Chapter Text
When Clark started doing the Superman thing, he didn’t really expect it to…
Well…
Take off.
At least, not to the degree that it has. Maybe that was naïve of him. Scratch that, definitely naïve of him. But shoot. He’s only been Superman for a month and a half, and there’s Superman shirts in stores, Superman news sites, people telling Superman jokes…
And now, this.
Superman looks at the address on the letter, written in careful handwriting with a purple glittery gel pen, and back up at the address on the house. It’s a nice house. The paint is peeling, a little, and the porch is crooked, but it has a pretty garden and there’s a cat in the window, which is always a good thing. It reminds him of his Ma and Pa’s house, not because of the shape or color, but because of something about the… the vibe it gives off.
Clark takes a deep breath, walks up to the door, and knocks.
The person who answers the door can’t be more than a hair over five feet, with crow’s feet and wrinkles between regal, arching brows. They’re wearing a flower bandana wrapped over their coils of black hair, and a flower dress to match. They also look, if Clark is guessing right, totally shocked to see him standing there.
“Hi,” Clark says. “Uh. I got a letter…” He holds it out, but the person makes no move to take it. His stammer slips out, makes his voice wobble. “I-I think this is the right place? I’m looking for, um. The Metropolis and Outlying Suburbs Chapter of the Girl’s Super Club?”
“You actually came,” says the person at the door.
“Uh. Yes? Should I… not have?”
“Hell no. The girls are going to lose their minds. Come on in, Mr. Superman.” The person steps aside, then puts a hand to their mouth and hollers “Brianna! Hailey! Rebecca! You girls get downstairs!”
Clark hears a set of uncoordinated footsteps, like several people rising unexpectedly, and a door opening. “What?”
“I said get downstairs!”
More footsteps, then three children appear around a doorjamb to the right. Clark gives a little wave.
“No. Way,” says the shortest one, a child with a dusting of freckles over tawny, gold-brown skin. They’re wearing battered overalls over a t-shirt with Superman’s symbol on it, and they’re missing their left front tooth. As a result, they whistle a little when they talk.
“I told you he’d come!” crows the tallest, a lanky child in a patchwork fedora. The fedora has a Superman pin stuck in it. Their hair is the same texture as the hair of the person who answered the door, and they have the same deep umber skin and the same big eyes. Clark’s guessing they’re related.
The third child is somewhere between the other two in skin tone, with hair like a mad scientist and the intense gaze to match. They’re wearing a cape. The cape is purple. Clark approves. “You guys! Do it like we planned!”
The kid in the fedora straightens up immediately. “Hello, Mr. Superman. We are the Metropolis and Outlying Suburbs Chapter of the Girl’s Super Club. I’m the club president, Brianna. This is the Vice President,” the kid in the overalls raises a hand, “Hailey, and the Vice Vice President, Rebecca.” The kid in the cape waves. “We’re the founders of the Girl’s Super Club, too,” Brianna adds.
“It’s an honor to meet you,” Clark says. “I liked your letter. I can keep it, right?”
Brianna nods.
“Thank you. I like the ink. Purple’s my favorite color.”
That must have been the right thing to say, because Brianna grins, a wide smile full of teeth and braces. “We’ll show you the clubhouse! Come upstairs!”
The kids thunder back around the doorjamb and up the stairs. Clark looks to the person who answered the door. “I don’t want to intrude. May I…” he gestures at the ceiling.
“You go on up, Mr. Superman. I’ll come, too.”
“Thank you.” Clark takes a step, pauses. “Uh. You can just call me Superman. I’m not much of a mister.”
“I’m Donna Fields. And you can call me Mrs. Fields.”
“Mrs. Fields. It’s a pleasure to meet you.” Clark offers his hand. “What are your pronouns?”
Mrs. Fields gives Clark a look, and Clark retracts his hand. Was that not… “Well, I’ll be damned. It’s not an act, then?”
Clark feels like he missed something. “Sorry?”
“You really are an upstanding, socially conscious fella, aren’t you?”
“Um. I try to be, I guess,” Clark says, rubbing the back of his neck.
“You have no idea how relived that makes me,” Mrs. Fields says. “If you turned out to be a jerk who just acted like a good ally for the press, you’d have broken Brianna’s heart. And then I’d’ve had to found a way to kill you. My pronouns are she, her, and hers, and so are the rest of the girls’. Yours are?”
Clark decides that he really likes Mrs. Fields. She reminds him of his Ma. “He, him, his, though I also use they, them, and theirs, sometimes. And, um, if I got your meaning right, Mrs. Fields, I’m not really an ally. I’m, uh…” Well, this is new. He sort of said it, with the pronoun thing, and he’s come out plenty as Clark Kent, but this isn’t something he’s shared much as Superman. It feels different, somehow. He knows he ought to make more of an effort to be out, seeing as he’s kind of become a whole phenomenon, but… heck, how does he even script for that? Where can he drop in that information, between giving his statements on the altercations he’s involved in and talking about personal responsibility? “I… I’m trans myself, actually.”
Mrs. Fields raises her eyebrows. “Well, that’s even better, then! I’ve gotta tell Brianna, she’ll be over the moon.”
A door opens upstairs. “Mr. Superman?”
“We’re coming, Brianna, hold your horses!” Mrs. Fields says. “After you, Superman.”
Clark walks up the stairs. They’re carpeted, well-worn and clean. The banister has notches and scuff marks. This is a home, in a way that he can feel in his heart.
The second door on the left down the hall is open. Clark steps inside.
The walls are covered in Superman posters, horse posters, and drawings done in crayon. In the middle of the floor is a plate of grapes, strawberries, and pineapples. Toothpicks are scattered over the plate and the surrounding floor. There are pillows that pretty clearly came off a couch or two arranged in a loose semicircle around the plate. Three of the pillows are occupied.
“Here’s your pillow,” says Brianna, and picks up a pillow with a Superman scarf tied around it like a pillowcase. Clark takes it from her and sets it on an unoccupied bit of floor. Mrs. Fields sits on a pillow with corduroy ridges.
“Now, Mr. Superman,” Hailey says. “We have a very important question for you.”
“I’ll try to give you a very important answer to match,” Clark says. Rebecca stifles a giggle. “And it’s just Superman, please, Ms. Vice President.”
“Ahem.” Hailey shuffles some papers, and then places one on the hardback book in her lap. She’s holding a purple glitter gel pen. “Superman, why are you doing what you do? Lots of people on the news and also Danny in my science class say that with all your powers you ought to be president or God or somebody. Why aren’t you?”
“Well,” Clark asks slowly, “what do you think?”
“I told Danny that not everybody wants to be president and maybe you just wanna be like a firefighter and go around and help people, but he said firefighters are dumb ‘cause they don’t have guns, so I told him that firefighters have fire trucks and fire dogs and guns are dumb anyway, so he threw a book at me and I punched him in the stomach.” Hailey sounds very proud of herself. Clark thinks she should be.
“Well, it’s really close to that, actually. See, there’s this thing called ‘tikkun olam’ and –”
Rebecca gasps. “I know that! It means fixing the world!”
“Yeah!” Clark says. His voice comes out louder than he means it to in his enthusiasm, and he tries to dial it back as he continue, “It’s pretty important to me. See, what I think, is that regardless of my powers, I shouldn’t be trying to tell people what to do. I don’t know everything, and I’m not going to try to tell people how they oughta be. But when I see things I can do, and things I can help with, I want to do them. I want to help out, as best I can.” Clark’s speech patterns are slipping towards the Midwest, though luckily he hasn’t gone all the way into his Clark voice. He tries to correct it. He’s Superman right now. Network standard English. “So, you can tell Danny that you’re right. About all those things, and especially about fire dogs being cool.”
“Are you Jewish?” Rebecca asks. Then, “My mom says I’m not supposed to ask people that, but you know tikkun olam, so I thought…”
“I am,” Clark says. “And I don’t mind you asking.”
“I knew it,” Rebecca murmured. “Last week when you got that fishing ship back to shore, your hair was all curly like mine.”
“I usually slick it back so it doesn’t get in my face when I’m flying, but it got wet at sea,” Clark explains.
“How do you fly?” Brianna asks.
Clark purses his lips, then asks “Have you ever had a dream where you could fly?”
Everyone, Mrs. Fields included, nods.
“Well, it works similarly to that. I think about flying, and feel… light. Then I’m doing it.” Clark lifts up, a foot off the pillow, to demonstrate. The girls clap. “So, when did you found the…” he searches his memory for the full name, “Metropolis and Outlying Suburbs Chapter of the Girl’s Super Club?” He floats back down to sit on the pillow, which is actually pretty comfortable.
“Last month,” says Brianna. “We wanted to get all set up before we invited you.”
“I appreciate the invitation,” Clark says, and means it. “Will you tell me more about what the group does?”
The girls explain, with clarifying points interjected by Mrs. Fields as needed. They’ve seen what Superman’s doing, followed the news stories and the interviews and read some of the forums (with adult supervision). There are some other kids who like Superman at their school, but they don’t look at things the same way. All they want to do is play Superman versus robbers (Brianna explains, very primly, that based on the evidence, stopping robbers is one of the things Superman does the least often. He spends far more time helping with evacuations, saving transportation vehicles like trains and planes and ships, putting out fires, and halting muggings, which are different than robberies.) Brianna, Hailey, and Rebecca wanted to do something different than that. They wanted to follow his example, not by pretending to fight robbers, but by doing good.
At this point in the story, Clark leans back, eyes flicking from Rebecca to Brianna to Hailey to Mrs. Fields. He can feel his heart beating faster.
So far, they’ve set up a beverage stand at the local park, where they sell water bottles and lemonade and pop to kids, parents, and joggers. They give the money they make to the kids at school they know don’t have that much. So far, they’ve only been able to run the stand twice a week, but once they get more members, the girls explain, they’ll run it every day. And that’s just the beginning. They’re also planning a book drive for the local libraries, and they want to volunteer at animal shelters once they’re old enough, and maybe set up a Superman museum someday, or make and sell Superman comics, or Superman costumes.
“I made this cape,” Rebecca tells Clark. He nods solemnly.
“It is an excellent cape,” he says.
They have a thousand plans and the drive to execute all of them. They call themselves the Metropolis and Outlying Suburbs Chapter of the Girl’s Super Club, even though they’re the only three members of any Girl’s Super Club, because they know that someday there will be a hundred hundred chapters in a hundred hundred places. Clark believes them wholeheartedly.
They finish explaining and look at him expectantly. He’s not sure what he’s supposed to say, but he’s clearly supposed to say something.
In the end, he decides on “How can I help?”