It was easy, to say the least, to deduce that Superboy was not having a good day. First, he'd ripped his favorite pair of jeans fighting(guess what?) another troop of monkeys. Only this time, they were just escapees from the zoo.
The mission was a success. They all ended up in tatters, him more so than the others thanks to a very unlucky leap into an unnoticed electric fence, but all the animals were rounded up and put back in their places within a few hours. He was damn proud of himself. It was his first time at the zoo and he'd actually managed to do something productive, instead of hovering and having to be guided like the Genome reject he saw himself as all too often.
Then, his amazing day took a nosedive. The zoo fiasco had been a distraction meant to preoccupy the League, but since Young Justice had taken the chore, Mr. Badguy was caught. Good thing, right? Yeah, that part was awesome. But it was after their own business was done that Batman felt it right to drag Superman with him to go check on the kids. Bats had called ahead to tell Robin that Super Senior was on the way, but that didn't help the instantaneous downturn in Superboy's attitude.
He was sad, but he wasn't very good at being sad, so he got angry, not as violently as he used to, no no, he'd been working on his "temper" as Miss M and Aqualad called it, but he was most certainly seething as Clark made his landing.
Landing.
Superman could fly.
Another thing Superboy couldn't do right.
So he perched himself on the wooden railing of a seating area, hovering behind the team, using them as a shield against the man he yearned for approval from. What was so hard about being polite? The team did it. Apologizing had been his first skill to learn... Superman should certainly be more than capable.
Then as those thoughts receded he began to notice something else. Miss Martian could fly. Which, she's an alien, so it sort of doesn't count, but Robin could practically fly. He could jump around and flail through the air in ways that Superboy was positive he'd get injured if he tried. It was rather annoying, watching him soar through trees, barely touching branches as he went after animals.
Robin could pretty much fly.
Batman could coast on the air, that's flying.
KF could fly in a sense.
Aqualad's swimming looked like flying through the water.
What could he do? Jump buildings in a single bound? So? He wanted to learn how to fly, then maybe Superman wouldn't be able to just leave him standing around like he was stupid. Maybe if he could fly Clark would like him. He liked Supergirl just fine.
Supergirl could fly.
"erboy? Supes? Conner!" The blur of a hyper-accelerated hand waving in front of his face brought the Kryptonian out of his inner rant.
"What?" He batted at the hand of one Wally West until it found the ginger's hip and a smile plastered itself across his face.
"C'mon man, Superman's treating us to lunch." Wally's eyes shined at the look on Conner's face. He giggled and Robin was suddenly at his side, standing before Superboy with a crooked grin. Conner recomposed himself and stared over their heads at his adult counterpart.
"Maybe I need to fly..."
"What?" Wally knit his eyebrows at looked between Supes and Supes Jr., it looked like his face was seizing, that is, until Robin smacked him in the back of the head. "Dude!"
Conner stammered for a second, then hopped off the railing and turned to face his back to Superman.
"Nothing. I was... I was just thinking about how everyone else can fly. I need to learn..."
"Man," Robin patted his shoulder, smirking up at him, "Your flying, or not flying as the case may be, is gonna make Superdouche any better of a father." Superboy began a glare down at the other black haired boy, but Wally cut him off.
"Besides dude, flying is pretty easy when you think about it." He shrugged offhandedly, earning two rather confused looks.
"Since when do you fly?"
"I don't, but the whole idea is pretty simple," Images of the complexity of a birds wing ran through Superboy's mind. Simple? "I mean think about it; all flying really is, is having really bad aim."
...
At the sight of both boys deadpanned in front of him, Wally sighed, "Okay, so. Flying is just aiming for the ground with your feet, and failing miserably, right? Right. Jumping is like temporary failure, and walking is success. People are engineered for success from the start, you just happen to be really really good at walking." Wally grinned, like it all suddenly made sense.
Superboy was just as perplexed as before, but apparently, Robin grasped it now, so he continued;
"Yeah. So, what I do is almost failing, cause I jump around like I'm flying. Now, what this one does," he ruffled Wally's hair the wrong way, "is just pathetic. He aims for the ground with his feet and ends up flat on his face. Superman over there has to try to do what comes naturally to you." He grinned, "I was looking through the database and I found some old records about him forgetting he couldn't fly at school sometimes."
"So, in a way, you're better than he is." Wally continued.
"And a whole lot nicer." Robin finished.
Superboy smiled then. It was nice to know that even if he couldn't manage approval from his own father, that he did have some support system.
A/N: FFFFFFFT. I am unsatisfied with this, but I can't seem to do anything else with it. It's fluff. Unadulterated, useless, pairing-less fluff.
I'm sorry guys.
-RHT
