We're Damaged (But Your Love's Too Good to Loose)
PAIRINGS: superboy prime x reader | WC: 11k
SUMMARY: you grew up with clark on earth prime, and everything was perfect until the sky turned red…
WARNINGS: CONTAINS SPOILERS! angst, violence and blood, emotional abuse, physical assault/minor injuries, PTSD themes, dissociation, existential dread, angst with a happy ending, fluff if you squint your eyes, canon compliant (mostly), toxic love.
A/N: hey so first time posting a fic hahaha… icl this turned out longer than expected and probably isn’t all that good and a tad bit boring since this is my first time! i lowkey enjoyed writing though so i may aswell post more in the future because i got a looot of unposted stuff in my drafts. honestly, this was supposed to be a series but then i realized if it is i prolly wont finish it so forgive me if some things aren’t as fleshed out. also.. the timeline may not be accurate because its been a good while since ive read infinite crisis lol and english isn’t my first language
the sky above your beloved earth, or earth prime as you learned it was called, had always been a brilliant, beautiful, unremarkable shade of blue. it was the kind of sky that belonged to a world where the most exciting thing that could happen on a random tuesday was a pop quiz in geometry (which to note, was not the good sort of exciting, you always hated geometry), or a new issue of action comics hitting the stands at the local pharmacy.
you remember that sky so incredibly fondly. you remember the way the summer heat used to rest softly on your skin as you walked the smallville streets alongside your friends, the way the air smelled like cut grass and always a little salty before a thunderstorm came through which gave you a perfect head-start on when to prepare for rain or when not to.
but most of all, the thing you remember the clearest, was a boy named after a comic book hero and who wanted to be a hero so badly himself. clark. clark kent. not the superman, or well, superboy-prime everyone else knows (and formerly knew) him as on new earth, or the cosmic terrifying anomaly or the monster who punched reality until it shattered. just clark.
he had been a boy with messy black colored hair and glasses that always sat slightly uneven on his nose. a boy who could rant for hours and hours and hours about one topic.
the boy who would sit with you on the hood of his dad’s beat up truck, sharing a basket of chili fries from the local diner, arguing passionately about whether batman could actually beat superman in a fair fight (which you still don't believe batman could, and you will die on that hill if you must).
‘‘its about preparation,’’ clark had insisted to you one evening, waving a fry in irritation to your disagreement which made you struggle to keep in a laugh - he had always been so easy to throw off the rockers, and god did you enjoy doing it.
the grease of the fries stained his fingers, and he wiped them carelessly on his jeans as he noticed it, much to aunt naomi’s future dismay. ‘‘batman is a tactician! tactician,’’ he emphasized. ‘‘superman is just raw power. if bruce has time to plan, he wins. he always wins! thats the whole point!’’
‘‘clark, superman can literally just throw the moon at him.’’ you countered, stealing a fry from his basket. ‘‘i don’t think any planning or usage of utility belt gadgets is going to save batman from getting the full, concentrated power of the moon thrown at his ass at the speed of light. its the moon.’’
‘‘um, actually, in the comics superman is faster than the speed of light,’’ he began which made you groan and roll your eyes.
such a nerd, but still so endearing to you. at your visible annoyance, he had laughed. that bright, unburdened sound that seemed to belong to an entire different lifetime. a laugh you had adored. ‘‘you just don’t appreciate the nuance of the narrative. it’s not just about throwing the moon or that he simply could y’know? its about the psychological warfare and what's behind it—’’
‘‘i appreciate that you’re such a nerd,’’ you interrupted him before his umpteenth-ramble, teasing him and bumping your shoulder against his.
he had bumped you back in response, his cheeks flushing slightly. ’‘heeey! i’m just an enthusiast. that’s like… completely different!”
sure bud.
that was the clark you knew and adored. the enthusiast. the boy who was named after a hero and loved them so much he wanted to be one, even in a world where heroes only existed in four-color print.
clark kent, son of jerry and naomi kent. he showed you his scars and flaws, and in return, he let you pretend that you had none. he was kind and he was earnest and he was yours. you had known him since kindergarten, back when he was just a quiet kid who got picked on for having the same name as a comic book character. you had defended him then, and you had defended him every day since.
you remembered the halloween in eighth grade. he had gone as superman, (naturally, who else would clark kent go as?). aunt naomi had sewn the costume herself, and he had worn it with a mixture of pride and profound embarrassment. you had gone as lois lane after his repeated asking (you did not know back then, that they were lovers. a much similar fate you would share with lois).
you had worn a trench coat and were carrying a notepad around, mostly just to make him smile. and he had smiled. he smiled and his face was like the sun - he had looked at you like you were the only person in the room.
‘‘you make a good lois,’’ he had whispered, his voice cracking slightly.
‘‘you make a good superman.’’ you had replied, fingers running along the giant ‘s’ on his chest.
soon enough after halloween, clark would confess to you and you would become boyfriend and girlfriend.
it was a simple, but happy life. a life of watching comic live action movies at the local theater after clark’s relentless begging, sneaking beers from his dad’s garage, and bowling on friday nights.
it was a life of being a normal teen, of thinking you had all the time in the world to figure out who you were going to be.
the two of you had stayed in that room standing together for several long minutes, your first awareness of each other undimmed and uninterrupted by your surroundings. slowly, clark’s face turned red and his face split even more into a smile like a burst of sunlight - a sun that would warm you for what it felt like a long time, until the day of your last farewell, when the cold that has dried out your beloved earth had suddenly gotten to him.
because then, the sky turned red.
the memory of that day was burned into your mind, like a massive jagged scar across your consciousness you are forced to live with your entire life long. it had started like any other day, as most bad days do. you were sitting on the bleachers at the highschool football field, watching clark try out for the team. he wasn’t very good, but he tried so hard to be.
then out of nowhere, the air pressure dropped. the sky, that brilliant, beautiful, unremarkable blue you so loved, bled into a terrifying, apocalyptic crimson (a shade of color you would come to hate dearly).
the clouds twisted into unnatural shapes you had never seen before, and a very low, resonant hum vibrated through the ground, rattling your teeth in your skull.
with the way the entire fucking planet was practically shaking, it felt like your teeth were about to fall out your damn mouth.
panic erupted and people were screaming, running and pointing at the sky. hell, some idiotic fucks even took out their phones to record instead of running for their lives.
you had scrambled down the bleachers, searching frantically for clark who had disappeared from the middle of the field, because of fucking course he did.
luckily, you found him near the fifty-yard line instead, staring up at the sky with an expression of absolute awe and terror… mostly awe.
‘‘clark!’’ you had screamed, grabbing his arm. ‘‘are you actually insane? standing here like some weirdo, we have to go!’’
even as you tried pulling him, he hadn’t moved. he just kept staring at the sky like a man possessed. ‘‘do you see them?’’ he whispered.
‘‘see what?’’ you demanded, still pulling on him and strangely enough, he wasn’t budging at all.
‘‘the heroes,’’ he said. and his voice sounded strange and manic in a way you had never heard it be before.
and then, the impossible happened. a man descended from the red sky, wearing the exact costume aunt naomi had sewn for him that one halloween. superman. the real superman, (kal-l from earth two. you only figured out from which earth and who he was exactly later). superman landed on the field, the ground cracking beneath his boots.
‘‘clark kent.’’ the man had said, his voice booming across the chaotic field. ‘‘we need your help.’’
clark had looked at you, his eyes wide, terrified and… exhilarated?
honestly, you should’ve seen his choice coming. it was clark afterall, your clark. the boy obsessed with becoming a superhero. why wouldn’t he accept an offer from his absolute idol to save the world? it was stupid to expect anything else.
of course, you had pleaded anyways.
‘‘i have to go.’’ he said, his voice trembling.
‘‘no,’’ you had pleaded, gripping his arm tighter. ‘‘clark, you can’t leave. please. don’t leave me! this is fucked! you don't even know those weirdos!’’
his brows furrowed and he looked sad for a moment, but that wasn’t enough to keep him. ‘‘i’ll come back,’’ he promised, pressing a desperate, fleeting kiss to your forehead. if the situation had been different, you would’ve been tripping over your shoe laces and gushing.
but you hadn’t.
this wasn’t some fairytale romance where he’d sweep you off your feet and carry you off into the horizon.
this was your damn reality, and clark was leaving you for men wearing their underwear over their damn clothes.
‘‘i’ll come back for you, okay? i promise. but i have to do this. i’m meant for this - to be super.’’
before you could even muster up a reply, he had flown away with superman who gave you an empathetic glance. fucking flown - you didn’t even know he could fly!
you couldn’t even fully process what was happening at the time, the sky turning red, literal superman taking clark away?
so to say that you were abandoned by clark would be unjust, he didn’t expect the earth to dissolve into nothingness later on, afterall, he tried to save it. but that you felt abandoned, and horribly so, is true.
the neverending garden of purity ends the second you step on a flower - your beloved earth didn’t die in a day. the gods aren’t that kind.
you had returned to your parents alone, who cradled you and held you as they cried. the world slowly turned into anti-matter around you, washing over your universe.
people were dying and the world erupted into chaos.
your parents dissolved into the anti-noise soon after everything went wrong, they tried to protect you until the very end.
then it was aunt naomi and uncle jerry, they didn’t stop looking for their son until it was their turn to dissolve.
you didn’t have the heart nor the words to explain what had happened. hell, you couldn’t even fully fathom it yourself.
yet you still had hope for some time, even after they disappeared, that clark would come back for you, as he had promised.
you sat alone in the end, watching the crimson sky as your home kept disappearing.
you closed your eyes and wondered if clark knew what was happening to his home… he probably didn’t. maybe it was to comfort yourself from the impending doom of death, but you’d like to imagine that if he knew his world was actively disappearing, he would’ve come back. for his family. for you.
he was probably out there being super alongside that weird superman guy who took him. and even in your misery, you couldn’t find it in yourself to blame him. after a while, you had stopped hoping for him to come too, only hoping he was safe wherever he was and that this wouldn’t hurt him too much. he had always felt everything so strongly, afterall.
all you could do now was wait for the end and the end came.
you had been seventeen when he left, and you had been seventeen ever since.
and for years, or what you believed to be years, you thought you were dead. or rather, you didn’t think at all. you were simply unmade, a casualty of a cosmic crisis too vast for your small mind to comprehend.
and you think you’re fine. not understanding, i mean. it’s easier to just cope with the fact that you existed in a state of non-being, a ghost haunting the mere edges of reality than some other crazy explanation.
but, of course, the multiverse is such a strange, fractured thing, isn’t it? when alexander luthor and clark shattered the walls of their paradise dimension, the resulting temporal shockwave had unintended consequences.
fragments of dead universes washed up on the shores of new earth.
and somehow, by the grace of the universe, you were one of them.
you woke up in an alleyway in metropolis, gasping for air, your lungs burning as if you had been holding your breath for a decade.
you were wearing the same summer clothes you had on the day the sky turned red. the world around you was so damn loud, chaotic and just fundamentally wrong.
the heroes here weren’t confined on the pages of comic books like back home; they flew overhead, real and really fucking imposing.
but they were so much darker than in the comics and so much angrier. the city felt so heavy with a cynicism that your home had never known and it scared you.
the news broadcasts you could see on the giant screens of sky scraping towers were filled with violence, corruption and utter despair.
it wasn’t exactly hard to figure everything out, but it still took you a while after doing your own research in public libraries and finding homeless shelters who wouldn’t try to send you into the adoption system.
thanks to this thing called ‘daily planet’, you learned what happened to your universe (not that they explicitly said it, but based on the video footages and your own experiences, you had a pretty good guess) and essentially the multiverse.
the destruction of blüdhaven, the slaughter of the green lanterns, the death of superboy, or connor kent if you remember his name correctly, and you learned the name of the monster responsible for it all.
superman-prime.
this version of metropolis was the complete opposite of what you remembered of your beloved home.
it felt more like a monument to a future that was a complete lie. to everyone else here, it was the ‘city of tomorrow’, protected by a god amongst men in a red cape.
to you, it was a graveyard of memories you weren’t supposed to have.
the butterflies of hope for a good life in your stomach have long since turned into skull moths crawling up your throat and you can’t help but throw them up.
and no matter how good superman seemed, you couldn’t bring yourself to like or trust him. remembering what happened what felt like an eternity but also just yesterday ago.
if you’re going to trust a hero just because he wears a cape, you might aswell trust a snake just because it doesn’t have hands to scratch you with.
you lived in a studio apartment in suicide slum (a name that felt far too on-the-nose for your current state of mind). the walls were so damn thin that you could hear your neighbors cough and the constant, loud ass honks of the city’s traffic.
it was a small and cramped place - absolute shithole if you were to be honest with yourself. it smelled faintly of old paper and damp wood at times due to the rain. but it was yours. or at least, this was the space you occupied. nothing felt really like ‘yours’ in this god forsaken planet.
you basically were a ghost. nothing more and nothing less.
it felt like the only plausible word befitting enough to describe your current state of mind. you walked through the streets of new earth, yes, but you didn’t belong in its soil.
you had no birth certificate, no social security number, no history and no family. you were a mere fragment of a world that had been erased, a glitch in the multiversal code.
you were all alone.
but you didn’t feel as terrible as when you first ended up here all by yourself. back then, in those first days, you were so alone that everyday was like eating your very own heart.
you had managed to secure a place at a small, local library, which was obviously how you paid for your apartment. it was an old and dusty place because most people were drawn to electronics nowadays, but it was enough.
you spent your days shelving biographies of people who probably never existed on your earth or were slightly different - and filing history books that were either completely different from what you knew or altered.
sometimes you would wander into the daily newspaper section. you would see the glossy covers of the latest ‘‘crisis’’ events, and you would feel a physical wave of nausea.
these weren’t stories to you anymore that you saw in one of clark's many comics.
they were crime scene photos. everytime you saw a drawing of superman, you didn’t see a hero; you saw the man who had taken clark away.
everytime you saw a mention of the green lanterns, you saw the victims of a boy who used to share his life with you. a boy who was a sun child once - now it seems there’s nothing left but rage.
and for what? a world he chose to leave despite your begging?
your friends (if you could call them that, they were very few), were martha and leo. martha was the head librarian who was too kind to ask you why you had no family and absolutely no history or anything else you'd usually need to get a job. she just saw how miserable (and possibly pathetic) you looked and gave you a job.
leo was the guy who ran the coffee cart on the corner. they were both nice people, but they were ‘‘new earth’’ people. they weren’t your people.
they lived in a world where the sky turning red was just another normal day.
they didn’t understand the fucking misery and ache and absolute hollowness of losing an entire universe.
you kept up with the news, of course. it was impossible not to. the giant screens in centennial park were always flickering with the latest exploits of the justice league.
you watched them with a grim, detached fascination as they rebuilt after what they had deemed ‘‘infinite crisis’’ aka the shit clark, or rather superman prime had caused.
you heard the talks of the monster they had apparently locked away in some part of the universe, the boy from another world who tried to destroy this one to ‘‘fix’’ everything.
to reassure the public, the masses were informed that the threat was safely tucked away guarded by fifty green lanterns very deep and far away in the universe.
and yet, despite all he’s done, you had hoped in a dark, selfish corner of your heart, that he was okay. and in another, louder corner, you hoped that he would never get out.
because you knew what happened when clark got angry.
even back home, he had an incredible hot temper. give a boy with a shit temper the powers of basically a god and there’s guaranteed to be wreckage.
the shift, of course, happened on a tuesday. it was always a fucking tuesday.
you were closing up the library, the sun setting behind the skyline of metropolis.
for some reason, the air felt more tense today than usual and you got random chills throughout your shift. like the hair on your arms would stand up at random which was really weird because it didn’t usually happen and shouldn’t be happening now.
deciding to brush it off because there’s nothing you can really do, you turned on the small, flickering television in the breakroom to catch the evening news, a habit born of desperate need to know where the monsters were. (if you meant the justice league or actual monsters is unknown even to you).
the screen came out as a chaotic mess of static due to the tv.
‘‘reports are coming in from across the globe,’’ the anchor stammered, her voice trembling. ‘‘it seems as though an unknown force has breached the atmosphere. they’re calling themselves the sinestro corps.’’
the camera cut to a shaky feed from the coast. the sky wasn’t red this time. it was a sickly and very ugly, blinding color of piss yellow.
thousands of streaks of light were descending like fallen stars, each one a warrior clad in black and gold, wielding massive rings.
and then, you saw him.
the camera zoomed in on a figure hovering above the wreckage of a military vessel. he wasn’t wearing the tattered remains of a blue suit anymore. he was encased in a new set of armor; yellow and giving off absolute villain vibes.
it looked like a mockery of the anti-monitor suit he had worn before, but sleeker and more predatory. on his chest the ‘‘s’’ shield was carved deep.
he wasn’t a boy anymore either. his face had hardened, his jawline sharp as a damn razor’s blade and his eyes glowing with a manic, solar-charged fury. he looked like a damn god of wrath.
‘‘superman-prime,’’ the reporter whispered, the name sounding like a death knell.
you watched in absolute horror as he reached down and tore a fighter jet out of the sky with one hand, crushing it like a soda can. he wasn’t even fighting them, he was enjoying it!
and he was laughing - the same laugh you had so adored and so missed. but there was something twisted and wrong and really fucking messed up about it.
it sounded cruel. and he was slaughtering people. real people.
you felt the bile rise in your throat at the sight, gripping the edge of the table for support so damn hard your knuckles turned paper white.
this was the boy who wanted to be a superhero.
this was the boy who promised he’d come back for you.
‘‘clark,’’ you whispered and suddenly, the television exploded into complete static. the lights in the library flickered for a second and then died, plunging the whole room into a suffocating darkness.
the fuck? you moved your hands to shield your body as the air pressure dropped so fast and hard your ears were about to pop, and the temperature in the room skyrocketed like hell.
the windows of the library fucking vaporized a second later!
a shockwave of heat and yellow light slammed into the room, throwing you back against the shelves. books tumbled down around you, but you were quick to scramble to your feet.
what the actual fuck? you coughed through the dust caused by the falling of the books, your heart hammering against your chest.
in the center of the ruined room, he was standing perfectly fine though.
the yellow piss colored armor radiated a very weird low frequency vibration that felt like it was rattling your bones.
the glow from his eyes was the only light in the room, two twins of pure, unadulterated rage. he looked like he had just stepped out of the heart of a damn star.
he didn’t move and merely stared at you.
‘‘i felt you,’’ he says finally.
his voice was so different. it wasn’t like the voice from your dreams and memories at all. it was resonant and powerful and felt like it could shatter the world. but underneath all that you could hear a tremor. a mix of relief and the innocence of joy.
‘‘how are you here? earth prime got ruined by them, didn’t it?’’ he began, ‘‘actually, it must’ve happened when we broke the paradise dimension, right? did the multiverse spit you back out? but that means you were alone for so long… m’sorry. m’so so sorry. because of those wannabe-hero-supervillains we were separated for so long, but not anymore.’’ he rambled and rambled and if you weren’t paralyzed with shock, you’d punch the air out of his lungs.
‘‘i was at the center of a sun, y’know,’’ he continued, taking a slow, heavy step toward you. the floorboards charred beneath his boots. ‘‘i was fighting the entire universe, fixing it, all the corrupted and evil stuff like a real hero, ,’’ he rambled on. god, he fucking rambled on. just like back then. and its so cruel.
its so fucking cruel.
‘‘i was killing everything that wasn’t real. actually, no not killing. fixing.. yeah. fixing everything. making things the way they were s’pposed to be. and then… then i felt a heartbeat. a real one.’’ he stopped a few feet away from you and the heat radiating off him was almost unbearable, the smell of ozone and burnt air filling your lungs.
he reached up with a gauntleted hand and unclasped his helmet. the metal hissed as it retracted, revealing his face.
you had seen his face on tv just a second ago, but the second between him putting his helmet back while he assumingely flew to you on and then seeing him take it off in front of you was immense.
he looked older, yes. there were lines of exhaustion and something you could only guess to be madness around his eyes.
but despite all that, he was still clark, wasn’t he? he was still the boy you lost all that time ago on that forsaken football field.
‘‘you’re here,’’ he whispered, his eyes searching yours with a desperate, terrifying intensity. ‘‘you’re actually here.’’
you looked at him, really looked at him - the armor, the blood on his hand, the monster he had become to ‘‘save’’ a world that was already gone. you looked at the man who had just murdered hundreds of people on live television.
‘‘clark,’’ you said, your voice trembling. ‘‘what have you done?’’
he didn’t flinch, albeit you could see his smile slightly twitching before a bigger, more terrifying one spread across his face - a burst of sunlight that felt like it was going to burn you alive.
‘‘i found you, thats what i’ve done.’’ he said, stepping into your space, and shit was his presence overwhelming. ‘‘i told you i’d come back. i promised.’’
well a tad bit too late, ain’t it? you weren’t able to get those words out as his yellow-piss colored gauntlet hand moved to hover just inches from your cheek.
he was still looking at you like you were the only thing in the multiverse that truly mattered.
‘‘now,’’ he whispered, his eyes glowing brighter. ‘‘once im done, we can finally go back home.’’
you always knew that clark was a little delusional, but holy shit. ‘‘clark, there is no home!’’ you screamed, the word basically tearing from your throat - years of repressed emotions finally pouring out like a waterfall.
you took a step back, your heels crunching on the earth he deemed ‘fake’. the earth you tried so fucking hard to live on.
‘‘our earth is gone, clark! it’s dead and it’s not coming back! you literally saw it burn, god! you saw it dissolve into nothingness from wherever the fuck you were!’’
‘‘no!’’ he yells back, the sound shattering whatever of the windows was left. hell, the glass vaporized into thin air before it could even hit the ground. ‘‘it’s not dead! i can bring it back! it’s…it’s just hidden from us by these failures who call themselves heroes!’’
he was breathing heavily. you always knew clark was fragile mentally, and he never took well to rejection. his eyes were hysterically moving across the room, avoiding direct eye contact with you before they eventually stopped on you.
if this person wasn’t your clark, you probably would’ve shat yourself seeing the look in his eyes. absolutely fucking manic.
‘‘they… they turned you against me, didn’t they? they got to you before i did..’’ he explains, more to him than you.
god, you wished he would just shut up. if anyone here should be losing it, it should be you! while you aren’t the fondest of the justice league either, you’re rational enough to know what happened to your home wasn’t their fault. clark is just…
mental.
he’s gone absolutely fucking mental.
but.. thats how he always was, wasn’t he? maybe it wasn’t as bad back then, or you pretended not to see it, but he always felt very strongly and reacted accordingly.
and yet you still adored him so. afterall, you don’t fall in love with people just because they’re good people.
you fall in love with people whose darkness you recognize. you can fall in love with a person for all the right reasons, but that kind of love can still fall apart.
but when you fall in love with someone because your monsters found a home in them, like yours did clark’s, thats the kind of love that owns your skin and bones.
it’s why you could never stop loving him either, no matter how much of a shit-show he has become.
you want to say something, but before you can, you are very rudely interrupted by said shit-show.
‘‘they filled your head with their venomous, piece-of-shit air!’’ he moved forward as he spoke, and you flinched away from the sudden movement - more instinct than actual fear.
however, clark froze.
well shit - the silence right now is definitely worse than any scream you have heard on television just now. but you’re not sure you want him to talk either.
of course, once more despite your pleas, he did.
‘‘you’re afraid of me.’’ he whispered. it wasn’t a question and more of a realization - a wrong one! you definitely did not fear clark!
but the boy in front of you hasn’t been your clark for a long time, has he? so maybe you are afraid. how could you not be?
‘‘i don’t know you,’’ you said, your voice more a mixture of desperate, agonizing grief than terror. ‘‘i look at you, and i see the face of the boy who i loved, but the person standing in front of me… he’s a stranger. he’s a monster, clark. you’re going down a path i can’t follow!’’
‘‘i am a hero!’’ he screamed, his heat vision flaring. two blinding, hot beams of red light scorched the floorboards between you, sending up a cloud of ash. ‘‘i am the only real hero left! i’m the only one who cares enough to do what needs to be done! i fought my way out of a sun for this - for you!’’
‘‘and that’s the problem!’’ you yelled, stepping forward. you don’t know what the hell has gotten into you, but a sudden, definitely fueled by desperate, rage ridden, suicidal bravery, let’s you grow some guts.
‘‘yes, we’re damaged, clark! really fucking damaged! but that does not make us wise! we’re not - you’re not special! we don’t get to choose who lives or dies!’’ he stiffened, and fuck did it feel good to get this out. his piss colored weird-energy pulse in his suit even stuttered for the entire fraction of a second.
‘‘we’re just kids,’’ you finally whispered, tears finally falling out of your eyes. ‘‘we.. we were supposed to just be seventeen y’know? i know it was ages ago for you, but for me it wasn’t that long ago. we were supposed to live together and see bad movies and sneak beers and… and just be. but you’re playing god with people’s lives for some fucked up fantasy or dream!’’
you inhale and then exhale, voice slightly softening. ‘‘that’s wrong, clark. a hero doesn’t murder. look at yourself, at what you’ve become!’’
‘‘i have to!’’ he pleaded, his face contorting into a mask of pure, unadulterated lunacy.
of course he’d rather double down than to admit he was wrong. what else did you expect from him?
‘‘if you don’t come with me.. if you don’t stay… then what was it all for? why did i fight? why did i survive up until now? because i’m meant to save us. we're supposed to be together!’’ clark pleads once more, and you’re not sure if he’s trying to convince himself or you.
‘‘if we're supposed to be together,’’ you replied, looking him straight in the eyes, ‘‘you would have stayed that day when i asked you to. you would have listened. you’re so damn obsessed with the past that you’re murdering the future. i won’t be a part of it. i won’t go with you.’’
‘‘that boy you want is dead!’’ he screamed, once desperate emotion turning into pure rage once more - this time with the vengeance cherry on top. ‘‘the universe killed him! and now, i’m going to kill the universe!’’
before you could process anything, he lunged forward, his movement a complete blur to your normal eyes. hell, before you could even blink, his gauntleted hand was clamped around your upper arm.
it feels like your bones are melting! who the fuck even wears arm gauntlets that hot!?
you groan in pain as he pulled you towards him, his face inches from yours.
‘‘you’re coming with me,’’ he said angrily, if a tone of voice could kill you’d be dead a dozen times over. ‘‘i’m taking you away from this filth. and then…’’ he paused, his face softening if only for a brief second.
‘‘we’ll relive being seventeen again, before our home was taken. we’ll do all the things we couldn’t.’’ clark being the hot and cold boy he is, suddenly turned angry again. ‘‘whether you want to or not. but obviously, you will.’’
‘‘clark, stop!’’ you screamed, his strength was so superior you couldn’t even properly struggle. ‘‘you’re hurting me! please, you’re hurting me!’’
he flinched at the words, his grip loosening just a fraction, but his twisted mask of love and madness remained unbroken. ‘‘it’ll.. um, it’ll be better once we’re home,’’ he promised. ‘‘you’ll see, and then you’ll understand me. you’ll love me again… and everything will go back the way its supposed to be.’’
‘‘i never stopped loving you, you fucking crazy bastard!’’ you sobbed in pain, looking into the twin suns of his eyes with a mixture of pity and horror. ‘‘but you are not who you were! not in the slightest!’’
the words must’ve hit his ego like a physical strike because, albeit barely, in your pain you could see his chest heaving, his eyes flaring a bright shade of crimson once more.
well fuck - you didn’t mean to make him even angrier (not that you knew it was possible, but then again what isn’t possible with clark?)
he stared down at you, but the desperation in his face quickly hardened into a cold, ugly sneer.
he didn’t look at you with guilt or anything like that. the guy looked fucking disgusted.
‘‘i thought it wasn’t too bad yet, but you’re already corrupted.’’ he spat, his voice dropping to a terrifyingly calm, venomous whisper. ‘‘look at you, you’ve been breathing their air for too long. you’ve been living in their dirt, listening to their lies, until you’ve become just as broken and fake as the rest of this garbage planet’’
he let go of your arm, shoving you away from him like you were something contaminated. the sudden release of pressure sent you stumbling backward, collapsing into the wreckage of library shelves.
you can only groan in pain while having half a mind to ponder on what the actual fuck is even happening right now. after trying to convince you like that, you’re what now? broken and fake?
you know he was only coping, but god did you want to give him a right hook so badly. if only you weren’t groaning in pain and actually had super powers.
‘‘i thought you were real,’’ clark said, looking down at you from his height, his weird piss-colored armor humming, with what you assume to be energy. and even that sounded arrogant to you.
‘‘but you’re not. you’re just another bad copy now. you want to stay in this shithole for now? fine. i’ll just cut you free myself.’’
he took a step back, the madness surging to the surface as he looked up at the ceiling. ‘‘those pretenders did this to you. superman did this. they say they protect people, but they let you rot here until you forgot who we were, i’m going to make them pay for what they stole from me.’’
he looked back at you one last time - not with despair, but with a chilling, messed up superior form of detachment.
‘‘enjoy your burning shit hole.’’ he paused, eyebrows slightly furrowing as he whispered something you couldn’t fully make out. ‘‘i will definitely rescue you, just wait for me…’’
without another word, he ignited - and gone he was.
a devastating shockwave of the piss colored yellow light and absolute heat exploded from his body, shoving the library shelves you were against and you even further back.
all you could really do right now was sit in silence. by the time the dust settled and you could open your eyes, he was already gone as fast he came. you looked down at your arm, a dark blooming bruise the shape of his fingers forming.
well, you were alone now. you can still feel the lingering heat, but that barely does anything for you.
wanting to take you ‘home’ your ass! he wanted to put you into a dead world and call that shit a life! all to.. to satisfy his fucked up fantasies!
he wanted to freeze time and make you both statues in a museum of his own making.
you should be relieved that he’s gone. you should be running to the door, screaming for help, finding a way to hide from all of this.
but for some reason, you can only sit here.
are you even real?
you are a fragment of a world that was erased, a glitch in the code, a girl who died what it felt like ages ago on a football field in smallville.
and the only person who truly remembers you - the only person who knows the sound of your laugh and how you prefer things - is a monster who just tried to kidnap you and then called you ‘another bad copy’ when you didn’t meet his standards.
the tragedy isn’t that he’s a villain with the delusions of a hero, but that he is the only thing of home you have left - and also left of him himself.
a crazed, lunatic, bastardized version of home and the boy you used to love.
but you did the right thing not going with him didn’t you? despite your hatred and pain and desire. you deserve to feel better. you deserve to grow and live. you tried to be good.
you cry, tears clearing the dust off your skin.
maybe sometimes, the only closure you’ll ever get is the quiet knowing that your intentions were pure and that you tried - that your heart was in the right place.
maybe not every ending comes with explanations or apologies or understanding.
maybe some people might walk away without even trying to understand, and situations maybe just close without justice or fairness.
but also maybe instead of grieving - constant, constant grieving, you can find peace in knowing that you finally tried. that you didn’t give up. that you gave him honesty, kindness and love - even when it wasn’t returned.
you feel a strange sense of closure form as you let your body fall back and rest, taking a breath. you did your best. you meant well. and that’s enough, right?
you open your eyes and look around the room.
it looks really fucking disgusting and if you weren’t in so much pain, you’d be aching to get out of there.
but you’ll deal with this all later, you just need to breathe right now.
alright? that was it?
you pondered as you slumped back against the jagged remains of a library bookshelf and inhaled, the dust of a thousand dead stories coating your throat before you pushed the breath out of your lungs with more force than normal.
it wasn’t that you missed him now that you’ve got a clearer mind. or to be more precise, there wasn’t anything to miss.
you hardly knew the monster he’d become, but the way your heart was hammering against your ribs maybe said otherwise.
kicking your feet forward, you outstretched them into the rubble, slamming them into the debris before using the leverage to pull yourself upright. if you couldn’t stop thinking about the piss-colored golden blur of his exit, then you’d just clutter your mind with the physical reality of the absolute wreckage that surrounds you until you could.
you’d expected the aftermath to be worse, in all honesty. not because the library exploding wasn’t bad - it was. very much so. libraries weren’t supposed to explode, much less the one you worked at.
most buildings weren’t supposed to actually. still, you’d expected something a tad bit more dramatic. a breakdown or a crisis, maybe even a conveniently (and justified) timed mental collapse.
instead, the police asked questions. lots of questions. questions you couldn’t (and for a part didn’t want to) answer. questions you utmost definitely shouldn’t answer because that would earn you a psychiatric evaluation if you answered honestly.
so you lied.
a lot.
and not particularly well, either.
still basically sitting in the midst of the rubble because you absolutely couldn’t give a shit about moving out, you watched the firefighters in your peripheral vision trying to move through it.
you would have felt bad for them if you weren’t stuck in your own damn dilemma, the only thing keeping you somewhat from thinking about clark and wallowing in your misery was the scratchy emergency blanket wrapped around your shoulders.
a certain red-caped hero, however, did not agree to let you wallow in peace much to your misfortune.
descending through the completely butchered ceiling, his boots thudded against the cracked marble floor with far too much weight for someone who claimed he was just there to ‘help’ (help your ass. you didn’t need his help. if he had just never appeared in the first place everything would have been better).
it didn’t exactly help that he looked like clark, too. hell, he had the name, the face (although to note, he looked a tad bit older than your clark did), the same dark shade of hair. but when he reached out a steady, warm hand to pull you from the ruins, you flinched.
honestly? the movement was more instinctive than outright rejection to his kindness even though it must’ve looked that way to him.
why couldn’t he just leave you be anyways? he was a total stranger and reinforcements were already here. a god playing man who stayed while your clark left, only to return some wannabe herald of absolute destruction.
superman protected people. superman comforted people. he was everything clark was supposed to be and not be, and the stark contrast made you want to vomit.
however, through his presence, you eventually understood the difference between someone who simply possessed power and someone who chose to use it responsibly.
and eventually, you like to think you found it in your heart to stop holding a grudge against every superman that exists. that the podium of believed superiority your clark believed himself to stand upon was not constructed of marble but mere dirt and sand.
your friends, leo and martha, eventually found you in the wreckage next to superman, far more frantic than you and saying, in their words, that ’‘you look like a vampire sucked the life out of you’.
thankfully though, they took over answering questions and giving statements to responders. but with the library entirely reduced to debris, your sanctuary was gone. more importantly, your only source of income was gone too.
the months that followed were a mindless grind of survival. you honestly felt like batman with the way you were existing in metropolis as if you were one of the many shadows caused by the massive sky scraping buildings.
you bounced from one dead-end job to another with absolutely nothing to your name. you weren’t even supposed to exist here for fucks sake!
to say the least, existing was exhausting. and you were done merely existing - not living. you were done feeling out of place because you were some weird multiversal glitch.
so somewhere between one cold dinner and another last sleepless night, you decided it was time to live again - even if you had to break the law to do so. the question just was.. how?
lucky for you, as if your prayers had finally been answered, you met him. evan. and he’s just a guy, really. no tragic backstory, no glowing fancy world destroying powers, and no reality-altering fists, (thank god).
as it turned out, this guy you met was a government official in charge of databases and cybersecurity, secretly keeping a double life for the state because he was also a wanted hacker. just your luck, of course.
the friendship happened gradually, the way the best ones usually do. one conversation became two, two became twenty, and suddenly, he knew your favorite drink order. life was just weird like that, y’know?
the real problem was when evan dearest became quite curious about you. and in hindsight, it was fair enough, you never shared anything about yourself and evan being the nosy-freak he was decided to look you up in the database and no records of you existed at all.
the discovery happened exactly as horribly as one would expect such a thing to happen (if one would even have the mind to expect such a situation in the first place).
he had been trying to help you secure an apartment lease, his fingers flying across the keyboard with a locked in intensity until he suddenly stopped. his shoulders tensed as he stared at the glowing monitor in silence. one moment he was looking into a standard background check, the next he was looking at you. then back at the computer. then back at you again, as if your records might magically manifest if he stared at you hard enough. they didn’t.
‘‘bro.. you don’t exist.. like, at all.’’ he said, his voice flat and final. and faced with the bleak truth, you finally let the words out. there wasn’t much point in lying anymore, was there?
so you told him about your world and the guy who became a massive multiversal threat trying to restore it.
the reaction could have been worse. you had braced yourself for a shit ton of questions, or disbelief or laughter or screaming.
instead, he just looked incredibly exhausted and then sympathetic. which, funnily enough, felt so much worse. but… he didn’t run or abandon you or call the heroes. he just took pity on you, slumped back into his chair, took a deep breath, and got to work.
he never exactly showed you the process of what he was doing because its not like you would have understood anything anyway.
he never explained which firewalls he bypassed or which databases he manipulated. but suddenly, you had a history. a pristine childhood, a highschool diploma, and graduation credentials from a good college. a life that could exist on paper, stamped and verified by the very system that should have rejected you.
years later, you would reflect on it with a grim sort of irony. you were living once more on a lie, but it was the only way to be real.
still, the counterfeit worked. years passed after that. actual, quiet years.
you finally settled into new earth, and things genuinely got better. you moved out of suicide slum into a larger, spacious apartment in metropolis where the walls were actually thick enough to drown out the neighbors.
you found stable, good work as an archivist, spending your day filing records of a world you finally were able to accept living in. you even started buying stupid little decorations, fully accepting your home as your home.
you made more friends, built a real social life, and kept in close contact with martha and leo.
evan made sure to crash by at least once a day, too.
you still bought your morning drink from leo. life was just happening, quietly. and somehow, despite everything, it was happening to you, too. you were growing. not barely existing anymore but actually living.
but of course, clark remained a permanent, haunting fixture of your mind.
the nightmares never really stopped and you don’t think they ever will. maybe with luck only get less frequent.
some mornings you would wake up utterly convinced the sky outside would be bleeding a crimson, your breath coming in short gasps thanks to memories you longed to bury.
everytime you caught a headline in the daily planet mentioning ‘superman-prime,’ you froze, your skin remembering those searing heat gauntlets on your skin.
when the news reports finally announced his definitive defeat - that the villain had been captured and ‘safely tucked away’ as the justice league had put it in a debrief conference, you felt bittersweet.
a mixture of relief and a hollow, aching grief. you sat in your apartment, staring at the white ceiling, wondering if the boy you grew up with and loved was going to die entirely alone in the dark. millions of miles away at the edge of the universe and despite you not wanting to, you grieved him.
anyhow.. life went on. you would wake up, go to work, answering boring emails, and buy groceries.
however, every now and then a strange phenomenon began occurring over metropolis. the sun would turn a deep red for an hour before returning to a normal. the constellations appeared slightly shifted one night before correcting themselves by morning. unnatural red lightning storms swept across as the city without producing a single drop of rain.
like everyone else, you simply assumed these were the typical consequences of living in a world overflowing with metahumans. you would shrug it off, kicking your feet up your desk, trying to desperately ignore the way your heart shattered at the all too familiar sight of sky crimson. (you would only figure out later that this was part 2 of clark trying to punch his way back into reality).
if the library scene had been complete horror, then whatever the fuck was happening now was something else entirely.
see, you had spent years painstakingly rebuilding yourself whole again to become a functioning member of society, while… clark was doing whatever the fuck he was doing.
point is, neither of you were the same people anymore.
the first sign that reality was fracturing once more was the sky. naturally. honestly, at this point you should have really expected it. the universe had apparently decided long ago that subtlety was for cowards and now it’s just breaking down every chance it gets.
you noticed it on the walk from after your finished shift at the archives, the sunset looked really strange that day. maybe not dramatic enough for anyone else to care, but you (justifiably) had your own sense of paranoia and danger.
people continued walking their dogs, cars drove through the standard metropolis traffic, and nobody pointed upward in absolute horror. but you noticed it.
how could you not? the sun looked really damn red. almost as red as… well, that day. the bleeding crimson that stains the absolute worst of your nightmares.
your stomach dropped. you utterly hated that a single color still had that kind of power over you. years later, and all it took was a particular shade of red to undo you.
pathetic, really. why couldn’t you just grow past this? why did he still get to control your breathing from millions of miles away? you forced yourself to keep walking, the mundane buzz of the city carrying on as normal around you. conversations drifted past, traffic lightened, and somewhere a dog barked at birds.
life continued as it always would and did.
you had just reached your apartment building when every sound abruptly disappeared. it didn’t fade out: it literally just stopped. the traffic, the conversations around you, even that distant barking - vanished in a single instant.
your breath halted and your pulse immediately started hammering against your ribs.
no.
please god, no. not here. not after everything it took to build this life. you didn’t even need to turn around, before you even dared to look, you just knew.
‘‘well that’s usually a bad sign, y’know? the sudden silence.”
the voice came from right behind you. it was older, quieter, and yet so devastatingly familiar.
you closed your eyes for a second. just one second. after all these years of nightmares, memories, and the slow, agonizing process of healing, some stubborn, desperate part of your soul had always known this day would come. you could never fully believe what you saw- the shit about your clark being ‘dead’.
slowly, you turned.
for a long, suffocating moment, neither of you spoke. you hated that seeing him still hurt this much. you hated that a part of you was desperately relieved. most of all, you loathed the fact that against all reason, logic, and common sense, you still loved him.
how could you? after what he did? after the library? the feeling was like a disease, a stubborn parasite refusing to just fucking die.
‘‘you’re fucked up, you know that?’’ you finally said.
his mouth twitched, and then, completely unexpectedly, he let out a small laugh. it was nothing like the cruel sound from the library or the terrifying rumbles from the news broadcast back then when he was destroying earth. it was just clark’s laugh. god, you absolutely hated that, too.
‘‘yeah,’’ he admitted softly, rubbing the back of his neck. ‘‘been getting that one a lot.’’
the silence returned and neither of you seemed eager to fill it. it was strange in a way. the clark you grew up with hated silence and always tried to, whether intentionally or unintentionally, fill it with his endless rambling about comic book trivia or whatever else weird tangent possessed his brain that day.
now he just stood there, watching you as if he couldn’t believe you were real - even though it should be the other way around.
‘‘you shouldn’t be here,’’ you told him, your voice tight.
his eyes lowered to the pavement. ‘‘i know.’’
‘‘you really have a really bad habit of showing up and ruining my week.’’
that earned another laugh - quieter this time, and infinitely sadder. you didn’t laugh with him. clark looked up at and you and in seemingly immediate shame or guilt or maybe a mix of both, looked away immediately.
‘‘i came to apologize.’’
what? you blinked and pursed your lips. an apology? now? after he basically made you go insane and left you to rot in that god forsaken library? a part of you had spent such a long time fantasizing about this exact conversation, dreaming up vicious arguments. the screaming and insults and curses you would hurl at him if you ever saw him again.
now he thought a few soft words could fix what he had done?
‘‘you what?’’
‘‘i came to apologize,’’ his voice remained surprisingly steady and calm, there was even a hint of certainty to it. ‘‘i was wrong.’’
you could only stare at him, the rage beginning to boil beneath your skin in an instant.
the words just simply didn’t make sense coming from his mouth - not from the guy who had hurt and killed so many people, and certainly not from the monster who had spent years blaming everyone else for his own wreckage.
and yet there he was, standing in your street, saying them anyway. i was wrong. the confession sounded painful, like something torn out of his throat rather than spoken.
“i thought i was fixing things,” his gaze shifted toward the horizon. “i thought if i fought hard enough… i’d get everything back. i thought i could get you back.”
get you back? he thought he was doing this for you? the absolute nerve of him. clark laughed again, but there wasn’t a single happy thing about it. “turns out the universe doesn’t work like comic books. well, kinda, not entirely though.”
“oh, is that what you think this is?” you spat, taking a heavy, furious step off the curb. “a comic book event? a little plot twist you get to narrate?”
clark flinched, his eyes snapping back to yours.
“you left!” you screamed, years of repressed grief, loss, and pure, unadulterated venom pouring out all at once. you stepped right into the middle of the street, your chest heaving.
“you don’t get to stand there and look sad, clark! you left me on that football field while our entire world fucking disappeared! i watched our sky turn to blood, i watched my family turn to nothing, and you weren’t there! you were out playing the cosmic savior with people who didn’t even care about you!”
“wait, i-“
“no! shut up! you don’t get to speak!” you yelled, the tears finally breaking through, hot and stinging against your cheeks, but they were born of pure, raging fury.
“you came back to new earth, you tracked me down, and what did you do? did you comfort me? did you stay? no! you destroyed the one damn place i had! you grabbed me until my bones felt like they were melting off, you threw a goddamn tantrum, and then you called me corrupted! you called me a bad copy because i wouldn’t bow down to your psychotic little fantasy!”
“i know,” he whispered, his voice cracking, his shoulders dropping under the weight of your words. “i know, i was mental, i-“
“you were a fucking monster!” you threw the word at his chest like a weapon, wanting it to leave a bruise.
“you terrified me! you became the exact thing we used to read about and hate! you butchered people, clark! real people with real lives, and you justified it by using my face! you used our dead home as an excuse to murder people!”
you were shaking now, the rage vibrating through your entire frame. you stepped directly into his space, forcing him to look at the tears on your face, forcing him to see the raw wreckage he had made of you.
“you don’t get to do this,” you said, your voice dropping to a low, vicious hiss that cut deeper than the screaming.
“you don’t get to disappear for years, let me crawl through the mud to build a fake life, and then show up on my street looking like a beaten dog, expecting me to forgive you! i buried you, clark! i buried you so many damn times! do you have any idea what that feels like? i buried the boy from our home. i buried the boy who i shared so many precious memories with. i buried you so many fucking times because it was the only way to stop the nightmares!”
clark looked absolutely, completely devastated. his chest heaved, his bare hands trembling at his sides.
good. a selfish, deeply human part of you wanted him to bleed. you wanted him to feel a fraction of the agony of the girl who had sat beneath a bleeding red sky, waiting for a savior who was actually just a herald of destruction.
look at him. the great and powerful superman wannabe, brought to his knees by a normal human girl’s rage. he deserved every ounce of this fire.
“i know,” he whispered again.
there it was. no excuses. no tantrums. no heat vision flaring to melt the pavement between you at the slightest inconvenience. just total acceptance. for the first time in his entire life, clark wasn’t trying to force reality to agree with him; he was simply facing it.
well, now you just felt pretty damn exhausted. the fire burned out, leaving nothing but ash in your throat.
he had finally grown up.
it was years too late, it was after a trail of blood and an entire shattered world, but he was finally facing reality.
you suddenly felt so incredibly tired, your knees trembling under the weight of a decade of grief. looking at him, you realized he was entirely empty, too.
“stay,” the word slipped past your lips before your brain could filter it. why did you say that? why, after everything, did you still want to crawl back into the ruins with him?
his expression shattered. just for a single, fleeting second, the weary soldier vanished, and the seventeen-year-old boy from home was staring right back at you from behind his eyes.
you could see exactly how badly he wanted to hold you. you could see the desperate urge to throw away the universe just to stay.
then, it was gone. the quiet resolution of a real hero settled over his face. he offered you a small, sad, beautiful smile.
“i’m finally doing something right.”
your chest tightened, a cold, sudden panic replacing the anger. no. not a sacrifice. he couldn’t leave you to mourn again. “clark-“
“i can’t stay,” he whispered, his voice trembling just a fraction. “i really want to.”
the finality of it stretched between you, painful and absolute. clark took a slow step backward, and the physical space between you suddenly felt like an enormous, uncrossable gulf.
“i kept my promise,” he said softly.
the words almost made you angry again because he didn’t, he came back but he didn’t stay. but instead, they just left a dull, aching hollow in your ribs.
because looking at him, you finally understood what he meant. he hadn’t succeeded, and he hadn’t fixed your dead world, but he had never stopped trying to get back to you. he was going to face the dark so you could have a tomorrow.
his smile softened, turning into the exact same smile from the boy you so adore. he reached out his hand as if to touch you, but in seemingly shame he pulled away.
he looked at you one final time, and then he flew away.
this time, you knew he wasn’t coming back. and for the first time since the sky turned red, neither of you tried pretending otherwise.
superman was gone.
just… gone. the big guy in the red cape had vanished, and for a few weeks, metropolis had been a collective, anxious wreck.
you’d been sitting in the breakroom of the archives, nursing a lukewarm coffee and trying to ignore the way the silence in the city felt like a complete threat because it always did. you visited gotham once, and you’re just glad you don’t have to put up with that.
anyway, you’d mourned clark. you’d done the whole ‘moving on’ thing. you had a proper life now.
for years, you had lived with the absolute certainty that he was dead and soon enough… you found peace with it. you had sat in your spacious apartment on new earth, watching the news reports after that final, pitch-black night against, what the justice league labelled “the darkest knight,” and you had accepted it. he was gone. he had burned himself out to save a tomorrow he wouldn’t get to see.
real damn heroic.
the first few years after his sacrifice had been a total shit-show inside your own head.
the nightmares didn’t just disappear, because it’d be waaaay to easy if they did. you’d wake up drenched in sweat, your lungs burning as if the anti-matter wave was actively swallowing your bedroom, or you’d dream of his iron-hot yellow-piss colored gauntlets bruising your flesh all over again.
sometimes you even dreamed of the football field. and every single time, you woke up crying.
but time is a weird, persistent bastard. slowly, the nightmares grew less frequent. the painful edge of the grief started to dull, shifting into something you could actually carry without choking.
you didn’t forget him - how could you? - but somehow, against all odds, you had found a quiet kind of peace with his memory.
you had buried the guy who didn’t know how to be super in the most sacred, locked-away corner of your heart and you would never forget him.
you had forgiven him in the dark. you had accepted that he died a hero (something he had always wanted to be), and you had finally learned how to breathe the air of this stupid, chaotic new earth as your own without any back thoughts.
you were a girl with a fake history and a real life, and you were finally, genuinely okay.
then the news hit the screen and blew all that hard-earned peace to total hell.
some new hero had just stopped a building from collapsing in the middle of the city and beat the shit out of a supervillain.
the reporter was stammering, the camera shaky as it zoomed in on a figure in blue and red. no yellow-piss colored armor and no jagged ‘s’ scar. just a kid - no, a man - who looked so much like the boy from all those years ago that you nearly choked on your coffee.
“the hero, calling himself superboy-prime…”
superboy-prime?
what the actual fuck?
you didn’t think. hell, you didn’t even finish your coffee. you just shoved your chair back, the legs screeching against the floor, and bolted. you ran out of the archives, your heart hammering against your ribs like a trapped bird.
are they serious right now? you couldn’t even have a dead boyfriend in peace? the universe just had to keep messing with you. you didn’t care about your shift. you didn’t care about the confused looks from your coworkers as you bolted. you just needed to see if reality was playing another one of its sick, twisted jokes on you.
you burst out onto the street (luckily and sometimes unluckily your work building was near the center of metropolis and its park), your lungs burning as you shoved through the crowds. people were pointing at the sky, whispering, looking up with a mixture of awe and confusion. you followed their gaze, your eyes searching the blue until you saw him.
he was hovering a few feet above the pavement in centennial park, surrounded by a small crowd of reporters and grateful citizens who were chanting ‘superboy prime’ over and over. he looked as smug as always and carried a smirk on his face, but he also looked awkward.
“hey!” you screamed, your voice cracking.
he froze. even from fifty yards away, you saw the way his shoulders tensed. he turned, his eyes searching the crowd until they landed on you.
the reporters tried to swarm you, but he was there in a blur of motion, landing in front of you with a soft thud. he looked at you, and for a second, neither of you said a word. he looked older, sure, but the madness was completely gone. the rage was gone. he just looked like clark.
“you’re alive,” you panted, doubling over to catch your breath. “you’re actually alive, you crazy bastard.”
“i… yeah,” he said, rubbing the back of his neck. he looked like he was about to cry, or maybe throw up. “i’m back. i’m trying to… to help. since superman is gone ‘n allat.”
you straightened up, wiping the sweat from your forehead. you had cursed and buried him and relived him so much that you didn't have the heart to get angry anymore. you looked him up and down - the suit, the cape, the whole ‘hero’ look... at least he didn’t wear superman’s red undies.
“superboy-prime?” you asked, a hysterical laugh bubbling up in your throat instead of anger. “seriously? you went from superman-prime, the god of fear, to superboy? what, did you lose your man-card in the dark multiverse?”
clark winced, a faint blush creeping up his neck. “it… it felt more right. i’m not superman. not yet. i’m just… me. but i’ll be just as good soon enough. i’m on my redemption arc, every sick hero gotta have one, ya know.”
“you’re a dork, that’s what you are,” you said, shaking your head. you wanted to punch him. you wanted to hug him. you wanted to scream at him for another ten years.
“you have any idea how many times i’ve had to mourn you? i’ve buried you like three times in my head, clark! you can’t just keep popping back up like a goddamn weed!”
“i know,” he whispered, stepping closer. he didn’t try to touch you, but the heat radiating off him was familiar. it didn’t feel like a threat this time. it just felt like him. “ m’sorry. m’so, so sorry for everything.”
“yeah, well, you should be,” you snapped, though the edge was gone from your voice. you looked at the crowd, at the city that was finally starting to feel okay again.
“so what now? you going to save the world and then vanish again? or are you actually going to stay this time?” you may have put up a nonchalant front, but you were nervous. really fucking nervous.
clark looked at you, and for the first time in your life, his eyes were clear, no red glow, no manic intensity and no sorrow.
“i’m staying,” he said. “if… if you’ll have me. i know i don’t deserve it. i know i’ve messed everything up. but i want to try. i want to be real. i want to be with you again.”
you looked at him, and then at the blue sky above. it was just a sky. no red suns. no impossible storms. just a clear, unremarkable blue.
“you’re still a total mess, you know that?” you said, a small, genuine smile finally breaking through.
“i know,” he grinned, and it looked so much like home.
“fine,” you sighed, reaching out and finally, tentatively, taking his hand. his skin was warm, solid, and real. “but if you ever wear that ugly armor again, i’m personally going to kick your ass.”
“deal,” he laughed.
you looked down at your intertwined fingers, the heat of his palm seeping into yours.
you had spent so long telling yourself that dying under that red sky back on the football field that day would've been the perfect ending to your life.
it would have been clean and painless. but he ruined it. he had to go and survive. he had to go and drag you right back into this confusing, messy world of never-ending uncertainties.
but if that's what life truly is - this chaotic, fractured thing you had both been running from - then you'd still choose this life.
even if there's nothing perfect, beautiful, or clear about it. even if it's full of suffering and the heavy weight of dead worlds.
you would rather choose this life where you can finally be with clark, and perhaps at one other day and time, far in the future, perish peacefully under a blue sky.
you mean it, too. even if the two of you were destined to be constantly tormented by a delusion that will never truly go away. even if the ghosts of earth-prime would always linger in the corners of your eyes.
maybe if you both keep being in the dark like together like this, walking towards the light and hiding away from the grand cosmic stages and just trying to be ordinary, for a day, two days, or even several months… maybe once you've both gotten used to walking towards a new light and letting the past rest, you'll never have to let go of this hand that you grabbed on to almost miraculously again in the middle of a crowded park.
you leaned your shoulder against his, and clark seemingly to this as a sign to pick you and begin flying as he grinned down at you.
you laughed, holding onto him, your eyes closing against the brilliant, mundane metropolis sunlight. maybe this is a fairy tale romance where he ends up sweeping you off your feet after all.
no matter how many times it takes, you just needed him to keep returning to you, just like he did on that day.
