Contemplations

   Clark walked to the Princes' apartment.  He would have flown had it been nighttime, but he couldn't risk someone seeing him in the clear daylight.  That thought bothered him.  In Smallville, the wide-open fields and sparsely-populated farmland meant that he could do whatever he wanted, for the most part.  He normally kept to the ground, but he often got the chance to fly.  From the distance at which the next-nearest farm sat, he'd probably look like a bird or a plane.  Unless someone had a telescope and randomly decided to point it over his house, Clark was safe there.  But if Smallville was his playground, Metropolis was his cage.
   For a city so huge, Metropolis was rather open.  The skyscrapers were set farther apart than most cities, affording wide open views of the blue skies overhead.  It gave the city a sense of hope; of freedom.  Of course, this also meant that the five-million-or-so citizens on the streets below would have an easy view of a boy flying across the sky.
   What would they say if they saw him?  Would they be curious?  Afraid?  Clark wasn't ready to make his personal life into a public circus, so he wouldn't be able to explain who he was or why he was flying.  His presence would probably scare people, and he didn't want that.  If he was going to go into the business of publicly using his powers, he'd need to figure out a way to solve this.
   The population of Metropolis wasn't nearly as dense as New York, L.A., or Chicago.  Most of the housing in the city was notably spacious and rather inexpensive, allowing its citizens to live comfortably.  Lois had once explained the reason for this: Luthorcorp had built most of the city through its subsidiaries.  If there was one positive thing Lionel Luthor had to his credit, it was that he genuinely believed in scientific progress, economic prosperity, and the general advancement of civilization.  Of course, Luthorcorp offset their losses with the cheap housing by secretly monopolizing the local transportation, food, and electric economies, but it wasn't anything that actually hurt the average citizen.  If anything, it seemed that Lionel was actually crafting some sort of modern utopia.  Clark had read about similar men and their ideas throughout history:  Marx.  Stalin.  Hitler.  All dictators and madmen who sought to better the world by twisting it into their own vision.  The difference between Lionel and those men was that his plan actually seemed to be working.  Of course, Clark thought, that was probably only because his underground crime network was secretly forcing it to work.
   That had actually struck Clark as odd.  Despite the fact that he'd heard rumors and powerful whispers of Lionel's secret criminal mastery, he'd had yet to truly see it for himself.  True, he and the others had been attacked at Bruce's tower—an incident which Lionel later had practically admitted to orchestrating—but that was it.  The hostage situation at Excelsior was almost definitely not Lionel's doing, and there hadn't been anything linking Luthorcorp to the attempted bank bombing last month, and none of the other minor crimes Clark had seen (or stopped) had been linked to Luthor in the slightest.  Lois and Bruce insisted that Luthorcorp was merely laying low because of Lionel's arrogant slip-up at the Metropolis High.  Clark figured he could trust them to know what they were talking about.  But then there was today's attack on the jewelry store.  What possible purpose did that have?  Why would someone like Deadshot bother to mess with a jewelry store?  Was he trying to get caught?
   ...That was it.  Clark mentally slapped himself in the forehead.  Of course.  Diana had been the one to stop Deadshot the first time, and she nearly got sniped during the attack on the bank.  Clark had read that Floyd Lawton's ego was legendary; he must have wanted revenge on the girl who'd managed to beat him.
   But how could he have known that Diana would be the one to respond to the attack?  What about Clark or Bart?  Another obvious realization hit Clark: Deadshot might not have known much about Clark, and he probably didn't even know that Bart existed.
   Clark felt a pang of guilt.  If he'd not been at the farm doing chores—at super-speed, of course—he would have been there to help Diana.  He might have even gotten there first.  Bart didn't show up at all, but he was elsewhere as well.  He'd said something about "getting genuine burritos in Mexico," but Clark had a little bit of a hard time understanding him.  Whenever Bart got nervous or guilty, he tended to inadvertently speed up his words into an incomprehensible blur.
   No matter.  Whatever she'd done, Diana probably needed a friend right now.  Despite their recent issues, Clark wanted to make sure she wasn't alone, and that she was okay.