DISCLAIMER: THE SUPERMAN STORYLINE AND FRANCHISE DOES NOT BELONG TO ME NOR AM I PROFITING FROM THIS.
Summary: Hope is the greatest strength in all men, and it commands the highest of prices.
"#Blah blah blah#" Kryptonian speech.
SACRIFICES
Oneshot after 'Legacy'
"…faithless generation; to those who ask for a sign, none shall be given."
'This is not the answer', the realization flitted through his mind him once more.
He'd been wrangling with the suspicion that he was drifting off mark for some months now, but had insisted on pushing onwards driven more by desperation and fear of failure than his fabled logic.
Way off mark.
A deep hopeless anger simmered quietly inside him as he gazed down at three years worth of his limited time. Futility had no better name.
He lashed out, unable to ignore so mocking a setback. There was a loud crunching sound within the grand room that served as his laboratory as unyielding strength met stubborn surface. He gazed down at the arm that was now protruding from a jagged hole in the crystalline countertop, raising an eyebrow in surprise.
Before he could re-examine this new thought in his mind, the chamber walls around him rumbled to life, thrumming in an equivalent of anger and impatience at him. His reaction speed was too slow for the facility's defenses and he was rewarded with the full brunt of the blood red light that he'd come to fear and respect courtesy of his many run ins with it.
His body weight multiplied tenfold and an uncommon feeling of fatigue permeated through him as he literally felt the energy get shunted out of him. His lungs, unused to taking frequent breaths struggled to draw in more air where there was none.
Only their owner's previous experience with this kind of situation prevented his body from going into shock, as he concentrated more on pulling his arm out of the already self repairing counter top, than on the ongoing assault.
"#You are to desist from damaging fortress components #". The stern warning was given in a disturbingly toneless voice that indicated the speaker was standing right behind him. He didn't turn to check, there was no one there.
A significant duration later and he felt the red rays lift off him, the facility apparently satisfied that he no longer posed any threat to its integrity. Raising himself off his knees, he relished the telltale prickling surge that flashed through his body followed closely by the feeling of being dunked in molten steel.
He gave a minute twist, savoring the grinding feeling against his skin as he pulled out his arm. He ignored the warning pulse from the mammoth crystalline walls around him, and turned back to the bio-simulation engine, observing with disdain as the sample within it finished its self destructive cycle.
Soon all that was left was pink tinted plasma, that shortly too, lost its color to become watery pus.
The sample was dead, just like all the others before it.
So much effort...
Maybe he wasn't meant to save his people. Why should he suffer through this when they were clearly responsible for their own demise? He looked around at the facility around him. Any race that could create this kind of technology had no excuse for losing a battle of any sort.
Not unless they'd already poisoned themselves with arrogance, ignorance and idealism, and someone else just had to come and deliver the killing blow.
Fools.
All he'd ever done was being born into their race, if they could still be called that. He'd never agreed to bear this responsibility.
'#If you do not, then who will? You are all that is left, Kal-el, we have no one else.#' The whisper was somber and as empathetic as the facilities Ai could manage. A scowl marred his often passive face. He hated it when it intruded on his thoughts.
'#Do I continue even when it is evident all my efforts are doomed fail? Even my patience is finite.#' He gestured at the watery substance that had once been a complex genetic construct in progress.
An image flashed into his mind. Miles and miles of white sand, stretching into the infinity this place represented. It would have been a serene sight if it weren't so dead. Even the light here was pale and dying; a never ending dusk, but without the red beauty of sunset on earth.
The sky was sickly; a pale, luminous never ending white.
He hated this place.
And it was the reason he was so afraid to turn around, clutching onto this simulation of purgatory that the Ai had pushed him into. His head throbbed in warning; he could already feel the leeching sensation that pulled on his skin like a giant suction cup. Still he refused to turn around.
'#Look and see those you wish to abandon.#' The command was irrefutable; spoken directly to his limbic system by the intrusive entity in his mind.
He turned.
He stood at the centre of thee room, guiding a string of light through various complicated three dimensional patterns in the air- a new program to define the new parameters of his next attempt at creating the mutation. He tried valiantly to ignore the slight tremor in his fingers.
Almost in remembrance, he glanced back at the bio-sim at the far end of the lab. His mind was still fatigued from the Ai's projected vision of the phantom zone prison.
A horrific vision of the damned people; if one could still call them that. His people.
A single word ghosted through his mind as he played the vision over and over in his mind. Humans had a similar place in their endless cultural references. Tartarus.
He would not fail. He could not.
"#Destroy sample LGT413, and send the molecular blueprint to main chambers for analysis#"
The crystal counter made a tinkling sound as it melted into itself, taking both bio-sim and sample into its now liquid structure for transport and polymer breakdown. The Ai reported a sharp decrease in energy storage, which Kal-el paid little attention to.
Leaving the heavy instructions to busy the artificial intelligence, his mind drifted off in numerous tangents as he made his way through of the massive primary lab that almost equaled a football field in size. Covering the distance to the exit almost instantaneously, he emerged into the mile long maze of halls that made up this remote facility.
Giant crystals that occasionally sprouted from the walls and floor got nothing more than a cursory glance, as his attention oscillated between his rapidly diminishing window of opportunity and the pressing need to develop a new working specimen.
He flickered to his left, avoiding impalement on a sharp, transparent spire that shot up suddenly from the crystalline ground beneath his feet. This branch was still in its more infantile stages in comparison to its counterparts and as such had quite the distance to cover before it could even match them in size, let alone power.
For now the only function it could perform was privacy against prying eyes, and a serene watchtower location to work from. It didn't hurt either that the view was to die for. Still, a few more thousands of square feet more were needed before he could incorporate it into his plans.
Another piece in his already significant collection of contingent facilities set up.
He was outside sooner than he'd anticipated and for a moment idly wondered whether the Ai had been changing up the corridors again.
As if his life wasn't hard enough without having to randomly guess exits and entrances. It was just easier to teleport outside sometimes, despite the telltale energy burst signature.
He however understood its obsession with dynamic architecture. Even its counterpart, the artificial construct, had the same idiosyncratic need to constantly shift shape. A twisted never ending search for a perfect structure built into them by his race as a safety feature.
One had to appreciate the cunning ruthlessness of his people when it occasionally revealed itself. Inbuilt sentient intellect was a common feature in most Kryptonian creations, but even Krypton was wise enough to realize when a certain level of intellect needed reigning in, lest it develop higher level self-realization sentience.
Better to keep it busy with an impossible task than have it idle enough to try to take over the Universe, starting with you.
It was a flaw that neither Ai was aware of, and one they were designed to never notice: an almost cruel irony; building such an obvious imperfection into entities that were, by their nature, constantly biased towards perfection.
Anyway, that wasn't important.
Stretching his back, more out of trained 'habit' than necessity he spread out his senses into the barren environment he stood in.
He turned to look at the structure behind him. Massive glassy spires that dwarfed him many times over; each climbing upwards at various angles to taper off several thousand feet above the ground in a race to reach the sun's rays. It would have been a comical sight to see him emerge from within such a gigantic structure, if there had been anyone to see it.
Looking back in front of him, he could clearly make out the numerous tiny hills and sand pits that made up his surroundings, set against a black unending canvas. It was peaceful here, despite its barren nature, and he couldn't help but appreciate that rare, relative quiet.
The dust around his feet kicking up with each step, he wandered off aimlessly hoping to get as far away from the towering crystals behind him as possible. Their persistent grinding and clinking as they emerged from the ground below was getting on his nerves. He needed to think and for that he needed as much silence as he could get.
Getting a little sun also wasn't such a bad idea and he could see the last rays sinking in the distance. He raced off towards it, enjoying the freedom of not needing to constantly check his actions within these surroundings.
Here he could let go of the weighty restraints that held him in place while around humans and their ever fragile world.
He didn't need to worry about someone seeing his display either, there were no spy satellites in the sky here, and the likelihood of anyone even surviving such a hostile environment was marginal at best. He slammed bodily into a steep cliff wall and continued through it, smiling thinly at the smell of metals and silicates that pervaded his sharp sense.
With the ground around him trembling with each step he took, he blew out of the hill's other end and was miles away before the dust from his movements could even stir.
He stood unnaturally still on the edge of a steep crater, drinking in the star's harsher rays some few thousand miles west. Here, the sun was still in its noon position in the sky and with the lack of clouds in the sky, he could almost imagine the heat around him.
Ever objective, his mind immediately shifted gear to the reason he was here. The genetic solution that was critical to his long term goal was consistently failing to materialize and his time was running short. Soon his leniency period with Eve and her little 'long term investment' club would come to pass and there would be war between them.
He needed this to work or everything would be for nothing.
The problem…
Despite the startling similarities between the human body form and that of a Kryptonian, that was where the illusion ended and reality begun. The two species couldn't be any more alien considering. From the epidermal layer through to the muscles, the internal organs, nerve system and bone structures, humans and Kryptonians were completely incomparable.
He guessed it should have been obvious from the start, the difficulties he would be facing. The similarity between them didn't even go skin deep with humans and their 'fingerprints'-a purely isolated characteristic of the human species as far as he was aware.
They were the only known species his people had encountered that could be uniquely identified by their finger skins. He stifled a laugh.
It was a ridiculous notion that had held his curiosity for some time in his younger years, especially given Kryptonians homogenous print pattern- a fact he'd come to attribute to the fact that kryptonian children weren't born in so much as they were designed during the in vitro fertilization matrix.
Still two species could not be further apart and yet look eerily alike.
Like some sick cosmic joke by the universe. What better punch line than the more powerful, god like race almost going extinct while their primitive, self destructive, infinitely flawed version lived on; ever ignorant even of the existence of other life in the universe.
It was not funny.
But fate would not be righted unless he created his hybrid genome. A perfect constitution between the more pliable mutant gene and Kryptonian gene; a mix that would give his people the one thing whose lack had been the true cause their death –choice.
If, no, when he succeeded, his people wouldn't…
His omnipresent perception of his environment shifted, alerting him almost instantaneously as the being behind him commenced its approach. The sound of its laggard movement, though highly muffled, was more than loud enough to announce to Kal-el, the approximate distance from him the trespasser was.
In the same manner, he could almost taste the smoke and ashes wafting off the beings skin or clothes and diffusing into what little atmosphere there was around them.
It reminded him of the few times he'd gone a bit too close to Sol. Fun times.
As his mind considered all this, his instincts and years of training under the Fortress AI and its more autonomous version, Milton Fine, had him in motion in a fraction of a second. Bowing low, he twisted his body away from the edge of the crater, willing himself to move as far away as possible from the likely threat.
If there was one important lesson he'd learned years ago, it was that he was never assured of his superiority at any time. Arrogance of assumed victory had almost gotten him killed once.
Even on earth, there were some entities one was better off avoiding at all costs. Most of the times it was always better to overestimate your assailant and be disappointed rather than surprised.
His enhanced vision automatically scattered the light spectrum as he whipped his head around to track his would-be attacker's movement. When he finally identified the entity, he could only tilt his head in curiosity at the sight he beheld, where he'd been standing just a moment ago.
'It' seemed to be bowing before him, whatever it was. Whether in greeting or otherwise, was impossible to tell, with its features all covered up by the hard worn rags it was wearing. Everything from head to toe was a muddy brown silhouette from a robe like garment that had obviously been through more than its owner.
Offhandedly, he noted that his eyesight couldn't penetrate the material this thing was wearing; a phenomenon whose implications were not lost on him.
Though he tried to keep his interactions with other sentient races as limited as possible for obvious reasons, he knew a number of races whose primary method of greeting was a bow. Even humans had it in their many cultures.
But of those few races, not very many could survive this environmental extreme without some highly visible contraption strapped to them, and those that could were not the kind he wanted hanging around earth. Most tended to be followed closely by a Green lantern.
Wishing to keep things civil for the moment, he straitened his loose shirt as he bent his knee in mid genuflect, still hovering a few meters above the crater.
"#please do not bow before me bethgar#" the creature requested desperately in a delicate female voice.
The force of the creature's voice coupled with his surprise slammed into him like a punch to his gut, unbalancing him both physically and psychologically. Reigning in his shock as fast as he could, he cautiously waited for the dust around him to lessen before he deemed it appropriate to reply.
All the while, the being before him kept to its position, although he thought he detected some trembling in its posture. But it was hard to tell with all those rags around it.
"Pull back your hood that I may see your face" He hedged, still wary that this was some kind of trick. Replying in Kryptonian at this stage would be foolish.
The figure seemed startled by his words, and he caught a minute jolt in its shoulders at his voice. He didn't worry about it not complying to the request though. It had referred to him by his noble title of Bethgar (one more reason for his caution), when it had requested he not bow in return.
If this creature was truly a remnant of his home, it would be bound to obey his command.
There was hesitation in those limbs as if the figure was having doubts as to the situation but he waited patiently as it rose into an upright kneeling position. For a supposed Kryptonian, it took quite a long time to react.
Ever so slowly, oversized sleeves reached up to push off the dusty hood on its head. And as the light finally touched its face, Kal-el had to struggle to hold back his gasp at the sight. Unfortunately, his horror was still written all over his face and the young female before him sharply turned her face away; the pain of her forced revelation showing clearly in her eyes.
Kal-el was not a bigot. You couldn't travel to distant galaxies and systems and meet other species while clinging onto a narrow definition of life. He had seen creatures that couldn't logically be described as physical, others that could pass for inanimate objects and few that existed beyond the three dimensions. Life was extremely diverse out there, but even he knew that what he was looking at was not the natural form of this female.
Missing chunks from her nose that showed through to the bone, bared muscle tendons in her right cheek with the occasional glimpse of teeth underneath, and hidden behind a tuft of carefully positioned hair, a decaying left eye that was little more than a messy white mass. Looking at her whole face, it seemed like someone had really given her a working over.
And the closer Kal-el looked, the more unsettled he got from her condition. His enhanced vision was indicating a bioelectric field present around the female's face and surprisingly rich hair. He idly wondered if his shock at her visage had made him miss it the first time.
It was…wrong, off somehow, causing some deep sense of ingrained fear to well up in him. He instinctively shifted further away from her.
Disease?
He paused.
Not like any he'd ever encountered even from the Fortress's massive information reserves. No, this was not likely. A common characteristic of all Kryptonian diseases was that they rapidly depleted their solar reserves and rendered them relatively powerless.
This one would not be able to survive here in such a case.
It had to be something else.
Who…? What…? Where...? How...? For the first time in a long while, Kal-el's mind blanched, as it was bombarded with an emotional and informational overload.
The young woman, taking his silence to indicate horror, drew up what Kal-el deduced were probably badly damaged or likely missing hands, to cover her face.
He was not aware of how he covered the distance between them, all notion of self preservation dropped from his mind. His still attuned perception reported her motion in thousandths of a second, and then he was there, her- what felt like stumps- in his hands as he knelt before her.
The moment his action registered in his confused brain, he cursed his foolish haste and lack of forethought as he watched bits of skin and chalky flesh break off her face from the force of his momentum. She winced as she turned to look at his hands. Whether in pain or at the additional facial damage, he didn't know- probably both.
"What happened to you?" He couldn't keep the incredulity out of his voice.
Damaging a Kryptonian to this extent was beyond the ability of almost anything he knew. Though he was hardly an average benchmark, his people were extremely durable and once exposed to all but red starlight, even the damage done, save certain extremes, would be undone. That was the meaning of a High Tier race; doing this level of harm to one was not easy.
The woman, though fully understanding his question, met his inquisitive gaze with a curious one of her own; silver eyes flicking rapidly across his face.
"#why do you insist on speaking human language? Are you that ashamed of us?#"
Her reply once again caught him by surprise before he managed to reign in his haywire emotions once more. This experience would definitely be going into the fortress archives as one of his more interesting days.
"I have no one to speak Kryptonian with other than my AI's. I have grown used to the human tongue in my long stay on earth." He explained.
At that she turned her attention to the blue ball in the sky, floating silently in the deep black abyss. And then she was back to studying his face, her eyes drinking in every detail of him with an unrecognizable emotion in her eyes.
Pity?...Worship? No, it was shifting too fast.
Acknowledgement?
This situation made no sense. She made no sense.
"#the price we have paid…no…not close…forgive me.#" She turned away from him to hide the pain in her eyes; whether from loss or guilt, he didn't know.
He resisted the urge to turn her face towards him, remembering once more just how fragile her form was.
"#Forgive you? What have you done? #"
She didn't acknowledge his words or maybe didn't hear them. She seemed so distracted and tired. Whatever had done this had almost killed her and Kal-el had to wonder at her determination to find him this far out.
For that matter, how had she…
"#time does not kindly to those who ride against its stream Bethgar and the price has and continues to be paid….willingly. #"
She looked up at last directly into his eyes and for a moment there he saw his future written all over her face. He turned his eyes away unable to withstand the intensity of such expectation.
"#i never thought we, i #" she paused, tilting her head so her hair moved to hide half her face,"#…so many… out of thirty, me…No, important, had to be…, needed to be done. #" she whispered as a sparkling drop floated past them disintegrating before his eyes.
"#Hope#" She grazed the back of his hand with her sleeve covered arm almost to convince herself he was actually there. A flicker of relief flashed across her visage as she found what she was looking for.
Deciding to snap her out of her reverie before she was too far gone, Kal-el chose the moment to voice the most important question he could think of, "#What are you talking about sister?#"
Apparently finding humor in the nature of the question, the young lady gave a tentative smile with what was left of the mouth.
"#mother used to tell us so many stories about you Bethgar. The Last Scion. The New father. The Son. The S…# "Her ramblings skipped a few beats before she went on,"#He never forgot us- she would say, 'We who had despaired against ever leaving that forsaken place. We whom he never knew. We the foolish race that left nothing but bitter memories for him. He never forgot-she was pregnant with me at the time you know. one of the first who got out.#"
At this point her sleeve covered arms came up to linger on his cheek for a few seconds, and he found himself frozen by her sincere touch, gazing at the single eye that seemed to carry the emotion of a whole people.
"#you are never forgotten Kal-el, just as you never forgot us.#" Her now trembling hand, straining to stay in contact with his face was held in place by his own; all the while crumbling away as she finally let go of the force of will that had sustained her this far.
She was dying.
A heavy cough racked her afflicted body and something meaty fell out of her mouth as she collapsed forward into his waiting arms.
"#your fortress refuses to lend me any more… I am wasting, but, my task is done. i need no more.#" Her gaze drifted away from him, to follow a strand of hair that had broken away from her scalp.
It seemed to be on fire, though there was no flame, as it crinkled and twisted in the grip of an invisible force that seemed to have no reverence for the fabled indestructibility of Kryptonian hair, nor the obvious efforts woman desperate to preserve what little of her beauty she had left. In a second there was nothing left of it bust dust motes, and soon those too were lost to oblivion. She looked at him to confirm that he understood.
He didn't think to ask to save her. Such was impossible against the condition he had finally figured was wasting her away.
She was dying and there was nothing he could do about it, other than hold on for as long as possible.
She finally looked away, content to lay there in her last moments.
At some point most her lower body had been eaten away, having been hidden by from his view by that cloak she'd been wearing, and the only reason he could now tell was because the lower half of her cloak seemed deflated, having nothing to hold it up. He shuddered to think what it was like to gradually feel your body ripped apart atom by atom.
Even the bioelectric aura around her was sputtering off its last sparks, with the little energy left in her body being leeched away in torrents. She would not survive that disappearing.
"#Why did you…#" He attempted to fill the silence-maybe take distract her from her inevitable death.
She interrupted him, knowing what he was asking even before he could finish his question, tilting her head so that only the unmarred portion of her face were displayed.
She struggled to voice her words despite her rapidly diffusing body and could only imagine the pain she was in- yet she didn't scream. The only sign of her agony was the silent tears that evanesced to non existence before they even left her eyes.
"#even you need a sign of hope, Bethgar. Especially you.#"
He didn't move from the edge for hours after she fell into the Kryptonian regenerative sleep. He just sat there, staring out at the earth above, refusing to look back into his arms even though he could feel her form gradually waste away, pound by creeping pound, in his embrace.
At some point he'd taken off his dark Long coat to drape it over her then shivering form, still not looking at her as he did so.
He could still remember her pain at his reaction when he'd seen her face the first time. The least he could give her was a dignified memory of her death and the comfort of his presence.
He hoped it was enough.
And so he sat there, doing the only thing he could; offering her warmth and company- dying alongside her with each passing minute that dragged past them.
Recalling her jumbled speech, he couldn't help but feel the weight of the moment.
Thirty.
She'd said there were thirty.
Was this how the other twenty nine before her had passed? All in the hope of finding him?
A sickening feeling settled in the pit of his stomach; disgust-at himself.
He had almost given up on them earlier in the laboratory, ready to abandon them to whatever fate they'd have in the phantom zone. And now as he looked down at the young woman, whose name he now realized he didn't know, he finally understood the price of her devotion and faith in him, and couldn't help the feeling of complete unworthiness of such a level of sacrifice.
A level he had until now, been unwilling to consider.
So he sat there by her side, never moving, until the only thing left in his coat was dust. And then waiting until that too, wasn't.
When he finally did rise up, it was with grim determination to accomplish what so far had proven impossible.
He could not fail and would not fail.
Not when his people were willing to pay such a high price to restore his hope.
He would justify the sacrifice.
The End.
Author's Explanations
Bethgar: Kryptonian title of royalty assigned to the head of a house.
ChronoDecomposition
If some haven't figured it out yet, travelling back in the time stream or even stopping in it is fatal. The atoms of any object that is displaced in time are continuously subjected to extremely strong temporal currents that try to push the object back to its correct time instance. Unfortunately, since time displacement doesn't occur naturally, the temporal currents relentless pushing starts decomposing the object.
Each atom consequently exerts energy to resist these currents and the only way to do so is by continuously and rapidly depleting its own mass as a source of energy. In the end the entirety of the object converts itself into energy and even this energy burns itself out of existence. The more the energy found in an object the longer it can survive against the time currents. However, the further something goes into the past, the stronger the time currents have to be to correct the displacement and the faster the decomposition.
The initial power needed to displace something to the past is near infinite and can only be harvested from newborn stars. The object being sent back must then be infused with obscene amounts of energy at an atomic level if it is to even arrive at the destination.
Kryptonians are obviously highly suited for this although they have to cap other uses of their solar power, lest they accelerate their own death.
As for displacing into the future, that's impossible. The infinite uncertainties that branch out from even the smallest instant of present time have impractical requirements if one is to even travel one millionth of a second into the future. According to theory the only destination possible if a future displacement is ever tried would be the end of the universe, where nothing exists to induce uncertainty.
For obvious reasons future displacement has never been attempted.