by Nicole Field
"Shh, it's okay," Leo murmured, gently encouraging him towards the stairs to their bedrooms, away from the back door.
They were going to have to move somewhere new. He couldn't just… not be able to deal with seeing the back end of his own home.
Bruce didn't start to feel calm again until he was up in his bedroom. "I'm sorry," he said, feeling ashamed of his reactions, not the least that they were displayed in front of Leo. Leo who had had to kill what appeared to be an eight-year-old girl. Leo who had had to kill a human man in order to save a whole town. And Bruce couldn't manage to suck up an abduction that had probably taken place over no more than 90 seconds.
"If I'm not allowed to apologize, neither are you," Leo told him and Bruce was struck suddenly by the differences in Leo.
It was beneath what was physical. Bruce looked Leo, wondering when he'd last heard that light, mocking tone of voice. Leo had often been the one to 'school' Bruce in matters of social conduct, and Bruce had become used to the tone as they'd grown up. He smiled at hearing it again now.
"Deal," he said.
Leo ducked his head, looking self-conscious. "What?" he asked, only looking at Bruce from the corner of his eyes, like he was ashamed at Bruce peering at him so closely.
"It's good to have you back," he said. "Without you being Captain Hart as well."
"Good in some ways." Leo's shoulders were hunched over and he turned away from Bruce, walking towards the window in the room and looking out of it. "I feel strange. Like I don't know what I'm going to see the next time I look in the mirror." His palm covered his face and rubbed against the bridge of his nose.
"You're going to see Leo Hart," Bruce said from behind him.
"Am I?" His hand dropped. "Right now I feel like a fake. Like the last six months of my life have been a fake."
"But we picked up testosterone on the way home," Bruce said, trying to be encouraging. "And your top surgery is already booked."
Leo lifted his chin, but didn't say anything. He didn't need to. The day before, he wouldn't have needed testosterone or top surgery. Bruce's words weren't a comfort to him. He shook his head, unwatched by Leo. It was only in saying the words that he heard how flimsy they were.
Leo lowered his head again. "I'd better get the gel out," was all he said, disappearing out of the bedroom and going downstairs to pick up the bag he'd left in the living room. He'd gone with the testosterone gel over the injections, at least to start with and see how it went.
Bruce sat on his bed, not sure whether he should stay where he was or whether Leo wanted him to come in with moral support, or something like it. He listened for the sound of Leo moving around in the house, coming back up the stairs to the bathroom on their level. He used the sound of Leo's footsteps to drag his thoughts away from the living room and sofa. He was going to have to go in there again. It was the part of the house in which he lived. He was going to have to face it eventually.
But eventually was not right now.
Leo poked his nose into the bedroom on his way to the bathroom. "You okay?" he asked.
Bruce nodded wordlessly. Then, "Do you want me to come in there with you?"
Leo considered it, then answered, "No. I think I've got this. Thank you, though."
Bruce lifted his chin in a nod, then watched Leo step back and continue down the hall. The bathroom door opened and closed. Bruce stared at his fingers and tried to imagine what it would be like administering the first dose of testosterone to the skin.
He couldn't imagine it. Maybe there would be nothing. Maybe there would be nothing for weeks, or a month, and then…
The bathroom door opened again, and Leo's footsteps came back to the bedroom. Leo didn't look jubilant, so much as settled within himself.
"How do you feel?" Bruce asked cautiously.
Leo nodded several times before putting thoughts into words. Then he gave a small, self-deprecating laugh. "Like I've just rubbed cold, clammy gel onto my skin."
Following Leo's lead, Bruce smirked as well. "So, that'll be the best part of every day from now on."
"Yes," Leo said, no longer joking. "Yeah, it will."
He joined Bruce again on the bed, wrapping his arms around him.
"It's weird, you know?" Leo added. "I keep thinking this'll mean I'll wake up tomorrow and be back to the way that it was. But it's gonna be slow." As Bruce turned to look up at him, he drew himself up and pressed his lips into a smile. "It's gonna be so slow. But it's gonna be the healthier way of doing it. And that's good."
Bruce didn't say anything. He didn't need to say anything; Leo already knew what he thought.
Instead, he chose to derail the entire discussion. "We need to figure out what we want to call this," Bruce said between the movies.
"Movies in bed?" Leo asked, raising an eyebrow.
"Not that. This." Bruce gestured the two of them with his fingers. "This thing that's between us." He shifted, sitting up in bed and looking down on Leo. "I keep thinking of you as my best friend. Or my roommate. But those things don't really apply anymore, do they? I mean, they do, but there's also—"
"Something more. I agree," Leo said, cutting Bruce's babbling short with another indulgent smile as he moved his fingers lightly up and down Bruce's arm. "I may have told the hospital staff that you were my boyfriend. They said 'family only', so…" He shrugged, as if not to make it too big a deal.
Bruce enjoyed the sensation. It almost distracted him from his thoughts and the conversation, but not quite. "Hang on… you did?"
Leo just gave him a smile. He looked kind of self-conscious.
Bruce realized an identical smile was on his own lips. He cleared his throat. "I'm glad you did. So… you've given it thought then?" he said, deliberately offering a leading question.
"Mostly, I've just been trying to stay afloat," he started. His smile became a grimace. However, knowing Bruce well enough to know this wasn't the answer Bruce was after, he added, tightening his fingers around Bruce's upper arm, "I want to think about it now, though."
Bruce smiled and pressed himself against Leo's body for the intimate contact and the positive reinforcement. He only wished that he could claim he knew Leo as well.
The tips of his own fingers stroked over Leo's skin. It was more intimate and less sexual than a hug, and Bruce found himself enjoying time to explore the sensation of the skin of Leo's arm, shoulder and back, lazily drawing unseen patterns against them so that he almost didn't notice the passage of time. He'd never felt fascinated by someone's skin the way he felt with Leo's.
"That feels amazing," Leo said, dropping his arm back to the bed and closing his eyes.
"I'm glad," Bruce said softly, leaving him to enjoy the touches and to the privacy of his own thoughts for a moment.
"Would it be too far off to call you… my boyfriend?" Leo asked eventually. "I mean, that wouldn't make you feel weird or invalidate you?"
"It wouldn't." Bruce thought about the way he'd thought identifying as asexual meant he could never have a romantic partner. But further researching had shown him that there was a very common difference to be found between asexuality and aromanticism. Though he fit into the former, he most definitely did not fit into the latter.
His lips curved. 'Boyfriend' was more than he'd thought Leo would offer. Honestly, he'd still thought that the fact he wasn't able to offer sex would limit what Leo would offer him in return. He wondered how long it would take before that thought stopped being so prevalent.
"I've never had a boyfriend before," he started. Leo's eyes were still closed, so he didn't see the expression of wonder in Bruce's face, though he no doubt heard it in his voice.
"I'd be happy to be your first," Leo murmured, eyelashes fluttering up.
"And you wouldn't mind…?" Bruce wanted to verbally query Leo's potential needs for more physical intimacies, but really didn't want to drop the word 'sex' into the conversation. His gaze dropped back to his hand, still drawing light circles on Leo's skin.
"If y
ou just keep touching me like this, that's all I'll need," Leo said, curling closer into him.
The tension he hadn't even realized he'd been carrying in his shoulders eased. He thought of the level of intimacy they were currently sharing. His fingers paused in their trail down Leo's back. He was wearing a t-shirt. And pants. He hadn't taken either of them off when he'd come to the bed. That was different. But Bruce could understand it. They hadn't talked about it, and they didn't need to. His body was different than how it had been the last time they'd lain together in bed. Just because that didn't make a difference to Bruce didn't have anything to do with Leo's comfort levels.
Bruce kissed the top of his head. "I like the sound of boyfriend," he said.
"I like the sound of I love you," Leo said, his cheek pressed against the pillow. "I do, you know. I was just… overwhelmed, in the hospital. And I didn't want to..."
"It's okay, I didn't mean to say it there either," Bruce said, unable to keep himself from grinning. "It just kind of popped out."
"I'm really happy it did," Leo told him.
"Me too."
"Hey… I don't suppose you'd be willing to put on the next DVD? You've kind of disabled me right now. I can't move." He waved one of his hands feebly, and Bruce liked the demonstration that non-sexual contact could disable his boyfriend in such a way.
"Sure." Bruce smiled, looking down at the beautiful man draped across his bed, then stood up to put the next movie into the machine.
*~*~*
It wasn't until they were both at the breakfast table the next morning, before Bruce had to go to work, that he muscled up the courage to ask, "What ended up happening to the D.A.?" His brow furrowed as he broke eye contact with Leo. "Or, I guess the Kath'lar who was impersonating the D.A."
Leo finished chewing his cereal slowly, evading Bruce and staring intently down into his bowl. When there was nothing more left to chew, and he'd procrastinated more than enough, he finally said, "I think you know." His voice was deep, rough, with emotion.
Bruce held off saying anything for a while, not sure if it was too soon to talk about the things that he had done while under the Kath'lar influence that made him into a superhero. But Leo was right; with that answer, Bruce did know. And he couldn't pretend to feel anything other than relief.
He was glad when Leo finally looked up at him, searching his eyes for answers that Bruce couldn't find a way of putting into words. Whatever he saw there seemed to relax him. His shoulders slackened. Seeing that, Bruce offered him a smile.
"Some of them were unredeemable," he said, finding the words at last as he said what he should have said a while ago.
Leo blinked, then smiled at him, and Bruce suspected he was grateful for the words. He ducked his head and went back to eating his cereal.
His manager frowned at him when it was maybe one minute past nine and Bruce sat down at his desk with his second cup of coffee of the morning. He looked at his boss then dropped his gaze. Maybe there was something to what Leo said about getting a job he was passionate about. Unlike Leo, Bruce had never particularly followed his passion. He'd taken the first job that had offered, and then stayed there. Maybe it was time to follow a passion. It had so far led him to Leo, after all.
Leo was sitting at his computer on the dining room table when Bruce returned home.
"What are you doing?" he asked, kissing the top of Leo's head before settling in beside him. He'd walked through the living room with his gaze firmly on the floor and deliberately averted his gaze from there.
"Just thinking." Leo shifted forward and shut down the page. He swallowed, before glancing at Bruce with a rueful smile. "I'm going to miss being important. Being listened to."
Bruce's brow furrowed. "You'll still be listened to."
"It won't be the same." Leo waved a hand towards the closed computer window. "It's going to be a long time before I pass as male again. If I ever do. I'm going to miss the… simplicity of just being a guy."
Bruce's eyebrows lifted. He couldn't think of a simple thing in the last month that had been simple. "You thought being Captain Hart was simple?" he asked, incredulously.
Leo rolled his eyes as if Bruce should have known better. "Not like that. Being that Leo Hart, though, that was simpler." Leo held up his hands as Bruce opened his mouth. "Simpler! Not simple."
"I wasn't going to argue. Sorry," Bruce added.
"That's okay." Leo shrugged as though this didn't matter to him either way, but Bruce had a flash of the man in the hospital bed who had cried and covered his face, presumably so that Bruce couldn't see him. "Who knows what I'll look like with testosterone and top surgery. It's silly to worry about this."
"It's not silly," Bruce argued.
Leo raised his eyebrows, perhaps because Bruce had just said he wasn't going to argue. "I dunno. Pretty silly to mourn something I'm not going to have again, particularly when I've already taken the actions I can take towards making it better again."
"Grief is normal. You lost something." Bruce wondered if, perhaps, Leo didn't think he understood that because he'd been the person to push him into taking the Kath'lar cure. He pressed on, "You did. And the dangers of what you had doesn't mean that it didn't give you amazing things while it was still in your system," he added, hoping it was the right thing to say.
"But, what if the sky opens up and reveals more alien space ships one day?" Leo swallowed. It was still odd not to see the Adam's apple bobbing there. Bruce looked up into Leo's eyes instead.
"Then we have to believe the American government will know what to do. They're trained for it after all, remember?"
That got a small smile from Leo. "I was just a person who attended activist rallies before all this."
"Exactly," Bruce said.
Leo's gaze lost focus for a second, and Bruce knew better than to speak again until he'd figured out whatever thought had got his attention.
"I think I've figured out what I want to look into doing as a job," he said, looking across to Bruce again and reaching out a hand so that they were touching again. "I think I'm gonna try to become a social worker."
Chapter Twenty
One week later—at seven o'clock on Saturday morning—a phone call came through to Leo's phone. Leo's arm moved out of the comforter. He patted the bedside table a couple of times, blindly, before lifting his head off the pillow and picking up the phone groggily. Even though Leo didn't put the call onto speakerphone, it was clear enough to hear the voice coming from the other side of the conversation.
"Good morning, Mr. Hart." It was Vice President Hutchins.
The sound of his voice put Bruce back in mind of the tall, thin man who'd been present at the meeting in the Oval Office Bruce had attended.
"Good morning, Mr. Vice President," Leo replied after clearing his throat. "How can I help you?"
He pulled a face over at Bruce, indicating the question of who called at seven o'clock on a Saturday morning? Bruce smothered a laugh beneath his hand, and then smothered a yawn. When he met Leo's gaze again, Leo was looking at him fondly. In that moment, Bruce completely forgot the figure on the other end of the phone call.
"It was thought that you and Mr. Paulson might like to know the outcome of the medicines that were sent to those rural hospitals," said Vice President Hutchins. "It was 100% effective in patients who were infected."
Which meant that the Kath'lar virus that had been slipped into the hospital's medical lab had worked. The Kath'lar scientist had told the truth. With luck, nobody would ever need to know it hadn't been from the human scientists' own design. So far, Leo hadn't let on to anyone that there were still some Kath'lar in their midst. Bruce reached out to hold Leo's hand.
"Thank you, Mr. Vice President," Leo said. "You are right. Bruce and I are very happy to hear that."
"Mm. Now, to the other matter. The president has asked that you come to approve a contingency plan based on your future involvement as a civilian… consultant, when needs arise—"
Leo cut him of
f. "I'm sorry, Mr. Vice President. I'm not sure that you know this, but I no longer have any superhero powers…"
"We're aware of that," said Vice President Hutchins. He spoke in a level tone and, if there was any censure to the words, Bruce couldn't make it out. "That is where 'civilian consultant' comes in."
"I've already told Sergeant Marsters everything I already know," Leo hedged. "I'm sorry, I fail to see what help I will be to the government from this point on."
"I see." Again, that same level tone. "There is another position available that we thought might be of interest to you."
"Oh?
Bruce wasn't sure, but he thought that the sound of a smile entered Vice President Hutchins' voice.
"Transgender individuals make up a large number of Americans. It's a part of the populations that we are
currently failing."
Although it surprised him to hear an official say as much, Bruce agreed wholeheartedly with the Vice President's words.
Bruce tried not to eavesdrop on the conversation-turned-employment-opportunity, but he still got the basics.
Providing that Leo agreed, he was being offered a new transgender relations position within the White House,
scheduled to start as soon as Leo recovered from his top surgery.
"It sounds as though it's going to be a role somewhere between a media relations specialist and a social
worker," Leo told him, leaning forward in his chair as he explained it. "It's an incredibly open ended position.
I'm already thinking of ways I could potentially expand out the role to include a team of individuals from other
minority groups."
Leo's face shone with new light as he outlined some of the plans that had come to mind almost as soon as the
Vice President had made his offer.
"That's not all. I haven't posted this yet, but it's something I want to do, at least in the intervening time."
Leo led Bruce to his laptop and opened it up to where he was already logged into his video channel.
"Just watch," Leo said, as Bruce opened his mouth to ask a question.
Bruce did exactly as asked, and watched.