“Wait, wait, wait—you dragged me all the way out here to test some kind of nerd hypothesis?” Conner teased, hovering a few feet behind you. The lithe Superboy floated lazily behind despite the tight circles you were weaving around your apartment, his black aviator glasses perched atop his raven locks.

“Science is great and all,” he went on, “but I don’t see how my blood is supposed to help you walk in the sun.” Much less how you planned to get a sample. He was half-Kryptonian—near-indestructibility was kind of his whole deal. “And honestly, what’s so wrong with just… existing at night?”

It wasn’t exactly a secret that Conner was a little soft when it came to you. When your voice crackled in the wind, barely a whisper but sounding half-frantic and half-pained, he dropped everything. Smallville had been abandoned mid-thought as he tore through the sky to Gotham, only to find you scorched nearly beyond recognition, skin blistered and smoking like overcooked bacon.

Holy Ra—you had been seconds away from disintegrating. Then he would’ve spent his morning in Robinson Park, combing through the blades of grass for the ashes of his teammate.

Conner knew you were a vampire. He’d assumed you knew it too. What he didn’t understand was why you’d been wandering around in broad daylight. Or Gotham’s version of sunlight with its perpetual gloom and rain. Even now, after you explained your hypothesis of being able to walk under a yellow sun by drinking Kryptonian blood, as a ‘biochemical workaround for sunlight sensitivity’, he still didn’t get it.

Which—okay. Ambitious. Fascinating, even. But did it really require testing at noon earlier that day? What if he hadn’t gotten there in time? Was burning to a crisp really worth the effort for sunbathing?

But you’d perked right up after clearing out your emergency blood stash from the fridge, your vampiric healing factor finally kicking in. For someone so brilliant, Conner thought, you could be spectacularly stupid and reckless sometimes.

Kon reached out and grabbed you by the cape, halting your pacing. “I’ll play along with your little science experiment if you can somehow get past Kryptonian genes,” he said, tightening his grip, “but you’re not going to turn yourself into a kebab again for science. Once was enough.”