Bruce/J'onn snippet

[icarus_chained]

Okay, this is more or less a sex scene, taking place just after Bruce and J'onn have bonded. I hope at some point to maybe incorporate it into an actual fic with plot and all, where I show this bonding actually happening, but my muse just WILL NOT cooperate, so this is all for now. Still, I hope it's not too bad, in and of itself.

Rating: fairly low for a sex scene, I guess, because I actually squick quite easily, but still. Adult content and all. Pay attention. Slash and sex. On a stairs. With armour, and lots of mental angst. So PG13 at least, and prob higher.

Title: Martian Oysters      (you'll see why)

Disclaimer: the boys unfortunately belong to someone else, who for some odd reason just won't let them do these kind of things. I know. I don't get it either.
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It was mostly Bruce who held them upright as they began to negotiate the stairs up from the Batcave. The Bat had been prepared, after all, or at least in part. J'onn was only barely cognisant of his physical form, riding deep currents between minds for the first time in too long to think of without pain, heady and intoxicated. Thoughts and emotions flowed along the paths of their minds like sands sifting around each other in a desert wind, pouring into all the deep places of their souls, and the telepath danced among them in inexpressable joy, even as the memories of two men born in pain linked and drew the net of sorrow and memory through their minds. It was only when he touched a memory of his sons, and then of Jason, that he remembered his partner's potential pain. And, turning, reaching for the part of Batman that wasn't forever monitoring the physical, reaching for Bruce to share and comfort, he saw something that ripped his joy, his drunkeness and his self-interest away.

Trailing watchfully behind him through the grains of Martian memory, Bruce's child-avatar, eight years of age with eyes as eons deep, paused in the act of gathering those grains, the touch of pale spirit hands turning red sand to pearls, white and heavy with meaning. Caught without thought, J'onn watched as Bruce lifted the memory of a lost child, changing it, embracing it, cradling the memory of a boy he had never met as if he were Dick or Jason. Making J'onn's pain a part of his own, in an attempt to lessen it. In those small, tired hands, with that strange logic of the mental planes, lay dozens of pearls already transmuted, each a name, each a face that no other on this earth would care to remember. But Bruce did. He learned, he knew, and he mourned, with all the weary caring of his heart, and suddenly J'onn could not wait until they were safe to touch him. Suddenly J'onn could not bear to be even this far apart. The love that welled in him tasted like tears and gratitude and desperate understanding, and he couldn't bear it.

He surged upwards in Batman's arms to press burning Martian lips against surprised human ones, toppling them both to the stairs even as his form shifted, softening and surrounding to take the brunt of the landing on more pliant Martian flesh. The Bat, instincts too deeply ingrained to bypass, had begun to brace, muscles sliding flawlessly to bear impact, shifting against the cucoon that was J'onn, until two strong hands passed through the alien to catch the step. Bruce froze, inside and out, the shock of pain and the fear of having hurt J'onn drawing a tense stillness over him. J'onn couldn't bear it.

He moved. Gentler, this time. Slower. A kiss, invitation and need. An embrace, reassurance and warmth. The soothing stroke of hands, powerful and tender, to draw Bruce down to him, to make the wary human relinquish the instinctive fears and allow his stronger form to bear them up.

For long, aching seconds, Bruce didn't respond, tension singing through his braced arms as his eyes closed against that gentle kiss. Then, slowly, with a silent surrender that was almost a sob, his human let go and curled softly into him. J'onn embraced the weight that eased onto him, the power and fear of that surrender arcing through him like lightning, and moved again. In the silent darkness of the cave, pooled in the deeper shadow beneath the Bat, green flesh moved and scintillated, armour against armour at first, then deeper as Bruce began to touch in return. Softer, now, caressing, but with heat building beneath it, so that touch began to shimmer and crackle with a thousand tactile meanings.

And inside, he embraced the mind that had laid itself open to him as sacrifice and gift, to stave off the darkness. He joined with it, with this spirit who seemed so desperate to give that it no longer remembered how to recieve. He reached out into Bruce's memory, and began to gather the pearls.

Instantly, Bruce resisted, clutching the drops of remembered pain against him, holding them close in fierce possession. Once, J'onn would have hesitated, would have thought himself intruding on a sacred privacy, but he knew better now. Bruce never wanted the pain, but his first instinct was always going to be to shield those he cared for from it. But here, now, that wasn't going to happen. J'onn was not a passive mate, was never going to be, and if there was pain it was going to be shared, no matter what the Bat dictated. He reached out, trusting to the man to understand, offering and taking, the hands of his avatar outstretched to the ancient child as the hands of his flesh wrapped around the man he had become. Green hands to clasp the pearls of another man's pain.

And Bruce took them, quaking in soul and mind and flesh, and laid his burden in them. And in J'onn's hands, suddenly the pearls weren't pearls, but tears, and they fell swift and heavy, and the dry sands surged to meet them, embracing and holding them, a sea of red and white released agony, and the sounds Bruce made against him as he plunged beneath suit and skin weren't moans, but thin, thready cries, and the white star of hope in Bruce's soul flared out to meet the older, warmer star that burned in J'onn. Tears poured steadily between them, and the human's movements grew frantic, his heart pulsing iron blood against the intangible invasion of green cells in a pool of green and black, driven wild and free and powerful. And J'onn realised why, realised how simple a thing it was that could free the passion of the man from the iron bounds of his control.

In that odd, distant part of him that watched all and everything from afar, that part that matched the remotest aspect of the Bat, he thought with sad surprise of all the people who never realised it. All those people who thought adrenalin and conflict released the power of Bruce, all those speculations on what dark urges would drive his passions, and no-one thought that in a life lived in pain and brutality, maybe it's lack would touch the deepest part. But as the tears flowed into a joined sea, as the pains of both were shared and eased, as touch grew strong and fierce but never harsh, the light of Bruce's soul continued to flood through him and embrace him, a steady blue-white radience that gave back in turn what he offered, that soothed and accepted and loved beyond all reason.

And J'onn let it. Buoyed up, dancing soul to soul in the light of paired stars, he joined Bruce above the sea of their pain and memory, seeing it, accepting it, but no longer drowned by it, and somewhere the Great Soul of Mars and all the lost and lonely dead of Gotham smiled on them. Somewhere his lost family and Bruce's looked back at them in infinite joy and understanding. As bodies strained and strained and finally gave, as an ancient child and a weary alien flew together in perfect abandon over a quiet sea, the soul-stars met and merged and went nova together, and all was washed clean by an endless burst of searing white radience.

It took J'onn a small eternity to return from that joint edge, to come back to his body, lying puddled beside and beneath Bruce, to come back to his mind, in warm contact with his mate. For time without meaning he lay there, staring almost blindly into ancient blue eyes, the cape a black pool around their limp forms, while riptides of joy and love and need and pain churned in his/their mind, before gradually ebbing down into a calm, quiet wonder. The silence between them was warm and blessed and utterly unlike the solitude that had once haunted them, and the beauty of that wholeness stirred an almost human desire to weep. Then a wild skein of fierce humour blossomed in his love's mind, and human fingers gathered his green hands to hold them quietly between worn, powerful palms. Bruce's voice as it caressed his mind was man and boy and bat, all three, whole and filled with awe and gratitude and a kind of desperate tenderness.

"Look," he murmured, inside and out, "Martian oysters."

The wave of love that ignited inside J'onn at that moment was a fire unlike any other he had ever known. Physically, he did nothing except clasp his lover's hands in return, and lay his head nuzzled in Bruce's neck so that his lips pressed against the powerful pulse, but his laughter as it curled through his mate's soul was rich with the scent of iron, and life, and all the joy in the universe.