Archive of Our Own

You have no memory of ever meeting Clark Kent.

There were photographs suggesting it had happened sometime before either of you started kindergarten, but none offered much evidence about the occasion itself. One showed you sitting in the dirt beside the Kent farmhouse with matching plastic buckets, Clark solemnly holding something that might have been a worm in his palm while you appeared to be explaining it to him. Another had been taken at a church picnic when you were five, both of you asleep beneath the same tree after apparently deciding the adults could manage without you.

Your parents’ house sat a few properties down the county road from his, which meant considerably more distance than the phrase a few houses away suggested anywhere outside rural Kansas. There were fields between you, a narrow stretch of woods that had seemed enormous when you were small, and a county road you weren’t allowed to bike alone until you were older.

The Kents and your parents had been neighbors for as long as you could remember, with the kind of friendship that made keeping track of favors pointless. Your father borrowed Jonathan’s equipment and returned it with loose bolts tightened or stubborn parts working again, while your mother and Martha traded recipes, vegetables, gossip, and whatever else happened to move between the two houses.

Nobody considered it strange when you started spending more time at the Kent farm than at your own house. Your parents were loving, attentive, and perfectly capable of keeping track of their daughter; they simply knew where you were likely to be. By the time you were old enough to bike between the properties without permission, your mother had stopped asking whether you would be home for dinner and started asking whether Martha already knew she was feeding you.

It began with afternoons after school. Martha was usually home when the bus dropped you off, Clark was already disappearing toward whichever project had caught his attention that week, and your parents knew exactly which number to call if you failed to materialize before dark.

Afternoons turned into evenings, especially once homework became complicated enough to justify doing it together, because numbers and science came more easily to you while Clark had a much better instinct for essays, history, and making an argument sound convincing on paper.

Eventually, evenings became nights, and the guest room upstairs quietly stopped being a guest room. A toothbrush appeared in the bathroom first, followed by pajamas folded into the bottom drawer. Then came books, spare clothes, a hairbrush, school supplies, and a collection of mismatched socks that seemed to reproduce whenever Martha did laundry. By the time you were eleven, there was enough of you in the room that accommodating an actual guest required more effort than anyone thought worthwhile.

A distant cousin of Jonathan’s discovered this during a Thanksgiving visit when he carried his bag upstairs and asked where he should put it.

“Not in her room,” Clark said immediately, pointing at you.

You looked up from stealing marshmallows off the sweet potatoes. The cousin glanced between the two of you before looking toward Martha.

“I thought that was the guest room.”

“It used to be,” Martha said, as though that explained everything.

Your parents found the story hilarious when they heard it later. Your mother pointed out that you possessed a perfectly functional bedroom under their roof, and you reminded her that your bedroom didn’t come with pie cooling on the kitchen counter three nights a week.

She conceded the point.

You weren’t a Kent, and nobody pretended otherwise. Your parents expected you home often enough to remember you technically lived there and occasionally exercised the deeply unreasonable authority of people who objected to their daughter treating another family’s refrigerator as communal property. The Kent farm simply became another home, and Martha and Jonathan became another pair of adults you trusted without ever displacing the parents who had raised you.

Growing up at the Kent farm also meant you noticed very early that something about Clark was different.

At seven, you thought he was simply better at everything physical than the other children. At eight, you became suspicious after he caught the back end of a tipped wheelbarrow one-handed and spent the next ten minutes insisting you had imagined how heavy it was. By nine, suspicion became certainty when the two of you climbed somewhere Jonathan had specifically forbidden you from climbing and a rotten board gave way beneath your feet.

You remembered the drop and Clark shouting your name. The next thing you knew, you were against his chest on solid ground several feet away, his arms locked around you tightly enough that you could barely breathe.

The distance between the broken board and where you stood was impossible, and Clark realized that at approximately the same moment you did.

His face went pale. “You can’t tell anybody.”

You stared at him.

“Anybody,” he repeated, already panicking. “Please.”

You were nine, still startled by what had just happened and more than a little offended that after years of being best friends, Clark apparently thought you might run home and tell half the county his secrets.

“I wasn’t going to.”

“You have to promise.”

“Clark, I said I wasn’t.”

“Promise.”

You did.

Clark lasted two days before telling Martha and Jonathan himself.

They sat you down in the kitchen shortly afterward and explained what they knew, which at the time wasn’t much. Clark could do things other children couldn’t. They didn’t completely understand why, and if the wrong people found out, it could put him in danger.

You absorbed this with the solemnity of a child being entrusted with something enormous, then asked whether Clark had always been able to catch falling people.

Clark buried his face in his hands.

After that, his abilities seemed to arrive in pieces, and you were around for enough of them that eventually there wasn’t much point pretending otherwise.

Strength was manageable once Jonathan taught Clark that almost everything around him needed to be handled more carefully than his instincts suggested. Speed became something he practiced in distant fields where nobody could see, usually with you serving as a lookout and occasionally holding a stopwatch despite neither of you having any idea what useful information you were collecting.

His hearing frightened him more. It didn’t ask permission before giving him information he didn’t want, and there were weeks when the world seemed too loud for him to stand inside it. You learned to recognize those days and sometimes sat beside him in the loft while he pressed his palms over his ears and tried to separate one sound from another.

Talking helped. Reading helped more because it gave him one voice to follow without requiring him to answer, so one afternoon you spent nearly two hours reading increasingly boring sections of a biology textbook aloud until Clark finally laughed and informed you that human digestion couldn’t possibly be the solution to sensory overload.

You pointed out that it had worked, and he was forced to admit you had a point.

The stranger discoveries came later. Heat vision cost Jonathan part of a barn wall and Clark nearly all of his dignity, while his earliest experience with floating happened one summer night as the two of you lay in a field looking at stars.

You rolled onto your side to say something and discovered Clark several inches above the grass, staring down at you in absolute horror. You laughed so hard you were useless for several minutes, which Clark considered a personal betrayal, and he refused to speak to you until breakfast.

The laughter became harder when the questions did.

Martha and Jonathan told him the truth in stages because that was how they had learned it themselves. There had been a ship, and they had found him as a baby inside it. They took him in and raised him, but the circumstances of his arrival meant the explanation for what Clark could do wouldn’t be found in any family medical history.

Eventually they understood that he hadn’t come from Kansas, or from Earth at all.

At thirteen, Clark took the revelation about as well as could reasonably be expected.

He disappeared for most of an afternoon. Jonathan looked toward the fields and told Martha to give him some time, while Martha worried anyway. Your parents had expected you home an hour earlier, but one phone call between the houses took care of that, and you went looking for him.

You found Clark near the edge of the Kent property where the land dipped toward the creek. He was sitting with his knees pulled up, staring at nothing, and you lowered yourself beside him without asking whether he wanted company.

For a while, neither of you spoke.

“What if I’m not supposed to be here?” he finally asked.

You looked over. “What?”

“What if they sent me here for something?”

“Who?”

“I don’t know. The people I came from.”

“You were a baby.”

“That doesn’t mean anything.”

“It means babies are terrible at plans.”

Clark didn’t laugh, and you stopped trying to make him.

He picked at a loose thread near his knee. “What if I’m more like them than I am like you?”

You were thirteen too. There should have been some profound answer available for the occasion, something worthy of the revelation that your best friend belonged to another planet and had no idea what that meant about who he was supposed to become.

Instead, you frowned.

“You’re Clark.”

His expression tightened. “That’s not what I mean.”

“I know.”

You bumped your shoulder against his. “You’re still Clark.”

It didn’t solve the problem, and you knew that even then. Clark would spend years learning what Krypton was, what had happened to it, what had been lost with it, and how to carry a heritage that had reached him through fragments. There were questions you couldn’t answer and grief you couldn’t share in quite the same way because you had never lost an entire world before you were old enough to remember it.

What you could do was stay, so you did.

Somewhere during those years, “Martha” and “Jonathan” became “Mom” and “Dad” as naturally as the guest room had once become yours. Nobody marked the change when it happened. One day the words were simply there, interchangeable depending on which house you were standing in and which parent you were trying to get the attention of.

By fifteen, the Kent farm had been your second home for roughly a decade. Jonathan assigned you chores right alongside Clark, Martha automatically counted you when she planned dinner, and half your belongings seemed to live somewhere in the house whether you remembered leaving them there or not.

That was how you ended up at the kitchen table one Friday evening snapping green beans while Clark complained about a spectacular romantic catastrophe unfolding among two of your classmates.

“They broke up again,” he said.

You glanced up. “Again?”

“Third time.”

“This month?”

“This week.”

You stared at him while Clark dropped another bean into the bowl. Martha hid a smile as she moved around the stove, and Jonathan stood at the counter with a stack of mail, listening with the vague attention of a parent who had learned teenage conversation became considerably more interesting when nobody acknowledged hearing it.

“They’ll get back together Monday,” Clark predicted.

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“Yeah.”

You snapped the end off another bean. “Dating is stupid.”

Clark considered this. “Probably not all of it.”

“You have evidence?”

“No.”

“Then my argument stands.”

He smiled, and the conversation should have ended there. Instead, you looked across the table at the boy you’d known for so long that you couldn’t remember what life had looked like before him and arrived at what seemed like a perfectly reasonable solution.

“If neither of us has somebody by the time we’re thirty, we should just marry each other.”

Martha’s spoon paused briefly against the side of the pot.

Clark glanced up. “Thirty?”

“Yeah.”

“That’s really old.”

“You’re missing the point.”

“I’m thinking about it.”

“You don’t need to think that hard.”

“You’re asking me to marry you.”

“When we’re thirty.”

“Right.”

“Which is basically forever from now.”

Clark considered this argument and apparently found it persuasive. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Yeah.”

You held out your hand. “Deal?”

He took it.

“Deal.”

You shook once across the bowl of green beans while Jonathan lowered the mail and Martha turned back toward the stove. Neither of you noticed the glance that passed between them, and by dinner you’d already forgotten about the whole thing.

Martha hadn’t.

The pact survived adolescence mostly because your families found it funny.

Martha brought it up the following year after Clark returned from an unsuccessful attempt to ask someone to a school dance. Jonathan referenced it when one of your dates arrived at your parents’ house twenty minutes late and spent another ten trying to figure out which driveway he was supposed to be using.

Your mother learned about the pact somewhere along the way, though you strongly suspected Martha.

“She told me you proposed to Clark,” she said while putting away groceries one day.

“I did not.”

“Apparently there was a handshake.”

“That was a contract.”

“Ah. Much more serious.”

You groaned, but nobody treated it seriously enough for either of you to become embarrassed. It became another story accumulated over a childhood full of them, filed beside the time Clark got stuck halfway through the kitchen window because he’d forgotten the door was unlocked and the summer you both insisted you could build a functioning raft from scrap wood.

By spring of senior year, Smallville had started to feel different. It wasn’t smaller exactly, but once Clark knew he was leaving, familiar roads began to look less permanent, and the possibility that you might not be following the same one out of town became unexpectedly difficult to ignore.

Clark had already been accepted into a journalism program in Metropolis. You were still waiting to hear back from a different university, where you’d applied for computer science with plans to move into cybersecurity. The more you learned about systems, the more you liked figuring out how they failed; there was something deeply satisfying about finding a weak point before somebody with worse intentions did.

Metropolis made sense for both of you for completely separate reasons.

That didn’t stop you from spending the three days between Clark’s acceptance and yours pretending the possibility of living in different cities for the first time in your lives didn’t bother you nearly as much as it did.

Then your own letter arrived.

You opened it in the Kent kitchen, and Martha cried before you did. Your mother cried later and denied it.

The final summer passed too quickly. Clark helped pack up your childhood bedroom at home, then crossed the fields with you so you could do the same at the farm. Packing the room upstairs took longer than expected because every drawer and shelf seemed to contain something you’d forgotten you had left there years ago.

There was a sweatshirt you hadn’t worn in forever, three paperback novels, a chipped mug with your name painted badly across the side, and a stuffed rabbit you swore you hadn’t cared about since elementary school before putting it carefully into a box anyway.

Martha stood in the doorway while you tried to decide how much of the room actually needed to come with you to Metropolis.

“You know you don’t have to clear everything out.”

You looked back at her. “I don’t?”

“It’s still your room.”

Something in your chest pulled unexpectedly tight.

Martha smiled. “You’re going to college, sweetheart. You’re not being evicted.”

You left half the books.

Jonathan helped load your car beside Clark’s the morning you left. Your parents arrived before breakfast, and the six of you spent an unnecessary amount of time checking things that had already been checked twice.

Clark eventually leaned against his car and looked at you. “Ready?”

You looked at both families standing behind him, at the farmhouse that had contained most of your childhood, then toward the road stretching beyond it.

“Yeah.”

It wasn’t exactly true, but you went anyway.

College introduced a kind of distance neither of you had dealt with before. You were attending different universities on opposite sides of Metropolis, and both schools required first-year students to live on campus, which meant that for once you couldn’t cross a field or bike down the road whenever you wanted to see each other.

The adjustment lasted approximately six hours before Clark appeared at your dorm carrying takeout.

Your roommate looked from him to you. “Boyfriend?”

“No,” you said at the same time Clark shook his head.

“Best friend,” you explained.

She accepted this.

Most people did, at first.

College gave both of you lives that didn’t automatically overlap. You met people Clark didn’t know, and he joined the paper and spent long stretches disappearing into assignments you only heard about afterward. Your classes became more specialized and demanding until you discovered that spending four hours trying to break into a system with permission could somehow count as homework.

You both dated, sometimes casually and sometimes seriously enough to matter. Neither of you consulted the other beforehand, although subtlety had never been particularly effective between you. Clark could tell when you liked someone by the amount of unnecessary explanation you offered about them, while you could usually tell when he liked someone because he suddenly became very interested in pretending he didn’t.

Some relationships lasted weeks and others lasted months. During your junior year, one of yours made it close to a year, long enough for him to learn most of your habits and for Clark’s place in your life to become difficult to explain without sounding strange.

Clark never interfered in your relationships. He never made a date uncomfortable on purpose or behaved as though your attention belonged to him, and you offered him the same respect. Whoever Clark chose to be with deserved the chance to know him without feeling as though they were competing against a history neither of you had any intention of weaponizing.

The difficulty was quieter. Clark already knew things about you that newer partners were still learning: when you were angry before you’d decided whether you had a right to be, when silence meant you wanted company and when it meant everyone needed to leave you alone, and which version of your voice meant something was genuinely wrong. You knew him in equally inconvenient detail.

About nine months into the relationship, your boyfriend noticed Clark’s name listed as your emergency contact.

“Why Clark?”

“Because he’s Clark.”

You didn’t realize how inadequate that explanation sounded until it was already out.

“Your parents are back in Smallville.”

“Exactly.”

“Then why not me?”

You stared at him. You’d been together for nine months, but Clark had been your emergency contact since the first form either of you filled out after turning eighteen. It had never occurred to you that there was anything to reconsider.

The relationship ended a couple of months later for several reasons, none of which had anything to do with Clark Kent.

You never changed the form.

Around the same period, Clark’s habit of helping people stopped fitting neatly inside Smallville-sized incidents.

There had always been rescues. As children, they were small enough to hide: a tractor stopped before it crushed someone, a lost kid found unusually quickly, a fire that should have spread somehow contained before anyone understood why.

Metropolis made anonymity easier in some ways and impossible in others because too many people needed help. Clark couldn’t hear someone in danger and decide that protecting his secret mattered more than whether they survived, and his interventions became more frequent as both of you got older.

Your concerns were practical because the larger existential questions belonged to Clark. Cameras were everywhere. Facial recognition was improving. Metadata existed whether aspiring superheroes liked it or not.

“You need to stop carrying your phone.”

“I turn it off.”

“That isn’t what I said.”

Clark looked at you from across your apartment, and you turned your laptop around before spending the next forty minutes explaining location histories, background processes, and why a device designed to maintain constant network connectivity was a terrible accessory for secret heroics.

He listened, more or less.

His digital security still needed work. You once spent an entire Saturday helping Clark understand why reusing passwords defeated the purpose of having passwords at all.

That was friendship.

After graduation, adulthood arrived with jobs, rent, and the peculiar discovery that nobody warned you how often grown people had to buy household items.

You started at a security firm while Clark eventually joined the Daily Planet. The work was good and the hours less so, but you learned quickly and discovered you had a talent for telling companies that the systems they had spent millions of dollars building could be compromised by someone with patience and a poorly secured vendor account.

Journalism mattered to Clark just as much as the work he did with his abilities. He liked finding the part of a story people had ignored, talking to someone long enough for them to trust him with what actually happened, and forcing institutions to answer questions strength couldn’t solve. Reporting gave him ways to help that had nothing to do with how strong or fast he was, and he took that responsibility just as seriously.

You celebrated his first Daily Planet byline with cheap champagne neither of you particularly liked and takeout consumed while sitting on the floor because he hadn’t bought a proper dining table yet.

In the first few years after graduation, the rescues finally stopped being something Clark could do anonymously. There were too many cameras, too many people watching, and too many emergencies where hiding his face mattered less than getting someone out alive.

The name came later. So did the suit and the symbol.

By the time the world started calling him Superman, you had already known about the ship, Krypton, his birth name, and the long process by which he had learned that being from somewhere else didn’t require him to belong here any less. Kal-El mattered. Krypton mattered. Clark mattered. None of those truths had ever required you to choose between them.

Superman didn’t change your relationship nearly as much as it complicated scheduling.

Sometimes Clark disappeared halfway through dinner. Sometimes he arrived at your apartment after midnight because something had happened and he needed ten minutes somewhere nobody expected anything from him. Other nights, he sat at your kitchen counter while you worked, cape folded beside him, talking about nothing important until he sounded like himself again.

Those evenings never seemed particularly unusual to either of you. You had spent most of your life watching Clark learn what he could do; this was simply what carrying the responsibility looked like now.

At twenty-three, you moved into a better apartment, and Clark carried the couch up three flights of stairs by himself after checking that nobody was watching. The following year, he moved again, and you received a key before his parents did.

By twenty-five, both of you had settled enough into your careers for adulthood to feel less temporary. Your firm promoted you, and Clark showed up at your office with flowers before looking faintly alarmed when three coworkers assumed he was your boyfriend.

You laughed about that for far longer than he thought necessary.

That same year, the marriage pact made its inevitable Thanksgiving appearance.

You were both home at the farm when Martha looked across the dinner table and said, “Five years left.”

Clark frowned. “Until what?”

You understood immediately. “Oh my God.”

Jonathan’s mouth twitched while Clark looked between the three of you.

“What?”

“Your wedding,” Martha said.

Recognition arrived.

“Mom.”

“You agreed.”

“We were fifteen.”

“You shook on it,” Jonathan reminded him.

You pointed your fork at Clark. “Legally binding.”

“That is not legally binding.”

“You didn’t specify terms.”

“I was fifteen.”

“So was I. I understood the stakes.”

Jonathan nodded gravely. “That’ll hold up in Kansas.”

Clark stared at his father while you laughed hard enough that Martha eventually told you to stop encouraging him.

The joke remained harmless because thirty still felt safely distant.

Later that year, Clark entered one of the more serious relationships of his twenties.

She was intelligent and kind, and Clark genuinely wanted it to work, and you wanted that for him too. He never told her about Superman, though, which left a part of his life he couldn’t explain no matter how serious they became.

For a while, they managed around it. Then the absences became harder to excuse. Clark canceled plans with almost no warning, disappeared in the middle of evenings, and occasionally became unreachable for hours before returning with explanations vague enough that even someone inclined to trust him could only accept so many of them.

By twenty-six, the relationship was over.

Neither of you blamed her. She had been dating Clark Kent without knowing why so much of his life seemed to happen somewhere he couldn’t let her follow, and there was only so long trust could bridge a gap he refused to explain.

Clark came to your apartment afterward, and you opened the door, took one look at his face, and stepped aside.

He removed his glasses as he sat on the couch, rubbing a hand over his face. “I really thought that one might work.”

“I know.”

You closed your laptop and sat beside him.

“She didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You don’t have to convince me.”

“I know.”

“And you don’t have to decide whose fault it was.”

Clark nodded, and when you leaned against him, his arm came around you automatically. He tucked you against his side and rested his cheek against the top of your head while the television continued playing something neither of you had been watching. Eventually he pulled the throw blanket over both of you, and you stayed there until exhaustion had taken enough of the edge off the evening for him to go home.

It never occurred to you to call any of it romantic. Clark was your best friend, and this kind of closeness had been ordinary between you for so long that comforting him when he was hurting felt as natural as breathing.

Your own career changed around the same time.

Consulting had been sitting at the edge of your plans for a while, and by twenty-six you had enough experience to realize companies were willing to pay considerably more for expertise they could bring in when they needed it. You left the firm, slowly built a client list, and discovered that independence came with greater flexibility and significantly more responsibility.

Most days, you worked from your apartment. When you went home to Smallville, you set up at the Kent kitchen table, and in Metropolis you increasingly ended up at Clark’s place whenever the two of you already had plans later. Somewhere along the way, his kitchen table became an unofficial second office.

You’d arrive with your laptop expecting to work until dinner. Clark would leave for the Planet or disappear because Superman was needed somewhere, then return hours later to find you exactly where he’d left you except surrounded by more cables and increasingly hostile opinions about somebody else’s network architecture.

It became normal enough that neither of you thought much about it.

Around the same time, you started seeing someone who eventually became the most serious relationship of your adult life so far.

He was smart and funny without treating every conversation like a performance. He had his own career, his own friends, and no interest in competing with yours. Clark liked him, and you initially assumed that would make everything easier.

For a long time, it did.

Your consulting work became more established while the relationship did the same. Repeat clients meant you could afford a better apartment and choose more of your own schedule. Clark helped with the move, naturally, and acquired the new building code almost immediately.

By then, the members of the Justice League who knew Clark’s civilian identity also knew what you did for a living, which meant technical requests occasionally found their way to you through him. You established very quickly that working in cybersecurity did not make you the League’s personal hacker, and you had no intention of breaking into traffic systems, government databases, or anything else simply because somebody with a cape thought it would be convenient.

Clark found this boundary extremely reasonable whenever he wasn’t the person asking for help.

Your boyfriend rarely objected to Clark himself. That would have been easier to argue against. Clark was friendly without inserting himself into your relationship, and you made a point of giving your boyfriend the same consideration you expected whenever Clark was seeing someone.

The problems came from places none of you had deliberately created.

The relationship had lasted close to eighteen months when the small fractures became difficult to ignore. He wanted to move in together, and you hesitated. He asked whether you could spend Christmas with his family, and you explained that you had already promised to be in Smallville. When he invited you to a wedding several states away on a weekend that overlapped with Martha’s birthday, you immediately started calculating whether you could fly back overnight.

One evening, after Clark stopped by your apartment to return something you had forgotten at his place, your boyfriend watched the door close behind him.

“Do you know what the weirdest part is?”

You looked over. “What?”

“I don’t think either of you realizes you’re doing it.”

Your brows furrowed. “Doing what?”

He studied you for a moment before shaking his head. “Never mind.”

You refused to leave it there, and the conversation lasted nearly an hour.

He didn’t accuse you of cheating or suggest that Clark secretly wanted you. He didn’t ask you to cut Clark out of your life. Instead, he started pointing out things you had never thought to group together: that Clark was still your emergency contact, that holidays were planned around whether you would both be in Smallville, that you had a key to his apartment and he knew the code to yours, that major decisions somehow seemed to include him even when they had nothing directly to do with him.

“He’s my best friend,” you said.

“I know.”

“He’s family.”

“I know that too.”

“Then what exactly are you asking me?”

Your boyfriend was quiet for a moment. “Maybe whether there’s room for somebody else to become that important.”

You opened your mouth and discovered you had nothing to say.

The relationship ended three weeks later.

You didn’t tell Clark exactly why because it wouldn’t have been fair to either of you. Instead, you went home to Smallville for the weekend and spent most of Saturday at the Kent farm because habits formed before memory were difficult to break.

Martha found you sitting at the kitchen table with your laptop closed in front of you.

“You okay?”

“Yeah.”

She gave you the look mothers perfected regardless of whether they had given birth to the person receiving it.

You sighed. “I will be.”

Martha squeezed your shoulder once before returning to dinner. She didn’t mention Clark, and you were grateful.

Afterward, life settled again. You both dated occasionally, though nothing serious enough to reorganize either of your routines, and the practical overlap between your lives continued much as it always had. Clark kept food you liked in his refrigerator, you kept a toothbrush for him without thinking about it, and belongings traveled between your apartments so regularly that neither of you bothered keeping track anymore.

Clark remained your emergency contact and the first person you called after your parents when something genuinely serious happened. You were the person who could tell from a three-word text whether he’d had a bad day at the Planet or a catastrophic one in the sky.

Holidays were planned with both of you in mind. You each had access to the other’s apartment, knew one another’s schedules well enough to notice deviations, and maintained relationships with each other’s families that no longer required the other person’s presence. You regularly worked from his kitchen table, while Clark occasionally arrived at your apartment after Superman work and fell asleep on your couch before making it home.

By your late twenties, the two of you had fallen into a version of adulthood that seemed perfectly reasonable from the inside.

From the outside, perhaps less so.

These were facts of your life, not evidence of anything.

At least, that was how you understood them.

Thirty became less funny once it stopped being theoretical.

At fifteen, it had represented a distant species of adulthood populated by people who owned matching furniture and understood taxes. At twenty-five, it had still felt comfortably far away. By twenty-nine, the number had started appearing on forms often enough that every so often your mind supplied a kitchen table, a bowl of green beans, and Clark’s hand closing around yours.

You laughed at yourself the first few times.

But the thought kept returning.

The pact had never mattered, which should have made it easy to ignore. Instead, you started noticing every time somebody referred to Clark in relation to your future.

Your mother asked whether he was coming home for Thanksgiving before she asked what time you planned to arrive. A colleague discussing an out-of-state conference asked whether Clark would be checking on your apartment while you were gone, and you answered yes before realizing they hadn’t asked whether you needed someone to do it. They had simply assumed it would be him.

Martha called to ask what dates you and Clark were coming home for Christmas, phrasing the question as though the two of you operated under some form of joint custody agreement with Kansas.

None of it was new, but now you were hearing it differently.

You knew you loved Clark. You had always loved him, and the sentence had never frightened you because it had been true in too many forms to require definition. He belonged beside your parents, Martha and Jonathan, childhood summers, scraped knees, college move-ins, and every adult milestone worth remembering.

Then one evening, Clark let himself into your apartment carrying groceries because he’d noticed you were out of the yogurt you liked.

He set the bags on your counter and started talking about something that had happened at the Planet while you watched him move around the kitchen as if he belonged there.

He did belong there.

That was the part that caught.

You wanted him there tomorrow and next year and ten years from now. You wanted his keys beside yours, his ridiculous schedule, his jacket over the back of your chair, and the cereal you didn’t eat occupying space in your cabinet. You wanted Daily Planet stories over dinner and Superman emergencies before sunrise. You wanted Christmas at the farm, Martha’s phone calls, and Jonathan asking whether you had finally gotten that noise in your car looked at even though you had already paid a professional to fix it.

You wanted every ordinary piece of Clark’s life you already possessed in fragments, except suddenly fragments were no longer enough.

The realization settled heavily rather than dramatically.

The thought of marrying Clark because neither of you had found somebody else felt wrong now. What you wanted had nothing to do with reaching thirty, exhausting other possibilities, or honoring a joke made over green beans.

You simply wanted Clark.

That distinction made the pact unbearable.

You sat down at the kitchen table.

Clark glanced over from the refrigerator. “You okay?”

“Fine.”

He looked unconvinced, but you opened your laptop before he could ask again.

You opened the security report and tried to focus, but your attention kept drifting back to Clark.

Several months later, Clark went home to Smallville alone for the weekend because you had a client deadline and couldn’t justify leaving Metropolis, even though you’d promised Mom you would visit as soon as the project finished.

Saturday morning found him repairing a section of fence beside Jonathan before carrying groceries inside because some habits survived superhuman strength.

Martha was putting things away when she glanced toward the calendar.

“Your birthday’s getting close.”

Clark smiled. “I know.”

“Thirty.”

“Please don’t say it like that.”

“I didn’t say anything.”

“You were thinking it.”

She laughed and handed him another bag to unpack.

Several seconds passed before she added, “I suppose we should start budgeting for the wedding.”

Clark groaned. “Mom.”

“What?”

“That joke is fourteen years old.”

“Almost fifteen.”

“That doesn’t make it better.”

Martha handed him a carton of eggs. “I’m sure she’ll want something small. Your father will probably decide the barn needs rebuilding from the foundation before he lets anyone hold a reception near it.”

From the other room, Jonathan called, “It could use work.”

“You are not helping,” Clark said.

Martha smiled.

Clark put the eggs in the refrigerator and laughed despite himself.

Then he pictured it.

You beside him. The farmhouse behind you. Both families crowded together somewhere nearby while Jonathan complained about folding chairs and Martha cried before anything had actually happened.

Your hand in his.

The image arrived so easily that Clark stopped laughing.

Martha noticed.

He closed the refrigerator and looked at her. She was trying very hard to look normal, which immediately made him suspicious.

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“Mom.”

“I’m putting away groceries.”

“You stopped.”

Martha glanced down at the bag in front of her as though surprised to find it waiting, then resumed unpacking.

“Mom.”

“You should call her.”

“I talk to her every day.”

Martha looked at him then, whatever amusement had been in her expression softening into something warmer.

“That wasn’t what I meant.”

Clark went still, but Martha didn’t explain. She only returned to putting away groceries, leaving him to turn the comment over in his head for the rest of the weekend.

The idea of marrying you wasn’t unpleasant, which should have made it easy to dismiss the whole thing as the natural consequence of knowing someone for most of his life. Unfortunately, Clark’s imagination proved far too cooperative.

He could picture living with you because the two of you basically lived together several days a week already, just inefficiently and across two apartments. Coming home to you required almost no imagination at all because he did it constantly. Waking beside you lingered in his mind long enough to make him tighten his hands around the steering wheel on the drive back to Metropolis.

By the time he reached the city, he had decided the safest course of action was to stop thinking about any of this.

Then you texted asking whether he wanted dinner.

He went to your apartment.

You were sitting at the table in sweatpants with your laptop open, one foot tucked beneath you, muttering about a client who apparently believed multifactor authentication was optional.

Clark stood in your kitchen and looked around.

His mug was in your cabinet. A jacket he had forgotten the previous week hung over the back of a chair. You had bought the cereal he liked despite never eating it yourself, and he knew where you kept the spare batteries, which floorboard near your bedroom creaked, your Wi-Fi password, the alarm PIN, and exactly how long you would tolerate him interrupting you before threatening to revoke every privilege he possessed.

Nothing around him had changed. Only his understanding of it had.

“Clark?”

He looked at you.

You frowned. “Did you hear me?”

“No.”

“I asked if you wanted noodles.”

“Yeah.”

Your expression remained suspicious. “You okay?”

He had answered that question for you hundreds of times, and suddenly Clark wondered how many times you had asked because you were always the person who noticed.

“Yeah,” he said.

You went back to the screen.

Clark watched you for another moment, and the answer he had been avoiding finally became too obvious to mistake.

He loved you.

He had always loved you, but this was different from the uncomplicated certainty he had carried since childhood. He wanted the future his mother had joked about, stripped of the joke and the deadline and the implication that either of you had failed to find something better.

The realization felt less like discovering something new and more like finally understanding something that had been true long enough to rearrange his memories.

Once Clark understood, he became intolerable to himself.

He examined years of history as though somewhere in there he might identify the exact point at which friendship had changed into something else. Maybe it had happened in college. Maybe later, when adulthood turned your lives into something neither of you could have imagined at fifteen and you kept choosing each other anyway.

He never found an answer.

He remembered you at thirteen telling him he was still Clark, you asleep against his shoulder on a bus in college, the flowers he bought after your promotion, and countless late nights spent together at one kitchen table or another. None of them felt more like a beginning than the others.

What he could see, now that he knew to look for it, was how completely you had worked your way into every future he had ever imagined. Sometimes you were standing beside him. Other times your presence was simply assumed, so certain that he hadn’t thought to account for it at all.

Clark sat with that realization for nearly two months and did absolutely nothing useful with it.

You decided to call off the pact three weeks before Clark turned thirty.

Neither of you had possessed enough contract law at fifteen to specify whose thirtieth birthday counted, but the technicalities didn’t matter anymore.

You couldn’t let the joke survive now that you understood how you felt.

Marrying Clark because neither of you had found somebody else had once sounded funny. Now the idea made something inside you recoil.

You didn’t want to become the person he settled for because of a promise made over green beans. You wanted him to choose you without a deadline forcing the decision.

Since you had no reason to believe he ever would, dissolving the agreement seemed safer.

You waited until Friday.

Clark was at your apartment with dinner, you had finished work early for once, and the evening had settled into the comfortable rhythm that had once made everything easy and now made this particular conversation worse.

You closed your laptop. “Can we talk about something?”

Clark looked up immediately. “Sure.”

“The pact.”

He blinked.

“What about it?”

“I think we should call it off.”

Clark set down his fork.

“We’re almost thirty,” you continued, trying to keep your voice light. “It was funny when we were fifteen, but I think we can officially admit we were idiots.”

His expression became strangely unreadable.

“Why?”

You blinked. “Why were we idiots?”

“Why do you want to call it off?”

Because I’m in love with you.

You looked down instead.

“Because it’s stupid.”

“That never bothered you before.”

“Well, now it does.”

Clark leaned back slightly, and something about the hurt that crossed his face startled you.

“Did something happen?”

“No.”

“Are you seeing somebody?”

“What? No.”

The relief on his face made your stomach twist.

You folded your hands together beneath the table. “Clark, we made that deal because we thought thirty was ancient and assumed that if neither of us had found anyone by then, we might as well settle for each other.”

His eyebrows drew together. “Settle?”

“You know what I mean.”

“I don’t think I do.”

You exhaled. “This is exactly why I wanted to call it off.”

“Then explain it.”

“I don’t want to marry you because we ran out of options.”

The words came out sharper than intended.

Clark stared at you, and you regretted the phrasing immediately.

His voice was quieter when he answered. “You think that’s what it would be?”

“What else would it be?”

He looked away.

For several seconds, the refrigerator was the loudest thing in the apartment.

Then Clark gave a short, humorless laugh. “I had this whole explanation.”

Your pulse stumbled. “What?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out how to say this for weeks.”

“Say what?”

He looked at you again.

You had known Clark almost your entire life. You had watched him terrified, grieving, furious, embarrassed, exhausted, and hopeful enough times to know the tells he had never managed to hide and several he probably didn’t realize he possessed.

You had never seen him look quite like this.

“I don’t want to marry you because I couldn’t find anyone else.”

Your fingers tightened beneath the table.

Clark continued before you could speak. “I don’t want you to be what happens if nothing better works out. I don’t think I realized how much I hated that until recently.”

“Clark—”

“I think that’s why the deal sounds wrong now.”

You stopped breathing.

He rubbed a hand over the back of his neck. “I’m doing this badly.”

“No,” you said, although you weren’t remotely qualified to judge.

Clark gave you a helpless look.

“I love you.”

Everything inside you went quiet.

He swallowed. “I know I’ve said that before.”

He had.

Hundreds of times, at graduations and airports and family funerals, before dangerous rescues and after arguments, in careless phone calls where one of you hung up with love you because neither had ever needed the words to mean only one thing.

Clark looked at you as though he understood the problem too.

“I mean it differently now.”

Your eyes burned.

His expression changed immediately. “Please don’t cry.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say to someone who’s about to cry.”

“I know.”

“You’re making it worse.”

“I know.”

A laugh escaped you despite yourself, and you covered your face.

Clark waited. He could have crossed the space between you faster than you could perceive, but he stayed where he was until you lowered your hands again.

“How long?” you asked.

His mouth opened and closed. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know?”

“I figured it out a couple months ago.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

“I know.” Clark looked almost apologetic. “I don’t know when it started.”

Something in your chest loosened.

“Me neither.”

He stared at you.

You smiled shakily. “I was calling off the pact because I’m in love with you, you idiot.”

Relief transformed his entire face so quickly that you almost laughed again.

“You are?”

“Don’t sound surprised.”

“I’m allowed to be surprised.”

“You just confessed first.”

“That doesn’t mean I knew what you were going to say.”

“You can hear heartbeats.”

“I wasn’t listening to yours.”

That stopped you.

Clark looked embarrassed by the admission. “I don’t do that.”

You knew he didn’t. It had never been something you needed to ask him not to do, and hearing him say it aloud only made the moment feel more intimate.

You stood from the table, and Clark followed a second later, moving with deliberate slowness as if speed had become irrelevant.

“You really didn’t know?” you asked.

He shook his head.

“Did Mom?”

Clark groaned.

You started laughing. “She knew, didn’t she?”

“Apparently.”

“Dad too?”

“Almost definitely.”

“They’re going to be unbearable.”

“They already are.”

Clark smiled.

The conversation finally ran out of places to hide.

The distance between you was barely a step, and when your gaze dropped briefly to his mouth, Clark noticed.

His voice softened. “Can I kiss you?”

After nearly twenty-five years of friendship, almost fifteen years of a marriage pact, and several months of mutual emotional incompetence, the question still made your heart race.

“Yes.”

Clark kissed you carefully.

That lasted perhaps three seconds.

Your hand caught in the front of his shirt, Clark made a startled sound against your mouth, and careful became considerably less relevant.

You knew how his hands felt. You’d held them crossing roads as children, tugged him toward classrooms, reached for them during long drives, and fallen asleep with your fingers tangled together on road trips.

Romance made the familiarity strange rather than easier.

Clark touched your face like he was learning something new about a person he already knew better than anyone else, and when you finally pulled apart, both of you were smiling.

“This is weird,” you whispered.

Clark laughed softly. “Good weird?”

“Extremely weird.”

“We can stop.”

You kissed him again instead.

His hands settled at your waist, and you let yourself enjoy the unfamiliarity for another moment before drawing back.

“We’re not getting married.”

Clark’s eyebrows lifted.

“Right now,” you clarified.

“That feels important.”

“The pact is canceled.”

“Okay.”

“I mean it.”

“I know.”

“If you ever ask me, it has to be because you actually want to.”

Clark’s expression softened. “I do actually want to.”

Your stomach flipped.

He smiled when he saw your face. “But I think we should probably go on a date first.”

You stared at him. “One?”

“At least one.”

“Very traditional of you.”

“I’m trying something new.”

You kissed him before he could say anything else.

The following weekend, Martha opened the front door, looked once at the way Clark’s hand rested against your lower back, and stepped aside.

She managed almost twelve seconds without saying anything.

Jonathan entered from the kitchen, looked at Clark, then at you, and finally back at Clark. “Huh.”

Clark narrowed his eyes. “Don’t.”

Jonathan raised both hands. “I didn’t say anything.”

Martha was visibly losing a battle with herself.

You hugged her, and she squeezed you tightly enough to confirm that whatever smugness she was suppressing came with genuine emotion.

When she pulled back, her eyes were suspiciously bright. “I’m happy for you.”

“Thanks, Mom.”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

Clark pointed toward the kitchen. “You told Dad.”

“I’m married to him. Of course I told him.”

Jonathan nodded.

Clark looked betrayed.

You laughed and leaned around Martha. “You knew too, didn’t you, Dad?”

Jonathan considered the safest answer. “I suspected.”

Clark made an offended sound.

Martha touched your arm before the situation could deteriorate. “Are you staying in your room?”

You looked at Clark.

Clark looked at you.

Jonathan abruptly became extremely interested in something outside.

Martha closed her eyes. “You know what? Don’t answer that.”

Clark turned thirty on a Tuesday.

Martha had ignored Clark’s insistence that he didn’t need a party and celebrated him in Smallville over the weekend. When his actual birthday arrived on Tuesday, you took him to dinner in Metropolis, just the two of you.

Dating Clark was both stranger and more ordinary than you expected.

Some things changed immediately. You kissed him now. You fell asleep beside him sometimes, at his apartment or yours, and his hand found yours automatically beneath restaurant tables. He had also developed the distracting habit of kissing your temple whenever he passed behind your chair while you worked.

Other things barely shifted at all. You still argued about whose apartment had the better fridge, he still called you after difficult days, you still worked from his kitchen table whenever the mood struck, and you still went home to Smallville together as though there had never been any other reasonable arrangement.

The categories had changed, but the life underneath them remained familiar.

After dinner, you walked through Metropolis without any particular destination, Clark’s fingers threaded through yours.

“You’re thirty,” you said.

He sighed. “You’ve mentioned that six times.”

“I’m enjoying it.”

“You’ll be thirty soon.”

“Not today.”

He squeezed your hand.

A few blocks later, Clark slowed.

“What?”

He looked at you. “You know our deal technically failed.”

You considered it. “Because you found somebody?”

“Because we both did.”

Warmth spread through your chest.

“That’s very sentimental.”

“I’ve been working on it.”

“You should keep practicing.”

Clark laughed, but his expression softened a moment later. “For what it’s worth, I’m glad we broke it.”

You looked at him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

He lifted your joined hands and pressed his mouth against your knuckles. “I don’t ever want you wondering whether I chose you because a deadline ran out.”

You swallowed. “I don’t.”

“Good.”

You walked another block before adding, “Although we did shake on it.”

Clark groaned. “I knew you were going to say that.”

“Legally binding.”

“My dad has done irreparable damage.”

“He was right.”

“He was encouraging you.”

“Same thing.”

Clark stopped beneath a streetlight.

You turned toward him and found him smiling in the quiet way that had belonged to Clark long before the rest of the world learned Superman’s name.

Looking at him made years collapse into one another: Clark at five with dirt on his knees, nine and terrified you would tell, thirteen and asking whether being from somewhere else meant he belonged with you any less, fifteen solemnly shaking your hand across a bowl of green beans. Eighteen beside a packed car. Twenty-three carrying your couch. Twenty-five bringing flowers to your office. Twenty-six with his arm around you beneath a throw blanket after a breakup. Twenty-nine, when something familiar had begun looking different to both of you.

You had spent most of your life loving Clark Kent. It had simply taken you a while to understand all the ways that could be true.

“So,” you said, “what happens now?”

Clark looked down at you. “Now?”

“Yeah.”

He leaned in until his forehead rested against yours. “We figure it out.”

You smiled. “We’ve been figuring it out for twenty-five years.”

“I know.”

“That doesn’t inspire confidence.”

Clark laughed softly before kissing you beneath the streetlight, thirty years old and still learning, while the city moved around you.

The promise you made at fifteen had assumed that if neither of you found someone, you would eventually choose each other.

You had gotten the order wrong.

The choosing had happened first.

It had been happening all along.