#definedself

❝ oh shit ! ❞ he’s bumped into a stranger because he wasn’t looking ahead. lesson learned. ❝ if i damaged anything because of coffee spills or something, i can give you my number and you can send the dry cleaning bill to me. ❞

Sometimes (okay, basically all the time), being able to fly was awesome. It was particularly awesome on a day like today, all open blue skies and barely any wind to knock him off-course. It’s a bird! It’s a plane! someone had shouted a few blocks over, and Jon had laughed. No, they’d be disappointed. It wasn’t even Superman. It was still sick, though, being able to give the kid a wave and keep going, all red and blue and streaming cape and wind-swept hair. Yeah, sometimes, it felt good to be Superboy. It felt even better when the flight ended in a fire escape with a familiar scowling figure waiting on it. Without landing, without so much as grabbing the railing, Jon dipped down and leaned in to kiss them, then pulled back with a cocky grin.

It was a new world, a new city. Everything was a little backwards, a little upside-down, a little off. (And the dead were rising now? Someone should probably look into that.) There wasn’t a Fortress of Attitude here, and there wasn’t the farm, or even Wayne Manor, but some things were constant. There would always be bad guys, there would always be heroes, Krypto would always drag Jon through the air chasing a squirrel, and there would always be Damian Wayne.

They weren’t kids anymore. They hadn’t been for a long time, long before Jon had taken a family field trip to space and come back older and taller, years lived in a matter of weeks. Years without their best friend. Things had been off since--the Pizza Rolls in the Fortress fridge looked like relics of a bygone era, the muscle memory reflexes at MarioKart had gone rusty, and something was weird between them, something he didn’t know how to fix.

At least they were here together, wherever here was. Jon didn’t want to do this without Damian again. So he showed up at their door, pizza in one hand, Switch in the other, ready to either start to set things right again or to continue ignoring everything and playing video games past daybreak. As long as they weren’t alone.