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Even in telephoto paparazzi photos of the Justice League mid-firefight, Clara never gets mistaken for Diana, even though their long dark hair and determined expressions should make them look at least like they were developed from the same aspect.
When Clara first donned the cape and tights, she'd tried her best to project motherly protection when she was being--well, an interfering alien, which at the very least counts as busybodying by Kansas standards. She'd lifted children from wildfires, and cradled old women to her chest as she flew them to safety, speaking calming and softly while making precise eyecontact. Diana always leaned more into fierce femininity, in a way which seemed far more alien to the men writing stories about both of them than Clara's own efforts. Diana fought with strength, and wit, a whip and a sword. Clara bulldozed her way through falling buildings to rescue who could be rescued, and terrified the perpetrators into collapsing at her feet, and tried her best to look harmless in the aftermath.
Diana looks like a woman who can beat you in a fight, and look feminine while she hands anyone their own behind.
Clara looks strong all over, like a Polynesian goddess who could stand against a tsunami, or an olympian shotput star like the villain in Matilda. Somehow, witnesses saw a rightous man rescuing grandmothers from fires, not a motherly woman who could crush someone's skull between her thighs.
The press call her Superman. Clara had tried to correct them, with a vague statement about how Kryptonian gender doesn't match up to human expectations, but it was entirely pointless. The name stuck.
When cartoonists and artists draw the Justice League, Clara always ends up with an outline which looks more like Batman than like Wonder Woman, with thick thighs and broad shoulders and the disguising swoop of a cape, her hair in the meticulous braids which pick out meaning on her home planet.
To the humans of Earth the person who could fly around the world in seconds instead of days was Superman, and they currently don't want to know any more, and all the carefully planned lies mixed with truth weren't even asked for.
The name suits her, the masculine aspect which aligns closer to strength than guile. Because for all Wonder Woman could beat every single human in a fair fight, there is something about how she is perceived which implies Diana is cheating. The lasso of truth is a very threatening thing, to anyone with the secrets of their own insecurity to deal with.
"Humans," Clara had muttered to Diana's raised eyebrow as they shared breakfast after one of their first global engagements working together with what would become the founding members of the Justice League. Batman has turned on ZNN while they ate before debriefing the mission, opinion commentators about Superman and Wonder Woman running in the background. Diana smirked in agreement.
Batman poured them both more coffee, silently polite.
"They would really rather forget the whole 'alien' thing," Diana said.
"But enough to continue to call me 'man'? I have breasts. Humans are very sure that breasts are only on women."
"Perhaps the emphasis is 'man' like 'mankind'," Batman had said, "to tie you and your motives to Earth. It is more comfortable to think of your power as being used for mankind, not anything more abstract. Humans are remarkably self-centered, even when not confronted with a wider galaxy."
"That doesn't mean I want to be named after a philosophical ideal."
"This is probably your fault, Batman," Diana said, "and the press just copied your naming convention."
Batman had barely shrugged in agreement. Diana passed Clara the plate of hashbrowns, and well, she was right. Fried potatoes made even ZNN better.
There was nothing for it. As far as public opinion goes, Clara was Superman, and she just had to acknowledge it could have been far worse.
Batman was a little less sympathetic to Clara's suppressed wince whenever reporters call her Superman. If he let the bottom half of his face move, he'd probably be laughing.
The look on the Flash's face the first time he saw Clara dressed down as herself. Still Superman, but with her hair loose around her shoulders, her posture relaxed so her muscles no longer bulged like she was actively holding up the world. He'd been as bleary eyed as a speedster could manage, but the way he'd vibrated back and forth in surprise was like something from a silent movie it was so exaggerated. Clara had just smiled at him, and passed the butter.
It had become something funny when Batman had just turned his blank mask on anyone who attempted to flirt with her once they released that Superman might be female. It was sweet, in a hilariously patriarchial and overbearing way. Very Batman, all things considered, with a slice of good rural boy behaviour, looking out for a sister's honour.
Gossiping about her slowly developing crush on Batman with Lois had been a mortifying game of playing with words as she tried to sort through her own feelings. Clara had pretended to be absolutely plastered, one shoe off, her hands working through yarnovers and picked up stitches, lace forming under her hands as she spun a story about a mysterious stranger, good hands, deep voice. The only downside being that Clara couldn't figure out if he wanted to fuck her, protect her, or conquer a small nation at her back.
Lois had been a very receptive audience to Clara confirming that, while the protecting her thing was annoying, and the possibilities of conquering a small nation was still on the table, he definitely wanted to fuck her. And wasn't too shabby on the follow through.
Lois was delightfully pissy when, nineteen months and three kidnappings later, Clara revealed the whole Superman thing. She wanted revenge for the missed exclusives Lois could have been getting to improve her career. She was pissed about Clara's bad taste for dating Batman, though. Clara apologised by knitting her a lace-weight blouse so delicate it looked like something from a pre-Raphelite painting. Bruce apologised for his part in Clara's deception with an actual pre-Raphelite painting.
Lois had been even more pissed by that, since it meant she had to organise insurance, and some convincing fakes of similiar style. It wasn't that anyone would expect real art in Lois's one-bedroom apartment (she'd moved up in the world, since the first time Clara had been to her place), but it was better to have diversions in place before she needed them.
Clara had finally placated Lois with access to Clara's Kryptonian holograms, and permission to make as many notes or writings on the topic as she'd like, so long as she didn't publish anything just yet. Lois had a 80k draft manuscript on Kryptonian culture. She'd spent more time with the social and political information than Clara could manage, and learnt how to braid Clara's hair in the Kryptonian ways to mean 'steadfast' and 'seeking to bring light to what is hidden', which was as close to seeking justice as they could find in the archives. Martha and Clara had only searched so far through the information so that Clara could wear the braids of her family line, overlapped with memories of Martha doing her hair in two practical dutch braids on a summer's morning. It would be one of those things which could be a good soundbite about being raised as an alien refugee. Except no one ever asked her about being raised by aliens, and their questions were boring, easily redirected things.
Every time Lois directed Clara to sit on the floor between her spread legs was forgiveness and acceptance, and the knowledge that someone was holding onto Clara's culture even when she couldn't face it herself.
Once Clara and Bruce had sorted out their trust issues (well, Clara saw it more as sculpting Bruce's trust issues into an elegant topiary which allowed for her to see glimpses of truth through the leaves of his thorned armour), the press started talking about their wedding.
Usually in incredibly derogatory terms: Rural heartthrob crumbles under city pressure -- Is Wayne's favourite squeeze prepared for the pressures of big city life? -- Gotham's Golden Girl Turned Fool's Gold
"These ones think I'm too dumb to be a gold digger," Clara muttered, as she went through the latest gossip over brunch with Lois, "and I don't know if I want to be insulted by that, or relieved. I'm not sure which part is worse."
Lois was her best friend, and also a troll, so she just laughed.
But she was her best friend, so Lois kept note of who wrote what, who was friends with whom, and who managed which twitter profiles which were particularly vicious. Having a politically minded best friend was very useful, when instead of marrying a social recluse superhero, Clara was publicly marrying a social recluse billionaire. It wasn't great for her image, honestly. No one trusted a journalist who was in the papers.
There were so many different ways for a woman to lose credibility in the face of a man, and marrying rich wasn't actually one Clara had thought to guard herself against.
Clara-Kent-the-journalist fell into every public appearance with the guile-less smile of a pretty thing from the country who learnt her manners at the knee of a corporal punishment-wielding God-fearing woman.
"Am I overdoing it?" she asked Lois, as they watched back the footage where someone had 'caught' Clara after a Wayne gala, and she'd channelled the absolute best impression she could of Myra-Lou Wallace, who had been homeschooled by the most terrifying woman of Clara's childhood, and already had three babies of her own. All country charm, big eyes blinking stupidly at the camera with a smile that implied she'd never met anyone who had a bad thought in their pretty head.
Lois hummed, filling her own glass of wine and skipped topping up Clara's own. She'd become very stingy with her wine after Clara had come clean about how it didn't intoxicate her. Or possibly since Clara had come clean about her options as a trophy spouse to Bruce Wayne. It was hard to tell which had pushed Lois from a socially generous pourer to someone who glared at Clara when she tried to act human in particularly stupid ways without justifying her behaviour first.
Lois flipped through a few screens worth of reactions: gossip and tweets and instagram impressions.
"Well, most people don't think you're marrying him for his brains," she decided.
"Most people don't think he has any brains."
"I still don't know how you managed to figure out Bruce was smart enough for you."
Clara smiled, looking down at the lacy bits of crochet in her hands which was going to be her wedding dress. She still had so many excruciatingly tiny flowers to make out of thread so fine a single flower made of five spiralling rows of stitches was less than an inch across the petals.
"Bruce is a little like me. No one was going to ignore him for long, so he decided how he wanted people to see him, and--Well, he definitely has brains, he just tries to make everything look like an accident when it goes well."
"Like that thing where he kept proving unions right at WE, while telling the right wing press he was doing it to prove that socialist principles wouldn't work in industrial cities. And he's not as much of a dick about funding superhero antics as I'd think. Okay, yeah, he could be worse. He's better than some sort of--I don't know--those cult of personality men with money. Where because they have money they have to have the best business instincts, the biggest dick, the best taste in cars, and the very tastiest brains."
"I'll ask the next brain-eating species I come across if eating the rich tastes better."
Lois huffed, and wiggled her toes under Clara's hand until she put down her crochet to give Lois a foot rub.
Clara let her, finishing up the latest flower she'd been creating at carefully below super-speed before she put it down. She kept the tiny steel crochet hook that had belonged to Martha's grandmother in a loop of the fine linen-silk thread. She had a long way to go, and a slowly growing bag of flowers and leaves of irish lace motifs, tucked into a lead-lined box.
(The lead-lined box was a gift from Bruce, because he thought he was funny, and forgot he'd sacrificed his sense of humour to an overwhelming need to make justice his defining character trait a long time ago. Clara's parents, however, had been delighted to have an active listener to their stories of how they tried to hide Clara's presents at Christmas time. Bruce, of course, took that as both instructional and a personal challenge.)
Clara had enough enemies as Superman, and enough bad luck as Clara, that she'd wanted a fireproof box as she made the lace pieces for her wedding dress. The fact that she could see it from bed, and not see inside the box, made it feel like she was making her own gift. Tucking away the idea of some imagined future, a day's work at a time.
Of course, she was marrying Bruce Wayne, so there was always the possibility, as he wrapped his arms around her and they both pretended she couldn't escape, that he might add something else to the box she couldn't see into.
The first time Lois had followed Clara into her bedroom so she could show off her slow and labourious progress on her Irish lace wedding gown, she'd seen the heavy lead box Clara pulled from beneath the bed, and said she didn't want to know about alien sex toys. Or billionaire sex toys. Both were horrifying ideas "not for mortal ken, Clara!"
That she kept the pieces of her future wedding dress in a lead lined box so she couldn't see into it didn't help her protestations that it wasn't a sex thing, it was a trust thing. That had just lead to raised eyebrows.
"Clara, honey, I thought you were faking that clueless country face? That man has a competence kink a mile wide, and no one who wasn't you has managed to touch it."
Well, that was true. Bruce got frustrated with anyone who couldn't keep up with him, which was almost everyone, but had a special sort of understated pride when one of his boys or their teammates anticipated something which needed to be done before he had to ask. The small nods of satisfaction were sparce enough to probably be a contributing factor to the Robins daddy issues, and she was honestly quite glad that no one was expecting her to parent the Red Hood.
"He likes that you can kill him," Lois muttered, which was speculation, and not something Clara was going to say yes or no to. (It was a yes, but that was bedroom talk she wasn't going to confirm. Lois should stop looking so damn smug about her suppositions.) "He likes that you know he probably has plans to take you down if you go all Earth-destroyingly rogue alien."
"Well, of course. I'm not an idiot."
"You like that he likes this about you -- he likes that you're a ridiculous and overpowered woman who is making her own wedding dress in the most stupidly labour-intensive way possible, and only some of the reason why you're doing it is to troll the media who thinks you're a ditz, and will have to write about how long you spent making your own wedding dress."
Clara grinned, because that was going to be fun, and Lois curled her toes under Clara's hand.
"But most of it is to prove you're a person, and you're connected to human things, and the past, just like the rest of us."
Having friends who knew her this well was inconvenient.
"The box is still not a sex thing," Clara said, but she was socialised to be a good Earthling woman, and if she could blush, she would be.