The air in the Legion clubhouse was filled with a sharp, burnt plastic smell, thanks to Lightning Lad's latest practice and that ozone vibe hanging around. It stuck to everything – the shiny furniture, the holographic mission logs flashing on the walls, even the annoying protein bars Rokk always had around. But deep down, there was just a hint of Imra's perfume lingering around. Vanilla and something chill, like a bit of sparkle. That smell hit me harder than Kryptonite.
I flopped down on this super weirdly shaped sofa, just looking up at the ceiling with its fake nebula lights. My head was killing me, and it definitely wasn't because of Cosmic King's latest mind-blast attempt. It was just guilt. The guilt feels so heavy and sticky, like someone just dropped a bunch of dense goo right in my stomach. Last night was a vibe. The chill observation gallery. Saturn Girl leaned against the sturdy plexiglass, taking in the view of Titan. The rings of Saturn cast cool, icy stripes of light on her skin… and on mine too. She didn't gasp because of the chilly sight. The memory was as intense as a solar flare.
"Hey Supes." Rokk's voice broke into my thoughts. He walked in, looking like someone just kicked his puppy. His little pup. Lightning Lad! My buddy. The dude whose girlfriend I just… yeah. He flopped down on the sofa next to me with a thud, looking all slouched over. He didn't even glance my way, just kept his eyes on his hands where tiny sparks of electricity flickered anxiously between his fingers. "Imra... she broke up with me." His voice sounded flat and empty. Like the echo in a drained reactor core.
My stomach performed a Night Girl-worthy backflip. "Dumped?" I tried to sound shocked, worried, and completely unrelated as I choked out, which wasn't difficult to do. It appears that I was mistaken to believe that Imra would continue to be in a relationship with Rokk. "Rokk, man… what happened?" It tasted like ashes, the lie. It feels particularly scummy to act foolish when you're essentially a god. What was I going to say, though? "Yeah, I'm sorry, buddy. Your true love? She completely lost it last night while you were having fun at the Ballroom. My fault." Not happening.
With a jerky, defeated motion, he shrugged. On his knuckles, sparks popped out. "Said... it wasn't working. No longer felt "the spark." His laugh crackled with static and was bitter. "The spark. Coming from me, that's rich." At last, he turned to face me, his eyes rimmed in red. "Nate, we were meant to be together forever. Did you know? Legend of the Legion. Saturn Girl and Lightning Lad. Like... fate." He sounded disoriented. Like a child who has just discovered Santa isn't real, only much worse.
I shifted awkwardly and muttered, "Destiny's a jerk sometimes." It felt too tight, too alien, like my Kryptonian skin. Nathan Cornsweat, the college student still missing instant ramen and studying for his economics midterms, was yelling inside. What on earth did you do? This was not meant to be a messy situation. It was simply exploring. To have a real feeling. When Imra touched me, I felt the excitement of the secret and the forbidden electricity crackling beneath her cool telepath skin. It was thrilling, a respite from the debilitating monotony of guarding the Fifth Dimension and watching over abstract ideas of the imagination. With the Legion, here on Earth-247? It had a living quality. Complicated, sticky, messy, yet alive.
Watching Rokk who was broken? It seemed too real. Too heavy. I thought about fixing him for a split second. Snapping my fingers and rewriting yesterday with my imp powers. Pretend it never occurred. However, that felt even worse... similar to cheating. Like acknowledging that I was merely dressing up in Clark Kent's borrowed cape and wasn't actually living here. In addition, Imra looked at me last night as if I were her new fate. Back then, her eyes weren't cold. They were incinerated. That would be vaporized if I fixed Rokk.
I forced a smile that felt like cheap plastic and said, "Come on. Ignore fate. Take a moment to forget about Imra." I pushed him. "We should go to the gravity gym. Fry some punching droids. Let off some steam." My fingertips tingled with cosmic imp powers, a faint prod that lifted a tiny bit of the crushing despair from him. Making the pain bearable, not eliminating it. Sufficient to breathe. He sniffed, wiped his nose with the back of his hand. A tiny spark jumped. "Yeah? You think?"
"Know it," I said, getting to my feet and giving him a shoulder clap. The Legion uniform made his muscles tense. "Dude, you're Lightning Lad. The fastest draw for the Legion. Girls swarm the neighborhood to try their hand at you." At least this part was accurate. Rokk Krinn was a hero. A real good man. When he wasn't moping, he was charming, strong, and handsome. He would recover. Quick. Likely quicker than I had hoped.
He forced a feeble smile. "Perhaps you're correct." He got up and stretched. The sparks that danced across his skin appeared more vibrant and vivacious. More restless energy, less grief. "Thank you, Supes. Really." He gave my arm a light punch. "I don't know what I'd do without you."
The phrase "If only you knew" reverberated in my mind more loudly than the logic circuits of the Brainiac 5. The guilt became more twisted. I was Superman, the symbol of hope, and he saw me as his anchor. Not the cockroach from space that took his girl.
Two weeks later. It turns out that Lightning Lad's default setting was "fast..." not only in his abilities. How long did it take him to recover? The speed was blink-and-you-miss-it. He's drowning his sorrows in synthale with me one minute, and then what? In the mess hall, he is leaning in close to make Shrinking Violet laugh. Every time he zipped past Violet, she flushed red. By the third week, he was seen in the starlit lounge holding hands with Phantom Girl, Tinya's ghostly figure glimmering with warmth. Attending a mission briefing and witnessing his effortless charm of Triplicate Girl's three bodies at the same time? That was the decisive factor.
That weight of a neutron star pressing down on my chest, the guilt? On Mercury, it evaporated more quickly than water. Poof. Lost. In its place—relief? Annoyance? How simple it was for him to trade up? Imra's words reverberated: "I didn't feel the spark anymore." Perhaps she had a point. Whoever smiled at Rokk next might have been his "one true love." Hero privilege.
Consequently, my issue intensified. Because I was juggling thermonuclear warheads dressed as girlfriends, while Rokk was busy gathering phone numbers (or whatever the futuristic equivalent is).
Saturn Girl. Imra. Still a secret. Still very intense. Our "meetings" were moments of stealth: a telepathic whisper during a boring council meeting, her fingers grazing mine beneath the table; a desperate, panting encounter in an abandoned storage bay after the lights went out, her mind open and hungry against mine, her cool skin burning against my Kryptonian heat. The excitement was still there. It was more acute, tinged with the risk of being found out. Instead of viewing my Fifth-Dimensional oddity as a weakness, she found it fascinating... unusual. Risky. She enjoyed danger.
Then there was Kara. Supergirl. Whatever she was to me. My time-travel-crime partner. My previous secret before the Legion. Together, we entered the twenty-first century, energized by the rush of leaving behind the past, Metropolis, and the dull duty of being super-cousins. We weren't expected to be anything more. However, my desire for "real" overcame me. The fact that it was so impossible—cousins! or at least technical cousins—only made it more intense. Squared forbidden fruit.
It took more skill than Mxyzptlk to keep them apart; it was a full-time job. Superman is noble, strong, and subtly otherworldly; I had to exercise caution around Imra. Alongside Kara? Nathan could be myself. The guy who detested calculus and could still taste cheap pizza. She hardly understood the slang used by the man who occasionally slipped. The messy, self-centered, homesick imp in a Superman suit was the real me that Kara knew. She was aware of the crushing duty I fled, the Fifth Dimension. She was aware that I was more than Clark. She noticed the fissures. Still, she stayed.
The farewell was unavoidable. Kara missed her the past. Her companions. Her life. To be honest, staying in the future meant constantly avoiding Superboy Prime detection procedures and avoiding Legionnaires from finding out about my secrets. We were standing close to the main time bubble chamber of the Legion. With her blue eyes and blond hair gleaming in the sterile light, Kara looked stunning. She softly used my real name, a stolen intimacy, when she said, "It's been… wild, Nathan." She threaded her fingers through mine. powerful. "But we gotta go back. Before someone notices we've rewritten a dozen minor historical footnotes."
"Yeah," I said as I drew her near. She smelled so different from Imra's frigid star-vanilla—sunlight and Kryptonian ozone. "Returning to the dull 21st century." I sounded unconvincing. I had had a real time here. Excitingly complex, messy, and filled with guilt. Actual.
Imra materialized like a ghost close to the chamber controls, appearing silently. Her expression was calm, flawless, Legion Leader. However, she fixed her gaze on mine. A feather-light, incredibly private telepathic whisper swept across my mind: "Don't forget Titan's rings."
I brushed past Imra as Kara moved toward the glistening time bubble portal, its chroniton field humming softly. My hand slid under Imra's Legion tunic at a speed faster than even Kara could follow. Only for a split second. Under the uniform cloth, I cupped the warm, velvety swell of her breast. She let out an audible gasp. I saw a flash of pure, startled heat before her mental shields slammed down hard. She didn't give me an angry look. It was a pledge. Dark promise, exciting promise.
Then I felt Kara's hand pull at mine. "Slowpoke, hurry up!" We then passed through the glistening curtain. Like a dream, the future disappeared behind us.
My apartment back in Metropolis had a stale smell. Dust particles dancing in the afternoon sunbeam slicing through half-closed blinds, and old takeout containers... regularity. I hadn't even finished putting my belt on the couch when Batman's shadow appeared in my doorway. He did not knock. He suddenly showed up. Like an expensive, sulky gargoyle.
"Three weeks," he snarled. His voice sounded like bedrock being scraped by gravel. His cowl lenses were judgmental abysses. "Unexpected temporal deviation. To an uncertain future. alongside Supergirl." He didn't inquire. He spoke. Like he'd watched the whole damn soap opera unfold.
I pretended to be casual as I leaned back. "Bats, it was a scouting mission... possible dangers in the future. Items from Legion. You know how it is." My grin felt brittle under his stare.
"Don't insult my intelligence," he snapped, stepping fully inside. Silently, the door closed behind him. "The timeline is brittle, Clark. There are repercussions for what you did." He wielded the name as a weapon. "It is not League protocol to engage in careless tourism."
"Tourism?" I sneered and got to my feet, glaring at him. "We prevented Starfinger from robbing Titan! Prevented a chronal cascade failure in the Negation Zone!" Well, perhaps I accidentally broke a temporal anchor during a… private moment with Imra, which led to the cascade failure. A small detail.
"Your 'help' leaves ripples," Batman shot back, his icy rage radiating from him. "We must contain ripples. Cornsweat, lives are on the line." My fictitious name. He knew... or sufficiently suspected. My imp senses were pricked. He was discussing more than just timelines. He was referring to Lightning Lad. Concerning Imra. Regarding the tangled mess I left behind. Though he was unaware of the details, he could see the patterns of fallout. "Next time, consider this. There are actual repercussions. Not dreams."
He didn't wait for a response... simply turned and vanished into the darkness of the hallway. Lost. However, his words weighed more than Kryptonite chains as they hung in the stale air. Repercussions. Timelines, he meant... stability... obligation. However, all I could hear was Kara's reassuring hand drawing me back, Imra's snatched gasp, and Rokk's broken voice. The mess I had created. Once more, the authenticity I sought tasted like ashes.
For a minute only, though. Metropolis pulsed outside my window, even though Batman might cast a long shadow. In the distance, sirens cried out. Hotdogs from street vendors and exhaust fumes wafted in. Normalcy. For Nathan Cornsweat, the cosmic imp portraying Superman? After the sensory overload of the thirty-first century, even normalcy was an exhilarating experience.