I drank a beer (aroace Ryland Grace fic). I drank another beer. Three beers. Four beers. Five beers. Six beers. Seven beers. Eight beers. Nine beers. And a BloodyMary!
Summary: Mother’s days are always amazing, and Clark only keeps making them better year after year. Breakfast in bed and impromptu beach trips.
Dad Clark Kent x Fem!Reader
more kent family adventures here!
even more kent family adventures here! (pt 2 of the masterlist)
WE ARE SO BACK!!
You woke up to the absence of a heavy arm around you, and the smell of something warm and buttery drifting under the bedroom door. You hummed sleepily before rolling over and burying your face deeper into the pillow.
You knew what day it was. You had known since last night, when you caught Jon attempting to whisper something to Clark in the hallway and failing spectacularly at it, his voice carrying clear down the whole upstairs corridor. "Daddy, Daddy, is it Mommy’s day yet?"
So you stayed in bed and kept your eyes closed.
Downstairs, Clark stood at the stove with one eye on the eggs and one eye on Jon, who was sitting on the counter, pressing both fists into a lump of playdough that was supposed to be, apparently, a flower. There was flour on his cheek. There was also flour on the ceiling, and Clark had decided not to investigate how it got there.
"Is it good?" Jon asked, holding up what appeared to be a flat, vaguely circular blob.
"It's perfect, buddy."
At the kitchen table, Leia was bent so close over her piece of paper that her nose was nearly touching it. Two cards were already finished and lined up in a row. The first had a drawing of four of you standing in front of the house, stick figures with wild crayon hair. The second had a poem she had copied and then decorated with many hand-drawn hearts and stars. Now she was making a third.
"Leia," Clark said gently. "More cards?"
"Yes, daddy," she said, without looking up. “But this one is different."
"How is it different?"
"The other two are from you, me, and Jon. This one is just from me."
Clark shrugged and turned back to the eggs.
Jon slid off the counter, landing with a thud, and padded over to look at his sister's work. "Pretty," he announced, patting her hair with a floury hand, leaving a small white print. Leia looked at him carefully, and decided to let it go.
"Okay," Clark said, sliding the eggs onto the plate and turning off the stove. "We’re ready to go.”
"I carry the tray, Daddy!" Jon was already running toward the counter, arms up, reaching.
"Jon…"
"I carry it. I'm big."
Clark crouched down to his level. Jon's face was serious, the same look he got when he was trying to put his own shoes on.
"Okay," Clark said. "You carry it. But I'm going to put my hands right here, just in case."
Jon nodded. "Okay. But I'm really carrying it."
"You're really carrying it."
"You're just helping a little bit."
"Just a little bit."
-
You heard them coming up the stairs.
You heard Jon's voice, hushed with great effort and not quite succeeding, saying "shhh, shhh, shhh" the whole way up. You heard Leia whisper "I know, I'm being quiet." You heard the low, warm sound of Clark murmuring something to Jon about the tray, steady and careful.
You closed your eyes and kept your breathing slow.
The door creaked open.
"She's sleeping," Jon whispered, at full volume.
"Jon," Leia whispered back.
"Mommy’s sleeping, we have to be quiet."
"I know, you have to be quiet."
"I am being quiet."
You bit the inside of your cheek.
"Okay," Clark said softly, "nice and easy, let's put it right here."
There was a careful shuffling, the soft thump of the tray settling on the nightstand, and then a long pause. You could feel all three of them looking at you.
And then Jon, unable to contain himself for even one more second, climbed up onto the bed, crawled across the mattress on all fours, and put both hands on your face.
"Mommy. Mommy, wake up. Mommy."
You opened your eyes.
His face was inches from yours, wide-eyed and beaming, flour still on his cheek. "HAPPY MOMMY’S DAY!" he shouted, and then immediately looked at Leia, silently telling her that it was her cue.
"Happy Mother's Day, Mommy," Leia said, and she was trying to sound calm and grown-up about it but her smile was giving her away completely. She climbed up on the other side and laid the stack of cards in your lap. "We made you cards. We couldn't pick the best one, so you get all of them. There are three."
"Three of them?” You asked.
"The third one is just from me."
You looked at Clark, who was standing in the doorway with a quiet expression he got on mornings like this, leaning against the frame, watching. He smiled at you.
"Come here," you said.
He came and sat on the edge of the bed, and you looked at the tray: eggs, toast, a small glass of orange juice, and a slightly crushed flower that might have come from the backyard, sitting in a cup of water. Jon immediately pointed at the flower.
"I picked it," he said.
"It's beautiful, Jonny bear."
"I know." He crawled into your lap and settled there, tucking his head under your chin.
You looked through the cards one by one while Leia watched your face carefully, tracking your reaction to each one. The drawing of the family. The poem with the hearts and stars. And then the last one, the one just from her. It was simpler than the others. On the front she had drawn what looked to be a portrait of you, and inside she had written “My mommy is the prettiest mom in the world. She gives great kisses and hugs”.
You held it for a moment.
"Did you like it?" Leia asked.
"I love it," you said. "Come here."
She leaned in and you kissed the top of her head, and Jon, not wanting to be left out, tilted his face up toward you too, so you kissed his forehead as well, and he made a satisfied sound and burrowed closer.
You ate your breakfast in bed with Jon in your lap, Leia leaning against your shoulder flipping back through her own cards to point out details you might have missed, and Clark beside you, his arm easy and familiar around your back. The sun came through the curtains slow and golden. Jon fell almost back asleep against your chest. Leia eventually settled too, curled into your side with her eyes drooping, still holding the crayon drawing of the four of you in front of the house.
Clark pressed a kiss to your temple.
You stayed like that for a long time.
Later, after the slow untangling of limbs and the transferring of a drowsy Jon to the couch with a blanket, after Leia had gone to find her book, you and Clark stood at the kitchen sink together doing the breakfast dishes.
You were handing him the pan when he set it aside, turned toward you, and kissed you, warm and unhurried.
When he pulled back, he stayed close. His forehead almost touching yours. And then he turned his head slightly, lips near your ear, and whispered, "I don't know what I did to deserve this. Any of it. I want you to know that I know that. I'm so happy. I'm so grateful for you."
You closed your eyes.
You had heard him say it before. Last Mother's Day, standing almost exactly here, the sun coming through this same window. And the Mother's Day before that, when Jon was still a baby and Leia had carried the card downstairs herself, enormously proud. And the first one, years ago, when it was just the three of you and everything felt new and a little terrifying and he had looked at you like you had given him everything.
Every year. The same words, more or less. Like a thing he needed to say and you needed to hear, a ritual that belonged to both of you now.
You leaned into him. His arms came around you.
Outside, you could hear Leia's voice drifting in from the other room, narrating something to herself, and the occasional soft sound of Jon on the couch, not quite asleep.
Clark would say it again next year. And the year after that. For all the years to come, as many as you had, he would find you somewhere ordinary and say it like he meant it, because he did, because that was who he was.
You thought about the cards on the nightstand upstairs. The flower that Jon picked.
You tilted your head up and kissed him again, soft and slow.
"I know," you said quietly. "Me too."
-
“So,” Clark started, leaning against the counter and folding his arms. "The kids have never seen the Atlantic."
You looked at him.
"It's a nice day on the coast," he said. "I checked."
"You checked."
"Cape Hatteras is seventy-three degrees right now."
"Of course you know that."
"Light wind. Almost no cloud cover." He tilted his head slightly. "Two hours by car. Approximately four minutes the other way."
From the living room, as if on cue, Jon's voice drifted in. "Daddy, are we doing something fun?"
Clark raised his eyebrows at you. You dried your hands on the dish towel.
"If I get sand in places I don't want sand," you said, "that's on you."
Clark smiled. "I'll take full responsibility."
"You always say that."
"And I always mean it."
When you told the kids, Jon fell off the couch. He rolled onto the floor and immediately jumped up with his arms in the air like it didn't happen. "BEACH!"
Leia gasped, grabbed your arm with both hands, and shook it. "Are we actually going or is this a maybe?"
"We're actually going."
She let go of your arm and turned to Jon. "We're actually going."
Jon, who had been spinning in a circle, stopped spinning. "BEACH," he said again, with renewed emphasis.
Clark was already carrying a bag from somewhere with everything already in it, and you squinted at it with suspicion.
"Did you pack this already?"
"I had a feeling."
"Clark."
"You were always going to say yes."
You had absolutely been always going to say yes.
-
Jon, it turned out, had opinions about altitude that he had not previously had the opportunity to express. Specifically, he wanted to see. He kept craning around in Clark's arm trying to look down, saying "whoa" in a very small voice, over and over. "Whoa. Whoa, Daddy. Whoa."
"I see it, buddy."
"That's tiny."
"That's a farm."
"It's tiny."
"We're very high up."
Jon considered this for a moment, looking down at the tiny farm. "Cool," he decided, and relaxed against Clark's shoulder.
Leia, tucked against your side with her hair absolutely everywhere despite the ponytail she'd started with, pointed at a river below them and said "what's that" and then before you could answer pointed at something else and said "what's that." You gave up trying to answer in sequence and just held her and let Clark handle the navigation.
Four minutes. He had said four minutes and he had not been lying, which was somehow the most Clark Kent thing about the whole situation. The landscape shifted, and the light changed, and then there was a long blue line on the horizon that got wider as you dropped lower, and the air tasted different all at once, salt and openness, and Jon lifted his head off Clark's shoulder and said, very quietly, "Water."
"That's the ocean," Clark told him.
Jon stared at it. "It's big," he said.
"It's very big."
"Is it the biggest?"
"It's one of the biggest." You told him.
Jon stared at it for another long moment. "Okay," he said, in the tone of someone filing this information away carefully.
-
Clark set you all down in a quieter stretch of beach, easy and gentle, the sand pale and wide and the waves rolling in slow. It was a gorgeous day. Seventy-three degrees, just like he'd said, and you hated a little bit how right he always was about things like that.
"I need to change," you said, taking the bag from him. You had grabbed a change of clothes in the rush before leaving. "You've got them?"
Clark looked at the children. Jon was already sitting down in the dry sand, pressing both hands into it with an expression of deep interest. Leia had taken her shoes off and was walking toward the waterline.
"I've got them," Clark said.
You headed up toward the public changing areas, which were not far. The walk took maybe five minutes. The changing took another five.
When you came back, following the path back down toward the beach, you heard Leia before you saw them.
"Again!" she was saying. "Do it again!"
You came around the low dune and stopped.
Clark was standing in the sand with his shirt and shoes off, and as you watched, he planted his hands and went into a cartwheel. Clean, easy, unhurried, a full rotation with his legs straight in the air before he landed back on his feet.
Leia and Jon were watching him with identical expressions of absolute wonder.
You stood very still. You did not want to interrupt this.
"AGAIN," Jon said.
Clark did it again.
"Okay," Leia said, with the gravity of someone accepting a challenge. "I'm going to do that."
"Alright, sweetie." Clark nodded, hands on his hips, "Do you want me to show you how to–"
"I know how."
Leia did not know how. Both hands went down, she got one leg up, and then the whole thing just sort of listed sideways and she went into the sand shoulder-first, rolling to a stop and ending up on her back looking at the sky.
There was a pause.
"I meant to do that," she said.
"Absolutely," Clark agreed.
Jon, who had been watching Leia, decided he had learned enough. He stepped forward, bent down, put his hands in the sand, and then simply fell directly onto his face.
Not a cartwheel. Not even an attempt at a cartwheel. Just a small determined boy tipping forward and going down.
The sound he made on impact was mostly just surprised.
The laugh came out of you before you could do anything about it. You were laughing properly now, and Clark turned toward the sound of you and saw you standing there, and the smile that crossed his face was wide and completely unguarded.
Jon pushed himself up from the sand. He had it on his nose, his chin, both cheeks. He looked at his hands. He looked at Leia. He looked at Clark.
"I did it," he said.
"You really did," Clark said.
Leia sat up with sand in her hair and pointed at you. "Mommy was watching!"
"I know," Clark said. "I heard her laughing from over there."
"I wasn't laughing," you said, walking toward them and absolutely still laughing.
"You were," Leia said. "It's okay. I'm going to do it for real next time." She stood up and brushed sand off her arms. "I was just warming up."
Jon was still sitting where he'd fallen. He looked up at you as you reached them and held both arms up, the universal signal.
You crouched down and picked him up, sand and all.
"Did you do a cartwheel?" you asked him.
"Yes," he said.
"It was very good."
"I know."
He put his sandy head on your shoulder, already losing interest in cartwheels now that the ocean was right there, and pointed toward the water. "Can we go?"
"Yeah, baby. We can go."
-
Hours later, Clark brought his family home. He carried Jon upstairs and got him into dry clothes, somehow without waking him. Jon stirred once, muttered something that might have been "ocean," and went back under.
Leia was tired but fighting it, operating on the seven-year-old principle that sleep was something that happened to other people. She sat on the bed wrapped in a towel and accepted the cup of warm apple juice Clark brought her and watched you with the expression she sometimes got, the thinking one, where you could almost see something turning over behind her eyes.
"Mommy," she said.
"Yeah, little star?"
She looked at Clark. Something passed between them.
Clark set his own cup down. "Actually," he said, "I think now is a good time."
"Now is a good time for what?" you asked.
Leia was already off the bed.
She came back from the hallway closet carrying something with both hands, carefully.
It was a book. A real one, or close to it, hardcovered, wrapped in brown paper that had been decorated with flowers and stars and hearts and what appeared to be a dog that was probably meant to be Krypto. Across the front, in Leia's careful handwriting and Jon's rather more enthusiastic scribbling, it said FOR MOMMY.
She held it out to you.
You took it. It was heavier than you expected.
"We made it," Leia said. "Me and Daddy. And Jon helped."
"Jon picked some of the pictures," Clark said. "He was very decisive about it."
"He kept pointing at the ones with food in them," Leia added.
"That's fair," you said. Your voice came out a little unsteady and you didn't try to fix it.
You pulled off the paper carefully. Leia watched you.
The cover underneath was a deep blue, and in the center was a photo you recognized immediately: the two of you on your wedding day, not the posed portrait, not the formal one, but the candid someone had caught of the moment just after, when you were both still laughing about something and Clark had his forehead tipped toward yours and neither of you were looking at the camera. You had always loved that photo. You had not known he had printed it.
You opened it.
The first pages were the wedding.
Not just the ceremony, but all of it. The chaos of getting ready. The moment before you walked out, caught by someone from the side. Clark at the end of the aisle and the particular look on his face that you had seen in the photos before but that still hit you the same way every time, like he couldn't quite believe it, like he was trying to memorize you.
Your first dance. The cake. The late part of the night when shoes had been abandoned and someone had put on something ridiculous and everyone was dancing badly and happily and you were laughing into Clark's shoulder.
You turned the page.
The hospital. Leia, hours old, bundled tight, eyes scrunched shut against the light. Clark holding her with an expression you did not have words for, had never had words for. And one of you, just after, looking down at her with your whole heart on your face.
You pressed your fingers to your mouth.
"Keep going," Leia said softly, sitting close beside you now.
There were years in that book.
Leia's first birthday, cake everywhere. A vacation you'd taken when she was barely one, some small town, and a photo of Clark carrying her on his shoulders while she grabbed fistfuls of his hair. Ordinary Sundays. A Christmas morning with wrapping paper knee-deep. Leia's first day of school, backpack nearly as big as she was, chin lifted.
Then Jon. The hospital again, that same late-night quality of light, and Jon so small, so new, and Leia holding him for the first time, leaning over very carefully to look at his face with serious expression before announcing that he was okay.
You laughed at the memory.
More years. Jon learning to walk, caught mid-tumble, laughing anyway. The four of you at the park, at the table, in the backyard. Small moments, ordinary ones, the kind you lived inside of without always knowing you were building something.
And then, near the back, a page that was more recent. This past year. Jon asleep on Clark's chest on the couch. Leia reading with her legs over the arm of the chair the way you always told her not to sit. The four of you at the kitchen table, Sunday breakfast, everyone slightly disheveled, no one performing anything for anyone.
Home.
The last page was a letter.
Handwritten on paper that had been glued in carefully, a little crooked, which somehow made it better. Leia's handwriting, her best, each letter formed with effort. And at the bottom, in Jon's wide wandering scrawl, his name. He had also drawn a star next to it, and what might have been a cat, and a number four for reasons known only to him.
It was not a long letter. Leia was seven, and she had written it herself, and it said what it needed to say.
She wrote that you were the best mother in the world, and she had thought about this carefully and was sure.
She wrote that you were the best mom because you always knew when something was wrong even when she didn't say anything, and she didn't know how you did that but she was glad.
You were the best mom because you made her and Jonny feel safe.
And then, near the end, in the same careful handwriting, she had written, "If me and Jon got born again, we would choose you to be our mommy again. Forever and ever and ever."
You didn't try to hold it together.
You weren't sure you could have even if you'd wanted to, and you didn't want to, not here, not with the three of them right there watching you with so much love it was almost too much to be inside of.
Leia climbed into your lap and put her arms around your neck. "Don't be sad, Mommy," she said, against your cheek.
"I'm not sad," you told her. "I promise I'm not sad. This is the other kind."
She pulled back to look at your face, checking, the way you had always checked hers. Whatever she found there seemed to satisfy her, because she settled back against you and let out a long breath.
Jon appeared at your elbow.
He had woken up somewhere in the middle of the letter, soft-eyed and rumpled, drawn by the sound of your voice. He looked at you, at Leia, at the book in your hands. He reached up and patted your face with one small hand, very gently.
"Okay, Mommy?" he asked.
"More than okay, baby," you said.
He nodded, satisfied, and climbed up too, wedging himself into the remaining space, and you made room for him. Clark moved to sit beside you now, his arm coming around all three of you, solid and warm and steady.
You leaned into him.
He pressed his lips to the side of your head and kept them there for a moment.
"Leia stayed up very late three nights this week working on that letter," he said quietly, just for you. "She kept starting over because she said it wasn't right yet."
You looked at your daughter. She was pretending not to have heard this. She had her face turned away with nonchalance.
"Well, she got it right."
She turned back. Her eyes were a little bright. She lifted one shoulder in a shrug that did not fool you at all. "I just wanted to say it correctly."
"You did, baby girl."
The sunset came the way May sunsets do, spreading color across the whole sky.
The four of you sat on the back porch. Blankets had materialized. Jon was back asleep, curled against your side with his shell still in his hand, carried all the way from Cape Hatteras. Leia was leaning on the porch railing watching the sky go pink and orange.
Clark had his arm around you. He hadn't stopped touching you all day in small ways, a hand at your back, fingers through yours, the easy and unthinking language of someone who has loved someone for a long time and doesn't see any reason to stop.
"Good day?" he asked.
You looked at Jon's sleeping face. At Leia pointing out a color in the sky to herself, quietly, just noting it. At the scrapbook sitting on the table behind you.
At the sky, going gold, going rose, going the deep and luminous blue of something ending well.
"Best one yet," you said.
Clark pressed a kiss to your temple. "I'll take that," he said. "And I'll do better next year."
"You cannot do better than this year."
"Watch me."
You laughed, soft, so as not to wake Jon. Leia turned around at the sound of it and smiled at you for no particular reason. You smiled back.
The sky kept going. You had the warmth of your family around you, the day settling into evening, and the unrepeatable gold of this one hour in this one May.
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