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Smallville was, at its heart, Clark’s home, but there were moments that Metropolis was where he belonged—and this time, he was determined to share it with Conner properly.
He was avoiding his gaze just like he usually did, staring out over the city like he was seeing it for the first time. He did that a lot. He didn’t just look at things, he analyzed them. He discovered them, one fraction of the sight at a time. Everything was new. He wasn’t sixteen, Clark was reminded over and over again. He was new to the world.
Holidays were new, too.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked before he could tell himself that it was a bad idea. Whatever Conner and him were, surely they could be civil with each other.
Conner glanced up at him for a second, like he was surprised he started the conversation, and then shrugged. “I haven’t been up here before. It’s a different view than I expected.”
“Expected how?”
He paused again, brow furrowed, and then sighed. “I don’t know how to explain it,” he said, sounding embarrassed, “Just… brighter?”
Clark smiled. “Ah. Yeah, I get what you mean.”
“You do?” Conner asked, and there was an edge of relief to the question. As if he was still afraid of saying the wrong thing, around him, and Clark would be lying if he said it didn’t give him a twinge of guilt. He was supposed to be better than this, to a kid who still didn’t know his place in the world.
“Yeah. It’s night time, so you’d think it would be quieter and darker. But instead, Metropolis lights up at night.”
“Yeah,” Conner breathed, adjusting from where he was sitting on the edge of the building, legs dangling over the edge of the skyscraper. On a normal person, Clark thought he would be concerned, but he had learned in the short time that he knew Conner that he had no sense of how a normal person acted. He didn’t know what he was doing was dangerous, because it was barely dangerous to him. When you were bulletproof, you acted like it.
It was mostly endearing now, Clark thought. It made him smile, to see Conner sitting on the edge of a building the way a normal kid sat on the edge of a pond, with no idea of the parallels.
“So why are we waiting up here?” Conner asked at last. “Just… looking?”
“And waiting.”
Conner glanced back up at him. “Waiting for what?”
“Just trust me and keep watching.”
Conner’s face scrunched in distaste—he didn’t like being kept in suspense, apparently, another good thing to know about him—and he turned his attention back to the city. “Waiting for something… good?”
Clark couldn’t help but chuckle. “As opposed to?”
Conner ducked his head, but not before Clark saw that the tip of his ears was turning red with embarrassment. He also didn’t like being teased, apparently, which he should have guessed.
“Sorry,” Clark said. “That just slipped out.” Conner wasn’t yelling, though, which seemed like a good sign, so he took a chance and sat down next to him instead of standing over the top of him. His shoulders were up with discomfort, but Clark sat far enough away from him that he wouldn’t be crowded and could scoot away if he wanted to. He didn’t, which was a step in the right direction.
“It’s okay,” Conner mumbled, and it sounded like he was forcing himself to breathe. “I… The team tells me I need to learn how to take a joke, anyways.”
“It’s a learned skill. You’ll get there.”
Conner glanced back at him—grateful, maybe?—and then looked back down at the ground far, far below them. “Not very fast.”
“You’re less than a year old. That’s not bad.”
Conner barked out a rough laugh. “You say that so casually.”
Clark shrugged. “We’re also aliens.”
“Mm.” Conner frowned, and then tilted to look up at the stars instead and the frown got more pronounced. “The sky looks weird, here.”
“Weird?” Clark repeated, tilting to look up with him. Nothing stood out to him—nothing dangerous, especially, which he was bracing himself for. That was a good sign. “What do you mean?”
“You can barely see any stars.” Conner’s voice was wistful, strange. “M’gann and I like to look at the stars from the top of Mount Justice, try to find Mars and the constellations. I can’t see anything here.”
“That’s the light.” He did understand the sadness in his voice, though. He was raised on Earth, he thought of himself as a citizen of Earth most of the time, but he always felt more tethered when he could see the stars above him. He had never found Krypton—it was gone long before he was old enough to look for it—but it was comforting to know it was somewhere above him. It felt as if it could watch over him, sometimes, when he felt alone. “When you’re in the middle of the city, the light pollution makes it hard to see.”
“Oh.” Conner’s gaze was still trained up, straining to see them anyways. “I guess that makes sense. There’s a lot less light at Mount Justice.”
This seemed like a safe topic, Clark decided, if he was going to bring it up. “I’ll bet it’s quieter, too.”
“Mostly.” Right on cue Conner cringed at the sound of a car’s tires screeching forty stories below. It was the sort of thing you got used to with time, he knew, and he resisted the urge to put a hand on his shoulder. Lines. “You can kind of hear the city next to it, when it’s a Friday or Saturday night, but mostly just the ocean and the wind.”
“That sounds peaceful.” Clark adjusted in his seat so he wasn’t sitting on his cape, holding his breath when he tilted towards Conner. He didn’t move, so he let himself relax. “Smallville is like that, too. So quiet that you can hear when there’s a car driving up from miles away.”
“I like that.” Conner blinked at nothing, kicking one of his legs up as he leaned forward to look down. Clark didn’t tense to catch him in case he fell, but it was a close thing. “Sometimes… it’s all too loud. Is it like that for you?”
Yes, Clark wanted to say with his entire being, yes, because he had never met someone else who understood him so perfectly. Someone else with enhanced senses that you could dim but not turn off who just wanted a little peace some days. Others could sympathize, but they couldn’t actually understand what it was like to hear a hundred people screaming for help and know that you couldn’t fly fast enough to reach all of them, to smell gas and wonder if it was dangerous or normal and second-guess yourself until you couldn’t think straight, to feel that the world was so damn loud that you were going to lose it. When he was younger, on some days, he had locked himself in the closet and tried to drown it out by screaming until he lost his voice. Was that what he told Conner, now that he was asking, or did he put on a smile and tell him it got better?
Conner ducked his head, tucking his hands in front of his stomach instead of leaning back freely, and resolutely looked back down at the traffic. Losing his nerve, Clark thought. He had taken a risk and Clark hadn’t answered him, so he needed to take a risk back.
“Some days, yes,” Clark admitted, the words fighting to stay in his throat, Conner deserved the truth but he wasn’t sure if this was something he had told someone else before, “You can learn to filter out what’s important, and that makes it quieter, but some days it’s just loud. And that’s just something you have to get used to.”
Conner’s mouth twitched. “The rest of the team thinks I’m crazy sometimes,” he muttered. “I made everyone hunt through the whole base for a leaky pipe that I could hear. And it should have been nothing, but… but it was constant. I couldn’t sleep because it was going all night. It felt like it was driving me crazy.”
“I get it,” Clark said, smiling at him as reassuringly as he could. “And you’re not crazy. The team’s not going to understand why you can hear those things or why you’re not scared to get hurt and that’s okay.”
He thought, this time, that he had said the right thing at last, but Conner glanced at him with a questioning tilt to his head. The second part, Clark thought.
“Not many people are going to sit on the edge of a skyscraper and not worry about falling,” he explained, gesturing with his head at how they were currently sitting.
Conner laughed, though—a genuine, short laugh like Clark had never heard from him before. It wasn’t exactly like his own laugh, he thought, it was a little sharper and shorter than his laughs, but it still made his chest feel warm. There was nothing mean about his laugh, or embarrassed, but it was a little coarse and uneven, as if he was still trying it out. It was endearing to hear.
“What?” Clark asked, feeling himself smiling alongside him. “Did you not notice what you were doing?”
Conner shook his head, smiling down at the street below. “I’m with you,” he said, giving him a wry look. “Of course I’m not worried about falling.”
It was a simple sentence, but it still made Clark’s stomach flip. The first time he had met Conner, he remembered clearly, he had blanked and run; the second time, he had argued with him and left quickly. The third time, he had fought him under mind control and come to with Conner covered in rubble and bruises left from it, and he had thought that was it. There was no way that, after everything, Conner would want a peace offering even if he tried it. There were very few people that could fight someone—even someone being controlled against their will—and not remember it afterwards. When he landed in front of Conner after they were free, he had braced himself to leave again.
But Conner had given him a once-over and nothing more. He hadn’t run, he hadn’t flinched when Clark put a hand on his shoulder, he had smiled at him like he had done nothing wrong when Clark tentatively tried to open the door. This is what it was supposed to be like, he thought in the moment, and I’ll do better.
And Conner felt safe with him. So maybe he could do this.
Conner blinked and leaned forward. “What’s that light?”
Clark followed where he was looking and smiled. “That’s what we were waiting for.”
As they watched, the light started to grow. What began as one little flickering of a candle grew into two, into twenty, into several hundred, until the streets were full, like a river running through Metropolis.
Conner didn’t ask any more questions, but Clark couldn’t help watching him when he leaned even further, enough that he was worried about him falling off, to see all the way down the main street. It was dark, but the light was enough—from the candles, most of the skyscrapers were dark now and the street lights were off for the event—that he could see the rapt attention with which he gazed down at it. Like a normal kid, witnessing something incredible for the first time and drinking it in.
And then the lights started to rise out of the streets and towards them as the floating candles were released. When Clark saw it for the first time, he was so enthralled that he had looked up everything he could about it, so he knew that they were released into the sky with wishes. Wishes for prosperity, wishes for love, wishes for health, wishes for joy. It made his heart swell, looking down at all of the wishes of the people in his city.
Conner made a choked laugh. “It’s… I’ve never heard of this.”
“People make wishes,” Clark said, careful to keep his eyes forward. Whatever Conner was feeling, witnessing this, he would give him his privacy. “And then release paper lanterns in the hopes that the wishes come true.”
Conner exhaled. “There are… There are so many of them.” He tilted back to watch as the first lantern floated over their heads, more right behind it. Clark was trying to give him his privacy, he remembered too late as the light cast on his face and he saw that he was biting his lip to hold something down. Maybe he was thinking something Clark hadn’t predicted.
Clark turned forwards again. “I love being up here for this,” he admitted. “I tell the Justice League I need to be here in case one of the lanterns catches on something, but… it’s mostly just to watch it.”
Conner laughed, turning to give him a disbelieving look. “You lie to the Justice League?”
“It’s not lying! It’s… stretching the truth.”
Conner scoffed, shaking his head, and then looked up over his head. “It’s amazing,” he breathed, leaning back on his hands and staring out of the city. Past the main street there were hundreds more, so that the entire horizon was tiny flames that floated on the wind. “It’s like… like we’re in the stars.”
Whether he knew it or not, Conner and him did understand each other. Clark had had the exact same thought on the first year he had seen it, and he ended up watching it teary-eyed from the shadow of a skyscraper, feeling like maybe this could be his place after all.
And now he had someone to share it with. Someone else who understood why he needed to be up here instead of on the ground. Someone else who looked for pieces of magic that humans made to try to feel a little less alone.
“I hoped you would like it,” Clark said, and somehow his voice stayed steady. “It’s not the kind of thing you can see in Happy Harbor.”
Conner shook his head. “Even if they did it, it wouldn’t be like this.” He hesitated. “We don’t have to go back yet, do we?”
It was such a kid thing to say that it made Clark smile. He had remembered suddenly that he had school in the morning and he should get to sleep, but he didn’t want to leave yet. He wanted to just damn the consequences and stay for as long as the magic lasted.
And maybe it was the responsible thing to say that they needed to get back, for the test that he needed to study for at the end of the week, but Clark had never been good at ‘should’.
“I’m with you,” Clark said, putting a hand on his shoulder, relieved when Conner relaxed under his hand instead of tensing. Baby steps. Attempt by attempt, he could get this right. “We can stay as long as you want.”