Superboy / Kon-El (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
matchmadeinhell) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
ya_assemble2015-05-12 10:19 pm
matchmadeinhell) wrote in ya_assemble2015-05-12 10:19 pm
"You have to start out learning to believe the little lies to believe the big ones."
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.
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.
no subject
"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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.