An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
WHAT IF SUPERMAN HAD A DAUGHTER, ALSO LEX / KARA
She'd fought sleep the whole way up β chattering the entire flight about the physics of tidal locking, insisting she already knew all of it, thank you, she'd read the book twice β and then, somewhere between the exosphere and the black nothing beyond it, she'd simply stopped talking. Her head had dropped to his shoulder. Her arms, which had been wrapped around his neck in a stranglehold of excitement twenty minutes ago, had gone loose and soft, fingers still hooked loosely into the fabric of his cape like she meant to keep hold of it even unconscious.
He hadn't corrected her seating. He'd just adjusted his hold, one arm coming around her back to keep her steady against the vacuum-cold that didn't touch either of them, the other hand settling over the crown of her head, palm curved against black hair that was, in this light, almost the same non-color as the sky around them.
She weighed nothing. She always weighed nothing to him, which he knew wasn't literally true β she was eleven, gangly with the promise of height she hadn't grown into yet, all elbows and knees and stubbornness β but here, asleep, folded into him like she'd been made to fit there, he could have told you she weighed exactly as much as a held breath.
Home, he thought, and didn't know if he meant the girl or the planet.
He'd promised her the moon for her birthday. Not literally β though if she'd asked, if she'd really asked, he thinks some foolish, helpless part of him might have found a way to give it to her anyway β but a trip, a place, somewhere she could see it the way he saw it, the whole aching blue miracle of it, without a roof between her and the stars. She'd wanted it since she was seven, since the first time he'd told her, half-embarrassed, that he sometimes came up here to think. She'd looked at him with those eyes β his eyes, people said, though they weren't, though nothing about her was his except the eleven years of breakfasts and bad jokes and Band-Aids and bedtime β and said, Take me next time.
He pressed his lips, very lightly, to the crown of her head. She smelled like the shampoo Lois had picked out, something with too much vanilla in it, and underneath that, faintly, like ozone β like every child on this world was supposed to smell like grass and sunscreen and hers smelled, always, just a little bit like the sky."I'm sorry," he said, so quietly the words barely disturbed the vacuum around them, more breath than sound. "And I'm not sorry. I don't know how to be both those things at once, but I am."
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