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It was a sunny day, as was the usual for the bright and busy city of Metropolis, and Damian swore he was the only one for miles who was not enjoying the lack of cloud cover and gloomy weather. Everyone they passed by on the streets wore blinding smiles and talked with too much enthusiasm for a Monday afternoon. People waved at strangers and stopped for street performers, and in general acted as the Utopian image of city life.
Damian almost found himself missing the dark and very real streets of Gotham. Almost.
Of course, that didn’t mean he wasn’t enjoying the day so far.
At that particular moment, he was walking down a sidewalk with a certain Kryptonian boy who was laughing far too hard for someone who hadn’t been told a joke.
“The acting was unrealistic, the CGI was terrible and the props and costumes were the work of anmitures,” Damian persisted, still hung up on the awful movie they had gotten out of half an hour before. It had been the newest installment in the Sunrise series, and it was so bad Damian would have been at a loss for words if he were forced to watch just five more minutes.
He had only gone to see it in the first place because Jon had loved the first movie and he, Raven and Todd had all loved the books. If the books were anything like the movie had been, Damian would have to have a serious talk with his friends and brother about their taste in media.
“Stop laughing, I’m serious,” Damian huffed, but despite his annoyance he was fighting a smile of his own.
“It’s good bad,” Jon said through his laughter, wiping tears from his eyes and clutching his side.
“That wasn’t ‘good bad’ it was a disgrace to all of cinema!” Damian scoffed. “I knew you were tasteless, but I had no clue it was this atrocious.”
“You just aren’t getting it because you’re taking it too seriously,” Jon insisted. “If you stop looking at it as an actual romance and look at it from a comedic angle, it’s the best thing ever.”
“The protagonist was bland, her love interests behaviors were unrealistic, and the message of the story is disgusting,” Damian continued to list off the movie’s flaws.
“Damian, stop for one second,” Jon said, finally freed of his laughter. “Remember, we aren’t the intended audience. The intended audience is teenage girls. It wasn’t meant for a message, it was meant for escapism and wish fulfillment for its intended audience . When you keep that in mind, it’s an absolute masterpiece.”
“Tt, whatever you say farm boy,” Damian rolled his eyes. He checked his watch while Jon laughed a little more. “We still have three hours before we have to meet Drake and the Clone.”
“Perfect,” Jon bounced. “That means we have time to stop by the arcade, sweets shop and my favorite cafe!”
“If you insist,” Damian sighed.
“Don’t be like that, I’ve had this day planned for weeks!” Jon whined, tugging on his arm. “I even did extra chores this week so we would have enough money.
“You could have just asked me to bring my wallet,” Damian said.
“Nu-uh, there is no way I’m letting you pay for our first outing together,” Jon shook his head.
“This isn’t our first-” Damian was quickly cut off as Jon pulled him into the arcade, his super speed and strength slipping ever so slightly so that he had to rub his arm and catch his breath afterwards. By the time he regained his balance, Jon had rushed over to the coin machine and was feeding in a twenty he had earned from mowing the lawn and washing the dishes.
When he came back, he took Damian’s hand and dumped about half of the coins into it with a grin. He had been practically glowing ever since they had met up that morning, an effect that Damian could easily write off as being due to the shining sun and not his presence, as Drake had insisted. Even inside the arcade, shaded and away from the sun, the fifteen year old was still shining brighter than any of the neon lights around them.
Damian just shook his head but relented as Jon dragged him around the arcade, showing off his gaming skills and earning tickets. Damian was decent at most of the games, but was too unused to the mode of gaming compared to the consuls he played on with his family to truly be any good. He would never admit that out loud of course. It would go right to Jon’s head he was sure.
Damian had run out of coins and only had a fistful of tickets by the time Jon was down to his last two had had a plastic bag filled.
For his last game, Jon took Damian by the hand and pulled him towards an arm wrestling game that reached to the ceiling with a bell at the top. Damian had seen such a game in a cheesy movie Brown had shown him and the rest of the family. After asking his father more about the game, he was informed that, as many carnival games were, it was completely rigged and impossible to win.
“Those don’t actually work you know,” Damian said, leaning against the machine with an unimpressed raise to his brow. “Even for your strength it won't budge.”
“Want to bet?” Jon asked, his grin growing wider, a far cry from the shy and timid Jon Kent and much closer to the Superboy he knew from their late night escapades.
Damian snorted but gave a single nod. A simple dip of his chin, never breaking eye contact.
“All of the loser’s tickets to the winner?” Jon asked.
“Whatever you say,” Damian agreed.
Jon rolled up his sleeves and, gaze still on Damian, took hold of the fake hand and started the simulated arm wrestling contest.
Damian actually gave a jump when he felt something rush past him inside the machine and hit the bell at the top with an almost deafening ding ding ding!
While he stared wide eyed up at the bell, Jon cheered and collected the tickets spilling out from the machine into his plastic bag. When Damian turned back to him, still slightly in shock, Jon was holding out his hand expectantly with a self satisfied smirk.
“The machine must be broken,” Damian said as he handed them over.
“Whatever you say,” Jon teased. After taking the tickets, he took Damian’s hand again and went up to the prize counter to feed the tickets into a machine to get a receipt. He handed off said receipt to a tired looking teenager, only a year or so older than Damian, bouncing on his heels.
“Could I have that bear?” he asked, pointing up to the ceiling. Damian followed his finger’s direction and found a large bear that was at least five feet tall hanging from the ceiling. It had a superman symbol on it’s chest in the shape of a heart, which was more than enough to make Damian roll his eyes. It was very much something the young Kent would waste his tickets on as a gag with his family.
The teenager behind the counter smiled through their clear as day lack of sleep and scanned both the receipt and the little sign that announced the bear’s price. He had to pull over a ladder and get a long hooked pole to unloop the bear from where it was hung up, and struggled with handing it to Jon over the counter.
As soon as the bear was in his arms, though, Jon immediately pushed it to Damian’s chest. He struggled at first, with the bear being as big as himself, but managed to get a good hold on it and look around it to furrow his brows in question.
“I won it for you,” Jon said like it was obvious. “If you need me to carry it it can.”
“I am perfectly fine carrying the monstrosity on my own,” Damian said. “You couldn’t have chosen a more impractical gift?”
“It's not an impractical gift,” Jon said. “It’s cute.”
“Can it not be both?” Damian asked, but relented in following Jon out of the arcade the fastest he could with the monstrous stuffed animal in his arms.
“Sweets shop or cafe next?” Jon said allowed, though it was clear he was asking himself.
“We only have time left for one of the two,” Damian said after checking his watch again.
“Cafe it is then!” Jon said. He guided Damian back down the Metropolis sidewalk, pointing out different stores and vendors along the way as he told stories about them. Damian only heard half of the stories, his sight too focused on Jon’s lit up and expressive face for any of his other senses to properly function.
Halfway through a story about a noodle store he liked to visit with his older brother, Jon noticed Damian’s staring. He ducked his head, his cheeks flaring bright red, and Damian couldn’t help but give the smallest of smiles at the reaction.
The rest of the walk to the cafe, Jon’s voice was back to its usual shy softness as he chatted on about the city he so clearly loved. Damian didn’t stop his staring, but did end up lost in his own thoughts about the past years’ events.
He could still very clearly remember the day when he was thirteen and his father had carefully sat him down in his study for a talk. During that talk, he was told of one of the most disturbing things yet to happen in his life, which was saying something considering his childhood.
Through dimension hopping events that Damian never bothered to understand, Jon had gone from ten years old to seventeen overnight. He was different now that he was so much older, and Damian found a hole grow in his chest from the loss of his closest friend.
The event was possibly the thing that finally cemented his bond with Drake, and they had both lost their kryptonian friends under circumstances completely out of their control. The only problem Damian saw with the bonding they had done was that Drake had gotten Conner back. Not only had he gotten him back, but the two had started dating not too long after his return, which brought Damian an odd sense of jealousy he had never been able to understand.
After a year of consideration between himself and his parents, Jon had gone to Zatanna for help in reversing his physical age. The magician had agreed, but had only been half successful in her daunting task. The next time Damian saw Jon, he was only a year younger than him, still with his ever present height advantage, now coupled with his mental age.
Damian was still ashamed when he remembered his initial reaction of slamming the door in Jon’s face. He had refused to speak to the Kryptonian for months on end, so unsure of how to feel about the entire situation he had found himself in. He had gotten his friends back, but he wasn’t sure if he was still really his friend.
He still wished that his family could have stopped being so damn unconditionally supportive for one moment and knocked some sense into him so he could have accepted Jon’s returned presence in his life earlier than he actually had.
It had been a year since the two had fully reunited, apologies coming from both ends despite Damian’s admit denial that Jon had anything to apologize for. He was big enough to admit he had been the one fully in the wrong even though everyone repeatedly told him his reaction was perfectly reasonable for a fourteen year old presented with such a stressful situation. Even at sixteen, he couldn’t understand Jon’s easy forgiveness of his behavior.
“Dami?” Jon pulled him from his thoughts gently, cheeks faded to a much softer pink, but the blush still clearly present.
“I’m okay,” Damian nodded, ignoring the clear pull in his chest. Jon had been so gentle with him the past year no matter how much they had both moved on, and it was enough to drive him crazy “You were saying?”
“We’re here,” Jon smiled, nodding to the cafe now in front of them.
Damian gave a small smile in return and followed Jon to the outdoor table he claimed to be his favorite. While Jon placed their orders at the front, Damian set the super bear up in one of the seats at the table. He pulled out his phone while he waited, finding texts from Grayson, Todd and Brown all asking him a variation of ‘how’s the date going?’
Damian responded to all the texts from his prying siblings with ‘it’s not a date’ and put his phone away again to look around at the others sitting outside of the cafe.
There were a few younger high school and older middle school students hanging around the tables and benches outside the cafe, enjoying the nice weather and food Jon had claimed to be some of the best in metropolis (“Besides that one time Conner brought me with him to a custody required dinner with Lex a few years ago. That was the best,” he remembered the teen chatting on the walk there). Damian realized Jon had probably learned about the cafe from friends he knew from school.
As he looked around, though, he noticed more and more that the other teens around him were all there in pairs. Sipping on milkshakes and coffees together while they ate a split pastry. Some were holding hands over or under the table, or kissing on benches or leaned against the cafe’s garden walls. Subconsciously he found himself beginning to go into panic, because this was clearly not a place a normal friend from school would take Jon.
He didn’t understand why he was panicking at the notion of the boy having a boyfriend or girlfriend, or having gone on dates before. He was mentally aged to nineteen, even if he was currently dwelling in the body of a fifteen year old.
Maybe it was because sitting among these couples brought out something in him that had nothing to do with Jon. At least, he was pretty sure it had nothing to do with Jon.
He had never felt threatened or out of place when at events that had many couples, his age, younger and older, all gathered and acting as couples. He knew the divorce, widowing and murder rates in Gotham meant that very few couples actually lasted for life. Even around his family he never found himself upset because he was too happy for their pairings. His father and Selina had made a great match despite his earlier doubts, Grayson and West were married with kids of their own, Todd and Harper as dysfunctional as they were still held Damian’s vote as the best fit couple in the family, and Drake and Jon’s cloned older brother were engaged to be wed in the spring.
But these couples were affecting him in such a way that he started to squeeze his stuffed bear’s paw under the table.
What’s wrong with Gotham? He thought, rerunning every statistic and horror story of love he knew from the city. The thought quickly morphed into What’s wrong with me?
It had been a long time since he asked that question, two years to be exact, and it was quickly waved away back to his first question. It had taken years of extensive therapy ordered by Alfred and plenty of love and care from his family, colleagues and friends to help him accept there wasn’t anything wrong with him. He was raised in harsh circumstances that his mother had gotten him out of and to his father the soonest she could. He had built walls and defences, and he knew now at a more mature age that they were all just for show and were unneeded now.
He looked around at the couples again and forced his heart not to harden in the presence. It was beautiful what youth and a good city could do to grow love, and he would be damned if he let a coping mechanism from his childhood make him view it as any less.
“Sorry I took so long,” Jon’s laugh caught his attention and he gave a soft smile up at his friend.
“Not at all.”
Jon took his seat across from him and sat down the tall pink and white milkshake between them as well as a napkin with two cookies on it. Just with a glance Damian could tell Jon had gotten him a dark chocolate variety, and couldn’t help but let his smile grow.
His attention on the cookies of course made him belatedly notice that the milkshake was singular and had two straws sticking up from the top.
“I wasn’t sure what flavor you wanted,” Jon admitted while Damian’s gaze whipped around them, knowing there must be a mistake. Instead of an explanation, Damian’s eyes locked onto a few couples who had a drink or milkshake set up the same way. One drink, two straws, with them drinking from them happily as they stared into each other’s eyes.
“It’s strawberry and cream,” Jon said, drawing his attention again. The teen across from him was nervously adjusting his glasses and pushing back his dark curls, looking anywhere but Damian. Damian noticed the faint blush dusting his cheeks and smiled, before his entire face went red at realization that he had just smiled at his friend blushing.
His brothers’ and Brown’s texts suddenly came back to mind, along with a few romcoms they had watched together and his own observations of his family and their significant others. The movie with a shared bucket of popcorn, the holding hands, the bear purchased and given after winning an arcade game, and now the obviously romantic cafe with a two straw milkshake and a blush.
“Are we on a date right now?” Damian blurted, eyebrow furrowed but eyes wide.
Jon’s head snapped up so quick Damian had barely seen it, compliments of super speed, his eyes equally as wide, “I thought we were, but your expression is telling a totally different story. You don’t have any kryptonite batarangs on you right now, right?”
“Why would I-” Damian shook his head, “We’re on a date no one had the decency to tell me?”
Well, technically Grayson, Todd and Brown had told him, but that wasn’t important. What was important was how shrill his voice was to his own ears, and the sympathetic glances a few couples were giving him.
“I asked Tim to ask you if you go on a date with me since my phone broke,” Jon was babbling now, hands flying around as he tried to explain. “I thought when he told Conner that you said yes you were saying yes to the date!”
A set up, Damian realized. Drake had fully intended for this mess to happen just to spite him. The man was lucky Damian now accepted he loved him, or he would never live to see his spring wedding.
“I need a second,” Damian said, resting his head in his hands. His face felt hot under his fingers, and he feared to imagine just how red it had become. A lifetime of training was all falling apart all because he had spent an entire date with a cute boy completely in the dark to the fact that it was a date.
Wait. Cute boy?
Did he think Jon was cute? Jon was cute, he had always known that, but did he really think he was cute in the way that Drake found the clone cute?
He had been jealous when Tim got the clone back but he lost Jon. That meant something, he had always known that, but he had never really looked into it. If he thought Jon was cute in that way, it explained the jealousy. The feeling of emptiness the half kryptonian boy’s absence had left him with. The reaction of honest to god fear when Jon came back in a way that was definitely socially unacceptable for him to be with.
Jon is cute. I like Jon. Jon likes me…
“Dami?” Jon said quietly, nervously. No, it was more than nerves now, he was afraid. He was afraid in the same way Damian had seen him in his older form. Rejection and heartbreak surly making the taste in his mouth bitter as apologies he didn't need to say weighed on his tongue.
“We’re on a date,” Damian finally said, peeking up from behind his finger. He said it as the statement it was and not the question from before.
“If you want to be,” Jon nodded, some of the fear falling away.
Damian took his hands away from his face but kept his eyes on the milkshake instead of Jon’s face. It was already starting to melt and turn sluggish in its tall cup.
“I want to be,” he said, a soft smile falling on his lips.
“Thank goodness, because I don’t know what I would tell Mom if I went home single,” Jon sighed in relief, then stopped. “That does mean you want to be my boyfriend, right?”
“I want to be your boyfriend,” Damian affirmed, smile growing wider. There was something fuzzy and warm and safe growing in his chest. It reminded him of Jon, as silly as it was considering Jon was the one who put it there.
“Thank goodness,” Jon repeated, letting his head fall on the table. “I think that was the most stressful thing I’ve ever done.”
“Jon, you’ve fought gods.”
“That was a hundred times easier than this was.”
“The milkshake is melting.”
Jon bounced up at that and quickly leaned forward to start gulping the sugary drink from his straw. Damian shook his head with a smaller smile and leaned forward as well.
His face lit up in heat once again when their noses brushed and Damian realized just how close there were, but he didn’t pull back. The milkshake was good, but it had nothing on the bashful and overwhelmingly happy look in Jon’s eyes. Damian was sure it was a look he could get drunk off of if he tried.
“We should probably get going,” Jon said with heavy remorse after they finished the milkshake.
“Probably,” Damian agreed, checking his watch. He wished he had the ability to make time stop, just for a second. He had just found out this was a date, and it was already ending. He would have to use the walk back to Drake and the clone to make up for that lost time.
As they walked down the sidewalk they finished their cookies and stared ahead at the near setting sun. When they were both finished, Damian took Jon’s hand and intertwined their fingers without looking towards him.
“Our next date you should take me to that sweets shop you’ve been talking about,” Damian said with a smile teasing his lips. He glanced from the corner of his eye just in time to catch Jon smiling a close lipped but wide smile. Domain was sure he would never get over how shy Jon could get in his civilian persona.
“I will,” Jon promised.
They reached the fountain they were meeting their brothers much too soon for Damian’s liking. Drake and clone spoted them right away, surly partially due to the oversized stuffed bear Damian was hulling along, and smiled upon spotting their intertwined fingers.
“I see the date went well,” Drake said with a devilish grin.
“No thanks to you,” Damian glared.
“He was just having a little fun,” the older Kent boy waved off Damian’s anger. “You figured it out before it ended at least.”
“Barely,” Damian rolled his eyes.
“But we still had fun,” Jon interjected. “Thank you for bringing Damian with you. It was a good first date.”
“First date as in there will be more,” the clone’s grin matched his fiance’s as he looked between them. “Jon you sly dog, did you get yourself a bat boyfriend?”
“Oh my God,” Jon mumbled, face going red in a new way for that day that was more familiar to Damian as his My Family is Embarrassing me Please Send Help face, as titled by his brother.
“He did,” Damian spoke up for him with a slightly puffed chest.
“I did,” Jon repeated with a smile down at Damian.
“Well, it’s time for me to get your little bat back to Gotham,” Tim interjected.
“Who are you calling little?” Damian raised an eyebrow. He was as tall as Drake and still growing. If it weren’t for Cain, Drake would have been the shortest of the bats.
“Can you please let me live in a fantasy where my little brother is still little for five minutes?” Drake pleaded with him.
Damian rolled his eyes again as Drake kissed his fiance goodbye.
Together they started to walk away from the Kent brothers and back to Drake’s car. Drake allowed the kick that came to his shins as they walked off and even smiled. When they got to the car, Damian had made up his mind.
“Hold this,” Damian said, passing the bear off to Drake as quickly as he could with a stuffed animal of it;s size. “If you drop Jon Jr. I won't hesitate to stick a blade in your shin.”
“Got it, no dropping,” Drake grinned at him over the bear. “Go get him.”
Damian nodded and ran back in the direction they had come from until he reached the fountain and spotted the Kent brothers walking in the other direction. He had to rush to keep up with even just their walking speed, reminding him of how much Jon had to control himself and slow down the entire day. Luckily his own speed, as human as it was, was enough to reach them before they got to the clone’s car.
Without a word, Damian grabbed Jon’s arm as he turned to face him, and pushed up onto his tiptoes to lock their lips together. Jon froze under his hand before melting into the kiss and sliding his hand into Damian’s hair and his other arm around his waist for support.
Damian pulled back with Jon chasing after his lips with his eyes closed. He smiled at the sight and pecked Jon’s lips one more time before parting fully and starting his run back in the direction of his brother’s car.
“You’ll call me, right?” he heard Jon yell behind him.
Damian turned on his heel to look back, “Get your phone fixed and I will.”
Then he kept running, a wide grin on his face.
Maybe sunny days in Metropolis weren't so bad after all.