More Young Justice Trash

Miscommunication

-Today we have an Artemis and Superboy centric piece from the perspectives of Oliver Queen and Lois Lane respectively-

"Clark." Lois sung, swinging slowly by his desk. "I'm popular, don't you know?"

"Did somebody slander you?" The man was hunched inches from his computer display, typing away busily.

"Better." She held up a leaf of freshly printed pages. "A highschooler wrote an admiration piece about me-- and made it public!"

"Lo, you're not--"

"Of course I'm going to read it." She tutted. "If I feel especially generous, I'll grade it." and with that Lois returned to her desk.

The cover page of the essay gave her some insight into the author: Conner Kent, 11th grade, Mr. Burnard's Class, Happy Harbor High School. It was kind of precious, in the way a bunch of crayon scribbles can be precious; it was double spaced and typed in Times New Roman-- bless this kid's heart. 

Oliver had learned many things about kids and teens since he took Roy in, but the first one was probably that they always left stuff in their pockets and forgot about it. As a result he insisted on shaking out their laundry before washing it, just in case. It was one of the most embarrassingly fatherly things he had to do regularly. 

It was on one of these occasions that he found, at the bottom of a hamper, a few small plastic packages.

He picked them up.

He immediately dropped them.

Lube. Water-based, name-brand lube. He ran to wash his hands, if only to deal with the horror of it all.

Had it really gone that far? Had he really become the bossy dad who suspected his kids of things they obviously didn't do? Or, knowing his kids, something they definitely did do.

Was it Roy? Fuck, that was gross, but he hoped it was true, because the alternative... no, it couldn't be his little girl; she was only fifteen! Sure, Oliver had been sexually active as a teen, but Artemis was just a kid! 

He had to sit down. 

It had to be Roy's.

Conner Kent wasn't a bad writer, he presented facts clearly in plain language, everything was grammatically correct, it was well researched... he could have been a bit more expressive though, the middle of the essay slogged a bit.

Lois copy-pasted the kid's student email from the document and threw it into a new email. 

She wasn't crazy, she didn't want to shoot down the young writer, but if she was a teen writing to their idol then she'd want some advice from them. She'd just let him know she liked his approach, but advised studying narrative works to create more compelling works. She'd make it a compliment sandwich and pray she didn't come off to harsh and crush this kid.

"Errr, Roy?"

"Yeah?" Roy pulled his headphones back, still clacking away at an application. 

"I was just... returning these." He squeezed into the room, holding out the packets with a fringe of embarrassment. "I found them in the wash."

Roy glanced fleetingly at the lube packets, not even processing what they were. "Not mine. Ask Artemis." He shrugged, sliding his headphones back on. "Close the door?"

Oliver staggered back down the hallway. From the guest room he heard Artemis' voice cursing at a video game and laughing.

Ollie went back downstairs.