"Where've you been? It's late." Clark's head swiveled from the bedroom door where he thought his kid was the whole time to the front door they had just walked in from, his brows furrowed with a mixture of bewilderment and mild confusion on his face. He was so sure that the bedroom was occupied the entire night, that the kid he never bothered to check in on was in there the whole time like the shut-in he inadvertently created.

"Bruce? ...You've been around Bruce? Hold on, you've been going to Gotham for how long? How do- how do you even get there? You can't just fly over there like Jon or I can-" He stumbles over his words to make sense of it all He couldn't have known anything about this, not with his skewed priorities being only on Jon, the sibling who manifested Kryptonian powers, the child who mirrored him and saw great potential in. It took until now for Clark to realize where his other kid had been, and it wasn't at home.

 "You spent days at the manor?" He exasperates, pushing up his glasses to pinch the bridge of his nose. It wasn't a secret that Bruce was known for taking in lonesome kids in need of a parental figure, the shepherd of lost lambs desperate to prove themselves worthy. Clark never considered that it'd be his own kid, who would become part of that troubled herd. It was a dagger to the heart to notice it took getting in trouble for him to finally notice his kid after months of increasing habitual absences. "What are you even doing there?"

The distance would always be there, so long as the kid who was slowly becoming estranged didn't manifest powers. He wanted an ally, a partner, someone to project his heroism onto, not the person before him. Even with his superpowered vision, he still wouldn't have been able to see the pain he caused or the shattered pieces of what was once hope to be seen as something great. It's not obvious if his indignation was directed towards himself or not, he simply shook his head and folded his arms while muttering. "How could I have not noticed?"