A/N: Hello everybody! This is my first fanfic in the Superman fandom, and I have to warn you that my knowledge of the "legend" is limited to the latest movie and a load of half-forgotten "Lois and Clark" episodes I watched when I was a kid (or rather, a slightly younger kid). I hope this is alright. I thought it would be kind of interesting to explore Clark's powers from the point of view of his mother (as a person hailing from the UK, it has felt very strange to type 'Mom'!), who doesn't receive an awful lot of screen time. Have fun!
Disclaimer: It pains me to say this, but I don't own Superman. I'm just... borrowing him.
Learning to Fly
Martha Kent could not be prouder of the boy she had brought up as her own, but looking back over the years there were certain moments which stood out from among them all. One was the day when Clark came into what she often referred to as his "majority" in terms of his powers – the day when he learnt to fly, or at least, realised that he could defy the laws of gravity as well as those of human biology. The day – and the expression upon his face – remained clear in her mind even though the relative boy he had been at the time had since grown to be a man.
She had been in the kitchen, enjoying a rare moment of quiet laziness, when Clark barrelled into the room, his eyes wide with something that was almost like fear.
"Mom -" He said, and stopped short, his breaths coming as deep, desperate gasps. Martha rose immediately, and crossed to his side. She had seen that look before – on the face of the toddler who had accidentally broken the kitchen table and known instinctively that it was not normal, on the face of the eleven-year old who had received the shock of his young life upon looking at his mother's hand and suddenly seeing a dim image of the skeleton underneath.
"Clark?" She spoke his name, once, and then fell silent. Like any other teenage boy – though he was at that awkward age now, seventeen, a boy waiting to be a man but unsure of the kind of man he would make – he needed time to think and choose his words before he spoke. And Martha sensed that this conversation would carry more import than most – though of course the kind of conversations she had been forced to have with her son in regards to growing up were a little different to those which most mothers had with their sons.
Slowly, her boy shifted away from her, sitting down heavily (though not too heavily, Martha thought; last time he had looked this shell-shocked he had broken a chair simply by sitting in it) onto one of the chairs by the table. He held his hands out in front of them and surveyed his palms, before saying;
"I think you should sit down." He said. Martha did so, her sense of foreboding increasing by the moment. Before, whatever fear and surprise his powers had caused him, he had always greeted the revelation of new abilities with a tinge of excitement. There was none of that here. Perhaps he was a little more grown up now – or perhaps it was something too... big for him to comprehend yet. Whatever it was, Martha hoped it wasn't something too big for she as a human mother to support her human in soul, if not in body, child.
"Clark," she said, her voice gently pressing, "just tell me. What is it?"
Her boy took a breath and then let the words out in a confused rush.
"I think I can fly."
Martha sat very, very still. Perhaps now she understood why Clark, so strong and brave, not just in body but in all the little things, like facing without complaint all his differences, had looked so scared when faced with this difference. She could not speak.
After a moment, her boy's face contorted, and his eyes behind the glasses shied away from hers. The glasses had been a feature of his life since he was twelve years old, when one of his friends had alarmed him by asking him why he never had anything wrong with him. A week later he had 'developed a need for a prescription' which had got thicker every year. Martha knew, though Clark hadn't told her, that the served a secondary, incidental use – they blocked what she called when in public his "long sightedness"; his x-ray vision. She was a mother, after all, and mothers notice things – even the lowering of a pair of glasses when that mother's son is asked, say, to check the truck's engine without springing the bonnet by his father.
"I'm sorry, Mom." Martha looked up sharply, and at the expression on her son's face she realised just how costly her silence could prove to be.
"Clark, I didn't mean – you know I didn't -" Martha stopped herself short. Clark was confused enough as it was; her own half-formed sentences would do nothing to allay that. One of them needed to be calm and collected, and since Martha wasn't the one who had just learnt she could fly, such a task would inevitably fall to her. She started again. "Are you sure? That you can...?" Somehow, she could still not quite bring herself to say the word. He nodded.
"Yeah." He leant forward, and he gave a sigh that Martha knew was about to pre-empt a healthy, angst-ridden phrase about the unfairness of it all. Good. He was a teenager after all. "Mom, I don't know what to do. With all the other... stuff, that was just about okay, but this is -"
His predictable soliloquy was cut off by a gruff voice from the door.
"This is different." Clark looked up, and Martha saw on his face just a little of the gratefulness that she felt at seeing that his father had been listening all the time. It would save either of them having to explain it again.
"What do you mean, Jonathon?" She asked, though she knew full well what her husband meant, and knew that Clark did too. But there were some things her boy needed to hear, as well as think. Her husband slowly took his place beside her and surveyed the young man they had moulded with a careful expression.
"What do think, Clark?" Martha suppressed a smile as her husband did one better and rallied Clark into saying the words himself; it would give them more reality then. Clark frowned, and Martha watched silently as the fear began to move towards anger.
"It's different because all the other things were just... one step up from what... everyone else can do. Everyone can run, I can just run faster. Everyone can see, I just see more." He paused dubiously. "But I don't think many people can fly."
There was silence in the little kitchen. Clark seemed lost in thought, Jonathon seemed simply lost, and all was quiet until the dog barked outside, breaking the deep calm. Clark jerked out of his thoughts and gave a slight smile.
"Do you reckon she's found her ball?"
"What?"
Clark shook his head.
"Never mind."
Martha looked him up and down once more, and realised at last that underneath the fear at the craziness of it all, and the anger at how different it made him, there was something else as well, something which shone like a tiny, precious crystal.
"How did it feel?" She asked, and for but a moment, something like shame crossed his face.
"It felt good." He admitted at last. "It felt like – like even though I was only a few metres of the ground, I was still closer to the sun that I'd even been. It was... good."
Martha smiled gently.
"I'm glad." She said, and she was. Jonathon coughed awkwardly, and Martha thought with a smile how very like each other the two men in her life were. It was through the little things that she kept her feet. It seemed that now more than ever she would be needing them.
"What are you going to do?" Her husband, Clark's father in soul if not in blood, asked. Clark cocked his head to one side and caught his mother's eye. She nodded, and a slow mischievous smile crossed his face.
"I'm going to go and practice." He said, rising from the table and glancing hesitantly at his father. "Want to join me?"
Jonathon coughed once more, but Martha could tell that he was both pleased and proud that Clark had of his own volition invited him to join his adventure. And an adventure it would be. Martha could see them now, in her mind's eye, messing around in the barn and the hay bales till twilight put an end to their aerial escapades. Jonathon, just like Clark before him, caught Martha's eye, and she laughed.
"Go on, the pair of you. Though I don't know how good a coach you'll make, Jonathon, having never even stepped on a plane in your life."
But then Clark, the mischief in his eyes replaced by something calmer and warmer, said something unexpected.
"Don't worry, Mom. I think I know what to do. And if I fall it won't hurt."
And as he exited, Martha wondered where her boy had learnt such wisdom. It certainly hadn't been from her.
888
A week or so later, Clark came to her with that look on his face again, except this time the excitement and exhilaration in it was far greater, and the fearer far less. Jonathon had told her little about their "flying lessons", save to say that Clark would tell her himself when he was ready. Martha did not press the issue; she knew that, as with all things in growing up, this step would be made in its own sweet time and none else.
"Mom," he said, his eyes bright behind the glasses, "can I show you?"
Martha cleaned and dried her hands of her cooking before turning to him. She had not gone with Clark and Jonathon when Clark had first made the revelation that he could fly, because she knew that Clark would rather she see the final product rather than the half-completed one. It was what mothers were for, after all; for making proud.
"Alright," she said, "in the barn?"
Clark nodded, and she walked out with him, keeping her pace even – not too fast and not too slow. When they entered the barn Clark turned to her with a smile and held his hands out. The barn was empty – evidently, as the learning to fly had been a 'father-son thing', this moment was to be one for mother and son alone.
"Dance with me?" He asked, and Martha, surprised, took his hands. They stood in the waltz position which, with a smile, Martha remembered teaching Clark a year previously for a school dance. He had grown a lot since then, in body as well in heart, and Martha was enveloped for a moment in the sheer hugeness and warmth of both his body and his heart. She wondered, with the biased affection of all mothers, why he did not have more girls chasing after him. They stood in the position, but Clark did not move. His expression was sombre. "Now," he said, "stand on my feet."
Martha did so, her frown of confusion only slight. She glanced up at Clark, and realised that the hand holding hers was trembling slightly. Clark was nervous.
"Go on, then."
Clark gave her a slight, sheepish grin.
"You'd better hold on. I haven't quite got the hang of the take-off thing." And with those encouraging words, he tightened his hold on her, bent his legs, and –
Martha let the smallest of gasps escape her as they stopped short with only a few inches to go between their heads and the roof of the barn. She looked down, her hand shaking a little too.
"When you said you wanted to show me," she said quietly, "I didn't think you meant like this."
Clark avoided her eyes, his expression undecided, and hovering between joy and sadness. She felt his heart speed up as they began to shift, dancing in the air, and for a single moment she understood entirely why he had been filled with such strange emotion the week before. They were closer to the sun.
Then Martha lent in closer, and asked the question she knew he had been longing to hear.
"Does this thing go any higher?"
Clark laughed.
"If you want." A grin crossed his face. "But then, of course, there's the coming down..."
Martha laughed gently and, as they rose further into the twilight air through the hole in the roof of the barn (which she could get Clark to fix, now he could get to it so easily), she thought of the day when Clark had been given to them. He had been so tiny. Had she imagined what he would grow up to be, then? Would it have changed anything?
She looked up into her boy's face, his eyes filled with the exhilaration of flying, and she realised that she still could not imagine what he would do, what he would become in the future.
But that still would not change now, just as today could not change the gift she had been given when she had stumbled across the child she now called her own. Because whatever happened, she would always be the first person he had ever taken flying.
888
A/N: One chapter down, one more to go. Or, rather, one 'one-shot' down, one more to go.
Please review, they make me feel very, very happy!
