Chapter 1: hey, arch nemesis, i stole ur blood and made us a son
Chapter Text
He didn’t have a name.
Not that he needs one, everybody who surrounds him always says something quick and biting to get his attention- “ Clone, It, Thing, Experiment, Project.”
The scientists get names, they call one another playfully and tease across the room, across consoles and when controlling the lights overhead.
He wonders, for the first several months of his stuttering half-existence he wonders when a name will be blessed upon him, when will somebody look at him with any kind of emotion other than vague disinterest and tell him his name. Give him something that he can look inside of himself and label the mess that makes his unstable self a little less unstable.
For the first several months, he’s not a whole person, not really, he’s not really a person at all. He’s a melting mess of a clone before he stabilizes up enough to be taken out of the tanks and into the holding cell. His hands stop shaking themselves into non-existence and his skin stays on for almost a full week before they remove him from the floating tank and into the place where the lights are red and he can stand under his own power.
His skin is white, his veins wiggle underneath his skin, a brilliant pathway that he follows with his fingers when there’s truly nothing else to do and everyone has gone away from the room that he’s never left.
The light above him is red, red, red, the people around him talk about it all the time, they check on the several red lamps and banter back and forth when they do maintenance- nobody talks directly to the clone that sits underneath them and uses most of his energy to hold himself together. The best thing in the whole wide existence is when the people talk to one another about things that aren’t him or the other clones, They talked about daughters, or sons, or cats or dogs, or cousins, or sisters, or brothers, mothers, fathers-
They talked about the world- the whole wide world that must have been- it must be rooms and rooms and rooms, larger than this one and filled with so much love, so many people. They talk about cities and lovers and cars and-
They talk about the clones the most. The failed ones, the ones that have made it this far, the ones that have already died.
They talked about their bosses, their funding, their progress.
The clone liked it more when they talked about themselves.
“We’re going to do a big test today!” one of them jokes, a short one with short hair that’s dark like their skin tone, so different than the clones own. “You’ve done so well so far that we’re moving your schedule up!”
The clone doesn’t understand. The people take his blood constantly, twice every time there's people around- like clockwork. What is possibly on his itinerary that would warrant this?
Turns out- those lights above him can be turned off.
It happens fast, just a simple flick while there’s five or six white coats outside of the glass that separates them-
The lights go out.
There’s no red anymore, no bright lights above him, cold and soft at the same time, like the clone imagines what snow must feel like, what clouds have to be when people touch them. To have anything touch him, something that wasn’t the cool metal of the floor, or the slick sparking glass of his walls. The lights go out- the darkness sits like a lead weight against the clone, his vision black, the whispered words just outside of his hearing, just right there, so close, so very close.
The clone stands, carefully on shaky legs, and moves forward. His hands are out in front of him, fingers spread wide and nervous, the glass wall is four steps in front of him- he counts them out mentally as he takes them, making sure that he’s not going to collapse with every step.
He takes five steps- smaller than normal due to the nervous nature of the halting strides- and when he touches the glass that keeps the boundary of his room it tingles in the normal way. A small shock that jarred the clone's hands, arms, shoulders. It’s a relief to touch, to hold onto something that is solid in the dark.
“H-” The word gets caught in his throat- stuck there from lack of use (nobody likes it when he tries to mimic their sounds back at them) - “Hello?”
It’s not a perfect sound that escapes from the clone, but it's enough.
A creak, rusted metal groaning in distress from above.
The clone doesn’t make another sound, he simply huddles closer to the glass, the shocks echoing down his chest from where his thin chest now presses against the cold surface.The sounds above him are terrifying, they squeak and pull and scrape, a slow tripping drawl that creaks and-
There’s light, coming from the top.
Not normal light, which is red, red, red and rests in the clones’ very bones. This light is weirdly without color, the same as the coats in which the people outside of his room wear. The light is just getting brighter- the opening gasping open like a yawn.
Sure enough, there’s a hole in the ceiling, nestled between the artificial lamps and it looks… It looks strange and weird and so very colorless.
Without the red tint, the clone's eyes aren’t used to this- it burns. There’s colors that are creeping out from the blurry pain- bright vivid colors that the clone’s brain informs him of blue and green and yellows . Colors that he knows of- mentally, from whatever they do to feed him this information without his being aware of- but seeing them for the first time makes something misfire.
They’re beautiful.
The colors that aren’t red.
“Are you gonna get into the sunlight or are you just gonna gape like a fish?” The white coat that’s not very nice sneers from the back, the clone can imagine their face perfectly all scrunched up and their teeth on display.
“Shut the fuck up, Bennie.” The short one with dark hair and skin snaps back.
The clone is still in the dark- about six inches from the blinding light that filters in from above.
It looks so innocent, a hexagon on the floor that displays the lab’s logo so perfectly in the center. The metal looks slate grey now, bluish tinted with hints of green that zig zag through the metal as it reflects up.
“Will it hurt?” The clone asks, the words burn in his throat.
Nobody answers him.
They normally don’t.
There’s only one thing to do then- the clone braces himself against the pain that’ll rankle up his form, adding to the low-lying pain that is constantly hidden in his joints, his center, his heart.
The clone steps into the light-
It’s warm.
It shocks the clone so bad he screams, the sound ripping from his throat with a painful yank, jerking back.
There’s sounds of the white coats moving behind him- they’re talking to one another with vivid interest.
He’s shaking, scared, unsure, his heart pounds heavy in his chest- the monitor that tracks his slow and steady beat now trips up in a stucco rhythm. Thirty five beats a minute. Racing.
“Stand in it for more than a millisecond!” That's the mean white coat- his face screwed up so tight it was hard to get any smaller. “You stupid brute-!”
A shock- a serious one, hard and violent- comes from the glass. It hurts, hurts enough to make the clone stumble back from the six inch safety of the glass and back into the strange light.
It’s warm.
It’s warm, and it makes it so that the hair that falls into his face lights up a different color- it’s not pure black ink anymore it’s got undertones of red that shine brilliantly.
It’s warm and it makes his pale, almost translucent skin shiver. His veins shine so purple-blue-green underneath the shine, if he looks carefully he can spot the red-purple flush of color that blooms up.
It’s warm and it makes something inside of him creak open, soft and unsure like a sprain that’s being worked out. Like the door that opens and lets in the white coats, slow in the morning and hazy.
The clone looks up, up, up . Into the warmth like if he stares hard enough then more will come. He can feel every twitch of himself, every breath, every inhale, he can feel the way his pupils contract, narrowing just the barest hint, swirling like an aperture of the camera lens, open and closed, open and closed.
There’s a blooming in his chest, pumping through his five chambered heart like an injection through his veins. Something pushes out, an awareness like never before, weak and fleeting as it grows slowly around his skin.
The light is sunshine, and the clone has gotten his first taste of it.
Organs that have long worked in their perfectly intended ways underneath a red sun now desperately react and respond to a whole new radiation spectrum.
A little oval shaped organ- about the size of a cookie- that rests above his heart swells up as it takes in as much radiation as the ambient atmosphere provides. There’s nothing sweeter to a Kryptoian than certain wavelengths of radiation, ultraviolet in particular along with gamma makes the cells in the clone's body react in strange and exciting ways.
The scientists watch the heartbeat, enzymes and nitrogen in the clone’s system react in ways they’ve been trying this whole time. They whisper to one another, and they take notes with a vicious kind of glee. There’s nothing like an experiment going so right , it all coming together and a clone holding together when all the others up to this point have failed rather spectatuallry.
The clone reaches upwards, grasping at the light that filters through his fingers.
It’s a drowning man getting to land, a desert oasis to a traveling merchant, a taste of sugar for the first time after a lifetime of nothing to eat but sand.
The clone wants more, wants to be covered with all this light all the time, to feel so free and so endless, to see the particles in the air and to hear the heartbeats of the living creatures around him and to feel the way the air moves on his skin in almost slow motion. It’s coming up for air after living in the darkness, it’s kissing in the rain or finishing a life goal or-
The light above him begins to close.
“No!” The clone stands right in the center, but he can hear the electronic buzz of the button being pressed, hear the shift of gears and hydraulics, the click of a gear beginning to close. The light gets smaller by a slow inch.
“No! Please!” The clone reaches up, desperate, grasping, he looks from the light to the white coats behind the glass, they look so clear in the darkness in a way they never were before.
They don’t respond to his requests, they never do.
The light gets a little smaller, a little further away.
“ No! ” The clone’s desperate, he can feel his heart pound in his chest. There’s something primal within him that wants this to last a little longer than it has.
So he lets instinct take over, he surges forward, something in his brain telling him to grab at the thing out of his reach.
The air parts for him, it sings under his hands.
The clone flies .
Distantly, the clone can hear the gasps from the white coats. They’re all talking now, loud enough that they’re all overlapping one another in his senses, screaming in excitement. Fists hit glass, thick and solid and just as electrified as the glass that surrounds the clone at all times.
The mechanics still close the window to the light- slowly and surely removing the white from the clone’s cell. The door is above the glass somehow, the clone can’t reach it, can’t stop it.
“No! No! Please! No!” There’s nothing more than the clone can think of to scream, to beg. He’s useless here, stuck in a glass container and being played with.
The light disappears and the clone falls.
--
“What the fuck is this?” The man in the suit visits today- Lex Luthor is what the white coats call him.
The white coats don’t realize that the clone can hear them a whole lot better since they’ve been exposing him to the sunlight. They talk about so many more things when they get out of the room where they keep him.
“What… What do you mean, Luthor?”
“You said this was a clone of Superman and myself. How is it female ?”
The tone of voice is one full of contempt, disgust.
“Ah, yes, a surprise to us too about it’s physical shape. You said you wanted it to look more like a kryptonian does so we designed the genes to make it exactly how you wanted it-”
“Why is it female ?”
“It’s not .” The white coat talks to the man right before the door has an undercurrent in the voice of the whitecoat is strained.
Luthor opens the door anyway, full of bluster and importance even as he slams a tablet into the white coats hands. The clone has seen him before, once or twice, never often, and the last time he came around the clone was still trying to hold himself together, be stable. The sunlight has improved his stability by leaps and bounds, he very rarely has spasms anymore.
Luthor has a sneer on his face, like he has the previous two times, and a suit that’s nice and shiny and black.
Luthor walks around the whole cage, pacing quick fast like people do when they're agitated. His eyes trace over every inch of the clone's body. This isn’t the first time and it won't be the last that someone is going to look over him with a critical eye.
“You certainly look more like him than myself.” Luthor … it’s not really a smile, but it has the passing appearance of one.
The whitecoat tetters in, tablet pressed close to their chest. They’ve got long hair with thick glasses- “We told you before you came, it’s more Superman than it is you, it had to be to have similar properties to Kryptonian powers.”
“It certainly looks like a boy, doesn’t it?” Luthor ignores the whitecoat like he does everybody underneath him. “A boy about ten, you didn’t age him up to where I wanted?”
“It’s a slow process, we have to age him in increments because he doesn’t seem to age on his own.”
Well that's new information. The clone wasn’t aware that he didn’t age.
“Strip, boy. ”
Luthor’s command sent ice down the clone’s spine for a brief flurry of a second, but it’s nothing that he’s not done before.
So he reaches back, catches the seam where the white malleable fabric is sealed against his skin at the base of his neck, and pops the tab. The suit technically doesn’t have a zipper , it’s more like a strong adhesion that activates with the tab at the base of the neck.
So peeling himself out of the suit is nothing, it unfolds around his body easily with no effort on his part and falls to the ground.
Nobody’s surprised by either the nudity or the way the clone looks, his entire body has been made with exact care over the course of many years of study. There’s nothing for any person in this room to be surprised at, they’ve all seen everything he has to offer many times over.
“I knew I should have said girl instead.” Luthor sneers.
“We made him to your exact standards, Lex. We were surprised at the … appearance of the first clones but we’ve done x-rays and we’ve done autopsies on the failed ones. The joints are strange too, Superman must have had some kind of training to look as normal as he does. This one tries to emulate but he’s grown up mostly without interference so he moves as his ligaments and joints allow naturally.”
“ Really ?” Luthor seems so interested, morso than any of the white coats when they talk about the clone. “Show me.”
The white coat huffs, irritated underneath the false veneer of an underling. “When there’s people in the room it naturally tries to emulate them.”
The clone hates that they don’t talk to him, they chat and mumble like there’s not a single brain cell in the clone’s head. It’s like they think he doesn’t understand them, or he can’t contribute to the conversation at all. “Of course I try to emulate you.” He doesn’t snap, because when he does people file out of the room quick and don’t come back in for hours. It makes him relentlessly bored, so he doesn’t let his voice growl out above a daring if not pointed conversation. “It makes you uncomfortable when I don’t”
“She speaks!” Luthor laughs, bright and amused.
“It’s male .” The scientist grounds out, fingertips white against the tablet they have in their hands. “If you want to refer to it using gendered language at least recognize that we’ve been tasked on making a clone of Superman , not his stupid fuckin’ cousin or whatever Supergirl is.”
Luthor huffs out what could be a laugh or could be an amused form of hatred. “It looks like you forgot it’s dick then. There’s not even hair anywhere- and it’s in the wrong spot to be anywhere close to a real woman.”
“Internal reproductive system, Lex. Inactive unless stimulated and the body’s currently fuckin’ ten . We’re not touching that, you can’t begin to make us.” The white coat shutters, visible to the clone’s heightened senses.
The clone looks down at himself, then right back up.
Luthor makes a noise of surprise, genuine. “Oh there is something wrong with you, when you move.”
Is there? The clone’s noticed that when he moves too much people get wary, but he’s always chalking that up to people not enjoying his presence in general.
“Do something else then, show me how you move.” Luthor leans close to the glass, closer than any other scientist has ever, “ Boy. ”
So he does. The clone strides forward, no tension in his limbs or expectation on how he should appear, it’s not often he moves without thinking about it, a world of restriction he’s always been very aware of how his body is shaped and how far his chains can be tugged. He lets his bones move how they walk, and not how he’s seen others. It's odd and weird and a little shaky, but it feels right in a way that he hasn’t felt in a long time.
If ever.
Luthor scuttled away from the glass with a kind of instinctual jerk. Eyes wide, a quickening of both heartbeat and breath, the smell of the first trickle of preseperation, the smell of sharpline fear . “Jesus christ that’s creepy.” Luthor takes control of himself with the distance between them, always looking down at everyone. “God how uncanny, when it moves it really does look like a little alien doesn’t it?”
The clone mimics a very human gesture- it shrugs.
Luthor laughs again, delighted. “But it blends in so well!”
The clone steps back to the center, right where the first hint of real sunlight would start if they opened the window above him. It’s his favorite spot in the whole cell, it's where he gets the most amount of sunlight time if he starts and stops here, in the warmth of the centre. His clothes- the white suit they have given him- is pooled at his feet.
Luthor is impressed .
A little horrified, a whole lot more curious, but impressed .
“Let him have some sunlight.” Luthor tells the man at the controls of the cell. “I want to see him at his best.”
The man nods, and presses the button.
The clone’s head snaps right up, his huge pupils going into pinpricks, letting the almost-too-blue overtake everything. At both extremes Luthor can see the clone has hexagonal shaped pupils, not circular ones. With big eyes, a brilliant blue, the clone looks right up into where the sunlight falls down and settles around him.
The clone doesn’t move even to breathe.
Luthor waits, it’s thirty minutes before the scientists close the opening as a safety precaution.
Even when the sunlight is gone, the clone still looks up, hands lax at its side and unmoving.
Nothing anybody does makes the kid move, he just … looks up into nothing.
The rest of the visit goes off without a much more interesting happening, there’s files and files on the thing that sits so still in the cell that Luthor has poured over every night. There’ s nothing to be gained from a project that won’t move.
--
Luthor watches the way the clone’s knee’s bend just a little off from humans, how it twists its hips in a way that’s just downright fucking unsettling. It’s just a little farther than what normal people should be capable of, but at the same time weirdly restricted. A torso that’s stiffer than a human's very flexible spine but joints that seem to make up for it. The thing before Lex has two less vertebrae than humans do and two extra ribs down the side of the ribcage with no floating ribs to speak of. The clone has more space in his joints to make up for it however, along with a strange kind of flexibility in its neck.
It looks mostly with full body twists, able to turn its head just a little less than a normal human would. It seems like tracking with just eye movement is a learned behavior, not one that comes naturally to it,
It’s ankles and wrists have more of a range of motion than humans do, so do it’s fingers. IT’s hair doesn’t grow longer than it’s collar bones no matter how long the scientists here don’t bother to cut it. Hair doesn’t fall off either, it just stops growing but it doesn’t fall out. The thing’s skin also doesn’t shed, it seems like the thing recycles its own skin from underneath instead of on top.
It’s now physically about fourteen or fifteen, aged up artificially over the course of several months. It learns fast when given the opportunity too, so the scientists that get put on this project quickly learn to stop talking to it. It doesn’t move often, and eats the sunlights that gets fed to it for thirty minutes every four days.
Luthor watches it move and twist and dance to follow the beam of sunlight that moves through its enclosure. Lex is the one on the controls, he’s got the sunlight narrowed down to only about the size of a fist and makes it jerk all over the cage.
The clone dives after it like a starving man- which it technically is. Luthor has asked the scientists not to feed it the sunlight for a total of two weeks, the thing waned like a drooping sunflower and got more and more lethargic until it barely responded to stimuli anymore. This is its first food in that time, and now it’s being recorded to get the full extent of how the thing naturally moves.
It’s amazing how instinctual beings get when they’re deprived of basic needs.
“Has it reached maturity yet?” Luthor asks, almost offhandedly, as he toys with the thing in the cage that looks so much like superman but has Luthor’s narrower frame and sharp brows.
“It will when we run it through the next aging session.” The scientists says, easy as ever and bored. “Then we can start harvesting its finalized adult DNA to make more clones. We can’t clone children- it makes unstable clones everytime, but once we have a full working adult on our hands we can begin to make more and more.”
“ Excellent .” Luthor’s excited that something is finally going his way for once.
The clone dances for the sun, darting back and forth at just a little less than human eyesight can comprehend.
It’s like a cat, an overly complicated cat that costs billions of dollars every time it so much as twitches. Luthors little plaything, his almost son, the thing that’s going to take superman’s place as a perfect obedient thing under Luthor's instruction.
“When can we age it up to an adult to harvest the mature DNA?” Luthor asks.
“For him to be stable enough that we’re sure of its success, it'll take another month.”
That’s alright.
The sunlight stops in one place now, Luthor taking his hands off the controls. The clone stops with it, putting his face to the beam and staying as stock still as possible. When the thing eats it takes hours to reboot back to baseline.
The sunlight will only be open to the clone for another three minutes.
Luthor doesn’t mind.
He’s got a month to spare.
--
“We’ve gotten word from a whistleblower that you might want to check out.”
Batman stands on a rooftop in Metropolis, his cape is long and it covers most of his body, even when it blows in the wind that laces through the bright city that Superman has called his own.
A wonder, this city is a night, with it’s dancing white lights of an era bygone and the smell of the sea close at hand. There’s still billboards with fluorescent bulbs, selling products for the common blue collar worker. The city is all gleaming whites and blues, dancing with red flags with Kal-El’s insignia. There’s something to be said about it here, with it’s color and its hope that can’t be found nearly anywhere else.
Batman sort of hates it here, it's not like Gotham, where it's a battle that cuts away the rot at the heart, but something much stranger that echoes rust over a golden facade that can’t be contained no matter how much polish one gives it.
Kal-El raises an eyebrow at his sister city's protectors, but there’s been information leaked to Bruce’s company through a whistleblower that needed his attention.
Bruce had promised Tim to take him out on patrol the day before, so he’s keeping that promise.
Now Batman and Robin are talking to Superman a building over from the daily planet, the two have to be incredibly delicate when breaking the news to him.
Kal-El just smiles as easy as he can and puts his hands on his hips. “Sure, lay it on me.” He holds out his hand.
“I don’t have it on a flashdrive.” Bruce has given the alien information like that in the past, but this has been too delicate.
“You’re going to tell me all about it? Like, actually physically talk to me about it?” Kal-El’s eyebrow ticks right up in a bemused expression.
Robin laughs, just a little high echoey giggle.
Batman’s already regretting everything about this, but he couldn’t just email this to Superman and let it be done with.
“Kal, this information is …. Not easy to hear.” Batman had a say in who came to his home, who he accepted with open arms, but this is a violation of the absolute highest order if it was true.
Kal sombers, his happy go lucky attitude is replaced by something much more reliable and real.
Bruce walks over, getting closer so his voice doesn’t have to tumble across the whole rooftop, motioning Robin to walk with him.
They went over what they needed to do, to say, to show Kal on the way over to get the full point across without triggering the alien into some kind of emotional meltdown. Tim has the files ready to be accessed on his gauntlet, ready to show. Bruce is going to do most of the heavy lifting here, because he’s closer to Kal in approximate age and has-
They get within four feet of the alien, something Bruce would normally never do. He motions for Tim to show what they got from the whistleblower.
A picture flickers to life on the holo-display on Tim’s glove.
It’s a boy, only two or three years older than Tim himself, closer in age to where Jason is- had been.
He’s clearly related to Superman, to Kal . With the same dark hair and the same eyes, the bridge of his nose and the curl of his mouth. There’s something else mixed in- in the shape of the face and the cheekbones that peak out of a thin visage. It’s just a face, colored with red overtones and young in a way Clark isn’t.
It’s the something else that raises huge alarms, that made Bruce leave the boardroom and almost run back to the manor, only barely managing to grab Tim on the way.
Kal goes completely still, eyes blown impossibly wide.
Another photo, this time the boy’s whole self, covered in something form fitting and white while he looks up like a sunflower to a beam of light that rains from above. The body type is wrong for Kal, to thin in the shoulders with longer fingers.
Another photo, this time of the boy from the back, no clothes on, showing a musculature that’s unlike any human on earth.
Another photo, from the front, from the chin to the knees-
“That’s enough .” Kal doesn’t clasp a hand over the hologram that Robin provides- he’s seen how Batman reacts when he views that his partners are in any kind of danger- but he does turn away.
Robin turns off the display, moving back behind his mentor with practiced ease.
“What the hell is that, Batman.” Kal’s still not moving but he does look back now. “Because if I didn’t know any better I would say that was me .”
“We have intel from a deserter at LexCorp that Luthor had gotten ahold of some of your DNA.” Bruce doesn’t know how to explain this without it … without it being terrible. “Through a fight, through his own strange methods, through kryptonite, who knows. He tried to clone it, but failed-”
Kal’s jaw tightens “Bizzaro.”
“This is a combination of your genes and a human donor, with some of J’onn’s DNA to hold it together.”
Bruce can trace the Martian's contribution with the barest hint of the way the clone’s eye is shaped. Just an impression, a barest hint that would never be connected if Bruce hadn’t seen the files for himself.
Kal bites in a terrible sound that emits from somewhere in his chest, a pitched keen that makes the hair on Bruce’s neck stand straight up. “Where is he?”
Bruce hesitates, a moment, trying to decipher the alien noise that can't reach very far at it’s pitch. Robin huddles closer to Batman, a knee jerk reaction to the sound that makes something in his chest ache.
“Where. Is. He.” Superman grounds out that noise hasn’t stopped even through the English words. “ Batman -”
“He’s currently hidden somewhere in Hawaii.” Bruce can feel that soft, pitched kneel in his sternum, it’s strange and makes his heart beat just a little faster.
Superman grabs ahold of Batman’s wrists.
“Take Robin as well.” Bruce has to speak quickly, forgoing his normal growl for pure speed. “I can’t leave Robin alone-”
Superman moves , a blur of blue-
Bruce finds himself holding onto Kal’s back, a position he’s been in before. Kal’s got one arm underneath Batman’s thighs and the other one holding Robin in the same way, an impression or a parody of a parent holding onto two overgrown children. Bruce immediately throws one hand over Robin to stabilize him, to protect his child- his Robin not his child- in some way and then his other hand goes around Kal’s neck. There’s no moving Superman’s steel, not for a normal human with no leverage, so both Batman and Robin are along for the ride of a man who’s controlled by his emotions.
“The main island has a LexCorp building!” Batman shouts over the wind, knowing that Superman can hear him anyway. “It’s forty levels underground and underneath white noise generators and lead! They wanted to keep this from you at all costs!”
Superman can’t go his top speed with a normal human on board, but he can push it pretty far with people as well trained as Batman is, however-
“If you make my Robin pass out, I’m going to gut you.” Batman growls out as not a threat but a warning .
Superman slows down by only the barest increment, but it’s enough for Robin’s eyes to focus back on the real world and not being close to blackout.
The trip’s long, shorter than it would be on a plane that’s for sure but in no way comfortable. Kal’s arms have a human softness when a brief touch occurs, but when pressed it’s more like trying to press down on hard sheet metal. The entire time it’s almost like holding onto a warm industrial barstool, Bruce can feel the bruises from last week smart in pain at the position.
Tim wiggles like nobody’s business, but he’s not able wiggle free thanks to Superman’s tight grip.
Thank god.
It takes nearly four hours.
Which is downright amazing, considering that if it was in the batplane it would have taken closer to eleven.
By the time Superman sets Batman and Robin down on the LexCorp building on the main island of Hawaii both normal humans are groaning in sore pain. At least the six hour time change makes it so it's close to the same time in Hawaii as the time that they left Metropolis. Tim’s rubbing his sore knees, wincing as the blood flows back into his feet, but Bruce wants to lay down for several hours for his body to readjust to living. Bruce doesn't lay down, he sends a request for the watchtower to send down a Javelin sooner rather than later and have it in the area for a retrieval after this mission.
There’s no time though, because they’ve got to get down the entire LexCorp building, then underneath the building into the secret levels.
The government already must know that they’re here- Superman was flying at a speed detectable by radar- if Luthor gets the call, and that man will get a call, then the entire project could be destroyed or moved elsewhere.
“I can’t hear anything.” Superman says, eyes narrowed as he looks downwards. “You’re right, there’s a white noise generator that’s buzzing down below- it’s taking out most of the noise of the whole block. There’s also a large shielding of lead that covers the whole building, I can’t see through.”
Bruce wasn’t surprised. His home had a white noise generator- but so did multiple other buildings in all major cities, but there was no lead anywhere because it’s a dead giveaway that somebody has something to hide.
(There was enough natural lead ore in the cave that X-Ray vision wouldn’t help anyway.)
“We have to act fast- Robin, get into the security systems. Superman and I will start heading down.”
Robin nods, bending his knees a few more times before he darts into the roof access door. Tim’s had enough training that it’ll be fine to leave him to the security and minor reinforcements.
Batman follows Robin into the stairwell- it takes no time for Batman to watch his charge dart into a vent ahead of them.
Superman’s out of his depth here, with some of what he normally uses to get around blocked. Batman grasps his hand and tugs him along down the stairs at a breakneck pace- there’s no easy way down for them- it’s all running.
Thank god buildings in this state have to be shorter here than the east coast. Twenty flights of stairs are nothing to sneeze at but it’s better than some of the stairwells Bruce has climbed in Gotham.
The com link clicks to life, a soft sound that let’s Bruce know that Robin’s gotten more than ten meters away from him and now coms will pick up even the sounds of their breathing through the line.
“Howdy B.” Tim says, soft and quiet. “I’ve located where the security room is and I’ll be down there within fifteen.”
Bruce hums a tone that gives confirmation.
Superman and Batman don’t stop running downwards, Superman cheating by floating at the brisk pace Bruce sets.
“Security is down.” Robin calls through the coms thirteen minutes later, just as Bruce is making it to the ground floor. “I’m replaying footage from yesterday and deleting the footage of us in the stairwell.”
“Acknowledged, Robin.” Bruce says soft and low.
“I’ve also found the controls for the white noise generator, tell Superman I’m turning it off now.”
“Tell him yourself once you do.”
A huff of air, a laugh coming from Robin. “Fine you loser .”
Superman makes a noise, a human one of surprise.
“Hi, Supes.” Robin drawls over the com, exactly in the same midwestern accent that Superman has. “I can direct you to the spot in the floor plans that don’t make sense- but I don’t see a ‘obvious evil lair’ door labeled anywhere.”
Superman cracks a smile- “Just tell me where to go, Robin.”
--
There’s no noise anymore.
The clone looks around, unsure of what's happening, why it’s happening, and why nobody else is responding to it.
The white coats don’t seem to mind, or even notice. They keep on with their day like nothing’s changed. One of them is the dark skinned one who’s nice and will smile if the clone catches their eye- the other one is the lazy one who works only when observed.
The clone stands up from his curled up sitting position. He paces his whole room, back and forth, agitated that there's no more sound. He can hear the room over, then the next room after that, even one after. He can hear the heartbeats and the breath and the blood in their veins.
“Why is it loud?” The clone asks, mostly to himself. He feels his own voice in the air like- like a hammer on the glass.
The dark skinned one looks up, “What is it sweetie?”
“Why is it loud? ” He asks again, nervous that they’re not answering him. Is this a punishment, and if it is then why is he being punished?
The nice one frowns, confused. She looks at her colleague for only a second before turning back and getting up to walk closer to the glass. “What are you hearing?”
It’s not what he’s hearing, it's what he’s not hearing anymore. “Can you not normally hear the noise? Where’s the noise? What have you done to it?”
“What noise are you talking about, project?” The nice one doesn’t get too close to the cell, staying at least a step away from the glass.
There’s footsteps everywhere, the sound of people and the stuttering wheezing death of the few other projects like him that made it to any kind of stable heart beat. Creaking of bones in bodies, the hum of the earth below him, the sway of the rooms and the pipes in the walls, the scratch of skin against skin as people moved, the riding of fabric, the noise of airwaves being distrubed. It’s all his to take in, to observe, to process.
There's something pressing at his skin, it’s everywhere, he can hear the way that the air rubs together on itself, the way that the vibrations echo along the solids and the strain of chairs as the white coats breathe three rooms over. The soft noise blanket is gone , and with it comes all this new information that the clone has never had to process before.
Why did they do this to him? Has he not done all they asked of him? Why did they take away the soft noise that underlined everything around him? What?
Who is that?
Footsteps, one, but two heartbeats. Slow and steady, both of them, but one’s the typical ba-dum, ba-dum of a human the other is something he’s never heard outside of himself .
Ba-tish-da, Ba-tish-da .
It’s louder than his own, larger, stronger . It’s not a clone, he’s the only one they’ve ever managed to get the heart right for he’s heard them talk about it.
Ba-tish-da. Ba-tish-da.
Even without being able to see anything outside of the red glow of his room, the clone can follow the sound of the heartbeat as it treks wide above him. It’s getting closer, he can tell. He can’t take his eyes off of where the heart thuds in a chest that matches his own.
“Honey, what do you hear?” The nice dark skinned one asks again. “Do you hear somebody talking to you?”
Ba-tish-da. Ba-tish-da.
It’s getting closer by the second, but it’s still not walking. There’s no sound of footsteps to accompany the soft sounds of silken fabric moving across something broad and the sound of the heart that matches his own. The only set of footsteps that he does hear are light, almost silent even to his ears, and carefully placed- they’re not carrying the heartbeat he could recognize anywhere.
“Hello?!” the clone calls up to the ceiling. He speaks on all of the frequencies he can press into his voice, something deep in his chest breaks open, desperate, long since beaten out of him by the lack of response to the calls. The thrill starts underneath his sternum, low in his lungs and coming out unbidden.
“Oh honey-” The nice white coat looks so sad, but she doesn’t step forward. “Honey stop that noise, it makes us sad.”
But the clone can’t stop- he can’t - because there’s finally, after all this time, an answer .
The answer is a deeper one, hummed at a different tone and rolling along the air like nothing the clone has ever heard before. It catches like a surfer through the waves and slices straight to something hidden in between his ribs.
The clone just tries to thrill a little louder. “Hello!?”
“Stop that right now, you know none of the scientists here like that.” The nice woman scolds, she’s right in front of them and has her arms crossed now, a frown on her face with a stern kind of expression. She’s frowning at him. “I know you’ve stopped those noises in the past and I’m going to need you to stop them again for me. Can you do that?”
“I can’t.” He can’t, he can’t not when there’s finally an answer right there and getting closer every time he gives the call. “I can’t stop it.”
There’s commotion above him- there’s the sound of things hitting against one another and the panicked sounds of people moving faster than they normally would. Screaming, calls of voices in distress, the heartbeat is coming quicker towards him now- a direct path.
The clone has to help- somehow- has to meet them halfway.
The clone walks from his position in the center, towards the wall where the scientist stands.
She backs away quickly- faster than normal with her heartbeat racing against her throat. The clone can see it, can hear it now.
The clone puts his hands on the wall, feeling the low level shock that always thrums through the glass. It hurts, it always does, but it doesn’t hurt enough to stop the clone- it hasn’t in a long time now.
The first hit does nothing but shock the clone, sparking up and off the glass with the impact. The second hit does nothing better- the third is when the first crack appears underneath the clone’s knuckles.
“It’s trying to escape!” The lazy one screams, loud and energetic for the first time the clone has ever seen him. “Stay back! Stay the fuck back!”
Both jump to the consoles, they work the controls over with a frantic energy, a hectic pace.
The shock gets stronger- on the fourth hit it hurts all the way up to the clone’s shoulder. The fifth hit shocks the clone so bad he cries out and steps back, jerked by the pain and the fury.
He can see the sparks, the small pops and sparkles that set fire in the glass in ways he hasn’t seen since the first time he woke up in here. He can hear the hum of the electricity, loud and vibrant, sparking and spitting.
It covers up the sound of the answer .
“No!” the clone screams, hidden underneath the layers of noise again. “No! Turn it off! Turn it off, you're not letting him answer anymore!”
“Calm down honey! Calm down!”
That’s when the ceilings cracks open, and it all goes to hell from there.
--
Clark hears him before he sees him, the white noise machine gets turned off and Clark might not be able to see through lead but there’s nothing stopping him from hearing around it. A buzz of electricity, the sound of people milling about, talking, typing, breathing, living .
The soft humming buzz leads to a heartbeat underneath layers and layers of rock.
Clark’s learned to tune out his own heartbeat over the years, it’s always been just a little off compared to his mothers, his fathers, the people at school and work. His own heartbeat was always underlying his existence, as easy as ever, but now there’s the same ba-tish-ba that is just a little out of time with his own.
“Stay hidden .” Batman hisses from behind him. “It’s easier to get out if you stay hidden .”
There’s a fury that erupts within him, at the proof that sits right under them. Luthor has done something unexceptable, something that violates every kind of law in existence. There’s no reason in the universe to explain why Luthor thought this was any kind of okay to do. This violation goes beyond the normal beatdowns, this is a whole sentient life that’s sitting down in the basement of a lab somewhere that's being manipulated, that comes from Kal’s own genetic line.
Distantly, Clark can hear Batman say “Damn it, Kal-el!”
But underneath the fury there’s an instinct that gets triggered at the soft sound that comes from underneath the floor.
Clark has never cared about the sounds of baby crying- no more than what is a learned response over the many years of living on earth. Cark always assumed it was because he heard the undertones of the shrill cries, the sound of the vibration that echoed up from human vocal cords has never done anything to Clarks base emotions. There’s only certain kinds of sounds that automatically catch his attention and most of them exist outside of the realm of human hearing.
The sound that now comes up from the floor is similar to the sound that’s Clark built into Jimmy’s watch- pitched and high that percies through the ears and hits a chord deep inside of his chest. There’s a rumble that Clark emits when the beacon watch gets activated, but normally when the watch gets activated it is just a soft sound just fluctuating at the bottom of the human hearing range that gets smushed immediately, this rumble is a low rolling one that builds on itself.
Ma always did say that when Clark was a baby he made the strangest little noises, liked being held by his Pa when Pa would sing along to old country songs.
Clark’s always sort of liked the old low songs, and now he might have a reason why.
The fortress has plenty of files on Krytponian biology and children, but beyond looking at if human and kryptonian biology is compatible (it’s not- well it's not naturally at least) Clark’s never spent time looking that deep into it.
Clark’s burrowing through the floor to get to that noise, tearing apart pipes and concrete and computers to get through to where the call is coming from.
The final wall is like wet cardboard bursting through, the soft hum of a live wire has snapped into something that’s more like an active electric relay plant. There’s enough power here to hurt even him .
The room is full of red sunlight, when the dust finally clears. Two scientists and a cage that’s way too small, there’s nothing out of the ordinary about the two scientists or the paneling on walls. The control panels seem to have all kinds of complicated buttons and keys that would take Batman a few seconds to figure out but Superman had a much faster solution.
There’s a teen behind the glass- wearing white and holding onto his hand close to his chest. Clark smells the faint hint of what he would once assume was his own blood, now he sees the way the knuckles on the boy’s injured hand are split and cracked open. Long hair, a gaunt face full of open wonder and the sound of that pitched whine. A faint crack has already laid the groundwork for Superman to follow-
Clark cracks open the boy’s cage with a single hit.
Faster than humans can comprehend the teenager’s bursting out of the glass room, he’s fast and shaky on his feet, clearly not used to moving around so much, while the sound that comes from the teen’s chest warbles three little notes that have Clark rush forward and scoop the teenage close to his chest.
The teenager goes stock still at the touch, but takes only a second to lean into it fully and wholly.
This isn’t like holding onto cardboard, there’s clearly some of that easy give that Clark feels when he holds onto his Ma and Pa, but there’s a solid kind of hold that displays itself in almost the same way as hugging Kara feels like. It’s easy to hold onto and offer comfort, the teenager clearly hasn’t had any lessons in controlling that strength he has locked in his frame because the hug would have crushed a normal human.
“Superman!” Batman’s voice comes from several floors above- strained and in need of assistance.
“We’re going up kid- hold on tight.” Superman tells him.
“Don’t have to tell me twice.” The teeanger grips a little tighter, Clark can feel his ribs constrict. It’s a little surprising that the clone can speak so well, considering the whole Bizzaro fiasco and the fact he’s probably never been out of this lab.
Superman tears right back out of where he’s tunneled down- using the holes he’s previously made to get right back up to where Batman is trying his best to dodge the bullets of the security team.
“Kal-El! We’ve got Flash on his way right now with a Javelin.” Batman curls behind the bullet blocking body of Superman, his cape flared and a teenager in his arms. Clark can smell the sharp tang of iron and wet heat that means injury, some of it the security officers - Batman doesn’t pull punches for anybody which means batman’s gauntlets always smell like iron and cleaning detergent, along with anybody Batman puts down for the count- but some of it’s the familiar scent of Batman’s own blood.
Clark shifts the teenager out of the way a bit before he opens up a hand for Batman.
The teen doesn’t want to move, but Clark’s still significantly stronger than him and maneuvers him with only minimal effort. Batman reaches out and takes the offered assistance, holding onto Superman’s arm.
It takes no time at all to go back the way they came, up the fight out’s normally easier anyway- the package is safe and secure and they’re going to keep it like that. There’s no computers they need to mess with and Luthor and his supply of kryptonite is all the way across the globe, there’s no bombs to disarm or any other delay to work around- it’s a in and out mission through and through.
Batman drops his hold when they get to the stairs, preferring to get around under his own power and not have his shoulder torn out of socket. The clone also wiggles out, so Clark lets the kid drop just a little bit.
He drops to the ground- no hovering or flying to Clarks surprise- and begins to run right behind Batman.
Robin’s already waiting for them on the roof, he’s fending off any security who wants to try and prevent the Javelin from landing.
Batman jumps right into the fray, seamlessly integrating into Robin’s choreography.
Superman jumps forward to help, to either block bullets or play damage control.
The clone got to the roof with them, but when he emerges into the moonlight all he does is look straight up at the moon and stutters to a halt.
The Javelin lands, the Flash isn’t the best pilot of these things but he was the only one available to give them a lift today so they’re just going to have to put up with the shaky landing before Batman can rush in there and take over the controls.
Once the docking doors are open Robin immediately jumps up into it the cargo bay, the ramp hasn’t even fully extended yet but the bo-staff comes in handy when used by a person who’s an expert in how it works.
Batman doesn’t need the ramp either, he’s a master of movement and follows his Robin like a shadow. “Swap with me!” He calls to the Flash, who’s already moving out of the driver's seat to allow a more experienced flier to maneuver the plane.
Superman notices that his clone is frozen in his spot, so Clark darts back to grab him- scooping the kid up and darting into the Javelin.
The clone lets out another little warble of a thrill, that same one deep from his chest. Superman answers with a much deeper one, the clone relaxes into his genetic donor's hold and both of them go up into the safety of the plane.
Batman takes off without bothering to close the cargo doors, with a glance Superman can see that Robin is strapped in while Flash is only half in costume holding onto the cargo netting.
The cargo doors close while they’re in the air, getting further and further away from the clusterfuck they left behind with every second.
--
There’s so much to see, overlooking everything from up here, and the clone can’t keep his eyes off the world below.
There’s so many sounds here, even though they tell him that it’s rather late and this ‘watchtower’ place is normally just absolutely filled to the brim with people, right now there’s a skeleton crew just keeping it floating peacefully above the entire rest of the planet.
The clone doesn’t touch the glass, he’s been taught better than that, but he was directed into a room with a wall of glass pointed to the globe and more of that pale bluish light that seems to fill up the entire space with it’s lovely warm glow. It’s blessed , the amount of light that the clone is being exposed to, if this is how normal people got to live then the clone wants to live among them all and never again go below ground. Of course if this is just something that people exposed to guests too, or if this isn’t normal at all then the clone is going to have to figure out how to lay himself here for the rest of his probably short life.
Currently there’s only one other person in the room, the boy the other’s had called ‘ Robin ’. A bird’s name, unisex for humans, fallen out of style in the 1980’s in America.
This particular Robin seems short, small, a boy, black hair like the clones own but his skin seemed weird, covered in dots and nothing like the clone has encountered before.
They haven’t really … spoken yet.
The clone and Robin, a few preliminary words in the jet but other than a stark order to ‘stay here’ by the man in the black cape to both of them no words had been exchanged since the adults had rolled into another room and the conversation started up.
The clone could hear talking, muffled words, but there was that same underlying noise here like there was back home- that easy repetitive flickering oscillation that makes it easy to relax and hard to overhear specific words or heartbeats or the sound of the blood in Robin’s veins while the other boy works with his hands mindlessly on something in front of him.
It’s also hard to hear the answer to his calls when he starts to rumble out little panic noises, but he’s only started that up once and stopped when he got that low tumbling gravel roll back at him. He’s been very good, and hasn't made much noise at all. The scientists told him his reflexive sounds make people uncomfortable, that he should stop making them, that he needs to be quiet . He’s been very quiet since he came, he’s being so good, when they give him back he’s going to get all kinds of sunlight as a reward.
All kinds of sunlight, just like he’s getting now where he looks down onto the whole wide planet below him.
--
This kid was a freakazoid.
Robin had been asked by Batman to keep an eye on things and to stay out of the way while the rest of the big league talked about what exactly to do in this situation.
Robin had perched up and got ready to be talked to, to listen to excited babble or even rambling happy stories just like Superman would do.
The kid just kept his hands perfectly at his sides and looked through the windows. He hasn’t moved in the slightest, just a hitching almost real kind of breathing that looked more like a porcelain automaton than anything else. He looks older than Robin, but according to the file’s he’s about two, aged up artificially, worryingly translucent, with viens a color just a little off from humans trailing up from his fingers and across the back of his palms, in his neck, the little bit of skin revealed looked computer generated and not really human .
Uncanny.
Superman sometimes moved in a way that made Robin jump, everybody’s seen the youtube videos that have collected the various bits of shaky camera footage of Superman moving or acting or saying things that aren’t quite lined up to the rest of humanity. #Alien, #NotHuman, #ETQuirks. All kinds of people who took screen grabs from interviews and fawned over the minute almost unnoticeable differences between Superman and the human race.
None of those people have ever seen Superman after a fight, collapsed onto a chair somewhere and wearing soft sweatpants holding a piece of gauze to a scrape and trying not to fall apart as one of his friends gets stitched up from the edge of death in medbay. When not thinking about it, Robin has seen Uncle Kal fall apart and move like no horror movie could ever capture, but it’s always offset by blinding smiles and apple pie and careful control.
This … person had none of that.
None of that training, that experience, that life.
Just a little too pale, a little too still, and a little too alien.
The Javelin ride was mostly Batman yelling at Superman about being discrete, Flash asking what the fuck was going on, and Superman yelling back that he was gonna punch Lex in the goddamn face, now they were stuck here and not doing much, so Robin decides that he’s gonna make the weird clone thing a little less strange.
Now they’ve been sitting in silence while Tim works on cleaning the lenses of some high-end cameras that are used mostly for surveillance (the Question has a collection of cameras, but takes horrible care of them, having something easy and mindless to do while on the watchtower while Batman is on a warpath is satisfying).
“What’s your name?” Robin decides on, because when you name something it grows on you.
The clone doesn’t startle, just twists around a little strangely to look at Robin. “What?”
So much for super hearing, christ . “Your name?”
“I don’t have one.” The clone turns back to looking at the world below. “Mostly they referred to me as a project, or a clone.”
Christ . This is the saddest shit. Good god.
“Do … Do you want one?” Robin’s not sure how to proceed in this situation, it’s like talking to a weird brick wall that you were pretty sure had feelings of some kind but you also weren’t sure how to go about navigating those feelings.
The clone turns its eyes on Robin, a jerk of his whole upper torso to turn enough to see Robin fully instead of how everyone else would just cut their eyes askance and give Robin a side eye.
A smile, hesitant, hopeful, creaking across the clone’s face, a smile that’s awkward and unnerving and more of a barring of teeth than an actual smile. It’s like a ray of sunshine after a hurricane, a door to the storm shelter opening safe after a tornado, a soot covered fireman saving a family from the burning building.
A thing they pulled from somewhere equable to hell, in the facsimile shape of a person, backed by the nothingness of space and haloed by a sun over the edge of the world.
Long hair tangled, dirty from dust sticking to it’s too oily strands, eyes too unsure and wide. White uniform streamlined in a way that only can be described as something out of a medical sci-fi movie, complete with the tag that dangles from his ear like an animal for slaughter. The clone looks heartbreakingly happy here, delighted in something as simple as a name.
Before Tim even thinks about it, he’s holding one of Question's really nice cameras, lines up the shot through a newly cleaned lense, and takes a picture.
--
Luthor sues the Justice League.
He’s on a podium, leaning into a microphone at a press conference smiling wide and amicable while laying out exactly what had occurred- and why he’s both in the right to sue the Justice League for ‘Scientific Misconduct’ and ‘Theft’ .
“-We were using a highly anticipated brand new method of cloning to create healthy genetic matches for people on the organ donor list.” Luthor’s tie is a brilliant green today, against his black suit it stands out on camera for the whole nation to see. “We were going to revolutionize the field of medicine, allow sick people a second chance at life, but we’ve been set back years by both corporate espionage and the merry band of vigilantes who tore through my facility with little abandon.”
“We need to tell these so-called ‘ superheros ’ that they have no right to barge into our personal and private property, to moderate our ideas and free thinking like the very thing that the American Nation has always fought against. I was trying to do something wholly good for people who needed it the most, and the alien being who nobody can beat or contain came into my facility, took my research and destroyed my files, preventing me from continuing my research as planned.”
“We’ve already established in a previous legal case- such as the Hero's Foundation vs. Wayne - that as vigilantes the men in tights have no rights to their image, name, and likeness. That case was established as meaning that these beings, beings that we as normal people have no real chance against, can be used as objects in the public trust, a copyright free for all. When I was using this precedent to the fullest extent I could, the Justice League decided on their own violation to uphold their own version of the law.”
“What is this then? Where is the line?”
Luthor raises his arms, gesturing to the entirety of the room at large, to the nation watching, to the world that was watching.
“Do I have to live in fear of the next time I cross some arbitrary line? Do I have to run by every \single idea I- or anyone on my team- thinks of the team that lords over us in the sky just in case? There’s nothing I want more than to help people, so how can I possibly do that when I don’t know when anything I look into might trigger the destructive rage of an alien who nobody on earth can barter with?”
“I ask you, humans, people, beings whom I share my life with, what is the line? ”
The reporters take pictures, surge to ask follow up questions, and the world over considers these words.
--
Clark doesn’t know what to do with the boy.
He doesn’t have enough to support both of them, he’s sitting well enough on his own but adding a child into the mix with strange needs and no control means money that he simply doesn't have. He doesn’t have the time either- between his job and his hero work there’s very little time for himself , let alone a kid who needs a little more care than a normal child.
The kid doesn’t seem to want him either, if that’s any consolation. They don’t know what to do with one another, but everyone else seems to think that they just need to be best friends immediately or something, come out of here with the kind of relationship that Batman holds with his Robins.
Batman is a father, though, he loves being a father, loves having kids, loves being paternal even though he’ll never say it. Batman wanted kids since he was a kid and collecting up teenagers like pokemon can’t put much financial strain on a guy who’s wrecked more plans than Clark has had vehicles. Why can’t Batman take the boy, Clark wants to ask the League at large, but as much as Batman keeps shooting glances over at the unclaimed teen with itchy fingers Diana, Barry, and J’onn seem to think that Clark should be the one to take this boy under his wing and be a dad!
Arthur seems uncensored either way, while Hal hasn’t commented on anything.
They’ve been talking about this problem for almost a week now, the whole world below them is kicking up a fuss demanding the League to give Luthor back his ‘experiment’ while the League can’t really reveal that Luthor made a weird copy of Superman and himself without stripping away any chance that the boy has at being a normal teenager .
Personally, Clark thinks the kid is so beyond normal that it’s not worth trying to salvage.
Batman is very much on the side of trying to keep the kid out of the limelight, and seems to be rather desperate to keep the clone as far away from prying camera’s as possible.
It’s a fight, like it always is between them.
At least Robin is having a good time, him and the clone seem to have made fast friends up here.
Clark has been trying to avoid the boy, and the boy seems not to care whether or not he’s within visible range of his genetic donor.
It’s not because of any hatred of the boy, or despises the clone’s percentage of Luthor’s genes, there’s nothing against the kid.
It’s so that Clark won’t latch onto him without thinking this through and being ready to fully support and take care of a kid that he didn’t have any say in or know about.
Kryptonians have … bonds , is the closest collective word in english. There’s a connection thrumming through blood that solidifies over the course of child’s development and birth into a family bond between whoever was involved in making the child and the child itself. It’s a slow building unbreakable core concept that once it takes hold means that Clark won’t be able to give up the kid to somebody more suited to taking care of him, more interested in raising him, somebody who can give this kid a better life.
Clark latched onto his parents as a kid, as children do, and he feels their warm contentment in the curve of his skull. Us-te , the bond between child and parent. There’s a reason why he’s able to call his Ma or Pa when they're feeling down with unerring accuracy, it’s because he knows at some basic passive level when they're feeling particularly strong emotions. He has to visit them at least once a month or he’ll get upset and nervous, unsettled. Krypton had huge family clusters, multiple people all living and breathing and settled into the same space with little problem. Clark knows it’s probably not healthy to have as little bonds as he does but he’s talked with Kara about it and she says that it’s okay to only have so little- Kara and Clark send one another pings of warm affection every few days just to reassure one another.
But Kara and Clark aren’t parent and child- their bond’s are purely functional as cousins. They’ve talked about it, they meet up to get lunch every now and again, and they work as perfectly fine extended family members. Us-cheh , the bond between them, a bond between close family members on the same level, cousins, siblings, more distant but still called upon.
Clark can feel the want of connection that thums through his heart every time the kid looks over at Clark when they pass by one another. Us-kah , the bond from a parent to a child, careful and overpowering, a need to protect and keep safe, a drive to provide for and cherish.
(Just like the dusty deep-love-bond pings a little question every time Clark and Batman spend quiet time together, leaning on one another after a hard battle and saving the world. Us-ni , the word for a bond between lovers, a bond that Clark is refusing to inflict on anybody around him.)
Clark does acknowledge that he’s got to be the one to bring the poor clone to the fortress and teach the boy about … well… everything about himself. He’s not a full Kyrptonian, so there’s bound to be some differences that hopefully can be ironed out and are not a danger to the boy’s long term health, but from what files where given over with the corporate whistleblower and the ones pulled form Luthor’s files before Robin had data-nuked the entire facility, the clone is more like Clark than he is like Luthor.
Which brings them to where they are now.
Clark had agreed to bring the boy to the fortress but only with J’onn there for his minor contribution to the boy and Batman as a buffer (and as a person who might know what he’s doing in regards to parenting teenagers, Clark is so out of his depth ).
Clark’s pulled up every file he could over the past few days about family and teenage care, but those files are few and far between, laden down with scientific inquiry and strange phenomenon outside the norm.
There is a whole subsection dedicated to cloning and genetic reconfiguring, but that’s been labeled as dangerous, do not try, will disintegrate over time, and abomination .
This, the word for atrocity, monster, disgusting, is written over the translation for clone .
Kon .
Clone, horror, broken one, exact match, Kon .
Robin had asked for the word for clone during that initial meeting at the watchtower, where Clark wasn’t nearby and so he had looked at the other authority on Kryptonian culture, and without thinking Kara had given it to him.
So now, a week after Robin and the clone had made friends with one another, Clark doesn't have the heart to tell poor Kon that his name doesn’t mean anything nice.
Kal-El, Batman, Robin, J’onn and Kon are all in the fortress now, with the two boys off in the sunroom while Batman and Kal work through the files on childcare and teenagers. Kon only has a few articles of clothing, mostly borrowed from Batman or Clark himself, but he likes wearing the hand-me-down shirts. If Clark wanted to bother, he could pull up footage and check on the two teens, but he’s trying to distance himself so that the us-kah doesn’t solidify.
Batman flicks to a new file, thick gloves not at all clumsy on crystals.
Clark looks over, it’s a file about the separation of children and parents with and without a bond.
Batman’s got his cowl off- just a domino and his under armor for comfort during this long weekend at Kal’s fortress- so Clark can see the confusion flash across his brows before being smoothed out.
Clark goes back to looking over his own files- about how teens needed both an excess of sleep and a large social group to function optimally during the day.
“These would be a lot more useful if we knew how both the yellow sun and the human genes affected him.” B says, low and almost to himself. “Does he form these same links as you do? Is he too human? Does having other, martian, DNA make him form the … us-te differently than you or Kara would?”
J’onn’s mostly been reading the files from Luthor’s facility. “There’s no significant notes on his mental ability.” J’onn moves, tapping a few keys on Batman’s laptop that sits in his lap. “Cadmus labs mostly focused on trying to keep him stable; it seems like they cared not for his ability to think or form mental links.”
Kal can’t even imagine. It’s his childhood nightmare come to life. “ Rao .” He breathes, a catch in his breath and a stutter over his emotions. That calming sound comes from deep in his chest, a noise that’s an adult soothing a child, like cooing at a baby or sushing a toddler.
The response comes immediately, a much higher pitched call at a much higher decibel down past the winding hallways. Kon’s safe and alert.
It makes Batman flinch away.
Over the course of the week Clark has noticed that everytime he chimes in that particular infrasonic rumble it makes normal humans uneasy, unsure, move away from both Kon and Clark.
It’s why the boy’s previous caretakers told him to not make that particular call, it made them scared .
Batman recovers quickly from the quick shock of ice down his spine that comes with the sound. “Can we test Kon’s ability to form mental links through something called-” Batman flicks his eyes to look at the document on his side of the screen, rechecking his pronunciation “- us-ni ?”
Breath stuttering, Clark jerks in surprise. “ No. ”
“Why not? Robin and Kon seem close enough-”
“ Nope! ” Clark can’t listen to that, oh god. The two of them are children . “They’re teenagers!”
Now that flash of confusion from before comes in full force. “What? Don’t you have this link with somebody? A ‘ bond - allies - trust - together - endless ’?”
Clark sags, grabbing ahold of the console and leaning heavily into it. Translation error, maybe? “That’s- it’s a little more than allies , it’s more like …”
Batman cocks an eyebrow. “Isn’t it something like you have with the Justice League?”
Shaking his head, Clark doesn’t even know how to begin to unravel this misunderstanding. “It’s like- J’onn help me out here.”
The martian perks up, and like he always does press a gentle question of permission on both Kal and B’s minds.
Kal accepts, and floods the link with the exact connotation of the us-ni bond. Deep, unending, sexual love, a full devotion and binding bond that doesn’t end except in death. Batman’s mind blinks, like a rubber band, before mortification floods the mental connection between them facilitated by J’onn.
J’onn breaks the overt link, leaving Kal with just his three baseline ones at the very back of his awareness.
“ Jesus .” B rubs at his eyes. “You could have just told me that I was making the wrong assumption there. Now I have to live with the knowledge that I accidentally proposed a forced marriage between our kids.”
--
Shit .
Bruce controls his base flinch when Kon begins up that unsettling rumble-cry-whine.
It’s late, late enough that J’onn has gone back to America and took Robin with him so both of them could get back to work and school, respectively. Officially, Bruce had taken a ‘impromptu vacation’ from Gotham, to be back at an indeterminate date. Nightwing has agreed to take over for a little bit, now with the help of Robin.
Kal had run off to help with some disaster in Europe, a massive flood if the news feed was correct, so the only two people here where Bruce (doing work and translating any kind of resource from the fortress) and Kon (who was working on controlling his strength and flight- the only two abilities the boy has shown to have had so far).
Kon’s a fan of laying in the sunroom, either basking in the warm water pool by the tropical plants of Krypton or floating right above it. The sunlight here in the arctic hasn’t faded, it’s the wrong time of year for that, and Kon hasn’t come out of the brilliant blinding light more than twice.
Bruce had moved his laptop to the sunroom just to keep a closer eye on Kon while Kal was out.
Bruce isn’t the one with super hearing or the ability to smell when the kid’s in distress or whatever it is that Kal does. Bruce isn’t the one with a helpful emotional link between him and his sons, if he was then his life would have gone so much differently.
Jason would probably be alive-
Not going down that path! Bruce does not go down that path. He is a simple human with simple human limitations and there is no way to make sure that he always knows that his children- no, his Robins are still alive and breathing and how they’re feeling that day.
Kon’s still making that soft rumble sound, pitched in such a way it feels like fingernails down chalkboards, but somehow soft ? It’s like the scrape of a fork against a plate, something about it makes a shiver go right down Bruce’s back.
“Kon?” Bruce asks, closing his laptop and putting it aside to focus totally on the kid in front of him.
Kon snaps too, the noise stops- Bruce has noticed that Kon is a lot better at stopping noise and movement than Kal is- and Bruce involuntarily relaxes.
“What’s wrong?” Bruce asks, not standing, just sitting on a comfortable lounge chair and keeping his attention fully on the boy in front of him. “Is Kal coming back?”
Kon unfurls from where he’s been hovering above the warm water pool, turning his gaze onto Bruce. “Sorry.” Kon says, soft, “I’ll try to be quiet.”
Bruce’s heart breaks a little more, damn Luthor to hell. No children should have to go through events that break them down into nothing, no child in the world should have to pick themselves up from the very bottom and claw themselves back into a semblance of a person.
“You don’t have to be.” Bruce decides on saying, words are his most hated enemy here, but he’s trying . “If you tell me what’s wrong I might be able to fix it.”
Both of them are … not ever going to be the best at human interaction and communication. Bruce has a whole host of problems wrong with him, so many problems that go a whole hell of a lot deeper than just him beating the shit out of muggers in the back alleys of his home town. Kon’s chronologically a toddler, physically a teenager, but mentally all over the place, he’s interacted with maybe seven people outside of his original cage and says things that Robin has reported back to the League as being ‘horrifically depressing’.
But Kon’s trying his best to sort everything out, just like Bruce is trying to be a little more open with people.
“I don’t know what’s wrong with me.”
Kon’s hovering a foot above the pool, hair floating up around him with weightlessness, eyes not meeting Bruce’s. “I’m getting enough sun, I’m not in my room, You aren’t asking me to undress and you don’t want pictures or my blood or samples. I’m- I’m just sitting here talking with Robin and you and Kal and J’onn day in and day out so nothing should be wrong with me but-”
Bruce opens his arms, but Kon doesn’t come closer.
“I’m okay! I should be fine.” that unsettling rumble whine starts up again, the sharp terror accompanies it like a shotgun cocking, “I haven’t been hurt, why am I not-”
“Kon.” Bruce says, gesturing with his arms again.
The rumble cuts off- sharp and choked down, suppressed and smothered and desperate not to be reprimanded. Kon warily looks up at Bruce’s arms, but still doesn’t move.
“Kon, come here?”
The boy floats over, his hair moves in ways Superman and Kara’s doesn’t. It’s more like the boy is moving through water instead of air, while Kal’s and Kara’s hair seems to be affected by gravity at all times. Is he floating the same way as either of them?
Kon gets within two or three feet, Bruce closes the difference,
Gentle as possible, Bruce puts his hands onto Kon’s shoulder and pulls the boy close. Gentle, so very gentle.
Kon goes very still, he’s been working on not breaking things he touches, but accepts the hug by leaning as far as Bruce allowed him too.
Bruce was stronger than the average bear, he’s also more used to Kal’s hugs than most of the rest of the population of the entire world. He so very softly pulls Kon into his embrace, and offers the most basic form of comfort he can. Kryptonians are a little cooler than humans naturally are, but clearly that didn’t matter to Kon or Kal or Kara, who all seem to melt into any embrace given to them.
Sure enough, Kon stops hovering, falling into Bruce’s chest and curling in on the warmth and comfort offered freely.
--
There’s a problem here, however.
Clark Kent was trying his best to do what he had thought was the best.
Bruce Wayne was trying his best to do what he had thought was the best.
Kon was simply working with his own very limited view of the world, his own instincts and emotions and desperate attempts to feel both safe and secure.
Beforehand, he had never imprinted onto the scientists around him because while he had always liked listening to them, he also knew that he wasn’t on the same level, that none of those scientists had cared . So now Kon sits, wrapped in the warmth of B on a sunny arctic day in a room that was out of a tropical island, he calms down, the beat of his heart loud in his own ears.
Ba-tish-da. Ba-tish-da.
Us-te .
It’s a bond from the child onto it’s parent, unable to be taken back and unable to be broken. There’s a faint connection that has strengthened Kryptonian families for generations and protected the people who it holds.
Kon’s mind works a little strangely, as it always will. A Kryptonian’s psychic centers are normally small, just enough to latch onto one another and share faint whispers of emotions.
Kon’s own brain is a hash between multiple people and races- a pure half and half human/kryptonian split should have had a weakened psychic center, but not only was Kon’s human DNA altered to be ‘more Kryptonian’ in nature, boosting his psychic center, but he also had a good amount of DNA from a species that was considered one of the most psychic in the universe.
Which means that he forms mental attachments rather easily, with all the ferocity of a fish hook in soft skin, and those mental attachments are a tad stronger than a normal Kryptonians would be.
Which means that when Kon finally feels comforted, safe, he latches onto that feeling- that person- with all his might.
Kon, a clone, not a person, not an individual, not a real boy, latches onto the mind of Bruce Wayne with a desperate grab at comfort and safety.
Bruce Wayne’s mind, a normal human mind, offers no resistance.
Chapter 2: hey you ever think about how a telepath is probally terrified of being one?
Notes:
strikes a pose, hell yeah, i need a shower, also look the romance is comming i pinky promise probally also who keeps taggin my stories as 'neurodivergent' and how tf did you know
Chapter Text
“The kid hasn’t eaten anything.” B starts up from where he’s been looking over autopsy reports from Luthor’s lab.
Clark gets taken for a loop for a moment, looking up from where he’s been doing some (very) light sparring with Robin and Nightwing. “What?” He asks.
Robin then cracks across Clark’s face with a bo-staff.
Sneaky little shits! Clark rolls with it so he doesn’t break Robin’s bo-staff, but as he’s moving with it Nightwing gets him right in between two of his ribs with those cattle prods of his. Thankfully they’ve been turned off for this exercise but the jab still makes Clark huff.
“Kon, he hasn’t been eating. You haven’t either.” B’s laptop setup has evolved from a simple portable computer to a small roving crime lab. “Unless you’ve both eaten while we’ve been away?”
B, Nightwing and Robin have been slightly abusing the Zeta systems to be-bop between Gotham and the fortress with wild abandon- Batman and Nightwing have swapped days to look after Gotham so that one of them could come back with Robin after work or school and bother the hell out of Clark and Kon.
Kon’s loving it.
J’onn is helping Kon right now with meditation (officially) and looking into Kon’s mind to see if the kid has any ticking time bombs the league should know about (unofficially).
But today’s a Saturday, so all three of Gotham’s vigilantes have moseyed on over during daylight hours. Nightwing to ‘ get a load of the new kid’ because Nightwing leads all of the younger generation with a charismatic fist, Robin to ‘ hang out and explore the fortress’ because the third Robin is nothing if not nosy, Batman gave no reason at all, simply continued to show up.
“I don’t think we’ve eaten, no.” Clark can’t think of a reason why he would have. He’s not hungry. He doesn’t get hungry besides for once or twice a month when he starts to need nitrogen and minerals- then he eats peanut butter and fatty protein and spinach for two or three days to feel better and then he’s good to go for another month.
Oh shit. Is Kon hungry? Has Clark even asked?
“Some of the necropsies have-“
“You can call them autopsies. ” Clark waves a surrender and lets the two Gotham boys know he’s out of the spar for now. Nightwing and Robin turn on each other without hesitation, previously having focused on a single opponent with team attacks now they move to test their strength against one another. “Rao, just because I’m not human doesn’t mean you have to refer to the clones' post-mortem dissections with the word for what vets do to animals that have died.”
“It’s not correct to refer to these as autopsies. They’re necropsies because the procedure was done on something inhuman.” Batman doesn’t huff, nor does he pout, his face and tone is perfectly impassive but there’s just a sense about it all that Batman thinks Clark’s in the indignant wrong here.
Clark just rolls his eyes, the two of them can argue semantics all day, and walks over to where B is set up by the door. “What do the autopsies show?”
“The necropsies show that some of the previous generation of failed experiments had eaten food.”
Clark leans over B’s shoulder as Batman pulls up- oh god there’s pictures? Some half melty goop that just brings up Clark’s memories of cleaning out chicken and deer with his Pa on the farm. Rao , this was brutal in a way that was uncomfortable to look at, some of these clones looked nothing like Clark, looked nothing like anything human , but sometimes Clark saw his own face on very much dead individuals, Clark also saw something that looked more like Luthor on the table once-
It wasn’t as cathartic as you’d think.
It was sort of sad.
Batman just looks through each picture- each set of notes over every organ- there’s even weird additions from Batman himself, adding in assorted knowledge that B’s gained from either tending to Clark after kryptonite slash magic battles or through going over notes on the fortresses computers.
Batman just looks over at Clark, tapping on a clear plastic container in one of the pictures of what looked like …
“What the hell kind of food is that ?” Clark has to ask. It look liked weird slush, not anything Clark would ever bother to eat, good god-
“It seems like they were either IV feeding the first few attempts at cloning or they force fed them a mixture of basic baby nutrients.”
Oh, Clark see’s the problem then.
“Including lactate?”
B stops typing.
“That was a pretty immediate question.” Batman’s hands hover over the keys, his eyebrow is quirked just barely.
“It was a pretty immediate thought.” Clark shoots back.
“Do you- are you lactose intolerant?” Batman asks, genuinely surprised. It’s not often that the League discussed dietary plans with one another (besides Barry, who told people that he had to basically continuously eat or else he would suffer a quick starvation so they needed to stock up on food for the entire watchtower).
Clark thought this would be rather obvious. “Yes, less of an intolerance and more like downright severely allergic . Milk wasn’t something Kryptonians produced- anywhere on the planet. I can’t digest it, it’ll just clog up my ability to filter sunlight.”
Batman doesn’t look away as he types a note to himself about the new information he’s learned about his friend.
--
“Are you hungry?” Bruce asks Kon.
Kon blinks. “Am I what?”
Amazing. Good to know. Bruce mentally reassess his entire outlook on this situation. There’s been concepts that Kon has run into before that he’s been unfamiliar with, but that’s mostly been easy to explain and work with, with somebody able to word it out in such a way Kon understood.
How do you explain hunger?
Bruce’s first instinct is to bring Kon to the manor and feed him, Alfred’s always wanting to try out new and unique recipes and the kitchen is a too big place for just the few of them that come and visit. Bruce and Alfred are the only two living at the manor full time, with Dick in college and Tim technically not his ward, Bruce wakes up in an empty house and eats breakfast and waits until his sons come back to him.
“Do you want food?” Bruce asks again.
Tim’s doing homework, ankles crossed in the warm water pool in the tropical room, tablet perched precariously on his knobby knees and leaning against a few stolen cushions from the chairs. Dick’s in the actual water, the only thing above the surface is his eyes as his long hair bobs around his face. J’onn is used to much colder temperatures than the warm tropical room, and prefers not to stay in the sunny atrium for long periods of time so he left after dropping Kon off a few minutes ago after meditation- but Kal’s clicking away at Bruce’s laptop doing his ‘real world work’.
That ‘real world work’ which stopped completely at the admission that Kon didn’t know what food was.
Kon’s eyebrow quirks up, a mirrored response to confusion that he’s gained from watching the rest of them. “Like, taking a break?”
Dick moves, fast as a snake in the water, and he’s snagging onto Kon’s ankle.
Kon floats above the water, right in the center of the room where most of the sunlight hits. No shade, nothing preventing him from the full blast of the UV radiation of the constant sun from above. So Dick’s hand just makes Kon look down, not even bothering to shift his weight. Dick tugs, so Kon follows obentaintly where Dick pulls him.
The nightwing suit is folded right by the Robin and Batman cape, right by where Tim is sitting, and that’s where Dick is headed. Kon follows with no questions.
Tim moves his tablet to a slightly safer position, shifting to hover his hands over the Nightwing suit. “What do you need?”
“The emergency rations.”
All the Bats of Gotham have been extensively trained on how to keep a tidy utility belt- in Nightwing’s case he has a slim utility backpack- so there’s always a basic system to everyone’s tools so that no matter what situation they can pass anything they need between one another pretty easily. There’s always a few quirks between each person, like how they pack their smoke pellets or how many batarangs they feel comfortable with side by side in a pocket, but the location of each item tends to be the same across the board.
So Tim fishes out the blueberry peanut butter granola bars from a hard to reach left back pocket with ease and tosses it to his brother.
Dick catches it easily, only about ten feet away. “Robin, I’m swimming . Don’t throw things at me when I’m swimming .”
Picking up his tablet again, Tim rolls his eyes. “You caught it anyway, didn’t you?”
“How am I meant to swim without my arms, baby bird?”
“Kick, you big nerd.”
Kon just drags Dick to the side of the pool, flying easy and slow with his hair floating around him just like Dick’s was. Once they reached the side Dick easily pulled himself up and out of the water, right beside Tim.
“Christ, you really had to sit right here?” Tim scoots away and pushes at Dick’s shoulders. “I was dry!”
Dick ignores his brother, and rips open the nondescript wrapping on Alfred’s emergency wrappings. The smell is fantastic, most of Alfred’s cooking is beyond fantastic, the man prides himself on feeding several incredibly athletic boys on a pretty daily basis on a rotating menu of highly nutritious meals. The man knows how to make some granola bars that keep for several months and still taste good slightly squashed and body-warm.
Dick breaks the bar in half, then one half again. Three pieces, two much smaller than the other. Dick holds out the larger piece to Kon, wiggling it a little big. Kon takes it. Dick holds out one of the smaller pieces to Tim.
“This is food.” Dick explains, holding up his own smaller piece of granola. “We eat it, to digest it, to get energy. Humans have to constantly keep eating at regular intervals or we’ll get weak and eventually stop working.”
Kon’s looking at his blueberry peanut butter granola bar with a whole lot more reverence than before, his hold going from a loose carry to a much more delicate grasp. “How do you eat and digest it?”
Dick takes a bite, flashing his teeth, and chews.
TIm follows suit, not as exaggerated as Dick’s show, but easy and simple and natural as he can.
The two of them both swallow, Dick with gusto and movement in his whole throat while Tim moves naturally, the flex of Tim’s thin throat almost as visible as Dick’s.
“Then the digestion happens without conscious thought- we don’t control our interior. I assume it’s the same for you-” Dick cuts his whole body to look at Kal. “as for humans. Isn’t that right Uncle Kal?”
Superman’s been watching the teaching display for two whole minutes now, so he doesn’t startle at the address. “I’m the same. Yes. Interior isn’t under conscious control.”
Kon opens his mouth and carefully as a child can take a bite he gets a half a mouthful.
Instantly spits it out.
Bruce doesn’t laugh. Nope. He is an adult and will not laugh.
Kon scrapes his teeth against his tongue to get the taste out. His face is screwed up in confusion and disgust.
Dick does laugh, giggles starbursting into the air. Tim hiccups out a few breathless huffs of his own. “You have to chew it!”
“It feels weird!”
--
Luthor watches the newspapers and websites and social media feeds flood into his favor.
He loves it when he’s got the upper hand in a long standing war against the people who have decided that they don’t need any kind of control over what they do. There’s no reason for them to follow the law, no reason for them to follow the laws of the known universe. So why the hell should Luthor use methods that are normal or morally ‘right’?
Everyone is a simple bug underneath Superman’s heel, so why the hell should Luthor just lay on his back and scuttle?
Fuck that.
There’s nothing better than making sure public opinion swayed against the thing that hovered in the skies above them. It’s like sweet honey in tea on a cold day. Blessed.
There’s certainly a whole lot of lying involved in the carefully constructed metaphor that Luthor is using to twist the truth to the public at large, but Luthor is willing to bet the farm that the Justice Brats aren’t going to reveal the public face of a teenager who’s going to be used as a substitute punching bag by Superman’s many, many enemies. There’s nothing worse than allowing a child to get into the line of fire, Luthor wouldn’t have thrown the boy out there until he was aged up into an adult and there was another one lined up as a backup.
But he’s not on the board of ethics for the super elite, so he watches from a distance as the team of almighty gods above throw their children into a hail of bullets and come out of the other side covered in blood and scarred for the rest of their short lives.
The Batman is smart enough to not throw the kid into the line of fire right away, hopefully not before Luthor wins the intellectual suit and can proceed to get a precedent to use any DNA collected from the hero’s to make his own personal army.
But then again, Batman is smart enough to reveal the whole poker deck if it gets him what he wants. A dangerous enemy- which is why Luthor says far the fuck away from the dingy dirty Gotham streets.
That and trying to build up in a territory owned by Wayne is a nightmare and a half- the stuipid bastard might be a party animal who can’t walk straight most nights, but the man also has managed to build up the most profitable business on the entire damn planet. The man’s a billionaire and he would be more than that if he kept the same business practices as the rest of the world's uppercrust.
Luthor looks down from his office for the people who are holding signs below, chanting in his name against the lords above their heads with a giant ass space station pointed downwards in a direct path of destruction. There’s people all over the world who are on his side right now, and with people on his side that means that the government focuses less on his supposed evil empire and more on putting any kind of control into their resident alien.
A notification ping from his phone- a tweet?
He opens the app, curious what’s gotten through his filtering system.
A post from one of those menaces in Gotham. The smallest one that keeps an ongoing war with Twitter to whether or not the thing’s account has an official blue checkmark or not.
ROBIN @v_robin_gotham
“Highly anticipated brand new method of cloning to create healthy genetic matches” Where is the line, Luthor?
There’s a picture attached, two.
It’s already in the thousands for retweets.
Luthor sees red .
Furious, hideous, awful red .
--
Kon jerks upright. Aware. Something is wrong, something’s not right with the world.
Something’s not right with Batman .
Kon’s not sure how he knows, but he does , it’s something that pings in the back of his head like a pinball bumper, lights up and the alert tone rings out deep inside of his head.
Kon’s gone from the tropical room within a breath, he’s searching out, fanning his senses as far as he possibly can and reaching. There’s the way that the world breathes around him, forms in his awareness that he can feel in a very real kind of way. Kon grips everything he can and drags the world to him in a way that he’s never done before.
The crystal glass in the hallway bends towards him- the cases of artifacts from what’s left of Krypton jumps in his direction. There’s nothing in his way as he darts throughout the winding systems flying at speeds he’s never gone before.
Batman, Robin and Nightwing are talking to J’onn and Kal in the main room, where the main controls are, the place that looks over the entire rest of the fortress. Everybody but Superman was about to leave, going back to their homes and leaving Kal and Kon to see if Kon had anything else up his power sleeve than just flight and strength.
Kon races in, still trying to pull the world to him.
The whole place is shuttering, shaking as it leans into where Kon’s yanking with all of his might.
Everybody looks up, they’re saying something, Kon can’t hear them.
Batman’s there, only a hundred feet away, something wrongs with Batman. Kon doesn’t know what's wrong with B, but something is wrong .
Kon crosses the distance in a blink.
He doesn’t ram into Batman no matter how much he wants too. He’s going too fast and he’s too solid he’d hurt Batman even more than-
He slams into Superman instead, somebody who can take his speed and bulk without a blink.
Kon makes a hard turn, eyes wild, that desperate rumble sound has long since burst from his chest. It makes people uncomfortable, it makes everybody uncomfortable, including Kal- the poor guy always responds back with a deeper humming call that’s so soothing but there’s always a somber look when he does.
Kon slips right into Batman’s side, not daring to wrap his arms around the man, simply pressing his weight into B’s ribs as far as he can until Batman moves under the weight.
Something’s still wrong, what’s wrong? Why didn’t this fix it? This fixed it last time.
J’onn’s hands have shot to his head, wincing into a grimace and backing away while hissing in sharp pain.
Kon can hear the heartbeat of everybody in the room, can feel the air hovering around them, the heat that emenantes off the bodies of humans in massive cold space, Kon can smell the way that they all feel, he’s so aware of everything but how to fucking fix this.
Kon grabs onto the world around him tighter in that awareness, pulls it to him, yanks it all close like he’s about to lose it all with the desperation of a man looking at freedom but only though the bars of a fucking cage .
The entire world bends, just for a moment, people are talking a lot louder now, the wrongness with Batman changes from wrong to something else, a jumpstart of the heart, a fluttering series of gasping astonishment.
J’onn’s there, he presses a hand into Kon’s temple-
Sleep .
Kon’s mind stutters, trips over itself for just a second before he slams down the walls of his mind. He pushes J’onn out of the space that’s meant for him and him alone.
Get out.
Kon screams it into his awareness of the world, throwing it into the air, desperate for something he doesn’t understand.
--
What in the everling sin is happening?
Batman was getting onto Robin for prodding the beast that is Luthor over social media, Robin had posed some of the more safe for work images of Kon that were pulled from Luthor's own servers. Two photos, not showing Kon’s face, one of the poor kiddo’s back, mid-head to just above mid-hip. No bruises, but obvious signs of green-laced needles pulling out blood that wasn’t quite red. Veins and muscles in a different pattern from humans, a diagram written in hastily scrawled sharpie that points out where different organs were and what their functions might be. The other photo is from the side, but Kon had turned away from it, hiding his face but not his youth, markers once again against his ribs, marking out bones and organs and the way his hip was shaped.
This second one was cropped- Clark remembers that those marks went all the way down to the boy’s knees, not stopping just at the crest of his hip.
Clark is sort of thankful that a naked Kryptonian wasn’t posted all over the internet, but at the same time he’s sort of upset that even this much medical information is available.
It’s not hard to tell who Kon is related to- the two main genetic donor’s are listed in the bottom of each photo, written out digitally for Luthor’s organization system.
Robin wasn’t sorry, his little frame was every bit as defiant as Batman’s could be sometimes.
Nightwing was saying nothing, but was on Robin’s side here.
Clark could tell B was upset, genuinely, that even this much private information had been leaked into the entire world.
Then everything had gone to shit.
The whole forretress creaked .
“The hell was that?” Nightwing asks.
Then nothing makes any sense.
Clark can hear the distressed rumble-whine from miles away- literally. He rumbles back, automatically, confused. Kon was fine when they had left him about an hour ago to float quietly in the tropical room. Then more sounds Clark doesn’t understand the creaking of crystal and wood, the bowing of porcelain and glass, that’s the sound of things in a vacuum, being pulled into on direction by a strong force-
Then Kon’s there, eyes wide and scared and that rumble-whine horribly loud.
Clark steps forward, asking what’s wrong and making sure that his own response-call is loud enough that Kon feels soothed. There’s a moment where Clark doesn’t understand what exactly is happening around the clone, the way the whole world seems to twist towards Kon, like trees in a storm,
Then Kon’s slamming into Clark at high speed, all of the force of a freight train with none of the control of the tracks. Just as quick as Kon rams into Clark, he’s up in Batman’s space with panicked eyes and floating hands, not touching but leaning.
Then there’s a feeling of being grabbed onto by everywhere at once, and getting pulled .
Clark’s not used to many things being able to move him, but this force yanks and there’s nothing to be done against being hauled three feet closer to where Kon’s huddled into Batman’s side.
Robin and Nightwing are not nearly as lucky as just a simple three feet, Robin only barely gets caught by his older brother while Nightwing slides across the ground until he hits his father’s unoccupied side.
J’onn fairs a little better, but he’s also gripping his head and screaming something about a psychic attack.
Things in the room jump with the pull, and sure as shit there’s a pull. This is something that Clark can’t do, Luthor sure as shit can’t do this, J’onn can’t do this.
This is something that’s brand new, slightly terrifying.
J’onn puts a hand to Kon’s temple, there’s a slight waver through the space that Kal knows is the mental space, just a shiver.
Kon rears back.
The mental space rocks, the feeling like the sound of a heavy piece of furniture falling in another room, solid and heavy and oppressive . An iron curtain.
The welling against Kal’s mind, that’s not J’onn’s gentle asking of permission, this is a battering ram, a wrecking ball, an avalanche. It crushes through everything in its way, there is no give and take of soft permission, this is a starburst migraine exploding into an infinite fractal pattern.
Get out .
Kon’s voice, his emotions , crashing into people at a pace that Clark can’t keep up with. There’s terror, confusion, disconnect, desperation, the need to please underneath it all. Kon’s projecting, telepathic, telekinetic with the rest of the movement happening as well. It’s a power that’s brand new and specific to Kon and Kon alone. The strength of the clumsy invasion of Clark’s mind makes it so that every other mind in the room is placed into the same metaphorical area of Kon’s control- everyones thoughts and feelings and emotions are piled on top of one another and left jumbled together in a uncoordinated move by a scared teenager.
Clark can sense the awe from J’onn, the defense of Nightwing, the calculations of Robin-
Then underneath it all, the very still and careful mind of Batman.
Clark’s at all very good at mental movement- but he’s better than three humans who have no mental abilities at all, so he’s on the job of carefully directing everybody’s mind into their own little muddled piles while J’onn’s doing the heavy lifting of trying to calm down and help unravel the iron grip that Kon has on everybody and everything in the room.
Nightwing’s easy to get out of the pile- the boy’s always had a strong sense of self and personality so that makes it a simple task to put Nightwing’s mind into its own corner. Robin’s a little harder, he’s been the kind of boy that’s always looking to please and conform himself into the perfect image of what people wanted.
Batman’s mind thankfully is neat, tidy, in it’s strange and slightly tilted sprawl kind of way and requires only a little bit of looking around. Clark grabs it and begins to separate it from his sons when-
There’s a thread here, in the space of everyone’s mind, that is tied around Batman’s.
Clark feels at it, presses and prods against it.
Batman sends out a flash of displeasure, a twist and flash of whip quick danger that warns Clark to stay away . Clark ignores it, J’onn’s almost gotten through Kon’s panic, so there’s not a whole lot of time to separate and make sure everyone’s safe.
Clark pulls at B’s mind a little harder, mentally grabbing onto the underside of B’s mental belly and flipping to get a better look at where this thread leads.
It’s a link- a bond- but that’s impossible. Batman’s a human who’s shown no talent in mental arts.
Clark plucks the bond, strumming it.
No.
Clark jerks up, slamming back into his physical body like waking up from a nightmare. All at once and gasping for air he didn’t need.
Kon’s staring at Clark, hidden into the side of a half-unconscious Batman. Tears gather in Kon’s eyes, Clark can feel the panic, the heart pounding need to be safe, then underneath all that, just as J’onn finally breaks into the walls that Kon has hastily built up around himself, Clark can see the was that golden thread of connection forms a us-te.
Kon has attached himself to a protector.
Clark has
no idea
how to tell either of them.
Chapter 3: get naked and laugh about it, also is it weird to make ur homie custom underwear
Notes:
happy national nap day cheers
what am I doing, you ask? im imprinting my own autism onto batman and nobody cna stop me
Chapter Text
“No comment.”
Luthor walks down to his car and avoids the flashing of the lights around him. There’s dozens of people all wanting to know what was happening, what was being kept from the public, and what those photos mean.
Since Luthor was tagged in that photo that Gotham’s favorite child posted on the internet it’s been non-stop fighting with the media. His PR team has been working overtime, saying that it’s not at all what people are accusing those pictures of.
There’s nothing but questions on all of the news stations- who was in those pictures, what were all those notes written on a teenager's body, why did that jawline look a little too much like Superman ?
All the news stations sounded the same:
“-an interesting situation that develops in the Luthor vs. Justice League case with a new development from a twitter account that’s supposedly in the hands of a Gotham vigilante-”
“-that’s got to be something related to Superman! Look at these notes written all over the kid’s body! There’s a circle right here under what I can only assume to be a shoulder blade with kidney? -”
“-we have to ask, is this a sick kid who’s been given cloned organs from Luthor’s less than always ethical obsession with heroes? Or Is this a whole separate clone that’s been pulled from some unholy combination-”
“-the man’s a genius, we should be looking at him to lead up into a new age of people who can protect themselves! Luthor’s in the right on this, from a purely legal standpoint, and personally I think he’s right morally as well-”
“-this is a question about the rights of people who can’t be considered human in a traditional sense. There’s nothing written into the American system about aliens or mutants or, in this case, clones-”
“-what’s next? If there’s nothing stopping mad men with money from going to space or growing people then what can we expect from America’s real ruling class?!-”
It’s a media circus all around. Nobody’s sure of anything, not even the identity of the boy who’s chest has been on every TV and social media site for the past twelve hours. Luthor had bet on Batman controlling his brats a little better than this- so he had to re-get in front of the massive shitstorm.
Luthor can’t let this escape from him, he can’t , or else he’ll never be able to recreate his shining opus.
Maybe…. Maybe Luthor could steal his property back?
--
J’onn took several attempts to knock Kon out then J’onn basically dragged the boy back into the depths of the fortress while spitting out soft curses and telling everyone to stay back until J’onn had sorted things out for a bit.
Bruce put both his boys into the Zeta tube, telling them to go back to Gotham until things were safe again, then got into position himself to zap back to his hometown but Kal put a hand onto Bruce’s shoulder and said “Hey, I need to talk with you a second.”
So now Bruce has his head in his hands, sitting in a lounge in the fortress with a blanket over his shoulders, and trying to make sense of what Kal had told him. They sit side by side, touching knees with every breath.
Kal wrung his own hands, opening and closing his fists. “I’m sorry, I don’t think we can break the us-te between him and you.” Kal looks so upset, like this was a death sentence. “J’onn’s looking into the possibility right now-”
“If it hurts him to remove it in any way, I’m okay with allowing a rather inert mental link. In the files it says there’s no way to reach one person through the link-” although Bruce would be brushing up on ways to resist mind control again “-and if I’ve learned anything over the course of this business is that sometimes you have to roll with the weird.”
Kal’s hands stop flexing, they just curl up beside his knees.
Bruce is missing something.
“Does it hurt to have an us-te without the accompanying us-kah ? I’m not able to form a parental bond back to him.”
Shit, there was no information on that, there’s nothing to indicate that these bonds cause any kind of pain it’s usually just a very low level empathy or awareness, nothing as active or-
Kal shakes his head. “No. Each bond is independent of the other. There’s no pain in having a lopsided bond- my parents don’t have an us-kah to me, but I’ve never felt any discomfort from that fact.”
Bruce itches to know. He’s always been faintly aware that Kal had something underneath the image of a perfect alien he presented to the media- it’s impossible to miss when you’ve spend any time with him in the watchtower and he gets on a humorous tangent- but Bruce had been respectful and hadn’t pried into Kal’s personal life. A mutual respect between colleagues.
Even when sometimes that personal life slipped out and Kal admitted not only that he had alive parents but also those parents were presumably human who couldn’t form the mental us-kah bond with their son.
Kal sighs, his eyes are so tired. “Shit. This is a nightmare.”
“It certainly isn’t a walk in the park.” Bruce agrees. “It could have been worse if Kon had imprinted on Luthor instead of one of the Justice League members.”
“God, B, don’t even say things like that.” Kal makes a noise, a horrified one. “The kid can still make a few more us-te bonds, we can’t let him even look at Luthor until he’s older- or can control his emotions a little better.”
“Could you imagine? Sharing custody with Lex?”
Kal laughs now, a snort of air and a flash of a smile. “Do you get custody of him every other villain battle? Or-”
“I would argue Lex gets holidays and big villain meetups- over fifteen big names- while I get him the rest of the time.”
“You’d let Luthor keep Kon for evil christmas?” Kal leans into Bruce’s space now, pressing the entirety of his thigh against Bruce’s own.
Bruce likes the fact that Kal runs just a little cooler than the rest of humanity, cold hands, cold skin, cool against Bruce who runs just a little too hot. Bruce allows the touch, the heat exchange between them. He wonders how Kal lives in a world full of people who must feel like a fever all the time, but then again after being here on earth for so long does Kal even know the difference?
“I’d take Kon for not-so-evil Hanakauh, let Luthor have evil Christmas.” Bruce decides.
Kal laughs again, bright and bubbling. “ Rao .” He wipes at his eyes, smiling brilliantly in the light of the lounge. “This is why we don’t talk to the reporters after a battle.”
“I thought we set Diana and Arthur on the media because we both thought it was funny to watch reporters squirm?” Bruce likes this easy back and forth between him and Kal, he always has.
“Oh we definitely set Diana and Arthur on the press to watch all the reporters cringe back at having to deal with them.”
Might have been rude, but it also gets them out of the post-battle a hell of a lot faster than if anybody else did it. Diana and Arthur had a certain … air about them … that made the media both eat up their words and not understand a single thing that came out of their mouths. It was fantastic.
But, unfortunately, speaking of the media-
Burce has to bring it up, because the opinion of the public at large is a huge factor in whether or not the Justice League can continue to exist- the difference between helping and dictatorship. Originally it would have been fine to lie to everyone and make something up to the public that would make Luthor lose the case against them-or stall it out- but Tim had to go and incite a whole riot out there and now the civilians wanted to know more about an unknown figure.
Bruce hates to have to curtail a strong sense of duty and justice, but sometimes Tim needs to know when’s a good time to lie for the greater good and when to be truthful.
“Kal… when the court case comes up and we’ve got to show the pictures from Luthor’s files, they’re going to have to be unedited if we want to keep up any credibility in the courts and in the press.”
The previous laughter dissipates from the line of Kal’s shoulders, the soft pressing lean between them becomes something tense and tight. Kal can’t argue, because Bruce is right ; they can’t hide anything if they want to remain in the right during this whole thing. Technically they’re not operating under any law but their own- so at any time they could be persecuted actively by various governments of the world- but right now it’s mutually assured destruction with the American government and every single member of the greater League.
They’re not going to actually go to court- god no that would be ridiculous- but they have a representative given to them by the United States government and a team of lawyers that go to court constantly and work out various deals about cleanup and battle damage.
Bruce knows how the court system works, he’s been all over it for multiple reasons, so he knows that the best chance of convincing anybody that they were in the right was to lay out everything they had and to point out that Luthor was a monster who wanted nothing more than a mindless soldier.
But those photos from Luthor's lab weren’t just laying out muscular and skeletal systems, weren’t just close ups of Kon’s eye, or the way the biopsies look underneath the microscope, or the way that Kon’s heart looks underneath a ultrasound.
It’s the entire system underneath the hood on display- from images of dead clones half formed and half melted to MRI’s of Kon’s head all the way down to his feet.
It’s revealing a mystery, it’s uncomfortable for Bruce to look through- if not admittedly enlightening- but it would be worse for Kal , who’s a rather private person, to hand it over to a courtroom to dissect into public record.
“Do we have to give anything over at all?“ Kal asks, soft. “Can’t we just … shit I don’t know.”
“We could put Kon himself on the stand.” Bruce says, “But that’s the very last resort, there's a million other better avenues to work down than putting a young unstable target somewhere he’s not going to move from for several hours.”
“Then we can’t do that, it would unnecessarily upset Kon- he doesn’t need that in his life right now.”
Kal once admitted that one of his worst nightmares was being sequestered off into a lab somewhere, packed away where he couldn’t see anybody and all anybody wanted from him were tests . This shit must hit a little too close to home, a nightmare brought to life and lived by somebody else in your place. Bruce wouldn’t trade his and Kal’s life for the world.
But Bruce also could potentially offer: “We could lie and say that Kon’s biology is nothing like yours.”
Kal pulls away, shying away, the cool length of his thigh is missed immediately. “We can’t say things like that. It’ll make people even more curious about what's below my belt than they normally are.”
And Bruce- Bruce can’t say he hasn’t looked before.
It’s wrong, Bruce knows it, but after a mission covered in unmentionable things everybody shuffled into the locker room at the watchtower and got changed into something a little fresher. The locker rooms were designed with privacy in mind, but there’s always slip ups occasionally. Bruce has seen the curve of Kal’s back, the soft padding of his stomach and thighs, the lack of hair trailing into where a towel was slung low- Bruce had apologized for startling Kal at the time but had made notes about the strangely shaped belly button and what Bruce had assumed at the time was a vertical scar on his pubic bone.
Nowthat Bruce has seen too many pictures and diagrams to last a lifetime, Bruce can say for sure that it wasn’t a vertical scar.
“We’ll figure something out.” Bruce promises as soft as he can make his tone through the growl of his voice modifier.
Kal just smiled weakly back. “What if I just need to rip the bandaid off?” He asks, he’s not looking Bruce in the eye. “What if I just need …”
A pause, then two.
“What if I need to just let myself be seen one time on my own terms?” Kal asks. “Maybe I wouldn’t be so bent out of shape if it was my own decision.”
—
Clark’s a fuckin idiot.
That’s okay! He’s stupid, but that is not what is going to kill him.
The embarrassment is.
But he’s in it too far to quit now, they moved from the lounge to the bedroom wing. Designed to be a scout ship, the fortress has plenty of bedrooms all designed for utility and basic comfort. Clark’s stolen the biggest one for himself- the captain's room, he assumes- and that’s where he is now with Batman trying to get over the fear of being known.
When he was young it was easy, nobody was interested in the bodies of anybody else (unless you had a cool birthmark) then as teenagers in a fairly religious small town it was easier than one would think to avoid temptation, then as an adult he had dated, sure, but hadn’t ever bothered with actually going all the way to home base.
Because he was an alien .
Who, before he had the fortress’s files to access, was so different and weird he couldn’t even figure out how to properly jack off!
Thank god the pod he had touched down with had told his Ma and Pa in no uncertain terms he was … well … a he.
Batman entered, sat down on the far side of the bed, turned around and took off the simple black domino. “I figure it’s the closest I can come to leveling the playing field.” B says, soft without the voice modulation as he fiddles with the high collar of his undersuit at his throat. “An eye for an eye.”
Clark appreciates it. Rao. It really does feel a little more even, a little more like an exchange and not Clark trying to get over his prude values. Of course, is it prude when you’re in Clark’s situation, or is it just self preservation? Clark tried to never think about it, he just assumed that one day if he ever really fell in love he’d explain it and him and his true love would live happily ever after.
Fuck.
“Is it weird that I’ve thought that this would be more romantic?” Clark has to ask, trying to break the tension in the air between him and his best friend. “Somewhere warm and on the beach?”
It works, B laughs a rumbling chuckling. “I wanted the first person to see me naked to not be paparazzi, we don’t always get what we want.”
Which, Clark can’t even begin to comprehend when B says shit like that very casually. “Is that a metaphor or-?”
“It is not.” B’s still turned away, waiting for Clark to say the okay or to leave the room or to do anything else- Batman had been very clear about respecting Clark’s comfort level here. It was rather endearing. “I was fourteen, so the photographer couldn’t even do anything with the candid if that makes it any better.”
“It does not?” What do you even say to this? Clark has been wearing a mixture of various Kryptonian clothes and regular everyday comfort wear while he’s been in the fortress, so it’s been space leggings and oversized triple X cotton shirts. The cotton shirt comes off easily, it’s not Clark’s chest that looks strange. “I hope this story has nothing to do with being Batman.”
B cocks his head, his baby fine black hair falls with the movement. “I would say no, but Dent was there so the best I can give you is a ‘ not really ’.”
Clark’s hand goes to the side clasp of the alien material, it’s not a zipper it's a very secure kind of tie but instead of a human front tie all of the Kryptonian garments are done up on the right hip. “You’re crazy.” Clark laughs at his best friend. “You’re absolutely the most wild man I’ve ever had the chance to meet.”
“You’ve met people from all across the galaxy and I’m still the one who takes that title? Pretty impressive of me.”
Clark laughs, just a little huff of amused air, and finally gets the black leggings loose.
--
“You can turn around now.”
Bruce takes a final half a second. To prepare himself, to finally let go of his civilian identity. To finally get to see his boyish crush naked. He had to be doing various mental and breathing exercises to keep control of himself as the sound of material dragging off of Kal’s body came from behind Bruce’s back.
He turns around.
Kal’s beautiful .
Bruce has seen the top of Superman before- most everyone’s seen the footage of a torn uniform once or twice. Kal doesn't seem to care if his upper body is exposed (neither does Kara, christ that had been a conversation to have) but the man’s never gone around the training grounds without a shirt like Bruce, Barry, and Hall do. (Also Diana, who had to be told just like Kara did that maybe she should wear a bra? Diana had refused, and nobody had wanted to argue with her.)
Bruce, at first, sees nothing of great interest.
Which, okay, there was nothing there .
A clear pinkish purple bilateral line, just like a hypertrophic scar that starts about an inch above where a penis would begin but goes all the way down and curves under the pubic mound. There’s nothing but smooth skin, no freckles or moles or even hair. It’s nothing interesting, beyond a vague ping of curiosity. It’s the exact same as in those stolen photos, which is a horrible thought to think. Look’s more like a woman than a man, but the shape of the hips that bracket what is clearly the sealed opening to the sexual organ suggest otherwise. Bruce has slept with trasnsexual individuals, and even that is incomparable now because of the length of the slit and vague sense of difference .
“Would I offend you if I said you sort of look like a G.I Joe doll?” Bruce has to ask, his analytical scientific mind working a hell of a lot faster than his social one.
Kal frowns but blushes. “Well at least you didn’t call me a Barbie .”
“I would never.” Bruce mentally notes that the comparison must be a sore point.
Kal’s face is red, his entire upper torso is flushed with pink purple embarrassment. Hairline to ribcage, the blush is only offset by Kal’s own exploration of Bruce’s own face. He’s got that look that people make when they’re trying to place where they know Bruce’s look from.
Bruce moves, getting up from the bed and moving closer.
Kal stands stark still. Allowing Bruce to move however he wants.
Bruce doesn’t get too close, but circles Kal once, twice, glancing at the skin on display. He’s not going to get this opportunity more than once.
“You don’t have tan lines.” Bruce decides on.”You spend so much time in the sun, you are literally solar powered, but you don’t have any tan lines.”
“Is that what you noticed?” Kal, without even seeming to think about it, puts a hand on his cocked hips. “ Really? ”
“Yes.” Bruce did notice the lack of shading on all three Kryptonians, but with Kal and Kon barred before him it’s obvious that the lack of varying pigmentation is a whole-body deal. “The underside of your arms is the same shade as your shoulders, you don’t have any change in coloration anywhere. The only way I can get the same even tone is through naked tanning bed sessions.”
“B.” Kal looks like a mixture of relieved and confused and- “B, once again you’re the wildest man I’ve ever met.”
“Once again, that’s pretty impressive of me.” Bruce hasn’t gotten an answer to the tan line question. Maybe Kryptonians only get tan lines under a red sun? Bruce has to test this later. Kal’s already pretty tanned, just over the edge of that perfect summer beach shade, a shade or two darker maybe, but it would be an interesting experiment to see if nothing else. “Do you think you tan under a red sun?” Bruce asks before his social mind can tell him no, do not ask, this is not polite .
Kal actually laughs . “You are ridiculous!”
Bruce is sort of put out about that accusation. “I’m asking a serious question.”
“Batman, B. I don’t have a dick and you’re asking about tan lines .”
Yikes. Wrong word to use for genitals when you have a child who goes by that name, but Bruce has heard it all before. “I assumed you have some kind of reproductive system, from the files I’ve been reading I can tell that you’re a male Kryptonian who’s in his prime, congratulations, your organs are on the inside where they’re meant to be and you have a distinct advantage over human males in a dirty fight. I could put that together. What I didn’t put together until now is that you really don’t have any skin tone variance.”
Kal just laughs harder, the asshole. “You’re thinking that I have an advantage in a fight ?”
Bruce doesn’t even know how this got out of hand so quickly. “You don’t have anything to hit! Of course you have an advantage in a fight!”
“This is not how I imagined my first time being naked with somebody going.” Kal is looking away, his laughter comes from his chest and brightens his whole face. Breathtakingly beautiful. “I assumed so many things but asking about tan lines and doing this to get over a fear is not what I was picturing.”
Did Bruce misstep somewhere? Did he miss a social que somewhere and just-
Kal reaches for his clothing, the black alien silk and red cotton. “Rao, B, how do you make everything better?”
“Thank you?” Bruce is pretty sure he’s missed a social step somewhere and he’s rolling with it.
“That’s a good thing.” Kal moves in such an interesting way, now that Bruce can see the muscles flex and twist as Kal begins to slip into the leggings. “I imagined a hell of a lot more surprised indignation, some slapping maybe, begging for my partner to love me anyway.”
“Well. I’m glad I exceeded your expectations?” Bruce grabs Kal’s shirt, holding it out for when Kal’s ready for it. “Has this soothed something in your soul?”
Kal pauses, leggings almost all the way up and just the barest hint of that bilateral slit visible (is this why Kal only wears high-waisted things? More comfortable like that? Would a different kind of underwear be comfortable for Kal other than basic men’s briefs? Would it be rude to invent a whole new kind of underwear for comfort? Can Bruce ask that?)
“You know what? I think it has.” Kal says, soft and warm and full of something that can almost be attributed to fondness . “Thank you, Bruce .”
Ah. “You figured it out then?” Bruce presses a hand at his own face.
Kal slips the leggings up all the way to his rather high natural waist. “You’ve got the most reported face in America. You’re literally on every news network in the nation nightly .”
“Not nightly .” He’s not. Not every single night. Once a week at most.
“You’re pretty well discussed in reporter's circles.” Kal says, laughing weakly still. “I would know, I
am
one.”
Chapter 4: theres gonna be a lawsuit and the lawyers hate their boss so its gonna be great
Notes:
listen im so sorry my life has been HECTIC with thanksgiving and the christmas tree and the wedding and my family basically holding me hostage ha ha please im sort of off the rails here but im trying my absolute best
Chapter Text
J’onn is overlooking central Africa when he talks to Batman and Superman about it. The three of them are up on the watchtower, they have updated the rest of the founders on the whole ‘Superman’s Clone’ situation and are leaving J’onn to look after his scheduled observation duty.
J’onn had children, before his- before. He had a child and nieces and nephews and frequented talking at schools. He knew how to deal with telepathic children flinging out their minds and grasping onto thoughts without care.
He also is thankful that his own race has telepathy and not telekinesis .
There’s little that phases J’onn, especially nowadays, but trying to navigate a mind and help a child of a species that isn't his own and a mixing of several at once. Kon’s whole head is like a minefield of sharp spikes and soft pitfalls and sometimes both at once. J’onn can’t push too hard one way or another, but also has to tell the child he flies less like Superman can and more like J’onn himself does, the poor kid is a hodgepodge of self taught mental mimicry.
“What do you mean? ” Batman’s voice is strained underneath the voice modulator. “Do you think that he’s not able to live in normal human society?”
“Not without extensive training I don’t.” J’onn acknowledges. “He’s psychically unstable, prone to fits and bursts of uncontrollable psychic attachment and power. There’s no predicting when his mind will work overtime to produce power he can’t handle or will simply give up altogether and not produce anything at all.”
“Is he dangerous?” Superman asks, he’s biting his lip and nervous.
That’s the question of the year isn’t it. J’onn honestly doesn’t know. There’s no way to tell without trial runs. Which could be dangerous. To both Kon himself and anybody around him. The problem with having a telekinetic and or telepathic child intermingled with a race that has neither ability is that when the child throws a meltdown then there’s nobody to catch the backlash. That’s a serious danger to both the child and the people around without the ability to negate or shield or calm down the meltdown.
There’s no telling who’s dangerous to who, and if there’s anything they can even do to train out the natural fluctuation of Kon’s abilities.
--
There’s probably a reason why they shouldn’t be doing this, but they’re doing it anyway and Kon’s outnumbered so he can always just point at somebody else and claim it wasn’t his idea.
Nightwing had called this ‘ training ’ but Kon’s also pretty sure that somebody made a bet with somebody else and now Nightwing and Robin were in nothing but their domino masks and boxers saying things like ‘resisting cold’ and ‘polar plunge’.
There’s nothing like the brisk chill of the arctic, Kon’s checked it’s about fifteen degrees fahrenheit (about negative nine, celsius) and when Kon strolls outside for a minute to dig the hole for the stupid stunt that the two are about to pull it bites at his nose and causes chill in the very tips of his fingers and toes.
x
Then when the hole is exactly how Nightwing described, Kon comes back and flashes the okay sign.
Robin hands over a phone to record. Kon’s already wearing a makeshift chest harness to hold it steady as he moves.
Kon starts up the recording, and Nightwing smiles, introduces himself to the camera, then slams open the button for the door.
“Ah!” Robin crosses his arms, body immediately starting to shiver. “ Geez it’s freezing!”
“Below freezing, actually.” Nightwing winks, all gaudy and flashy and smiles. “It’s the arctic! Who in the world beside us has the ability to do an actual polar plunge-”
“More people than you think, actually.” Robin cuts in, before he darts into the icy snow.
“Robin!” Nightwing chases after him. “I told you, me first!”
The two boys race, faster than most people can manage, and Kon follows above with the phone dutifully recording at a steady pace.
The hole that Kon has dug into the ice has already begun to refreeze back over, that thin layer of crackling ice that doesn't take more than a gentle press to break. The square is about seven by four feet, but it’s been dug about a fifty feet from the main entrance so everybody has to sprint as fast as they can to even get to the water.
Kon makes sure to get a great shot of the two of them jumping, Nightwing pulls up both knees to his chest as he jumps, flinging himself far and high as he leaps while Robin jumps more like a hurdler, head down and leg extended to make sure he clears whatever's in his path.
Nightwing hits first, quickly followed by his brother.
Kon waits a second or two, phone still pointed downwards at the crackling ice water at the two pale shapes of the sinking vigilanties. The water’s too cold for either of them to move, it shocks their systems on contact and they won't be able to pull up on their own- so Kon makes sure to get ‘action shots’ as called so by Robin before he pulls them up.
Kon dives, going after Robin first.
Robin gets secured around the waist, Kon’s much studier against the cold so he moves easily in the water, Nightwing gets grabbed under his armpit and Kon pulls .
The air feels colder now that they’re wet, so Kon moves like a dart through the air.
The fortress’s main door hasn’t closed, thank god, so Kon tumbles in with all the deadweight of the two siblings. Everybody’s laughing through chattering teeth, Robin’s blue and Nightwing’s not far behind. “Holy shit ” Nightwing gasps through his breathless giggles. “Holy shit that was terrible!”
“You don’t get to decide what we do for fun anymore.” Robin weakly flails out and kicks Nightwing in the ribs- the two are so robbed for air and feeling that it’s less of a ‘ kick ’ and more of a ‘ nudge ’.
“We can’t tell Batman about this, you hear me?” Nightwing tells them both, “He’ll kill us.”
This makes Robin perk up a bit from where he’s laid curled in a ball. “I thought you said you asked if we could do this.”
A scoff, “I did ask.”
Robin stutters, kicking his brother again and screeching. “He said no?! ”
Kon covers his mouth, trying not to let the smile through.
--
It’s clear that the kid is more in tune with his telekinesis than his often not used telepathy.
Besides from some very faint echoes of the us-te bond, there’s been almost no instances of mind to mind communication. When prompted there’s some hesitating conversation back at J’onn when the martian initially begins to speak through telepathic communication, but besides from one instance of Kon perking up and freaking out over feeling that Bruce had gotten rather hurt during his nightly escapades he tends to talk verbally. When Bruce had gotten hurt Kon had started up that grumble-rumble-hurt-want noise and called out mentally everybody around him.
Clark had apologized to every known entity above, then once again mentally to Bruce, before abusing the Zeta tubes once again and as carefully as possible had taken Kon to Gotham.
Now Kon’s been playing around with his telekinesis in Bruce Wayne’s very nice house, and Clark has tried every midwestern parenting trick he knows in the book to get Kon out of here and back to the fortress but it seems that everytime he does something new develops and Kon weasels out another night.
“This is hilarious.” Dick Grayson’s saying, balancing another piece of silver somewhere on Kon.
“It’s like those cat memes.” Tim Drake agrees, handing over a knife worth more than Clark’s oven.
Kon’s sort of asleep- more of a dazed zoned out state than anything else, Clark and Kara have to sleep under a red sun but the yellow one just makes them able to go sort of dormant for a few hours every couple of days. The eyes are open, half lidded, but not looking at anything in particular as Kon hovers a few inches curled up in a ball in a lounge. The sunlight drapes across everyone, which is probably why Kon felt good enough to sleep in the first place.
The kid hadn’t taken it well when he saw his first sunset, but after promising him that the sun would really come back and not to worry he was much better.
Now Dick and Tim aren’t mean spirited, but they are a bit raised by Batman and when Dick had tried to balance the TV remote on Kon’s head when it was discovered that he had dozed off into a dormant state it had turned into a pleasant delight of anything that touches Kon’s skin sticks to him in some kind of passive telekinetic grab.
Now they’re up to almost sixty items, most of which being small things, but some of the more impressive of the collection is a ladder for the bookshelves, a whole mantle clock that’s still chiming every hour, and a throw pillow that’s balanced on one perfect tassel.
Clark’s been taking photos with his phone and texting Bruce to please hurry. Bruce only laugh reacted to the first desperate cry for help but other than that there was no response.
Even Alfred had walked in, politely asked “Not any of the Ming vases boys, you’ve broken enough” then had left .
Clark couldn’t contain these beacons of chaos that Bruce lovingly calls his boys, these two were going for gold and stacking silver knives on Kon’s face .
“Would it be weird to see how many we can get on his eyeballs?” Dick asks, squinting as he looms over Kon, squatting by balancing on his tiptoes on the books that have been stacked up on Kon’s knees.
“Super weird. I bet four per eye.” Tim concedes before handing over another knife.
“Lets not .” Clark tries to bargain with the boys again, they haven’t ever listened to him and they're not going to start now but Clark has to try. “What if we wake him up? You’d feel pretty bad wouldn’t you?”
Dick responds to Clark’s plea by looking Clark right in the damn eye and balancing the first butterknife against Kon’s eyelid.
Kon doesn’t even twitch.
Clark really is glad that he’s not a parent. Rao, these people are gonna be the death of him.
--
“We’re going to do what ?” The harried lawyer asks, dirty blonde hair all askance and glasses so low on her nose that the things are going to fall off any moment. “You’re in-fucking-sane.”
“Listen, look at this fucking memo and tell me there’s a god.” The other lawyer flips around their tablet screen and shows off the aforementioned memo to their coworker.
The dirty blonde lawyer snatches up her coworkers tablet and furiously reads over what’s going on in this godforsaken company herself. The asian man leans back, not even bothering to appear like he’s doing any work right now. The two of them are the forefront of the legal team for LexCorp, so they’re used to having to wiggle their way around specific cases to get their … wonderful CEO out of jail. They’ve gone to trial with less evidence and precedent than a fingertip but they’ve managed to keep Luthor a practicing businessman so far- with minor parole and fines and all kinds of bribes.
But this?
This is asking a little too much of them.
“He’s batshit. He’s crazier than- than- he’s crazier than somebody crazy!” The dirty blonde woman says, her hair is falling out of her ponytail and really is right between two colors. “We’re white collar law, the shit like insider trading and rulings on contracts. I didn’t get into divorce law for a reason .”
The asian man shrugs, unconcerned. “We’ve got interns-”
“We’ve got no knowledge on how to do this!”
“We both went to the best law school in the country, we know how to do this.” He cuts his coworker off. She’s brilliant but prone to fits of wild uncertainty and overwhelmed fevers. “We talk to people who do this for a living and we change up our stance- if Luthor wants his weirdo half son back then we’ll get it for him.”
“I hate you.” The woman says. “I hate Luthor, I hate you, I hate Superman, I hate everything.”
“You need a drink, that's what you need.”
“I hate drinking too.”
The asian man laughs, and takes his tablet back. “Listen, Linda, we’re going to win this case and make history and give our boss exactly what he wants. I think we then sit down and renegotiate our salaries again, and our boss is going to be so fucking happy that he’ll have to say yes.”
Linda presses her lips together in a hard line, she does make a lot of money being one of the top dogs in the legal department. She hates a lot of things but money isn’t one of them. “I hate you.” She settles on. “I hate how persuasive you are.”
“You love me.” The asian man nods, knowing he’s sort of right here. “You love me, and you’re going to go into your office and study up on custody law until you can’t stay awake anymore then the two of us are going to go to the town and get something very nice for breakfast and charge it to the company card. Then we’re going to not only put together the best damn case anybody’s ever seen, we're also going to make history in the legal system.”
Linda laughs, shakily and unsure but a little more grounded now. “We’ve already made history in the legal system- we were the first people to make sure that the superheroes were responsible for the damages that they caused.”
“We were! And now we’re going to do it all over again, by proving that clones are the legal property of the people who cloned them as long as the people who cloned them were using the cloning technology to create genetic offspring.”
The two legal team members of LexCorp nod at one another, knowing that they’ve got a whole new battle to fight for their frankly insane boss.
It’s not the first time that they’re going to the plate without a leg to stand on, but they weren’t hired by one of the most profitable fortune five-hundred companies by nepotism and chance.
--
Kon doesn’t know why he can’t fly around the manor.
Well, okay, he does.
But he doesn’t like not being able to fly around the spires and the sloping roof and the big open windows that he can fall in and out of.
The Wayne’s are nice people, very nice people who Kon kinda never wants to leave, but they’ve also got more camera’s facing them then the average person. So Kon can only ‘use his powers’ in the cool darkness of the cave, in the places where nobody can see him and there’s nothing to hide. In the cave there’s things he can latch onto if he falls (which has only happened twice , Clark, stop being such a worry wart) but there’s not that open aired sunshine that Kon got to fly through when he visited the Kents once.
Clark had worried the whole way, but Bruce had told them both to go , visit family, explain to Martha and Jonathan why Clark had been so secretive these past two weeks and a half weeks. To let Kon be out in the wide open plains of Kansas farmland, to bond with the kid for a while as Bruce and his own boys were busy in Gotham.
Clark takes a few days off of work, Perry yells at him like he always does and Lois laughs and asks why he’s been so distant lately. Clark can’t tell anybody that he now has a genetic son he doesn’t want and didn’t ask for and is also the genetic son of the resident billionaire that’s slowly jacking up the rent rate in the city.
That would be hard to explain.
So Kon and Clark fly to Kent's farm, Clark careful the entire time to hover at a place that’s easy to grab Kon if Kon’s powers fail. The flight is beautiful, dark starry skies above both of their heads as they both take a looping scenic route through rural America.
Kon loves stuff like this, flying, freedom, the moon above them at a half cast full and making it bright enough to see every stray leaf in the dark. Kon’s got a picture on his brand new phone from it- Clark had taken it and sent it to Kon after they had landed.
The moonlight makes Kon’s hair a ruddy dark red, like old blood on the floor, unlike Clark’s oil slick almost-blue black, and the way he’s floating makes his still too long hair flare around him like water. It’s like he’s floating in an underwater forest, laughing at something that Clark had said. Kryptonians' eyes flash in the dark, caught with the flash of the camera and the half strength moonlight, a blue reflection of the backhand of their irises that make Kon’s eyes look like galaxies in the photo.
Clark set it as Kon’s contact photo.
The Kent’s had been delighted .
After they had gotten over the initial shock at least, Martha had grabbed up Kon and pressed him close and kissed his forehead and gently told him that she was so happy that Kon had found his way to her. That she had never thought she was going to get grandchildren, that no matter how he came into this world she was going to bake him something good to eat and love him with all the space she has in her heart. Jonathan Kent had asked for help on the farm, smiling and easy the whole time. The man was a saint at heart and explained in gentle words exactly what he was doing and how he needed help with certain things and how the world out here worked. Kon was enamoured .
He also loved the fact he could touch something, and with Jonathan’s slow easy deep words and Kon’s own ability to map things out in the physical world through a weird kind of sideways telekinesis there was nothing he couldn’t reach into and fix. There was nothing he couldn’t clean or grease or ease or even break to fix later. Each piece of farm equipment that needed a fine small touch Kon could whip into shape with a mental nudge or two. Jonathan loves it, the help and the way that Kon latches onto all the weird old farm stories that Clark has heard a million times but are brand new to Kon.
Kon flies at night, tumbles through the air during the day to get to places fast, Clark catches him sometimes, snatches his right back down to earth calling for lunch. There’s something fascinating living out here, something so different from the Wayne Manor up on it’s hill in Bristol. The air out here is cleaner, the sounds are softer, and the days move slower.
It’s only three days out with the Kents, and Kon feels to pull to go back to Bruce, to make sure that Bruce is still there, but Kon could see himself happy with the Kents, who asked him to call them Ma and Pa and had kept their promise to bake Kon and Clark all the food they wanted and Pa had sent them back with a brisket that Pa had raised and glazed himself.
Alfred had taken the brisket and dolled it up with sides to serve for dinner when they got back from their long weekend. There’s nothing like sharing food with others, Kon hasn’t gotten over his strange relationship with food, but he’s willing to take a few bites out of everything. Nothing like how Bruce, Dick, and Tim destroy their dinners with a rather horrifying gusto.
A lot of people find watching others eat to be weird and gross, but the Wayne’s need a whole lot of calories so they need a whole lot of food.
After that dinner Kon is curled against the couch cushions, tucked under Dick’s arm with his legs in Bruce’s lap. Tim’s situated himself in Clark’s side, talking a mile a minute about an old cold case from the forties that he’s sure he’s solved as long as he can get some DNA from the descendants.
Wayne manor is a little confined compared to the wide openness of the Kent’s farm, there’s opulence here, with it’s amazing views and expensive furniture and perfect food, but everything here that’s related to their true selves has to be hidden away underneath the floorboards like the tell-tale heart. There’s no freedom here, but there’s family .
Bruce treats Kon like either of his other children, he sighs deeply when Kon and Dick are doing something maybe illegal and highly annoying during a get together of Wayne investors for a luncheon, he picks Kon up bodily to move him around during a slow morning breakfast, Bruce is a father through and through.
But Clark is sometimes one too.
Kon feels it when Clark brushes Kon’s hair off of his face and tells him that he’s perfectly okay, to calm down, the dog’s not going to bite him. Clark crosses his arms behind Bruce when Bruce is yelling at the three of them for seeing if Kon can manipulate all of the pool water into the pond by simply being in the water (he can) and Clark and Bruce talk in soft tones at night before Clark leaves to go to his own home and work the next day, talking about how Kon needs to be enrolled in real school soon.
Kon can sometimes feel like Clark is wanting to be his father, but other times Superman is so distant .
It’s not an exact science, but Kon can feel that something is coming, but he’s not exactly sure what.
Chapter 5: In the criminal justice system, the people are represented by two separate yet equally important groups, the rich and the everyone else
Notes:
hey remember when i said i'd be back
here i am
thank you, lovely Kay (SalParadiseLost) and Caly (Calypso_Rambles) you people im much big love yes they made this chapter readable :)
also thank you batfamily shenanigans discord server, you guys encouraged me to finish this with all the kon agnst
Chapter Text
It’s rare to see Superman.
But if you do see him, it’s usually through a screen.
He’s on television after natural disasters, seen being a hero when there's no hope left. He’s in hundreds of YouTube compilations, his smiling face out when he notices a kid with a camera. He’s CGI’d into movie posters, advertisements, and music videos. Digitally, he’s everywhere.
But seeing him— right in front of you— in the flesh? That doesn’t happen unless you’re utterly, stupidly, truly in some deep shit.
So when the court comes into session and the opening statements get declared, the lawyer for the Justice League calls its first witness– Superman steps into the courtroom, standing tall, standing regal, standing broad, and the entire room goes silent.
Seeing Superman in the familiar red and blue would have been awesome in its own right (awesome in the biblical sense, in the ‘reconsider how long you think you’re going to live’ sense, in the awe as striking terror into your heart and making you feel animal again sense), but it’s even more of a shock to the system to see him in anything that’s not the normal suit.
It takes away any sense of the familiar as you stare upon what should be a well-known face. It reminds you that you don’t actually know Superman despite how many times you’ve seen his face on the screens. It scratches that place in the back of your mind that says - not human.
It puts the entire room on edge for reasons they can’t quite articulate to themselves.
He’s wearing ceremonial robes, court after all is a formal occasion. The recognizable crest sits embroidered in gold to ornately decorate the black broad swatch of alien fabric on Superman’s chest. The rest of the robes have the similar drapery, edged in the same fine gold and laced with black and white in such a stark pattern that it plays tricks on the eyes even at a glance. He’s still wearing a cape, but somehow it seems more important now. It’s become an almost intimidating thing, thick and weighty, dragging on the floor in a way that makes it seem like liquid, spilling out.
“What is your name?” The Justice League’s lawyer asks. The woman is tall, slim, with a no nonsense demeanor and a gaze that seems like it could pierce iron. She’s been a representative for the League for nearly eight years. The Legal world has come to both fear and respect her name with it shows up on court documents.
“Kal-El,” Superman responds with an easy, simple smile to go with it.
He has too many teeth, when he smiles that wide.
The entire courtroom breaks out into whispers, into gasps of surprise, into hushed, but furious conversation. The cameras go absolutely nuts, flashing so brightly that the inside of the courtroom looks like a surgeon's theater for a couple of sentences.
It might as well be, considering the topic being discussed today.
“Do you, Kal-El, think that you are a real person?”
“Objection.” Linda Swadwell rises instantly. She’s got her hair in a tight bun with not a bit of frizz in sight. Her mouth is already pulling at the edges, tightening in anticipation of the battle to come. “Relevance – that question isn’t on the topic for the present case.”
The eyes of the court and all the viewers among it swing towards the judge.
He’s an older gentleman, with a thick white beard and not a hair on the rest of his head. He’s fair (so the report says). He has been on the circuit for longer than most of the lawyers who enter his courtroom have been alive. He wasn’t the ideal man for either case, mostly because he’s not so easily swayed. He is usually strict towards the letter of the law, except in strange, unpredictable cases where he flips the script.
He’s old enough to not fear setting precedent. He’s intelligent enough and experienced enough to know when he’s being served bullshit too.
Today, he just cocks one of his gray eyebrows, looking towards the Lex Corp lawyer with a stern expression.
“I think, due to the nature of the present case and the evidence that has been filed with both parties, that this question is very, very relevant.”
Linda Swadwell opens her mouth and visibly fights the human instinct to argue. But then, she snaps her mouth closed and sits down again, hand going over to grab at the papers that sit in front of her co-counsel, Andrew Zhang.
The lawyer representing the Justice League isn’t ruffled. She’s perfectly put together, as she always is. She continues her examination with not a hair out of place.
“Do you think that you are a real person?” she repeated, her voice just a little bit gentler.
Kal-El actually takes the time to think. For a second or two of consideration, he is genuinely thinking of the answer.
“I think therefore I am,” He finally decides. The entire courtroom is silent as the onlookers lean in, each spectator is hanging onto his every word.
“Isn’t that a famous saying here?” he continues, slowly, methodically. “I think. I feel. I have emotions. I help because I want to. I strive to protect my fellow man and those who cannot protect themselves. I learn from my mistakes and I grieve for the losses of the people around me.”
No one moves. Not to shift in their seat. Not to lean over to whisper to someone else. Hardly even to blink.
“I think I am a person, because if I am not considered a person, then what kind of impossible standard is everyone else reaching?”
--
The trial is televised, of course.
It's Lex Corp v. The Justice League Alliance, and this isn’t the first time these titans have gone to the legal system to figure something out, but it's the first time that Superman showed up to talk on the behalf of anyone.
The whole world is paying attention.
There's talk shows that can’t talk about anything else. There’s such an influx of people that Twitter actually broke for a day, buckling under its own traffic.
Gossip magazines sell better than they had in years. The fashion industry is making replicas of the ceremonial suit Superman showed up in as fast as possible. Youtube videos splice together clips of the courtroom, setting the calls for evidence and objections to Top 20 music. It's all over Reddit's front page, both sides getting torn apart for equally ridiculous reasons. Influencers react to “Greatest moments” videos. One beauty guru announces an eyeshadow palette inspired by the proceedings. Each colour is given sarcastic, cutting names like “Objection! Orange” and “Blue you think you’re a person?”. It sells out instantly.
Nobody can escape it.
Bruce wakes up to the news of it, and goes to bed with the day’s closing statements in his head.
It’s frustrating.
It’s infuriating.
It’s so present that the pressing urgency of what’s become his every-day-life is barely able to drown out the winds of the media storm.
Kon switches between the Kent’s farm and the Manor, learning more and more about the world every minute of the day.
Bruce uses the distraction of Kon’s education and training to distract himself from the shitshow that is the hearing about theft of Lex Corp property, intellectual property, destruction of property, and sharing trade secrets.
(Lex’s lawyers are good. That’s for sure. They’re treading such a thin line in the eyes of the law. Technically, since Superman is an alien, he was not a human, and therefore, not a beneficiary of the rights given to humans. And, in the view of strict black letter law, anything that wasn’t a human or given the special ‘personhood’ status, was property. Something to be owned and controlled and reproduced with no prejudice.
It was laughable, in the darkest ways, that Superman, protector of Earth, technically wasn’t a legal person. Under American law, LexCorp, the corporation, had more rights than the man standing in front of the judge.
Technically, he was owned by the Justice League.)
For now, Kon sits on a barstool, sitting straight as he can while Dick explains to him the concept of a haircut.
“I’ve collected a couple of styles for you.” Tim is saying, tapping the screen of the tablet that he’s holding out. Bruce is at his back, looking over his son’s shoulder. “You can pick any of these that look cool.”
Kon takes the tablet, scrolling through the images. Bruce knows there’s over four hundred pictures to look through. That’s the sort of preparation and love that a bat provides.
Kon goes through each choice carefully, gently, but still fast enough to the human perception that the whole ordeal of picking out a hairstyle goes by within five minutes.
Eventually, he pauses, eyes transfixed on a style. A little smile tugs at the edge of his lip. Bruce feels a little something inside of him tug.
“This one?” Tim questions with a little chirp. Kon responds with a nod. Tim takes the tablet back, flitting through the Cave just like the bird he’s named after.
They use a piece of ship, the same piece of ship that Clark uses to cut his own hair and shave, to actually do the deed. Dick takes extreme care not to tug or to cut too close. The long hair that Kon has gets taken off in one easy slice. It gets put aside in one simple braid before Dick gets started on actually shaping up the style.
Tim is talking to Kon the entire time, theorising about how the metal works, explaining what Dick is doing, jabbering in a way he only does when he’s really happy.
He cuts off his stream of conscious talking when Dick draws the shears back.
“All done,” he says with a smile.
Kon’s hair is almost shaved to the skin in the back. The hair becomes thicker further up and is topped with a pile of red-black curls on top that like to twist on themselves.
It’s instantly apparent that Kon loves it, running his hands over the shaved backside of his own head.
(Bruce puts the long section of braid away. His mind gives him uses for the invincible strands, but that’s not something he’s even going to begin to idle on, not when the current situation is as it is.)
Clark smiles loosely at the nonsensical joy on children’s faces. He’s just come in from another day of court proceedings and he’s still in his traditional ceremonial robes. Bruce had only seen the robes from far away, and up close he realises exactly how the fabric plays on the eyes. The way it reflects light is mesmerising. The way it hugs the soft curves of Clark’s body stirs something unnamed behind Bruce’s ribs. Bruce can’t look too hard, but he also can’t look away.
“He’s going to realize how hard that is to maintain pretty soon,” Clark chuckles softly, standing next to Bruce and looking over to the children.
“Hm?” Bruce is so distracted he almost misses the statement. Clark is smaller in the dim light of the cave. He’s painfully vulnerable in his exhaustion. The courtroom lands blows that hurt him more than anything physical.
It weighs on Clark. It weighs in a way that even superstrength can’t fully keep up.
Bruce knows that coming here and seeing the children just be children helps take off some of the weight on those shoulders. (Bruce silently hopes that seeing him might help with that weight too.)
Bruce and Clark have been doing as much as they can lately, but eventually they have to take a break. They enjoy a coffee, eat a small snack or two, and rest on the knowledge that they can’t help the trial any more than they already have. At least not anymore that day.
“His hair, if it's anything like mine, is going to grow too fast to keep that fade for long.”
The children are still making nonsense noises and rubbing their fingers all over Kon’s head.
“It looks so good,” Tim whispers, almost in awe. Bruce wouldn’t be surprised if he asked for a similar style, though Bruce didn’t know how good it would look with the boy’s bone-straight hair.
“He looks like a hellion,” Dick says with a smile that’s all teeth. He’s standing tall, hands on his hips and proud of his work. “Oh my god, you know what would be perfect?”
The boys descend into rapid, conspiratorial whispers. Nothing good ever came from those types of whispers from his children.
After a couple of seconds, Dick bursts away from the group, disappearing towards the elevator. He looks way too mischievous as he leaves. It rings the ‘parent bells’ in Bruce’s head.
Dick might have grown up, but his streak of childish evil had never quite left. He could be so brutally and subtly mean, but he always said in such an innocent way it was impossible to stay mad at him. He knew exactly how much he had the adults around him twined around his fingers and he wasn’t afraid to use it. He lived by the motto that it was better to ask for forgiveness than it was to ask for permission. (An easy motto when he could so easily get forgiven and he so willingly ignored Bruce’s parental objections.)
Bruce has long accepted that that was the way of his children. He just hopes nothing ended up on fire again.
Beside him, Clark laughs, startling Bruce.
Bruce raises a silent eyebrow in question at the alien.
“You’re looking at him like he's committing a crime,” explains Clark, laughter still tickling the edges of his voice.
Bruce grunts, eyes still narrow as Dick bursts back into the room, something hidden in his arms.
“You haven’t been a father before,” Bruce says, focusing on the man next to him. He didn’t hear screaming from behind him, so things must be at least a little bit under control.
“Children are capable of the greatest crimes against humanity and they know they can get away with it by looking cute.”
A full, hearty laugh bursts out of Clark. It’s a miraculous sound. He stares at Bruce, searching his face to try to decipher whether Bruce is joking. He won’t find a hint of humour on Clark’s face. Bruce is too practiced at hiding it.
Clark’s expression wavers. “No, you don’t really believe that, do you?”
“I do,” Bruce says evenly. “It’s especially true for my children because I made the grave mistake of teaching them combat skills, training them in chemistry, biology, mechanics, criminology, advanced mathematics, and psychology, and then, on top of that, letting them have an unlimited bank account.
“Make no mistake, Clark. I love them very much, but they are weapons of mass destruction.”
“Look, B!” Dick cheers, making Bruce turn away from Clark and towards the rapidly approaching group. Dick is leading the charge. He’s shoving Kon up towards them, happily dragging the boy along like a golden retriever with a prized toy.
Kon, for his part, doesn’t seem to mind being hauled about.
The boy had been shoved into one of Bruce’s leather jackets. (How had Dick even known that Bruce had that? He hadn’t worn it in years.) Dick has artfully tousled Kon’s new hair by running some hair gel through it and stuck a silver earring into the used-to-be empty hole in Kon’s ear. They had swiped coloured eyeshadow onto the lids of Kon’s eyes.
Bruce’s mind is a vicious thing. It remembers details, hundreds of details, and has a habit of bringing them back right when they will make the most impact. His mind catches on the eyeshadow. It doesn’t let it go.
“He looks like a punk, doesn’t he?” Dick says with a huge, guileless smile.
Kon is smiling wide too, wider than Bruce had ever seen before. It has too many teeth and triggers an uneasy instinct that Bruce is ashamed to admit he has. It says ‘not human’. It says ‘get your children away from that thing’. Clark is saying something, but the words are swimming outside of Bruce’s head.
Blue you think you’re a person?
It’s the exact same shade as Clark’s eyes.
--
“The current law, as it stands, is not against us cloning animals,” Zhang says to the jury. He’s commanding the space he occupies, presiding over the room with ease. Everyone in the Delaware Superior Court listens to him with rapt fascination.
“Dolly the sheep, famously, was a huge advancement in the scientific community. It helped us understand genes, how they aged, how something who was cloned would live, how much they were identical to the original copy. We strive to advance the understanding of our own self by first exploring what it does to animals.”
Zhang pulls up another chat on the display with a flick of his wrist. It shows expansive data on the human genome, on development of gene sequencing and mapping, on knowing what genes to include and what ones not to.
“This was an experiment for the betterment of humanity, and it was stolen out from under a man who would have used it to help people,” he pauses for dramatic effect. “Helping people. Is that not the goal of science? To help people in need, help people who are sick, help people who have been on a donation list for years. Right now there are labs that seek to try to copy a person’s organs or marrow directly from them, but that isn’t the solution. A broken organ is a broken organ. The problem is only delayed, not fixed.”
“LexCorp needs a guarantee that giving people help is not just delaying a disease, that it isn’t just supporting a horrible and slow wane of existence. LexCorp wants a way to guarantee that people would be better after their surgery, permanently.”
“What is better, we ask the people of the jury, than the paragon of health and ability?”
Zhang motions once again, and the screen changes from the data on humans to the data collected from many small samples of DNA that could be obtained from Kryptonians.
The DNA is not even close to the human samples depicted in the previous image. There’s a whole different way that the DNA is held. There's no double helix structure here, hell, the lifeform was only barely carbon based at all. It’s, for lack of a better word, completely inhuman.
“The asset, and all that came previous to it, is not something that should be viewed with empathy. The asset was not alive until it was pulled from its home and forced to come into waking awareness by the so-called heroes. The asset was used like its predecessors, to see how well the mixture of human and Kryptonian genes could blend until we could get something that could be given to humans in need.“
“The real weight of this topic is not a single, unstable, uncertain future of an asset, it's the human lives that aren’t going to be saved because of a misguided sense of justice.”
With that, the lawyer finally moves back to sit, satisfied about his words on the topic.
--
Eileen Olin has been a lawyer since she was only three, when she presented to her parents on why she should get to have a sleepover for her birthday. She worked her way through school as a legal aid. She clawed her way into the job she has now by being not only the best lawyer she could physically be, but by also dedicating any free time she had to trying to help people and non-profits.
When the JLA reached out and asked if she wanted a position as a retainer, then she jumped for it, grabbing at the opportunity with both hands and a determined grit.
She now stands, as tall as she is able to in her bright red heels, and looks at the courtroom at large with all of the command of a general at war.
“I ask of you, jury, to look at this child, this boy, and imagine how twisted your mind has to be to think of him as anything less than a trauma victim.”
“Objection-!”
“Mrs. Olin,” The judge warns.
“I ask of you, jury, to look at this child, this boy, and imagine yourself as Kal-el. That something has been taken of you, and created in your image. That the boy that comes from your own lineage and you have to stand up against a crowd of people, people that you protect, and be gawked at like a spectacle as you fight to the right to keep your son. You fight for the right to be recognized as an individual, as a person.”
She lets that sink in for them. The silence is oppressive.
“We stand here today, discussing the bodily autonomy of a child, and whether or not we should send this child back to someone who wants to use his internal organs, the very thing that makes up the being of him, to perform unregulated experiments. We are discussing whether or not Superman, and his kin, should have the same rights as ourselves.”
“If you, the jury, say no to this, take away what should be unalienable rights, then you’re undermining the rights of anything that comes after this. You’re undermining people that might one day be a part of your own family, dooming them to nothing more than fodder for experimentation.” “I’m asking you all to not think about this as an us versus them, because this includes all of us, as we are, thinking sentient beings.”
“Think about this, as you ponder on the outcome of the child whose life is up for trial, think about this.”
--
The court is not at all silent when the star of the trial is brought in.
The asset- the boy- the child- the project.
He follows in after one of his main genetic donors, dressed in the same sort of formal robes.
The crest of the house of El sits proudly across the child’s chest, in that same refined, intricate gold. The same panels of black and white alien fabric flow down the lines of the outfit.
The only difference is that the edges are lined in a navy, beautiful blue instead of the gold that decorates the edges of Kal’s own finery.
The child walks in under his own power, head held high and eyes protected by large circular sunglasses.
There’s screaming, demands for a picture, a statement, anything. The swarm of the press in the back of the courtroom is losing it. The judge is calling for order. The bailiff is trying their best but the chaos is unfounded, screaming into the sky about the real life, in the flesh, proof of the concept that has been presented to everyone for over a month now-
The child-asset-boy gets called to stand.
“What is your name?”
The sunglasses stay on, the alien leans forward into the mic to speak. It speaks clearly, with thought and with clear enunciation. “My name is Kon-El.” He has a different accent than Superman does.
“That’s a very unusual name, who gave it to you?”
A fidget, a glance around the barely restrained court. “Robin gave it to me.”
Another eruption of sound, the Judge slams the gavel down, hard and loud. “If this court does not come to order, I am demanding every single inch of the audience get out!”
This quiets people down, but only barely.
Eileen takes a breath to calm down her shaking nerves. The court around her is a sham of its normal cool and collected countenance. She’s been a lawyer for so many cases she can’t count them all and yet this one is the worst she’s ever had to put herself through.
The child on the stand looks at her, with his eyes hidden behind glass-
(The same eyes that had looked at her so earnestly across a table, when they were preparing him to be a witness. He had demanded to do this, to help prove to everyone that he was alive, that he was a person.)
(That he had a family.)
“Can you tell us the story of how Robin gave you that name?”
So Kon tells them.
“It started with a heartbeat,” he recalls, thinking back to not that long ago.
He tells it all from his point of view, from hearing something he never expected, never knew to want, to bursting out into the sunlight for the first time, looking up at the sky because he had never seen it before, taking in every single bit of what had been closed off from him time and time again.
He talked about getting his name from Robin, about how it felt when he finally had a name.
“I wasn’t just Supermen Project 13 anymore.” He smiles, with too many teeth, as he looks at the jury, tapping his ear. “I was Kon.”
Half the jury is crying, and the half that isn’t sobbing their eyes out look enraged enough to start fighting. Eileen Olin walks back up to Kon’s line of sight, clearing her throat. “I’ve seen you make that motion for several days now.” She mimics the tug of the ear. “What does it mean?”
Kon nervously tugs on it again, the little silver earring he has there. “It was where my tag was.”
Eileen nods, looks at the judge. “Exhibit 458.”
The screen flips to an image of what appears to be a cattle tag, the inked number of SP13 sits bold on its metal surface.
--
“Do you know who this man is?” Zhang asks. He motions to where Luthor sits now, in a dangerous black suit.
Kon-El nods, tugging his earring. “Yes. That’s the non-white coat man.”
Zhang picks his eyebrow up, looking at Luthor with a hard expression. Luthor is not moved. He continues to stare down impassively at the entire court. Linda looks furious, she grabs the arm of Luthor and drags him close so she can hiss into his ear.
The lawyer turns back to Kon-El. “Explain what you mean by non-white coat man.”
So Kon does.
He describes the scientists, how he knows that they’re called scientists know- geneticists even- but at the time he just called them by their white coats they wore. Nobody came into the room he was held in, the room that was his whole world, without the white coat.
Expect one man.
One man who liked to open up the sunshine and move it all around to watch how Kon moved, who stripped Kon down to look at how he was built, who talked at Kon, and not to him.
Zhang turns to Luthor. There’s no description for his expression beyond pissed the fuck off.
Luthor’s face reveals nothing, not even as the hissing from Linda gets louder.
--
“Why did you greenlight this project?” The lawyer asks.
Luthor shifts forward. “To help the people in need of an organ transplant.”
Linda Swadwell nods, sharp, quick. “What made you pick the DNA that you picked to make the product?”
A moment of two of silence, consideration, and thought. “I wanted something that surpasses anything on the market today. I wanted people to get better, permanently. I didn’t want relapses, or organs to be rejected, or for the same disease to run through a second set. I wanted it to be a permanent sort of solution. I picked the one thing on this entire planet that could possibly be that solution.”
The jury considers.
Linda Swadwell nods again, her hair is fraying a little at the sides. “No more questions, your honor.”
Linda sits down, and Eileen stands up.
“Mr. Luthor, you say you were doing extensive tests on the internal organs of Kon-El, correct?”
“I was monitoring the progress of the internal systems of the product, yes.”
Eileen Olin presses her lips together, and she goes over to the screen. “If you were monitoring the internals to make the organs fit for humans, then why is Kon-El more Kryptonian than man?”
Luthor isn’t phased. “It just so happened that this particular product was the one who was stable enough to survive. The internals weren’t purposely created one way or the other. That’s just how it happened naturally.”
“So, if Kon-El wasn’t fit for your organ project, then why continue with his development? The other twenty five projects didn’t get that special treatment.”
“The organs that were produced were viable for humans. I’ve done testing to make sure of it. They look different but there’s enough of a one to one that makes it easy to switch between the two.”
“You aren’t worried about how Kryptonian DNA could affect humans?”
Luthor smiles, actually smiles, like Eileen Olin is nothing more than a simpleton, an idiot who’s getting something explained slowly. “No. I’ve done extensive testing. Exhibit 874. Those are all the tests that I’ve done to show that this is the future of modern medicine.”
Eileen smiles now, her own expression much softer than Luthor’s, much, much more dangerous.
“Let's pull up those pieces of evidence now.”
The screen shows Exhibit 874, the first page of thousands of scientific jargon that explain how this would work.
It’s been explained to the jury in excruciating detail.
Linda points at this evidence now, the miles and miles of paper trail. “You overlooked all of this yourself?”
“Yes.”
“You know for a fact everything in these papers is true?”
“Yes.”
Linda smiles now, a huntress who’s ensnared her prey exactly how she’s wanted it to happen. “Then why, Alexander Luthor, did we just get word about how Kryptonian DNA affects human DNA from a third party lab?”
Luthro’s smile freezes on his face. His whole body goes still.
“Submitted into evidence this morning, may I present to you the findings of the Arkansas State Crime Lab, about the interactions between Kryptonian cells and human ones?”
The screen switches now, to a video.
It's cells, smashed together close, all moving. There’s a timestamp on the bottom, along with the explanation that this was a human blood sample that has been exposed to Kryptonian DNA.
It highlights the needle tip, explaining how that was the injection point, about how a small shred of KNA was introduced into the sample, the amount less than you would get from a passing touch.
The KNA isn’t cell shaped, not how you or I would recognize it. There is nothing there besides an alien feeling. The way it moves, the way it pops and changes shape and fizzles around. The way it spreads out, touches against a cell near it, and eats it.
The jury gasps, jerks back, and watches as the KNA slowly, ever so slowly, eats the other cells near it, before shivering, and splitting apart to a totally new offshoot of KNA.
The sample is small, and since it’s under a microscope eventually everything does stop moving, but it's not before the sped up video shows the KNA taking over half of the single drop sample, one cell death at a time.
It ends with half of the human blood cells, but for every two human cells eaten only one Kryptonian cell was produced. Not enough for any one to one ratio, not enough to sustain anything real.
Not enough to sustain a hybrid.
“This, Luthor, is what was discovered that happens when human cells get in contact with Kryptonian ones. This is what happens when you introduce these two systems together. There’s nothing here that looks like it’s helping. It’s a miracle that the boy you made stands today, as within his half and half combined system, there's a war happening. A war happening that is going to end up with that boy’s slow, painful death. You have done no research, you made him for something that only your own ego can understand, and now a child is going to suffer for it.”
Eileen Olin goes back to the bench, “You have doomed somebody to death, somebody that by all eyes of the law is your child. I hope you sleep well at night. That will be all, your honor.”
--
The jury comes back with their verdict.
--
The celebration is subdued at the Kent’s house, with a cake that has been hand baked by Martha and several pastries that are provided by Alfred.
The Wayne family are overdressed in their suits. They came directly from court, but Clark and Kon have switched out of their production ceremonial robes and into something not so recognizable. Kon’s got a hoodie from Jonathan on over jeans he’s stolen from Dick. Clark’s wearing a plaid monstrosity and well loved blue jeans.
They won the case.
Kon’s recognized as a person.
Kon is recognized as a person, because he’s got half a person’s DNA in him. He’s half Luthor, so that makes him Luthor's child, an American citizen. An American citizen with rights.
Kon’s recognized as a person, but Clark, Kal-El, Superman, is not.
Chapter 6: fuck this nonsense, we're going on vacation with blackjack and hookers (and historic villas and beaches for the kids, mostly)
Notes:
thank you once again to salparadiselost and caly, the betas even tho their brains were dead dead. special thanks to birbteef and vinny, for being such fans, and damn thank you for reading this, and the over a year it took to update and get to this point.
the end is in sight,
also, i'm apart of a Kon zine, so that's fun :)
Chapter Text
Canada is the first country to declare asylum for Superman.
“If our neighbor won’t recognize the most human individual any of us have seen in a long time-“ the prime minister is saying to a crowd of desperate reporters. Lights flash in his eyes. Microphones lean in- “then we will. Superman, Kal-El, you are welcome in our land with the full rights granted to all of our citizens.”
The next country is harder to tell.
The United Kingdom gets on the news within two hours. France declares that Superman and any of Superman’s kin are welcome. Germany, Russia, Japan, Ukraine, Norway, Finland, Philippines, South Africa, China, Japan, Libya, Chad, Egypt, Spain, Brazil, Chile, Argentina, Cuba-
The list gets longer with each passing hour as various government bodies latch onto America’s mistake.
The American people are up in arms.
Talk shows, news casters, the internet is in shambles.
It's sort of humbling, to know that the opinion of the country you live in is on your side, but it’s also very, very scary.
The judge stands strong in his decision though, unwilling to break under the mounting pressure. The law doesn’t work like that. Judges are meant to stand impartial to the wills of a vocal society; if it truly wants something changed it must go through the obstacle course of debate, rule-making and legislation.
And evoke debate it does. Everybody talks about how the law was both flexible, and very strict, and how the man wasn’t really deciding on the fate of two, just one. “The trial was on whether or not the experiment on the boy was within the realm of the law” the judge says to the press when asked. It is his only response thus far and given in an undisclosed location he had to retreat to. “I was deciding on the narrow window of one individual. Not on the entire race as a whole.”
Everyone was also talking about how the law is stupid and dumb and antiquated. Those people who screamed that aren’t the same people who studied law.
Well, most of them.
It’s a shitshow, all around.
The only highlight about it is that while America quarrels over Superman’s status as a person/ownable object, there is blessedly less attention given to Kon. The boy, for the most part, slips under the discourse of America and finally begins to get some normality in his short life.
Kon’s mostly still bouncing around between the fortress, Wayne Manor, and the Kent farmhouse. He’s spending most of his days in the farmhouse now, but he likes taking detours as he travels. More than once, Clark has found Kon with his toes in the sand of Hawai'i, looking out onto the ocean sunset and breathing deep the salty ocean air. He hadn’t seen any of the world cooped up in a lab and deprived from almost everything except for a square of sunlight. He seems to be trying to take in the world as much as he can now.
Clark, mostly sticks to work.
Lois is furious, of course, she’s a force to be reckoned with, demanding an investigation, demanding justice, demanding to set up another meeting of court to determine what exactly Superman is to America with no interpretation of the law.
Clark knows that he shouldn’t be petty. The people who live in the country should not be affected by the feelings of one man. Clark shouldn’t take out his disappointment, his anger, his boiling sad rage, his emotions on the people who are under attack every day.
But Clark is, in fact, a little petty.
He’s not perfect, that’s for sure. He’s not that good of a person, deep, deep down. He’s got the same complicated mess of feelings that everyone else does, and that means he has to sort them all out one at a time to make sure that each feeling he acts upon isn’t going to hurt anybody else.
Because it would be so easy to hurt someone else. It would be so, so easy to be the “monster in sheep’s clothing” that YouTube “activists” warn about and fear and demand to go back to his own planet.
As if he knew a planet other than Earth. As if he had any other place to call home.
Despite the screaming, this is the only people he had ever known, the people he had grown up with so he still saves them when danger arises.
He still helps people out of burning buildings and he still saves people trapped in earthquakes and he still fights off major threats.
But if he’s considered just another aspect of nature, just another thing to own, be studied, be used-
Then Clark won’t give them the person anymore.
He stops talking to people after a hurricane wipes through Florida, He saves them, drops them off with the rescue teams without a word. He puts out a fire without a smile. He works to hold a building up like Atlas, silent and load bearing.
But in Canada he allows himself to chat, to calm down the little girl he’s saved from an ice storm. In England Superman is seen talking to the people he saved from a road accident. In China. In Sweden. In India. In Australia-
He’s just quiet in America.
Clark’s an adult, sure, but he’s not above the silent treatment.
America notices.
Metropolis most of all. He’s a helpful blur in the background and the city feels like it has lost its soul.
It’s a mess. It’s stressful. It pulls on that part of him that the court said was not “human”. Clark just wants a vacation, he thinks he deserves it.
But how, Clark asks himself everyday while fastening the cape to his kryptonian armor, does Superman take a break from the weight he has taken on? Atlas can’t drop his burden, and neither will Clark.
He’s petty but there are people that need to be saved.
Bruce is the same. He wears the face of a socialite well, but it’s not flawless. Cracks are showing, surely and slowly breaking through his vapid veneer. He hasn’t stopped moving since this whole thing began, and Clark can see the way it wears on him.
It’s most obvious in times when they’re all eating dinner together at the manor. Bruce’s shoulders fall. His chest compresses. The skin on his face seems to wrinkle more and his breaths are so heavy they look like sighs. He’s so exhausted that he can do little more than give a soft, closed-lip smile as he watches his boys’ argument over fresh strawberries.
Sometimes when they do their nightly job, the pressure is a little less. Saving people, stopping crime, foiling villainous plots. All that is straight forward, black and white compared to the boiling swamp of American politics and philosophical questions of “what makes a person?”
At least when they are working, they know what to do.
The tension in the air is still there, of course, as palpable as the Gotham smog. It’s thick, heavy, sitting on the lungs as they move around one another. Crime fighting, though, makes it bearable, ignorable.
Who would have thought that the shield of superhero capes would be their retreat from a world that screams at a constant, whining pressure?
--
The next League meeting is filled to the brim with an awkward air, back and forth looks and tapping fingers against the table as Batman goes over coverage for the next quarter’s financials.
Superman doesn’t look at anybody else, but they’re all looking at him, that’s for sure. He sort of wishes that there were more aliens on the team, instead of just Green Lantern fuming at the very seams and Flash very obviously not looking at either of them. Wonder Woman focuses on Batman like she usually never does, actually giving him her full attention instead of staring into space. J’onn’s got his eyes narrowed and you can tell even without pupils that he’s glancing back and forth between several individuals.
Batman is ignoring the hell out of everything by slogging through an incredibly boring economic review. He’s doing a truly great impression of a drone up there by his powerpoint, one point after another on rather well done slides.
When Batman is finished, the feeling still hasn’t dissipated, if anything else it’s just gotten worse.
Flash looks at Wonder Woman when Batman asks if anybody has any more points to bring up. Wonder Woman sighs and stands.
She towers over nearly all of them, and straightens up right next to Batman. It makes him look strangely small. It’s like they negate each other in prowess, it’s like they match so well until you walked up to them and saw for yourself, Wonder Woman and Batman looked oddly normal next to each other.
Diana clasps her hands on Batman’s armored shoulders and brings him close in a warrior's embrace. “A moment?” She asks, before letting go and motioning him to sit down.
So Batman sits, gliding into his designated spot at the table and folding himself over into his normal black shadows. Clark knows him well so instead of intimidating he looks more like an extremely grumpy pile of blankets.
Diana takes a deep breath, and announces to the room at large, “You both need a break.”
Immediately both Batman and Superman are up, protesting, and Diana just holds up a hand for their silence.
They respect her request and quiet down.
“You both are under a pressure unknown to me,” Diana starts. Her voice is powerful and calm, one of the only things Bruce implicitly listens to. “I know how many resources you have sacrificed, Batman, and I know how much of your hand you have shown, Kal, and I know from that both of you are in a space where it makes you uncomfortable.”
She’s right, as usual.
“I’m telling you,” she paused, her face growing more serious. “No, I am ordering you both to take a break. Calm down, take a vacation.” She stresses this word hard, nearly hissing it through her teeth. “An important part of war is the downtime and how you use it. A stressed heart dies as fast as one that is pierced.”
“Are you imparting words of wisdom from the gods?” Batman tries to cut, his words aren’t as sharp as they could be.
“These are words of wisdom, but not from any god.” Diana shoots him down, “These words come from an old friend, a long time ago. You are a part of a team for a reason, a team that helps when needed, and will fill in for you when asked.”
“I don’t need somebody to take over Gotham-”
“You don’t,” Diana cuts him off. “You are a well trained man, and you are able to continue under the harshest of conditions. You don’t need anything. But we are not under such duress that would allow my morals to allow you to continue as you are, as either of you are.” She nodded towards Clark and he feels a bit like a scolded puppy.
She motions to herself. “I am going to be active in Gotham and Metropolis for the next two weeks. Neither of you can stop me, I am not asking you to try. I will be assisted by the Flash, by the Flash’s proteges, and if I see either of you working, I am going to beat you senseless in the streets.”
It’s not a joke. It’s a warning. Enough to make both of them gulp and look back to each other.
Diana looks back at her colleagues. “Am I understood?”
Flash nods, quick enough that he’s almost breaking a sound barrier.
Clark and Bruce both don’t say anything.
She narrows her eyes, looking at the men around her.
“Am I understood?”
--
“We’re taking a vacation,” Bruce announces to the living room.
“We are?!” Dick perks up, his whole body, limbs and all. His excitement gets the better of him and he flails in a way that’s uncharacteristically ungraceful. Bruce has found, the more comfortable Dick is, the less he fears a cutting comment or a sudden insult, the clumsier he allows himself to be. His swinging spaghetti of a boy is comfortably clumsy in his excitement and the speed that he’s trying to get his feet on the floor.
“You are?” Tim asks, still curled around his tablet and looking up where he’s been cocooned in a soft and warm handmade blanket. He startles at the word ‘vacation’, looking instantly wary of the prospect of his family going.
Well, it isn’t the leaving that he’s worried about. It’s the possibility of being left behind.
Bruce hates the resignation that fills Tim’s eyes. He hates the want Tim just accepts that he’s not included. Like it’s expected that he will stay at home. Like it’s normal for a family to decide a trip would be better without him. Like he’s not worth bringing along anywhere.
Not for the first time, Bruce wants to raise Jack and Janet from the grave just to strangle them about Tim’s lonely childhood.
“We are all going,” he says, stressing the ‘we’ and even going so far to ruffle Tim’s hair as he does so.
Tim blinks, confusion filling his face like Bruce started speaking a different language and doing a dance.
Again.
Strangle.
Jack and Janet.
Alfred looks up from where he’s crocheting another (eventual) blanket. It looks to be the startings of a hat now, but one way or another Alfred will fuck it up and it’ll end up another part of their piecemeal blanke collaction. Alfred may be many things, but a good hand at knitting he is not. “When are you leaving? Where are you leaving too? Do I need to pack your evening suits?”
Bruce winces. He remembers Diana’s threats, her rather explicit threats.
“I don’t need an evening suit, thank you Alfred.”
He pauses, catching onto another implication of Alfred’s words. How did he have so many family members that didn’t believe they were included in family vacations?
“Like I said before,” he stresses every word very carefully. “This is a family vacation. For all family members. Without any work.”
This makes everybody perk up, for different reasons.
Dick is shooting off like a rocket. He’s screaming something about being excited to travel around and enjoy the sights as a tourist. He’s already asking if he can wear a fanny pack. Bruce fears whatever monstrosity of a clothing collection he’s going to pack.
Tim’s much more reserved, curling in tighter as he looks between the adults, then towards the door where Dick shot out of. He’s hesitant and confused like he’s trying to solve a puzzle in that beautiful brain of his. It occurs to Bruce suddenly, that maybe Tim hasn’t been on a family vacation before. Maybe he doesn’t know how to begin.
Bruce makes a mental note to make sure Tim has luggage, and that he gets everything packed. Tim isn’t good when he doesn’t know what to do. It stresses him out to the point of shutting down and that isn’t within the family vacation spirit.
Alfred is slowly going back to his knitting disaster, recounting the purl’s that he’s already got. There’s a soft smile on his face and tells Bruce the man thinks he’s doing something right. It’s as clear as glowing praise.
“Where will we be jettisoning off to, Master Bruce?”
That is a question.
Bruce has an idea about where he’s going to go, thinking about one of his properties that needs a bit of refreshing. He’s got many around the globe, given to him by his family and occupied by people who look after them for a wage and free living. Most of them are safehouses now, tucked away in all corners of the globe and just waiting to be given the signal that Bruce wants to use them.
He’s going to have to decide whether he wants somewhere warm, or somewhere cold.
Maybe a city, maybe somewhere more scenic? He’s thinking about it, thinking about where to curl up to take a break and where the kids will like going. He’s going to invite Clark, of course, and Kon/ Maybe Martha and Jonathan?
That means it’s going to need to be somewhere where they can fit all of them. Maybe he’ll just pry open the penthouse apartment he’s got in San Francisco? Is he still renting that out to the nice older couple who run the soup kitchens?
What about the place in Paris? The townhouse? No, that’s been turned into a school he thinks.
The place in Hong Kong? Or is that still being rented out? Bruce’ll check.
He thinks about it, but mentally decides on crossing large metropolitan cities out. They live in cities and Bruce wants a change. He also wants a place where he can set his children loose without the prospect of thousands in property damage. The wilderness would be better for that. His kids could be their natural hellion selves in the wild.
So maybe he could use that place in South Africa? Huh, maybe Bruce could talk to the people that are using it as a halfway house.
Though he’s unsure whether it would truly be a great idea to let his kids loose on a continent with so many large mammals. Despite how sprawling the grounds of the Manor were, he doesn’t want to try to fit a serengeti onto it.
He’s got a list of places he can actually use, with a bit of notice, in the study. A quick check to see how many can fit all of the family.
And Clark’s parents, of course.
Bruce yells down the hall, “Don’t pack too many tacky shirts, Dick!”
He hears a muffle response that could be a curse come from Dick’s room.
He’s got to do some planning.
Diana’s going to be here in three days.
--
“Grab your bags!” Bruce is holding open the door. The luggage is packed full to the brim. They each have at least two pieces of big but sleek luggage. Bruce’s got three luggage cases in a matching set with his initials monogrammed onto them. Dick has four wheeled bags each with their own unique paisley pattern. Alfred fitted everything he needed into two cases that looked older than Bruce. Tim walks out with his two brand new roller bags that Bruce had to buy him two days ago.
They're being driven by one of the hired help that assists Alfred in cleaning the manor every weekend. He’s a good man, who does mostly landscaping, but will gladly drive a large hummer back and forth from the airport for a slick three thousand.
The back seat of this thing is packed with their bags and blocks out the back window. Alfred gets the passenger seat, talking to his old friend the entire drive. Bruce gets the window seat. Dick gets the middle. Tim is supposed to get the other window seat, but it has been pulled down to allow enough space for the luggage. Tim insisted that he could sit on the floor. He’s fine. He’s small. He folds himself up, as neat as a cat, but almost immediately, Dick pounces and plops Tim into his lap. Tim hisses at the manhandling, but relaxes into a grumpy pout when Dick tightens his grip and makes it clear Tim isn’t escaping. Tim complains the entire time, but doesn’t actually fight the grip/hug.
The drive is about forty-five minutes at two thirty in the morning. Everybody’s wide awake, used to the schedule, but they’re leaving this early for a damn good reason. They’ve got a long flight ahead of them and they are traveling by civilian air.
Bruce is going to meet Clark in London, and from there they’re going to travel together, but it’s Clark’s job to get his parents to London when Bruce gets there. Bruce needs to have a tangible trail, as Bruce Wayne at least. This is going to take ages, but it’s going to be a nice, relaxing time.
At least he prays it’s going to be nice and relaxing.
He’s trying to tell himself it will be, even as his boys begin to start poking each other and exchanging increasingly ridiculous insults.
The plane they fly on is nice, first class of course, and not one that’s easily accessible by the normal public. It’s not the private Wayne Ent. Jet, but it’s a luxury flight and priced so only the rich can access it. Their final destination is Hong Kong.
Bruce and his brood aren’t going to Hong Kong, though. They’re going to a destination in the middle of the flight's itinerary. Cathay Airlines, from New Jersey to London. A seven hour flight. Hopefully, they catch a tailwind and get there a little earlier.
The first class gives each of them a little individual pod to relax in as they fly. Tim sets up shop immediately, hooking into the internet and ready to chat with his little speedster buddy, the new kid on the scene, Bart? Impulse. The two of them are fast friends, and it might be something that Batman needs to be worried about. He hasn’t met this kid and Tim is… well, Bruce is desperate to protect him after what happened to Jason.
A voice that sounds suspiciously like Dick’s warns him that he might be overprotective. That kid that Barry looks after- Wallace? Wally? Kid Flash- turned out okay so it should be fine…
Batman makes a mental note to start a file on Impulse when he gets back.
Dick’s always ready and willing to take the opportunity to sleep, and he’s not ashamed in laying himself flat and covering his eyes with a hand embroidered sleeping mask that Barbara made him for a home economics project that she was trying to flunk. The mask was fine on one side, but ass-ugly on the other, with rhinestones and sequins and a massive penis covering the eyes. It was an eyesore, but it was also weighted and Dick’s favorite thing for long distance travel.
Bruce doesn’t comment on it. He’s going to ignore it politely and not say anything when he doesn’t have anything nice to say.
Alfred is happy to crack open one of the books he’s packed in his carry on. It’s some kind of murder mystery that’s been hitting the top charts for the past several months. There’s a rather grisly looking murder scene painted on the cover.
Bruce just sighs a little, opens his real world Wayne Enterprise work, and gets started on his backlog.
--
London airport is crowded, smells like salted garbage, but is thankfully not too long of a layover. They have three hours to relax and eat some food and collect the Kents.
Dick had woken up about an hour left before the flight had landed and he and Bruce talked about what their game plan was when they got to the actual airport. Dick was going to get some food and snacks for the journey, Alfred was going to grab their spots at the private lounge that is their terminal gate. Bruce was going to wake up Tim and they’re going to grab Clark, Kon, and the Kent’s from the security checkpoint.
They land, and the motion of the plane wakes Tim up from his little cat nap. Bruce is talking to Dick when his youngest pops his head above the seats with a wicked case of bedhead and bleary eyes. He mumbles something that might be a question, but neither Bruce nor Dick understands.
The deboarding goes fast, and they’re off.
Alfred really gets the best job, he takes the carry on luggage and secures himself a table. It’s large enough to fit everybody, all eight of them.
Dick steals one of Bruce’s credit cards when they hug. He’s not very slick about it, and Bruce doesn’t say anything. They both know Bruce knows, but it’s a game Dick plays all too often and it’s good for Dick to get out some of his restrained energy. If Dick sits still for too long it usually results in fights or breaking of priceless items. Bruce is sure the London airport can survive Dick’s energy for an hour.
Tim lets his hand be held as they walk to pick up the Kents, still sleepy and still mumbling softly about what they were gonna do when they got to their final destination, about what they were gonna do with all the downtime they had on their hands. He keeps bringing up work and asking whether he should try to be Robin remotely.
Maybe Bruce needs to give his kids more downtime. It would have made it easier to handle Dick as a teenager, certainly would have made Jason happier-
The thought of Jason, his child, the boy after his own heart, forms a lump in his throat.
Bruce will look into giving Tim some time off. He’s not going to lose another child. He will learn from his mistakes.
He stands next to Tim, holding his youngest’s hand, and trying desperately not to think about Jason.
He tries not to think about the first time Jason was on a plane, scared but plowing through his fear because of pure excitement. He tries not to think of the way that Jason dove for Bruce’s hand when the plane began to land. He tries not to think of his boy, so small, so pure, laughing in the Colorado snow, gasping at the Rocky Mountains, curling up next to Dick by a fireplace.
He tries not to think of it, but when he feels a small hand in his and sees an unruly mop of dark hair in his peripheral vision, the memory of Jason so piercing he can hardly stop himself from crying.
Tim doesn’t realise that Bruce is falling apart right there next to him. Bruce just prays that Clark is hurrying up.
Thankfully, they’re not waiting for long.
It’s easiest to spot Clark first, considering the man’s height. He’s heading towards them at a casual pace and acting like he hasn’t immediately spotted them the moment they were in the room. There’s no way to hide from aware and open super senses, and Clark has been looking out for them all.
He’s in a simple, loose flannel, red and blue and white like an American dream. He’s stunning, with his work worn jeans, his well used boots and rough and tumble duffle bag that’s got Clark’s initials embroidered into it. Wow. Just… wow.
Kon’s looking all around, with his thick sunglasses blocking the little bit of sunlight that’s coming in those big windows. He’s also carrying a duffle bag and this one looks to be an old FFA bag with the logo printed on the side. Kon looks sun kissed and like he’s steadily getting tanner and tanner with every time he comes back from the farm. He’s fully decked out in a hand me down shirt and jeans from Dick’s closet.
The Kents are somebody that Bruce has talked to before, but never seen in person. Their hair is windblown, they look excited, and when they spot Bruce and Tim they brighten up.
Martha Kent is lacking in height, but nothing else. She’s got wild deep brown eyes, with crazy curly hair and a smile that lights up with her entire face. Instantly, she’s reaching out, her own luggage older than Bruce by a mile, and going in for a good natured hug. “Bruce!” She says, holding onto Bruce’s elbows and smiling like only a mother can. “And one of your beautiful boys! Hello! It’s so good to have another handsome young man around.”
Tim blushes and immediately looks like he’s considering hiding behind Bruce. He’s endearingly shy around new people, something Janet Drake tried to train out of him, but always came out in galas. Back then, it had endeared Bruce to the boy and now that Bruce could call him his, it only charmed him more. He doesn’t understand why in God’s green earth Janet would ever try to get rid of it.
“This is Tim,” he introduces with a soft smile and places his hand on Tim’s unruly hair. “He’s my youngest and thankfully a bit quieter than Dick.”
Martha Kent’s smile becomes melted butter. “Hello, Tim, it’s very nice to meet you.”
Tim’s voice is still edged in sleep when he speaks. “And you too, Mrs. Kent.”
Bruce lifts his head to meet Martha’s eyes. “We are very glad that you were able to come with us. I know running a farm can be quite hard to get away from.”
“We couldn’t resist such a treat,” Martha leans down and gives a hug to Tim, who blinks slowly. Bruce didn’t know how Martha Kent figured out one of Tim’s greatest weaknesses so quickly, but she hugged him like a mother and he leaned into her embrace. He even stayed in her arms, when she didn’t let go, soaking up the affection.
“Clark won’t tell us where you're taking us,” she says as she smooths Tim’s hair down, magically making it look somewhat presentable. “Are you going to give us any hints?”
“Somewhere warm.” Bruce laughs, “I promise you’ll enjoy it.”
With that, Martha rolls her eyes, giving Tim one last squeeze before letting him go, and allows Jonathan to thank Bruce himself, just a simple shake of the hand. Kon gives Bruce a hug, before taking Tim’s hand for his own and giving Tim a hug too. He wraps up the smaller kid and pulls him up off the ground, making Tim squawk.
Apparently, there’s something about Tim that invites people to manhandle him.
With that it's just Clark, who already knows the plan and who carried his parents here this morning alongside his clone. Clark, who looks great, smells like the fresh farmlands of Kansas, golden sunshine and ocean waves.
They embrace, briefly, Tim’s still sleepy enough he’s not very talkative, so Bruce explains the way to the gate.
Martha, Jonathan, Clark, and Kon have the cheapest clothing in the whole gate. They’re in comfortable garb, the same kind of clothing that's got work stains and wear marks and are worn year after year after year. Their clothing is something that works for them, is something that isn’t for show.
Meanwhile, Bruce is wearing a suit that costs nearly five grand. Dick’s sweater is a cashmere hand knit one from Loro Piana, Tim’s shoes were a gift from his mother, Dolce & Gabbana.
Alfred looks up from his third book and smiles, soft and warm. “Oh, I see the whole family is here.” He motions to the plush booth he’s managed to snag. “Sit down, we’ve still got thirty minutes. Dick will be here in a minute or two, he’s trying to find the greasiest thing he can eat.”
They all sit down and mingle, their whole family mixing together seamlessly.
--
Ten people get off the plane at their final destination.
They get into a car and the driver’s a jolly woman with bright teeth and black professional attire. The heat is stifling. The humidity slithers down your throat. It’s almost unbearable for the Gothamites but the driver’s still wearing stockings.
The city is seen through the windows of the car, a secondary car holds all their luggage.
Victoria, Mahe, of the country of Seychelles. One of the smallest capitals in the world. There are gorgeous smells that come from the local farmers markets. Rich forests line the coast. The entire place is beautiful with the hustle and bustle of the people all busy with their lives.
The driver talks about what it’s like to live on the islands. Her accent is smooth and she chatter mostly to Martha, who’s a fountain of questions and awe as she looks around.
Clark and Jonathan are talking about the food, looking at the street vendors with their fruits and fishes.
Tim’s more awake now, and him and Kon are trying to decide if Kon wants to eat any of the fish he’s smelling being cooked. Their conversation seems to be devolving into what sorts of fish that are out there in the world.
Dick’s on his phone, trying to get the satellite to work, to check in on his team.
Alfred is still reading the last of his books, the ride ahead is going to be short, but the traffic is going to be terrible.
Bruce doesn’t really mind. The car is a small sort of perfect.
--
The historic villa was once a French plantation. It’s historic and shows its age in weird ways. There’s a door that leads to nowhere. An engraving on a rock that no one has managed to translate. Weird nooks and crannies that have no explanation. The rooms are smaller than Clark is used too. He has to be very very careful not to break doors when he goes through them.
The people here are happy to see Bruce, it seems, but Clark isn’t sure if they’re happy to see Bruce, or happy to see Bruce’s money.
But it doesn’t matter, because apparently Bruce owns the home, and he’s asked for the upcoming days to be allowed for him and his family. The home is overlooking a massive, sprawling landscape that has been kept up in breathtaking gardens. There’s a beach that’s not even a five minute walk from the location and a practical jungle in the front lawn. A sapphire pool sparkles in the middle of the courtyard styled left wing. It's downright unreal.
“It’s in use as a museum,” Bruce sheepishly tells Clark, when they arrive. “I allow them to keep it open for tours, to store historic items, and to be used as a teaching tool. I’m still paying all their salaries and such during this time-”
“You are an insane man,” Clark cuts him off, Bruce’s heart trips from his normal olympian baseline into what would be considered a healthy resting rate for an athlete. Racing for Bruce, who clearly got flustered at the Kents' reactions to something like this.
They’ve rented out non-historic beds to sleep in, and some modern cabinets to use for their clothing. Anything priceless has been put into three of the rooms upstairs, but the rest of the house is free and open to be explored at their leisure. There’s still little blips of readable information that have been put along the walls, places where ropes cut off access to the rest of the historic home. They’ve been asked to not use the old kitchen to cook, and to use the kitchen that the onsite caretaker uses in the smaller, more modern home about half a kilometer away.
Alfred tells everyone that they’re mostly going to eat at restaurants, that he's not going to cook every night on vacation.
Clark can smell nothing but the plush landscape. He can hear the chuckle of a gardener out there, laughing at a joke his friend told him in the native creole and the seascape, which the boys are running to as fast as they can, excited to get into the water after such a long flight.
Martha is on the balcony, overlooking the gardens and the ocean, leaning into Jonathan as they hold hands silently.
Clark thinks that they’re happy. They never got a real honeymoon, that was what Clark had used to get them to come with him for this. They had gotten a small town church wedding and had used their honeymoon money to pay for Clark his first few years of life.
He’d always been guilty about that. He hopes this can sort of make it up.
Clark is in the living room, the historical couches and such were recreations in this room to allow guests to sit on them. The windows are open wide to the patio, allowing the cool breeze to blow through the billowing curtains. Bruce is on his laptop, in a wicker chair. He’s connecting to the satellite that will allow him unfettered internet access.
“Thank you, for this,”Clark tells him, gently. “I can’t thank you enough, I can’t repay you-”
“No need,” Bruce waves Clarks concern off, like Batman waves off anybody asking if he’s injured after a battle. “I’m happy to share my things with my family and my friends.”
Bruce looks up, and Clark, in that instant, knows he’s gone.
Bruce, sitting there curled up like a cat, warm and soft in the sun, shoes off his feet and hair in disarray from Dick and Tim and Kon attacking him when they got out of the car and headed towards the house. His suit jacket is off, Bruce’s eyes are so blue against the white of the ancient home they’re surrounded by, cheeks pink by the heat and the sun.
Clark looks at the man who has given everything he’s had to give, then gives even more. A man who’s a hero, just like him, a man who’s inspired, and driven Clark crazy in equal measures
Clark feels the soft rumble deep in his chest roll out, soft and sure and so, so soft.
Bruce just smiles back at him, outshining the beauty of the natural world around him.
--
The beach has ocean waves, and water so blue it nearly matches Clark’s eyes.
Bruce is applying sunscreen that’s SPF 70, reef safe, and all sorts of all natural. It smells like coconut and is moisturizing as well. The kids are also doused in the stuff, covering Dick and Tim head to toe in the shit to keep them from frying in the bright and brilliant sun. He’s hoping to get through this vacation with not a lick of sunburn and increased skin cancer.
He’s sure he can protect Dick, who naturally tans in the sun, but Tim who fries at even the word ‘sun’... Batman is going to have quite the challenge on his hands.
Tim groans audibly when Bruce dabs another glob onto his nose.
Martha, Jonathan, and Alfred are in the garden chatting. Clark listens in every ten or so minutes, just to check in on their gossip and their fun and to make sure they’re okay still. Bruce knows this because Clark gets a faraway look in his eyes and becomes unfocused on Dick and Kon who are apparently trying to drown each other.
Looking at Clark distracts Bruce enough to lose focus on Tim and the kid becomes as slippery as an eel. He escapes from Bruce’s hands and another sunblocking to throw himself into the drowning competition with a splash.
Bruce himself only will get into the water when one of the kids either are successful in getting another on the ground or they demand him to.
Which, well, it looks like Dick’s holding strong against both Kon and Tim’s attempts, mostly through his own flexibility. He has some time before the tides turn.
Clark zones back in with an almost there sort of smile, focusing back on the kids and quickly that smile drops from content to concerned.
“No!” He’s up, moving fast into the ocean waves that crash against his figure. “Stop pulling Dick under!”
Clark hauls Tim straight out of the ocean in one pull, but just moves Kon away.
Dick pops up from the waves, inhaling with huge gulps of air. Hair a mess around his face, a smile through the seaweed and the sand. “Clark!”
Oh, a wrong move on Clark’s part, because now the children have a new target.
Bruce watches as the three kids wrestle the shit out of a man who's powerful enough to throw them each into the sun. Kon manages to wrangle Clark’s arms, and Dick wraps around Clark’s feet. Tim’s wrapped himself around Clark’s head, Bruce is pretty sure he’s biting Clark’s ear. Cute little menace.
Bruce watches, as Clark gets pulled under, toppled by his own weight and the fury of the young.
--
The food is filling, full of rice and seafood, with curry dishes aplenty. There’s all sorts of new and interesting dishes to try, ladob for both dinner and dessert, prepared in different ways.
Alfred visits chefs from all walks of life during the day, ready and willing to learn. Martha follows him, also excited to learn new things. Jonathan talks to people who work the limited land, the farmers, the people who cultivate herbs and fruits and fish. Clark and Bruce and the boys are much more isolated, and spend hours at the beach.
Clark is a constant shade of sun tanned, a brilliant gold which Bruce now knows involves no tan lines. With all the exposure he doesn’t seem to get any darker, which is a wild sort of admittance.
Bruce sort of wants to see if any tan lines emerge after this trip all the constant sunlight, but the waves sometimes knock the shorts of Clark up on his legs, hugging thick thighs, revealing the same golden soil skin.
Bruce himself gets a shade or two himself, even with the addition of the sunscreen. Bruce doesn’t burn easily, but he’s still not willing to test it. Dick’s skin bronzes like tea ripening over a seep, sun loves Dick, and Dick loves the sun-
But poor Tim is just slowly, slowly turning a steady pink.
No matter how much sunscreen Bruce slathers on his kid, Tim gets redder every time Bruce looks at him. Fuck. Batman might be losing this one.
At least the kid looks happy as he steadily becomes a lobster.
At night they go to dinner, all of them, Bruce sits right next to Clark everytime, brushing against him, and sometimes even gets that bit of rumble-happy-gentle sound that while at first was so, so strange, now is soothing.
--
Clark doesn’t realize it at first, it happens so slowly.
They’re all curled around a fire, the beach waves reflecting the firelight with stark slashes of reds and yellows. The stars above them are endless, massive, expansive. The sounds of the forests scream out their life with every moment.
They’re playing music from a bluetooth speaker, dancing like maniacs in the sand. Martha and Jonathan are swaying in each other's close embrace, head resting against each other.
Alfred is swinging around with Dick, teaching the kid old styles, foxtrot and the charleston and the lindy hop and the swing and the jitterbug. Tim and Kon are doing some strange internet craze, laughing the whole time they kick up sand.
But Clark and Bruce? They’re laughing as well, mismatched steps to a rhythm that’s older than both of them.
They grab each other's hand, Bruce swings Clark around, Clark dips Bruce.
They’re howling, singing, hand in hand-
A us-ni bond is lit between them, with their joy.
--
Bruce wakes up to the sunshine, the nights of full sleep have made him lazy this past week.
But damn, has it been worth it. The mattresses aren’t that amazing, compared to what Bruce has at home, but it’s been better than sleeping at the computer some nights, when work just compels him until he can’t continue on anymore.
He’s got a full six hours of sleep, which is about as best as he’s gonna do in a day. The sunlight streams through through sheer curtains, Bruce can feel that the blankets have wrapped around him tightly last night, their warmth is not stifling, There’s the sound of an active house already, with Dick hollering about breakfast and morning swims. Tim’s pitched voice is calling up and telling Dick to hurry up. Kon laughs brightly at the antics, asking if they can have more of that grilled fish he liked so much last night.
Martha, Alfred, and Jonathan are laughing up a storm, talking about their planned day for the day.
A knock on the door, Clark’s deep voice from behind it. “Bruce?”
Clark opens the old thing, a gentle expression across his face.”Good morning, Bruce.” His voice echoes the soft humming that hasn’t really stopped since they had gotten here. Each word with the undercurrent of something so happy to it.
Bruce hums back, as best he can. “Good morning, Clark.” The rough growl of the normal Batman voice isn’t right for this occasion, it’s too harsh, too sticking in the preformative nature of it, but something much closer to his normal, normally unused vocal range. He puts it in there to try and mimic the person who's smiling so softly at him from the doorway, the man who deserved this break as much as Bruce did.
The man who's his best friend.
The man who Bruce wishes was something a little more.
Chapter 7: while everything else in the world is going wrong, I brought you another kid :) don't worry about the dirt
Notes:
(See the end of the chapter for notes.)
Chapter Text
Tim’s turning a brilliant red, but he’s not in any pain yet so it’s not sunburn.
At least that’s what he’s telling himself.
Over the vacation, he’s noticed that his hats have been getting larger and larger. He started with a beanie, which became a bucket hat (stolen from Dick), which widened into one of Bruce’s dad hats. Now, he’s outfitted in a big straw hat that’s wide enough to cover his shoulders and completely block the sun’s rays from frying his shoulders. A decorative pattern of little fish and dolphins swim around his head. It wasn’t the pattern he would have chosen (he would have picked something a lot less… loud) but Kon absolutely loves it and Tim couldn’t say no. (He absolutely could ignore the shiteating, knowing grin that Dick had given him though.)
It’s nice.
The hat and the vacation.
He’s having a fun time, more fun than he ever would have guessed. During the day, Dick, Kon and he spend all day playing in the ocean, going to museums and exploring the island. At night, they cause all types of mischief by pulling pranks and tackling each other to the ground with not a care in the world.
It’s a carefree existence. One that’s a far cry from the gritty, constant stress of being Robin. One that Tim could see himself getting lost in if he had enough time.
(In the small hours, when everyone else in the house is quiet and Tim is left with his own thoughts, he wonders if that’s what happened to his parents. If this was the type of life that they left Tim behind to chase. If this is what they had traded their son for. If this is what they had deemed more valuable than him. Vacation it’s nice but… he couldn’t imagine abandoning Bruce and Dick for it. He’s glad that they decided to take him with them.)
It’s four days until the end of their vacation, and they’re slowly starting to pack up the spare bits and bobs they’ve collected during their time here. It’s amazing how much they have accumulated during their time here. Tim doesn’t think he’s ever bought so many souvenirs in one place. Most of their hoard is because of Bruce, of course. Bruce has a bad habit of getting every single knick knack that they look twice at. He has to explicitly be told no when they walk around markets lest he will buy everything in his sight.
It’s sort of like being accompanied by a huge, well-meaning but overenthusiastic dog with a 24k gold-plated Visa card.
The hat is a recent purchase, and one of the few things that Tim actually asked for. He offered to pay for it himself, but Bruce just waved him off with his card ready in his paw.
Tim wouldn’t ever admit it but the small action warmed his chest so much that it almost burned. His parents wouldn’t have done it. They wouldn’t even have taken him on the trip in the first place.
They wouldn’t have flopped the hat right onto the middle of his head with a big grin and an affectionate ‘here ya’ go, kiddo’ that made Tim feel so full he almost burst.
(Maybe, if vacations were all these soft moments built on top of each other, Tim could convince Bruce to bring him on more.)
Tim is still wearing the hat when Kon invites him to go swimming later that day. It’s 5pm, the sun is slowly turning as orange as an egg yolk in the reddening sky. The ocean is calm. Tim and Kon are in the water and letting the gentle waves lap past their shoulders and up to their eyes. On the beach, Dick’s completely passed out on the floor of their beach cabana, snoring softly into a pile of towels. He’s a bit of a mess of limbs, all twisted in a way that shouldn’t be comfortable. But he’s Dick Grayson, so, of course he makes it work.
Behind him, lounging into the cabana’s couch, Clark and Bruce are talking to one another with shy, soft smiles. They’re both wearing swim shorts and those weird, dad tops that come with the sunscreen built in. Bruce is leaned into Clark’s side and Clark has his arm thrown over the back of the sofa cushions. It’s not quite touching Bruce’s shoulders, but it almost sort of brackets Bruce in close to him. He’s like a teen at a movie theatre, not quite sure whether it’s okay to put his arm around his date yet.
Tim pops his body up to get his mouth above water, “They’re so gross.”
Kon quirks an eyebrow, rolling with the waves.
Tim tilts his head, gesturing towards their dads. “Bruce and Clark. Old people love. It’s–” Tim scrunches his nose at the thought. “Wrinkly.”
Kon barks a laugh. It makes Clark and Bruce look over, both of them not bothering to actually move from their position. They seem to understand that Tim and Kon aren’t trying to kill each other, so they move back to talking about whatever gross old person love stuff they were talking about.
It makes Tim and Kon giggle like fools in the ocean together until they are out of breath. Slowly, without really realising it themselves, they float closer together.
Tim takes off his hat. He tells himself it’s because the sun is setting and he doesn’t need it anymore, but he knows it’s because it lets him and Kon drift closer together.
They’re happy, the two of them, happy as they can possibly be.
--
“Emergency.”
Clark’s words cut hard against the backdrop of serenity. They are jarring against the perfection of the beach, the ocean waves, the grill on full blast as Jonathan cooks some fish.
It’s dinner time. They are supposed to- but Clark jerks up and looks directly at Bruce.
“Diana’s yelling something- we need to go.”
Bruce shifts from his vacation mode into a working one. They have to go. If Diana’s requesting assistance then by damn they need to be there. They need to be there now.
“Stay safe.” Dick says, half standing, mind already going over the options that they all have here. They’re stuck on the other side of the world, only a day away from returning from their vacation. Clark could carry two people, but it would be slower than just taking one. Kon could carry somebody- but he has no training which makes him a liability.
Dick’s staying here, he realises it at the same time Bruce does and just silently nods. He silently places himself next to Tim, guarding the younger. Tim knows it too and his big eyes flick between Clark, Dick, and Bruce.
Martha, however, just sighs. She stands up and brushes the sand off her coverup. “Go,” she commands, her voice unflinching and her tone practiced. “John and I will take care of the kids and keep everything in order here. Just call me when you’re done.”
“Course, Ma.” Clark would always call his mother when she asks.
“Good boy,” then, more delicately, “Promise me you both will stay safe?”
Before Clark can answer, Bruce takes a chug of water, washing down the bit of mojito he had been drinking before, and puts on Batman like he’s putting on the cowl. “We need to go to the cave.” He says, tone authoritative and cool. From the corner of his eyes, Clark sees both Nightwing and Robin perk to attention even though they are not being spoken too. “I need my gear. My suit. Anything for whatever type of–”
“Now wait a moment,” Martha cuts Batman off, because only she would be brave enough.
It’s sudden enough to make Bruce pause, Batman slipping away to momentarily let a very confused Bruce show.
“I was almost finished saying goodbye to my boy, which I would like to do without getting interrupted” she pats Clark’s hand before turning back to Bruce. “And I want the same promise of safety out of you too, Mister. You also have loved ones that will be waiting for you.”
Loved ones that were now snickering behind Bruce’s back and not being intimidated by the Batglare he shot back.
He sighs and promises that he’s going to be safe too.
With that, Bruce holds his hand out and faces Clark in his board shorts and sunscreen. With his hair curled up by the salt from the waves and with a hint of sun across his face and shoulders, he’s beautiful, in that way a knife is. A weapon, shining bright, knowing his skills and his danger.
Clark takes Bruce’s hand.
They’re off, within a blink, into the sky and headed home. (and leaving their family behind).
--
Bruce and Clark crash into the cave with a rolling sort of chaos.
Bruce is already hopping out of Clark’s arms, heading towards the various costumes and armor he’s got lined up on the back wall.
Clark needs to get his own suit, so he does by zipping to Metropolis and back in under a heartbeat.
Bruce is moving at a human speed, but he’s screaming at his computer to open up communication lines, intel files, records, alert messages and anything else that will tell him what the fuck is going on.
Diana’s voice is thick with thankfulness when she answers Bruce’s call.
Apparently, she and Flash are fighting some asshole from another universe that’s trying to copy Superman’s whole deal. Her, Flash, and the rest of the Justice League had dragged the enemy to the middle of the American prairie to have their big fight. They’re tearing up farmlands, sure, but at this point there’s nothing they can do but help reduce the loss of human life and the destruction of property.
Batman is suited up in an impressive two minutes, locking armor into place and securing it with a flip of a latch. He’s been talking into the communicator this entire time, asking if known weaknesses would work on this new threat- “Superboy Prime”- or if this was totally and completely unknown territory.
He’s telling everybody to lock up the Green K, Batman and Superman are about to be on scene.
The way he says it, so confidently and like such a leader, actually inspires Clark to think maybe this will be a bit easy. Maybe they could be back to their family before they all go to sleep. But the scene, when they arrive, is a total shitshow.
Dirt is ploughed through in a scrape of one superpowered body pushing another along the floor. The trees are all blown over, roots scraping towards the sky like skeletal hands. Barns are in pieces and abandoned cattle are running out into the wild. It’s like a tornado went through.
Except that the tornado is still here, snarling at them with pearl white teeth.
It looks like Kal, in a strange sort of distorted way. It’s like looking at a funhouse mirror. Horrific lines of gold and power line this thing’s suit, a parody of the Superman that is known to the world, the Superman that fights alongside Batman right now, for the good of the people who can’t fight for themselves.
He looks at this thing that wears his face and knows it isn’t him. It isn’t the Kal that stands for freedom or the Clark that Bruce fell in love with. It’s… all wrong. It’s like him with no humanity. Him if he had never loved or been loved.
It’s a him that thinks nothing of trying to grab Flash by the throat or trying to rip Diana down from the sky by her leg.
“It’s a monster” is the last thing Clark thinks before he joins the fight.
*****
In the end, the fight is brutal.
Downright brutal.
Bruce knows they are lucky to be getting through it without casualties.
Flash screams as he gets his bones broken, then sobs as those bones heal in seconds. Diana’s full of scrapes and bruises and tears, her hair loose from its warriors bun and falling around her face in burned off sections. Green Lantern is losing power fast, trying to take the brunt of the force of the attacks that Superboy Prime is throwing around. J’onn’s puts up a good fight, his burns scalding against green skin. There’s more people here, more heroes here, responding to the emergency call than expected. Hell, Bruce even spots a few villains around the edges trying to help out, annoyed that some asshole is throwing this much of a tantrum.
Bruce doesn’t actually try to do damage, not with his fists at any rate. He knows he’s human. He knows if Diana is struggling to land damage, then he has a snowball’s chance in hell. Instead, he focuses on trying to cut the lines that are supplying power to Superboy Prime’s suit. It’s some kind of integrated system. Something that’s giving the kid more power than he should ever be able to hold.
Bruce manages four lines before he gets thrown to the ground, hard enough so that it makes his entire spine ache.
Shit, he cursed to himself and again as he gets up with a grimace. The nerves in his back scream at the treatment and it’s enough pain to make him take a few extra breaths.
Kal is up there, taking serious sorts of hits and dealing general damage. Diana’s right there with him, the princess is a menace with her sword and whip. They dart around, looking like pure fury, but it makes Bruce wonder how long they can keep this up.
The one who finally gets the last hit is the one that Bruce least expected.
Impulse.
Shaking, small, and too full of energy to look at for long, the kid is a powerhouse, spilling at the seams and shaking even when everything is still.
Bruce takes one look at him and a few thoughts pop into his head. First is that that thing needs training. That thing needs training, right now.
Bruce watches the teen, all pent up and vibrating, bursting from inside and his second thought is that the kid reminds him of his sons.
The third thought is that the thing, Impulse, cannot meet his children until he’s had training. He’s too unpredictable as he is. Too dangerous. Too much like an atomic bomb in the attic. Something that could entirely consume everything that surrounds it.
“I pushed him back.” Impulse is flickering in and out of existence himself, looking up at the heroes he ran by to body slam the threat into someplace unknown. “I pushed him back to where he belongs.”
The words come out jittery, and slammed together. It’s horrible to try and listen to. Something about the sound just grates under Bruce’s skin.
It’s wrong, wrong, wrong.
It almost makes Bruce miss the hint of desperation hidden beneath the tone.
Flash grabs onto Impulse's shoulder (something that probably only another Flash could do) an the flickering in and out of existence slows. “You did good, kiddo,” he says and the kid looks a bit more solid.
They all take a much needed breath.
The League has to regroup, to talk about what the fuck just happened, and to account for the damage that has been done. Lick their wounds, so to speak.
Batman yells across the field, telling everybody to gather up, that they need to do a post-op discussion.
Very quickly, the normal villains begin to skitter away, quickly and quietly escaping into the night and allowing themselves to leave with grace. Captain Cold is one of the prominent ones, his distinctive white and blue parka loud and proud against the torn dirt and grass and blood. If they wanted to show up, help, and leave, good for them, Batman wasn’t going to allow him into headquarters anyway.
There are no casualties, thank god, but the injuries are numerous, life threatening if not treated. J’onn’s more burned marshmallow than martian at the moment. They need to bring him up to the Watchtower.
“Reconvene at medical in the Watchtower!” Batman yells to the desolated field. “Reconvene at medical!”
--
“We’re finding some serious fluctuations with the timeline.” Dr. Fate’s words are distorted through the helmet, but that’s just what you get when you’re dealing with Dr. Fate.
Dr. Fate’s wearing their helm and their cape, but is otherwise in comfortable sweats and a sling. They’re holding a pointer in their good hand and talking to everybody that is gathered around the Watchtower main room. There are about a hundred people, varying from helping out doing first aid to getting treated for devastating injuries. They all listen as Dr. Fate slowly walks them through the temporal physics of a timeline kink.
Bruce is thankful that his own injuries aren’t anything major, just a couple of cracked ribs and a dislocated shoulder. Nothing that physical therapy won’t fix.
Kal’s got bruises that are a vibrant purple pink color, but nothing deeper under the skin. Small mercies considering that anything worse requires taking out the kryptonite scalpels.
“The goal of this, Prime, was to seemingly- and I quote- ‘fix’ the current timeline.” Dr. Fate is joined by Zatana, who’s side is torn up from being thrown across the battlefield. Her normal costume has been exchanged for something that won’t grate on those open sores. She’s looking at some magical artifact or another and talking to both Dr. Fate and Constantine, who doesn't have a single injury due to not being able to get there in time.
He and Zatana have their heads together, talking and inspecting and talking some more. It’s never a good sign when a bunch of magical assholes are up there talking in secret to one another. If Shazam hadn’t been hit so hard he’d be up there too, chatting and pointing things out and looking worried.
Why do they look so worried?
Fuck.
“The current timeline is stable at the moment, but there will be minor effects that may see ripples from the point of origin of where the battle was held, so we’ll need to have a statement to release to the press soon.”
Which means that there’s about to be some nonsense again. Fuck. With magic it could be anything from ‘oh no somebody’s shirt changed colour’ all the way to, Bruce doesn’t know, something like his parents never being killed. Magic is a grabbag like that. A big, vicious, fuck-you grabbag in Bruce’s experience.
Which means they’re going to have to send out a red alert to the major media outlets and the world governments and the NGOs to look out and be aware of changes that might occur. Fuck, it probably means Bruce is going to have to do some kind of Brucie skit about all his shoes changing feet as a public PSA.
Dick is going to make fun of him for weeks.
“We’re currently monitoring the situation.” Dr. Fate promises. They look real official in those sweatpants. “The attack by Prime mostly seemed to focus on us, as superheroes, so be aware of things that might change in your professional or personal life.”
Thank god Bruce’s kids are going to be at the beach for a whole extra day. Bruce can handle things, but he handles things much more slowly when his children are there and able to be fussed over.
Clark, sitting by Bruce, grabs hold of Bruce’s uninjured hand. “I need to call my Ma,” he whispers to Bruce, low and soft and almost lost in the cacophony in the noise around them. “Do you want me to tell the kids anything?”
Bruce sighs, trying to think of anything to say. Words, the damn things. They’re always so much of a terrible mix of complicated meanings and emotions. “Tell them I’m alright.”
Clark squeezes Bruce’s hand, the reach a little awkward to get the arm that wasn’t dislocated. “I will.”
With that, Clark stands, moving away from the mess of the central room and heading off, finding his own personal quarters to make a personal call.
Bruce instantly misses him.
--
Bruce gets cleared within the hour. The first aid team is fast, fast enough that anybody without some serious wounds gets pushed through with painkillers and a serious scolding to take it easy. There’s nothing keeping Superman and Batman there besides some minor things to talk about and go over with the cleanup. It’s things that can be easily done from home.
J’onn, wrapped up in bandages and burn cream, tells everybody that doesn’t live at the Watchtower to go home. Get rest. Calm down and take some time to recover.
So Bruce and Clark go back to the Manor.
The kids won’t come back until late the next day and Bruce is already mentally preparing himself for it.
They’re going to ask so many questions. So, many questions.
Bruce supports the right for a child to be curious, but when they get going, Dick and Tim are all about the damn questions. Bruce knows those first few hours will be nothing but question after question after question.
Bruce loves the little guys, but they're going to be the death of him one day, asking so many questions.
A day to figure out how to answer all of them will be a blessed reprieve. Especially when Bruce is both recovering, and-
And has a gift.
It hadn’t been ready in time for the vacation, or Bruce would have given it to Clark then, but it had some final pieces that hadn’t arrived in time.
Now, with Clark upstairs making dinner, Bruce can fix up the final touches of the gift. Like all the garments that Bruce had seen, fastening up the right hip in a strange sort of secure tie that would normally not really be used in standard fashion. It’s a mix of a bowline on a bite and a fisherman's knot, sliding around when needing to be fitted correctly, but able to be tightened and secured with a simple tug.
Ingenious, really, but Bruce had to recreate the knot by hand with each article of clothing. And with the gift consisting of about twenty articles of clothing, it got trying fast. But Bruce weathers on, tying the last of the securing knots with a flourish.
There’s no time to wrap, not with one shoulder down on bed rest for the next couple of days. Bruce hopes that Clark likes it. The gift.
After dinner, Bruce promises to himself, after dinner he’s going to bring these to Clark.
For sure.
--
Dinner is simple, some rice stir fry that Clark learned in Korea, staying at a hostel for a few weeks during college. It’s delicious, with just the right amount of love poured into it that means it’s just overall good.
Spicy, sure, with a hint of savory underneath, but overall it’s truly a treat.
Clark cleans up, Bruce minimally helping when and where he can, where and when Clark lets him.
“You are not doing the dishes with that shoulder,” Clark chastises him, laughing. “Sit down, I know Alfred doesn’t let you do them when he’s here.”
“He very much allows me to do dishes,” Bruce scoffs. “We only have one dishwasher in this entire house and it does not do fine china. We have to wash all that by hand.”
“Your house is this and you only have one dishwasher?” Clark scoffs, gesturing with the hand that has the drying towel at the crown molding that has been in place since the original house was built in the 1730’s.
“Yes, you try getting the permits to retrofit a dishwasher into pipes that are two hundred years old.” Bruce snatches the towel out of Clark’s hands. “We have one in the big kitchen, not this one.”
Clark looks around at the beautiful kitchen they had eaten in.
It’s got these beautiful windows, overlooking the manor grounds, floor to ceiling curtains in some sort of gilded fabric and with chairs that are antique and fancy. There’s an old gas stove, the sort you see in museums and places that are older than dirt itself, but Clark doesn't think it's connected to anything, considering that there’s another, obvious working oven and stove a hop away from it. The cabinets are all painted a soft blue-white, and the countertop is a dazzling marble.
It’s gorgeous.
“It’s historic.” Bruce tells him, snatching a dish from Clark’s hands to dry. “Since it’s historic, there’s limits on what I can actually do in it.”
“No shit?” Clark’s surprised, and yet not. That sort of tracks, when thinking about it. There’s historic facade laws that dictate what a building can look like in downtowns, it tracks that a house this old might have some caveats about what’s allowed and what’s not. Historic homes must have some sort of weird laws on them,
“I have to keep a certain level of authenticity to keep my historic home certificate.” Bruce admits, the plates are almost clean, with the final fork being handed over now. “There’s a whole process that’s needed to go through a historic individual property, and with that comes both protection and tax benefits, along with grants and such to uphold the estate and the significance of the property.”
Bruce puts the towel on the oven handle, letting it dry.
“A house like this? If it’s not protected it will go into disrepair, even with me living in it. I do a lot of upkeep on this old heap.”
They walk, the two of them, through the home. Bruce leads, a hand on the wall as he speaks.
“It was here through the witch trials, several, and the original home was a part of the original settlement here in Gotham. It was one of the first homes built, as a part of a greater estate. The other, outer houses have fallen into disrepair in the forties, I’ve fixed up a couple of them but the rest are too dangerous to keep maintained.”
The walls of the home change from wooded, thick and stocky, to something a little sleeker with just a step. A change from the original home into something just a tad different.
“It was here in the revolutionary war as a hospital, with the rooms being surgery theaters, one of the first places to get plumbing in the entire state of New Jersey. It was a town hall for a while, when the Waynes lost it for about twenty years, and then it was a hotel for a spell, before being back to a home in the civil war, when it was used as a home for a general- my ancestors again- and his family. It’s been blown over from hurricanes, burned partially down, and rebuilt more than I can even recall.”
The floorboards are old underneath their feet, old wood, old forests that had been pulled down first from the New Jersey shore then further out west as the country became what it is. The history is palpable, the walls not perfect, the styles and dates clashing in a strange sort of way that made it cohesive.
“This is my history, Clark.”
Bruce turns, finally in the study, with its huge windows and second story library facing into the backyard, facing the massive cliff sides. “I’m lucky, that I can live in this, lucky that I can raise my kids here, luckier than so many people, lucker than almost anybody.”
Bruce looks, really looks at Clark, catching Clark off guard, making Clark’s breath stutter in his chest.
“Luckier than you.”
“Bruce-”
Bruce waves it away, the words that Clark wants to build for him, the words that Clark wants to say. “I have a gift for you.”
Clark follows Bruce, he always will.
Follows Bruce sauntering down into the Cave. Feels how Bruce’s emotions roll in him, how there's been a tsunami of intensity as soon as Clark called the emergency. How Bruce is feeling, how that little connection of the bond sparked to life and went from silence, still, deep waters to this whirlpool of feelings.
The Cave is still, with air that’s stagnant, that smells of earth and rocks and moving water. It smells like blood and leather, like stale sweat and animals. It smells like Bruce, from how much time he spends here.
Bruce heads right to where he wants to go, directly to the third floor costuming area and grabs up a cloth box.
It’s one of those boxes that you use for organizing objects, this one a light blue with rough-hewn rope handles and a dark blue bottom lining. It’s full of something- a lot of things.
It smells like wool?
“I have a grouping for both you and Kon.” Bruce explains, his ears are pink, his emotions cascading, crescendoing, cresting-
Falling still.
Evening out as the basket gets passed to Clark.
Going back to that stillness from before.
Clark picks up the piece of fabric on the top.
Oh.
Oh.
It’s nothing like Clark has ever felt before. Like velvet, like clouds, like cashmere if cashmere was softer. It’s a blessing of a feeling, the sort of thing that shocks you, at how soft it is. There’s been nothing like this Clark has experienced on this earth. The only thing that comes close is the silk that the fortress makes-
The gift falls like water in Clark’s fingers into its final shape.
Secured at the right hip, with silk to match the light brown natural color of the fabric. There’s no metal grommets, the stitching is all the same material as the blessed cloud that is the rest of it.
It’s shorts- underwear, made in the style of Kryptonians.
There’s about twenty pairs in here, each a different color, all dyed with dyes that are natural, they have no trace of stark chemical odor.
“Bruce.” Clark’s breathless, speechless, amazed. “Bruce these are-” Clark doesn’t have the words for this, for all the experience in shaping them up they’ve all escaped him now. “These are incredible.”
The pink of Bruce’s ears go a shade darker, the flush of tan looking good on him, making him look healthy and hale.
“Vicuña.” Bruce’s eyes don’t meet Clark’s. “It’s made from vicuña. I made them for you. I noticed how the fortress made you a certain kind of cut, and wondered if it was more comfortable for you. So I did some research on fashion, both Earth and Krypton.”
Bruce grabs the second basket, the one with the other set of twenty. The set for Kon.
Clark carefully puts down his basket on the worktable.
“I made them so you’d have something nice. A little part of what the people around you would wear. Vicuña’s not an exact one to one, but it’s similar to a sort of wool that Kryptonians had access too-!”
Clark hugs Bruce.
Just hugs him hard, wrapping Bruce into an all encompassing hug. Clark brings Bruce into him, pressing his face into Bruce’s and sobbing, just once.
“I love it,” Clark says, desperate to let Bruce know how he’s feeling, to let Bruce know a fraction of what Clark can feel through their new, fledgling bond. “I love it.” Clark tries to pour everything into those damn words.
“I love you.”
Clark says, speaks, begs, into the little space between them. Pressing the words against Bruce’s jawline.
“I love you.”
The emotions are turbulent, rolling, true.
Clark, out of his own mind with the love that he feels for the man in his arms who’s ears have gone fully red and is so full of love that it overflows into every action that he does, kisses Bruce.
Kisses Bruce with everything he has. Bruce, the absolute insane man that he is, kisses back.
--
Bruce get’s a firsthand experience at the strangeness that is a Kryptonian.
The poetry on Krypton makes sense, now, the way they speak poetic about the opening of flowers in the spring. About the dewdrops on the petals that weigh down the sweet aroma after a storm. The way the poems wax on and on about the color of sweet pea blossoms and the fertility of a bloom.
Bruce’s arm is still in a sling, but that’s less of a worry when one has a lover that can hold you one handed, bring Bruce against his chest and kiss away anything that begins to worry at him.
Clark’s a beautiful man. His eyes are a piercing alien blue. His tongue is pink and gentle as it traces strange patterns into Bruce’s hips and thighs. Bruce traces each part of Clark, sliding his fingers over everything both man and alien.
They make sweet, dangerous love into the night. The two of them, hot and heavy and brand new to each other.
--
Clark wakes up the next morning, almost afternoon, and feels the full window of sunlight bathe the bed in warm light. The sun dances across Clark’s chest, over where Bruce has his face ugly mashed up into Clark’s armpit, snoring like a broken chainsaw on every third breath. Bruce’s hair turns a slate blue black where it catches the sun, and is all tangled up in a rat’s nest.
Clark’s gross, sweaty, and can feel the way Bruce’s legs tangled in his own make him a little too hot under the soft covers.
The morning is perfect, as far as Clark is concerned.
Clark lies awake, in that almost-not-morning-anymore sunshine, and thinks about how lucky he is.
He curls a little closer to Bruce, thinking about how to spend the day without anybody else until later tonight.
--
Bruce’s shower is heavenly.
Bruce himself is already scrubbing up, the smell of mint and lavender strong as Bruce washes out his messy hair. It’s time for them to get up and meet the day, well past any semblance of what could be called morning anymore and into the afternoon. They need to eat, so they’ve pulled themselves from Bruce’s beautiful bed and are getting ready.
Bruce’s shower has two massive rainfall shower heads, with multiple jets on the wall that spray out water like they’re trying to bore a hole into you. There’s a sauna in the bathroom, already warming up to spend thirty minutes in there drying off and to get their clothing warm.
The body wash that Bruce passes over is complicated, the text is all in french, but Bruce points out what each bottle is for, when he hands them over.
Clark cleans himself, taking care to scrub everywhere before he hops into the sauna.
Drip drying while talking to Bruce, figuring out the plan and what to tell the kids and what to leave out. They need to get back in touch with the Justice League and talk about the systematic dimension dilation that’s spreading slowly across the country- eventually fizzling out when it hits itself when it circles the globe. There’s a watch on it, the slow moving dilation is currently still in the Midwest, it’ll hit Gotham about an hour after the family gets here.
The news is already talking about it, giving out information as soon as it’s discovered. They’re playing a live feed of the current progression of the magic on the website of the JLA.
Bruce and Clark get ready for the day.
Bruce in his traditional, easy, in home attire of an old Gotham Knights jersey and loose, old pants that have long since lost their elastic.
Clark tries out his new underwear.
It fits perfectly.
Clark feels pretty in this, like it belongs on him. There’s no chafing, there’s no unwanted rubbing or strange feeling or even pressing in places where it shouldn’t be pressing.
Clark wears soft legging and an oversized crew neck from the Metropolis University debate team. He and Bruce order out for lunch, sitting in the beautiful study and talking.
They talk about the plan, moving forward. Bruce likes having detailed plans. He speaks about boundaries, about clear lines. Clark talks more about vague abstract things. They work well together, figuring out the future, one word at a time.
--
“We’re home!” Dick screams.
The door had been torn open not even a second before, the sound pulling Clark and Bruce out of making dinner.
Martha and Jonathan would still be on the plane, they had decided to go straight to Kansas on their return trip, getting a neighbor to pick them up so they could ask about the farm and brag to their church friends about their vacation.
The boys and Alfred arrive straight home to Clark and Bruce.
The same landscaping gentleman from before picked them up from the airport, thanking Bruce kindly for the extra bit of cash. Dick, Tim, and Kon bring in the luggage. Alfred heads right to the kitchen.
“We beat you to it,” Bruce laughs as his father figure enters the family kitchen, surprised at the smell of burgers and fries. “Welcome home, Alfred.”
Alfred smiles, a gentle kind of thing, and embraces Bruce in a one armed hug, the small man dwarfed by his son. “Glad to be back, Master Bruce.”
The dinner is simple, smash burgers with some fixin’s and hand cut french fries. Clark was the one working the flat top, while Bruce greets and welcomes his kiddos.
Dick gets a full pick up, wholly jumping into Bruce’s arms and climbing him like a jungle gym. It’s so, so Robin that for a second it makes Bruce’s heart ache for when his boy was younger.
Dick wraps himself around Bruce’s shoulders, making sure to put all his weight on Bruce’s good shoulder, and chatters a million miles an hour, asking every single question about the emergency. He also not so subtly checks over Bruce for injuries, poking bruises and peeking down the back of Bruce’s shirt.
When he’s finished with his inspection and his inquisition, Dick holds Bruce’s neck tight, pressing close, taking reassurance in the fact that his dad is safe. His dad is okay.
Bruce needs that moment as much as him.
Eventually, Bruce and Dick separate when Bruce tells Dick to set the table for them all. Dick grumbles, but unhooks himself and darts right over to Clark. The questions start again, but this time they have a new target.
Tim’s next, Bruce pulls him close with a quick, simple, loose hug, rubbing through Tim’s hair and giving a gentle forehead kiss. Tim preens at the affection, scrunching up his whole face when Bruce lays a silly smack! of a kiss on his kiddo’s head. Tim doesn’t fight. Dick and Jason both would have, but Tim always soaks up any affection he can get. The kid knows abandonment too well to shrug off any affection.
It makes Bruce squeeze him tighter just for a second before he’s sending him off after his brother.
It leaves Kon standing in the doorway, hovering, almost literally.
“Come here.” Bruce tells him, opening up his arms.
Kon collapses into them, wrapping around Bruce’s chest and burying his head down in the comfort and safety of a father.
Then, just as fast, Kon untangles himself, needing only a moment to take in everything he wanted, before diverting off to dinner.
“So, we’ve read all the internal memos,” Dick says as soon as they’ve all collected their plates. Dick’s burger has onions, spinach, and a fried egg on it. “What are we to expect with all of this? What was- what was that guy's name, Tim?”
“Superboy Prime.”
“What was this Amazon Prime’s guy's goal?”
Bruce, who’s burger is blue cheese and roasted mushrooms, considers this. “He wanted to change the timelines to something he considered more correct.”
Dick pulls a disgusted face, before tearing into his fries.
Tim, who’s burger is just a simple tomato and cheeseburger, has a contemplated sort of look. “What did he consider the correct timeline?”
Clark, with his barbeque monstrosity, shrugs. “We don’t know. His first plan of action was to try to usurp myself and to be the ‘Superman’ of this world.’
Kon’s now pulling a face, copied from Dick, but his alien muscles pull his skin in strange and uncanny ways. “That seems rather short sighted of him.” Kon’s own burger is just plain. He’s still new at this eating thing and likes to take things slowly. “He’s also sort of taken a name away from me, hasn’t he?”
The table erupts into noise, denial and trying to shut that line of thinking down.
But they all sort of know.
Superboy isn’t a name that Kon can take anymore. He can’t just be a single step down from Superman. The villain took that name off the table pretty permanently. It’s tarnished by the news running nonstop about the effect of the dimension dilation that’s nearly to Gotham.
It’s been as minor as people having the color of their shirt changed, all the way to changing around families and people who weren’t there yesterday appearing as if nothing was wrong.
Gotham is holding its breath. Looking to the horizon, wishing that the wave would only affect them positively. For the clown to stay down, for the current supervillains to continue their roster and not have any nasty, terrible surprises.
Tim reaches, grabs Kon by the hand with a shaky smile. “We’ll figure it out.” Tim tells him. “Dick’s good at names, an expert even, he’ll help you out.”
Dick nods, “Absolutely! I couldn’t be Robin forever. I had to choose something new when the time was right. We can even look into more Kryptonian myths!”
The topic switches now, to something more light hearted.
--
They eat dinner together, before all converging into the study to listen to the news, the police scanner on low while the news palsy on the TV on mute. They’re preparing for the worst.
Alfred is off, cleaning the nearby hallway, removing dust covers and folding them to put away, the sound of his busy work only barely covered by the police scanner. Dick’s pacing, one way on his feet, the next on his hands. Nervous energy jumping out, conversation starting and stopping and starting again. Bruce is sitting at his desk, typing out emails and checking the Justice League for any new potential information about what’s happening. Live updates in real time.
Tim’s on his phone, leaning against Kon and showing him the text conversation, letting Kon text himself every now and again. Kon might be physically three-ish years older than Tim, but Tim’s found a good friend in Kon, despite the age and size difference.
Clark is looking at the books on the second floor of Bruce’s study, reading the titles and tracing the spines.
These books are well loved. Their spines are soft from use, not cracked carelessly. There’s a clear reverence in the way these books have been treated, the titles faded from handling and time.
“It’s hit us.” Bruce says, his voice strong in the quiet room. “Prime’s dimension dilation hit us. We're preparing for anomalies now.”
Clark forces himself to focus on the books. Some of them are first editions. He wonders if some are signed.
One in particular has been given a special kind of attention, over and over again. The title almost entirely faded, the top showing fraying wear.
L'Homme au Masque de Fer, Dumas.
Clark plucks it from the shelf, holding it gently in his own hands. The front has a golden engraving on it, some fleur de lis design that trails into the beginnings of the Iron Mask. It’s beautiful, priceless. There’s a heaviness about it, dangerously so.
“What’s that?”
They all look at Kon, who’s got his entire head tilted, eyes unfocused and confused. His eyebrows are mashed together in that strange way he hasn’t perfectly copied yet, that makes him look more like a cartoon character than fully human.
“What are you hearing?” Tim asks, twisting around to face Kon on the couch. “What’s it sound like?”
Kon shakes his head, eyes looking to the west, across the manor grounds to a point none of the rest of them can see. “It’s- I’ve never heard that before.”
Clark stretches his own senses, over Gotham, flexing, hearing the sound of children crying, of mothers yelling, of fathers getting home. Of aunts and uncles and siblings and people who didn’t have any family, of friends and coworkers and lovers. The sound of vehicles, the sound of transportation. Of elevators and escalators and movement and snoring and of waking up and of sex and of fights and of making up. There’s the sound of buildings being built, buildings being torn down, and everything in between. The sound of life.
Gotham is loud. The deafening sounds of its iron bars rattling in the wicked coastal winds make it impossible to hear anything specific.
Kon’s up now, fully standing, his movements jerky as he tries to figure out the sound he’s hearing.
“It’s breathing but- the heart- it’s wrong.” Kon’s voice pitches high in distress, that familiar whine rumbling up-
Clark’s there, before anybody else can be, bundling Kon to him, releasing his own call back in that deep gravel roll back.
Kon’s panicking, eyes going wild as they dart around, trying to locate-
“What.” Kon’s hands are scratching against Clark’s forearms, his fingernails digging into skin. “Why is- It’s screaming.”
“Kon!” Tim’s there, pulling at Kon’s hands, careful not to get caught in an impossible grip. Dick’s right behind him, trying to hold Kon’s face, petting through his hair in comfort.
“It’s screaming!” Kon’s voice is so distorted through the rumbling whine that his vowels are slurring together as he sobs. “It’s not alive yet and it’s- it’s screaming!”
Alfred busts into the room, eyes wild, panicked, looking around and counting, making sure that everybody’s here.
Bruce comes to Kon. Gently pushing his sons out of the way, holding onto Kon’s shoulders, catching his eye. Breathing deeply, humming as close to that gravel roll as he can. Getting close, blocking out whatever Kon is trying to look at, trying to see.
“Kon.” Bruce’s words are low, sharp, pointed. “Kon, look at me, breathe. Where is the noise coming from?”
Kon takes a massive gasp of air, like he just remembered how.
“Take Clark there,” Bruce tells Kon, holding onto his shoulders with all his strength, trying to ground the poor kid. “Take Clark there, save them, okay?”
Kon lets out a single, heart wracking sob.
Voice firm, only broken up by continuing the rumble gravel roll underneath it all “Take Clark there, Kon, you can do this. Save them.”
Bruce’s fingers sting from where they used to be holding tight.
Kon is gone, and with him, Clark.
Dick’s already out the door, pulling out his phone, pulling up trackers. Tim’s right on Dick’s heel, the two of them running.
Their father does the only thing he can do.
He follows.
--
Kon’s halfway through the dirt before Clark even realizes that they’ve stopped.
They haven’t gone far, no.
In fact, they’re still on Manor grounds.
Kon’s on his knees, hands tearing through the silt. The stone had already been tossed aside, the first thing Kon had done when he had landed was crack it. There was something wrong. There was something wrong.
It had started off with the strange wave that had passed. Sure, it was shaky and strange but it just simply continued to roll, moving like a heavy slow moving tide. Kon had thought that the strange magical wave was it, that their worrying would end there-
But no.
The second Kon had begun to relax, that was when the wrong-no-bad had started.
The ragged breath of broken air, the stuttering sluggish movement of retreating fungus, of rot erasing away, the way the da-dum of a heart only kicked into gear after the first pleas had passed the lips of the monster under the gravedirt.
Kon manages to hit the top of the concrete support , in the space it takes for a choked off gasp to erupt from the lungs that the bacterial cultures are still leaking out of.
Crack!
The support sounds underneath Kon’s palms. The tactile telekinesis rumbles, grabbing at the dirt that’s falling into the desperately dug hole and flinging it out at high speed. There’s a horrific mess of dirt as Kon plays the game of excavator.
The concrete fails. The hole is bust through, the smell is horrendous.
Rot, dirt, wet earth, decay, blood, chemicals.
There’s no vault here, nothing protecting the coffin from the elements. The bottom of the simple concrete support has been left open, allowing the holes that had been drilled into the bottom of the simple pine to have open and unfettered access to the ground below.
Kon rips the door off of that simple pine box, shreds through the wood like it’s nothing more than wet paper pulp.
The boy in the simple pine coffin gasps out a choked off scream and opens his eyes.
--
Dick’s running.
He’s sprinting into the night, the sun has long since set. His brother is beside him, breathing so silently that it’s hard to even tell he’s there at all.
Dick’s heart beats like thunder during a storm, panic laces through his blood. There’s a sort of desperation that comes from a situation like this that can only come from experience.
A desperation of somebody who has lost and does not want to lose again.
Kon had panicked, in the study, had panicked so hard and with such a violent outburst that there was nothing to do but allow that energy out. By the time Dick was following, the aliens had already gone.
The rest of them were just following the trail of destruction.
The door that had been blown open, the furniture that had been knocked over and down. The front door is almost completely off its hinges. The path through the forest was cleared by a hurricane force.
There’s the sort of destruction that plowed through trees thicker than Bruce, thicker than a couch, thicker than-
There are trees that are hundreds of years old, rooted deep, knocked over in the panic of a child.
Of a child who smiles too wide at things he finds funny. A child who looks just like his father. A child who’s scared of the horror games Tim plays but stays up and watches anyway. That child is something like a brother, already, and Dick vowed that he was never losing another family member ever again, not after-
The site is familiar, when they stumble onto it.
About half a mile away from the house, an old historic bit of land. The tree’s overhanging this bit of the property, thick roots and old crumbling walls, with stone monoliths rising high. There’s statues here, of angels.
There’s also Clark, standing at the edge of an open grave in his pajama bottoms, bare feet in the messy, muddy dirt, looking like he’s seen a ghost-
Kon, holding a dead man, stands at the edge of a hole in the ground.
Dick’s heart stops.
Tim, beside Dick, just a step behind gasps, loud and audible, hands throwing up and covering his mouth.
Bruce’s thundering footfalls race into the clearing, a tad bit slower than his sons, the fading echo of a desperate call on his lips.
They all stop, shaking, and look into the face of Jason Todd.
--
Covered in dirt, sweat, and a bit of lichen, Jason leans hard against the shoulder of Kon.
The suit he died in has half rotted off his body, but the body underneath is whole, hale, and somewhat healthy.
A little thinner, sure, but Jason’s still got his too wide shoulders he was just barely beginning to grow into, the height that he was finally getting after waiting for a growth for two years. He was just in the middle of that terrible stage where you’re not fully an adult, not yet, but you’re not a child either. The ripe sweet center that’s almost there, but not quite yet.
His braces are still on, peeking out between his busted up lips. His eyes are losing the lingering dread, and confusion is taking its place.
Jason’s skin is pale, but getting healthier looking by the minute. The bruises are stark on his skin as the blood rushes back to the surface. The bruises are getting both better and worse, losing that flush of death but filling in and getting darker with life. His hair is curly, but thin and matted up strangely on his head. He’s so filthy. He’s the best thing Bruce has ever seen.
“Jason?” Bruce breathes, just barely into the night air, afraid of breaking the spell.
The spell’s made of stronger stuff, it seems, because Jason takes a shaky, smoke filled breath, and smiles in a sideways sort of fashion. “Hey Bruce,” he croaks out, voice weak from disuse and-
From disuse.
Jason coughs, a huge hacking thing, and tries again. “Hey Dad, what have I missed?”
One step forward, then another-
Bruce moves, moves like lightning to grab his son, brought back to him from somewhere where Bruce was afraid he could not follow. He holds Jason tight against him, too afraid to ever let go again. Jason is still cold, so cold, feeling like ice in Bruce’s hands.
But he’s Warmer than the last time Bruce held him like this and instead of cooling, he’s getting warmer.
“Oh, Jason,” Bruce whispers into those disgusting, matted curls. “We’ll tell you all about it.”
Notes:
Hello, and welcome to the end :)
Thank you, Kay, for betaing this chapter, I can't do it without the friends who put up with me rambling madness into a discord. Thank you for Birb, who's kinds words helped me actually finish this, and thank you to the people who commented along the way! (That's you!)
Also, tell current me that I'm doing a good job, because I just got out of surgery on the day this gets posted, and I'm probably delirious out of my own head with sleepytimes medication and pain management meds.
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