Shooting Star

I do not own the characters in this story; Superman is a trademark of DC Comics. As will be seen, this story mixes and matches elements from various versions of the Superman mythos, and thus is best regarded as somewhat AU.

I would like to thank E Kelly, whose review of this story pointed out an error which I have now corrected.

I

The farmer's wife stirred in her sleep. Outside her window, the plains of Kansas stretched to the horizon, an inescapable daily image that pervaded her dreams. Rolling over, she put her arm around her husband and fell back into deep slumber.

"Ma, why are you and Pa my parents?"

In her dream she was speaking to her son. He was five or six years old, but well-spoken for his age. His large blue eyes were solemnly fixed upon her as they sat under a tree behind the farmhouse, the quilted plain stretched out before them.

In a dream one may know things about the world of the dream that one does not know in waking life. She knew that this was a question to be anticipated with trepidation, one that could not be answered casually or lightly. She knew also that she could not answer it fully, not without speaking to Jonathan first.

So she told the truth, as much of the truth as she dared.

"You came to us," she said. "You were a gift from heaven."

"I think I remember," the child said seriously. He paused, his face screwed up in thought, and she waited patiently to hear what he would say next, her breathing measured.

"I remember falling," he said. "I fell a long way through the clouds. And when I landed, there you and Pa were."

As sometimes happens in a dream when an idea or a concept arises that is so startling or frightening that it jolts the dreamer's whole body, Martha Kent was jolted, and woke up.

"Martha? You all right?" Jonathan said, half-asleep, his voice like the rusted hinge on the door of the barn.

"I'm fine, Jonathan," Martha whispered. "Go back to sleep."

She waited a moment to hear her husband's soft, even breathing. He had to get up early in the morning. When she was sure he was asleep, she silently rose from the bed, padded to the bathroom, and snapped the light on.

The sudden glare made her eyes tear, and she closed them for a moment. Then she opened them and stared into the mirror, reminding herself of who she was.

Martha Clark Kent, age 38, red hair graying around the temples. Wife of Jonathan Kent. Co-owner of farm on the outskirts of Smallville, Kansas. Two dogs, two hundred acres. No children.

The dream had been so real. She could still see his solemn blue eyes, gazing searchingly into hers, so like an adult's it was frightening. But it was only a dream. She had no son.

It didn't look like she'd ever have one.

II

Lara paced the floor of the tastefully simple vestibule in the Palace of Science, waiting for her husband. Her reflection in the crystalline walls showed her an attractive young woman with dark hair who had already lost the weight gained while carrying her first child. A woman who seemed to have everything to live for, everything to look forward to.

Lara's stomach tightened. Appearances could be deceptive.

Her dream had brought her comfort, and yet it seemed small comfort measured against the catastrophe that approached. Perhaps it was for the best, after all, that so few believed the disaster was coming. Even their ancient, stable society might have crumbled under the hammer-blow of mass panic.

And yet even her sorrow over the fate of the world could not prevent her from smiling as Jor-El emerged from his meeting, nodding seriously to the other scientists. Jor-El, large and strong, one curl of his white hair uncontrollably spilling out, as always, onto his forehead. Jor-El, with his unexpectedly soft and gentle voice, always sounding as though he had just discovered the very words of the Kryptonian language, making the most ordinary statement sound new and beautiful. Lara had felt from the day she first met him that she was safe as long as she was with him, that nothing terrible could happen in Jor-El's presence.

Now she knew that that safety, too, was an illusion. But she knew that Jor-El would fight and strive until the end.

It was clear from the state of his brow, even more furrowed than usual of late, that Jor-El's meeting with his fellow scientists had not gone well. Yet he smiled as he saw Lara, and stepped forward to take her long hand in his larger and yet dexterous one.

"My husband," she said.

"My wife," he replied. "I did not expect to see you here. Is anything amiss with our son?"

"No," she said. "The automated systems are watching him. How did your meeting go?"

"The same as ever," Jor-El said gravely. "None see so clearly that fear cannot blind them. Hope fades for our people."

"Today I had a dream of hope," Lara said hesitantly.

Jor-El's mild eyes searched her face for a clue to her meaning. As she paused, he patiently waited for her to tell her story.

"I was so tired from watching Kal-El, and from worry and fear… I dropped off to sleep in a chair next to him, knowing the automated systems would warn me if there was any change in his pulse or respiration. And I dreamed. I seldom remember my dreams, husband, but I remember this one."

Still Jor-El waited, his eyes meeting hers.

"I saw Kal-El on a world far from here, a world with a blue sky. All around him, as far as could be seen, there were fields growing some kind of tall plant – presumably a primitive form of food supply.

"He was sitting under a strange, alien tree near a small dwelling structure. There was a woman with him wearing peculiar clothing. They were talking to each other in a tongue I did not know – Kal-El was older than he is now.

"I looked at that woman, and I saw that she was not me, and yet she loved him as much as I do. I knew that all was well, better than well, with our son, that he was on a world with a middle-aged star, a world likely to be safe for billions of orbits.

"And I felt no jealousy of that woman. I felt only joy for her – great joy."

Lara smiled sadly.

"That joy is with me still. And yet I know it was nothing but a dream. Nothing can be done for Kal-El, or for us, or for our people."

Jor-El's expression remained somber, and yet as Lara gazed into his deep eyes they seemed to twinkle ever so slightly, like the faintest star she could see in the night sky.

"I think your dream may yet be fulfilled, my wife," he said.

"How?" she asked.

So on their way back to Kal-El, he began to explain.

III

They were on their way to a wedding. In the dream it did not seem to matter whose wedding it was or where, only that she must do something about her son's unruly hair. For the seventh time that morning she attacked his head with a comb, but the spitcurl that hung onto his forehead would not yield.

"You'll have to do something about that curl for Halloween," she teased him. "No matter what you dress up as, if you don't slick your hair back everyone will know it's you."

The little boy nodded solemnly. Then, as all children sometimes do, he asked an unexpected, serious question, one which did not flow from what had preceded it in the conversation but rather from the events of the whole day.

"Why did you marry Pa?"

"He asked me to, and I said yes," Martha replied. She was dimly aware, as one sometimes is towards the end of a dream, that her lips were not moving.

"What would have happened if you had said no?"

"I don't know," Martha said. "I can't imagine. I said yes."

"But if you had said no," the little boy continued with the dogged persistence of a young child, "what about me? Where would I be?"

Again Martha knew the answer to that question was not what it seemed. And yet the best answer was the truth.

"You wouldn't be here, Clark," she said. "You wouldn't be here."

And Martha Kent jerked awake, her heart racing.

Clark, she thought. Clark.

IV

"What are you going to name the baby?"

The young cop's wife smiled and patted her bulging middle.

"I was going to name him John, after his father, but my father-in-law doesn't like that idea. He says no one in his family is ever named after a relative – they all have new names. So I don't know yet."

"What's your father-in-law's name?" Jonathan asked.

"Zebediah."

Jonathan smiled and gave Martha the hint of a wink. Martha had to restrain herself from laughing out loud. Farming was a tough life, but she loved this man more than anything in God's world.

Maria Stevens' husband, who had joined the Smallville Police Department a year earlier, was on duty that day. Smallville High's football team was playing its arch-rival, Granville High, and John Stevens was there to "make sure the kids don't get out of hand," as Maria put it.

The Kents had met Officer Stevens when some middle-school kids from Paola had tagged their barn with graffiti the previous spring. They had dropped in on Maria, who lived a couple of miles up the road, to be neighborly and make sure she was doing all right with the baby.

"Would you like to stay for dinner?" Maria asked.

Jonathan glanced over his shoulder out the parlor window and frowned.

"We'd love to, but maybe we should be getting back," he said. "It looks like there's a storm coming. We'd better make sure the animals are safely inside."

Maria smiled and patted her belly again.

"We know you're safe, aren't you?" she cooed to her unborn child.

Martha was quiet as they got into the pickup truck and drove away. Jonathan was also silent for a few minutes, and then cleared his throat.

"Martha," he asked quietly, without looking at her, "are you sad that we never had a baby?"

Martha glanced over at him in surprise, but Jonathan kept his eyes on the road. A dog who appeared to have only three legs ran across a field to their left, seeking shelter from the rising wind.

"No, I'm not sad," Martha said. "It's God's will. I had a dream the other night that we had a child, but it was only a dream. We must be meant to do other things."

"But would you have been glad to have a child?"

"It would have made me happier than anything in the world," Martha said softly. Her own words surprised her. She was not sure she had ever realized that before.

"In your dream, was the child a boy or a girl?"

"It was a boy."

"I would have loved to have a son," Jonathan said.

Martha glanced through the windshield. Huge clouds were whipping across the sky, thick with the threat of an unseasonable snowstorm. Up ahead, through a gap in the clouds, she thought she saw an unusually bright shooting star.