Clark looked rough around the edges today.
He hadn't shaved. He'd traded the blue and red for a plain button-down shirt and jeans, and was sitting alone in a shallow lunar crater looking like the most powerful person alive in the middle of a thoroughly bad week.
He had obviously heard every word of the conversation below. He'd apparently decided to continue the thread in person.
"My father sent me to Earth," he said. "It took me thirty years to find a way of living with that—Clark Kent reports the truth; Superman brings people hope. That's the framework I built my entire life around." A pause. "I genuinely don't know anymore whether I'm the one who's wrong, or the world is."
Thea sat down across from him on the lunar surface and considered the conversational landscape. No café ambiance. No coffee. She reached into her spatial storage and produced a barrel—broad, rough-hewn, obviously not manufactured anywhere on Earth, a souvenir from Hell's more civilized quarters.
She poured two cups.
The wine inside was, paradoxically, extraordinarily gentle: pale, smooth, leaving the mind unusually clear and the thoughts unusually precise. It was something of a delicacy among Hell's greater demons, whose minds were perpetually battered by forces of chaos. Clark had no way of knowing its origin. He took a sip, paused with visible appreciation, and assumed it must be something new from Queen Consolidated's product line.
"That's genuinely excellent," he said, meaning it.
They drank. Clark talked. He talked about Lois not understanding him anymore. About the workplace shifting beneath his feet. About colleagues who seemed to have simply stopped caring what they were actually reporting.
"Isn't a journalist's entire job to report the facts?" He turned to look at her. "Lois told me we should give people the stories they want to read. I couldn't believe those words came out of her mouth." He held his cup in both hands. "You and Diana are basically gods walking among ordinary people. You have to have an answer to this: does truth matter, or do people's wants matter more?"
Being called a living god was something Thea continued to find entirely reasonable. She took a moment to consider how to answer usefully.
"The old priests and clerics believed they were shepherds," she said. "That ordinary people were the flock. They placed themselves on a higher plane automatically, by assumption."
Clark nodded slowly. He'd read extensively in human history—he knew what she was referring to. Many of the great scientists of earlier centuries had been clerics by primary vocation, people who had genuinely contributed to human development precisely because they held knowledge others didn't.
"The difference now," she continued, "is that the monopoly on knowledge has been broken. People can choose what to believe, what to read, what to let into their lives." She let the implication sit for a moment. "So—why are you so certain that people still need the specific truth you've decided to provide?"
Clark frowned. "Are you saying truth doesn't matter anymore?"
"I'm saying even the best priests didn't just broadcast truth directly. They guided. They worked with what people could actually absorb. They understood the gap between what they knew and what others were ready to hear." She set her cup down on the lunar regolith. "What you and Diana and Bruce do isn't entirely different. You don't explain Darkseid to the public. You don't announce the actual state of the cosmos beyond Earth's atmosphere. You hold things back, you filter, you choose what gets disclosed. And as long as you're doing that from a principled place, it's still the right call—because the alternative isn't a more informed public, it's a paralyzed one."
Clark made a face. He couldn't immediately find the counter to it.
"But honestly?" Thea said. "I don't think this argument is really about journalism at all. The real problem is that you and Lois don't really connect anymore. You don't spend enough time talking. You don't have enough shared territory."
He looked at her.
"Clark, I don't know exactly what Jor-El told you when he sent you here, but you've divided yourself into two roles for thirty years—Clark Kent and Superman—and neither of them actually lives. Clark Kent just goes to work, goes home, goes to sleep. That's not a life. That's a routine. Ordinary people don't live like that." She tilted her head. "Look at Kara."
Clark turned his attention toward National City and focused.
Kara was trudging down a shopping street under a mountain of bags, her face caught somewhere between resignation and quiet suffering—like someone who'd agreed to one store and was now on her fourteenth. Lena was three boutiques ahead, still going strong, chattering happily, occasionally turning to solicit Kara's opinion. Kara's responses had been reduced to nodding or shaking her head, all other communicative functions having been conserved for the purpose of staying upright. Lena pulled her into another doorway. Kara followed without resistance.
Clark turned back to Thea with an expression of genuine uncertainty. "That is... happiness?"
"That's someone living like an ordinary person," Thea said, without any particular embarrassment. "Enjoying life, even badly. Kara has real experiences now—good ones and miserable ones. That's exactly what it means." She met his eyes. "If you want to give people hope, you have to carry it yourself. You have to believe in life well enough to actually live one."
Clark was quiet for a long moment.
"Everything will be well," he said finally, half to himself, as though testing whether the words still meant what they used to.
Note to self, Thea thought, introduce him to Saint Walker at some point. They would get along extraordinarily well.
Words alone didn't reassemble a marriage. She reached into her spatial storage again and produced a second bracelet—compact, unassuming-looking, with a calibrated red-sun radiation emitter built in. Worn on the wrist, it would dampen every Kryptonian ability to negligible levels. Clark could eat a meal and actually taste it, sleep eight hours without his mind cataloguing every sound on Earth, and walk through a grocery store without accidentally denting anything.
"For when you want to actually be Clark for a while," she said. "Not perform the role."
He took it carefully, turning it over with evident curiosity.
She wasn't done. From the storage she produced a considerable stack: home design guides, seasonal cooking collections, restaurant recommendations for major cities, lawn and garden manuals, a full year of fashion publications.
Clark looked at the stack. Then at Thea. Then at the stack again.
He read everything in well under three seconds. Thea asked him several questions at random—fabric compositions, regional food pairings, color theory in interior design. He answered each one accurately, with context, without hesitation.
"Perfect," she said. "You are now a genuinely useful person to take shopping. You have opinions on quality, recommendations for lunch, informed views on whether the throw pillows work." A brief pause. "You should also consider a different haircut. Just to introduce some novelty."
Clark looked mildly alarmed. Then thoughtful.
He flew home—fast, purposeful, noticeably different in bearing than when he'd arrived.
So this was basically househusband knowledge, Thea thought, staring after him. Weird method, but if it fixes Superman's family crisis, that's still a win.
She was not entirely sure how she felt about this being a thing she did now.
The rest of her patrol circuit was straightforward. The global picture was calm—genuinely, quietly calm, in a way that felt earned rather than merely free of incident.
She wrapped up the circuit and set course for the Vanishing Point.