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It goes like this: Jon Kent is born, a beautiful, healthy baby boy, and when the doctor’s needle manages to pierce his skin his father snaps his mother’s neck for the weakness of her genes, for allowing their son to feel pain.
He grows up learning all the ways to make a human being hurt, although his father isn’t the best teacher. Superman grew up learning how to hold back, how not to kill, how to make it last longer, and Jon- well, if Jon held back, he wouldn’t kill anyone at all.
It’s not his fault, his father tells him. He may only be half of perfection, but that’s closer than anyone else has ever gotten.
(He doesn’t know yet of the other, the one that, by his father’s logic, is almost perfect. But those few genes, those telomeres twisting in his cells, come from someone unforgivable. Kon-El is a monster. Jon is a blessing.)
When he’s eleven years old, he meets his grandfather. His real grandfather, not his namesake, and he invites him to see the galaxy. He doesn’t hesitate for a moment before accepting the offer to be anywhere, anywhere else.
(When he sees the rift in the universe approaching, part of him knows that if he goes through it, the person he is will cease to exist. There is no Jon Kent on the other side of the portal, and he knows it in his half-unbreakable bones.)
(He remembers the day his super-hearing came in, how he couldn’t stop the screams, all across the world. He remembers his father showing him the only way to feel in control of it: to be the one causing them.)
(A more logical part of his mind realizes that he is going to die. He can’t quite bring himself to mind.)
-
“What the fuck,” the woman- his mother, he recognizes her from photographs- says.
Now that the silence is broken, Jon can bring himself to move, to speak. He rushes forward, crushing his mother in a hug- a bit too literally, it seems, as she barks out a noise of pain. Right. Human. Humans are fragile, imperfect, flawed.
Jon really shouldn’t be this happy to see one.
“Uh, sorry,” his dad says, “Who are you?”
Jon laughs giddily. “I’m Jon! Jon Kent. I’m your son. Well, not your son, I think this is an alternate universe thing. You’re alive!”
“Are we-” Lois cuts herself off with a wheeze. “Are we not alive in your universe?”
Jon lets go to give her a chance to breathe. “You’re not. You died right after I was born, I never really got to meet you.”
She furrows her brow. “What happened?” She says, the perfect reporter, just like Dad always talked about.
“Dad happened,” Jon says, and then things kinda go to shit.
-
Jon learns a lot of things really quickly, then, like killing is bad (duh, they’re the bad guys) and the Justice League are heroes here (even Batman? Yeah, right) and I’m never, ever going to hurt you.
That last one is weird, since Jon’s dad never hurt him either, but Clark says it like it’s important, so Jon nods firmly. Then Clark and Lois go into the other room to capital-T Talk, and Jon waits exactly three seconds before activating his super-hearing.
“I’m not ready for this, Clark,” Lois says. “I’m not even sure if I want…”
“I know,” Clark says. “I’m scared too. But he needs us, Lois. And besides, we can’t exactly put a traumatized kid from another dimension into foster care.”
“We could give him to Bruce,” Lois half-jokes. “He probably wouldn’t even notice another child.”
Jon isn’t scared, because he’s not supposed to be scared of humans, but he decides that he’s probably allowed to be angry. Everyone knows what Batman does to kids, and they’re just going to hand Jon to him? So much for heroes.
They go back and forth, debating housing and school and therapists, until they agree that Jon can stay with them.
Not once, Jon notes, do they suggest sending him home.
-
Living with Lois and Clark is… weird. That’s probably the best word for it, even if it’s not very specific. They’re weird, alternate-universe Metropolis is weird, this whole world is weird.
Jon’s not allowed to tell other people about his powers or his past, for one thing. Jon’s dad didn’t have a secret identity, but he understands the basic idea. The people around him don’t know he’s Superboy, and so they’re not afraid of him.
Weird. Really, really weird.
People on the street get close enough to accidentally bump into him. A granny pinches his cheeks and he’s so shocked he doesn’t snap her fingers off. No one seems afraid, no one watches the skies for an attack. Jon talks to more people in a week than he would in a year back home- actually talks, doesn’t just try to start a conversation while they cower and do what they think he wants. It’s kinda nice.
Four months into his stay, Clark announces that he’s set Jon up for a playdate.
“Damian is Bruce’s youngest,” Clark says. “He just got here, and he’s having some trouble adjusting. He’s- well, he’s a bit like you.”
“I know Damian,” Jon says. “I met him back home. He’s lame. What do you mean, ‘like me’? Is he from an alternate universe too?”
They glance at each other. There’s something they’re not telling him.
“Well,” Lois says, “No, but he is from very far away. Somewhere else, where they have different rules and… value different things.”
“Oh,” Jon says. “You mean he’s a murderer too.”
Clark winces. “Let’s, um… God, what did Doctor Hubner say? Don’t think of yourself as a murderer, Jon. You’ve… done some bad things, but that doesn’t make you a certain type of person, it just means you’ve done those things.”
Jon hates Doctor Hubner. He’s not supposed to talk back, though. It’s rude.
“Okay,” he says. “I’ll do it.”
-
“It’s so weird that you’re younger than me,” Jon says, staring down at Damian.
“I am a decade old!”
“Yeah, well, I’m eleven.”
Damian glances to the side, lip curling. “Confound it.”
Jon stares at him for a moment, laughter building in his chest. “Did you- did you just say ‘confound it’? In real life?”
Damian scowls at him. “Those are real words. Unlike the drivel you children spew, with your ‘nothingburger’ and your ‘rizz’.”
Jon laughs so hard he has a coughing fit. Damian tries to stab him while he’s incapacitated. It goes pretty well, all things considered.
-
“When I was learning surgery, Mother had me operate on live patients,” Damian says. “It was the best way to learn, and I could only have the best. I was six when I began, and I was too clumsy to hold the scalpel properly. I killed fourteen people by accident, and it somehow felt worse than the hundreds I’d killed intentionally. Your turn.”
Jon tosses his fidget spinner into the air, watching it rotate as it comes back down to his hand. “When we first found out about my supernova ability, I couldn’t control it. So Dad took me to a town, and he told me to destroy just that one town and nothing else, and then he’d take me to smaller and smaller ones until I could destroy a building without even shaking the ones next to it.”
Damian scoffs. “Superpowers are cheating.”
“I’ve never killed anybody without superpowers,” Jon says, rolling his eyes. “How many hundreds?”
“Counting those fourteen? Nine hundred and eighty-two,” Damian replies.
“You kept track? That’s weird,” Jon says.
“Like you didn’t,” Damian scowls. “What is it? A thousand? Two?”
“More like forty,” Jon says.
“Oh, I’m Jon, I’ve done such terrible things, I killed forty whole-”
“Forty thousand,” Jon sighs dramatically.
Damian doesn’t say much, after that, but ‘not insulting you’ is sort of how Damian apologizes.
-
Every season, the Kents get together to celebrate that season’s birthdays. It’s the summer of Jon’s seventeenth when he finally brings Damian over to the farm.
“Well, I’m very happy for you, Jon,” Ma Kent says. “Not as happy that you brought him around to meet your parents six years before Pa and I got to, but-”
“Ma, it’s not like that,” Jon says, hiding his face in his hands. He can hear Kon laughing at him from the backyard.
“Well, why haven’t you asked him to be your beau, then?”
“Ma, he’s right th-”
“I don’t understand it either,” Damian says, suddenly appearing behind Jon in a way that would have been startling if Jon didn’t subconsciously keep tabs on his heartbeat at this point.
Ma hides a smile behind her glass of iced tea. “You’re thinking about becoming a veterinarian, aren’t you, Damian? Marigold had her calf a week ago, and she’s been off ever since. Jon, why don’t you show him to the barn so he can take a look?”
Jon, blushing harder than he has in his life, complies.
-
The barn isn’t the worst place to have this talk, all things considered. It’s up there, though.
“So,” Jon says.
“So,” Damian mocks.
“You’re such a jerk,” Jon mutters.
“You’re seventeen years old and you don’t have the guts to call me an asshole.”
“Okay, wow, changed my mind, love confession over-”
“You love me?” It’s heartbreakingly genuine, vulnerable in a way he sort of hates.
Jon is silent for a moment, trying to think of what to say.
“It’s- never mind,” Damian mutters.
“I mean, I do,” Jon says.
“...But?”
“I dunno. I care about you, I want to date you. But usually, when people talk about really loving someone, they say all this stuff about how they’d love them no matter what, and I wouldn’t.”
Damian is silent for a moment. “What would it take for you to stop loving me?”
“Well, I knew you back in my original universe. He wasn’t like you. He wasn’t funny or passionate or- well, he was probably smart, but he didn’t show it. He just did whatever Batman told him to. Kal-Il used to say that he wasn’t all there, but I think he wasn’t any there. So I guess I wouldn’t love you if you were like that. I only love you when you’re yourself.”
“You really are backwards,” Damian says.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Everyone I’ve known wants me to be something other than myself. My mother wanted me to be an heir, my father wanted me to be a hero, Grayson wanted me to be happy. Here you are, telling me that you only love me for who I am, and no further. Backwards.”
Jon stared at him. “...Is that a good thing?”
Damian smirked, the way he did when thugs realized just who had come to stop them, and leaned in for a kiss.
A scream cut through the air, and Jon was gone before he even realized it, a blur of color heading for the house, where-
“Jon,” his father said. “I finally found you.”
Jon wasn’t sure if the black spots in his vision were from shock or the kryptonite embedded in Clark’s chest. Kal-Il released Lois’ body, letting it thud to the floor unceremoniously.
“I can’t believe- how long has it been for you? It’s only been two months for us. Oh, Jon, I’m so sorry. I should have found you sooner.”
“It’s okay, Dad,” Jon heard himself say.
“It’s not okay. Three people wasn’t enough for six years of my son’s life. I can’t fix it, Jon, but I’ll do anything. I’ll kill every human on this godforsaken planet, just watch.”
Jon thought of Damian still in the barn, of Kon and Pa at the grill.
“It’s okay, dad. I just want to go home.”
He took Kal-Il’s hand as he stepped through the portal, feeling more like a child than he had in years.