Superboy's punch came fast, a blur of motion fueled by raw, unfiltered anger. It wasn't the kind of strike you'd see in a training session or a sparring match. This was personal, visceral, and it carried the weight of everything he'd been holding back since the moment I'd been taken away.

  I didn't dodge. I didn't block. I let it nd.

  The impact was sharp, a crack of knuckles against my jaw that sent my head snapping to the side. The force of it would have sent a normal person flying, but I barely moved. My feet stayed pnted, my body absorbing the blow like it was nothing.

  For a moment, the world seemed to hold its breath. The team froze, their eyes wide, their bodies tense, like they were waiting for the other shoe to drop. Even Superboy seemed surprised, his fist still hovering in the air, his chest heaving with ragged breaths.

  I turned my head back slowly, meeting his gaze with a calm, steady expression. My jaw didn't ache. My skin didn't bruise. There was no pain, no discomfort—just the faintest hint of pressure where his fist had connected.

  "Feel better?" I asked, my voice quiet, almost gentle.

  Superboy's fist tightened around the fabric of my colr, his grip like iron as he yanked me forward. His face was inches from mine, his breath hot and ragged, his eyes burning with a fury that went deeper than words. "Where the hell have you been?" he snarled.

  "Superboy, that is enough!" Aquad yelled out.

  Not that that seemed to get through to the boy. His hands remained clenched, fingers digging into the fabric of my cape. His breath came in short, sharp bursts, angry. Vexed. Pissed.

  I didn't react at first. I let him hold on, let him vent his frustration in the only way he knew how. But when his grip tightened further, the fabric of my cape creaking under the strain, I knew I had to intervene. Carefully, deliberately, I reached up and pried his hands away, my own strength far superior to his. It wasn't a struggle—not really. My fingers wrapped around his wrists, firm but not harsh, and I pulled them free, one by one, until he was left standing there, empty-handed and seething.

  "This is neither the time nor the pce." I said, my voice low but firm.

  "He is right Superboy." Aquad stepped forward, his presence calm but authoritative, his eyes fixed on Superboy. "We don't have time for this," he said, his voice firm but not unkind. "The city's in ruins, and there are people who need our help. We can't afford to waste time arguing."

  "I'm not going anywhere. When you're done, I'll be over there at the-"

  ________________________________

  Hours ter, when the panic had died down and the screams had faded to whispers, I found myself here.

  In a Deli.

  The deli was quiet, the kind of quiet that only comes when the world outside has been torn apart and the people left behind are too exhausted to fill the silence. The hum of the fluorescent lights overhead was the only sound, buzzing faintly like a distant memory of chaos. It was almost peaceful, in a way, if you ignored the faint smell of smoke still clinging to the air and the occasional distant wail of a siren cutting through the night.

  I sat in a corner booth, the vinyl seat cracked and worn, my cape draped over the back of the chair. The smell of pastrami and pickles lingered in the air, but I wasn't here for the food. I was here because it was the only pce still open after the storm.

  Night had fallen, and the city was still reeling.

  I had spent hours doing rescue work, digging through rubble, clearing debris, pulling out those trapped. A mother pulled from the wreckage, her body broken but her arms still wrapped tightly around her child. An old man who whispered his wife's name as I carried him to safety, his voice trembling with a grief I couldn't fix. My only guide, their heartbeats. One after the other, again and again, until their faces blurred.

  Then I moved to the ones without a heartbeat—the bodies. Some with missing limbs, some crushed by the barrage of flying debris the android's attacks had unleashed. The numbers pyed on a loop in my mind, not out of grief or guilt, but as a reminder. A reminder of how fragile they were. How fragile all of them were.

  Humans. They built their cities, their monuments, their little lives, as if they were eternal. As if they could outst the inevitable. But they couldn't. They never could. Seventy-three dead in a single day, and that was just one city. One attack. Multiply that by the countless cities, the countless attacks, the countless wars and disasters and diseases, and the math was clear. They were a species living on borrowed time, clinging to survival by the thinnest of threads. And they didn't even seem to realize it.

  Their survival as a species had not been optimized.

  I stared at the table, tracing a finger along a groove in the wood. My hands were still dirty, the grit of rubble embedded under my nails. I should have washed them, but the thought of moving felt like too much.

  Superboy sat across from me. He didn't look at me, not at first. His hands wrapped around a mug of coffee he hadn't touched, his knuckles white with tension. The steam curled upward, dissipating into the air like the faint trails of smoke outside. His face was a mask, but I could see the tension in his jaw, the way his fingers tightened around the cup. He was angry. Of course he was. I was beginning to understand that seemed to be his default emotion.

  The silence between us was brittle, like the ceramic of the mug in his hands. I could feel the weight of his gaze now, though I didn't meet it. Instead, I watched the way his thumb tapped against the side of the cup, a nervous tic he probably didn't even realize he had.

  "You were in Washington." His voice was low, barely more than a growl, but it cut through the quiet like a bde.

  I didn't look up. "I was." There was no point in denying it. The tabloids and the press had gotten pictures of my arrival in DC. It was all but acknowledged now—there was another Kryptonian on Earth. A clone of Superman. Me.

  "With Him." He didn't say the name. He didn't need to. It wasn't a question. I met his gaze, finally. The sharp blue of it burned, edged with something too raw to be anger alone. Resentment. Betrayal perhaps. Maybe something worse.

  "Indeed." My voice was calm, steady. I had no reason to hide it.

  *CRACK.*

  The sound was sharp, sudden. The mug in his hand shattered, ceramic shards scattering across the table. Coffee spilled, dark and steaming, pooling around the broken pieces. He didn't flinch, didn't move to clean it up. Just sat there, his hand still clenched around what was left of the cup, his breath coming in short, controlled bursts.

  The force required to break ceramic like that—assuming standard diner-grade material—would be approximately 3,000 to 4,000 Newtons of pressure applied at a single point. Superboy had done it with a flex of his fingers, which meant he hadn't just broken it. He had crushed it.

  An excess of strength, an evidence of a certain ck of control.

  I tilted my head slightly, observing the way his knuckles whitened as he remained frozen in pce. He wasn't breathing evenly. The tendons in his wrist twitched, his muscles locked tight with restraint he thought he had control over. But if that grip had been around something more fragile—flesh, bone—there would have been no dey. No hesitation. Just a break.

  He could be so much more than this.

  Not a word was spoken. The server, a weary-eyed woman with lines of exhaustion carved deep into her face, set the fresh cup down without comment. She swept the shattered ceramic into her palm, the motions practiced, automatic—this wasn't the first time someone had broken something in this pce. Probably wouldn't be the st.

  Superboy didn't look at her. He didn't thank her. His fingers flexed once, twice, then curled into a fist against the table. He was still staring at me. Still waiting.

  I let the silence stretch.

  His breath came in tight, controlled bursts—inhale, exhale, the barely-leashed kind of anger that lived under his skin. Maybe he expected me to expin myself. Maybe he expected me to apologize.

  I did neither.

  Instead, I reached for the napkin dispenser, pulled a few free, and soaked up the mess he'd left behind. The coffee had spread, creeping towards the edge of the table, and I stopped it before it could spill into my p.

  "You gonna tell me why?" His voice was quieter this time, but the sharp edges were still there.

  I dragged the napkins through the mess, folding them over, letting them absorb. The action gave me a moment to choose my words carefully. He was emotional, but that didn't mean he was stupid.

  "I don't owe you an expnation," I said. Not cruel, not dismissive—just a fact.

  He exhaled sharply through his nose. A bitter sound, more amused than it should have been. "Right. Of course not."

  I didn't respond to that. There was nothing to respond to.

  I took the ruined napkins and set them aside on the table's edge. The faint scent of burnt coffee clung to my hands, mixing with the smoke still caught in the fibers of my suit. My cape, draped over the chair behind me, felt heavier than it should have.

  "But I will give one nonetheless. I was separated from you, in order to verify that I wasn't a threat. And to neutralize me if I was."

  Superboy's eyes narrowed, his jaw tightening as if he were biting back a flood of words.

  I could almost hear the unspoken why didn't they take him too.

  I could have told him I was assessing. That I had run the numbers and determined an alignment with Superman was an inevitability, not a choice. That I was hampered, trying to secure an empire worthy for me, for him…for us.

  That the seventy-three lost was an acceptable loss compared to the scale of the attack but not an optimized one.

  That if humanity wanted to survive, it needed to be restructured. Redesigned. Protected from itself.

  But I knew the thoughts running through his head weren't about global optimization or systemic inefficiencies.

  I could almost hear the thought rattling in his skull, loud and jagged. Why didn't he take me too? Why wasn't I enough?

  It was a human thought, in its simplest form. An equation not of logic but of sentiment, of emotions. It was a thought I had no use for, no reason to entertain. But I understood it, in the same way I understood the way people threw themselves in front of danger for those they loved, even when the numbers told them it was futile.

  Instead, I picked up my own cup—lukewarm now, the heat seeping out of it like the fading glow of an ember—and took a slow sip.

  "I wasn't away from you by choice. Infact I wasn't given much of any," I said simply, not as an apology, but as another fact.

  Superboy let out a breath, sharp and bitter. His gaze flickered away, then back again, like he was still searching for something I wouldn't give him.

  "That's it, then?" he muttered, voice tight.

  "You're just gonna py his game?"

  I looked up, startled—by the words and by the Vitriol in them.

  It was one thing to expect anger. I had anticipated that. Calcuted for it. But hate? Hate required depth. It required thought. And the way it burned in his eyes, raw and unchecked, told me that whatever had been festering inside him had finally begun to take shape.

  Oh, brother mine.

  There just might be hope for you yet.

  His fingers curled against the table, nails digging into the cheap veneer. His chest rose and fell in sharp, uneven breaths. I could hear the fracture lines forming, not in the wood beneath his grip, but in his self control.

  "Just gonna roll over like a little bitch-"

  BAM!

  A sp—open palm, controlled force—drove his face down into the table. The impact was sharp, not enough to truly hurt him, but enough to remind him. Enough to reset his rapidly unraveling composure. The table groaned beneath the force, a hairline crack snaking through the corner like a quiet warning.

  For a moment, there was silence. The old dy paused in her cleaning to us, and I lifted a cup, nodding to let her everything was alright and she went back to her cleaning.

  Then, muffled against the wood, came his incredulous voice.

  "…Did you just sp me?"

  "I did." My voice was calm, measured. "And I'll do it again if you don't watch your tone. Don't think I've forgotten the punch you gave me earlier. When did you get so crude. It's Kid Fsh, isn't it?"

  Superboy inhaled sharply through his nose, his jaw twitching and the veins of his head popping as he reddened. His hands flexed once against the table before he braced his arms and shoved himself upright. His breath came in short, controlled bursts—restrained, but barely.

  "Do not—"

  CRACK.

  I spped him again, sending his head right back into the table. The crack in the wood deepened, a jagged fissure that finally splintered the corner clean off. It tumbled to the floor with a dull thud.

  He froze.

  This time, when he pushed himself up, he didn't immediately speak.

  The tension in his shoulders was rigid, his expression flickering between shock and rage, his pride at war with his instincts. The bruised corner of the table sat between us like an unspoken warning.

  He then stood up.

  Fast. Aggressive. His chair scraped against the floor with a grating screech, the legs leaving deep scratches in the linoleum. His eyes burned into mine, fists clenched tight at his sides.

  "I—"

  I raised my hand again, just slightly.

  His mouth clicked shut.

  The muscles in his jaw flexed, the tendons in his arms tensed, but he didn't move.

  For all his anger, for all his fire, he stopped.

  I lowered my hand, watching the way he vibrated with suppressed frustration. He was fighting himself more than he was fighting me now.

  Good.

  He exhaled sharply, nostrils fring.

  Then he turned.

  Didn't say another word.

  Didn't sm the door as he left, though I knew he wanted to.

  Just stalked off into the night, shoulders tight, head low, leaving behind the shattered remnants of his pride on a cracked diner table.

  I watched him go, the storm of his emotions trailing behind him like a second shadow.

  I had almost forgotten—how angry he used to be.

  I was dealing with a child.

  A very angry, very superpowered lost child.

  I sighed, frustrated, and took a slow sip of my coffee. Bitterness settled on my tongue.

  Definitely need more sugar.

  Then—footsteps.

  Soft. Measured. Came in through the back. Almost bare, the faintest whisper of motion against linoleum. A soundless step, yet distinct to my ears.

  Purpose-built to disappear in motion, to move like a shadow.

  I had heard remarkably simir footsteps like this in only one other person.

  In Robin.

  ___________________________________________

  Hello everyone,

  Khanadiety here with the test update of Have You Come To Meet Your Match!

  I have so many stories I want to share with you, and so many stories to finish writing. I'm excited to dive back in. With that said, I'm thrilled to bring you the next chapter update—and there's more on the way!

  In addition, I'll be starting MCU/Thor SI fic, I am Odinson however this will remain pa-tr-eon exclusive for now. I currently have two chapters uploaded. And with the next chapter of this story. That's 3 advanced chapters avaible. So take a look.

  Khanadiety/pa-tr-eon

  Thank you all for your patience and support—it means the world to me. Here's to an exciting year of storytelling!

  Until next time,

  Ciao.