Chapter Text
Clark finished the last of the clean up. No one had been hurt, but the accident had involved a trailer full of paint and he was… who he was.
Kara had been helping, but she stopped to watch people, her head slightly tilted curiously, though her face had fallen again.
He followed her gaze to one of the more affectionate young couples , who laughed together as they walked down the street.
“Kara” He started to reach for her and she bolted into space.
He flew after her, slowing only when he saw her curled up in a ball as she gazed at their home over her knees.
He folded his legs and hovered beside her, waiting for her to speak.
The planet shifted slowly in front of them.
“How am I supposed to love if I cannot even grieve?” Kara’s voice cracked, her words so quiet they were almost lost to the vacuum of space. Clark felt Earth’s gravity tug at him a little harder. He wrapped her into a tight hug.
“One step at a time, just like anything else.”
“I keep trying to do what you and Lois do, but it does not work. I have even tried what your parents do, but that does not work either.”
“Okay, first of all, you and Jimmy are not Lois and me, or Ma and Pa. You’re you. Second of all, Lois and I have been together for a long time, and Ma and Pa have been together even longer.”
“So?”
“There are… You know, relationships are like stairs.”
“You said trees last time.”
“Well yes. But right now they are like stairs. We all start on the ground floor and have to figure out how to get up the first step. And then every step after that.”
“Do you not know how to go up stairs?” Kara rubbed her eyes dry and looked up at him so he would know she was judging him and his metaphors.
“Nobody knows how to go up these stairs. That’s the magic.” Clark smiled, he bumped into her shoulder gently and grabbed her shoulder to keep her from drifting away. “And they are different for everybody. Lois and I had… some things to work through. My parents had things to work through, so do you and Jimmy. No one knows how to love, we all just make our best guess, try to do right by our partners and learn as we go along. But, Kara, you are going to figure it out. I know you will.”
“Alright, that’s enough ‘mushy feelings’ in space.” Kara elbowed him and he let the momentum carry him until she grabbed his ankle and yanked him back. She scrubbed at her face as he pulled her into another hug.
“Thank you.”
Clark closed his eyes and snuggled her a little closer, their capes arched around them like a shield.
Kara left for the farm a few hours later. Clark had baked cookies and sent the last of them home with her, knowing they would not last her to the edge of the city.
Which was fine.
He’d added a nutrient mix, and she’d probably burn it off entirely by the time she actually got home, her flight path was already veering off towards the sea, presumably to go take pictures of things that were not dogs to send to Clark for identification.
Or drawings.
She’d visited the depths once and while her art was incredibly accurate, the creatures she’d discovered took him a week of talking to marine biologists and still had him second-guessing swimming.
What was far less fine was the sorrow on Jimmy’s face as he watched her fly away.
“Jimmy.”
“It’s fine.” Jimmy’s shoulders sagged even further and Clark’s heart sank with them.
“Oh Jimmy.” Clark reached around him and pulled him into a hug.
“It’s fine, Clark.” Jimmy’s voice wavered, “Really.”
Clark leaned back just enough to look at him.
“Why won’t you just talk to her?”
“Kara deserves so much better. Clark don’t even start.”
“You are dissing my best friend.”
“Kara deserves the world. There’s so much for her to see and experience and I just can’t, Clark. We both know she deserves better.”
“You are one of the best people I know.” Clark held on to Jimmy’s shoulders.
“Yeah, no, that’s called a bias, Clark.” Jimmy backed out of his grasp. “C’mon Kansas, let’s just go to bed. I’m pretty tired.”
Jimmy hugged him again and climbed up into his bunk. Clark stared at the bed above him.
It was almost dawn before sleep finally overtook the worry spinning through his mind.
Clark hovered outside Lois’ window.
“Okay, and I still think we should probably let them figure it out on their own, but what are your ideas?” Clark blurted the second Lois opened the window. “Also, hello.”
He pressed a kiss to her cheek
“Finally came around, Smallville?”
Clark sighed, “I don’t ever want to see Jimmy look that sad again, or Kara.”
Clark’s eyes stung just thinking about it, Lois pulled out her phone and turned on the whistle app despite Clark’s wince.
“Why do you think I said we had to do something?” Lois huffed. “I’ll make some more coffee.”
“It’s late though.” Clark followed her into the kitchen, his cape fluttered behind him until he pulled it around his arms like a blanket.
“We need plotting fuel.” Lois dumped what was left in the pot into a mug and drank it in one shuddering gulp.
“I could have heated that for you.” Clark wrapped his arms around her waist, moving with her, as if making coffee had become a slow dance.
“And?” Lois leaned back into his chest.
“And.” Clark nuzzled her hair. His hand left her side only to reach for the grounds in the cupboard.
They cuddled together while the coffee pot filled the apartment with what must be the scent of paradise. Clark pulled a small Tupperware box out of his cape’s pocket and Lois snatched a few as she brainstormed. She only left the comfort of Clark’s arms to fetch brochures she’d collected over her years of living in Metropolis.
“Okay.” She set her notebook on her lap.
Clark’s eye twitched as her phone continued to whistle. Lois couldn’t hear it, but it felt like his ears had grown claws just to scratch his brain for the past fifteen minutes.
“Can we. Can we maybe turn that down?”
“We can’t have Kara listening.”
“Kara is more resilient to noises than I am.” Clark massaged his ears.
Lois sighed and reached into her bag to pull out her old pink headphones. She set them over Clark’s ears. “She’s watching tv with Jimmy.
“Do I want to know how you know that?”
“I’ve been gathering data.” Lois waved her hand, “It’s not like I set up cameras in your apartment.”
Clark stared at her.
“I have your tv login.” She held her phone up, “So I can see— Wow season 14 already? We need to get them a box set.”
“Lois!”
“Anyways. This is how we surprise you, as long as you don’t look through our searches.”
“You were logged into my computer and left the page open!” Clark folded his arms, his playful defiance accentuated by the blindingly pink headphones over his ears. “I don’t think we need the whistle.”
“We need the whistle.”
Clark sighed.
“Okay, so we need to get them alone in a room together.” Lois tapped her pen on the page.
“Lois maybe we shouldn’t.”
“Jimmy helped us. And you’ve seen how he looks at her, and how sad he is. And how it’s upsetting Kara. We have to do this, for our best friends.”
“I—” Clark wilted, his eyes settles on the photo of the four of them at the farm Lois kept on her desk. It had been taken the day Kara woke up, when her scar was still so prominent and her body shrouded in Clark’s comfiest sweater. “Okay.”
“Okay.”
“Okay.” Lois grinned.
“But we need to be careful. This is both of their first times.”
“Oh, I know.”
“Lois!”
“It’s not Halloween! You can’t tell me not to ruin Halloween!” Lois giggled. “But seriously, we went mystery solving and they didn’t get to do everything. I want them in the maze together. Alone. No powers to save them.”
“Little harsh, Lois.”
“Well! We’ll tell Kara it’s a challenge.” Lois tapped the wrong end of her pen on her chin, which left a glittery pink smudge.
“And she’ll speed through it.” Clark licked his thumb and swiped at it, Lois was too absorbed in plotting to wave him off.
“And we’ll ditch them in the corn!”
Clark narrowly dodged her pen.
“Yeah except if she thinks we got lost she’ll hunt us down like every other time we’ve tried to give them time alone.
“That one place we went to last year is still open.” Lois ignored Clark’s voice of reason. “For one last weekend, so we’ll go there. There’s a snack stand here and here, we can start here. And we’ll make them ride in the backseat together. Do you think the bouncy house would be okay?”
“I don’t think that thing survived another year.” Clark laughed, “But if it did, maybe? I always had trouble with them and she’s still adjusting. Oh! The spinning apples! She’d totally go too fast and Jimmy would end up stuck to her side. Clark leaned closer to the map, uncapping his own pen.
“Enforced cuddling via physics. And you said I was harsh.”
“We all have our interests.” Clark smirked, “Okay. We need to focus. Actually wait. Kara just paused the show to make popcorn.”
Clark frowned, his head slightly tilted as he listened. The clock ticked loudly through five minutes as they held their breath.
“Okay.” Clark sighed, “We need to do the carriages too. How do we get them into one alone?”
“But then we can’t take pictures of them being cute.” Lois folded her arms, “We need a revenge scrapbook.”
“A revenge scrapbook.” Clark made absolutely no effort to hide his judgement.
“Yeah. Jimmy has this huge scrapbook of us in his sock drawer. Its really frilly, like he murdered a wedding dress and used its skin as a cover.”
“Thank you for putting that image in my head. Wait! You looked in Jimmy’s sock drawer?” Clark hissed, “Lois!”
“Oh, I looked in yours too.” Lois shrugged, entirely missing the point. “We need to make our frillier, and neon purple.”
Clark scrubbed a hand down his face.
“Oh, did you find out anything else about that clone?” Lois set her pen down.
“Not yet.”
“I thought you were going to the Fortress to check into stuff last night.”
“I got… distracted.” Clark hedged.
Lois crossed her arms and stared at her boyfriend, one eyebrow raised in a way she knew he could not resist.
“So it spawned these steward robots and they have no sense of personal space. Or taking turns talking, or just boundaries! And, Lois, they swarm. And they won’t even tell me their names.”
“Do they have names?”
“Probably not.” Clark wilted, “Not yet, anyway. But I have been leaving food near where we found him. And he has been taking it, but Lois he was so scared, and who knows how long he was down there.”
“Alone?”
“Yes. And hunted.” Clark’s shoulders sagged, “I know he came into Metropolis a couple times, and got a little overwhelmed. But I want him to come out when he is ready to, not because I tracked him down and forced him to. Because he trusts me. So as long as I know he’s okay I’m going to wait him out.”
Lois grabbed his chin and yanked him into a kiss. Clark melted into it for a moment before he pulled away, and idea gleaming in his eyes.
“Lois. Lois! She copies us!”
Lois blinked, her mind tried to reconcile the warmth of their kiss still tingling across her lips with the fact that her ‘we have to let them figure it out on their own’ boyfriend was finally fully onboard with meddling.
“She does.” Lois gasped. “Okay, so we just need to be extra clingy.”
Lois and Clark stared down at their legs, pressed so close together they were almost melded. Clark’s shoulder was warm and steady and familiar against hers, their hands were linked together, their fingers interlaced.
After Brainiac it was hard to walk down the street while holding hands, as though there was too much distance between them and the only thing she could do was snatch him by the waist and never let him leave.
He’d even started holding her hip sometimes. It had taken some reassurance (mainly Lois grabbing his hand and setting it there after he apologized for his hand placement on an awkward landing.)
But it was nice.
His hand was always so warm against her lower spine, it soothed the knots that tangled there from sitting at a desk writing too long. And if that was still too far away she could haul him into her lap like a weighted blanket and stare into his eyes as her soul settled back into her skin.
Love was not for cowards but sometimes she was still scared.
And maybe their love had been inevitable, some universal law written in the fabric of their lives and proved by the League of Lanes. But it was because Jimmy had spent so long subtly, and less-than-subtly, pushing them together, encouraging their romance like a beloved rose garden. She wasn’t going to let him let his own garden wither because he didn’t feel worthy of its blooms.
“I’ve been trying to talk to him about the worthiness issue. Gently. Last time I hit him with a ‘you are worthy of being loved’ he called me biased and sent me to bed.”
Lois snorted.
“You sure you’re not psychic, Smallville?”
“Mostly. Why?”
I was just trying to think about how to fix that.” Lois leaned back.
They fell silent, Clark’s thumb stroked over Lois’ shoulder as he though, and she bounced her pen off his hand absently.
“I just don’t know.” Clark sighed. “We need to figure out why he doesn’t think he’s good enough.”
“Because she’s Supergirl and he’s a human being and he doesn’t want to get hurt?”
“Yes, but you have abandonment trauma, we need to figure out what the root of Jimmy’s insecurities is.” Clark leaned forward, a frowning at their notes. “Protection maybe? Jimmy can get really protective sometimes.”
“What are you going to do, ask him directly?”
“Well, direct is always best.” Clark stole her pen and scribbled in his notebook.
“Clark. Clark.” Lois cupped her hands around his face when he was done writing, staring him directly in the eyes, “Do not go up to Jimmy and ask him what the root of his insecurities is. Maybe that’s the one thing we need to sit back and wait for Kara to kick his butt for. Like that one time you called yourself weird and she launched you into orbit for being mean to her cousin.”
Lois grinned.
Clark paled, but a slow smile spread across his face, “It would be her right.”
“See?”
“But I am still going to try to talk to Jimmy again.” Clark scribbled another note in his notebook.
Lois buried her face in her palms.