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seriousficTitle: Duality
Fandom: Batman Begins and Superman Returns
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,710
Acknowledgments: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damo_in_japan for betaing this.
Next Part: Chapter 2
Summary: Superman traveled for five years to seek life on Krypton. What if he’d found it?
Krypton was dead to begin with.
Clark felt sweat pushing out his pores, running down his flesh. He rotated through any number of clothes on the trip (being too naturally prudish to just pad around naked, although no one was there to see him). Sometimes jeans and flannel, sometimes simpler bodysuits -- not the full S-suit, but more like Fortress leisurewear. Today he was wearing Kryptonian robes, glowing with the colors of the House of El and its crest. He’d researched the crystals once more on the journey. The crest was more than just his family heritage. The House of El was first among the Great Houses of Krypton, incorporating tens of hundreds of lesser houses into its sanctity. Its symbol was one that represented hope for all Kryptonians.
Five years, in and out of cryo-sleep. He knew without looking that he hadn’t aged a day, not physically at least, but he knew the same couldn’t be said for his friends and adopted family. More than that, their absence felt like a growing hunger, a void which took up more and more of him. He missed having people. Not the adoration, not even the exhilaration of service, but just people to care for and care about. And to care for him in turn.
He set the scanners on automatic and put in the video of a Planet office party, six years past. It was creepy, he knew, but it kept him sane. Even if the doubt sprung up immediately afterward. He shouldn’t have left, his dream was foolish, people were dying…
But Krypton… home… family…
No, nothing, hopes dashed, dreams dead, no life on Krypton, no life but him for light-years and him not even a real Kryptonian, an alien raised by humans who paid lip service to the teachings of his biological father.
He played the tape. The familiar images swam in front of him, the nostalgic sound cocooned him. He closed his eyes and let himself be transported to that day, before the distress beacon from Krypton was discovered. Lex Luthor was in prison, Lois and him were…
Were…
Okay, he liked to tell himself, they were okay. So what if they were having a very weird relationship behind his own back, Clark-as-Clark ignored and Clark-as-Superman worshipped, with Lois-as-Lois caught somewhere in the middle. He didn’t like feeling sorry for himself, not when he was given such extraordinary gifts and such a happy life in comparison to so many… but loving someone who only loved half of you back was dang weird.
He opened his eyes. The scent of the birthday cake was gone beyond even his sterling memory’s ability to recall. Jimmy had marshaled Clark’s birthday party. He’d always been the youngest child of the Daily Planet family, eager to please, eager to keep the family together. Whether it was going to see a movie or grabbing a beer after work, anything was okay with him so long as he and his fellow employees were doing it together. It drove Perry nuts.
“That boy needs a girlfriend,” he had commented more than once, willfully ignorant that Jimmy fancied himself married to his work.
Clark shut the video off, thinking for the millionth time of dashing the tape against a wall to put it forever out of mind, out of his misery. But then he might start sculpting again and as good as he’d gotten at the composition, having statues of his co-workers lying around the ship wasn’t doing wonders for his mental health.
He missed cryo-sleep.
The VCR was beeping. The interface between Kryptonian and Earth technology had never been exactly smooth and Clark was about to jostle the wires when he noticed that--no, the beeping was coming from a console. He sped to the console so fast that he bled off some of his precious superpower reservoir.
Life!
He clicked for details. Not just bacteria or a mold or a fungus… something in the animal kingdom. Please, God, Rao, whoever’s listening, don’t let this be the family pet or some weird Sigourney Weaver cocoon thing…
The computer spat out more details. Kryptonian… he felt like he could weep. It had been worth it. His long exodus, the years spent away while his friends withered without him, it was all worth it!
There was someone to save.
He wiped a tear off his cheek (so he had started crying… he would leave this part out when he talked to Bruce next) and sat in the grav-chair. The seatbelts automatically locked him down. His fingers were fidgeting with excitement and he had to squeeze them into fists a few times before he could take hold of the controls. Even then, he immediately had to wipe the sweat off on his legs. It was like he’d taken a drug. All the doubt had just washed away. He realized, with a start, that he was smiling.
The ship (or giant Christmas tree ornament, as Ma had called it) dipped into a massive crevice in the arctic waste of Krypton, a vast gouge in the land. The ice around it had melted and frozen again almost instantaneously, resulting in strange formations that fooled the eye into thinking water was still flowing on this dead world. Without a thought to conserving power, he switched the lights on. Tentacles whipped out of the hull and concentrated searchlights on what he was searching for. It was a cave winking out the side of the crevice, a mere scab on the cliff face. Too small for the ship to approach. Clark went to get his spacesuit.
***
The bay doors opened and Clark was buffeted by the sensation of Kryptonite, the tingle but not the strength-sapping illness that he associated with it. Most of it had been scoured off the surface by the supernova’s shockwave, but enough of it was left to start an instant headache behind his eyeballs. Before he had left the ship, Clark had given himself a dose of precious yellow sunlight from what was conserved in the solar cells. He had also dressed in a lead-lined spacesuit, with an air supply to supplement what he carried around in his bloodstream. He could hold his breath for hours on a good day, but he didn’t want to chance it. Not when this stranger was also depending on him.
With a brief jolt of levitation he was across the gap between his hovering ship and the cave. It felt good to fly again, even for a moment. With a mournful sigh, he set down. The brittle ground cracked under his feet, like glass. He shined his flash-orb on it and found a thin layer of reddened ice coated the floor. Watching his step, he proceeded.
The cave was mostly natural, its contours like Earth caves, yet different in a thousand subtle ways it would take a geologist to point out. Despite his mental reminder to watch out, Clark found his pace quickening. Some of the crystals growing out of the walls weren’t natural at all, but Kryptonian technology. He stroked one in passing. It remained cold and dead. Power conservation. Had to be.
“Hello?” he called in Kryptonese, probably butchering the pronunciation all to hell. He’d studied in on the way, and the AI had tested him, but there was nothing like being a native speaker.
The planet itself gave a melancholic rumble, shaking the cave. Clark grabbed hold of a crystal for support. This one lit up, projecting Kryptonese holograms too fast for him to process.
“Slow,” he said, then remembered to speak in Kryptonese. The holograms dutifully slowed. He read through them. Although he found it hard to believe, there had been a domed city under the surface. Apparently, his race hadn’t minded living without sunlight. After the catastrophe, they had had some time to recuperate… sending out the distress beacon which had only now reached Earth, preparing some sort of stasis chambers… actually slowing down time in much the same way he had been preserved as a babe during the long voyage between galaxies.
He took the crystal with him, using it as a map through the winding tunnels. Many of them had collapsed or been blocked by glaciers and it was only as a last resort that he unmasked to use heatvision on one. The distant Kryptonite blurred his vision until he had his helmet back on. Water dripped on his shoulders and domed helmet as he passed through the newly-formed opening. What he saw shook him like an earthquake.
A vast cavern, miles long and wide, dominated by a domed city. The massive glass… or was it diamond?... dome had once shone like a prism, but now had been stained with volcanic gasses and cracked in places. It was one of those cracks that Clark dropped through, to the city obscured inside.
He self-deprecatingly chided himself for thinking of Oz. The city within was as epic and majestic as the history holos had implied, but it did decidedly ring of the Emerald City… as seen through the filter of his own, much smaller Fortress. His flight ability lessened the fall, floated him down to a gentle landing. The crack of ice underfoot echoed through the necropolis, a gunshot putting the city out of its misery. What was truly dead until someone saw its corpse?
He checked the crystalline interface on his arm, the distortion that gauzed the flesh beneath it broadcasting a holographic map of his surroundings. He got his bearings on a few of the more oddly-shaped landmarks, then headed for the life sign. It was hard-going. He had to be more careful not to overexert himself and that meant maneuvering the cumbersome suit with only his baseline human strength. For the most part he could get through the crumbling city, the debris making it a bit of a climb. Only a few times did he have to call upon powers beyond the ken of mortal men to make a great leap or smash a barricade open.
The crystal interface vibrated. He looked at it and saw that the life sign was in close proximity to him… a collapsed building. Clark looked closer at the map. Rotating it, he saw that the life sign should be just under it. Perfect. He could spend all day digging it out and trying not to cause a cave-in. Or…
Clark circled the collapse, looking for… ah-ha! A large crack in the pavement, barely iced over. Clark smashed it in with his bootheel. His light revealed a subtle curvature to the depths, but he had no illusions of climbing back up unassisted. He unfurled one of the tiny climbing nylons from his belt and tied one end around a perfectly massive crystal. That kept him well and truly anchored as he rappelled down.
His feet crunched down with the now familiar frozen crunch-crack of snowy ice. Cold-spiders and the frozen goop of their webs infected the corridor he was in. They must have been thirsting after its meager warmth. He avoided them as much as possible, shaking them off when they tried to climb up his legs and tore his fingers through webs. The interface was buzzing steadily. Up ahead, he saw a door tinted with its locked status. He punched it open. No more waiting.
Clark stepped inside. It was as if he never left Earth. The interior was an almost exact replica of the Fortress. He closed his eyes and sought that far vista’s details in his memory. Where would the living quarters be? He remembered and walked to them. The apertures were clogged with webbing he had to shatter, cold-spiders hissing at him as they fled.
He called out a booming greeting in Kryptonese and it echoed off the crystals. They vibrated in symphony, but were long-dead. He shut off the interface before it shook apart. The life sign should be close… but where? Then he looked up.
“Oh, Jesus.”
The ice-spiders had cocooned them. He nearly burnt the web off the prism, but stopped himself. He’d do no good to anyone without oxygen. It was a family unit cryo-pod, a sphere of Kryptonian science with crystal tombs growing out of it. Outcroppings. He checked them as fast as he could rip the river of frozen webbing off. Dead. Dead. Dead, decayed, body rotted to bones and bones frozen to glass. Where was the survivor? There had to be one, at least one, please God, let there be one…
Her. She was the one. All of a sudden the enormity of it doubled within Clark, muscling flesh and bones aside in its gargantuan understanding.
He was no longer alone. Within the tomb… no, the womb of the cryo-pod there was a female form, her chest rising and falling with glacial slowness, waiting for rebirth. For him.
Clark took off a glove, feeling the suit constrict at the wrist to trap in his air. Fingers splayed, he set his palm against the gentle curvature of the cryo-pod’s door. He could sense the torpid sludge of her blood in her veins, the millennial pulse of her heartbeat. Still alive, barely so, but clinging to it. Like him. Fighting to stay alive. Fighting a never-ending battle that was about to come to a long-deserved victory.
In the past, in Smallville, in Metropolis, on Earth, he had always imagined a fellow Kryptonian in human terms. Even with the realization that she (she she she) was a woman, that barely narrowed his options. Friend. Lover. Mother. Sister. Companion. Confidante. So many things she could be, but she was more, so much more. She was his salvation.
With a caress that would not be out of place in the restoration of some great work of art, he wiped the condensation from the fogged glass. He didn’t recognize her features as family, despite the House of El symbol she wore on her robes. Her hair was as golden as his was ebon. There was a delicacy to her features, in contrast to the iron-hard strength in his, with the blue chill that permeated her increasing the porcelain quality about her. So fragile… yet beautiful as well. Young… he found it hard to guess her age… but definitely womanly. He stopped himself from comparing her to Lois. He would have no expectations of her. As long as she was alive, he would be content… happy… overjoyed with having a companion in the universe.
He pulled his glove back on, wriggling his fingers to restore circulation. Although he had barely felt it, the cold here could equal the greatest of winters back on Earth. Earth… he could show her Earth, through the window of his ship as it grew from a marble to a whole world… Clark shook himself out of his reverie. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, as his mother had always said.
He hurried to the control console. As he’d expected, all the other pods had failed… shut down to conserve power. A gruesome death, but only to him; they had felt nothing except the transition from one sleep to a far deeper one.
Quickly, he reviewed all the data. Kara Zor-El… of the House of El, the Zor vassal family. Not a full-blooded El, but a cousin of sorts. He’d have a hard time explaining that weird hegemony of fiefdoms and nobility that made her his responsibility, his family, but still not blood. Clark supposed it was too much to ask for that he come across his immediate family… he might as well find a childhood pet alive and well.
Okay. He felt he had a pretty good grasp on the awakening procedure… and if he didn’t, hopefully the safety protocols would stop him. First things first. He sealed up the room, forcefields humming with energy as they blazed into existence, then pressurized it. Finally, he started up the process and backed away.
The crystal womb lit up, pulsating slightly. Not caring how much yellow-sun energy it used up, Clark strained his superhearing to detect the quickening of her pulse from weekly to daily to hourly. Although it wasn’t possible for her to regain consciousness so soon, her eyes were blinking open in slow-motion. Ice-crystals broke off her eyelashes and Clark saw that her irises were the same unearthly shade of blue as his. The light in the crystal increased, thawing her. A million technologies that Clark could never grasp were bringing Kara back from the brink of artificially-induced death, pumping her full of new life. Her lips pinked, her skin blushed. The long blink continued, her eyes now wide open and looking to remain that way. Light reflected off her glass fingernails as her fingers curled. Cold. She must be so cold.
The glass door shrunk away to nothing, dislodging her, although the process seemed only half-done. Kara fell forward and Clark caught her, shocked at how anything still alive could be so cold. He ripped his gloves off and rubbed his hands over her bare arms, willing the heat into her. Again he was struck by her fragility, and at last the give of flesh after so long in self-imposed exile. A touch, a handshake, a hug…
“Cold,” she said in Kryptonese, stuttering. Clark focused on the nearest metal and launched enough heatvision at it to turn it molten, not caring that it ruined his helmet. That he ripped off, rubbing his cheek against hers as he carried her next to the new heat source.
“Easy, easy.” He could feel the warmth returning to her small body, infusing it. “You’re safe now.”
“Where’s my father? My mother?”
She had to ask that first. “They didn’t make it.”
She looked wildly about her, as if they could be hiding in the shadows or behind a crystal. “No. No, I saw them! They got into the cryo-pods before me, they made it.”
He took her head gently, forcing her to look at him. “The cryo-pods were never meant for long-term use. When they began to run low on power, the computer cut life support one by one. You’re the last.”
“You’re lying!” She shoved him off her weakly. Not hard enough to truly dislodge him, but he let go of her anyway. “My father programmed the chamber. There was enough power to last for years!”
“It’s been years. Decades, in fact. I don’t know how long for sure. With the distance I’ve traveled, time gets a little…” He trailed off. She wouldn’t be interested. “The chamber was programmed to preserve you the longest. Your father succeeded. He wanted you to live.”
Shakily, she tried to get to her feet. She slipped and again Clark caught her, slowly helping her up and supporting her on his shoulder. She wrapped an arm around him, accepting his help. “And who are you?”
“Cla—-Kal-El of the House of El, son of Jor-El.”
“Kal-El…” She shook her head, trying to connect two disparate pieces that just refused to lock together. “I saw you just a day ago. You were an infant. Could it really have taken your growth in adulthood for Krypton to recover? Who were the fools that dallied about while my family died one by one?”
“There was no recovery,” he told her. “We’re the last.”
“The last what? We can’t be the last Kryptonians. Twenty minutes ago Krypton was the jewel of this galaxy!”
“It’s closer to twenty years ago. And you were the only survivor my ship detected.”
She shoved him off of her and grabbed hold of a crystal column. He circled around it to look at her. There were tears in her eyes, concealed by the veil of stringy hair that fell across her face. He brushed it out of her eyes.
“You… have a ship,” she said haltingly. “You’re not from here. You speak our language like a yearling.”
“My parents sent me to Earth when the end came. I was raised by the natives there.”
Kara sniffled. “Earth? Sounds familiar…”
“It’s a planet in the Milky Way galaxy, Sector 2814, Sol system.”
“Jor-El always was a proponent of space exploration, but no one supported his dream.” There was a grim, half-mad humor in her voice. “What a way to be proven right.”
“We should get out of here,” he said softly. “It’s not safe.”
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” She tapped her heart twice in ritualized greeting. “I’m Kara, by the way. I suppose it was rude of me not to introduce myself sooner.”
“Here,” he said, taking a crystal out of his suit. With an eye-dropper’s worth of water, it grew into a quarantine chamber… a pressurized one. “Get in there and I’ll carry you back to my ship.”
“You’d have to be strong as a mother flame-bird to budge that thing,” she said, clearly doubting his sanity.
He did more than budge it.
“There’s a lot to explain.”
***
“So, these humans,” Kara started, once Clark had explained most everything he could think of to her and shown her one of the videotapes, “they worship you.”
“Some of them do. I try not to encourage it.” He finished removing his spacesuit and put it in the bin, glad to be out of its stuffiness and down to his jeans and T-shirt again. Kara boggled a little at his wardrobe, but said nothing. “Mostly, they look at me… I don’t rightly know. Something like a friend.”
“A messiah.” She was paging through some of his mementos… a Metropolis snowglobe with a little flying Superman dangling from the top, a Superman bobble-head, random other trinkets Ma had parked to make the trip easier. “You inspire a religious fervor in them and hope to lead them towards Kryptonian rationality.” She nodded stiffly, still trying to contain her emotions. “A worthy goal.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I…” Almost idly he ticked the bobble-head with his finger, watching it shake. “I try to provide an example to them. A positive one.”
“Like a role-model.”
“Exactly.”
“And you want my help.”
That brought him up short. He hadn’t even begun to consider what to do with her when he got back to Earth. Five years and he had never thought that far ahead… except the possibility that maybe there was survivors, plural. Survivors who were trying to rebuild Krypton, survivors who asked him to stay and he accepted. He was never sure if those dreams were nightmares or not.
“I want you to live. Be happy. If that’s as a superhero or as a college student, I don’t care. Well, obviously I care, but… as long as you’re happy… alive…”
She worked her jaw. “I could teach at one of your Earth colleges.”
“Yes, but you’d look like a student.”
“So there’s ageism in your adopted society.” She jumped up onto a console, crossed her legs. “The judgment of worth based on relative youth or old age. Are there any other prejudices on your world?”
Clark crossed his arms a bit snidely. “Oh, we’ve got just about all of them. It’s why they need a role model.”
“But you were raised by them. What makes you worthy to teach?”
“I had a very good upbringing, compared to many. And Jor-El’s teachings have also been of use.”
“I thought Jor-El died.” There she fought hard to keep the emotion out of her voice.
“He did. But he provided a representation of himself in memory crystals to guide me. The crystals showed me how to build this ship, for instance.”
The interface vibrated. He took it off and set it down on a counter. “That would be the secondary scan. It’s official. We’re the last.”
“Yay us,” Kara said ruefully. “What should we order for the party?”
Clark was already seated at the controls. “Try not to think about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She leaped down from the console and stalked behind him. “You never even knew Krypton. For eighteen years, all I’ve known of life has been my friends and family here. And now they’re all gone.”
“You’ve still got me.”
“Hardly seems a fair trade,” she remarked caustically.
He swiveled in his chair to face her. “As much as I try to do to rectify this, life isn’t fair. You’ve been given a chance no one else has. Now, you can waste it on useless bitterness or you can try to forge a new life on Earth. I can’t promise it’ll be any better than the old one, but it will be life. That’s all any of us are offered.”
She looked close to tears. He stood, cupping her chin so she looked up into his eyes. “Your father wanted you to live. If not for yourself, do it for him. And me.”
“Was it really so hard? Being alone on a planet full of people who adored you?”
He thought of Pa, his mortality all too plain when it was engraved on his headstone. He thought of Lois, enamored with an alter-ego he’d constructed instead of the man he’d been born. He thought of Perry and Jimmy and Bruce, all the friends he couldn’t get too close to, couldn’t show more to than fractions of himself. The cape or the glasses, never both. He was a fractured man, and yet here was one girl who could see all of him. It made a world of difference.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, and turned back to plot a course away from the grave that was Krypton.
***
It only took her a day to subdue her feelings about Krypton. Clark was a little disturbed by that. For about twelve hours she was inconsolable. Constant crying fits and sullen silences. She only snapped out of it to ask him questions, which he tried to draw out into conversations. Kara was naturally extroverted, so it wasn’t hard. She told him so much of Krypton, the little things you couldn’t learn as a holographic tourist… the warrens where she played, the friends she bonded with, the pets she had. He held her hand more than once, as much for his benefit as hers. With each day her grip was a little surer. He dressed her in his Earth clothes, to get her used to them. She liked jeans.
He began exposing her to short intervals of yellow sunlight. Not enough to bring her up to full power, but just enough to get her used to her powers. Flying came first. It was a shame that she had to learn it in such a cramped environment, but from her open facial expression it was obvious she wouldn’t have wanted to wait. She greeted each morning’s exposure with almost narcotic glee. Clark suspected that was more psychological than physiological. After being powerless so long, to become a demigod… no wonder she would find it intoxicating. Just another thing he would have to temper if she were to ever have a normal… if she were ever to have a happy life on Earth.
“What are humans like?” Kara asked, floating around the ceiling. She still hadn’t gotten the hang of self-propulsion, so she pulled herself along the roof, practicing short leaps to the wall or ground.
“Even they can’t agree on that,” Clark said, adjusting their course. Thanks to the wormhole generator at the Fortress of Solitude and the one he’d opened up on Krypton, the return trip would take only a few weeks instead of years. He stood from his seat and cracked his neck. “Good.”
“Good?” Kara leapt off the wall and cartwheeled through the air, flailing as she tried to stabilize herself. “If they’re so good, why do they need you?”
“Most of them aren’t good all the time.” Clark ran a hand through his hair. “Or bad all the time. It’s complicated… and not a particularly fair question.”
“Only because you don’t like the answer,” Kara laughed, taking a running leap off the ceiling. She touched base on the floor and smoothly flew through the air until she tapped the opposite wall. “Are they truly the equal of a Kryptonian, as you said?”
“In some ways. In others they are superior.”
“Come on!” Kara said, dismissively waving a hand before smacking it against the wall to propel herself again. “More or less, are they inferior?”
“They’re less developed than us,” Clark admitted as Kara streamed overhead.
“You mean less evolved.”
Clark grabbed her around the waist and tugged her lower. With a few motions he shaped her outline to be more aerodynamic, moving her arms in front of her. Each finger he curled down into a fist. “That’s dangerous thinking. Zod’s thinking.”
“You’ve heard of Zod?”
“We met in passing,” Clark grimaced.
“What was he like?” Kara asked, her young voice full of curiosity and excitement.
“I’d really rather not talk about it.”
Kara scowled. “Is he alive?”
“More or less. He’s in the Phantom Zone, where he can’t hurt anyone else.”
”Acceptable. Give me a push.” Clark did, watching her careen around a boulevard in the ship. “So, these humans… they’re like… apes?”
“They’re still a species. We’re not,” Clark said, exasperated. “Do the math.”
Kara paused in a corner, hands against either wall to stop herself. “We’re not a species?”
“Not viably. Although I suppose it’s possible that we could interbreed with the humans, our genetic heritage passed on.”
Spider-like, Kara crawled up the vaulted ceiling at the center of the spaceship. Her body was lost among the darkness of the crystalline dome, dark clothes shadowing her against the stars. Her mouth remained, a Cheshire cat’s, wet red lips and tongue, white teeth so sharp.
“Aren’t we viable? You and I?”
Her shirt… Clark’s shirt… fluttered down and the starlight reflected off her pale breasts, just this side of visible. Clark caught it and looked away.
“Put that back on.” Clark held the shirt up to her.
“I’m literally the last woman on Krypton. We must do our part to preserve our species.” Her jeans fell a ways away. Her legs were the color of cream, gone frozen and without sunlight for far too long. And he felt so awfully warm. “ I’ve seen the way you look at me. I doubt it will be unpleasant for either of us.”
“There’s someone else,” Clark said simply.
“Ah.” With a whoosh, she was back in her clothes. She’d been practicing superspeed. “Your mate?”
“…hopefully.”
***
The ship traveled, faster and faster, and they went along for the ride. Kara picked up English fast, her mind every bit the equal of Clark’s. He’d never put much stock in the legends of Kryptonian supergenius… he himself was too thick to pull off a third of the schemes Luthor doodled while half-asleep… but heightened intelligence was clearly one of his gifts and Kara was on his level. She grasped concepts almost as quickly as he doled them out, even going so far as to adopt a Midwestern accent similar to his own. She pitched it high and low, amplified it to a twang or shrunk it to a mere background rumble in an otherwise cosmopolitan urban voice. She was still flirting with him… playfully, girlishly, maybe without even realizing she was doing it…
…
He could let her down easy. And the company was nice, at any rate. So for both their goods, he didn’t talk about Lois much.
“Jimmy, you’ll like Jimmy!” he enthused as they swam through the air, propelling themselves by ultra-fast beating of their arms and legs; superstrong pushes and kicks against walls. It was inefficient compared to his own internal anti-gravity propulsion, but Kara seemed to enjoy it.
“Tell me about him,” Kara said, as they passed each other. They linked arms, spun around each other, released, and flew off in opposite directions.
“Freckles! Red hair!”
“Red hair?”
On the next pass, Clark ran a hand through Kara’s hair, making it blizzard out in the low-gravity (alright, so he’d cheated to let her fly better. So what?). “They don’t have red hair on Krypton?”
“It’s a genetically recessive trait. We read about it in the history crystals, but as a hair color it died out millennia ago.”
“Oh.” Clark said, bringing himself to a halt with only his will.
Kara watched him, stationary, as she continued to careen out of control.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. But on Earth, if there were no more redheads, people would start dyeing their hair red.” He smiled. “Just to be contradictory.”
Kara smiled too, although she didn’t know what at… or why.
***
The weeks passed by in a flash and although Clark thought he should have been… bespelled by the thought of reuniting with friends and family. Instead, he remained captivated by this strange girl he had adopted as kin. Her customs, her way of thinking, it was all endlessly fascinating to him and he was sure she felt the same of him. They spent every waking moment together. Even when they didn’t feel like talking, they stayed in each other’s presence. It was one of those times, the ship quiet except for the grind of the crystals’ expansion and flare of its power, that he caught her teary-eyed.
He didn’t ask… there were too many answers… so he led her by the arm to the cockpit. A few simple gestures and the viewscreen magnified, transforming an ordinary blue marble into that familiar canvas of sea, land, and cloud that he had missed so much.
“What is that?” she asked, her eyes wide and blue.
“Home.”
***
The presence lurked. It could not be described as a ship, for a vessel implied windows, a hull, passengers, not a harbinger of death that seemed far too unearthly to have been built out of simple mineral ore.
Nor could it be said to wait, for this implied a patience in contrast to a lack of patience. The presence was neither patient nor impatient; it simply was.
Then the presence stopped lurking. It watched, keenly, curiously, as an intruder entered its domain. A Kryptonian ship making its homecoming. The presence watched as someone left the ship. It watched as two people returned.
It watched as the ship departed.
Then it followed.
The son of Jor-El had taken the bait.
Chapter 2
Fandom: Batman Begins and Superman Returns
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 5,710
Acknowledgments: Thanks to
damo_in_japan for betaing this.Next Part: Chapter 2
Summary: Superman traveled for five years to seek life on Krypton. What if he’d found it?
Krypton was dead to begin with.
Clark felt sweat pushing out his pores, running down his flesh. He rotated through any number of clothes on the trip (being too naturally prudish to just pad around naked, although no one was there to see him). Sometimes jeans and flannel, sometimes simpler bodysuits -- not the full S-suit, but more like Fortress leisurewear. Today he was wearing Kryptonian robes, glowing with the colors of the House of El and its crest. He’d researched the crystals once more on the journey. The crest was more than just his family heritage. The House of El was first among the Great Houses of Krypton, incorporating tens of hundreds of lesser houses into its sanctity. Its symbol was one that represented hope for all Kryptonians.
Five years, in and out of cryo-sleep. He knew without looking that he hadn’t aged a day, not physically at least, but he knew the same couldn’t be said for his friends and adopted family. More than that, their absence felt like a growing hunger, a void which took up more and more of him. He missed having people. Not the adoration, not even the exhilaration of service, but just people to care for and care about. And to care for him in turn.
He set the scanners on automatic and put in the video of a Planet office party, six years past. It was creepy, he knew, but it kept him sane. Even if the doubt sprung up immediately afterward. He shouldn’t have left, his dream was foolish, people were dying…
But Krypton… home… family…
No, nothing, hopes dashed, dreams dead, no life on Krypton, no life but him for light-years and him not even a real Kryptonian, an alien raised by humans who paid lip service to the teachings of his biological father.
He played the tape. The familiar images swam in front of him, the nostalgic sound cocooned him. He closed his eyes and let himself be transported to that day, before the distress beacon from Krypton was discovered. Lex Luthor was in prison, Lois and him were…
Were…
Okay, he liked to tell himself, they were okay. So what if they were having a very weird relationship behind his own back, Clark-as-Clark ignored and Clark-as-Superman worshipped, with Lois-as-Lois caught somewhere in the middle. He didn’t like feeling sorry for himself, not when he was given such extraordinary gifts and such a happy life in comparison to so many… but loving someone who only loved half of you back was dang weird.
He opened his eyes. The scent of the birthday cake was gone beyond even his sterling memory’s ability to recall. Jimmy had marshaled Clark’s birthday party. He’d always been the youngest child of the Daily Planet family, eager to please, eager to keep the family together. Whether it was going to see a movie or grabbing a beer after work, anything was okay with him so long as he and his fellow employees were doing it together. It drove Perry nuts.
“That boy needs a girlfriend,” he had commented more than once, willfully ignorant that Jimmy fancied himself married to his work.
Clark shut the video off, thinking for the millionth time of dashing the tape against a wall to put it forever out of mind, out of his misery. But then he might start sculpting again and as good as he’d gotten at the composition, having statues of his co-workers lying around the ship wasn’t doing wonders for his mental health.
He missed cryo-sleep.
The VCR was beeping. The interface between Kryptonian and Earth technology had never been exactly smooth and Clark was about to jostle the wires when he noticed that--no, the beeping was coming from a console. He sped to the console so fast that he bled off some of his precious superpower reservoir.
Life!
He clicked for details. Not just bacteria or a mold or a fungus… something in the animal kingdom. Please, God, Rao, whoever’s listening, don’t let this be the family pet or some weird Sigourney Weaver cocoon thing…
The computer spat out more details. Kryptonian… he felt like he could weep. It had been worth it. His long exodus, the years spent away while his friends withered without him, it was all worth it!
There was someone to save.
He wiped a tear off his cheek (so he had started crying… he would leave this part out when he talked to Bruce next) and sat in the grav-chair. The seatbelts automatically locked him down. His fingers were fidgeting with excitement and he had to squeeze them into fists a few times before he could take hold of the controls. Even then, he immediately had to wipe the sweat off on his legs. It was like he’d taken a drug. All the doubt had just washed away. He realized, with a start, that he was smiling.
The ship (or giant Christmas tree ornament, as Ma had called it) dipped into a massive crevice in the arctic waste of Krypton, a vast gouge in the land. The ice around it had melted and frozen again almost instantaneously, resulting in strange formations that fooled the eye into thinking water was still flowing on this dead world. Without a thought to conserving power, he switched the lights on. Tentacles whipped out of the hull and concentrated searchlights on what he was searching for. It was a cave winking out the side of the crevice, a mere scab on the cliff face. Too small for the ship to approach. Clark went to get his spacesuit.
***
The bay doors opened and Clark was buffeted by the sensation of Kryptonite, the tingle but not the strength-sapping illness that he associated with it. Most of it had been scoured off the surface by the supernova’s shockwave, but enough of it was left to start an instant headache behind his eyeballs. Before he had left the ship, Clark had given himself a dose of precious yellow sunlight from what was conserved in the solar cells. He had also dressed in a lead-lined spacesuit, with an air supply to supplement what he carried around in his bloodstream. He could hold his breath for hours on a good day, but he didn’t want to chance it. Not when this stranger was also depending on him.
With a brief jolt of levitation he was across the gap between his hovering ship and the cave. It felt good to fly again, even for a moment. With a mournful sigh, he set down. The brittle ground cracked under his feet, like glass. He shined his flash-orb on it and found a thin layer of reddened ice coated the floor. Watching his step, he proceeded.
The cave was mostly natural, its contours like Earth caves, yet different in a thousand subtle ways it would take a geologist to point out. Despite his mental reminder to watch out, Clark found his pace quickening. Some of the crystals growing out of the walls weren’t natural at all, but Kryptonian technology. He stroked one in passing. It remained cold and dead. Power conservation. Had to be.
“Hello?” he called in Kryptonese, probably butchering the pronunciation all to hell. He’d studied in on the way, and the AI had tested him, but there was nothing like being a native speaker.
The planet itself gave a melancholic rumble, shaking the cave. Clark grabbed hold of a crystal for support. This one lit up, projecting Kryptonese holograms too fast for him to process.
“Slow,” he said, then remembered to speak in Kryptonese. The holograms dutifully slowed. He read through them. Although he found it hard to believe, there had been a domed city under the surface. Apparently, his race hadn’t minded living without sunlight. After the catastrophe, they had had some time to recuperate… sending out the distress beacon which had only now reached Earth, preparing some sort of stasis chambers… actually slowing down time in much the same way he had been preserved as a babe during the long voyage between galaxies.
He took the crystal with him, using it as a map through the winding tunnels. Many of them had collapsed or been blocked by glaciers and it was only as a last resort that he unmasked to use heatvision on one. The distant Kryptonite blurred his vision until he had his helmet back on. Water dripped on his shoulders and domed helmet as he passed through the newly-formed opening. What he saw shook him like an earthquake.
A vast cavern, miles long and wide, dominated by a domed city. The massive glass… or was it diamond?... dome had once shone like a prism, but now had been stained with volcanic gasses and cracked in places. It was one of those cracks that Clark dropped through, to the city obscured inside.
He self-deprecatingly chided himself for thinking of Oz. The city within was as epic and majestic as the history holos had implied, but it did decidedly ring of the Emerald City… as seen through the filter of his own, much smaller Fortress. His flight ability lessened the fall, floated him down to a gentle landing. The crack of ice underfoot echoed through the necropolis, a gunshot putting the city out of its misery. What was truly dead until someone saw its corpse?
He checked the crystalline interface on his arm, the distortion that gauzed the flesh beneath it broadcasting a holographic map of his surroundings. He got his bearings on a few of the more oddly-shaped landmarks, then headed for the life sign. It was hard-going. He had to be more careful not to overexert himself and that meant maneuvering the cumbersome suit with only his baseline human strength. For the most part he could get through the crumbling city, the debris making it a bit of a climb. Only a few times did he have to call upon powers beyond the ken of mortal men to make a great leap or smash a barricade open.
The crystal interface vibrated. He looked at it and saw that the life sign was in close proximity to him… a collapsed building. Clark looked closer at the map. Rotating it, he saw that the life sign should be just under it. Perfect. He could spend all day digging it out and trying not to cause a cave-in. Or…
Clark circled the collapse, looking for… ah-ha! A large crack in the pavement, barely iced over. Clark smashed it in with his bootheel. His light revealed a subtle curvature to the depths, but he had no illusions of climbing back up unassisted. He unfurled one of the tiny climbing nylons from his belt and tied one end around a perfectly massive crystal. That kept him well and truly anchored as he rappelled down.
His feet crunched down with the now familiar frozen crunch-crack of snowy ice. Cold-spiders and the frozen goop of their webs infected the corridor he was in. They must have been thirsting after its meager warmth. He avoided them as much as possible, shaking them off when they tried to climb up his legs and tore his fingers through webs. The interface was buzzing steadily. Up ahead, he saw a door tinted with its locked status. He punched it open. No more waiting.
Clark stepped inside. It was as if he never left Earth. The interior was an almost exact replica of the Fortress. He closed his eyes and sought that far vista’s details in his memory. Where would the living quarters be? He remembered and walked to them. The apertures were clogged with webbing he had to shatter, cold-spiders hissing at him as they fled.
He called out a booming greeting in Kryptonese and it echoed off the crystals. They vibrated in symphony, but were long-dead. He shut off the interface before it shook apart. The life sign should be close… but where? Then he looked up.
“Oh, Jesus.”
The ice-spiders had cocooned them. He nearly burnt the web off the prism, but stopped himself. He’d do no good to anyone without oxygen. It was a family unit cryo-pod, a sphere of Kryptonian science with crystal tombs growing out of it. Outcroppings. He checked them as fast as he could rip the river of frozen webbing off. Dead. Dead. Dead, decayed, body rotted to bones and bones frozen to glass. Where was the survivor? There had to be one, at least one, please God, let there be one…
Her. She was the one. All of a sudden the enormity of it doubled within Clark, muscling flesh and bones aside in its gargantuan understanding.
He was no longer alone. Within the tomb… no, the womb of the cryo-pod there was a female form, her chest rising and falling with glacial slowness, waiting for rebirth. For him.
Clark took off a glove, feeling the suit constrict at the wrist to trap in his air. Fingers splayed, he set his palm against the gentle curvature of the cryo-pod’s door. He could sense the torpid sludge of her blood in her veins, the millennial pulse of her heartbeat. Still alive, barely so, but clinging to it. Like him. Fighting to stay alive. Fighting a never-ending battle that was about to come to a long-deserved victory.
In the past, in Smallville, in Metropolis, on Earth, he had always imagined a fellow Kryptonian in human terms. Even with the realization that she (she she she) was a woman, that barely narrowed his options. Friend. Lover. Mother. Sister. Companion. Confidante. So many things she could be, but she was more, so much more. She was his salvation.
With a caress that would not be out of place in the restoration of some great work of art, he wiped the condensation from the fogged glass. He didn’t recognize her features as family, despite the House of El symbol she wore on her robes. Her hair was as golden as his was ebon. There was a delicacy to her features, in contrast to the iron-hard strength in his, with the blue chill that permeated her increasing the porcelain quality about her. So fragile… yet beautiful as well. Young… he found it hard to guess her age… but definitely womanly. He stopped himself from comparing her to Lois. He would have no expectations of her. As long as she was alive, he would be content… happy… overjoyed with having a companion in the universe.
He pulled his glove back on, wriggling his fingers to restore circulation. Although he had barely felt it, the cold here could equal the greatest of winters back on Earth. Earth… he could show her Earth, through the window of his ship as it grew from a marble to a whole world… Clark shook himself out of his reverie. Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched, as his mother had always said.
He hurried to the control console. As he’d expected, all the other pods had failed… shut down to conserve power. A gruesome death, but only to him; they had felt nothing except the transition from one sleep to a far deeper one.
Quickly, he reviewed all the data. Kara Zor-El… of the House of El, the Zor vassal family. Not a full-blooded El, but a cousin of sorts. He’d have a hard time explaining that weird hegemony of fiefdoms and nobility that made her his responsibility, his family, but still not blood. Clark supposed it was too much to ask for that he come across his immediate family… he might as well find a childhood pet alive and well.
Okay. He felt he had a pretty good grasp on the awakening procedure… and if he didn’t, hopefully the safety protocols would stop him. First things first. He sealed up the room, forcefields humming with energy as they blazed into existence, then pressurized it. Finally, he started up the process and backed away.
The crystal womb lit up, pulsating slightly. Not caring how much yellow-sun energy it used up, Clark strained his superhearing to detect the quickening of her pulse from weekly to daily to hourly. Although it wasn’t possible for her to regain consciousness so soon, her eyes were blinking open in slow-motion. Ice-crystals broke off her eyelashes and Clark saw that her irises were the same unearthly shade of blue as his. The light in the crystal increased, thawing her. A million technologies that Clark could never grasp were bringing Kara back from the brink of artificially-induced death, pumping her full of new life. Her lips pinked, her skin blushed. The long blink continued, her eyes now wide open and looking to remain that way. Light reflected off her glass fingernails as her fingers curled. Cold. She must be so cold.
The glass door shrunk away to nothing, dislodging her, although the process seemed only half-done. Kara fell forward and Clark caught her, shocked at how anything still alive could be so cold. He ripped his gloves off and rubbed his hands over her bare arms, willing the heat into her. Again he was struck by her fragility, and at last the give of flesh after so long in self-imposed exile. A touch, a handshake, a hug…
“Cold,” she said in Kryptonese, stuttering. Clark focused on the nearest metal and launched enough heatvision at it to turn it molten, not caring that it ruined his helmet. That he ripped off, rubbing his cheek against hers as he carried her next to the new heat source.
“Easy, easy.” He could feel the warmth returning to her small body, infusing it. “You’re safe now.”
“Where’s my father? My mother?”
She had to ask that first. “They didn’t make it.”
She looked wildly about her, as if they could be hiding in the shadows or behind a crystal. “No. No, I saw them! They got into the cryo-pods before me, they made it.”
He took her head gently, forcing her to look at him. “The cryo-pods were never meant for long-term use. When they began to run low on power, the computer cut life support one by one. You’re the last.”
“You’re lying!” She shoved him off her weakly. Not hard enough to truly dislodge him, but he let go of her anyway. “My father programmed the chamber. There was enough power to last for years!”
“It’s been years. Decades, in fact. I don’t know how long for sure. With the distance I’ve traveled, time gets a little…” He trailed off. She wouldn’t be interested. “The chamber was programmed to preserve you the longest. Your father succeeded. He wanted you to live.”
Shakily, she tried to get to her feet. She slipped and again Clark caught her, slowly helping her up and supporting her on his shoulder. She wrapped an arm around him, accepting his help. “And who are you?”
“Cla—-Kal-El of the House of El, son of Jor-El.”
“Kal-El…” She shook her head, trying to connect two disparate pieces that just refused to lock together. “I saw you just a day ago. You were an infant. Could it really have taken your growth in adulthood for Krypton to recover? Who were the fools that dallied about while my family died one by one?”
“There was no recovery,” he told her. “We’re the last.”
“The last what? We can’t be the last Kryptonians. Twenty minutes ago Krypton was the jewel of this galaxy!”
“It’s closer to twenty years ago. And you were the only survivor my ship detected.”
She shoved him off of her and grabbed hold of a crystal column. He circled around it to look at her. There were tears in her eyes, concealed by the veil of stringy hair that fell across her face. He brushed it out of her eyes.
“You… have a ship,” she said haltingly. “You’re not from here. You speak our language like a yearling.”
“My parents sent me to Earth when the end came. I was raised by the natives there.”
Kara sniffled. “Earth? Sounds familiar…”
“It’s a planet in the Milky Way galaxy, Sector 2814, Sol system.”
“Jor-El always was a proponent of space exploration, but no one supported his dream.” There was a grim, half-mad humor in her voice. “What a way to be proven right.”
“We should get out of here,” he said softly. “It’s not safe.”
“No. I suppose it isn’t.” She tapped her heart twice in ritualized greeting. “I’m Kara, by the way. I suppose it was rude of me not to introduce myself sooner.”
“Here,” he said, taking a crystal out of his suit. With an eye-dropper’s worth of water, it grew into a quarantine chamber… a pressurized one. “Get in there and I’ll carry you back to my ship.”
“You’d have to be strong as a mother flame-bird to budge that thing,” she said, clearly doubting his sanity.
He did more than budge it.
“There’s a lot to explain.”
***
“So, these humans,” Kara started, once Clark had explained most everything he could think of to her and shown her one of the videotapes, “they worship you.”
“Some of them do. I try not to encourage it.” He finished removing his spacesuit and put it in the bin, glad to be out of its stuffiness and down to his jeans and T-shirt again. Kara boggled a little at his wardrobe, but said nothing. “Mostly, they look at me… I don’t rightly know. Something like a friend.”
“A messiah.” She was paging through some of his mementos… a Metropolis snowglobe with a little flying Superman dangling from the top, a Superman bobble-head, random other trinkets Ma had parked to make the trip easier. “You inspire a religious fervor in them and hope to lead them towards Kryptonian rationality.” She nodded stiffly, still trying to contain her emotions. “A worthy goal.”
“Well, I wouldn’t put it quite like that. I…” Almost idly he ticked the bobble-head with his finger, watching it shake. “I try to provide an example to them. A positive one.”
“Like a role-model.”
“Exactly.”
“And you want my help.”
That brought him up short. He hadn’t even begun to consider what to do with her when he got back to Earth. Five years and he had never thought that far ahead… except the possibility that maybe there was survivors, plural. Survivors who were trying to rebuild Krypton, survivors who asked him to stay and he accepted. He was never sure if those dreams were nightmares or not.
“I want you to live. Be happy. If that’s as a superhero or as a college student, I don’t care. Well, obviously I care, but… as long as you’re happy… alive…”
She worked her jaw. “I could teach at one of your Earth colleges.”
“Yes, but you’d look like a student.”
“So there’s ageism in your adopted society.” She jumped up onto a console, crossed her legs. “The judgment of worth based on relative youth or old age. Are there any other prejudices on your world?”
Clark crossed his arms a bit snidely. “Oh, we’ve got just about all of them. It’s why they need a role model.”
“But you were raised by them. What makes you worthy to teach?”
“I had a very good upbringing, compared to many. And Jor-El’s teachings have also been of use.”
“I thought Jor-El died.” There she fought hard to keep the emotion out of her voice.
“He did. But he provided a representation of himself in memory crystals to guide me. The crystals showed me how to build this ship, for instance.”
The interface vibrated. He took it off and set it down on a counter. “That would be the secondary scan. It’s official. We’re the last.”
“Yay us,” Kara said ruefully. “What should we order for the party?”
Clark was already seated at the controls. “Try not to think about it.”
“That’s easy for you to say.” She leaped down from the console and stalked behind him. “You never even knew Krypton. For eighteen years, all I’ve known of life has been my friends and family here. And now they’re all gone.”
“You’ve still got me.”
“Hardly seems a fair trade,” she remarked caustically.
He swiveled in his chair to face her. “As much as I try to do to rectify this, life isn’t fair. You’ve been given a chance no one else has. Now, you can waste it on useless bitterness or you can try to forge a new life on Earth. I can’t promise it’ll be any better than the old one, but it will be life. That’s all any of us are offered.”
She looked close to tears. He stood, cupping her chin so she looked up into his eyes. “Your father wanted you to live. If not for yourself, do it for him. And me.”
“Was it really so hard? Being alone on a planet full of people who adored you?”
He thought of Pa, his mortality all too plain when it was engraved on his headstone. He thought of Lois, enamored with an alter-ego he’d constructed instead of the man he’d been born. He thought of Perry and Jimmy and Bruce, all the friends he couldn’t get too close to, couldn’t show more to than fractions of himself. The cape or the glasses, never both. He was a fractured man, and yet here was one girl who could see all of him. It made a world of difference.
“You’d be surprised,” he said, and turned back to plot a course away from the grave that was Krypton.
***
It only took her a day to subdue her feelings about Krypton. Clark was a little disturbed by that. For about twelve hours she was inconsolable. Constant crying fits and sullen silences. She only snapped out of it to ask him questions, which he tried to draw out into conversations. Kara was naturally extroverted, so it wasn’t hard. She told him so much of Krypton, the little things you couldn’t learn as a holographic tourist… the warrens where she played, the friends she bonded with, the pets she had. He held her hand more than once, as much for his benefit as hers. With each day her grip was a little surer. He dressed her in his Earth clothes, to get her used to them. She liked jeans.
He began exposing her to short intervals of yellow sunlight. Not enough to bring her up to full power, but just enough to get her used to her powers. Flying came first. It was a shame that she had to learn it in such a cramped environment, but from her open facial expression it was obvious she wouldn’t have wanted to wait. She greeted each morning’s exposure with almost narcotic glee. Clark suspected that was more psychological than physiological. After being powerless so long, to become a demigod… no wonder she would find it intoxicating. Just another thing he would have to temper if she were to ever have a normal… if she were ever to have a happy life on Earth.
“What are humans like?” Kara asked, floating around the ceiling. She still hadn’t gotten the hang of self-propulsion, so she pulled herself along the roof, practicing short leaps to the wall or ground.
“Even they can’t agree on that,” Clark said, adjusting their course. Thanks to the wormhole generator at the Fortress of Solitude and the one he’d opened up on Krypton, the return trip would take only a few weeks instead of years. He stood from his seat and cracked his neck. “Good.”
“Good?” Kara leapt off the wall and cartwheeled through the air, flailing as she tried to stabilize herself. “If they’re so good, why do they need you?”
“Most of them aren’t good all the time.” Clark ran a hand through his hair. “Or bad all the time. It’s complicated… and not a particularly fair question.”
“Only because you don’t like the answer,” Kara laughed, taking a running leap off the ceiling. She touched base on the floor and smoothly flew through the air until she tapped the opposite wall. “Are they truly the equal of a Kryptonian, as you said?”
“In some ways. In others they are superior.”
“Come on!” Kara said, dismissively waving a hand before smacking it against the wall to propel herself again. “More or less, are they inferior?”
“They’re less developed than us,” Clark admitted as Kara streamed overhead.
“You mean less evolved.”
Clark grabbed her around the waist and tugged her lower. With a few motions he shaped her outline to be more aerodynamic, moving her arms in front of her. Each finger he curled down into a fist. “That’s dangerous thinking. Zod’s thinking.”
“You’ve heard of Zod?”
“We met in passing,” Clark grimaced.
“What was he like?” Kara asked, her young voice full of curiosity and excitement.
“I’d really rather not talk about it.”
Kara scowled. “Is he alive?”
“More or less. He’s in the Phantom Zone, where he can’t hurt anyone else.”
”Acceptable. Give me a push.” Clark did, watching her careen around a boulevard in the ship. “So, these humans… they’re like… apes?”
“They’re still a species. We’re not,” Clark said, exasperated. “Do the math.”
Kara paused in a corner, hands against either wall to stop herself. “We’re not a species?”
“Not viably. Although I suppose it’s possible that we could interbreed with the humans, our genetic heritage passed on.”
Spider-like, Kara crawled up the vaulted ceiling at the center of the spaceship. Her body was lost among the darkness of the crystalline dome, dark clothes shadowing her against the stars. Her mouth remained, a Cheshire cat’s, wet red lips and tongue, white teeth so sharp.
“Aren’t we viable? You and I?”
Her shirt… Clark’s shirt… fluttered down and the starlight reflected off her pale breasts, just this side of visible. Clark caught it and looked away.
“Put that back on.” Clark held the shirt up to her.
“I’m literally the last woman on Krypton. We must do our part to preserve our species.” Her jeans fell a ways away. Her legs were the color of cream, gone frozen and without sunlight for far too long. And he felt so awfully warm. “ I’ve seen the way you look at me. I doubt it will be unpleasant for either of us.”
“There’s someone else,” Clark said simply.
“Ah.” With a whoosh, she was back in her clothes. She’d been practicing superspeed. “Your mate?”
“…hopefully.”
***
The ship traveled, faster and faster, and they went along for the ride. Kara picked up English fast, her mind every bit the equal of Clark’s. He’d never put much stock in the legends of Kryptonian supergenius… he himself was too thick to pull off a third of the schemes Luthor doodled while half-asleep… but heightened intelligence was clearly one of his gifts and Kara was on his level. She grasped concepts almost as quickly as he doled them out, even going so far as to adopt a Midwestern accent similar to his own. She pitched it high and low, amplified it to a twang or shrunk it to a mere background rumble in an otherwise cosmopolitan urban voice. She was still flirting with him… playfully, girlishly, maybe without even realizing she was doing it…
…
He could let her down easy. And the company was nice, at any rate. So for both their goods, he didn’t talk about Lois much.
“Jimmy, you’ll like Jimmy!” he enthused as they swam through the air, propelling themselves by ultra-fast beating of their arms and legs; superstrong pushes and kicks against walls. It was inefficient compared to his own internal anti-gravity propulsion, but Kara seemed to enjoy it.
“Tell me about him,” Kara said, as they passed each other. They linked arms, spun around each other, released, and flew off in opposite directions.
“Freckles! Red hair!”
“Red hair?”
On the next pass, Clark ran a hand through Kara’s hair, making it blizzard out in the low-gravity (alright, so he’d cheated to let her fly better. So what?). “They don’t have red hair on Krypton?”
“It’s a genetically recessive trait. We read about it in the history crystals, but as a hair color it died out millennia ago.”
“Oh.” Clark said, bringing himself to a halt with only his will.
Kara watched him, stationary, as she continued to careen out of control.
“What is it?”
“Nothing. But on Earth, if there were no more redheads, people would start dyeing their hair red.” He smiled. “Just to be contradictory.”
Kara smiled too, although she didn’t know what at… or why.
***
The weeks passed by in a flash and although Clark thought he should have been… bespelled by the thought of reuniting with friends and family. Instead, he remained captivated by this strange girl he had adopted as kin. Her customs, her way of thinking, it was all endlessly fascinating to him and he was sure she felt the same of him. They spent every waking moment together. Even when they didn’t feel like talking, they stayed in each other’s presence. It was one of those times, the ship quiet except for the grind of the crystals’ expansion and flare of its power, that he caught her teary-eyed.
He didn’t ask… there were too many answers… so he led her by the arm to the cockpit. A few simple gestures and the viewscreen magnified, transforming an ordinary blue marble into that familiar canvas of sea, land, and cloud that he had missed so much.
“What is that?” she asked, her eyes wide and blue.
“Home.”
***
The presence lurked. It could not be described as a ship, for a vessel implied windows, a hull, passengers, not a harbinger of death that seemed far too unearthly to have been built out of simple mineral ore.
Nor could it be said to wait, for this implied a patience in contrast to a lack of patience. The presence was neither patient nor impatient; it simply was.
Then the presence stopped lurking. It watched, keenly, curiously, as an intruder entered its domain. A Kryptonian ship making its homecoming. The presence watched as someone left the ship. It watched as two people returned.
It watched as the ship departed.
Then it followed.
The son of Jor-El had taken the bait.
Chapter 2
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2008-06-30 05:48 pm (UTC)I've lots of questions but i'm sure they'll be answered if I just keep my mouth shut and wait for the rest.
More, more!
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Date: 2008-07-02 06:10 am (UTC)It will be dreadfully confusing to all the Lost fans in the audience.
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Date: 2008-06-30 07:55 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 10:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-06-30 10:56 pm (UTC)I can't wait for the next part!
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Date: 2008-07-01 03:47 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-07-02 06:49 am (UTC)War is declared and that's all I'll say.
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Date: 2008-07-01 09:23 am (UTC)I love this beginning and I can't wait for more. I'm a sucker for exploring societies from the POV of an outsider and I'm excited to see where this is going.
I also can't wait to meet movie!Bruce and see him interact with Supes. Thanks!
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Date: 2008-10-26 06:36 pm (UTC)What I've read so far, this is a very well crafted story and am looking forward to seeing where it's going.
Thanks.
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Date: 2008-10-27 04:18 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-08-15 08:18 am (UTC)