"You have to start out learning to believe the little lies to believe the big ones."

[matchmadeinhell]

They had to try their best to do this thing incognito. After all, the plan was get in, get the shard, get out, and while several of them were total unknowns in this world, three of them ran the risk of being recognized by some of the resident superheroes and supervillains since they were from a similar dimension and had equivalents here.

Nightwing, not so much since he usually wore a mask, but Cassie and Kon didn't wear masks as part of their costumes, and Kon especially wore a very familiar face. He was younger than Kal but still approaching adulthood now and that meant his cloney resemblance to the current de facto ruler of the world was pretty uncanny now.

That was why Kon was in disguise. He was wearing his usual jeans, black long-sleeved shirt, black boots, and black gloves. But he had a dumpy, shapeless, brown jacket over top of it all, a blue baseball cap, and a pair of dorky, large-framed glasses. Fortunately, spring was only just starting in this world and hadn't quite chased away the chill of winter so they could all bundle up with clothes that made them look innocuous.

The magical door had appeared in an alley, against a nondescript wall. As soon as they were all through and had closed it behind then, Kon peered around a corner to see if he could recognize where they were by the city's night-time skyline.

"Looks like Gotham." A pause. "It's hardly recognizable, though. I've never seen Gotham this clean."

He squinted instinctually, trying to peer around some more with his X-ray vision and found it working in full when he usually struggled with it back in the Guardians' universe. He held up his hand and poured on the teke, creating a field around it.

"My powers seem to be stronger here for some reason. The ones that are limited in the Guardians' universe are back, like my teke. You guys feeling the same? Most of us are superheroes or equivalents in our worlds. Being in a superhero universe might be amping up our powers or something. Maybe making the belief stronger."

It all ran on narratives, right? Stories? This was a story superheroes were supposed to be in.

Comments

[holynpcsbatman]

"Oh, Conner, the same right back to you. I can tell you're every bit the brave young man our Conner is."

Ma hugged him in a fierce hug.

"Please, when you get the other Titans out, let him know you're coming for him after it's all over. I don't want him alone in there, not knowing if he's getting out. And you tell him we love and him can't wait to get him home."

Then she let go of Kon to gently hug Cassie.

"And you, young lady, I'm so glad to see Conner's found you in another universe, too. Bless your heart for coming out here for us."

[injustice_npcs]

Jon went in to hug Kon now.

"You're the ones that need to be careful. Please take care, son. You're not the only one that can't stand the thought of something bad happening to family and Martha's right - we can barely tell you and our Conner apart, other than the age."

He drew back and nodded firmly.

"We'll keep your secrets. You do what you need to. He won't hear a word of it from us. And just like Martha said, you tell our Conner he's coming home and we'll be waiting for him when he does."

He gripped Kon's shoulder.

"Thank you for telling us he's alright and for helping get him back. Be careful out there."

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie hugged Mrs. Kent back, trying not to wonder about her counterpart's mother in this universe. She just had to believe that, with her daughter out of the picture, Helena Sandsmark was considered to not be any kind of threat.

"Stay safe," she said with a smile for both of them, and jerked her thumb in Kon's direction. "I'll do my best to keep him safe, too."

[holynpcsbatman]

"You keep each other safe," said Martha, leaning into Jonathan, looking over at him with a smile, the meaning very clear.

Whatever came next, they'd stand up to it together and they hoped Cassie and Conner would do the same.

The Kents saw Cassie and Kon to the door, their expressions wistful as they left. The ache Ma felt in her chest was almost a visible thing as they flew off.

[matchmadeinhell]

Kon kept the wistful smile on his face until the Kents were just little dots in the distance.

Then, when it was impossible for them to see or hear him, the smile dropped and turned into a scowl.

"I'm gonna feed him his own heart," he said hatefully. The only people he'd ever held more hate for than this were Lex Luthor and Amanda Spence. "He made Ma cry."

[mark_in_the_sands]

"No you're not," Cassie answered calmly. "If it has to be done, I'm doing it."

Because the last thing Kon needed was the blood of any version of Superman on his hands.

Even a shitty, awful Superman who made his mother cry.

[matchmadeinhell]

"Nuh uh, you should take on Wonder Woman. You're better equipped to deal with her than I am anyway. With all the kickin' booty with martial skill and everything."

He just really did not want to see Cassie facing Superman. The chilling image of the Superman robot killing Donna Troy entered his head, only in his little mental picture, it wasn't a robot, and it was Cassie instead of Donna.

"And it's my family he hurt." A pause. "Sort of."

[mark_in_the_sands]

"I've seen the way you fight now, don't sell yourself short."

Cassie turned in the air so that she could rub her knuckles across Kon's cheek.

"And don't do that to yourself unless you have to."

[matchmadeinhell]

That made him freeze there in the air, staring at her. For a moment, the look on his face was as loving as the looks Ma and Pa had given each other a few times during their conversation with them. And that...said something. It really did. He didn't even have any idea that he was looking at her that way.

Then his expression faded to something far more brittle and he avoided her eyes.

"If everything goes wrong and our nuclear option stops being an option, somebody's gonna have to try to do it by just toughing it out. Might as well be me."

A pause.

"You can't break what's already broken, right?"

Batman calling him a murderer hadn't really helped his self-image. He'd hidden it, trying to just grit his teeth and keep moving forward with the mission, but it had affected him.

"I've got blood on my hands already, what's it matter? Adding more?" He shrugged one of those shrugs he did where he was trying to act like something didn't bother him and it was just very, transparently obvious that it did.

He'd practically been born - well, cloned - with his heart on his spandex sleeve and it was more obvious now than ever.

[mark_in_the_sands]

It made her heart break, hearing him say that about himself. Cassie looked at him, struggling to find a way to verbalize what she felt he needed to hear, but words weren't going to cut it, were they? Diana could tell him he was still worthy of wearing the 'S' and he was still reeling too hard to believe it.

And Batman, Persephone damn him, had hurt him again, in the wound he was still recovering from.

"Object lesson," she said calmly, and stopped flying and started falling; momentum carrying her forward as she allowed gravity to reclaim her. They were low enough that the fall probably wouldn't kill her, not with her durability, but hitting the ground wasn't going to be fun.

But she wasn't going to hit the ground. Kon was going to catch her.

[matchmadeinhell]

Kon just watched for a second, nonplussed. He wasn't alarmed at first because Cassie could fly and it wasn't like someone had knocked her out of the air.

"Cass, what are you doing?" he called down after her.

Why wasn't she pulling up? What was she doing? She was obviously trying to make some kind of point but he had no idea what it was.

His brows furrowed. "Cassie!"

Whhhyyyy wasn't she pulling up?

Nope nope nope, he knew she could fly perfectly well on her own but she was doing something and what if she didn't pull up in time because she was trying to make some kind of point and being too stubborn about it? And and and -

And down he went, diving down after her, wrapping his arms around her and pulling up before she hit the ground.

"What are you doing? Invulnerable or not, that still would've hurt. I don't know what kind of point you're trying to make but it's not worth faceplanting into the ground after freefall, that's stupid."

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie smiled sweetly up at him, reaching back to hold the hand he'd used to protect her head and neck when he'd caught her right there where he'd put it. It was part of the point she was making, after all. Then her expression sobered again.

"They didn't break you," she said. "They gouged at you and they hurt you and they tortured you, but they didn't break you. You know how I know? Because when I fall out of the sky, even when you know I'm doing it on purpose, you're there to catch me."

She squeezed the hand behind her neck again, to draw his attention to it, then released it to cup his face in her hands so that he couldn't look away.

"They didn't break you," she repeated, blinking away the tears she felt building at the corner of her eyes. "Doing that might. But it won't break me."

[matchmadeinhell]

He had been made to hurt Superman. That was the entire purpose of his existence. Cadmus had cloned him to replace him, to be a Superman they controlled, but Luthor had sneaked his...his poison in - his DNA, the code words - to try to control him, to take control of his purpose.

When it turned out Superman was still alive, Luthor had taken it on himself to decide why Kon existed, that it'd be to cause Superman pain, and - ostensibly - to kill him in the end.

She was right that seeing that through, acting out that purpose, even on a different, evil Superman was probably the worst thing for him. She was right about a lot of things. Kon wanted to believe she was right about all of them. He wanted to.

Even with not being sure of that, one thing he was sure of, as he looked at her face, still cradling her head in his hands, was that he was desperately, madly in love with her for trying to convince him. For being willing to take something like that on so he didn't have to, if it all became just that desperate.

All because she didn't want him to have to be desperate again, lost again, forced to be something other than himself again. And that was borne of so much love, he knew, for the person he was when he was himself.

They had kissed many different ways, as couples did. Gentle kisses, passionate kisses, furious kisses (those times that arguing devolved into something else), desperate, hungry kisses.

But they were young. Their relationship was still a growing thing, working its way out of the awkwardness of youth, building up and evolving as they got older. By their very nature, the feelings they'd had for each other had started as the feelings a teenage boy and a teenage girl had for each other. And as they got older and as they both grew up, that...was changing. That was changing into the love of a grown man and grown woman, the kind of love where certain things like "we'll stand against the world together" were silently assumed, like some kind of universal truth.

And just like they found new ways to feel about each other, it mean they found new ways to kiss each other all the time.

Kon had never kissed her this way before, even at his most passionate, even at his most wild. He kissed her like a man possessed. He kissed her like a man who was starting to discover that the love he felt for the women he loved ran deeper than he could've ever imagined. Every day, he plunged further down, and every day he found himself hoping he'd never come back up for air. He wanted to drown in it.

[mark_in_the_sands]

Cassie wrapped her arms around his neck and kissed him back, drinking him in and pressing her body close against his. The scars hidden by his T-shirt, by the bands on his wrists, they didn't make him any less the Kon-El she'd fallen in love with, was still falling for everyday.

And unlike him, she didn't have the specter of her mentor's death hanging over her destiny like a trap waiting to be sprung. Diana had died once, and Cassie had tried her hardest to kill her once too, under Devastation's mind-control, but she'd become Wonder Girl independent of all that. She'd gone into Diana's closet for magical tools and slapped a wig on, and later asked Zeus for powers just because she'd wanted to help. She still wanted to help, and she especially wanted to help this man who she'd grown up with and grown close to and already lost once. She wanted to keep him safe and, acknowledging that 'safe' was never going to be a real option, she wanted to take what he couldn't bear and bear it herself.

She didn't want to kill anybody. But to spare Kon, she would, if it needed to be done.

But now, all she needed was to have him here and kissing her back, and maybe just believing a tiny bit more than he had a few minutes ago.