Magical Moonlight
Closed rp starter for @prime-magus
Clark had been trying to work. The article on relief efforts in Qurac sat open on his laptop, a cursor blinking under a half-finished paragraph like it was tapping its foot. His notepad was spread beside it with names, figures, and quotes from aid organizations, a rough outline that made sense on paper and refused to become prose. Outside the window, Metropolis carried on: distant traffic, an occasional horn, the hush-and-rise of the city breathing. Inside, his apartment was warm in that end-of-day way. The smell of dish soap lingering faintly on his hands from washing a mug, the radiator clicking softly, a single lamp casting a mellow circle of light over the table.
Clark leaned forward, forearms braced on either side of the keyboard, trying to coax his thoughts back into the shape of a sentence. He could do this. He’d written through worse, for crying out loud. Through sleepless nights and impossible deadlines and the kind of stories that made your chest ache. He just needed to focus.
'The humanitarian corridor....'
His mind slid sideways. It wasn’t dramatic at first. Just a flicker, an image that didn’t belong to Qurac at all. Zatanna’s hands turning something small between her fingers. The way she’d spoken once, offhand and bright, about crystals like they were old friends... or maybe it was more like unruly children. Alexandrite, amethyst, jasper, sodaite, he could recall off the top of his head. Clark had nodded at the time like he understood what any of that meant, because that’s what you did when someone you respected was sharing something they cared about. Now the words had lodged in him like a splinter.
He stared at the screen, blinked, and tried again. 'Supplies were delayed by...'
Another drift. A memory, sharp as a photograph: Clark out on patrol a week ago, hovering above a block where the night was restless, and somewhere below a couple of women walking arm in arm, laughing as they passed a storefront display full of gemstones. One of them had said, “No, moonstone is for sleep. You keep it by your bed. It blocks nightmares.” The other had snorted and replied, “That’s not moonstone, that’s just marketing. Amethyst is the sleep one.” They’d kept going, their voices fading into the city, but the exchange had stayed in Clark’s head in a deeply unfair way. He’d caught himself thinking about it later while saving a cat from a fire escape, of all things.
The cursor blinked. Blinked. Blinked. Clark exhaled slowly through his nose and rubbed a hand over his face, the heel of his palm pressing briefly against his eye like he could physically push the distraction out. When he dropped his hand, the room felt too quiet, like his thoughts were the loudest thing in it.
“Okay,” he muttered, mostly to himself. “Fine.”
He reached for his phone, thumb hovering over the screen with the kind of reluctant surrender one made when they knew they weren’t winning this fight. His search history already looked like equal parts boomer and conspiracy board half the time. What was a little more?
The research began with moonstone meanings, which turned into rhodochrosite magical properties, which turned into a dozen links that all seemed determined to disagree with each other. One site swore moonstone was for intuition and love. Another insisted it was for protection during travel. Someone else promised it would “align your feminine energy,” which made Clark’s eyebrows shoot up in sheer bafflement. This whole magic thing was beyond him. He scrolled, frowning, taking mental notes like this was investigative journalism and not him spiraling because he wanted to bring his coworker a thoughtful gift.
It wasn’t consistent. It wasn’t even close. The internet was a sea of certainty with no anchor; everyone declared their version of meanings like it was gospel. Clark sighed, tapped his phone against the table once, and leaned back in his chair until it creaked. His gaze drifted to the ceiling. The longer he stared, the more the thought settled in his chest with heavy inevitability. This is supposed to be simple. Why is this complicated?
Because it wasn’t about the stones. Not really. Zatanna was a friend. A teammate. A woman he admired- she's sharp, brave, funny, and more patient with him than he deserved when he asked naive questions about magic. Clark cared about her. He also cared about not stepping over lines. He was married. And he knew she had her own attachments going on. He didn’t want kindness to be misread as courting, and he absolutely didn’t want to hand her something that carried some accidental implication he hadn’t intended. So he didn’t buy anything. Not that night or even the next day. But he also didn’t stop thinking about it.
The Qurac assignment got filed. The week moved on. Clark went to work, went on patrol, came home, and tried to sleep. And every so often, the thought returned, persistent and oddly tender. A gift should demonstrate that the person cares enough to know what they like- that they actually listen to them.
By the time a couple of days had passed, he’d narrowed it down to two stones that, at least across multiple sources, shared a common thread: amethyst for sleep, calm, quieting a mind that wouldn’t stop spinning. And moonstone for gentler, softer, tied to rest and emotional steadiness. If nothing else, they were harmless. They were thoughtful.
He found himself at the Fortress of Solitude. He’d come to retrieve a data crystal, to cross-check a report, to look at a projection map that Four insisted had a more accurate model for an emerging storm system. The Fortress greeted him with its usual solemn quiet, Arctic air so clean it almost stung, the vast cathedral of ice and Kryptonian architecture humming softly beneath his feet. Light fractured through the crystalline walls in pale blues and whites, throwing reflections that moved when he moved, as if the place were always watching him back.
Clark walked deeper, boots crunching lightly, and as he passed one of the alcoves, a section of the Fortress where the structure shifted from smooth ice into something that was unmistakably Kryptonian. He slowed. The crystals there weren’t decorative. They were foundational. They grew in deliberate geometries, edges too precise to be natural, surfaces that held light the way a blade held sharpness. Some of them pulsed faintly, not with color so much as presence: a low, steady hum of stored energy, of memory, of function. The Fortress used them the way Earth used wiring and steel. They were conduit and archive and bone.
Clark stood there a moment longer than he meant to, staring at the subtle shimmer trapped inside a clear facet. He knew what these were. He knew how carefully Kelex tracked them, how they interfaced with the Fortress systems, how they carried data, absorbed solar charge, translated it into power. Kryptonian technology was built on crystalline architecture the way his own body was built on sunlight. It made sense in a way his human life rarely did.
And then the thought, quiet and dangerous, nudged into place: Wouldn’t this mean more than something I could buy at a shop?
Pause. He frowned, immediately wary of himself. He wasn’t trying to make it dramatic. He wasn’t trying to hand Zee a piece of Krypton like a confession. Clark shook his head, getting way too ahead of himself. That sort of gesture is reserved for a married partner- except Clark wasn't entirely sure giving Lex Luthor a crystal from Krypton was something he should responsibly do.
Clark left the Fortress with his decision folded carefully into his jacket. Two small stones wrapped in soft cloth so they wouldn’t clink together: amethyst and moonstone.
He still hesitated once he was airborne, the Arctic shrinking beneath him into a smear of white. Not because he doubted the gift, but because he wanted to do it right. So instead of turning toward Gotham, he angled up through the thinning atmosphere until the sky turned black and the moon rose close enough to make the world feel quiet.
Clark landed there lightly and set the two crystals into the dust like he was laying out something sacred. He let them sit in the pale spill of lunar light while Earth hung blue and distant behind him. The silence pressed in, clean and absolute, and for a few minutes he simply stood there, hands in his pockets, watching the stones as if moonlight could settle his nerves the way it settled over everything else. When he finally gathered them again, the cloth was warm from his hands.
He didn’t waste time second-guessing after that. He dropped back toward Earth, cut across the night in a clean line, and slowed only when Gotham’s sprawl came into view. Darker, denser, the air heavier even from above. He angled away from the city center toward the outskirts, where the lights thinned, and the land rose into quiet wooded stretches.
Shadowcrest sat back from the road like it knew how to keep its secrets. Clark set down beyond the treeline instead of on the drive, letting the leaves swallow the sound of his landing. The parcel stayed tucked close to his chest as he crossed the grounds on foot, moving with a careful steadiness that felt almost absurd after spaceflight. Gravel under his shoes, night air cool against his face, the house looming ahead in dark, elegant silhouette. He stopped at the front door and drew one slow breath, as if to settle whatever nervousness still clung to him. Then he lifted his hand and knocked three soft raps against the wood.