Eight o'clock in the morning, Midtown High.
Sunlight spilled across the faces of the students. As for whatever had happened the night before, whatever chaos had broken out across the city, none of them cared.
What mattered to them was whether lunch would be any good, whether a cute girl might talk to them, and whether class would be boring.
Peter, Gwen, and Cindy all had dark circles under their eyes and looked exhausted.
Their mutations had given them strong recovery, sure, but every single one of them had stayed up late.
The memory of last night kept replaying in their heads, not just the excitement of the fight, but the things they had learned from it, and the faint sense that the future was starting to shift under their feet.
"I called the hospital this morning," Peter said quietly. "Eddie's still in the ICU, but his vitals are stable now. They said he'll probably wake up tomorrow."
"Thank God... and thank Clark..." Gwen said, clasping her hands together and lowering her head slightly.
She thought back to Clark the night before, calm, steady, controlling the entire situation from behind the scenes, and that only deepened the feelings she already had for her childhood friend.
Cindy yawned and squeezed the pen in her hand without thinking.
It bent flat.
"Oh, come on." She hurriedly hid the ruined pen. A nerdy girl casually crushing pens with her fingers was not exactly a subtle look.
"Learn to control your strength, my friends," Clark said, walking over looking annoyingly refreshed and handing each of them a coffee. "Especially at school."
He gave them a faint grin.
"Drink up. Otherwise people are going to think the three of you were out all night committing crimes."
Peter and the others immediately took the coffee and gulped it down.
"Thanks, Clark. About last night..."
Clark waved both hands at once, cutting him off and distancing himself from everything.
"Nope. I went to sleep early. Sleeping when it rains is the best."
He absolutely did not want them getting into the habit of thinking like:
Ah! Let's go find Clark, the all-powerful one! He's invincible!
Because then the second they hit any real problem, that would become their solution to everything.
At that moment, Harry appeared from nowhere.
For some reason, his hair was just as messy as theirs, and he didn't look especially alive either.
"You guys have no idea what kind of torture I went through last night," Harry said, leaning against Peter's locker and rubbing at his brow.
"What happened, rich boy?" Gwen teased. "Dad cut off your credit card?"
Without saying a word, Clark pulled another coffee from his locker and handed it to Harry.
He had apparently prepared coffee for everyone.
"Thanks. And no, it was worse than that by a factor of ten thousand." Harry took the coffee and lowered his voice. "My father completely lost it last night and dragged half the senior leadership back into the office."
"Did you see the news? That explosion at the garage in Brooklyn? The villain they caught had a mechanical exoskeleton using technology from one of Oscorp's subsidiaries!"
Peter, Gwen, and Cindy all exchanged a deeply guilty look.
Harry didn't even notice their expressions and just kept complaining.
"That thing was supposed to be a sealed prototype in the lab, but somehow it ended up on the black market. Norman is furious. He's tearing through security records and investigating everyone. He thinks someone inside the company's working with organized crime. The keys I barely managed to get were confiscated immediately..."
"Thanks for the materials, by the way. And wow, that really is tragic," Clark said with a perfectly straight face, calmly sipping his coffee and handing one more to Mary Jane as she walked up.
At this point he was basically some kind of coffee sage.
At lunch, everyone else went off to eat, but Clark, still trying to avoid becoming entangled in whatever emotional pursuit Felicia had decided to launch at him, made a show of hiding in the library.
Naturally, he wasn't reading anything serious.
He was reading an old issue of Superman.
In this universe, DC's Superman had only lasted as the lead in Action Comics for a few dozen issues before being replaced by a new flagship hero called Soldier Boy, a more obvious Captain America counterpart.
Lying on a library bench, Clark heard footsteps approaching, along with a familiar perfume.
Felicia Hardy.
Today she was wearing a fitted black knit sweater, her long hair loose around her shoulders, emerald-green eyes fixed on Clark as he lay there.
"Good afternoon, big brother simp," Felicia said in one shot.
Clark bolted upright on pure instinct.
"Upperclassman! Don't slander me like that! You do not know me at all!"
Even though it was lunchtime, the librarian hadn't left. Someone still had to keep an eye on the place.
So one extremely resentful stare immediately shot toward Clark from across the room.
It practically said:
Shut up, kid. Do you know where you are?
Clark immediately put his hands together and bowed his head in apology.
Fair enough. He had broken the rules first. He was the one who'd gotten loud.
Mainly because Felicia had just said something wildly misleading.
That was why he'd reacted like that.
Just because she'd kissed him once didn't mean she got to run around saying whatever she wanted.
Felicia blinked those wide eyes at him, as if astonished that Clark had actually raised his voice at her.
In the end, Clark sighed. He was getting more and more helpless when it came to this catlike upperclassman.
"Upperclassman, robbery is forbidden in the library. So is spreading slander."
"I wasn't planning to rob you," Felicia said, stepping closer. "I just came to confirm something."
She leaned in, the tip of her nose almost brushing his face, like a curious cat sniffing for clues.
"Confirm what?" Clark tilted his head away, retreating from the danger zone.
"To confirm where you went last night." A smile curved at the corner of Felicia's mouth.
"There was a huge incident in Brooklyn. Three costumed 'Spider-Men' made a splash, and the police found traces in that alley suggesting a fifth person may have been there too."
She reached out and lightly poked him in the chest.
"I went to your house last night, Clark. You weren't in your room. Your brother wasn't home either. And today, your brother and Gwen and the others all look exhausted."
Clark's heartbeat remained perfectly steady.
Not even the slightest fluctuation.
For a Kryptonian, lying didn't come with much psychological burden. If he couldn't even control his own pulse, that would've been embarrassing.
"The rain was really heavy last night, so Peter and I went to an all-night theater in Brooklyn and watched movies," Clark said with a smile. "As for why they're tired, maybe the movie just ran too long."
"Liar," Felicia said softly, but her eyes only grew more fascinated.
She knew he was lying.
She just couldn't prove it.
And to someone like her, a thief moving between the light and the dark, a man wrapped in mystery and power was fatally attractive.
"No matter what you're hiding, big guy," Felicia said, taking one small step back as one long finger brushed lightly across his lips, "I'm going to take your mask off eventually."
Watching her leave, Clark rubbed at his forehead with a weary hand.
Women, sometimes, were more troublesome than supervillains with high-tech weapons.
That particular headache belonged to Clark alone.
***************************
Read advanced chapters ahead of everyone else on my P@treon.
P@treon/GodDragcell