaks. "And the—eighteenth," random, a number that might as well have been plucked from a hat, but he shouldn't make assumptions. He shouldn't leap to conclusions. He should be comprehensive, thorough, and not decide he understands what he's hearing just because the first and fifth stanzas sound so—
"Tara-dar-em fed to her the fruit, and it was ripe and sweet and dripping, it filled her mouth and overflowed, and she ate of it with eagerness until she had licked away even the juices, but her hunger had not yet been sated. Her greed was overwhelming; Tara-dar-em plucked her another and another, and still she ate—"
Christ. It has to be deliberate. But if it's innuendo, that's one hell of an extended metaphor. Bruce rubs a hand across his face, and firmly ignores the heat in it.
Maybe it's a quirk of the author's, a stylistic decision. An artistic trend, even; an oblique reference to some other more famous poem or scene or image, something a Kryptonian at the time would have understood without needing an explanation.
"Ship, perform an analysis. Are similar references to gardens common in this style of mir-deval? In works by the same author, or dating to the same period, or produced in a specific region?"
"Similar references, including identical or closely-related keywords in the preceding and following text, are common to a span corresponding to six thousand Earth years, both before and after the development of genesis technology and the Kryptonian Codex."
Genesis technology. The Codex. And the ship would have no reason to draw a line between the refinement of Kryptonian reproductive methodology and—gardening—unless there were already some intrinsic correlation between the two.
If that's not a confirmation that the ship is well aware it just read him a selection of Kryptonian porn, Bruce doesn't know what is.
And—six thousand years. That's a long, long time for a peculiar literary flourish to remain in common use.
But it isn't as if it can possibly be literal.
Can it?
Kryptonians are aliens; Bruce shouldn't discount the idea without some kind of evidence to the contrary, no matter how improbable it sounds. It isn't as though that kind of wording couldn't be describing a biological mechanism. Even on Earth, there are all kinds of species that exchange genetic material externally rather than internally—that scatter pollen, let seeds fall to the ground, deposit eggs that are inseminated afterward instead of beforehand.
Perhaps it was even part of a transitional progression toward what would in the end become genesis pods: relocating reproduction outside of the body first, to a garden and then a pool, and then a pod. Or perhaps it was simply the only pre-existing method, more frustrating and haphazard than poetry made it sound—the reason Kryptonians had invented the genesis system to replace it. And it had remained a common reference because—
Because if Kryptonians were in the habit of publicly declaiming pornographic poetry, there was a lot more imagery to mine in a garden, seeds and flowers and ripe fruits, than in dropping off a genetic sample at the genesis facility.
Bruce covers his eyes with his hand. He's already spent about six times as long thinking about this as it deserves.
"Ship," he says aloud. "Is the description in the mir-deval of Tara-dar-em accurate to the actual practices of Kryptonians at any point during their history?"
The ship is silent for a moment. "Clarify query," it says slowly, and—Christ, of course, Kryptonian wouldn't have a word that could be translated as "garden" if people hadn't literally planted things now and then.
"Does the mir-deval of Tara-dar-em describe Kryptonian sexual activity?"
"That cannot be objectively determined," the ship says. "However, analysis of relevant commentary dating to the period of its creation appears to indicate that it does."
Bruce sits there, a hand still over his face, and wets his lips. "Please—alert me," he says at last, as levelly as he can, "if I request material from your archive that is structurally or stylistically similar to this mir-deval and contains references like these."
"Request logged," the ship agrees.
Problem solved, he tells himself. The ship will let him know in advance before sharing any more erotica, and he can safely make a notation that it's irrelevant, shuffle it off into an innocuous side category in his indexing system and forget about it.
Beyond that, it doesn't matter. It can't. It won't.
He doesn't need to know how it works. What they did, how they did it, why they wrote about it the way they did. He isn't going to ask; there's no reason to, and—
And Christ, he doesn't know where the hell he'd start.
It's just that he can't stop thinking about it.
Unfortunate coincidence, that's all. He'd have forgotten about it by the next morning, probably, except that there's—there's a bowl on the counter at the lake house, when he's pouring himself coffee. Peaches; round, unblemished, perfectly ripe.
—sweet and dripping, and it filled her mouth and overflowed—
It makes him remember it. Reinforces the association, when that's the last thing he needs.
And once he's been reminded of the idea, the concept, it's difficult to escape. Every summer weed bursting up through the cracks in Gotham sidewalks, every flower planted in every traffic island in Metropolis, brings it inexorably to mind all over again. Whenever he hasn't managed to occupy 100% of his own attention, he inevitably discovers he's started turning the thought over again, some part of his brain frustratingly unable to let it go.
The shadow of it has been dogging him for almost two weeks by the time it happens.
It's nothing. It should be nothing. Fifteen seconds, seated idly along the counter of the Hall's kitchen with three-quarters of the League—the stars aligned, all of them having stopped by for one reason or another but without a crisis to set them into motion again.
Diana is seated also, laughing with Victor. Clark is listening to them, smiling, chin propped on one hand, elbow on the counter, with the other hand closed around a glass of water he seems content to sip from occasionally.
And then Arthur enters, brushes past them to grab a plate for himself, and Bruce observes with grim amusement that he is—of course—picking out a pair of bananas, an apple, two bunches of grapes, for himself from the refrigerator.
It just had to be fruit.
And yet it still wouldn't have mattered at all, if Barry hadn't zipped in just then, slow enough to see him coming but still throwing off a couple blue-white sparks as he goes, to grab the apple off Arthur's plate.
"Hey," Arthur says, play-acting indignance.
Barry arcs around the end of the counter, and then comes to a stop, vibrating a little in place. The apple's already half-eaten. "Aw, c'mon," he says, eyes huge. "I need it more than you do! Snack hole!"
And it isn't as if it's intended to be anything but a mild rebuke. It has no double meaning to anyone but Bruce, when he raises an eyebrow and murmurs, "You shouldn't eat other people's fruit without permission."
Or it shouldn't have had any. He's not expecting Clark to choke.
Clark's got a hand up over his mouth before he can actually perform a full spit-take; with some effort, he manages to swallow, coughs twice out of the reflexive urge to ensure he's cleared his airway successfully even though he hardly needs it. His face is red.
It could be a coincidence. But it isn't, and Bruce knows it isn't the moment Clark's wide eyes meet his, and Clark goes even redder.
Christ. He must know. Did the ship tell him? Did he run across it in the database, the same way Bruce did? Or—Bruce doesn't know which is better, which is worse. If he and Clark both sat there on the deck listening to the ship recite the same piece of alien horticultural porn, and are sitting here now, remembering it, staring at each other over Arthur's plate of fruit; or if Clark knows because he's felt it himself. An urge he doesn't fully understand, the desire to find a space of open fertile ground and take someone there and plunge their fingers into the dirt, fill their hands with seeds, over and over again.
—and beneath the hands of her wife, the flowers of her garden swelled and bloomed, lush and full—
That's the beginning of the end.
He starts dreaming about it.
About loose dirt, the smell of it as it warms under sunlight, the feeling of it underneath his fingernails. Of seeds in his hands, a dozen different shapes and sizes and colors, but he knows, knows, that they belong to Clark. About flowers, huge blooms thick and heavy with petals, and when he touches them with his hands, they open wide for him, and he lowers his face to them and skims his fingertips over their petals and feels them tremble.
He dreams about a tree, strong and green and young, with fruit so full and ripe its branches are drawn low; easy to reach, easy to pluck. Clark is there, because of course he is. Where else would he be, when the tree is his? He's there, leaning against the trunk, head tipped back against the bark—but his eyes are level, watching Bruce. Waiting there, shivering, mouth parted, throat working, as Bruce eats and eats and eats—
He wakes up hard, except for the times when he's already come in his sleep. Ignoring it works, and then doesn't. When he jerks off, grim, as quick and as efficient as he can make it, he catches himself thinking about the sensation of the flesh of a fruit parting under his teeth, the feeling of Clark's eyes on him; until she had licked away even the juices, but her hunger had not yet been sated—
He is, unmistakably, screwed.
He'd thought—he doesn't know what he'd thought. That he could force himself to be reasonable about this idiotic fixation on Clark, that he might not be able to get rid of it but at the very least he could control it. He could rein it in. There would be limits on it, somewhere, somehow. Surely there had to be limits on it.
But, offered the opportunity to decide he would go this far and no further, he has comprehensively refused to take it. He still doesn't even understand what this might actually entail; and to ask would be to be forced to confront the terrifying truth that the answer wouldn't matter. He would do it anyway, whatever it is. He would fly to Kansas, dig up gallons of the dirt that belongs to Clark—spread it out next to the lake, till it with his bare hands, if Clark would only agree to give him the seeds to plant it, if Clark would only pick the fruit of it and push it onto his tongue a piece at a time—
Christ, he's losing his mind.
And then, a day after he frantically jerks himself off to the image of kneeling on bare dirt and being allowed to take a seed from the tips of Clark's fingers with his mouth, he finds Clark in the ship, planting a garden.
It stops him short. He wasn't expecting Clark to be here at all; he wouldn't have come if he'd known, because these days he can't look Clark in the face without picturing juice dripping from his lips, trickling down to pool in the hollow of his throat.
And he definitely wasn't expecting to find Clark kneeling on the deck, hands streaked with dirt up to the wrists, spreading soil evenly across the large square plot the ship appears to have made for him, raised edges rising out of the hull to hold what must be at least a foot's depth.
Clark's head comes up. He freezes, a deer in the headlights, throat working.
"Bruce," he says hoarsely.
Bruce stands there, and forces himself to think, to breathe—wets his lips, and somehow figures out how to say, "Clark."
"I didn't know you were here," Clark blurts, and then grimaces. "I mean, I didn't—I wasn't, uh." He looks down at his hands, the dirt covering them. His face is turning steadily pink. "This was a scout ship, but it was carrying supplies. It was supposed to be able to keep its crew alive and comfortable, long-term, until the actual colony ship arrived. It's got a seed library, and I thought I'd try—" He stops again. "It wasn't supposed to be—I didn't know you were here," he repeats helplessly.
I didn't mean to set you up to walk in on me in the Kryptonian equivalent of a candlelit bed strewn with rose petals, playing Barry White, Bruce translates.
Clark shifts his weight from one knee to the other. His gaze drops from Bruce to the deck. "I know you know," he adds, quiet. "And I really am sorry, I swear I wasn't trying to—"
"Yes, I do know," Bruce agrees, before Clark can stumble any further.
And then he swallows, and takes a step into the room, and tells himself to get a goddamn grip and ask.
"Do you want some help?"
Clark goes still all over again. His eyes come up, wide, just like that day in the kitchen.
"From—me," Bruce specifies, hoarse.
Clark is staring at him. Blankly, at first. And then something passes through him, and his gaze turns raw, uncertain, searching, flicking back and forth over Bruce's face; he bites his lip. "Bruce, I," he says, and then falters. His breath's picked up, the pink flush spreading down his throat, his mouth red where he's biting it again. "Yes," he blurts. "Yes, jesus, please—"
Bruce crosses the deck toward him, four long strides, and drops to his knees, takes Clark's face in his hand and kisses him. Clark makes a frantic sound into his mouth, clutches him by the nape of the neck and kisses him back, and his hand is still covered in dirt; Bruce can feel it against his skin, cool and gritty, grinding itself into him everywhere Clark is touching him.
Clark fumbles somewhere behind him on the deck, doesn't stop kissing him long enough for Bruce to figure out why, and then it's—his other hand, Bruce understands dimly, hard smooth shapes in it, and he's pressing them into Bruce's palm.
Seeds.
Bruce controls a shiver by the skin of his teeth, closes his fingers blindly around them, and Clark takes him by the wrist, drags his hand to the dirt. Shoves it in, gasping into his mouth at the same time, and Christ, Bruce can't take it—he grips Clark's shoulder with his free hand, pushes, until Clark's pressed back against the raised edge of the plot, one arm still shoved behind him and clutching Bruce's wrist as Bruce works the first seed down into the soil, and Bruce can knee Clark's thighs apart, make room for himself between them.
Clark does at least have a cock, Bruce discovers, even if it's vestigial, or a secondary sexual characteristic instead of primary. It's impossible to tell whether it's the friction, Bruce's weight and heat, the long slow grind of his own cock against Clark's, that's doing it for Clark—or whether it's Bruce's hand in the dirt behind Clark, pressing the first seed deep and then using his fist to make room, to push a second deeper still.
But either way, Clark cries out, gasping open-mouthed against Bruce's jaw, hot and hard. Bruce gets a hand in his hair, tangles it there and pulls until Clark's head drops back, and Bruce mouths along the arched curve of his throat at the same time that he blindly slides a third seed out between his thumb and the knuckle of his forefinger, and is rewarded with a full-body shudder.
"Christ, Clark—"
"Yes, god, don't stop," Clark says blurrily; he's squeezed his eyes shut, mouth slack and wet, with his free hand fisted in the front of Bruce's shirt, a broad dark smear of dirt ground into the fabric, and Bruce has never seen anything so goddamn hot in his life.
He doesn't stop. By the time he comes, shuddering, in the slacks he never took the time to unfasten, there are no seeds left in his hand, and Clark is ecstatically weak under him, still clutching feebly at his wrist and the span of his back, shivering.
"Jesus," Clark says dazedly, when it's over.
"So I take it that worked," Bruce murmurs, hardly any more steadily.
Clark blinks once, twice, and then turns his head and meets Bruce's eyes, looking—sheepish?
"I, uh," he says. "I think so? I don't actually know."
"You don't know," Bruce repeats.
Clark makes a face. "To be honest," he admits, "I was kind of afraid to ask."
Bruce shuts his eyes, swallows the laugh but can't prevent the smile. "Well, I guess we're just going to have to keep trying, and find out." He's still got one hand in the dirt; he pulls it free, doesn't bother to shake it off before he slides it into Clark's hair, and Clark's shuddering a little even before he leans in close.
He was going to go for the cheap pun about talking dirty—but instead he finds himself whispering into the shell of Clark's ear, "Or maybe I won't come back until something's flowered for me. Maybe you'll just have to wait—"
And Clark shivers, clings closer and turns his face into Bruce's, and whispers, "I'll buy you flowers every day, Bruce, I'll feed you all the fruit you want. Anything," and Bruce doesn't even get a chance to answer before Clark's pulled him down, found his mouth, and is kissing him again.
But that's fine, he decides dimly. He'll have plenty of chances to explain that the only fruit he wants to eat is Clark's.