II. 

Smallville Senior High School was built in 1976 and remained a picture of Midwestern wholesomeness, dazzling in its red and gold finery, stylized crows on every available flat surface.  The trophy cases were shiny while the back shelves in the library carried nearly an inch of dust.  The computers were out of date, the lab equipment was cracked from age and poor maintenance, the school calculators were TI-80s in a world of TI-94s, but the gym facilities were slick and new.  There was no art room, and the only reason that the band remained was to march during halftime at football games and play to the spirit club during basketball season. 

Conner decided immediately that by burning down the entire school, he'd only be doing Kansas--and the world in general--the kindest sort of favor.  But before he could find scrap newspaper and a lighter and indulge in his pyromaniac tendencies, Principal Hathaway was ushering him down a horrifyingly red and yellow hallway toward what Conner hoped was the real school, what he'd seen so far being a hideously cruel joke played on out of town transfers.

"Smallville is a very welcoming town," Hathaway said jovially.  "I'm sure you'll be happy here."

In all actuality, Conner felt bitter and deranged and very hostile, with an uncomfortable side of persistent, inflammatory sexual frustration.  He forced himself to smile, his very best LexCorp Benefit Slash Charity Concert Or Maybe Some Sort of Auction smile, and ground out, "I'm sure."

"To that end," Hathaway went on as they passed through the catacombs of the gym, possibly oblivious to the considering looks Conner was giving the pool as a viable option for painless suicide, "I'm introducing you to one of our school's most exemplary students."  He smiled brightly.  "She's the head of the cheerleading squad and the secretary of the philanthropy club."

Conner could not keep the stricken horror from his face.

"Miss Ross will be a wonderful guide for you," Hathaway said blithely.

"I--it's not that big a school," Conner said desperately.

"Don't be ridiculous," Hathaway laughed.  "We have the largest sports facilities on this side of Kansas.  What'll happen if you're in the mood for racquetball and end up stuck with the football team?"

Conner bit back his knee-jerk desire to say something very offensive about football teams, gay pornography, and bear stereotypes, and what he'd do if he came upon some (lucky) combination of those factors.

"I'm sure it'll be fine," he ad-libbed.  "There's really no need to trouble her."

This was all going so much more wrong than he'd anticipated.

When he'd gotten caught cutting himself, exploded at his mother, lost fifteen pounds, started drinking Jolt in lieu of sleep, blown up the solarium, and made Mrs. Banner cry--he hadn't been (too) surprised that he had gotten shipped to Smallville.  If what he knew about the Luthor family line was correct, it seemed like the historically-accepted method of dealing with disaffected, prodigal offspring. 

And aside from a liberal dose of deep, horrified bitterness, he'd been grateful to find himself tumbling out of Lois' white Chevy Seabring onto his grandparents' dusty driveway, to find Grandma Martha's opened arms turned toward him, clutching him to her warm chest.  He'd even been happy to see his grandfather and his awkward, halfway-worshipful, halfway-disapproving affection as he'd been ushered into the farmhouse, given six kinds of pie and cake immediately, and had his things placed into his mother's old bedroom while his grandmother said, "We're so glad you're here, Conner.  Don't you worry about a thing.  This will be good for you, you'll see."

And since he was not at all interested in accepting his fate, Conner was a big fan of hiding, and embraced the idea of running away with Lois and burying his head in Smallville until the world realigned itself.  The doctors would say, "All the tests were wrong.  You've got allergies.  Sorry about that, Mr. Luthor," Geoffrey would develop a sudden awareness that he was gay and wanted Conner's ass desperately.  His parents would provide Conner a highly edited--because somewhere in his head, Conner knew that his dad and mom didn't look all glazed in the mornings because they'd been up all night talking about the tax code, and Conner really just didn't want to know--version of the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help them Mrs. Banner.

So Conner had said, "Thanks, Grandma," and eaten the six kinds of pie and cake and gone to bed.

He had not anticipated that in a stroke of unparalleled cruelty that those bastards would register him for school.  So instead of the comforting, nonjudgmental arms of his grandmother's baking, he was thrown into the fiery pit of Smallville's origin of vapidity.

"Maybe I'll die," he muttered comfortingly to himself.

Hathaway slapped him heartily on the back, saying, "Don't be ridiculous--student mortality's at its lowest since 2005," and disappeared around a corner.

Conner stared.

"Come along, Conner, you can get lost down here, and the squash team hates it when they find students wandering around on their courts," he heard called through the hallway. 

Conner didn't see any squash courts, but couldn't tell if Principal Hathaway was joking, either.

He rubbed the bridge of his nose.  "I motherfucking hate this town."

---

It was not, altogether, an unwarranted feeling.   

Conner imagined that his own father must have hated it, too, when he was much younger and first exiled here; though, his father had met his mother in Smallville and the only person Conner had met so far was Whitney Ross. 

"We're really excited to have you here, Conner," she said, in perfectly enunciated English. 

"That's great," he said, agonized. 

Whitney was very beautiful, and even Conner's bent sense of aesthetics could recognize that.  She had lovely, cocoa-colored skin and eyes fringed by dark lashes and a curving mouth.  She had dark hair pulled into thousands of tiny, intricate braids and then bound into a ponytail and wore trendy jeans and a casual, sporty shirt.  And apparently the combined activity of being in the Philanthropy club, the head of the cheer squad, and a part-timer at the coffeehouse her mother owned did a body good, because if Conner were about female curves, he'd be all about hers. 

She waved at the walls, which were covered in gold and red paper-pulp gore. 

"I'm sure it's not anything like your school in Metropolis," she said, with the shy, thrilled sort of hush over the word 'Metropolis' that just meant she'd never stepped in piss in the subway the way most people who lived in Metropolis had, "But we have a solid honors and AP program and we have one of the best vocational programs in the state.  Plus, we have one of the prettiest campuses around here." 

Conner wanted to say something about how they had to or they'd have one of the lowest ranked and ugliest schools in Kansas, but bit his tongue and managed to say instead, "That's really impressive." 

"Thanks," she said proudly, blushing prettily.  "Student council does what it can, you know?" 

Conner didn't, but he nodded.  "Yeah, totally." 

She smiled 100% of the time.  It made him seriously consider looking for a Kryptonite-covered field.  They had those in Smallville. 

"There're a lot of student organizations, and even if you're feeling a little shy, I'm sure all of them would be thrilled to have you," she confided in Conner, turning the corner into what appeared to be the main hallway of the high school.  There was a sudden, horrible clanging from the period bell, and oceans of people streamed out of doors on either side of them and turned into a living sea, moving around Conner and Whitney, giving them a small, if much-appreciated berth. 

Two things hit Conner in quick succession:  

Secondly, all of them were in casual clothing.  He'd been zoned out that morning when his grandmother had dropped him off at the high school, and so even though he was dressed in casual jeans and a black, long-sleeved shirt, he hadn't really processed that nobody would be wearing ties and blazers.  He'd always been fascinated by the prospect of being able to wear whatever he wanted to high school, but now realized sadly what a tragic mistake it would have been to indulge in the fantasy, because the moving mass of teenagers around him were all tricked out like carnival prostitutes or horrible catalogue accidents.  Whoever had informed the boys of Smallville High school that wearing a "SURF PATROL: AHOLA WAVES, BABES" t-shirt from Abercrombie and Fitch made them instantly cool needed to be dragged out into the street and shot. 

Secondly, he had to get out of there. 

But Whitney was still talking, as if she were one of those mutant, amphibious creatures with hidden gills and didn't actively need to pause her mouth to inhale.  They had those in Smallville. 

"Class periods are fifty minutes long, with five minutes in between.  There're eight periods a day and you either have fifth or six period lunch."  She made a face.  "I'd recommend bringing a sack lunch--" 

Oh my God, Conner thought, she just said 'sack lunch.' 

"--but if you're brave, you can try the cafeteria food, though it's been known to strip paint." 

Conner didn't doubt it; just being in the school was stripping the marrow of his soul. 

"That's tragic," he said moodily. 

Whitney paused, looking at him with a thoughtful expression before it softened into something uncomfortably similar to pity, which Conner had never gotten at home, rarely got at school (because they were nuns--bitter ones), and found fascinating in a horrifying way.  So he said, "Oh, God, what?" 

"You seem to have a lot of conflict in you," Whitney observed gently, with the tone of a prophet. 

Conner wanted to belt her with one of his shoes, and thought about actually bending down, unlacing a sneaker, and whacking her with it, and if the entire football team would kill him if he did--and then he wondered if it wouldn't be worth it anyway. 

He made a face.  "Excuse me?" 

"I mean, your dad is Lex Luthor--" 

"Oh my God," Conner said, "we're not going to have this conversation.  Weren't you warned by somebody that I don't have this conversation?" 

Conner had never had that conversation, not unless the person trying to start it had an active death wish.  He'd gone to a school so private that everybody had fathers you didn't talk about: judges and high-priced defense lawyers, cosmetic surgeons and captains of industry.  They had a code--emphasis on "unspoken"--that nobody asked too many questions and they had all been in the same boat: well-moneyed kids who were impoverished of their parents' time.  They had been horrible and spoiled and maladjusted, but they'd all cared for one another in the most important way possible, and they'd known how to sidestep all the dangerous questions, how to talk about Full Metal Alchemist instead of how Conner's father was Lex Luthor, how Geoffrey's father was rumored to be up for a position in the Supreme Court one day, how Randall's dad was in court for illegal logging. 

At least she wasn't giving him her condolences, Conner thought darkly. 

Whitney smiled at him encouragingly.  "Conner, it's okay.  You're just a normal kid, right?" 

Conner was as normal as possible given his fairly remarkable circumstances, though the ability to kill people with his mind--which was looking to be a much, much more attractive possibility by the moment--put a damper on an absolute evaluation.  Still, the all-knowing, overly-interested way Whitney Ross was looking at him made Conner feel more than a little tired, so he said: 

"Look, Whitney, I really appreciate you being all--" he made a nebulous hand gesture in her general direction "--really, but all I really need is my schedule and lunch, all right?" 

He wondered if he would have said, "and for you to drop dead and leave me alone," if he'd gone to public school, but chalked it up to the urban legends he and Garrison had traded when their entire class had taken their spring seminar on horsemanship, dressed in identically stupid riding pants and not making eye contact with one another. 

Whitney looked, for just a moment, defeated, but brightened immediately, beaming and saying, "You're right.  You're absolutely right." 

Conner breathed a sigh of relief.  "Thanks," he said genuinely. 

She shook her head, hair slapping her cheeks, and smiled wildly.  "I was planning on going to the Talon for lunch anyway--come on," she said, grabbing him by the wrist and presumably jerking him toward the parking lot.

"Wait--oh my God," Conner managed, but followed along miserably passive and blinked the Smallville sunshine out of his eyes when he stepped out of the main school doors into the brilliant afternoon light.  It was chilly and there was a breeze and the sky was crisp and perfectly blue, like something out of a fairytale--like everything in Smallville was out of a fairytale spun by the brothers Grimm.

---

The Talon was cozy and packed with raucous teenagers from Smallville High during lunch; they crowded together at tables and on the sidewalk, spilling out into the parking lot behind the store and eating in their cars, laughing and sitting awkwardly on the steps leading to storage upstairs, chewing on their sandwiches and eating their pastries, drinking their five dollar coffees.  Conner knew a lot--unfortunately--about small town economics, and how they were dying, and wondered distantly how on earth any of the farm kids here afforded to spend ten bucks a day on lunch when their entire town was withering.

Whitney had taken their orders and served them herself, and Conner had to admit that the corn chowder was, actually, very good.  Whitney had beamed at the praise in a way that had completely disturbed Conner, who had only grudgingly complimented it.

Though the decorating was in desperate need of help, the Talon did have a comfortable, worn-in feeling that Conner could understand as attractive, though it made him miss the Old Europe café with a phantom ache of the newly-bereaved.

"So how do you like the place?" Whitney asked, jittery.

Conner was totally puzzled as to why his approval seemed to mean so much to her, but figured that really, she probably had her own things going on, and he just didn't want to know.

"It's really nice," he said nicely.  "Your mom did a good job with it."

Whitney laughed nervously.  "It's kind of her life, you know?  She managed it all through high school--one of these days she says if I want I can inherit it."  Whitney looked around the room, speculative and seemingly deaf to the bubbling sound of dozens of teenagers jammed together on the premises.  "I sort of grew up here."

Conner knew that feeling, the strange, affectionate way one had two homes.  He'd seen LexCorp come from once upon a time, where it rented six sprawling floors on the top floor of a sleek black building on Millionaire Mile to buying the whole thing, to gutting it and remodeling it.  He'd seen people come and go and the carpet change three times, the computers change what felt like twice a year.  Conner had watched something grow, and that was an intimate awareness.

The way Whitney looked at the Talon made something on Conner's chest soften for her.

"It's cool that--" he started.

"Whitney!  Who's your friend?"

And it was asked in such a bright, breathless voice that Conner whipped around, slightly cross-eyed for a second before his vision cleared into the image of a lovely, fortysomething woman, the crow's feet around her dark eyes giving her age away.  Her mouth was almond-shaped and she must have been very pretty when she was young, her long, dark hair swishing to her waist, around her smooth, high cheeks.

"Hey!" Whitney said, nearly as bright as the woman.  "Mom!  This is Conner Luthor--"

The woman's eyes grew huge and hugely round at this.

"--he just transferred into our school.  Conner, this is my mom, Lana Ross."

Mrs. Ross's eyes were awed and fascinated as she said, "So you're Lex's son," to which Conner took instant offense, which must have showed on his shellshocked face, so Mrs. Ross went on to add, "Oh, I'm sorry, you probably didn't know.  Lex was one of my very good friends when he lived in Smallville.  Actually, he was my silent partner for the Talon until I bought it off of him a couple of years back."

One day, Conner was going to force his father to write down a list of all the people he knew, just so Conner would stop nearly giving himself heart attacks.

"I--uh, didn't know that," Conner admitted stupidly.

"Call me Lana," Mrs. Ross said soothingly, and in a much gentler tone of voice, she murmured, "I've been following the news--I'm sorry it's been so crazy recently." 

"Thanks," he said automatically.  Long ago, the publicist at LexCorp had drilled him for over an hour on how to react in case of total disasters.  Conner imagined that his father being diagnosed with cancer probably fell into that category and shifted comfortably into sense memories of what to do.  "I'll pass along your regards." 

Lana smiled supportively.  "Good," she said, and she seemed genuinely pleased, patting his hand.  "It's great to finally meet you, Conner." 

"Nice to meet you, too," he said. 

He was starting to remember something his dad had told him once, about his mother and how his mother had spent most of his golden, teenaged years obsessed with some girl named Lana.  He was forcing himself not to say anything unforgivably rude here, like, "Hey, did you ever do my mom?" or "I think my dad actually hates you.  Sorry." 

Thankfully, Whitney tapped him on the shoulder and said, "Hey, Conner, we better get going, or else we'll be late for seventh period." 

They got going.

---

Conner hadn't had to meet new people since kindergarten, and the sudden shocking realization that not only was he going to have to start over, he'd have to do it in Smallville made his chest crush inward, made him gasp for breath, feel a little overwhelmed and lightheaded. 

It did not help, he thought sullenly, that he was standing up in front of the class while the middle-aged chemistry teacher rattled off his entire life story. 

"…Either way, I want us all to make Conner feel very welcome here--he's a year younger than most of you and he's going through some tough times, which I'm sure most of you guys have already heard from the news," the teacher said, infinitely sympathetic.   

Conner focused some of the flammable materials toward the back of the room, and saw with great surprise that they shifted in the directions he'd willed them, but not enough to mix with one another, set the school on fire, and end it all in a blaze of blessed melodrama. 

"Conner, would you like to say anything to the class?" she asked him. 

He stared at her, and felt true hatred for the first time.  "Not particularly, Mrs. Funt." 

It also did not help that her name rhymed with a base, tasteless word for a female reproductive organ, which empowered Conner to think of filthy insult after rhyming filthy insult. 

She smiled charitably.  "Your seat's in the back, dear.  Lab table twelve." 

Conner dashed for it, making no eye contact with anybody else in the class and basically throwing himself onto the lab stool closer to the aisle, and by the time his shaking hands had deposited his backpack--newly purchased from Fordham's store, because he sure as hell wasn't taking his St. Ann's messenger bag into Smallville High--and realized there was somebody on the seat next to him, it was too late, any chance of being cool was totally destroyed. 

He peeked up through his overlong bangs to see a bored Greek god staring at him.  The teenager was muscled and tall and lean, with bronze skin and dark hair and devastatingly good cheekbones.  He looked like Geoffrey, if Geoffrey was buff through manly, sweaty activity instead of scrawny and thin and milky-white from long hours in the art lab.  It was all Conner could do not to cry about the unfairness of it all. 

"So you're the Luthor kid," the god said, thick fingers toying with a test tube. 

"Conner," Conner corrected instantly, wincing and examining the lab procedures Mrs. Funt set down in front of him, complete with another encouraging smile. 

The god rolled his eyes, which made Conner's fluttering, teenaged heart skip a beat in fear.   

"Sorry, Conner," the god said, emphasizing the roll of the 'n' off of his tongue in a way that made Conner flush. 

"It's fine," Conner said, sounding squeaky.  "So uh," he started awkwardly, gave up, and picked up the lab procedure.  "This is just a simple titration," he said, resorting to academics where no amount of personality could save him.  He shoved a beaker at the god with his free hand.  "You can condition, and I'll measure." 

"Meanwhile, my name is Terry," the Greek god informed Conner, transferring his large brown hands to the beaker and abandoning the test tube, all marked and molested-looking, by the sink.

"Sorry," Conner muttered.

Conner was willing to bet a hundred thousand million dollars that Terry was the kind of guy who called kids like Conner cocksucking faggots and then beat them up behind the school.  It was his luck that he'd end up paired with Terry for lab.  It seemed to be one of the overarching themes of his life: artificially conceived by deranged grandfather, possess two fathers possessed of equal and increasing psychosis, realize that one father has developed cancer while the other one wears primary colored spandex, get sent to rape-you-in-the-ass-maybe-literally, Kansas, and get paired with the star quarterback of the Neanderthal squad.

His hands fumbled with a beaker.  Around them, the other lab groups were well underway, giving them ample time to point and stare at Conner from their goggled vantage points.

The only thing that was keeping him from trying to throw himself out of the window was that he and Terry looked equally stupid in the required safety goggles.

Terry grinned, wide and friendly and surprisingly honest.  "Hey, guy, don't get nervous, right?  Whitney's a one-woman welcome wagon.  I'm like a little baby cat compared to her."

Terry, in no way whatsoever, looked like a little baby cat, though he did bear an uncomfortably delicious resemblance to a lot of attractive brunette men Conner had watched having sex with other attractive blond men in pornography.  He was all shining and gold from the sun and had dark brown eyes, an easy grin which made him much more approachable than other potential gay porn stars had been on the streets of Metropolis, and had a slight overbite, which Conner found distractingly adorable.  If Conner wasn't scared shitless and feeling a little trapped and claustrophobic, he might have said he was developing a little bit of a stupid crush.

When Conner didn't answer, Terry narrowed his eyes at him for a speculative moment.  "They jumped you a grade?"

Conner almost, but not quite, repressed his automatic snort at the horrific abuse of diction, but noted with gratitude that Terry didn't seem to notice.  Conner said, "Yeah," thinking about sitting in Principal Hathaway's office and listening to the man mutter about how Conner had already taken everything up through the eleventh grade curriculum, and how they may as well.

"Figures," Terry said dismissively.  "Whatever, let's just get this over with."

But apparently, it was also easier said than done, because despite the fact that it really was just a simple titration, Terry had three left feet attached to his wrists and absolutely no grasp of the finer points of basic knowledge in chemistry, such as how to properly measure and what a meniscus was.  It was funny, in a tragic way, watching Terry crunch his huge body up into the small lab table and break everything--twice.

At the end of the period, they'd lost two beakers and three test tubes to the cause, and no matter how many times Conner muttered the word "stopcock" in his head it did not change the fact that Mrs. Funt no longer looked amused and he was going to have to stay after class with his giant, grossly attractive lab partner to redo the whole thing.

He tried bargaining, he tried begging, he nearly threatened her with his mind, but in the end, because deep down inside he was just a kid who'd read too many graphic novels when he was young, he sulked and did as he was told.  It was gratifying to see that Terry did the same thing.

It was nearing three o'clock, and they were--again--on step two, when Terry said under his breath, "Wait, is the meniscus…?"

Conner jerked all the lab materials out of Terry's hands.  He pointed at the other side of the lab table.

"You stand there," he instructed, furious.  Terry stood.

The lab was finished in twenty minutes, and Mrs. Funt released them with a scowl.

Of course, as Conner stood in the doorway of the main building of the school, it started to pour, and Conner watched rain stream down from the sky like ribbons, flooding out the parking lot, misting the trees, making Smallville gothic and gray and gaunt.

He said, "Fuck fuck fuck.  Fuck."

The buses had left ages ago, and his remaining options were to call his grandparents, who had informed him they'd be out on errands until dinner, but to call their cell phone if he needed them, or to walk home and really drive in the point that he was a disastrous teenager once and for all.

A car horn honked at him, and Conner jumped three feet in the air before seeing a beautifully restored Cadillac convertible, top up, finished in a glassy, onyx black that made Conner think of sleek jungle cats and his father's office, unmarred and sheer, with rain beading on the hood.  Terry's dark head was visible through the half-opened driver's side window, and he shouted:

"Hey, sorry I was such a shit.  Get in the car."

---

On the way back to the Kent farm, Terry had talked about football.  He'd talked about being the starting quarterback; he'd talked about how much he liked practice; he talked about what a bear the coach could be, but how it was all for their own good.

"We're going to the championship this year," he'd assured Conner.  "And we're going to plow Wilson," he added, "get 'em back for last year."

Depressingly, Terry had been even more attractive up close.

"We're really going to bend them over and make 'em take it," Terry had promised.

Conner had suddenly blurted, "My school didn't have any sports," and been unable to keep himself from going on to say, "I mean, we had sports--but it was all like, horseback riding and water polo and squash and tennis and stuff."

He had forced his mouth shut and watched stare at him in something akin to wonder.  "Um," he'd said, high-pitched, "sorry I'm such a freak."

Terry had just shrugged and changed lanes.  "It's cool.  I hear it fucks you up when you get jumped a grade."  He grinned at Conner, sideways and very handsome.  "Plus, you saved my ass in chem. today--let's just let being a freak slide."

Conner had nodded, and somehow they'd been all-of-a-sudden at the Kent farm, and he'd waved goodbye to Terry, who'd laughed and waved back through the windshield, and Conner had barreled into the house, soaked to the skin from the short run from Terry's car to the porch.

The whole world was a dark, luminous blue from the windows of the deserted farmhouse, and it cast over Conner a suspended sense of unreality, as if he'd taken a sudden detour from his real life and found himself somewhere familiar and yet completely alien.  He knew all the details of the farmhouse with a cursory awareness, but found things that didn't quite fit, as if he was living out a thick, slow dream, and his brain was simply plugging the blanks, dropping random letters and postcards and a flash drive onto the white space on the kitchen counter.

He took a long shower without turning on any of the lights in the bathroom, and stood in the tub naked and wet after he'd turned off the water, watching the rain streak the window and feeling otherworldly, far outside of himself.

And when his grandparents finally returned home around five, it would be to the sight of Conner wrapped in an enormous SMALLVILLE CROWS afghan, asleep on the living room couch, where he'd crept out of wakefulness, watching the ocean drain over the world in choppy, desperate waves.

---

He'd woken up to the smell of dinner and stumbled into the kitchen to find his grandfather pulling something out of the oven while his grandmother set the table.  They both looked up at him and smiled when he said, "Hey."

"Perfect timing," his grandfather said, grinning.  "I was just about to go in there and throw a bucket of cold water on you."

Conner raised his eyebrows at his grandmother, who only laughed, and motioned Conner toward her, at which point she set down the napkins and spoons in her hands to cup his cheeks, turn his head left and right, to feel his forehead and stroke his hair with motherly concern that Clark's enormous, brown hands had nearly mastered over time.

"I think that nap did you good," she decided.  "You look better."

"I feel a little better," Conner said, mostly because he thought it was what she wanted to hear.

Grandpa Kent set a casserole on the table and tugged off the oven mitts, saying, "Conner, how about you go fill the pitcher and we'll get dinner started?"

The Kent's had the kind of kitchen that Conner had read about in his Little House on the Prairie books, with mismatched utensils and glassware that was different sizes, plates with different designs--a set of nice china and everyday tablecloths, made out of gingham, and eyelet curtains.  It was comforting and warm and orange-lit in the evening dark, and Conner filled the glass pitcher from the tap, because Grandma and Grandpa Kent would have none of the Brita filters Lex had offered over the years.

He settled the pitcher onto the table with a clink, and Martha said, "Thank you, Conner," just as John began filling cups and Conner reached for the dish of green beans near him.

"How was school today, Conner?" Martha asked, scooping casserole onto her plate and passing the serving spoon to John, who looked up with supportive interest.

The question caught him off guard.  While he and his parents did manage to have dinner together at least once a week, neither Lex nor Clark had ever bothered with pleasantries; it was one of many downsides to having two wildly paranoid fathers endowed with X-ray vision and technology beyond the wildest dreams of most men.  Conner had long surrendered himself to the reality.

"I met Whitney Ross," he said, because he figured "It sucked cock" would be inappropriate.

Jonathan snorted.  "Whitney," he muttered.

"Ah," Martha demurred, but her eyes twinkled.  "I see she's made an impression."

Conner scrunched up his face.  "Yeah, and it'll hurt for years," he said under his breath.

---

Conner hadn't met his grandparents until he'd been nearly eleven, and their first meeting had involved a lot of whispered shouting between his grandfather and his father, and awkward smiles from Clark.  His grandmother had adored him on sight and that had not changed in the intervening years, though she'd started offering him coffee with her cookies instead of milk.  Martha and John Kent were good people, the kind of good people who raised good children like Clark and who were more than a little bit bemused by Conner's city sensibilities.  When Conner made his once-monthly visits, he generally found himself relegated to some sort of farm labor, though he couldn't imagine why but for his father's amusement, because it wasn't like Conner's weak, girly arms could actually bale hay, muck stalls, or effectively catch chickens.

And Conner, for the most part, treated their home as his temporary escape, a nice, long breath outside of Metropolis, where it sometimes felt he was so busy trying to keep his head above water it'd be more worth it to drown in peace--thus, Smallville, and all the historical sites therein.

He'd first walked over the bridge where his parents had met when he'd been twelve, totally awed by the places where he could feel the ridged welding where new metal had been put into place after the car accident, where he could imagine the scrape of tires on the wood, where he could nearly see his father's Porsche flying through the air, his mother's shocked face.  He'd explored his father's castle in greater detail, but the house frightened him, left him feeling as shadowed as it was with all its gothic towers and dark corners, all the memories he had of the last time he'd been there, when he'd been waiting to see if his father would die after Metropolis had burned.  He'd walked through fields and forests and been into the town, though he'd never stopped in any of the quaint stores--his weekends in Smallville were devoted to the farm, to sleeping long, lazy days, and to scraping up his elbows and knees in the back forty of Kansas.

His parents' story had started here, he knew now, though all the details were sketchy.  He'd asked a hundred thousand times, and still all he ever knew was that they'd met on that bridge when his mother had been a freshman in high school and his father newly-banished.

"He hit you with a car?" Conner had asked, horrified, standing on the bridge.

Clark had just grinned, a little nostalgic and lovesick, but then, when he was twelve, his parents had just started dating (in secret) (again), and as a result Clark always looked a little nostalgic and lovesick.  So while he could admit that he probably shouldn't call his mom "mom," he would never ever believe that Clark was anything but an infatuated teenaged girl.

"Yeah," Clark had sighed dreamily.  "He was dodging a roll of barbed wire."

It wasn't that Conner hadn't known before that his parent were freaks, it's just that their depth of freakiness never failed to surprise him.

"And--you became friends?" Conner had asked, thought process completely derailed.  In his admittedly cursory understanding of the subject of dating, hit and run had never equated years long relationship and eventual offspring, though honestly, neither his father nor mother had been very good at the years-long relationship or were aware that said offspring was being created.

Clark had grinned, huge and stupid, and ruffled Conner's hair, which was as good a sign as any that their conversation had been about to end.

"Well," Clark had said, starting down the bridge, walking away from town and out toward the farm again, "then he sent me a truck."

"I knew it!" Conner had yelled, running after him.  "I knew your affection could be bought!"

---

His second day of school was marginally better than his first.  It turned out that Whitney was--thank God--a senior, and as such in none of his classes, as she--unlike Terry--had taken Chemistry her junior year like she was supposed to, instead of being hit in the face by other enormous Neanderthal men as Terry had done. 

So Conner spent most of homeroom with his face buried in a book, ignoring the blatant stares of his classmates and exercising a zen and restraint that had taken weeks of intensive seminars with very expensive public relations coaches to master.  He had nothing on his father, but Conner could fake it if necessary, and considering the ravenously curious looks from his classmates--all of whom were at least a year older than he was--it seemed necessary.  First period math had been boring, and thankfully the Smallville juniors were covering something Conner had just been learning the week before, so he followed along well and kept his mouth shut when it came time for class participation.  He'd read enough young adult novels when he was eight to know what happened to the smart-mouthed kid who got bumped up a grade, and he had no desire to acquire intimate knowledge of the inside of his locker.  Second through fifth period-- French, English, US History, Art History and French-- flew by and he ate his lunch discreetly in the back of the library, tucked among the nonfiction books about dead presidents and the Teapot Dome Scandal. 

He was the first person in the lab for seventh and eighth period chemistry class, and when he heard shuffling at the door, he looked up to see that Terry was second.

Conner nearly managed to suppress his immediate full-body flush, but didn't.

"Hi," he squeaked.  One of these days, he was going to commit seppuku.

Terry flashed him a grin, easy-going the way he'd been in his Cadillac the day before when the rain had melted the windows of the car and blurred Smallville beyond the glass.

"Hey there, Metropolis," Terry said. A stack of his messy books and papers scattered onto the table and Conner stared at Terry's very messy handwriting and fair to middling grades which peeked out in red pen from the edges of papers.  "So you're gonna cover my ass when I fuck up our experiment again today?"

Conner frowned.  "Or you could not fuck up the experiment today," he suggested.

"Hah," Terry said, laughing but with a slight, self-deprecating twinge that made Conner blink in surprise.  "Quarterback and quarks don't mix."

"Then good thing this is Chemistry and not astrophysics," Conner shot back, but before Terry could say anything else, three very vapid looking girls filed into the room, mid-shrieking conversation about one thing or another that basically amounted up to total crap, and Conner looked away, shifting uncomfortably in his seat.

Smallville had a weird educational mentality.  Though Conner had always known that private school effectively changed the way you viewed education--it was one of the primary reasons his father claimed for sending him to Catholic school all of those years--he'd always assumed the changes were superficial: not paying for your own textbooks, having teachers who were not brides of Christ, no uniforms, nicer facilities.  Smallville was newer and nicer than St. Ann's, and though the assumptions about books and brides had been valid, the largest, most shocking part of it all was Conner's growing awareness that people were allowed to be stupid.  It was a radical idea.

At St. Ann's, whenever somebody had seemed lacking in one kind of academic excellence or another, one or another nun would tell and then there'd be a full scale attack of tutoring or changes in learning environment until it was utterly impossible to remain in a state of ignorance.  Conner had been spared all such treatment thus far, but given his deplorable grades in French (which he'd stopped taking), German (which he'd given up on), Japanese (which escaped his feeble understanding), Chinese (which had just been stupid to try), and most recently his incompetence with Urdu, it looked as if Gemma the foreign studies advisor nun would get him sooner or later.

Anyway, it had looked, because in Smallville, being stupid was just another fact of life, one which, apparently, Terry embraced with a grimace and a wink.

"I've been hit in the head a lot," Terry added, but Conner only stared at the lab table.

Class started, but Conner had nothing to say to Terry or anybody else in class, and for the rest of the two period Chemistry class, the only words they exchanged were, "You're doing that wrong," and, "Then you do it, Metropolis."

---

In the six days since Conner had been summarily shipped to Smallville, he had exchanged exactly four phone calls with his parents.  The first of which had been a perfunctory, "You've reached Smallville safely?  Lois didn't drive you into a tree--or a tractor-trailer--or a building?"  The second, third, and fourth were simple correspondence calls, less than ten minutes long, to make sure he was neither slashing his wrists nor finding small animals on and around the farm to torture.  (Clark had a worrisome preoccupation with worrying over whether or not Conner was going to turn into a serial killer; given Conner's considerably fucked up background, Conner couldn't exactly blame him.)

Conner had spoken to his father for exactly thirty seconds, the second time he'd called.

"Conner?" Lex had said, answering the home line.  Conner had been able to imagine his father, barefoot in black slacks and a gray shirt, reading the display on the caller ID.

"Dad," he'd said.  "Hi--how are you?"

"I'm well," his father had said placidly.

Conner hadn't been able to believe that once upon a time not so very long ago, he had said things to his father like, "It ate shit" and "I'm going to wipe the floor with you" and "I could streak during Mass."  It was like he'd forgotten how to be comfortable with his father, and it carved across his chest a new wound, something which hurt so badly Conner barely remembered what he'd muttered at his mother once the phone had been passed off, barely remembered wandering into his bedroom and curling up in his bed, staring out the window.

In Metropolis, Conner had carried with him a slick cell phone wherever he'd gone.  It had been permanently set on vibrate so that he could discreetly pass text messages to Geoffrey during history classes--they'd upgraded from passing notes; deleting his inbox was much easier on his stomach than swallowing paper.  Given his father's penchant for elegant stalking and compulsive text messages, Conner had felt as if he'd had his finger on the pulse point of his father's life all the time, and it had become a comforting rhythm, to know the ins and outs of his dad so well that he never worried--always knew.

He still had the cell phone, it just never rang.  He still tucked it into his pocket when going to school, even if it was against Smallville High's backwater rules.  Something could happen--any minute, something could happen, and it was bad enough that he was three hours by car from the city where it was happening, but not to know about it made a shudder run down his spine.  So the awkward shape of it in his back pocket was a comfort, and though there were whispers that he was just showing off how rich he was whenever he pulled it out discreetly between classes, he shrugged them off.

His father had instilled in him at a tender age the awareness that wealth was neither a sin nor a matter of particular shame, only an adjective, a fact of life and society; wealth didn't make him any better than anybody else, Conner knew, it just meant that he could buy more.  Actually, it meant that his father could buy more, as Conner spent most of his life surprisingly destitute for the only son of the wealthiest man in the Western world. 

Once, when Conner had very agreeably asked if he could borrow twenty dollars to engage is some totally educational and utterly innocent group activities with his dearest friends from Catholic school, his father had cocked one smooth, amber eyebrow, opened his mouth, and talked until Conner had nearly asphyxiated from lack of oxygen.  His main point, which Conner had feebly grasped with the last of his waning consciousness before he'd simply surrendered to the sweet draw of a coma, was something about learning the value of money and working for his due wage.   But since Lex was all about interactive conversation, he'd stopped toward the end, and solicited Conner's opinion--and since Conner was struck with the same damnable mouth that afflicted his father, he'd suggested tartly that perhaps he ought to consider peddling his ass for cash.  And because his father was Lex Luthor and in no way normal, there was no uproar, but instead a black appointment book and a box of tissue on his bed when he reached home the following afternoon from having sulked the night at Geoffrey's, waxing poetic about being a genuine poor little rich boy while Geoffrey had rolled his eyes and played Final Fantasy XXVI. 

Clark had divided his time between looking horrified and amused, saying, "He's just joking, Conner.  Of course he's just joking.  Your father would never mean that.  I mean--have you seriously considered it?"  His eyes had been huge and imploring, which had signaled for Conner to sigh and assure his mother that no, he had not actually staked out a strip in Metropolis where he could bend over, clutch the edge of a dumpster, and earn some pocket money.

Next to the black appointment book had been a note in his father's slanting, smooth hand however, and it had said, "Because keeping track of your Johns is hard work."

Mrs. Banner had tittered at Conner's ensuing theatrics.

"We have a communication problem," Conner had shouted, making huge arm motions as Mrs. Banner had basted a turkey, sharing a fond, knowing look with Clark, who'd been lounging in the kitchen.  "That's what our dysfunction is--we have communication problems.  I say that I would like to borrow twenty dollars so that I can go to this thing--"

"A foam party is not a thing, Conner," Clark had interrupted.  "Besides, you don't like strobe lights and it'd be a shame if your father had to kill everybody in the club if somebody tried to give you drugs."

"--and what does he do?  He overreacts!" Conner had finished angrily.

"Yes, and clearly, it's genetic," Mrs. Banner had said pleasantly before hustling them all out of the kitchen, whereupon Clark had awkwardly tried to talk to Conner about premature sexuality.

It was then and it was still their greatest strength and greatest failing, for as much as Conner loved his father, with a reasonless faith and ferocity, he loved a father who hid himself, buried it beneath a smooth, comfortable exterior with which Conner had grown up.  But Conner was no longer the four-year-old child who woke up screaming in terror, grasping at his father's chest, body shaking out the last shattered memories of dragons that spiderwebbed his sleep.  Nor was he the curious, fearless boy who had ignored all the obvious dangers of the city to find his mother, who had broken up his well-ordered life for a newer, less efficient version, one desperately wanted.

There was a part of him, a very large part, which wanted nothing to do with what was happening in Metropolis, which was happy to be gone and glad to be in Smallville, where under the November sunshine it felt like nothing could touch him.  It was separate from reality, weirdly fairytale and episodic, life like an hour-long television series, and he finally understood what his father had meant when he'd said that Smallville had seemed like a series of scattered memories in between head injuries.  (Conner had never quite understood the head injuries, nor why his mother had looked so shamefaced about it, but knowing what he knew about what his parents had hidden in the bottom drawer of his father's nightstand, Conner figured that this, like the studded collar and the ball gag, was something he just didn't want to know about.)

But that was all very elementary of him, very safe and irresponsible, the opposite of what he'd tried to become, and it frustrated him, made something boil underneath his skin, made him panic.  He'd wanted to become somebody his father could lean on, not to be kept safe from all of it like a child, and in his heart he knew that knew he couldn't handle it, but it felt unfair that they wouldn't even let him try.  He'd never felt replaced by his mother before--he'd always loved Clark so well--but he felt shut out, uninvited, and it made something shriek, fever-pitch in his chest.

Conner was now, he realized uncomfortably, becoming a man, with so many things changing around him that his body was the least of his worries, the last of his cares.  At four days shy of sixteen, he knew how to give shots, how to care for a chemotherapy patient, where to cut himself if he didn't want to be caught for it, how to be sent away, how to be part of the problem instead of part of the answer, and most of all, above all, consuming all, Conner knew how to hide his broken heart.

---

On the third day of school, Conner got caught taking his lunch into the library and was summarily banished to the cafeteria, where he was miserable and tried to sit by himself in a corner until Whitney sussed him out, with a hopeful glint in her eyes.

"Conner!" she shouted, waving and jogging over to the empty seat across from him.

He forced a smile to his face and wiggled a few demoralized fingers in response.  "Hi."

She beamed at him, and dropped her textbooks on the table, where the noise of their landing made Conner look at her fingernails--which had been painted black sometime since the last time he'd seen her in her sporty clothes and smiling expression.  He glanced back up at her in blank surprise but she looked otherwise unchanged, so Conner just pasted an artificial expression on his face as she said:

"My God, you're a hard guy to track, you know," she said, and plopped down in the seat, tugging a brown bag lunch out of her backpack.

"I like being mysterious," he said, picking at his sandwich and wondering if Geoffrey and Eve were making out in the back stacks of the St. Ann's library.  He crushed half of the bread in his fingers and added, "You should probably be sitting with your cheer squad friends, you know."

From his vantage point opposite Whitney, he could see them, small in the distance against the soft curve of Whitney's cheek, scowling at him in a way that made Conner desperately miss the comfortable, familiar arms of parochial school.

Whitney made a face.  "Please, Conner, they talk about makeup and movies all the time--me?  I want something bigger."

If this was going to be followed by a proposition like, "I want you to take me there, Conner" and "Don't worry about being small--I like 'em young," Conner was already formulating an elaborate plan to blind her with his Coke and throw himself out of the nearest window and hitchhike to Edge City, where he'd hustle in a pool hall and never speak of this moment again.

"I want to get out of this town," she said, and there was something more sober in her voice.

Conner blinked at her, because she seemed sad, and it disarmed him, the way it had disarmed him when Eve Anthony had tackled him into the study room in the St. Ann's library, red-eyed, saying, "Does he like me?  Just tell me--he just, he just keeps breaking my heart."  It had shaken him enough then that he'd walked all the way to Geoffrey's house on that Sunday and told him, "Just ask her--she'll say yes," and then walked all the way back home.  He'd whined about it, later, to Mrs. Banner, who had smiled at him sadly and kissed his temple, said he had his mother's soft heart beating in his father's iron chest.

Here, it shook him enough to make him say, "There're buses, I hear."

And Whitney laughed, all new again, and Conner breathed a sigh of relief when she said, "Yeah, so I hear, Conner."  She grinned.  "So I hear you got stuck with Terminal Terrence in Chem."

Conner winced, and popped open his Coke.  "Terminal?"

Whitney unpacked her lunch, which turned out to be tuna salad and cucumber slices and a fruit roll-up, a touch which greatly endeared her to Conner.  She smirked, saying, "Terrence is--don't get me wrong--a great football player and he's not even as stupid as he likes to tell himself he is.  But the guy's a moron, I mean, I could give you the laundry list of stupid shit he's managed to do, and telling you about the time he got drunk and bricked the Sheriff's car would only get you about a quarter of the way through the list."

Conner stared in silent fascination.

Whitney grinned, satisfied.  "Yeah, so you see my point."

"He bricked the Sheriff's car," Conner said uncertainly.

Laughing, she said, "Yeah, totally smashed the windshield to bits--oh man, he got in so much trouble over it, Coach Garrety nearly bashed him over the head with the tackle dummy when he heard."  Her eyes were sparkling.  "Bet you can't top that one."

Conner looked thoughtful.  "Well," he admitted, "there was that time I set my school on fire."

He took a sip of Coke calmly, watching Whitney's jaw fall open with not a little satisfaction.

And when Conner found that he and Terry the first people in the Chemistry room again at the beginning of seventh period, he opted not for silent hostility this time so much as an awkward, "So Whitney tells me you bricked the Sheriff's car."

To which Terry replied with a huff and a, "Jesus, that story gets around, stupid bitch Whitney."

Conner decided that Terry and Whitney were probably not dating.  "Sorry, was it a secret?"

"Hah," Terry laughed, genuinely amused now, turning shining eyes set attractively on his devastatingly handsome face to Conner, who clasped his knees with his hands to keep from doing something unforgivable and stupid.  "As if it could be, they had me doing public service on the main drag for like, a year for that one."

Conner laughed, because the image of Terry in an orange vest staking trash was just that good.

And Terry, apparently endowed with a far better sense of humor than certain, unnamed artistically-inclined sons of Kansas Superior Court judges, laughed, too, saying, "Oh, man, it was awful.  Every time Sheriff Hutchin's walked by me he would just give me this totally scathing expression, like he was waiting for me to go batshit on one of the meter maids or something."

"My dad did that," Conner blurted out suddenly, and strangely didn't feel mortified, because Terry perked up, eyebrows raising, saying:

"Yeah?  Seriously?  Lex Luthor went--"

"--Batshit on a meter maid, yeah," Conner said, feeling weirdly shy, "he apparently bashed in the little cart with some golf clubs he had in the back seat.  I don't know--he doesn't even play golf."

Terry laughed, slapping the table.  "That's awesome, Metropolis."

"Yeah and--" Conner started, but cut himself off, because a blonde girl with a vicious look on her face came into the room and flashed Conner an expression that seemed to cut off all his circulation.  She regarded his silence with a satisfied expression before settling in her seat toward the back of the room, and when Conner glanced to his side to see Terry's frowning expression, he almost managed to say something, but didn't.

"Don't let them get to you," Terry said, later that afternoon, hustling Conner away from the line of yellow buses waiting, wreathed around the parking lot and toward his glorious car.

"They're not--you don't have to drive me," Conner pleaded, feeling the stares of everybody else in the parking lot, ranging from mild curiosity to mild disgust to blatant hostility.  While he was grateful that of the two people at Smallville High School who were speaking to him, at least one wasn't Whitney, but he wasn't sure how he was going to handle being the pseudo-buddy of the star of the football team.

Terry just shoved Conner across the driver's side seat, shutting the door and reaching over to take down the top, and as the cloth folded away, the afternoon sunshine burned down on Conner and he felt the wind brush the hair at his temples, a teasing suggestion of flying down deserted back roads.  He closed his eyes.

"Hah," Terry said, triumphant, the car bouncing with his weight as he threw himself into the driver's seat.  "I knew you'd like it--we're not even moving and you're like, having a moment in my damn front seat."

Conner scowled, but before he could come up with a witty response, Terry had shifted into reverse and then suddenly they were flying out of the parking lot, out of the town proper, and into the golden and green rolling fields, where all the wheat was waving like an ocean and frothing like the sea, stroked by the wind.  It whipped through Conner's hair and made his eyes water and he reached his hand out, out of the window of the car and felt the air shove at his fingers with its soft, pliant skin, moving his palms back and forward as Terry took turns and sped up and slowed down and drove the long way around to the Kent farm, grinning and different than anybody Conner had ever met.

Conner felt, for the first time in a long time, totally free.

---

It turned out that Terry was nice to Conner because Conner reminded Terry of his brother.

His retarded brother.

"Your brother?" Conner asked as Terry's car had skated around the perimeter of a deep forest toward the back of the former Ross family's property, close enough that Conner felt the dappling of shade and the temperature change.

"Yeah, he's retarded," Terry said.

"That's too bad," Conner said, wondering what it'd be like to have a sibling to call retarded.

Mostly, he was leaning back into the seat, exhaling long and easy, feeling the wind blow into his lungs, feeling Smallville melt him out of his skin.  Driving like this was almost like flying, and riding along felt like floating, with no responsibility at all, just to close his eyes and feel it streaming through him like a frictionless river.

"Naw--he was born like that, can't help it, it's not a severe form of Autism, anyway," Terry said.

Conner choked.

By the time they'd reached the Kent farm nearly twenty minutes later, Conner had decided that to be insulted was probably pointless, and so settled and feigned a sulk just to see whether or not what Whitney said about Terry actually being a hopeless softy was true.  It was, and somehow Conner had ended up telling the poor bastard to go into the farmhouse and eat a damn muffin before he sprained something trying to apologize.

"I didn't mean it like that, man," Terry whined, thumping into the kitchen.  "You're the smartest little bastard in our class--and you're like, what, two years younger than me?"

Conner rolled his eyes.  Over time and extended exposure, though Terry became no less crushingly sexy or obliviously cute or ridiculously athletic, he was becoming more real, prone to dropping lab equipment and mixing up "your" and "you're" when he was writing fast and really determined to make sure Conner never rode the bus again, for reasons Conner wasn't clear on himself.  Whitney, who still persisted on eating lunch with Conner every day--and who was, gradually, wearing more and more black, much to Conner's alarm--said that Terry had been telling Conner's Metropolis stories at practice the other day, and that he'd said that Conner was a good kid, funny as hell.  Conner had barely contained his pleased blush.  Whitney had rolled her eyes, "Oh for God's sake.  Keep that up and you'll immolate when he asks you to the Snow Ball."  Conner, because he was still fifteen--at least for a few days--had felt justified in throwing at balled-up napkin at Whitney's head.

By accident, he'd made two friends without trying, and he was all too relieved for them, even if one of them was Whitney, who seemed to be looking for something from Conner that he didn't exactly know how to give, stardom or a roadmap or permission to change--nothing she really needed and nothing Conner had ever had anyway.

"I'm only going to be one year younger than you in like, three days," Conner said, and handed Terry the muffin tin, motioning that he should help himself.  "Anyway," he said nervously, "I don't know why you care--I mean, I'm loser transfer scum."

It was amazing what being shut out of his father's life had done to his self-esteem.

Terry was ravaging a blueberry muffin, but mumbled, "Okay, I'm not going to pet your damn ego here, Metropolis, but you're pretty cool, and you piss off Melanie, which can't be bad."

Melanie was apparently the blonde vampire in their seventh period Chemistry class and Terry's embittered ex-girlfriend who spent the time she wasn't practicing for cheerleading regionals trying to launch a mutiny against Whitney and writing Terry tortured email about how he'd ruined her for life.

"Everybody pisses off Melanie," Conner muttered.

"She's got a complex, man," Terry said vehemently, but got no further before Jonathan Kent stomped into the kitchen, surprised and happy to see Terry there, too.  They exchanged manly backslaps--the kind Conner had instructed Terry never to bestow him because God damn it, he bruised--and then shot the shit about local agribusiness, Terry's retarded younger brother--God, had everybody known?--and the football team's prospects for winning the championship that year, which both his grandfather and Terry pronounced as "Damn good."

Terry begged out of dinner, but punched Conner in the shoulder before he left.

"Hey, Metropolis," he said, "remember to do our lab report."

"Get out of my house," Conner instructed, but he was grinning.

"I think it's great that you're friends," his grandmother said later, passing the mashed potatoes.  "Terry's a wonderful boy and taking care of his brother's taught him a lot about being good and accepting other people for who they are."

Conner snorted.  It figured.  He finally got a crush and it turned out it came part and parcel with a learning disability and a weirdly incestuous overtone.  It wasn't anything to write home about, which was how he justified it to himself when Geoffrey IMed him asking if he'd made any new friends later that evening and Conner said "No."

---

On Conner's sixteenth birthday, his grandparents made an elaborate chocolate cake, a huge dinner, and rented exactly four stupid movies, which they all watched together.  Geoffrey called to send his best wishes, to say that there was a gift in the mail and that it'd be there by the end of the week.  Clark and Mrs. Banner speakerphoned to sing "Happy Birthday to you" off-key, though there was a strain in their voices that had nothing to do with the fact that neither of them should ever, ever sing. 

Earlier that day, at lunch, Terry and Whitney had frogmarched him to Terry's car, effectively kidnapping him and dragging him out to Tony's, a pizza joint thirty minutes out of the town limits but where they made a pie so divine that Conner was too busy moaning around the cheese to complain about being forced to skip seventh and eighth period.

"Like it?" Terry had asked, smirking.  Whitney had been playing with her new wristband.  Conner was going to seriously have to have a conversation with her about the dangers of being emo, but at the moment he'd been otherwise distracted.

"This is the best thing I'll ever put in my mouth," he moaned, and ate some more.

Whitney had gotten him a copy of Football for Dummies and Terry had brought him a Smallville Crows shirt, and Conner was informed he'd be attending the next home game.  It was apparently near sacrilege that Terry drove him home almost every other day, that Conner ate lunch with Whitney all the time, and had never deigned to see them in their natural habitat, so his begging had been useless.

"I don't even know the rules," he'd whined.

Whitney had tapped the book.  "And that's what this is for."

"Shirt's so you don't get assraped in the stands," Terry had said around a wicked grin.

They'd returned him stuffed and smelling like Italian food into the bemused care of his grandmother, who clearly knew that he'd been Shanghaied from school and thus had not bothered to attend his last two periods, but was neither angry nor surprised.

"That was the first time I've ever skipped class," Conner had said.

"Well, Tony's is worth it," Martha had said, and handed him a stack of letters.

Also, Conner received a card in the mail.

It was dark purple, with no designs on the front or back cover.  On the inside, which was pure white and matte, was a brief note in his father's handwriting.

"Happy birthday, Conner.  Lex."

There was a P.S.:

"Your mother is irrationally frightened of needles.  I'm using this power for evil, not good."

Followed by a P.P.S. in smaller, shakier letters:

"You were, and are, and will remain to be, a miracle."

Conner tucked it under his pillow and slept like that, a stupid, hopeful smile on his face.

And because he was at heart his father's son, he believed that it would all end well.  He cradled the flickering thought somewhere deep in the hollow of his chest, where over time he had kept his many precious things, and laid it next to Geoffrey's smile, Mrs. Banner's hands, his father's eyes, and his mother's flight, free and weightless and endless, sailing over land and sea and the world, spread like a silk sheet beneath Conner's memories.

---

Over the course of days, which seemed to slip out of his grasp with surprising fluidity, Conner stopped obsessing over the newspapers, scanning for every piece of news about his father, which turned out to be a bad idea because one random Wednesday he stepped into the science hall to go to the bathroom and got body checked into a wall.

"Hey, it's fagboy."

In medias panic, Conner had three default settings: hostile, useless, and polite.  Given that guy who had him pinned to the wall was twelve feet tall and composed of seven hundred pounds of titanium and looked like he could crack walnuts with his buttocks, Conner opted for polite.

"Excuse me?" he said, wide-eyed.

He tried to remember if he'd done anything obviously gay since he'd arrived in Smallville, aside from nearly coming all over himself when he'd first met Terry.  And then again in Terry's car.  Still, he was certain that there'd been enough stuttering and shyness and logical circumstances that it'd appeared as if he was just nervous and not desperate to gain carnal knowledge of his lab partner.  He hadn't dressed in mauve or fluttered his hand or called anybody "sweetheart."

The goon in front of him sneered, and Conner watched in horrified fascination as light glinted off of two gold-capped teeth.

"I saw the news last night, you little cocksucker--just like yer daddies, right?"

That explained it.  He'd been waiting for the other shoe to drop since he'd come to Smallville; it alternately surprised him that it'd taken so long for people to make the Conner Luthor and Grandpa and Grandma Kent connection and filled him with dread that the moment had finally come. 

Something like this had happened before, years ago, when the first rippling rumors of a reconciliation between Lex Luthor and his longtime boyfriend had emerged on the Metropolis gossip pages, but there was nothing Lex could do to shield his son from reality, and Conner loved his parents too much to be ashamed of them.  He could still be afraid of the consequences, however, but that was his own burden to bear, and he'd never told his parents about the cold stares he'd gotten at school, the whispering that had sometimes waylaid nuns, uncertain of how to handle the child of an abominable relationship.  But the weight of time was very nearly like acceptance, Conner had realized with grateful awe, and so he hadn't felt stinging glances in years.

He shifted back to his first line of defense.

"I don't see how my parents have anything to do with you," he snapped, narrowing his eyes.

The gorilla leaned in, breathing hot on Conner's defiant expression. 

"Little shit's got spunk," the bastard commented, chuckling.

Conner had, since he was in the fourth grade and the shortest kid in the class, grown like a weed and was now a not-unacceptable five foot seven inches.  He was still scrawny but Mercy, Hope, and Mrs. Banner had taught him the Singapore slam, and the traumatizing memory of it was burned deeply into Conner's mind, enough so that Conner could kill this genetic throwback if necessary.

"Bet you grew up sucking cock, huh?  All fags are the same."

And that's when it happened; Conner vaguely remembered saying "oh, shit!" and then the same damned temper that had blown up the solarium and levitated an armored car and that could barely shift a mug when required to play nicely threw the offending teenager across the hall like a rag doll.  Conner watched in dull detachment as the boy hit the ground dazed and stared at Conner in renewed fear, noting with total incomprehension that Conner's hands hadn't so much as shifted from where they were pressed palms-flat against the wall.

"What the fuck did you just do?" the gorilla demanded.

Conner batted his lashes, feeling a little lightheaded and crazy--and above all, powerful, like he could rule and enslave the whole world.  It was awesome.  He wondered if his father felt like this all the time, and decided that if Lex did, that Conner's future plans in journalism were overrated and perhaps an MBA really was the way to go. 

"Nothing, man, remember--pansy cocksucker here," he said innocently. 

The gorilla rushed to his feet and started toward Conner again, shouting, "The fuck?" and Conner narrowed his eyes and felt, like a spray of rain focused to one central point, aligning rays in his head just as he murmured: 

"Now." 

Later, after the gorilla, who was apparently a benched linebacker for the team, was summarily reamed by the assistant principal, Mrs. Funt, and Terry, who was--and Conner didn't know how he'd managed to miss this one--the captain of the football team, he was allowed to visit the nurse to have his bleeding hand bandaged.  The janitor came to sweep up the remaining detritus of 432's classroom door, and Terry watched Conner with a strange sort of curiosity. 

"So he just threw himself through the door of our chem. room," Terry said, deadpan. 

"I think he saw the error of his ways," Conner said snippily. 

"What, in bullying people?" Terry said, disbelieving.  "Walden bullies everybody.  He probably bullies his mom.  Give--Metropolis, what'd you do?" 

"I didn't even move," Conner said honestly, but did not manage to keep the thousand-watt smile off of his face long enough to make Terry buy it.

---

Something--through no effort of his own--had finally clicked, and upon reaching home, he jumped out of the yellow school bus and bolted for the barn, where he proceeded to try flinging around bales of hay and then actually flung around bales of hay for hours, until he had given himself a roaring migraine and a renewed sense of accomplishment.  What he had lacked in accuracy he'd made up for (sort of) with enthusiasm and power, and he felt jittery, flushed, shot through with new discovery.  He tumbled back into the kitchen red-faced and thrilled, terrifying his grandparents by almost but not exactly managing to levitate the roast chicken they were having for dinner onto the table. 

Later, over pizza delivered by Tony himself (in a tractor), Conner apologized profusely for having broken almost all the glassware and plates in the house, and for wrecking dinner, but his grandmother and grandfather, who had far too much experience dealing with freak teenagers, weren't even fazed.   

His grandfather said, "Work on that a few more weeks and we'll see if you can help me clean out the shed--that place is a wreck and my back's going." 

"He's your grandson, not a convenience service," Martha said disapprovingly, and topped off Conner's Coke.  "How's your head, sweetheart?" she asked him gently. 

Conner rubbed his temple, chagrined.  "I think I overdid it," he admitted. 

His grandfather smirked.  "Make Clark tell you about when he figured out he could shoot fire out of his eyes."  There was an amused light in Jonathan's eyes that meant Conner definitely wanted to ask about that one as soon as possible. 

"I don't even know what happened, you know?" Conner said thoughtfully.  "I used to not even be able to move like, a cup.  But suddenly I get pissed and calm and woosh."  He threw out his arms, smacking his left hand into the couch leg, and so he pulled them back in, rubbing his tender hand and embarrassed. 

His grandparents graciously pretended not to have seen it. 

"Anyway," Martha segued, "every new power is a new responsibility.  Now that you know how to use it--" 

"Sort of know how to use it," Conner corrected. 

"--right, sort of, then you'll just have to be that much more careful at school," she finished smiling.  "Though I get the impression that you're less of a trouble-magnet than Clark." 

His first years visiting his grandparents had been filled with endless stories about escapades during his mother's youth, how he'd managed to do one or another stupid, illogical, or breathtakingly brave thing over and over again, though his grandmother and grandfather had looked uncomfortable and demurred when Conner had drilled them for details about his father in Smallville.  It was a subject it seemed nobody liked to talk about, despite it being common knowledge.  Everybody who was anybody in Smallville knew about Clark Kent and Lex Luthor, leaving Conner as the odd duck out, more than mildly disgruntled that he was the only one not in on the least secret secret ever, a gross insult made that much more insulting by the fact that he was their spawn. 

"Conner's too smart for any of that," Jonathan said confidently. 

His grandfather, though he'd harbored initial fits of rage and alcoholic tendencies, had over the years come round to see that just because half of Conner's genetic material came from Lex Luthor, who in many and various ways was still Jonathan's sworn enemy in life, half of Conner was also Clark--and that Conner was smarter than either of his parents.  As a natural result, Jonathan Kent had attempted to take Conner under his wing, show him around the farm, teach him how to farm, and give him all the agricultural basics.  To date, Conner had managed to scare one horse, kill seven plants, chase what felt like thousands of chickens, and lose a hog, but his grandfather seemed to appreciate his effort. 

Jonathan grinned and patted Conner's shoulder.  "Unlike your father, I'm sure you'll stay away from trouble." 

Conner smiled weakly at that, mostly because he hated lying to his grandparents but there was no way in hell he was going to explain about the burning down the school, petty theft, accidental solicitation of a she-male hooker, or any of the other colorful things that he'd managed to attract over the years. 

"Something like that," he compromised, and ate another slice of pizza.

---

The problem, like it had been with his mother and father, hadn't been staying away from trouble so much as it coming to him, and after the debacle with Harry Walden and the amazing collapsible door, there were more whispers and curious eyes than ever.  Conner had taken to dashing to class thirty seconds before the late bell rang, bursting into his classrooms gasping for oxygen and catching everybody's attention instead of making his way through crowded hallways and susceptible to jeers and inappropriate questions, about two thirds of which now were regarding his parents and their love life, which was scary enough when he thought about it in his head, much less heard it needled out loud. 

And Terry, roped again into the gruesome daily torture ritual that was football practice, could only offer Conner an apologetic smile come the eighth period bell and say, "Hey, if you'd be willing to hang out an hour or two, I could still give you a lift."  He winked and add, "Added perk: you get to watch the cheer squad practice." 

Clearly, Terry was either more oblivious than Conner had imagined or as terminal as Whitney claimed.  If after a month and a half of Conner touching him too much and laughing too loudly at his jokes and blushing when Terry said nice things about him the bastard hadn't noticed that Conner didn't exactly do the girl thing then maybe Terry's brother wasn't the only retarded child in that family. 

"I'll be fine," Conner said, and steeled himself for the bus.   

Terry punched him on the shoulder with an expression of manly pride.  "Onward, brave knight," he said with a grin, and left, waving at where Conner scowled at him from their lab table. 

On the bus, Conner sat in the seat directly behind the driver and read increasingly incomprehensible titles in order to distract himself from all the talk about himself by trying to parse the sentences correctly in his head.  Current selection was The Scarlet Letter, he'd been trying to decode the platform scene for nearly three days, which made it a notable success among Conner's choices thus far, which had included A Dream of Red Mansions (which he'd abandoned once he'd realized that "dance of the clouds and the rain" would be as explicit as the many sexual encounters would get) and The Unbearable Lightness of Being (which had been detached and weirdly disturbing). 

On the one hand, if this kept up, he was going to be incredibly well-read, on the other, it was wildly annoying.  His only real comfort was the pale green mini iPod that had been mailed to the Kent residence, courtesy of one Geoffrey Chaucer Archer, which was preloaded with a totally obscene amount of music, all of which Conner adored.  There'd been no note, but when the when the randomized playlist had skipped to a techno remix of Duran Duran's "Save a Prayer" Conner knew that the only person in the world sick and twisted enough to do it was Geoffrey, and tapped his foot to it while writing a history paper. 

So all of his new memories of Smallville, of her straight-line streets and curving properties, of her farms and farmers, paused on the side of the road on their John Deere's, waiting for the schoolbus to pass, were set to music.  The main drag to "Ooh La La," the school parking lot to Jimmy Eat World and "The Middle," the rare, delicious rides home from Terry to the Yeah Yeah Yeah's, wind rolling off his skin like their lyrics, ghostly and high. 

Somewhere in his head he had to know that he looked like the emo kid, always clutching a weird book and listening to his music, making zero effort to fit in and keeping his head down.  The fact that he'd found his rainbow wristband and started wearing it around in case he needed a scrunchy didn't exactly help--nor did the fact that it was rainbow. 

Then again, Conner was clearly losing the emo contest to Whitney by a mile.  Since they'd first met, she'd changed her hair (to thick, but not unattractive dreadlocks), kept painting her nails black, started opting for a totally black and denim wardrobe, and listening to the White Stripes.  Conner didn't know what was happening, but it was vaguely terrifying watching her go over cheer routines at lunch and retouching the dark eyeliner she'd started wearing with a compact with a skull and crossbones on them.  Where the hell did you even buy that shit in Smallville, anyway?  Fordham's carried Cover Girl, and on a clear day when you could see forever, the occasional tube of Maybelline mascara.  

"Why are you dressed like that?" Conner finally asked one day, when she had arrived wearing a t-shirt which had clearly been purchased at a Hot Topic and he could bear it no longer. 

She blinked at him in surprise.  "What?" 

He motioned at her outfit, which now included a wallet chain.  "That," he said, choked. 

"Oh," she said, surprised, as if she'd only just noticed now that the black sheep of the Gap family had tarted her out like she was their prize pony.  "I wanted to make a change, you know?  This seemed like the easiest first step." 

Conner was pained.  "Whitney--really, you're too good for that.  You need help.  Professional help."  Somewhere in his wallet there was a card for an image consultant, he just knew he had one, and it had very probably come from his father along with a very sincere plea that Conner visit one. 

She rolled her eyes at him, saying, "You're such a drama queen, Conner," and turning back to the latest stack of paperwork from the Philanthropy club for the barest moment before her head shot back up, and she said, "Oh, yeah!  I got the new White Stripes CD, want me to copy it for you?"

Conner muttered, "Gag me with a spoon."

---

At two and a half months in Smallville, when Conner had almost fooled himself into thinking that he was used to the entire state of affairs, Clark came to visit and wrecked the entire thing.   

Clark came with charts and graphs he leaned against the wall, shooting them nervous looks every few moments, annoyed.  He appeared with pamphlets about Lex's most recent treatment and the latest news clippings from the Planet and a note from Lois with a lipstick kiss on the fold.  He had video conferencing equipment and he had a grim expression on his face.  He said: 

"Conner, I'm really sorry." 

Conner gasped, turned white, and felt his heart stop.  "Is Dad--?" 

Clark shook his head.  He opened the laptop with an even more severe and tragic expression on his face.  He said, "Conner, I'm so, so sorry." 

Conner's eyes widened.  "No--there's no way--!"

As the black faded from the screen, a video conferencing prompt appeared.  His father’s face was in the window, and though it looked paler than Conner had remembered and perhaps a little thinner, he seemed no worse for wear, and it gave Conner heart. 

"I have to leave the room now," Clark said faintly, and disappeared toward the kitchen, which sent Conner reeling in panic before he heard his father's voice, tinny and strange from the speakers on the laptop, saying: 

"So you're sixteen now, and it's time we had The Talk." 

Conner barely had enough time to scream in horrified understanding before Lex indicated that Conner should look at chart A, which was, he realized with blank horror, a cross-section of a uterus. 

"Conner, please," Lex snapped, a little of his old color back in his cheeks.  "If you're going to overreact so badly right now I don't know how you're going to get through anal sex and safe bondage." 

Conner kept screaming.

---

"Traitor," Conner gasped, nearly three hours later.  "Betrayer." 

"I told you I was sorry," Clark said faintly, looking flushed and mildly nauseated.  "And don't think I got off easy.  I got the, 'So what if he has follow-up questions that I haven't prepared an answer for in the Sex Packet' talk before I came here." 

Conner covered his face with his hands.  "Oh, God, oh--God." 

Clark patted him on the shoulder comfortingly.  "If it makes you feel any better, I already told your grandma and grandpa that they're not allowed to make fun of you for it for at least an hour." 

Jonathan and Martha, to their credit, did not make fun of Conner at all, though they did spend an inordinate amount of time choking on their dinners and needing to leave the room.  The only thing that made the situation bearable at all was that they seemed to be not-laughing at Clark just as much as they were not-laughing at Conner, and it was gratifying to see his mother's crimson face when Grandpa Jon had said, "Not so funny when it's your turn is it?" 

Toward the end of the evening, when the late-autumn sky darkened to blues and submitting purples, Clark found Conner on the back porch, sitting on the creaking swing with one toe on the paint-split wood, watching the universe shift perspective as he moved, seeing the lights distant from the next farmhouse over.  Conner felt his mother sit down next to him, and closed his eyes, breathed in long and deep, smelling the cold on the edges of the air, like Kansas was on the edge, about to take a plunge into a long and drowsy winter. 

"Are you still angry with us?" Clark asked, soft and sudden and a little frightened.   

Conner felt the rough seam of Clark's jeans slide against the side of his own pants, the awkward slump of his mother's shoulders.  There was tension and tightness and uncertainty here, in the air between them that made Conner think that this conversation would be too hard to have.  He'd been prepared from the moment he'd seen Clark to ignore everything, skim the simple, smooth surface of it and think about it later. 

"How'm I supposed to stop being angry," Conner said, monotone.  "You kicked me out.  You guys thought I couldn't handle it." 

Clark was silent for a long time. 

"Your dad moved out of our apartment when LexCorp failed to IPO the first time," Clark said conversationally.  He leaned back and stared up, out over the treeline and into the darkening sky.  Conner stared at Clark and felt his heart pound. 

"Millions had been invested in the work and Lex had been--" Clark made a vague but emphatic hand motion "--just killing himself doing it.  But his father intervened at the last minute and the whole effort went to waste." 

Conner blinked in surprise; it was the first time he'd ever heard Clark talk about his grandfather.  Like Conner's father, Clark didn't call Lionel Conner's grandfather, either, like his parents were trying to maintain a certain distance between Conner and his roots. 

Clark laughed, and the crow's feet developing around his eyes deepened in a friendly, timeworn way, and they seemed to tell Conner that Clark had laughed a lot this lifetime. 

"Oh, man," Clark said, like he was remembering all of this as he explained it.  "Oh man, it was bad.  Your dad was so ripped up over it, and I was just a stupid college kid--what was I supposed to do to make him feel better, right?  But it was killing me to watch him be miserable like that and I guess it killed him to let me see it." 

Clark paused, and said, more softly this time, "It was after my copyediting final.  I came back home and found this note on the kitchen counter, saying something about how he needed his own space, blah blah blah--garbage, all of it." 

"This was," Conner ventured carefully, "the first you guys were together?" 

"Something like that," Clark said with a wry grin, "we've always been…really bad at being together and even worse at being apart, if that makes any sense."  He shook his head.  "Anyway, I was infuriated.  I busted into his new apartment all ready to pick a huge fight and I caught him sitting in his suit in--" Clark giggled crazily "--in the bathtub in this huge empty apartment, drinking Sherry out of a Dixie cup and reading Star Wars novels, sulking." 

Conner couldn't hide his shame.  "Dad's such a loser." 

"He didn't want me to see him like that," Clark explained fondly. 

"I wouldn't want you to see me in the bathtub reading Star Wars novels either," Conner said crossly. 

"So what do you think he feels like now?" Clark asked flatly and the world bottomed out. 

Conner stared in silence for a long time before he felt his jaw moving, his mouth moving around, making noises that sounded like he was trying to say, "This isn't--" 

"He's not just embarrassed this time, Conner.  He's sick and he's skinny and he doesn't like you seeing him all marked up by needles and throwing up all the time," Clark said. 

"It isn't the same!" Conner protested, jumping to his feet.  "He can't--I'm his son--!" 

"And he loves you," Clark interrupted firmly, grabbing Conner by the wrist, and holding him still, looking at Conner hard, until Conner felt Clark's green eyes burning into his own, until he felt small and stupid and the understanding, like the creeping light of dawn, seeped into his skin.  "And he loves you, Conner, more than he ever did or ever will love me," Clark whispered, "he likes you best and watching you watch him fall apart was killing him, Conner, more than anything else was--did you know that?" 

Conner's mouth opened and closed a few times weakly.  "I don't--but I want to be there." 

"I know," Clark agreed. 

"I can help," Conner babbled desperately, making a renewed effort, even though he saw Clark's face close over with a heavy finality.  "I can help and I can help you--I learned all of it!" 

Clark tugged Conner toward himself, pulled Conner into an awkward hug as Conner's words dropped out and said, into the air above Conner's head, in a very soft and sad voice, "You're smart, Conner, and your dad made you that way, but he never had the heart to teach you that sometimes the best that you can do for somebody is to let them hurt." 

That's bullshit, Conner wanted to say, and felt hot tears squeezing out beneath his shut-tight eyelids, digging his nails into Clark's shoulders.  But he managed silence, and Clark seemed to get it, just stroked the back of Conner's neck until Conner stopped shaking and the night around them was dark and foreign.

---

"You were lying," Conner said bitterly.  "That's the only explanation." 

Terry just laughed and high-fived his brother George, who grinned happily at the attention, and looked up at Terry with the same worshipful eyes Conner had always seen on the fourteen year old boy.  It took the sting out of losing--but only a little bit. 

"Naw, man, you just suck at poker," Terry crowed. 

Conner pointed at the quarterback, scowling.  "You go straight to hell, Daniels!" 

"Sorry you lost, Conner," George apologized sincerely. 

"Um," Conner said, suddenly losing steam in the face of George's expression, but was distracted again by Terrence's hysterical laughter, which made Conner point emphatically at him again, shouting, "Straight to hell!  Right now!" 

Around them, the scattered patrons of Sunday afternoons at the Talon were grinning at them affectionately, Terry and George being well-liked members of the town community.  Paired with Smallville's latest oddity, they were nearly afternoon matinee.  Conner's open-faced turkey sandwich was untouched and his phone was abandoned on the table next to Terry's half-finished milkshake and George's half-eaten brownie, which had been almost literally the size of his own head.  "That's disgusting," Terry had said, awed, but Conner had insisted, saying that he'd heard about George for so long that their finally meeting was a momentous occasion. 

One to be punctuated by George's total domination of Conner in Texas Hold'em. 

"He just learned," Terry had insisted innocently earlier, "so go easy on him, Metropolis." 

"I hate you," Conner hissed at Terry, who only beamed in response. 

George cackled gleefully, and Conner sighed, abandoning his cards on the table. 

"He's really not that good," Terry insisted later, after George had excused himself to the bathroom.  "It's probably just that you suck like, just unbelievably." 

Conner scowled.  "It's just amazing that you're single, Terry, just mind-blowing." 

Terry smirked in a way that was simultaneously self-deprecating and irresistible, Conner resorted to grasping the edge of the table.  

"Let me remind you that I broke up with Melanie." 

"Melanie is not human, Terry," Conner said seriously.  He meant it.  "Melanie is some sort of nuclear accident.  Melanie is living toxic waste." 

Terry smiled at Conner fondly, and George clambered back up to the table, grinning, hands still wet, saying to Conner, "My brother says that you're--" before Terry slapped a hand over his younger brother's mouth, eyebrows nearly at his hairline, saying: 

"That's just enough outta you, buddy."  He pulled his hand away and pawed his brother's hair with his huge, brown hands, smoothing George's ruffled feathers easily, and Conner only had a second to wonder about what Terry said about him before somebody at a far table yelled: 

"Hey, Daniels--aren't you supposed to be at that game this afternoon?"

---

It turned out that Terry was supposed to be at a football game, only it didn't start until half past four, which was why he had been sitting in the Talon at quarter past three with Conner and George, playing cards and eating everybody's food but his own, which Conner ate, more out of spite than any real hunger.  Even George's brownie had not escaped unscathed, and for all the Perfect Big Brother façade, a little of Terry's true nature came out when he only stuck his tongue out at George when the boy protested being robbed of his dessert. 

And as the clock ticked toward four o'clock, Terry said, "Okay, quick stop at your farm--" 

"Why?" Conner asked, puzzled. 

"--to get your Crows shirt so you don't get assraped in the stands," Terry continued, somewhat less than patiently, "and then a quick stop at the Ross's to pick up Whitney, and then, we're going to the game." 

"I'm going to the game?" Conner asked stupidly. 

"You're going to the game," Terry confirmed, smiling brightly. 

Conner suddenly remembered the Football for Dummies book (which had been sitting under a stack of printed A.P. US History notes since he received it) and the Smallville Crows t-shirt, all omens of possible participation in Smallville sports culture, though he'd mostly managed to forget about it, what with his father having leukemia and his being completely incapable of understanding conics and all. 

He made a pitiful expression and blinked his eyes hugely at Terry.  "Do I have to?" 

Terry stared at him for a moment before saying, "Uh.  Yes.  Um, yes you do."  He frowned, seeming to gather himself again.  "It's the championship game, Conner.  You have to be there, I'm really just doing this for your own good." 

"I don't see how watching you get bashed around by a bunch of large, sweaty guys will do me any good," Conner sulked, though he immediately regretted his wording at Terry's cocked eyebrow and his own insipient flush.  He was having post-traumatic stress flashbacks to his father's sex lecture, the five minute briefing about group intercourse, and how really, it was terribly overrated.  He covered his face and mumbled, "Anyway, I don't think I'd--" 

"I'm not listening to you," Terry said, blithely cheerful, and Conner heard George laughing, too loud in the relative quiet of the Talon. 

And then Conner felt Terry's huge brown hand on his arm, jerking him out of the chair, out of the Talon, into the midday sunshine and toward the Cadillac, deaf to Conner's spirited protests. 

Which was how he had ended up sitting in front of the forty-yard line of the Smallville High School football field, with George sitting in the seat next to him.   

He was wearing the Smallville Crows t-shirt and scowling at the green grass in front of him.  He was sitting on his copy of Football for Dummies, which he'd realized had been stupid to bring only after they'd already arrived at the field.  He craned his neck hesitantly to survey his surroundings and realized with a sudden shock of discomfort that aside from himself and George, the nearest males were at least four or five people away, and that he was blocked in by three or four girls in front, beside, and behind him. 

Some sort of buzzer sounded and the broad, irritating voice of the local sports announcer blared over the loudspeakers as cheerleaders, football stars, and the rival team poured out onto the green, green grass. 

While Whitney's huge, amused eyes from her vantage point at the top of the pyramid were clues, it was the unrestrained shrieks of "I love you, Bobby!" and "You're so hot, Dylan!" and "Kick some ass, Parker!" that really clued Conner into the mortifying fact that apparently Terry had seated him with the rest of the team girlfriends in their unspoken, designated section. 

"I'll kill him," he muttered under his breath, digging his nails into his thighs. 

"Don't be too mad," George said, though his face was still the mask of placid, sincere attentiveness, there was something in his eyes that seemed a little sad.   

George's Asperger flattened him out, Terry had explained, and though his brother felt as much as anybody, George had trouble expressing it.  The struggle between all the words that bubbled inside George and how little he was able to say out loud to others had always frustrated George.  Conner wondered if this wasn't another moment, and did as Terry suggested, waited quietly until George found his own voice to say, "My brother likes you a lot, Conner," and "He's just not allowed 'cause of me." 

Conner stared at George with wide, uncomprehending eyes until the shout of the surrounding crowd broke his concentration, and he looked up in time to see Terry's broad shoulders flex beneath the shining material of his uniform, his arms move the brown ball in his hands, and his blue eyes flash for one single second toward the stands, where they met Conner's. 

They won the championship game. 

When Terry bounded up afterward, shining and sporting a new bruise on the corner of his mouth and said, "I told you!  I told you we'd kill them!" and hugged George and Whitney, who was still tearful over their success and finally, Conner--for a long time, Conner thought crazily, feeling his fingers on the strong line of Terry's back, his mouth on Terry's shoulder, ultra-aware of every place where they touched--Conner was nearly bowled over by it. 

"That was a good day," George said later, in the car on the way home. 

And Conner, half-asleep in the seat, seeing Terry framed by evening light from the corner of his eyes, said, "Yeah, yeah it was."

The next-to-last thing he remembered before passing out was Terry draping his letter jacket over Conner, his large hand stroking over Conner's shoulder longer than strictly necessary.  And the very, very last thing Conner remembered was knowing that he was maybe beginning to fall a little in love with Terry, his awkward hands and his graceful run, the way that he loved his brother and embraced mediocrity--that Conner, in a life less ordinary, had finally found something normal.

---

And the next thing Conner knew it was Christmas, and the farmhouse was bursting with good food and presents which came daily from Metropolis, huge, extravagant crates of them, large wooden shipping containers via tractor-trailers, and smaller, finer things which were wrapped in gilt paper and newspaper, with Lex and Clark's slanting handwriting all over them.  Conner looked at his own Christmas present, a largish box with "Merry Christmas" and "Good luck in freakville," written on it in his mother and father's handwriting respectively, he'd rolled his eyes.  If his parents thought they were fooling anybody about the status of their relationship while giving joint presents, they were clearly out of their minds. 

Smallville decked out in holly and trees, with everything glittering so much Conner nearly forgave the town for being so provincial.  Both Whitney and Terry spent most of the break with their families, but managed to drag Conner out of the house once before Christmas Eve for a quick lunch and gift exchange at the Talon.  Conner reflected that for two people who never said anything nice about one another, Terry and Whitney were awfully good friends, and he smirked at the two of them when they sniped at one another over their sandwiches and drinks. 

"What are you grinning at, Metropolis?" Terry demanded to know, but he was grinning, too. 

"You two are just too cute," Conner laughed, and before either of them could protest, he gave them their presents.   

Conner had learned, as he learned many things from his father, the art of giving gifts.  Lex never used money as the barometer of a present, and had given Conner over the years second-hand books, old board games, a framed collection of reproduction Chagall sketches, a subway pass on Conner's twelfth birthday, when Lex admitted that it was time Conner have his full mobility.  Lex always gave presents with care and a thoughtfulness that had taught Conner the value of planning, and Conner had spent the time he'd been in Smallville watching Whitney and Terry and his grandparents, wondering what would make them smile. 

He gave Whitney a bracelet made out of an antique silver spoon that Conner had found in the attic and curled exhaustively around one of the bathroom pipes until it'd been a loose, beautiful circle.  She slipped it on and stared at it as it winked brightly against her wrist, saying finally, "Thank you so much, Conner," in a quiet, soft voice, leaning over to press a kiss to his cheek. 

Conner gave Terry a set of old Bellagio poker chips, worth about five thousand dollars before the Bellagio had updated and destroyed most of their old chips--the remainder of which Lex had purchased on a whim and decorated with, and a large portion of which Conner had pilfered long ago and asked Mrs. Banner to mail to him.  Terry just stared at them until Conner laughed and said, "They're totally worthless now, you know, just cool to look--" 

"They're great," Terry had interrupted, fierce.  "They're--they're really great." 

His eyes had been big and Conner swallowed hard under Terry's gaze.   

Whitney gave Conner a White Stripes CD case with a mix CD titled "I'm Too Cool For Popular Music" in it and a paperback copy of David Sedaris' latest book with a story about popular sports-related sexual fantasies dog-eared.  (She'd winked at Conner meaningfully when he'd registered it with a deep blush.)  Terry had brought Conner all three books in the Jedi Academy series, and though Conner battled a combination of mortification and glee at the sight of them, joy eventually won out.  He thanked them both profusely. 

Evening was starting to creep across the sky and Whitney declared that she needed to close up the Talon for the holidays, and could Terry and Conner please excuse themselves?  Terry called her something rude and Whitney implied he was stupid and they parted with broad grins, Terry shuffling Conner out of the café, pushing him by the shoulders while Conner called out, "Bye, Whitney!  Merry Christmas!  Happy Kwanza!" 

"Oh my God," Terry muttered, opening the car door for Conner and jogging to the driver's side, rolling his eyes and rubbing his hands together in the sudden cold snap.  "You're just so grossly politically-correct and attentive." 

"It was one of those classes they taught in pretentious, rich people school," Conner said tartly, snuggling down in his warm scarf and coat, jamming his hands into his pockets.  His father and mother would be in Smallville the day after the next, and nothing could bring him down. 

"I'll bet," Terry said affectionately, and put the car in drive. 

It was snowing by the time they reached the Kent farm, and the flakes looked ghostly against the dark blue of the sky.  Beneath the wide, wide Kansas night, Conner stood next to Terry's opened car door and stared upward, a little amazed by the sight of snow and nothing else, and felt humbled by it, alive all over again in the cold, and when he turned to catch Terry's eyes he saw the same expression on Terry's face. 

Conner had barely a day to stew over what it could mean before his father and mother arrived with the rest of the holiday trimmings (which included an eight-foot illuminated Santa Claus that Lex put in the front yard, deaf to everybody's protests) and all hell broke loose at Kent farm.  There were too many bodies in too small a space and Conner couldn't seem to detach himself from his father's side, constantly attentive and concerned and overwhelmingly fond of his dad, glad that he was there.  Conner had missed him; it was the "how much" that surprised him.   

Christmas day, with the living room a wreckage of wrapping paper, plank wood, and ribbon and all of their new gifts scattered around, Conner wore the extraordinarily ugly scarf his father had made for him--"Your mother would hide my work, Conner, I was desperate for something to do.  Mrs. Banner identified a moment of weakness and I'll rue this until the day I die.  Oh, God, you look terrible in that color."--to the hugely rowdy dinner, which fairly spilled off of the table. 

Hours later, stuffed to the gills and sleepy, Conner fell asleep on his dad's shoulder on the living room couch, watching the fire.  They had not talked about the leukemia or the treatments or anybody's broken heart, and Conner was grateful for that, happy to let it be silent for the holidays. 

Lex and Clark stayed through New Years, and when the ball dropped and his father said, "Thank fucking God," and chugged what remained of the champagne, careful with his elbow not to knock Conner's mother, who had passed out at ten thirty, Conner thought it was a good day. 

That all in all, he still had a very good life.

---

But that was the last good day in a long time.   

Shortly after his parents had returned to Metropolis, his mother called to say that the first round of chemo hadn't done as much good as had been hoped.  "Your father is totally unconcerned and he's starting radiation day after tomorrow," Clark had reported dutifully.  "He says that more than anything, he's sick of me hovering."  At that point, Lex had forcibly taken the phone out of Clark's hands, and Conner, though he was worried and heartsick and tired on his father's behalf, was grateful to hear that Lex's voice was even and strong.  Conner was also reminded to remain vigilant about his schoolwork, because whether or not he was in a backwater--"Hey!" Clark had yelled, "I went to school there!"--it was no reason to let his previous eleven years of very expensive private education go to seed. 

Three days after that, still reeling and sleepless from the bad news, Grandpa Kent got sent to the hospital with chest pains, which had Conner, Clark, and Grandma Martha in the hospital emergency room at three in the morning when the doctors came out and said that Jonathan Kent was all right.  His grandfather was all right, Conner was told, but his blood pressure was too high, his cholesterol too high, and his body too tired to do all the things he tried to do around the farm.  That night, Conner did all the farm chores he knew how to do, and fell into bed exhausted and still-filthy, and woke up nearly three hours later in the middle of the night when his grandmother shook him gently, saying, "Conner, Conner, here--let's change into your pajamas, all right?" 

What made all the bad stuff that much worse was that Terry, ever since Christmas, had taken his personality for a total one-eighty and transformed into a total jackass.  And though the occasional glimmer of humanity still emerged, he was more frequently than not found flirting obscenely with Melanie the vampire and touching her on the arm, the shoulder, one finger on the undercurve of her padded breasts when he thought nobody but Conner was looking.  Football season was over and so were practices but Terry hadn't so much as offered Conner a ride home, and spent Chemistry as clueless and unhelpful as ever. 

All of it boiled over on the second Friday after break. 

Terry had spent most of chemistry leaning over to Melanie's lab table, whispering things into her neck and making her laugh, which, Conner told himself, he was fine with, because as long as Terry was molesting his ex-girlfriend, he wasn't fucking up the lab.  Actually, what Conner suspected he felt was gut-wrenching jealousy and a distinctly violent inclination, and in his head he imagined what it would feel like to shove a pipette in Melanie's eye, to punch Terry in his perfectly kissable mouth.  But he steeled himself and worked diligently, not saying a word all throughout the period, finishing up and passing up the last worksheet just before the bell rang. 

Terry had still been occupied touching Melanie's neck so Conner had just shoved his books in his backpack and started out of the classroom when he heard Melanie saying: 

"Aw, poor little rich boy, feeling neglected." 

It froze Conner in his tracks, and he debated, fisting his right hand, how good it would feel to throw her out of a window, weighing it with the inevitable public humiliation of wearing an orange jumpsuit and being chained to his new prison boyfriend Horton.  So Conner took a deep breath and said, taking another step: 

"At least I don't have to let him touch my tits to get his attention."

---

It wasn't that Conner had no sense of self-preservation, it was just that he was more likely than not to ignore the clear and calm voice in his head telling him in very small words to shut up.   

And he was so very tired of this, whatever it was.  For a boy who'd welcomed Conner to Smallville with a wry smile and his car, Terry had changed a lot in a very short period of time, disappearing into the stereotype Conner had always gotten the impression Terry loathed.  And between the muted snubs, the silence that lingered between them now, and the way that Conner caught Terry looking at him, out of the corner of his eyes, when Terry seemed to think that Conner wasn't paying attention, Conner was tired. 

He hadn't come to Smallville for somebody to make him more miserable than he'd been before. 

So he said, "At least I don't have to let him touch my tits to get his attention," and waited for the boom.

---

It came in the form of Melanie's high-pitched shriek, a sudden sensation of motion and the sound of chairs jerking against the floor and people shouting all around them as Conner felt himself shoved into a lab table, felt pain explode in his side, knocking all the air out of him. 

"Oh--" Conner started, trying to say fuck but realizing his mouth was opening and closing and that no sound was coming out, and when he levered himself up he realized Mrs. Funt had run toward the back of the classroom yelling over Melanie's screams, her hisses. 

And Terry, where he held her against a wall by her wrists was staring at Conner with a wild-eyed sort of vulnerability, a world of words in that one moment that made Conner think--crazily--that if Terry wasn't holding Melanie there he'd stride across the room and stroke Conner's face, kiss his hands, his shoulders, the butterfly of Conner's ribs and murmur, "I'm sorry, I'm so sorry." 

But at the moment all Conner could think about was that it felt like Melanie's shove had managed to break a couple of ribs and that he was so angry and tired and irritated that he could burst into tears--only he'd never give her the satisfaction.  He only smiled darkly as she was jerked bodily out of the classroom by a furious Mrs. Funt, and the rest of the students started to file out, a roar of whispers as they passed by Conner, asking in concern if he was all right. 

He shook his head at all of them, pushing himself upright and saying, "I'll be good.  I'm just--" he paused, glancing at Terry, where he stood, hanging back from the crowd in the corner "--really fucking glad she's going to get hell for this." 

His classmates laughed and waved, chattering brightly as they squeezed out of the classroom until the only people left in the room were Conner and Terry. 

Conner didn't turn around, didn't look at Terry, and felt his hands tighten around his bookbag.  He thought about Terry's bored expression that first day of chemistry, thought about Terry's cocky grin, half-visible through his car window that rainy afternoon.  He thought about Terry's big hands and his big heart and his big eyes when he was telling Conner Oh Man, This One Time I Fucked Up So Bad stories.  Conner thought about Terry and the resigned affection Terry had for George, thought about the Smallville Crows t-shirt Terry had given him for his birthday and the championship game, the hug Terry had given him afterward and how the letter jacket had smelled against his skin when he'd woken up.  Conner though about Christmas and Jedi Academy books and thought that he was sick of this. 

"Whatever," he said under his breath.  "Just--whatever," he said again and bolted. 

"Fuck!  Conner--wait!" 

He was all the way in the parking lot, nearing the row of buses when Terry's much longer legs caught up with him and he felt Terry's hand close around his arm, jerk him to a halt with a shock of pain to his shoulder that had Conner stumbling until Terry righted him with his other hand.  Until Conner was half leaning into the big football player and staring, looking as lost and upset and betrayed as he'd been feeling this week. 

But he was showing his cards and Conner had been trained never to do that, so he narrowed his eyes and said, "What?" 

Terry was showing his cards, too.  Too bad Conner couldn't read them, only saw a blur of regret, of shame and a little sadness, tinged at the edges of whatever Terry was feeling.  And whatever Terry was feeling, it wasn't making him let go of Conner's arm. 

It took a long time before Terry managed to say, "I'm sorry." 

Conner sneered, because he'd learned mean before he'd learned polite.  "For what?  Your crazy bitch attacking me?" 

Terry's face hardened for a minute and his fingers tightened on Conner's arm, the pressure going painful--and Conner's instinct was to wince, but he didn't, he didn't want this to get more complicated than it already was--before Terry's eyes darkened and he loosened his fingers again, as if remembering himself.  "Yes--no.  I don't know," he said quietly.  "Just, sorry." 

Conner stared past Terry's left shoulder.  "That's fine.  Let me go, Terry." 

"You're still mad at me," Terry accused. 

"I'm not mad," Conner said honestly.  He wasn't, anymore, it had disappeared like a mist and now he was just tired, hollowed out.  "Just let me go, Terry." 

"Conner…" Terry said, a low murmur, nearly a whine, as if he waiting for "I forgive you," as if his half-assed apology for God knew what earned it, and Conner was furious again, mad enough to punch Terry's round, thick mouth--the one he'd dreamed about earlier that week, kissing his stomach, pressed against his own. 

Conner started shaking his arm, knowing it wasn't the most manly move, but needing to break their contact--and he was determinedly not looking at Terry's face as he did it, scowling every which way but directly in front of him.  God help him, if Terry did not let go in fourteen milliseconds, Conner thought, incensed, somebody was getting kicked in the nuts. 

And Conner was so intent on shaking Terry off that he only heard his name distantly the first two times; it was only when the voice escalated that something broke through: 

"Hey, asshole!" 

And Conner whipped around in the parking lot, ready to tear somebody's head off, at the very, very end of his rope, and-- 

Saw Geoffrey, leaning against a parked car, a dusty old Toyota.   

He was smiling, beautiful and golden in the sun, familiar and well-loved, longed-for, and in that moment Conner's loneliness seemed to well up in a great wave, breaking over him, and when Conner blinked again and saw Geoffrey was still there, he felt the smile on his face before he realized he was smiling, and his heart gave one, two, three skipping beats before Conner thought, in a reverent hush: I'm home--home's finally here. 

"Geoffrey," Conner murmured, soft and amazed, and shoved away from Terry, whose fingers seemed to have suddenly gone numb, to bolt across the parking lot, throwing himself with a whoop into Geoffrey's opened arms, smiling up at Geoffrey's laughing, shining blue eyes.

---

According to the Kansas Department of Motor Vehicles, Geoffrey had enough on-the-road experience to drive without adult supervision, and Geoffrey had decided that his maiden trip would be to Smallville, carrying with himself nothing but a poorly-packed backpack full of his meager belongings and a sketchpad. 

The way Geoffrey rolled his letters off of his tongue made something in Conner's chest loosen, ease, and like his first thought, it was home, the home Conner had known best.   

Geoffrey talked with his hands--or at least he tried to, fingers moving along the surface of the steering wheel, still a new-enough driver that his hands stayed at ten and two, eyes flicking over to catch Conner's.  Geoffrey talked about St. Ann's, and how all the students there had asked after Conner and wanted to know what it was like to live in such close proximity to farm animals.  He talked about Metropolis changing and the new Wayne Enterprises subsidiary that had opened up next door to the LexCorp building and about maxing out a year's worth of advanced allowances buying yards and yards of premium canvas at Aster's Art and Artistry.  He talked about painting the cityline and how it'd be orange and glowing.  He didn't talk about Eve, just filled the air with his own voice, so that even if they were going thirty-five on turns and hurtling inevitably toward their fiery deaths, Conner was grateful for it. 

"Dad thinks I'm going to die out here," Geoffrey said conversationally. 

"You are you know, going thirty on a right turn," Conner said, slumping down in his seat and bracing his feet against the floor, wincing, feeling the seatbelt digging into his neck comfortingly. 

"I know exactly what I'm doing," Geoffrey soothed, and jerked the car around some more.  "Anyway, I didn't come out all this way just to kill us both." 

Conner covered his face and said, artificially bright, "Well, how am I supposed to know that?  You never call, you don't write--I thought you'd started hating me." 

"Didn't know what to say," Geoffrey admitted, and the car tires made a noise that made Conner murmur a Hail Mary in his head, "and I never know what to write.  You get the iPod I sent?" 

"I sing myself to sleep every night with 'Save a Prayer,' you sick bastard," Conner said affectionately, and braced his left foot against the dashboard, whimpering as he saw a road sign streak past so quickly all he registered was a faint impression of a dizzying shape, lost in a blur.  He didn't even get a color, not even Conner's dad drove this fast. 

Geoffrey grinned.  "I knew you'd like it, you little girl," and added, "Oh, hey, did I just miss your turn?" 

Conner hazarded a glance at his surroundings, and had barely said, "Yes," before Geoffrey was doing a one eighty on the mostly-deserted street, tires shrieking in agony as Conner's voice melted into a high-pitched scream.

---

Conner barely stopped himself from falling to the ground and kissing it when he reached the farmhouse.  Geoffrey had a mild, affectionate look on his face that meant should Conner start any of his usual theatrics, Geoffrey wouldn't be surprised, and Conner endeavored to keep Geoffrey on his toes--if only to keep Geoffrey's attention. 

His grandparents were out for the afternoon, and had left a note on the kitchen counter.  The paper was green and had a pattern of lemons along the bottom edge; his grandmother's curling handwriting informed Conner that they'd gone out to an exhibition on new organic farming techniques, and that Conner would probably need to fend for himself for dinner.  In parentheses, she suggested that he fend with the leftovers in the fridge, and not attempt cooking on his own. 

Geoffrey, who had dropped his bookbag near the couch in the living room found the note hilarious, and grinned while asking Conner how many times he'd blown up the kitchen already.  He moved his hands when he talked like he was shaping words the way he shaped things on notebooks and sketchpads and watercolor paper, he smiled and he was familiar and so well-loved that Conner, watching his best friend stand in this still-foreign place, felt a renewed surge of gratefulness, utter relief, that he knew somebody as good and good for him as Geoffrey. 

"--told Dad I'd be here for the weekend, and he seemed to have no objections," Geoffrey finished, and then furrowed his brow, adding, "Though I don't know how your grandparents would feel about it.  Do you think they'd mind?  I mean, I hadn't thought--" 

"Don't worry," Conner assured him, winding around the kitchen counter and dropping a reassuring hand on Geoffrey's elbow and leading him into the living room, where they crashed onto the sofas.  "They'll be so glad that I'm not sulking in the barn that they won't even care that you're here having post-traumatic stress flashbacks to the first time you milked a cow," Conner said smoothly, turning his head to catch Geoffrey's expression. 

His friend's grimace was enough to tell Conner that the scars of many years previous had not yet totally faded. 

"I touched…" Geoffrey ran out of words.  He wiggled his fingers instead. 

Conner nodded solemnly.  "Yes, yes you did.  And your hands didn't fall off--hey, surprise!" 

"Let's not talk about that anymore," Geoffrey suggested in a rush, and brightened immediately, looking around the room, dark from the early winter evening.  "Can we get some lights on?  This feels like bad farmhouse porn." 

"You--!  Fine," Conner said, losing steam incredibly quickly in the face of Geoffrey's glittering eyes and horrible grin, sulking as he hauled himself off the couch to turn on all the lamps in the room.  It lit the farmhouse soft and orange, rounded with sienna shadows and he had to admit it was better, made the space seem smaller and kinder. 

And when he sat back down again, Geoffrey threw a pillow at him and said: 

"Hey, I really, really miss you, you bastard." 

Conner had to look away, so Geoffrey couldn't see the way Conner's face went all funny and his eyes got red, just so he could say, "Yeah, well." 

Dinner was leftovers, but something about dishing out food onto real plates and distributing silverware, getting up to refill Geoffrey's glass of juice and then settling back down in his seat and talking over a meal with his best friend--and only his best friend--made it all the more intimate.  Made something in Conner's chest thump happily, with great satisfaction.   

Conner felt bad about running the dishwasher when there were only a handful of plates, and bullied Geoffrey into helping him, elbows and hips bumping like they had in chemistry and home economics, looking out the window over the sink and seeing the stars appear one by one in the Kansas sky.  Then Conner set up the cot in his room, made it up with hospital precision and gave Geoffrey a refresher course on the shower, said, "You've had a really long day, how about you shower first?" before backing out the bathroom and giving Geoffrey his privacy. 

They watched movies and then Conner whined until Geoffrey sighed and said, "Fine," and they watched a syndicated rerun of Stargate: Atlantis , but he enjoyed it, too, so Conner didn't feel all that bad.  Eventually, they let the TV be white noise and they just talked, in low, scratchy voices until they were drowsy from a long, long separation. 

And half-asleep Conner could finally tell Geoffrey all the things he'd been thinking, everything that had flashed through his mind when they'd been flirting with disaster in Geoffrey's substandard car.  He talked about his father and the unsuccessful treatment, he talked about starting another six week round of chemo and how his chest hurt just thinking about it.  He talked about how he wanted to be home and he was afraid at the same time.  He talked about his grandfather's cardiac episode, how Clark had finally put his foot down, and rented out the last fifty acres to be sharecropped by a few small organic cooperatives and harassed his father into hiring two farmhands at Clark's expense.  Clark hadn't mentioned, Conner pointed out, that he'd been fired, but Conner figured that was yet another in a long line of secrets that were probably better off kept than clean.   

Conner told Geoffrey about Whitney and Terry and then how much he hated Terry and alternately how much he didn't understand what Terry's problem was, until he saw a strange shadow on Geoffrey's face and said, "So yeah--I'm glad you're back.  Nobody understands me the way you do," and the shadow had lightened, faded, disappeared into an expression of soft delight. 

Conner promised himself if the words "playing house" crossed his mind at all at any point the duration of Geoffrey's visit, Conner would throw himself off the top of the barn in a dramatic but necessary display of apology. 

It didn't work, because that night right before Geoffrey dropped off to sleep in the cot next to Conner's bed, he murmured, "Night, Conner.  See you tomorrow," and then his eyelashes were heavy and dark on his cheeks. 

Conner said, very quietly, into the dark, "Good night, Geoffrey," and found himself achingly curious about what it'd feel like to fall asleep next to Geoffrey, curled up along Geoffrey's long, lithe body, to rest his hand on the angle of Geoffrey's hip and to breath into the curve of Geoffrey's neck.  To wake up in the morning like that, warm and fit together. 

Conner said, "Fuck!" very quietly and then proceeded to spend the rest of the night attempting to smother himself with a pillow, wallowing in miserable, self-pitying lust until he fell into an unsatisfying, half-hearted sleep.

---

Geoffrey wasn't there when Conner woke up, but he was in the kitchen with Conner's grandmother--and he was standing over a waffle iron. 

"Oh my God.  I love you," Conner croaked, alerting Geoffrey and Martha to his tousle-haired, barefooted presence.  He thought he was about to cry.  His grandmother pressed a hand to her mouth, eyes dancing with laughter, shoulders shaking despite her obvious effort not to burst out into giggles.   

Geoffrey cocked his brow and said dryly, "There're fresh strawberries, too." 

He was dressed in old jeans that were worn white in the knees and a baseball shirt, with a dark blue collar and sleeves.  He looked well-rested and happy and exactly the way that Conner's very best friend in the world was supposed to look: good and making waffles. 

"I love you so much right now, Geoffrey," Conner said fervently, taking a few shaky steps forward and reaching out his hands.  "So much." 

Geoffrey looked horrified and backed away, saying, "Conner--your hair could be registered as a disaster area.  You haven't brushed your teeth." 

Conner frowned and Martha tittered, unable to help herself.  "That…those were big words," Conner finally decided.  "I'm going to go--" he made a vague gesture "--you make waffles." 

"I can do that," Geoffrey said amiably. 

Conner swore he heard his grandmother say, "He's always been like this," and Geoffrey say back, "This is probably one of his low points--though, this one time…" as Conner tottered toward the stairs, struggling against gravity.  He tried not think about the implications of Geoffrey gossiping with his grandmother and succeeded when he stubbed his toe (twice) getting into the shower.

---

Twenty minutes later, he was awake, his damp hair was sticking to his neck, and Geoffrey was picking at the last eggs on his plate and chattering with Conner's grandmother, about art and architecture and the galleries that had appeared on North Street when all the warehouses had been shut down in Metropolis' sea change from industrial to high tech.  Conner ate his fourth waffle and watched his grandmother's kind face, Geoffrey's kind eyes, the way that they talked fast and both used their hands, how Geoffrey was being his most polite and then his most charming, and how he slipped up sometimes and made jokes the way he would in front of Conner--and was flushed with surprise when Martha Kent laughed. 

Conner generally wasn't one for sitting back and letting the conversation swim around him, but he'd been starved of this easy camaraderie, lost without his anchors and now that most of them were in place he was still long enough to catch his breath.  He felt as if hidden tension was slowly melting out of him, replaced with something warm and comfortable and good. 

"Speaking of cold," Geoffrey said, glancing at the window to where the morning frost had knit lines and lines of intricate, spidery lace across the glass, "did Conner ever tell you about the thing with the freezer?" 

The kitchen warm against the chill of a frosty, Kansas February; the air had puffed like tiny, despondent clouds when Conner breathed out during his one brief, harried trip to the barn, peeking in to make sure his grandfather was merely supervising the new farmhands, and not tricking them into letting him do all the work.  Jonathan Kent had been behaving, obediently mucking a stall and not making his wife fly into a rage by trying to do something really stupid, like bale hay.  He'd been laughing and happy and waved good morning to Conner as he said, "Go on in, I'll meet you guys inside in a little while." 

Conner winced.  "I don't think my grandmother needs to know about that, Geoffrey." 

Martha's eyes sparkled, and she set down her coffee cup, palms still wrapped around it.  

"I think I need to know about it," she said solemnly. 

"I think you're wrong," Conner protested, though he knew from the way Geoffrey was shifting himself in his seat that it was pointless. 

"So Conner was on one of his little crusades to get us in as much trouble as humanly possible," Geoffrey started, gleeful, because even if Conner was the one who liked to write, it was Geoffrey who liked to tell stories.  "And he came up with this list of twenty-three viable options to achieve his goals." 

Martha laughed.  "How very organized." 

"Meanwhile, I'll be digging myself into a hole through your floors," Conner said sarcastically. 

Geoffrey ignored him, going on blithely.  "Most of them are like, total flops.  His dad's allergic to one of them, a couple of them aren't even scientifically possible.  Oh, and then there was my premature reception of the Talk from like, four nuns and a Father when your grandson here convinces me to distract Sister Tabitha with my newly emerging special feelings." 

His grandmother slapped a hand over her mouth, eyes darting between Conner--who was covering his face, partially to hide his flaming cheeks, partially to hide the fact that he was laughing just as hard--and Geoffrey. 

Geoffrey waved his hands.  "So anyway, the shining moment of this whole thing is when he figures that there's some sort of back route out the kitchens, and we sneak in there during recess and poke around until this genius--" Geoffrey elbows Conner "--says that he hears the law and shoves me into the meat locker." 

"In my own defense," Conner managed, a deranged grin on his face, "the law was coming." 

"The law was nuns," Geoffrey said disdainfully, leveling him a glare. 

"Okay, you only think they're harmless because you never had language tutoring with Sister Gemma," Conner argued, and then turned to his grandmother.  "He's totally mischaracterizing this whole thing--I mean, I shoved him in there to save both our butts.  We were already in loads of trouble for a couple of other things that were definitely not my fault--" 

"So Conner pulls the door shut on both of us, the room goes dark, and after the footsteps fade three things become very clear very quickly," Geoffrey interrupted.  He held up his index finger, saying, "One, it's really cold," then another, "two, we're going to die," and another, "and three, I'm definitely going to kill Conner first because your grandson here says, 'Well, at least we don't have to eat each other' and starts feeling around for the frozen meat." 

At this point, Conner's grandmother was laughing so hard she was supporting herself on the kitchen island, wiping her tears and struggling to say, "Oh, Conner." 

"So I wasn't in for cannibalism!" Conner said, heated. 

"Oh, man," Geoffrey said, laughing, "we had a fun time explaining that to your dad when he came to pick us up.  We were wrapped up in these spare habits they kept in storage and we looked like tiny, shivering angels of death in the back seat of Mr. Luthor's car." 

"Thanks for ruining my life," Conner said brightly, kicking Geoffrey under the table without any real venom. 

"Anytime," Geoffrey agreed sincerely. 

"Geoffrey," Martha said, huffing for breath, "in the future, please feel free to drop by any time and embarrass Conner.  It brightens my day so much." 

"There's something wrong with this whole family," Conner concluded hotly, and he was probably right, too, but he'd known that since day one and loved it since day one and he leaned back again as Geoffrey started in on some other hugely embarrassing escapade and his grandmother refilled her coffee.  His grandfather came through the back door, a gust of cold wind following him, stamping into the mud room to kick off his icy boots and peel off his coat and emerged rosy-cheeked and hungry for another serving of breakfast. 

So Martha Kent laughed and made more eggs and Conner bugged Geoffrey into making more waffles and they ate breakfast for lunch and when the white, afternoon sun slanted into the farmhouse, Conner fell asleep on the couch with his head next to Geoffrey's leg, where his best friend was resting an old copy of Mattimeo, and reading to himself, mouth murmuring the words as he went.

---

"Are you going to be okay going back?" Conner asked urgently. 

"I got here all right," Geoffrey soothed, swinging his backpack into the backseat. 

"Yeah, but, the road conditions have worsened," Conner invented rapidly.  Geoffrey could stay, register at Smallville High.  He could partake in various sports where large, sweaty boys could bash him and Conner could stare in drooling distraction. 

Geoffrey rolled his eyes.  "Conner, it's beautiful, the roads are dry, and you're worrying for no reason.  I'll be fine." 

"If you're sure," Conner compromised. 

"I'm sure," Geoffrey reassured him, and opened the driver's side door, pausing long enough to shift the weight in his hips and jerk Conner in for a one-armed hug, saying into Conner's shoulder, "Hang in there, okay?  You said you wouldn't break my heart." 

Which Conner interpreted as permission to clutch at his best friend and murmur into Geoffrey's neck, "I'll try.  I'll try really hard." 

Then Geoffrey drove away. 

Conner knew how much it had cost Geoffrey not to grab Conner's wrists, push up Conner's sleeves, not to stare too long at the horrible scars that had found their way onto Conner's palms.  Geoffrey had learned the basics of inspection as Conner had learned new ways to hide his dirty little trick, but Geoffrey was better, and thorough, and right, Conner knew grudgingly, and Geoffrey had trusted him this time to take care of himself, not to slice skin or bruise or break himself.  And most of all, Geoffrey had kept it a secret, for Conner, because Conner had begged him not to tell, and Conner didn't want to make that for nothing. 

But the same wave of loneliness that had crested when he'd seen Geoffrey in the parking lot came back and sucked him under with a tidal pull, and Conner found himself laying on the living room floor at four o'clock on a Sunday afternoon staring at the boring, stucco ceiling of the farmhouse, wondering how the hell he was going to do this, what Monday would bring, if Terry would hit him or speak to him, what Conner would do without Geoffrey to prop him up. 

Conner knew all about indulging in his weaknesses, but figured that it was all right for one night, so he curled himself around a pillow and fell asleep, face buried in its side, thinking about the curve of Geoffrey's spine, and the way the bumps of his vertebrae felt against the pads of Conner's finger when they had touched.

---

The next day was blessedly uneventful.   

He got to his classes early and took notes silently in all of them.  Conner wasn't sure, but he had a sinking sensation that the schoolwide rumor mill was a couple of hundred times more effective than the LexCorp interoffice memo system and that everybody already knew what had gone down on Friday afternoon, the whole gory debacle, from Conner's little verbal peccadillo to Terry's manhandling in the parking lot.  

At least the other rumors that were getting him stares had all but died down, Conner thought bitterly.  It seemed that the residents of Smallville weren't such assholes that they'd keep harassing a kid for having gay parents when one said parent was very publicly suffering from a life-threatening illness. 

But as the day crawled by and chemistry edged ever closer, Conner could feel his stomach in revolt.  He'd considered making his grandmother call into the school for him that morning but sighed and figured he couldn't hide from it forever, and it was better not to let a wound fester. 

So Conner was bracing himself for seventh period impact, which was part of the reason why he nearly crapped himself in public when Whitney met him at the door of the cafeteria, her expression volcanic. 

"Why didn't you tell me?" she demanded, grabbing his arm and jerking him out of the cafeteria, outside to where the twin, enormous AC units sat behind the building.  "If Terry was being a jerk--" 

"It's none of your business," Conner said, removing his arm from Whitney's grasp, pasting on his PR face, all calm and sophistication, insusceptible to ordinary human fallacy. 

"I'm your friend, Conner," Whitney said quietly, her voice low, "and I thought Terry was, too.  But if he's being a dick you don't have to take that, all right?  Don't let him push you around." 

Conner saw something in her expression that made his throat close up.  "Whitney?" 

She frowned, and plowed forward, "He likes you a lot, okay?  Don't let him chicken out of this." 

The thing about Whitney and Terry that Conner very rarely considered was that they'd known one another basically since birth.  Whitney and Terry were Geoffrey and Conner, only nobody had a crush on anybody and Conner imagined that allowed Whitney an amazing amount of perspective that Conner pretty much didn't have, since deep down inside he wanted Geoffrey to marry him and buy him manga and make him waffles every morning forever and ever.   

Whitney spoke eagerly about what an asshole Terry was, how he never brushed his hair and that the only reason he was hot was that she hadn't punched him in the face as many times as she should have when they were younger.  She also complained about how Terry liked to scare Whitney's boyfriends--which Conner found endearing--and how he was psychotically overprotective of his little brother, who wasn't even technically autistic, since Asperger's didn't really count.  "And anyway, George is smarter than Terry--" she'd smiled "--not that that's hard to do, but the point stands."  She thought that Terry needed to cut it out, whatever it was, and get on with his life; he couldn't use his little brother as a crutch forever.  Conner had never exactly figured out why Terry needed a crutch, only that Whitney ardently disapproved. 

Conner was about to ask her what she meant by "chicken out" when Terry burst onto the scene practically frothing at the mouth, yelling, "Whitney, don't you fucking dare--!"

At which point Whitney narrowed her eyes and shouted, "Fat lot of room you have to talk you God damn coward--!" 

Which was when Terry threw his bookbag on the ground and got in Whitney's face and incidentally the exact moment when Whitney pulled back her left fist.

---

"Um," Conner said, and handed Terry a towel full of ice. 

Terry said, "Thanks," and held it on his nose, which had stopped bleeding and started swelling and turning purple. 

"Do you think it's broken?" Conner asked tentatively. 

Terry snorted.  "No, it just hurts like a motherfucker." 

They were hiding in the Barn Loft, Not The Fortress of Solitude Because That Is A Stupid Name, as Conner called it, sitting on the old couch with a bucket of ice Conner had liberated from the kitchen, emptying every single ice cube tray in the freezer.  It was technically still seventh period, but Conner figured that since Terry's nose had been bleeding profusely after Whitney had punched him in the face, they'd had a pretty good excuse not to go to class.  Whitney had even felt bad enough to drive them home in Terry's car. 

"Oh my God your face is hard," she'd whined, flexing her hand. 

"Your hand hurts?" Terry had shrieked in a muffled, nasal voice, holding an old t-shirt Conner had dug out of the duffle bag in the trunk of the car to his face.  "Your hand?" 

"Stop being such a girl, Terry," Whitney had sing-songed and then Conner had threatened to grab the wheel and kill all three of them if Whitney and Terry didn't shut up. 

He'd planned on making the two of them talk it out, because if it was bad enough to come to blows, it was bad enough that the only way to resolve it was one of those agonizing, heartfelt conversations.  But Whitney had simply deposited Conner and Terry at the farmhouse and started driving away, saying that she'd return the car in the morning and flipping Terry the bird as he shouted imprecations at her from Conner's driveway, watching his car disappear into the distance. 

Which was why they were hiding in the barn loft with a bucket of ice between them while Terry sulked and Conner wondered what the hell had just happened. 

"God, she's such a bitch," Terry moaned, taking the towel off of his face to touch his nose gently, wincing as his fingers brushed against the swollen flesh.   

Conner grimaced and pulled his hands away, replacing the towel himself and gently brushing Terry's bangs out of the way, saying quietly, "I don't know what just went down, Terry, but you and Whitney have got to learn how to let each other finish your sentences." 

"Wouldn't help," Terry said stubbornly. 

"Have you ever tried?" Conner asked dryly. 

Terry stared hard at Conner's face for a long time before he said abruptly, "I'm sorry." 

Conner almost opened his mouth to ask for what when he remembered Friday and the parking lot and that all things considered, he probably should have been the one to deck Terry.  But Conner had his own Very Special Issues with physical violence, and every time he was tempted to hit somebody he thought about his father's broken wrist, the dark, terrifying bruise that had manifested on Geoffrey's arm one time when they'd been very small, and the desire shot through with fear and nausea.  Conner focused on rearranging the towel on Terry's face, not making eye-contact and saying: 

"I already told you: I'm not mad." 

"I think that's almost what's killing me the most," Terry croaked. 

Conner's brows knit together, and when he looked up, Terry's face was as red as his nose and his eyes looked huge and he seemed scared, taking huge, gulping breaths.  Conner let his hand fall away from Terry's face, dropping the towel and the ice into the bucket and frowning. 

The thing is, Conner thought to himself quietly, the thing is that even if Geoffrey was here and Geoffrey made me happy, Terry's here now and Terry makes me unhappy.  So if this was a crush Conner wasn't over it, and he really didn't need Terry sitting in the barn loft, making those horrible eyes at him and saying ’sorry’ like he meant it, not if he was just going to run hot and cold, be Conner's friend one minute and touch Melanie the vampire's breasts another.  Conner had almost been sucked into normal but normal hadn't wanted him, and he was okay with that--sort of, or at least, he would be in the long run--but he wasn't okay with Terry doing this to him again, especially not since he knew that he'd let Terry get away with it. 

"You know," Conner said, modulating his voice carefully, "I don't get you." 

He'd already showed Terry his hand once, and he wasn't prepared to do it again, not when he felt so confused, all soft from where Geoffrey had unknotted him over the weekend, opened all of Conner's windows and doors. 

So Conner didn't look at Terry's face when he went on and muttered, "You're so nice to me when I just get into town, you give me rides home, you trick me into being social.  You're not even terrible at Chemistry when you really try, and then you turn into this total stereotypical asshole overnight almost."  Conner rubbed his face, tired of this conversation already.  "Look, I already said I wasn't mad, and I mean it so--" 

"I really like you," Terry interrupted solemnly, voice serious enough to make Conner's eyes dart up in shock, only to find on Terry's face a sort of open fear that shook him out, made Conner's fingers go limp.  "I really, really like you." 

Conner's mouth fell open.  "Um." 

"It's almost embarrassing how much," Terry went on, suddenly feverish.  "You have no idea.  I even like how you correct my grammar, it's so sick I can't stand it." 

Conner choked.  "Uh." 

"I punched a hole through one of those poker chips you gave me with a drill bit," Terry babbled, eyes shining with manic light, digging through his pocket all of a sudden and shoving his key ring in Conner's face, Conner's eyes focusing on the Bellagio emblem when they stopped crossing.  "I play with it all the time and I get this stupid look on my face and George says I'm so obvious that everybody's going to know and then I'll be fucked.  I never should have taught him to cuss when he was four," Terry added, all in one breath. 

"I," Conner said feebly. 

"You totally think I'm stupid but I don't even care," Terry continued, desperate, dropping the key ring to latch his large, brown fingers on Conner's shirt sleeve.  "I skipped the post-game bonfire after we won the championship game and everybody in the entire school was pissed off at me about it and all I could do was think about you asleep in my car." 

Conner cleared his throat, but it didn't help and when he said, "So you like me?" it came out as a high-pitched and totally embarrassing squeak. 

Terry said, "Can I kiss you?" 

"Um," Conner said, but didn't manage to get out a "yes" or a "no" or a "you're gay?" before Terry had his hand on the back of his neck and was pulling Conner in, close, his mouth closed over Conner's.  It was hard and sort of uncomfortable and really strange and Terry jerked back with a hiss because their noses bumped, but then Conner said, "Oh my God, you like me!" and Terry yelled, "Oh my God, you didn't know?" but before they could start pointing fingers and arguing, Conner said: 

"Oh my God, shut up!" and grabbed Terry by the front of his t-shirt and jerked him in again, careful to tilt his head a little so Terry wouldn't pull away again and then Conner opened his mouth. 

Conner thought he was going to say, "yes, yes, yes to everything" but instead he just slid his tongue over the line of Terry's perfect, All-American teeth and made the kiss wetter, slicker, hotter and messier and he loved it, loved it so much.  He'd kissed exactly one person before and that had been in a dark closet at a terrible party with Geoffrey outside the door keeping time for Seven Minutes in Heaven so he probably didn't know what the hell he was doing, but Terry was making low, grunting noises in the back of his throat, so Conner figured he was doing okay. 

And then Terry's hand knotted tightly in his hair, which probably should have hurt but was actually incredibly hot, so Conner moaned into Terry's mouth threw his arms over Terry's shoulders, sliding their bodies closer together.  The ice bucket was still between them and Terry's nose was going to be the size of a football soon and this totally wasn't hot at all except it was the hottest thing ever, which basically proved what total whores boys were. 

Terry remembered that they had to breathe first, and when he pulled away, his mouth was wet and swollen and his chin was wet and his eyes were glazed and Conner wanted to kiss him again immediately--no more of this silly oxygen--but Terry said, "Can I--?" 

"Yes," Conner snapped, shoving the bucket onto the floor, where the ice scattered across the old boards with a plastic, hollow sound, skidding across wood. 

Terry frowned.  "I didn't even--" 

"Terry, I'm sixteen.  Yes, go ahead, do not pass Go, do not collect two hundred dollars," Conner muttered feverishly, tugging up the hem of Terry's shirt only to find another one underneath and throwing him a dirty look, nails scrabbling against the cloth until his hands met skin.   

"Oh my God," Terry moaned and pulled Conner in for another kiss, possibly messier than the one before but Conner's hands were mapping out the flat plane of Terry's stomach and mostly his thought process was "wow!" and "hot!" and "this rocks!" with a lot of "oh my God, what am I doing?" in between incoherent glee. 

At some point Terry's hands slid up inside Conner's shirt and Conner's rational mind promptly left the building, which left him with lots of teenaged lust and just enough mental acuity to shove Terry down on the couch, straddle Terry's hips, and tug Terry's shirt over his head.  Conner ran his hands over Terry's chest curiously, feeling Terry's hard-on digging into his thigh, and fear and adrenaline made Conner lightheaded.  He was either going to come in his pants right then or puke and it was the best feeling ever. 

"Okay, this isn't a bad thing," Terry panted, looking glazed and happy, "but you're kind of a slut." 

"I went to Catholic school for a really long time, Terry," Conner said.  Then, he took a huge breath and blurted out, "Also, I'm a virgin so I'll probably suck at this, okay?" which proved that not only was Conner sort of a whore he was totally a moron, too. 

Terry neither laughed nor frowned nor sighed in disgust and did not reach up to shove Conner off of his lap, he only grinned and reached up to stroke Conner's arm.  For no good reason at all, it made Conner shudder out a breath, made it easier to relax, stop rushing.  Terry was smiling and something about it made Conner less scared, and Conner smiled, tentatively. 

"Hey," Terry said quietly, and the whole room stilled, like he'd reset a metronome, and the beats of Conner's heart slowed.  "We don't have to do this right now." 

Conner almost said, "okay" because he didn't want to say anything that sounded like "no" to Terry ever and he was kind of a coward, but he took a deep breath and leaned down, curved his spine and kissed Terry again, not quite as urgently.   And when he pulled away, he murmured, "I really want to."

Terry's smile got softer and so did his voice and he said, "Okay," and kissed Conner again, soft and sweet and slowly, with aching gratitude, his palms smoothing up and down Conner's sides, moving over Conner's thighs, stroking Conner's back.

And by the time Terry was sliding his big hand into Conner's jeans Conner wasn't scared at all, just amazed and happy and turned on and really excited, tightening his own fist around Terry's dick, which was huge and hot in his hand.  It made Terry yelp in surprise, which made Conner laugh, and then Terry said, "You--!" and kissed him hard so that when they came all over each other's hands, rubbing together, the maddening friction of denim and new skin and the cotton of Conner's pushed-up shirt pushing them over the edge, Conner still smiling into Terry's mouth, saying "yes, yes, yes to everything" without saying a word.

---

Later, after Conner had rationed out tissues to clean himself and Terry up and then used up the rest of the box to soak up the water and slivers of ice all over the loft floor, after they'd zipped and tucked and curled against one another on the couch again, Terry tightened his hand where it rested on Conner's hip and asked strangely: 

"So who was that blond guy?" 

"He's my friend from back in Metropolis," Conner started carefully, and then blinked in amazement.  "Wow." 

Terry pinked.  "I'm just curious." 

"Wow," Conner commented again, and picked up Terry's hand to look at his watch, saying, "It's been like, twelve minutes since we had sex, you know." 

Terry scowled and tugged at Conner until Conner was sprawled over Terry's larger frame, draped decadently over Terry's chest, which put Conner in a perfect position to appreciate the rumble when Terry growled, "You were all over each other." 

"I hugged him," Conner pointed out, "it's not like we made out in front of you." 

Conner imagined that Terry probably didn't really want to know Conner's entire back-story with Geoffrey, or about how Conner had wanted Geoffrey to marry him and buy him manga and make him waffles forever and ever and ever.  Conner also didn't really want to think about it, in part because Geoffrey was terminally heterosexual and also because he really, really liked Terry, and there was that thing where they'd just had sex.  Sex, Conner thought stupidly, he couldn't believe people ever went to work or read books or watched movies or anything when they could be having sex.  It boggled the mind. 

"Did you make out not in front of me?" Terry demanded, but more playfully. 

"No, and I'm not going to tell you how that sentence doesn't really parse," Conner said tolerantly, grinning wildly, "it'd only turn you on so much that you'd probably ravish me again." 

"Yeah, that'd be terrible," Terry sympathized. 

They were quiet for a little while, and Conner put his head down on Terry's shoulder, heard the faint thud of Terry's heart through his clothes and thought about how he'd memorize Terry's heartbeat, too, now, learn it the same way he'd learn Geoffrey's. 

Total panic didn't really set in until he woke up four hours later in a pitch-black barn loft alone.

---

There weren't any paper bags to breathe into and Terry wasn't there to yell at so Conner did the only rational thing and called Lois from where he'd decided to curl up in a corner as far away from the couch as humanly possible without leaving the room.  Conner's knees were pulled up to his chest and he scowled at the desecrated piece of furniture as hard as he possibly could.  

"Lane," she said. 

"I just had sex in the barn," Conner said very quickly.  "I mean--not just now, but--" 

"Wait," Lois cut him off.  "You just had sex in Clark's barn?" 

It was getting kind of cold and he was kind of sniffling, and he didn't know whether it was because Terry had just left him or because it was getting kind of cold. 

Conner moaned.  "Yes, Lois, listen, I'm kind of freaking out--" 

"Oh my God!" Lois crowed, overjoyed.  "You lost your virginity in Clark's barn!" 

"Lois!" Conner wailed. 

"Can I tell him?" she asked urgently, pleading.  "I mean, only a little bit.  Please?" 

"No!" Conner shouted.  "Lois, focus!  Focus!"  

"Okay, okay," she said sullenly before she brightened and cooed, "My little boy, all grown up and popping his cherry in his mom's Fortress of Solitude--I'm so proud of you." 

Conner buried his face in his knees.

---

Lois drilled him about Terry--"Conner, you scored with the star quarterback, this is probably the coolest way to lose your virginity ever," she consoled him--and then cursed Terry--"He left you?  How could anybody leave you?  You just put out!" she shouted, enraged--and then begged some more to tell Clark--"Please?  Please please please?" she asked--before she said: 

"Look, Conner, based on what you've told me, this guy doesn't sound like an asshole.  Something probably came up, so breathe in and out and talk to him tomorrow, okay?  Besides," she'd added after a pause, "if it comes down to it, I know some guys who know some guys and you know where he lives." 

At which point his grandmother came up to the loft--where I just had sex, Conner thought in horror--to call him to dinner.  He managed to choke down his food but was sent to bed early on account that he, to quote his grandmother, "looked awful." 

Buried beneath the covers, he moaned into his pillow and tried not to let his mind run wild.   

Terry hadn't appeared to have freaked out during or after and it made absolutely no sense that he would have suddenly had a panic attack after Conner had fallen asleep and run away.  Only it did make sense, Conner moaned, because he was doing the exact same thing, only it was because Terry was a bastard. 

By the time Conner finally fell into a fitful sleep, he'd decided he'd set Terry's car on fire and vow celibacy and join a monastery, because seriously, it wasn't worth it.  Only when he woke up it was to Terry's concerned face. 

"What?" Conner said blurrily, and he sat up, leaning against his headboard and stared at Terry.  He was angry, or he had been last night, only he couldn't quite remember all the details and it was really early and Terry looked really hot.  He was wearing the jeans that were all worn on the thighs and Conner wanted to reach out and touch the cloth. 

"Your grandmother said you were sick," Terry said gently, and sat on the edge of Conner's bed, stroking Conner's matted bangs away from his face.  "I just wanted to make sure you were okay." 

Conner's brain kicked into gear and he smacked Terry's hand away.  "You!" he hissed. 

Terry's eyes widened.  "What?" he asked, sounding hurt. 

"You left me!" Conner accused.  "In the barn!  After we--you know!" 

For a moment, Terry looked like Conner was speaking in a totally different language before understanding washed over his face like a particularly slow wave and he tucked Conner's hair behind his ear and said feebly, "I didn't want to wake you up!" 

"You asshole!" Conner said, but without any real vehemence, since his whole body had gone soft from relief.  "That--you--!" 

"And I had to get my car back from Whitney," Terry went on, and frowned.  "I left you a note." 

Conner had opened his mouth to steamroll Terry and yell at him about how you didn't just do that to a person and how Terry was clearly going to have to make this up to Conner and how he was a jerk but at least he was hot but now his jaw was left hanging as Conner's mind braked rapidly. 

Terry frowned.  "You didn't see the note," he said. 

"You--!  I--!" 

"Ah," Terry corrected.  "You didn't look for a note.  You just freaked out." 

Conner sputtered for a few seconds before he narrowed his eyes and pointed at Terry, saying, "Okay, I'm going to let this one go because I'm so totally, stupidly grateful that it wasn't anything bad but this is the only time." 

Terry rolled his eyes.  "Okay, sure," he said tolerantly and Conner thought, it must be love. 

Then Terry smirked and opened his mouth to talk and Conner totally had to kiss him to make sure he didn't say anything to wreck the moment. 

Later, after a day of classes were Conner made a total ass of himself fourteen (14) times, he and Terry made out in the barn for an hour before Conner found the note stuck in between the arm of the couch and one of the cushions. 

It said, "I've got to go save my car from Whitney, the whore, didn't want to wake you up.  You look really nice when you're sleeping.  I'll pick you up for class tomorrow okay?  T." 

"I guess I'll keep you," Conner said between kisses, mouth swollen and red, arms looped over Terry's broad shoulders. 

"Yeah, cause I was really worried about that," Terry muttered, and slid his hand up Conner's shirt.

turn the page