A snippet of Connerverse
Capitalizing-but magnanimously! on the 14valentines wave, because why should Pru do all the work? [Especially since she ah, already did it, eh?] Anyway. Lovingly cut-and-pasted verbatim-sic from the Word doc. Damn straight.
Title: And those are cows
Author:
rageprufrock
"And those are cows," Conner babbled, excited.
From the driver's seat, Clark made a tragic noise. Conner ignored it.
He mashed his face against the glass of the window and turned with a squeak of flesh against the cold surface of it to burble at Geoffrey out of the corner of his mouth.
"They fall over if you push 'em while they're asleep, apparently," he reported.
Geoffrey looked horrified, but tried to smile supportively. "That's great," he said, sounding as if he'd like nothing better than to throw himself out of the car and brave the corn.
Though, given Geoffrey's track record with nature in general, Conner would put his money on the corn. It wasn't that he didn't have faith in Geoffrey's ability to survive--in a city environment, anyway--but Geoffrey was always the guy in the back of the field trip bus when they were driving out for nature survival trips asking if there'd be a place he could buy an extra towel, in case the two he packed were going to get grubby in the bathrooms out there. ("There are going to be bathrooms, right?" Geoffrey would ask. "I hope they have good water pressure. I gather a lot of stress in the shoulders.")
At least Conner made it a few hours before he started complaining about how his cell phone didn't get any reception in the woods.
"Are you sure your grandparents are okay with this?" Geoffrey asked, sounding as if he was hoping for some sort of awful miscommunication that would have him summarily banished from the Kent farm and back to the comforting arms of Metropolis and her loving smog.
"No, they're really excited to have you there," Conner said with perverse joy, so much apparently that Clark shot him a dirty look through the rear view mirror, as if to say, I can see the Lex in you, don't think I don't know, mister.
"I can see the Lex in you, don't think I don't know, mister," Clark had said earlier that week, when Conner had begged to visit his grandparents and bring Geoffrey with him. To be completely honest, Conner hadn't initially thought about all the fun side-effects of dragging Geoffrey out into the back forty of Kansas, he'd only thought about Geoffrey being there for the Smallville Fall Fair, taking him out to see the pumpkin-judging competition, the line-dancing party, the pie-eating contest and all sorts of other fun things that generally horrified Conner's father. It'd only been later, when Geoffrey had attempted to weasel out of it before finally caving to Conner's persistent, harassing phone calls that it'd sunken in that perhaps there was a lot of fun to be had with the situation.
After all, Conner's very first weekend at the Kent farm had been filled with fascinating activity. He had, for his first time, see anybody swing a shotgun, and saw his mother's superspeed in action for non-hero reasons for the first time when he jerked the pitchfork out of Lex's hands, before, and Conner quoted, he "hurt himself with the thing" trying to defend himself from Conner's grandfather in the barn. The enormous psychological trauma of finding that two men had (both) fathered a child never bothered to hit Lex and Clark but had somehow taken a left turn and three exits to find Jonathan Kent, who'd spent the rest of the weekend staring at Conner oddly and scowling when Martha Kent (who Conner loved right off) spoiled him hideously, which was pretty much anytime she was around him.
Conner had never eaten so much pie. So he figured that Geoffrey would want in on that.
"They moo," Conner said, bright-eyed.
"Are you actually thirteen?" Geoffrey hissed, glaring.
"Mooooooo," Conner mimicked enthusiastically. "Maybe Granddad will let us pet one."
"Oh God," Geoffrey said, going white. "Won't it, you know, charge? And gore us?"
Whenever Geoffrey went pale like that, there was something strangely, attractively tortured about him, as if he was a Romantic poet or something, and Conner was always tempted to pat Geoffrey's hand and ask him if he needed to go find himself in a commune or make out with John Keats or something.
"They're dairy cows," Conner said scornfully, and noted the flicker of metal out of the corner of his eye for just a second before he shouted gleefully, "Hey! This is the bridge where my dad hit my mom with a Porsche the first time they met! Look, Geoffrey, look!"
Geoffrey covered his face with his hands.
-----
Conner's very first visit to Smallville had been punctuated by brief periods of calmness in what could generously be called total chaos.
While his parents had made phone calls beforehand and the worst of the arguments had already occurred outside of his delicate hearing, their efforts had not precluded his grandfather from suffering some sort of breakdown at the relative normalcy of all he saw. Conner's mother had been, as usual, fretful and attentive, reminding Conner to put on a jacket if he was going outside and trying to make him eat more vegetables at lunch; his father had been, also as usual, affectionate from a distance, comfortable in Conner's abilities to take care of the few environmental factors over which Lex did not exercise considerable influence, and wildly amused by Conner's fascination with farm life. The three of them had fallen into a comfortable rhythm, and Conner felt no more out of place than any ten year old boy with a mother and a father, and hadn't behaved very differently from one, either, though he'd felt a press of shyness initially in the face of his grandparents, whose eyes had been hugely round at the sight of him.
Later, Martha Kent would admit to Conner that her initial shock when they'd opened the door to find Clark, Lex, and Conner on the front porch stemmed mostly from how very green Conner's eyes were--mirror images of her sons, and how his face had a delicate, porcelain quality to it, that Conner thought meant he looked like a girl and that Martha thought meant Conner looked like his father, pale and smooth.
There'd been a lot of polite shuffling, and it'd taken Conner a moment to register everything about the interior of the farmhouse, which was unlike anyplace he'd ever been before and wonderful. He'd gone through the entire house near-silently, carefully touching photographs of his mother had a younger boy, of his grandparents as a young couple, of odd possessions and things that were scattered pieces of a life Conner was not a part of. His heart had jumped, he remembered distinctly, at the thought that he could be, that there were still chances, and he'd turned, brightly smiling to catch his grandmother's soft expression, her affection clear in her eyes.
Conner had spent a very brief time being shocked at how carelessly Lex seemed to leave Conner as her temporary ward while he, Clark, and Jonathan Kent disappeared into the barn for what appeared to be an epic screaming match. From what Conner remembered, his grandmother had been invited, too, but declined to join in, saying that she was female and above their petty manfights.
And long ago, when all the men in Conner's life had disappeared to shout, she'd turned to him and smiled, held out her smooth hand and asked, "Do you want to learn to make pie?"
Ever since, Conner had viewed his mother with a sort of detached awe, amazed at what a fortune Clark had had as he was growing up, amazed that Clark had ever told stories of how poor his family had been. All Conner had ever seen at the farmhouse was plenty--bursting the seams of the building.
-----
Despite Clark's pubescent inclination to made disparaging jokes about anybody who did not join in on the manly work of being manly and mannish outside, Conner generally demurred from joining his mother and grandfather outside. There was something intrinsically wrong with braving fields full of cow shit, and if he was going to get labeled Conner-ina for the afternoon for it, then so be it, and he had decided to stay in the kitchen with his grandmother as he'd watched Geoffrey put on a brave front and follow Grandpa Kent out the back door.
That did not, however, preclude his own afternoon from involving shit.
So Conner and his grandmother were sitting at the kitchen sink washing chicken crap off of new eggs and talking, waiting for the deep, luscious cream pie Martha had just put into the oven.
And standing at the kitchen sink with warm water flowing over their fingertips, Conner related his life to his grandmother in excruciating detail, grinning widely at the opportunity to finally tell somebody something. His parents were intrusive, well-moneyed nosey-pants jerks, and Geoffrey was there for most of it so there was never any point to telling anybody anything, but his grandmother listened intently and dropped comments and laughed at all the right places.
Conner was midway through explaining to his grandmother he and Geoffrey's latest brush with the law when they heard noises on the back porch that sounded a lot like Geoffrey saying:
"Oh, God. Oh God. I touched them," in hushed, shaking horror.
And his grandfather giving Geoffrey a hearty slap on the back, saying, "It'll get easier when you get used to it. One day, the milk will just come right out, zip zip zip."
"I touched them," Geoffrey repeated.
"Look at it this way, son," Grandpa Kent compromised, "she only slapped you once in the face with the tail--heck, the first time Clark tried to milk a cow she kicked over the bucket and whipped him silly."
"I touched them!" Geoffrey emphasized.
"Geoffrey, hey, cut that out! Breathe, kiddo!" Clark said nervously. "It was only teats!"
"Oh, God, I touched teats!" Geoffrey wailed.
In the kitchen, Conner and his grandmother looked at one another and burst into laughter.
-----
Deep in the night, cocooned in his mother's old bed, listening to Geoffrey shuffling around on the floor where he was burrowed into a sleeping bag, Conner thought about home and homes and the people that made any given place one. He thought about feeling at home at the farm but thought that he'd be glad to go back to Metropolis, to her familiar streets and sideways, to her subways and buses, to normal life and no livestock.
"So," Conner said casually. "I'm sure there's some sort of cream around here somewhere."
Geoffrey said nothing.
"You know, for your face."
Conner heard him turn over in the sleeping bag. "For where the cow slapped you."
"Conner," Geoffrey warned.
"For when you touched her t--"
Geoffrey launched himself up and smashed a pillow over Conner's face, yelling, "You jerk! You ass!" the whole time, as Conner got a good shove in and threw Geoffrey to the end of the bed, before grabbing his own pillow and making a good offensive attempt.
When Martha Kent found them in the morning, they were groggily attempting to repair the destroyed pillows, and Conner took great pride in the fact that his efforts were far uglier than Geoffrey's.
"Hah, you girl," Conner accused.
"Okay, just because you're mentally deficient," Geoffrey snapped, and knotted off a thread.
"I see so much of Clark in you," Martha cooed.
-----
Some sort of scheduling problem arose--"Slight miscalculation," Lex dismissed and Clark yelled, "You're still in Singapore!"--occurred and Conner and Geoffrey ended up staying through dinner on Sunday night.
"Lex will be here any minute," Martha told them as Conner and Geoffrey cleared the table, while Grandpa Kent disappeared mumbling into the back shed, presumably to play with some sort of firearm. "How about you two go up to Clark's old Fortress--"
"That's a stupid name," Conner insisted.
"And hang out until he arrives," Martha finished with a grin. "Go on."
And from the barn loft, Conner and Geoffrey could see the edges of the town stretching out to the black lace edges of the night and they looked for constellations in the starry sky, much clearer without Metropolis' light pollution obscuring their vision. Geoffrey told Conner stories that he'd learned to understand the Greek and Roman art he loved, their buildings with their reliefs carved into soft marble, stories in the curves of perfect faces and stylized plants, and Geoffrey listened, imagining the Gemini twins and Sagittarius, the perfect arc of his arrow across the sky.
By the time Lex's car whispered up the driveway Conner and Geoffrey were both drowsy, and piled into the backseat of the Benz wordlessly and mumbled goodnights before dozing off.
And Conner's last memory before it all went black like the sky was the profile of his father's face soft with the glow of the lights on the dashboard, silvery in the dark--and he slept dreamlessly, Geoffrey's shoulder warm against his own.
-----
"How was it?" Clark asked the next morning.
Conner grinned. "Well," he said. "There were cows."
-----
The end.
Title: And those are cows
Author:
rageprufrock
"And those are cows," Conner babbled, excited.
From the driver's seat, Clark made a tragic noise. Conner ignored it.
He mashed his face against the glass of the window and turned with a squeak of flesh against the cold surface of it to burble at Geoffrey out of the corner of his mouth.
"They fall over if you push 'em while they're asleep, apparently," he reported.
Geoffrey looked horrified, but tried to smile supportively. "That's great," he said, sounding as if he'd like nothing better than to throw himself out of the car and brave the corn.
Though, given Geoffrey's track record with nature in general, Conner would put his money on the corn. It wasn't that he didn't have faith in Geoffrey's ability to survive--in a city environment, anyway--but Geoffrey was always the guy in the back of the field trip bus when they were driving out for nature survival trips asking if there'd be a place he could buy an extra towel, in case the two he packed were going to get grubby in the bathrooms out there. ("There are going to be bathrooms, right?" Geoffrey would ask. "I hope they have good water pressure. I gather a lot of stress in the shoulders.")
At least Conner made it a few hours before he started complaining about how his cell phone didn't get any reception in the woods.
"Are you sure your grandparents are okay with this?" Geoffrey asked, sounding as if he was hoping for some sort of awful miscommunication that would have him summarily banished from the Kent farm and back to the comforting arms of Metropolis and her loving smog.
"No, they're really excited to have you there," Conner said with perverse joy, so much apparently that Clark shot him a dirty look through the rear view mirror, as if to say, I can see the Lex in you, don't think I don't know, mister.
"I can see the Lex in you, don't think I don't know, mister," Clark had said earlier that week, when Conner had begged to visit his grandparents and bring Geoffrey with him. To be completely honest, Conner hadn't initially thought about all the fun side-effects of dragging Geoffrey out into the back forty of Kansas, he'd only thought about Geoffrey being there for the Smallville Fall Fair, taking him out to see the pumpkin-judging competition, the line-dancing party, the pie-eating contest and all sorts of other fun things that generally horrified Conner's father. It'd only been later, when Geoffrey had attempted to weasel out of it before finally caving to Conner's persistent, harassing phone calls that it'd sunken in that perhaps there was a lot of fun to be had with the situation.
After all, Conner's very first weekend at the Kent farm had been filled with fascinating activity. He had, for his first time, see anybody swing a shotgun, and saw his mother's superspeed in action for non-hero reasons for the first time when he jerked the pitchfork out of Lex's hands, before, and Conner quoted, he "hurt himself with the thing" trying to defend himself from Conner's grandfather in the barn. The enormous psychological trauma of finding that two men had (both) fathered a child never bothered to hit Lex and Clark but had somehow taken a left turn and three exits to find Jonathan Kent, who'd spent the rest of the weekend staring at Conner oddly and scowling when Martha Kent (who Conner loved right off) spoiled him hideously, which was pretty much anytime she was around him.
Conner had never eaten so much pie. So he figured that Geoffrey would want in on that.
"They moo," Conner said, bright-eyed.
"Are you actually thirteen?" Geoffrey hissed, glaring.
"Mooooooo," Conner mimicked enthusiastically. "Maybe Granddad will let us pet one."
"Oh God," Geoffrey said, going white. "Won't it, you know, charge? And gore us?"
Whenever Geoffrey went pale like that, there was something strangely, attractively tortured about him, as if he was a Romantic poet or something, and Conner was always tempted to pat Geoffrey's hand and ask him if he needed to go find himself in a commune or make out with John Keats or something.
"They're dairy cows," Conner said scornfully, and noted the flicker of metal out of the corner of his eye for just a second before he shouted gleefully, "Hey! This is the bridge where my dad hit my mom with a Porsche the first time they met! Look, Geoffrey, look!"
Geoffrey covered his face with his hands.
-----
Conner's very first visit to Smallville had been punctuated by brief periods of calmness in what could generously be called total chaos.
While his parents had made phone calls beforehand and the worst of the arguments had already occurred outside of his delicate hearing, their efforts had not precluded his grandfather from suffering some sort of breakdown at the relative normalcy of all he saw. Conner's mother had been, as usual, fretful and attentive, reminding Conner to put on a jacket if he was going outside and trying to make him eat more vegetables at lunch; his father had been, also as usual, affectionate from a distance, comfortable in Conner's abilities to take care of the few environmental factors over which Lex did not exercise considerable influence, and wildly amused by Conner's fascination with farm life. The three of them had fallen into a comfortable rhythm, and Conner felt no more out of place than any ten year old boy with a mother and a father, and hadn't behaved very differently from one, either, though he'd felt a press of shyness initially in the face of his grandparents, whose eyes had been hugely round at the sight of him.
Later, Martha Kent would admit to Conner that her initial shock when they'd opened the door to find Clark, Lex, and Conner on the front porch stemmed mostly from how very green Conner's eyes were--mirror images of her sons, and how his face had a delicate, porcelain quality to it, that Conner thought meant he looked like a girl and that Martha thought meant Conner looked like his father, pale and smooth.
There'd been a lot of polite shuffling, and it'd taken Conner a moment to register everything about the interior of the farmhouse, which was unlike anyplace he'd ever been before and wonderful. He'd gone through the entire house near-silently, carefully touching photographs of his mother had a younger boy, of his grandparents as a young couple, of odd possessions and things that were scattered pieces of a life Conner was not a part of. His heart had jumped, he remembered distinctly, at the thought that he could be, that there were still chances, and he'd turned, brightly smiling to catch his grandmother's soft expression, her affection clear in her eyes.
Conner had spent a very brief time being shocked at how carelessly Lex seemed to leave Conner as her temporary ward while he, Clark, and Jonathan Kent disappeared into the barn for what appeared to be an epic screaming match. From what Conner remembered, his grandmother had been invited, too, but declined to join in, saying that she was female and above their petty manfights.
And long ago, when all the men in Conner's life had disappeared to shout, she'd turned to him and smiled, held out her smooth hand and asked, "Do you want to learn to make pie?"
Ever since, Conner had viewed his mother with a sort of detached awe, amazed at what a fortune Clark had had as he was growing up, amazed that Clark had ever told stories of how poor his family had been. All Conner had ever seen at the farmhouse was plenty--bursting the seams of the building.
-----
Despite Clark's pubescent inclination to made disparaging jokes about anybody who did not join in on the manly work of being manly and mannish outside, Conner generally demurred from joining his mother and grandfather outside. There was something intrinsically wrong with braving fields full of cow shit, and if he was going to get labeled Conner-ina for the afternoon for it, then so be it, and he had decided to stay in the kitchen with his grandmother as he'd watched Geoffrey put on a brave front and follow Grandpa Kent out the back door.
That did not, however, preclude his own afternoon from involving shit.
So Conner and his grandmother were sitting at the kitchen sink washing chicken crap off of new eggs and talking, waiting for the deep, luscious cream pie Martha had just put into the oven.
And standing at the kitchen sink with warm water flowing over their fingertips, Conner related his life to his grandmother in excruciating detail, grinning widely at the opportunity to finally tell somebody something. His parents were intrusive, well-moneyed nosey-pants jerks, and Geoffrey was there for most of it so there was never any point to telling anybody anything, but his grandmother listened intently and dropped comments and laughed at all the right places.
Conner was midway through explaining to his grandmother he and Geoffrey's latest brush with the law when they heard noises on the back porch that sounded a lot like Geoffrey saying:
"Oh, God. Oh God. I touched them," in hushed, shaking horror.
And his grandfather giving Geoffrey a hearty slap on the back, saying, "It'll get easier when you get used to it. One day, the milk will just come right out, zip zip zip."
"I touched them," Geoffrey repeated.
"Look at it this way, son," Grandpa Kent compromised, "she only slapped you once in the face with the tail--heck, the first time Clark tried to milk a cow she kicked over the bucket and whipped him silly."
"I touched them!" Geoffrey emphasized.
"Geoffrey, hey, cut that out! Breathe, kiddo!" Clark said nervously. "It was only teats!"
"Oh, God, I touched teats!" Geoffrey wailed.
In the kitchen, Conner and his grandmother looked at one another and burst into laughter.
-----
Deep in the night, cocooned in his mother's old bed, listening to Geoffrey shuffling around on the floor where he was burrowed into a sleeping bag, Conner thought about home and homes and the people that made any given place one. He thought about feeling at home at the farm but thought that he'd be glad to go back to Metropolis, to her familiar streets and sideways, to her subways and buses, to normal life and no livestock.
"So," Conner said casually. "I'm sure there's some sort of cream around here somewhere."
Geoffrey said nothing.
"You know, for your face."
Conner heard him turn over in the sleeping bag. "For where the cow slapped you."
"Conner," Geoffrey warned.
"For when you touched her t--"
Geoffrey launched himself up and smashed a pillow over Conner's face, yelling, "You jerk! You ass!" the whole time, as Conner got a good shove in and threw Geoffrey to the end of the bed, before grabbing his own pillow and making a good offensive attempt.
When Martha Kent found them in the morning, they were groggily attempting to repair the destroyed pillows, and Conner took great pride in the fact that his efforts were far uglier than Geoffrey's.
"Hah, you girl," Conner accused.
"Okay, just because you're mentally deficient," Geoffrey snapped, and knotted off a thread.
"I see so much of Clark in you," Martha cooed.
-----
Some sort of scheduling problem arose--"Slight miscalculation," Lex dismissed and Clark yelled, "You're still in Singapore!"--occurred and Conner and Geoffrey ended up staying through dinner on Sunday night.
"Lex will be here any minute," Martha told them as Conner and Geoffrey cleared the table, while Grandpa Kent disappeared mumbling into the back shed, presumably to play with some sort of firearm. "How about you two go up to Clark's old Fortress--"
"That's a stupid name," Conner insisted.
"And hang out until he arrives," Martha finished with a grin. "Go on."
And from the barn loft, Conner and Geoffrey could see the edges of the town stretching out to the black lace edges of the night and they looked for constellations in the starry sky, much clearer without Metropolis' light pollution obscuring their vision. Geoffrey told Conner stories that he'd learned to understand the Greek and Roman art he loved, their buildings with their reliefs carved into soft marble, stories in the curves of perfect faces and stylized plants, and Geoffrey listened, imagining the Gemini twins and Sagittarius, the perfect arc of his arrow across the sky.
By the time Lex's car whispered up the driveway Conner and Geoffrey were both drowsy, and piled into the backseat of the Benz wordlessly and mumbled goodnights before dozing off.
And Conner's last memory before it all went black like the sky was the profile of his father's face soft with the glow of the lights on the dashboard, silvery in the dark--and he slept dreamlessly, Geoffrey's shoulder warm against his own.
-----
"How was it?" Clark asked the next morning.
Conner grinned. "Well," he said. "There were cows."
-----
The end.