#superboy week

Bart flopped onto the rug. “Man, I am pooped. Thanks for letting us crash here, dude.”

“‘Course,” Kon internally winced, because belly-flopping onto the floor didn’t look fun. 

Their mission had been particularly taxing that night—the League of Assassins somehow embedded cyborg parts onto resurrected corpses and it was just a mess. No wonder nobody wanted to make the journey back to their own houses. Kon didn’t take as much damage compared to his friends, but his muscles felt like lead and he wanted nothing to do with assassins, zombies, or cyborgs (no offense to Vic) for the next month.

He tried not to linger his gaze as Tim took off his shirt and adjusted the bandage around his torso. Though it wasn’t like Tim would know with his back toward Kon. 

He was effectively snapped out of his trance by a knock on the door. 

“Kids? Can we come in?” Clark asked.

Kon glanced at Tim, Bart, and Cassie. They gave him the okay. 

“Yeah, come in.”

Clark opened the door a crack and glanced at the four with Lois by his side. “Just checking in, anything you need?”

Cassie raised her hand. “I actually need to borrow some clothes.”

“Us too,” said Bart and Tim.

Kon got up and rummaged through his closet. He tossed a yellow Kid Flash hoodie and matching red basketball shorts to Bart. “You left your stuff here last time so you can take that. As for Tim…” He picked a Superboy t-shirt and gray sweatpants. “You can borrow my stuff.”

He rolled his eyes at Bart’s not-so-subtle “ooh”. 

Lois smiled at Cassie. “I can lend you something from my closet, sweetheart. Come with me.”

Cassie returned the smile. “That’d be wonderful, Ms. Lane.”

As the gals left, Tim took the clothes from Kon’s hand. Their fingertips brushed, leaving Kon frozen like a wax statue. Luckily, Tim didn’t seem to notice.

“I call shower,” he said.

“I can order pizza in the meantime,” Clark said. “You’re probably all hungry, but it’s too late to cook anything.”

“Sounds good.” Kon gave a thumbs-up.

He and Bart changed in opposite corners of the room, both done in a blurred tornado. 

Cassie returned a couple minutes later wearing a sweater and yoga pants with her hair in a ponytail. “Tim’s showering?”

“Yep,” Kon said.

“As expected—he’ll shower anywhere but his own house,” she said. “Everyone remember the plan?”

.

.

Read the rest on Ao3

That had been last week, but it felt like years ago, now. Because that bickering conversation was before Conner had found out he had no mother; before he found out his father had lied to him his entire life; before he found out that half his DNA came from fucking Superman-- which Dad had said he couldn’t ever, ever tell anybody about, no matter how cool it was.

Cool, and brain-numbing, and sort of sad, because Conner didn’t have a mother.

Conner didn’t have a mother-- was the only single human (half-human) on the planet who didn’t have a mother-- everybody had a mother! Even Superman had a mother!! And so, in a way, Conner was even more freakish than Superman-- an alien! From outer space!

It was funny, because it’s not like he’d had one before. His father had always answered Conner’s questions about his mother with evasive half-answers, “you don’t need to know her name”, she was a IVF donor, a surrogate, she “wasn’t a mother in any real sense.” But Conner had always assumed that he had, you know, an X-chromosome from a human female-- that genetically he was at least in lockstep with his peers.

Once when he was ten, in a bid to flush out more information, Conner had asked his father “What if my mother gave me some freakish hereditary disease?! What if I have Huntington’s or something?! What if I’m a paranoid schizophrenic?! WHAT IF I HAVE HEMOPHILIA?!”

His father had calmly reassured Conner that LexCorp doctors had conducted a full panel of genetic tests on him as a baby, and that he “couldn’t be healthier than if he was engineered.”

He can almost appreciate just how spectacular an example of “lie by omission” it really was.

Conner stretches his toes, glancing over at his bed stand, and the file laying on top of his phone. The file with old printouts dating back to 2002, before Conner was born. Not even born, but... “attained successful fertilization?” Ugh. There were charts and lab notes, detailing every step of Conner’s conception, dates with concise little observations like “embryo viable” and “rate of cellular mitosis normal”. In the file, they didn’t even call him by his name. He had a designation-- “CNR-15”. A namesake so depressingly desolate that Conner hadn’t gotten out of bed for half a day.

And it was sort of a bummer, too. Superman at least had cool powers, like super-speed and super-strength, and laser vision, and he could fly! So far the only thing Conner could do was cry hard enough to break windows. It was just his luck that the half of DNA he got from his super Dad was the lame half.

He grabs for his phone and clicks it open, pulling up the selfie photo from Saturday night. He stares at it, zooming in and out with a pinch of his fingers. He didn’t even look real-- he looked big and bright and made up-- the deep blue spandex, the S-shield shining and proud over his chest like one of King Arthur’s knights, the red cape falling regally from his broad shoulders.

“Clark,” he whispers, feeling the shape of the name in his mouth, bookended by the harsh ‘K’ sounds and the last voiceless, coronal stop of the T. “Clark..Kent. Clarkent. Clark Kent is Superman. Superman is...” my Dad, he finishes wordlessly. He finds it hard to say out loud.

Conner reaches out a finger, touches Superman’s big smiling face, noticing the sharp, slightly crooked incisors, which Conner had had before the braces in middle school. They had similar noses, too, he thinks. And the hair of course.

People had always said, you must look like your mother. Besides the eyes there wasn’t much there, which used to make him sad. He’d wanted to look like a Luthor, not the nameless egg donor who hadn’t even bothered to leave a name, much less a birthday card or an explanation.

Of course. None of that was relevant anymore.

The truth is mapped out in front of him, right here on his phone, and it’s spelled out in the file with charts of sequenced DNA, labeled neatly with abbreviations Conner doesn’t understand. There are photographs of what his father had called his maturation chamber, progress shots of a little floating tadpole Conner, then a peanut-sized blob, then fingers and toes, then something resembling an actual human--

Half-human.

Conner’s thoughts are cut off by three efficient raps at his door.

“I’m UP--”

Mercy pokes her head in the door, probably making sure he was decent.

“That doesn’t look like ‘UP’ to me.” She pushes into the room. “Let’s go, your Dad’s almost off his conference call--”

Uh oh. She’s got that gleam in her eyes.

“Mercy- DON’T, I’m getting up-- HEY!”

The bottom covers and sheet yank cruelly up and off, and the soft little cave of warm air is rudely invaded. Conner scrambles up, regrouping to tuck the comforter back under his feet.

“You know one day you’re going to do that when I’m naked under here and traumatize us both,” Conner grumbles, throwing his phone on the stand. He swings his legs around but waits to flip the covers back from his lap.

“Do you mind--”

Mercy snorts but turns, squaring her shoulders. “Nothing I haven’t seen before.”

Right. Not weird at all.

“Actually--” he calls from the walk-in closet, pulling a school uniform from its hanger. “About that-- if I was born in a lab, then you didn’t really change my diapers, did you?”

He pulls the slacks up, and peeks his head out to glare at the dark-haired bodyguard.

“I met you when you were three, and you were still shitting your pants.”

“Oh bullshit--”

He and Mercy have this thing about cursing in front of each other. His Dad used to make him put $20 in the swear jar because cursing was both ‘unattractive and a sign of the unintelligent.’ But Mercy always laughed when he said ‘fuck’ so he’d made a point to say it as much as possible from the time he was little and she’d caught on.

The buttons on his shirt go all crooked, and he has to start again.

“So-- you remember the lab?”

He hears her fingers still from whatever she was messing with on his desk. “I do.”

He finished with the buttons and steps out of the closet in socked feet, pulling the tie across his shoulders.

“Well what was it like?”

She turns, putting down the Batman action figure. “It was a lab. It was very clean.”

“Well that’s... illuminating.” He grumbles, and pulls the ends of the tie even. Fat end over skinny end-- “I’d like to go see it soon.”

She shook her head. “The lab was destroyed a few months after we took you home.”

Balls. The tie got twisted around somehow.

“What happened?” he yanks the knot loose.

“Your father burned it down.”

“He torched his own lab?!”

Mercy purses her lips in kind of a wry smile. “No. Your other father.”

“SUPERMAN burned down my lab?” he drops the ends of his tie. “Was he trying to kill me?!”

Mercy laughs, and slaps his dumb hands away from the tie. “Here, give it up.”

“Thanks,” he grimaces. “Why’d he burn it down? Did he use his laser eyes?!”

“He wasn’t trying to kill you,” she slips one end under the other. “Chin up-- he knew you were with us already. I think he was worried Lex was trying to replicate the process. And yes--” she smiles. “From the looks of it, he used his ‘laser eyes’.”

Mercy tugged the knot into place, tucking his collar down, smoothing the edges.

“It’s just--” there’s a strange tightness under his ribs. “It’s weird he didn’t come say hello. Right? Even if they had some kind of agreement, or whatever.”

Mercy’s eyes get all soft, the way only Conner can manage to make them.

He sniffs, tugging at his shirt cuffs. “I think I lost my cufflinks.”

She finds them immediately, underneath the copy of Infinite Jest split open and bookmarked by the flat glass surface of his desk.

“They were trying to protect you,” she grabs his wrist, matching the ends of the first little purple and gold piece. “Both of them.”

“Seems like an excuse.” He switches arms.

“Well he’s got his little red panties in a twist about you now.” She slips the other piece into place.

“Mercy, that’s weird--” he turns. “Where are my shoes?”

“Under your bed. What do you want for breakfast?”

“Hmm...” he sits on the bed, fishing out the shiny black oxfords. “Can I have French toast?!”

“An undignified choice,” she grimaces, but pulls out her phone to ring the kitchen staff in the LexCorp restaurant one floor down.

“And delicious!” he flips the second shoe from hand to hand like Mr. Rogers, which he used to watch on TV with Mercy in the long, golden afternoons in the living room before Dad came home from work. Sometimes she’d let him switch it to the five o’clock news, which always ended with a segment called ‘Today with Superman’ about the day’s exploits-- and sometimes the pretty news anchor Melissa Brunner would have caught a quick interview with Superman himself and asked him cool stuff like what his favorite food was (Mom’s meatloaf with ketchup) or his favorite color (anything but green) or if he was a dog or a cat person (definitely dogs).

Mercy plucks his school blazer from the back of his chair and holds it up so Conner could slip his arms through.

He turns and she tugs it into place, briefly rubbing her thumb across a pin bearing the Luthor family crest. “All ready?”

Conner ducks his chin, holding the fabric out to see. “Maybe I should get one of those Superman pins, huh?”

“It’s your funeral.” She rolls her eyes, and holds open the door, sighing impatiently while he spruces his hair into place with a little gel.

“God, you’re worse than Kit.”

Kit. With the hair-care empire. Hardy HAR-HAR.

“Don’t be such a bit--”

She gets him into a headlock long enough to mess up his hair and elicit an undignified squeal, dragging him out of the room and down the hallway, his fingers still tacky from the gel.

“Goddammit--” he tries combing his hair back down. It really threw his “artfully messy” look off equilibrium and into the “slob” end of the spectrum.

As soon as they hit the hallway her face shifts back into “professional Mercy” mode, as it always was around his father.

His father, who was waiting for them in the kitchen, a phone pressed up against his ear. He looked up, waving them forward with one hand.