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_assemble2015-01-27 03:04 am
matchmadeinhell) wrote in ya_assemble2015-01-27 03:04 am
Entry tags:
[LN] Thank Goodness We're Well-rounded Characters
Kon was reading at relative superspeed. It wasn't at his usual brisk pace, because he found that the limitations of his powers meant he couldn't retain the knowledge for more than a few minutes at his usual speeds, so he had to slow it down a little, but he was still thumbing through far faster than some of the others were taking just to go through the study guides they'd quickly procured.
"Is it just the fact I'm reading this as superspeed or does this story make no sense?" Kon said, as he thumbed through page after page.
Another reality shard had fallen away and now that their brands had signaled it, it was time to go dimension-hopping. Fortunately, it was a very small shard in the middle of the wilderness in Siberia and the area of effect was spreading slowly, so they had time to prepare.
With his otherworldly wisdom, Manny had managed to help out on this one, communicating some clues about the world they were about to enter by flashing the image of a cover of a book.
A fairly terrible book. Apparently they were entering the world it was based on.
So they were doing their homework as they geared up to go and trying to make sense of the senseless.
"So what I'm getting from this is this is a world where you're not allowed to have more than one personality trait? I think? Under pain of death, you have to be a one-dimensional character."
"Is it just the fact I'm reading this as superspeed or does this story make no sense?" Kon said, as he thumbed through page after page.
Another reality shard had fallen away and now that their brands had signaled it, it was time to go dimension-hopping. Fortunately, it was a very small shard in the middle of the wilderness in Siberia and the area of effect was spreading slowly, so they had time to prepare.
With his otherworldly wisdom, Manny had managed to help out on this one, communicating some clues about the world they were about to enter by flashing the image of a cover of a book.
A fairly terrible book. Apparently they were entering the world it was based on.
So they were doing their homework as they geared up to go and trying to make sense of the senseless.
"So what I'm getting from this is this is a world where you're not allowed to have more than one personality trait? I think? Under pain of death, you have to be a one-dimensional character."
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"Probably. When I told her what we needed to get rid of the illusion for, she looked like she wanted to eat my eyeballs."
Kon practically ran over to the blanket and plopped down to sit, looking for all the world like a puppy that just saw their owner grab a frisbee.
He even grabbed his feet and rocked slightly in place where he sat, in anticipation.
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"You look like you're twelve, on Christmas," she teased, feeling a little daring now that she'd taken the penultimate step toward being completely naked on a roof in another universe. She thumbed the edges of her panties and smirked. "I guess I'll just take these off myself. I was going to ask if you wanted to do it with your teeth, but..."
She pushed off the roof with her toes to hover in the air again, peeling her underwear off the same way she'd trained for getting her hands in front of her when they'd been tied behind her back. It was a bit of a performance sure, but she did have an avid audience, and--
"Shit!"
Stupid wind!
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"Runaway panties, ten o' clock!" Kon called out dramatically, hoping to get a laugh out of her. "Sound the alarm! If we don't catch them you'll be forced to run around with naught covering your naughty bits. They're high-tailing their way to freedom!"
He flew into the air after them, laughing, and snagged them. The second he had them in his hand, he bopped himself in the head.
"I just totally wasted a sexy moment there. I could've caught 'em with my teeth."
He flew over and stuffed them in the backpack, then made sure it was weighed down thoroughly with their boots. Then he flew back to the blanket again, kneeling there, and wiggling slightly in place.
"Alas, alack, I'll have to make up for that wasted moment by doing lots of other fun stuff with my mouth."
And there went the eyebrow waggle.
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"You can do fun things with your mouth when you don't look like jail-bait who let preschoolers cut his hair," she said, winding her scrunchie into her hair again as she moved toward the blanket -- it was longer now, which mean she could pull all of it back instead of just most of it. "What's the hold up, hot lips?"
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He had to bite the bullet now. It wasn't that he wanted to stay jail-baity. He wanted to be his glorious, muscular, even-hotter present-day self.
But a hurdle was in the way. A big one. A total moodkiller.
"Okay, so, you haven't seen me without my shirt since..."
Since his ordeal at Project: Gladiator. He hadn't even so much as changed shirts in front of her, always opting to do it in the bathroom or when she was out of the room.
He cast his gaze at the blanket.
"I got a lot of scars, Cass. They kept me in red light rooms a lot so I didn't always have my usual healing. They did - they did a lot of, uh. Like there's certain types of scars, you know?" Ones that were clearly made by strange devices or unnecessary surgery. Scars that didn't look like they came from fighting. Scars that were clearly from medical torture.
He held a hand over his heart. "I want - I don't want this to be all maudlin, though, you know? I want this to be fun. If it has to be sad, I want that to just - to just be a moment that we let go. Can we do that? Just...have the moment and then let it go?"
He looked up at her pleadingly. "'Cause I wanna be with you like how we used to be together."
Where it was saucy and fun and half the time he laughed her right into bed.
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Of course he'd have scars. She'd known they put the nanochain in, and he'd talked about the red light rooms. The nightmares he'd woken up from in her arms, she'd been able to guess at a few things. She'd tried not to speculate too deeply because there were only so many things she could punch at the Pole that wouldn't bring down either the entire workshop or the entire damn mountain it was on, and there wouldn't be enough of those things if she thought about it too deeply.
She knelt down on the blanket in front of Kon, cupping his face in her hands and kissing him gently.
"Yeah," she said. "We'll have the moment and let it go."
At least, she'd try. She'd try really, really hard.
cw: mention of attempted suicide
"Okay. Okay."
He held his arms crossed over his chest, self conscious, and inhaled deeply with his eyes closed. He let it out again in a little whoosh. Then he shivered as the illusion dropped, revealing his much more brawny body.
Lowering his arms slightly, he kept his eyes cast on the blanket, not quite ready to look at her.
His body, once mostly perfect barring a few small scars he'd gotten in his TTK-only days, was now almost unsightly. Between the experiments and Spence's beatings, the scars were nearly uncountable. Just like his face, his arms and legs were mostly clear, because they'd known that they should leave them in places less likely to be seen so the public didn't see them, but his torso and upper thighs were a mess.
The worst were the ones that were clearly medical in nature. The long line down the middle of his torso, ending at the little indent where most people had a belly button, and the horizontal line under the line of his ribs - from the vivisection and the surgery to put in his nanochain. The strangely shaped burns where different horrible testing equipment had been hooked up to his body. The places where little square and round sections of flesh had been cut away to be biopsied and experimented on.
"And that's not all," he said in a game show host voice, trying for darkly comical. "You're watching PTSD-TV - all maudlin, all the time."
Slowly, he lowered his arms so she could see the undersides of them - and the scars at his wrists. The purpose of the wounds he'd made there was very clear.
He bit his lip, mostly because he was trying to stop it from quivering. He finally looked up at her and with his voice a little choked, he tried to explain, "I didn't want to leave you. I didn't." He sounded desperate in his desire to make her understand that. "I got lucky one time. Got knocked into a drug store in a fight and I managed to sneak a razor into a candy wrapper and hide it in my mouth without looking at it so they didn't see, so I had it in the red room."
No, he couldn't look at her. He just couldn't. He clasped his hand over his eyes.
"I just wanted a way out before they used me to hurt more people. Not that it did anything, soon as I was healed up, Spence, she -"
No. No no, he wasn't finishing that sentence.
The tears started to trickle through his fingers.
"I didn't want to leave you. Or Rob. Or Bart. Or Kal. Or Ma. But it wasn't about just me."
He hadn't been able to escape. That meant to not be used to kill people, he'd needed to not be.
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In some ways it was a good thing that Kon wasn't looking at her, because Cassie had no idea what was showing on her face. She could barely even parse what she was feeling, everything was roiling and twisting together like a hydra in a pot of boiling water.
How could they have done this to him? How could anyone do this to someone? How dare they do this to him?
For a moment, clear and slick and shining, Cassie wanted nothing more in the multiverse than to be at the heart of Project Gladiator. She would kill them with her bare hands. She would rend their limbs from their bodies and their heads from their shoulders. She would tear Luthor's ears and eyes from his head and break every single one of his bones, she would personally test exactly how invulnerable Spence was before throwing her into the sun, and she would do so with a song in her heart and a smile on her lips. They would beg for death long before she let them have its mercy, and she would go on bended knee before Hades and Persephone to beg for the boon of being permitted to make them suffer longer.
The moment passed and she reached out to pull Kon into her arms, cradling him against her chest and stroking his hair.
"I love you," she whispered, her voice strained and trembling as she delved through her emotions for the ones that would most help him. She dropped a kiss on his hairline.
"I love you."
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And it was okay. He needed this. It needed to happen and then be over.
He wrapped his arms around her, buried his face at her neck, and let himself cry. It wasn't the wracking sobs that sometimes came after the nightmares this time, just a gentle plip plop from his eyes. He had cried a lot already. There was still a wellspring of tears locked in there, whole stagnant tanks that needed to be drained out. But the water pressure had gone down over time, thanks to the fact he'd been letting himself let them out as he went.
"I love you, too," he whispered back. "I love you so much."
So much that his reward for being "good" had been making her those little gifts. That was what had kept him sane at times, kept the despair from consuming him. It was such a tiny thing to cling to, leaving her gifts so she'd know he loved her, even if he wound up dying before he was ever free, but it had meant something.
Loving her had kept him sane. As sane as he could be anyway.
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And when they got back to the Pole, she was going to start making plans for what she'd do when they went back home. She'd talk to Diana, she'd talk to Bunny and Tooth, she'd raid the library, she'd do everything in her power to make sure that she could tear Project Gladiator out by the roots and bring those responsible to justice.
And if that meant that those monsters couldn't be caged or made harmless and needed to be slayed, Cassie thought she'd be up to the task.
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Then he pressed a few soft kisses to her neck and drew away, wiping at his eyes.
"Okay, moment over." He sucked in a deep breath. "So, this is me now. Kinda got a Frankenstein thing going. Except all my various parts are not scavenged from anywhere gross and are definitely fully functional."
He reached his hand up to caress her face, his eyes roving up and down her body.
"And we're alive and I'm free and we're both very naked right now. We should probably do something about that."
He survived. Through the pain and the loss and his life rolling wildly out of control. That was just what he did. He survived and he found the good. He always found the good. He'd found it with her even when the world had been ending.
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"We should definitely do something about that," she answered, snaking a hand around the back of his neck and rising up on her knees so that she could pull him in for a kiss. "We gonna wrestle for this one or just take it slo-o-ow?"
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"How about a little of column A, a little of column B?" he said with a grin.
He started kissing his way down her body, disappearing under the blanket, and stopped at her chest, focusing his attention there.
"Ladies. How I've missed you so."
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"Believe me, they missed you too," she purred. "Mmm..."
One good thing could be said for the wind: it covered up an awful lot of noise.
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"That was. So good."
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It really had been. She'd missed this -- not just the sex, but Kon being all loose-limbed and relaxed like some kind of giant cat. Things weren't back to normal, and maybe they never would be again, but she was breathing a little easier every day.
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Finally, he said, "I was numb for such a long time. I felt like I was dead inside." He snuggled a little closer. "Being with you helps me feel alive again."