Super Family Jon And Lois

On Sunday mornings, the Kent family had pancakes.

This was a rule as firm as any law in Metropolis — firmer, because Lois enforced it. She made them from scratch, which was the source of some friendly disagreement with Clark, who felt that the boxed mix was also quite good. Lois had strong opinions about this. Jon agreed with his mother, partly because he genuinely did prefer the from-scratch version and partly because he had very quickly learned that agreeing with Lois Lane was almost always the wisest course of action.

Jon Kent ate his pancakes at the kitchen table and considered, as he often did, the strange and wonderful fact of his life.

His dad could fly. His mom could write a story that changed the world. And Jon — well. Jon was still figuring out exactly what he could do, because the powers didn't all come at once. They arrived in pieces, unexpected, like surprises from a world he'd never seen. Last month: heat vision, which had gone off accidentally when he laughed too hard, scorching a neat hole in the living room wall. Last week: super-hearing had arrived with a rush of sound so overwhelming that he'd had to sit on the floor with his hands over his ears while Clark coached him through breathing exercises.

"Focus on one sound," Clark had said, crouching in front of him. "Pick one sound and hold onto it."

"Which one?"

"Your heartbeat. It's always there. It's always yours."

Jon had closed his eyes and found it. One steady, thumping sound in the center of all the noise. And slowly, slowly, the rest of the world had come down to a manageable volume.

He thought about that lesson a lot. His dad was good at lessons.

Clark Kent was many things. He was Superman, obviously — the Man of Steel, Last Son of Krypton, champion of truth and justice and all of it. But at the kitchen table on Sunday mornings with syrup on his tie, he was just Dad. He forgot where he put his glasses. He laughed too loudly at his own jokes. He asked Jon about school with the genuine, unhurried curiosity of someone who actually wanted to know.

And he told Jon things. Not the big cosmic things — those came in their own time — but the quiet things that mattered more. That being kind was more important than being powerful. That the hardest thing about having extraordinary abilities was not using them when every part of you wanted to. That his grandmother Martha, in the farmhouse in Smallville, had told Clark once that being good was a choice you made fresh every single morning, and Clark had never forgotten it.

Lois listened to all of this from her end of the table, reading her notes, her coffee going cold in the way it always did when she was thinking hard. She was the one who kept the Kents human — not in a small way, but in the most important way possible. She was the one who made sure that Clark remembered the apartment on East Thirty-Third with the broken radiator, and the family who lived there, and the follow-up story that needed writing. She was the one who told Jon that courage wasn't the absence of fear, it was the decision to do something necessary despite fear. She was the one who knew every single facet of this impossible man she had married, and loved all of them, and did not let him forget who he was.

Jon finished his pancakes. Outside the kitchen window, Metropolis hummed with its Sunday quiet.

"Dad," Jon said, "can we fly today?"

Clark looked at him. Something warm moved across his face — something that looked, if you were watching closely, a lot like joy.

"We can always fly," he said.

They went out to the field on the edge of the city where the buildings thinned and the sky opened up, and Clark showed Jon how to hold his arms and how to lean into the direction he wanted to go, and the first time Jon lifted off the ground — shaky and too fast and absolutely not in control — he burst out laughing, and Clark caught him, and they rose together over the city in the Sunday morning light.

Lois stood below with her phone and took a picture.

She saved it to a folder that she had named simply: us.

In the Fortress of Solitude, surrounded by the echoes of Krypton, Clark carried this knowledge above everything else: his greatest strength had nothing to do with the yellow sun. It had to do with the people who chose to stand beside him. The woman who was brave enough to love a man with the weight of the world on his shoulders. The boy who was brave enough to grow up in that same shadow and still laugh.

The family he had never expected.

The family that had turned out to be everything.