Disclaimer: I do NOT own the twilight saga franchise, Warner Brothers Entertainment, DC Comics, Superman, or the Smallville television series. The twilight saga is copyrighted by Stephenie Meyer, Megan Tingley Books, Little, Brown and Company and Summit Entertainment. Superman and the Smallville television series is copyrighted by DC Comics, which is a subsidiary of Warner Brothers Entertainment. The only copyrights that I may claim to own are for original characters, themes and story plot lines. No copyright infringement was intended on my part. I wrote this story with only entertainment purposes in my mind, and have made no monetary gain off this work of fiction. Please do not sue me.


Blue Moon

A Twilight and Smallville Crossover

By

Man, or Superman?


Clark

1. Arrival


I hadn't actually believed that leaving Smallville would have been so bittersweet. After my short rebellion in Metropolis, Chloe avoid speaking with me at length, wary that I might be on drugs, and my friendship with Lana was strained after she gave me her ultimatum and I rejected her. But Pete was Pete, if you could even call that an apt descript of your best friend. But there wasn't much I could say about him. With Pete, what you see fortunately tended to be what you get. He showed up to see my family off, and gave me an awkward one-armed man hug. Only when I rested for that night was I privately able to unashamedly admit that I'd miss him.

Heck, I'd miss Smallville, no matter how crazy the town tended to be. It still was my hometown, though, and it was the only home I'd ever known.

But no matter my great powers, I couldn't just stop the bills from piling up. Even if I worked without rest and pulled the weight of a hundred men, I couldn't speed up the clock. Like all farmers, we had to wait for the harvest to earn out annual income.

Like many farming households, we harvested the land several times a year by spreading out our crops and strictly maintained a timetable for which batch of crops to grow and when. But this past year had been unusually hard on us; with the interference from alien powers and a miracle baby eating up a lot of our funds, we'd been scraping the bottom of the barrel well before I unintentionally destroyed a good portion of the farm in my useless effort to destroy the spaceship that carried me to Earth fifteen years ago.

I'd wanted to use my superpowers to supplement my family's income, but dad shot the idea down immediately. He was too proud, and felt that the right thing to do was for a man to grit his teeth and apply himself to honest work. But the bank didn't care for the reasons for our financial troubles, and we soon were sent and eviction notice to relocate.

Mom had been willed a house on the west coast from her long dead mother, which was still owned under her name in her name. Without any real options left, she finally remembered the quaint house in the rural town of Forks, Washington. We knew that it was probably run down, but since I was strong and fast and had sharp eyes, dad was willing to let me take on the majority of the repairs. That was the plan, anyway, but I didn't intend for him to have to lift a finger. I've already given them enough trouble to last a lifetime or two.

Granddad was pretty furious with my dad, and there were plenty of heated arguments long into the night when they thought I had gone to bed. Fortunately for dad, mom was still fiercely on his side, and wouldn't be swayed by her father. Even if she would have a better life if she sided with her father, away from dad and me, she adamantly refused. She said there was too much love in the Kent family for her to abandon us

As we said our goodbyes, I told Pete to tell Chloe and Lana that I was sorry that I wouldn't be able to patch things up and for all the trouble that I'd already caused them, even if they didn't want to hear it. Maybe after college I'd be able to find them again and properly reconcile unlike the shoddy way I'd already managed so far. I had every intention to return to Smallville, once I had the money to buy the farm back. The farm had been in the Kent's good name for generations before me, so I didn't feel right abandoning it even now when it meant so much to me. Having some familiar faces there to ease the change would be welcome.

I know dad wanted to return. The farm was as special to him as it was mom and me. But we had much bigger issues to worry about now. Since it would cost a small fortune to move our belongings and purchase even low class plane tickets, we loaded most of our valuables on the truck and sold everything that we thought that we could part with, which turned out to be about 90% of the farm.

Since it'd be cramped, riding in the cabin of the truck with my parents, they told me to hurry over to Forks and start on the repairs. Since I'd already decided to do everything that I could to make my parents feel welcome and content in Forks despite how significant the differences between the two small towns were, I was determined to have most or all the repairs that the house that we were moving into to be completed by the time my parents arrived.

Secrets were hard to keep in small towns, so I tried to avoid interacting with the locals. I'd brought most of the tools that I'd thought would be necessary to start on and complete the repairs for the old house, but when I needed something that I hadn't brought with me I'd take a trip to either the nearby city of Port Angeles or into Seattle if I was really desperate. As far as the neighbors were concerned, their anticipated new immigrants had hired on a repair company from out of town that came in early every morning and left late at night so that they didn't know who was responsible for the majority of the visible repairs.

For almost a full week I kept my mind and body with physical labor, secluding myself from the rest of the town. During that time, my parents kept me abreast of their progress cross country. My mom liked to keep me up at night, getting me to tell her every microscopic detail about the repair work, my diet and how I was getting on with the neighbors. I avoided speaking in depth where I could, and answering in vague tones that conveyed my desire to change the subject. Dad usually saved me then, taking the phone from my mom and speaking to me quietly. I was thankful for his stoic reassurance; I knew he'd not even be half as willing to abandon Smallville if it weren't for the still painful loss of his legitimate biological child. The pain was still fresh on all our minds.

Sometime early that Sunday morning my parents arrived in the truck, which I helped them unpack and sort our belongings. This was the first chance that our neighbors had gotten to get a look at us, peeking out from window blinds and over the top of close cut, very green hedges. Inevitably, one of them chose to investigate by approaching us physically.

One of our neighbors was the police chief of the small town. He was tall, and dark haired with hard brown eyes, and moved awkwardly on his feet as if he wasn't really comfortable in his own skin. Apparently, every single member of his family had two left feet. In a strange quirk of fate, he vaguely reminded me of dad.

He introduced himself as Charlie Swan, one of only a few acting officers in the town.

From what he said, he had an ex-wife and a daughter that lived in Arizona, and who had all but avoided coming to Forks for the last three years.

But he was a good man. He didn't pry too heavily into our lives, just asking general questions about where we were from and why we'd left. My parents answered him simply but honestly, trying to keep their stories contained to the bare minimum of detail but still hold a source of truth underneath all the half truths.

I didn't talk to him to him personally, but I overheard him asking if I'd be joining the rest of my age group at the high school. They agreed that I would, and that I'd start with the new term. I didn't bother fighting the matter, since I knew how important it was to keep up the illusion that I was a normal boy and that we were an average family from the mid west.

Charlie seemed pleased, and gave directions to a nearby Native American reservation that he'd thought I'd like since it was apparently popular with the teenage demographic. Forks didn't have a lot of options for teenagers to choose their entertainment; it was either the beaches in the La Push reservation or the shops and sole theater in Port Angeles, which was a significant distance from Forks compared to even La Push.

They conveyed interest in the subject, which I interpreted that they were worried about me falling into another depression. It was touching, but I was childishly annoyed with their interference.

Even if I understood that it wasn't healthy to avoid any social interaction, that's exactly what I ended up doing the following week. The house that we'd moved to was small, so I ended up making a room for myself in the attic, which I spent the majority of my time brooding in. In the days that followed, I'd find myself sitting in my only chair, a rickety old rocker that I situated beside my window, looking into the cloudy sky.

It rained a lot in Forks, which I'd already known. But I hadn't really thought that I'd be hit with melancholy as badly as I had. I slept a lot, and when I awoke I was so moody that I chose to avoid my parents entirely.

I'd randomly suffer from bouts of fatigue and exhaustion, but that Saturday I more or less recovered. Mom worried that I'd caught something that could affect even my alien physiology, but dad's maintained composure was comforting enough that we didn't seek to contact Dr. Vergil Swan, who was probably the only person on the planet that we could trust to exam my body for illness.

But I eventually recovered, and on the Sunday following my recovery I decided to explore the rest of the small town. It was a rare sunny day, and I felt unusually energetic under the familiar warm rays of the sun. I decided to investigate La Push, which Charlie had recommended, arriving as crowds began to arrive at the entrance of First Beach.

Several groups of the teenagers from the Reservation were already there waiting, which I believed was due to the absolute lack of entertainment in both Forks and La Push. I'd done a quick scan of the reservation while heading to the beach, and I saw that they were only lucky enough to have a single coffee shop which they shared with a bakery. Though La Push was bigger than Forks and lucky enough to have a few interesting shops, they weren't much bigger than Forks and most of the shops in La Push were bakeries or places for tourists to buy souvenirs, which most teenagers wouldn't really find useful for entertainment reasons.

Of course I knew that I'd be recognized. News tended to travel fast in small towns like Forks, and even in Smallville which was about double the size of Forks, everyone knew who was dating who or which families were feuding. But gossip was the nature of small towns like Forks and Smallville.

Plus, I'd probably be a hot topic for the simple townsfolk; I was the only son of a couple of farmers and avoided leaving the house. They'd probably think that I was a troubled youth that didn't want to connect, or suffering from homesickness, or even that I was lame or retarded and stayed at home so that my family could care for me.

Even if none of it were true, people would gossip.

Naturally, teenagers being teenagers, the sight of the tall and dark stranger standing on the shore of the beach caught a lot of attention. The fact that I was the mysterious and reclusive son of Mr. and Mrs. Kent would be extra incentive to investigate.

Not for the first time in my life, I despised my strange, alien biology. I'd been short and baby faced in my early years of puberty, but in the summer between my 8th grade year and my freshmen year of high school, I'd shot up like a beanstalk. When I'd stepped into Smallville high that year everyone knew that puberty had struck, and struck hard.

But I was big, and freakishly so at that. The summer before my freshmen year I'd barely stood taller than five feet, but when I started I was a little over six feet and about a hundred pounds heavier with muscle. To say I stood out was a gross understatement. I'd never been so afraid to go to school since I'd first started back when I was five.

But now I was even bigger, growing an inch or so every year and putting on a few dozen more pounds of raw muscle. By now I was so heavily that I had to watch how I sat on chairs; most chairs were made either from cheap plastic or wood, and five hundred plus pounds of alien muscle tended to be more than they could endure.

I'd adopted the habit of slouching and wearing clothing several sizes bigger than me. When you slouched and adopted shy mannerisms, people tended to perceive you as shorter than you were. With clothing several sizes bigger than me, large enough that they hung off my body in great folds of cloth and denim, people would think that you were skinnier than you were.

Using personality and fashion to my advantage, I could subtly make people think that I was just tall and lanky instead of just being massive like I really was.

Unfortunately, that had the tendency of getting me labeled as a nerd even without the stereotypical coke bottle glasses and the horrible acne and braces.

It was one of the girls that approached me first. She was tiny, shorter than even Chloe, who was one of the shortest girls that I personally knew, with dark curly hair that seemed to make up for her height deficiencies, and had pale and freckled skin that she showed off with her barely decent two piece swim suit. But I still thought she was pretty.

"Hi, I'm Jessica Stanley," the girl introduced herself, giving me a once over and a wide, appreciative smile as we shook hands. "I've never seen you before in town, are you visiting?"

"My family and I just recently moved into Forks," I explained habitually, trying to maintain eye contact with the girl because I was both uncomfortable with how close she was standing next to me and because the two piece swimsuit that she was wearing looked more like a bikini than what I believed would be comfortable in the chill waters of a Washington coastal town. "I'm Clark Kent, I'm pleased to meet you Miss…?"

She seemed to appeal to my soft tone of voice and polite words, her pale cheeks flushing rather attractive as she demurely brushed her damp, brown bangs out of her eyes and fluttered her eyelashes.

"So you're Clark Kent," she greeted with interest. I fought a smile. It seemed that I was expected. "Does that mean that you'll be joining Forks High?" I could hear the anticipation in her voice.

I nodded. "Yeah, I'll be joining once the break ends," I admitted. She seemed ecstatic at the clarification.

"Oh, I'm sorry Clark! Would you like to join my friends and me for the day? We could totally show you around! You must be lonely, moving to a new town and everything," she suggested imperiously. I smiled, glad that I'd managed to keep up with her babbling.

"By all means, Miss Stanley," I motioned for her to lead on, and followed her as she led me back to her friends from the local high school.

"Hey guys, I'd like you all to meet Clark Kent! Go easy on him, he's new in town," she introduced me, winking at some of the other girls in the group. A very pretty blond and a few other girls that surrounded her giggled excitedly, sending me predatory glances and suggestive smiles. Most of the guys though seemed to take it all in stride, though the tall boy with the short and spiky blond hair frowned in annoyance as I sat down beside him.

"Hello," I greeted the group softly once I was seated amongst them. I could see that the group had started a driftwood fire that crackled with green flames from all the saltwater it was soaked with.

One of the other boys, who had a bad case of acne, leaned towards me with an eager grin. "Hey man, my name is Eric, Eric Yorkie. I'm on the school paper with Angela," he indicated a tall, dark haired girl, and then moved onto a shorter boy with Asian features, "And Ben. Not a lot of people are interested in moving to Forks though, so we don't see a lot of new students…so, scoop?" he suggested with a grin and a wink.

"Huh," I leaned in with obvious interest, "Would there be an opening in the newspaper club?" As I'd expected, the group was surprised by my eagerness. That wasn't so surprising to me; in the clothing that I was currently wearing, I looked more like a jock than a paper nerd. Deciding to ease them, I grinned sheepishly, ducking my head to make me seem a little embarrassed at my hobby. "I uh…had a friend who was the editor of the paper…"

"Really, what section did you work on?" the girl, Angela asked with sudden interest. Obviously, the paper was more important to her than Eric. I felt an immediate kinship with the girl.

I attempted a smile, but it felt slightly strained on my face.

"I wrote for sports, mostly, though I would fill in for my friends if they were busy with something else, and sometimes we all worked on stories together," I explained easily. It was the standard reply that I'd given plenty of times since I started high school. So there wouldn't be any hint of deception.

"I really don't see it," the boy with blond hair pointed out, and I saw several of the other teenagers murmured agreement. "You look more like you belong out on the football field than with the nerds," he said honestly, which wasn't surprising. I fought back a grimace at the reminder.

"Yeah, but my family owned a farm before we were forced to move here, and football takes a load of time out of my schedule that I could have been helping out at the farm. That was a pretty big deal, since we couldn't afford too many hired hands, so I had to pitch in on my family's farm as much as I could."

"But why…?" the pretty blond girl made a vague gesture. I smiled easily though, understanding what she meant.

"In my old school, club activities or joining a school sport's team were required extracurricular activities. Most of my classmates who couldn't make it on a sport's team ended up joining the newspaper club though, at least until they managed to earn the required credits, because the only other clubs were drama, chess and computers…at least with the newspaper club I had friends there with me…" I explained.

"Geese," the blond boy shivered in disgust, "I can't imagine. Considering those options, I think that I'd pick newspaper club too if I couldn't make it on a sport's team…"

I shrugged in apathy. "Well, we only really had the swim team, the football team and the baseball team at my old school…" I reasoned. A collective shudder went through the group.

"I honestly thought there couldn't be a town worse than Forks," Jessica gave a horrified shudder. "But at least here we have a pretty decent selection of clubs and sports to occupy all our free time…"

"Which is about the only thing we have," Eric pointed out. Another collective shiver of disgust passed over us.

"So far, it doesn't seem too bad," I said softly, drawing looks of disbelief from the other students. Flushing sheepishly, I explained tentatively, "Well, at least your crime rate seems pretty low in comparison to my hometown…"

"Oh yes," said the blond with obvious derision at the argument, "Let's all be thankful that we can't even host a party without getting the chief Swan on our case, or that it's pretty much impossible to even sneak a beer or two to liven things up…" she drawled. I gave her a hapless shrug and a rueful smile in reply.

"At least the homicide ratio seems lower," I said softly. A hush fell over the group my words.

"That…sounded pretty cryptic," the Asian boy, Ben commented with a frown. The rest of the group seemed to silently agree.

"Were there…a lot of murder cases…in your hometown?" Angela hesitated to ask. I paused to consider how to reply, then gave the tiniest of nods.

"There were…a few. After Lex Luthor moved into my hometown two years ago, which I can honestly confess is first I can recall that all our troubles started," I gave them a simple reply. That was true enough, though I'd obviously not divulged the whole truth to my new acquaintances. Even if I could trace back majority of Smallville's troubles to me, I was lucky that it hadn't gotten that bad until Lex had rolled into town. For a moment, I wondered why…

"Ah, man," Eric groaned, scrubbing at his bangs furiously, "Tough break, fella. At least you won't have to worry about any crazies here, right?" he tried to lighten the grim mood. He seemed like the kind of guy that would try to cheer anyone up with a joke, even at his own expense.

I attempted a smile, but really couldn't put my heart in it. Somehow I just knew that I'd never really be free of homicidal mutants and alien threat. If these past two years of my high school life in Smallville were indicative about what the rest of my life would be like, than any normal life that I might have had was already doomed before it could even begin.

"Its okay, Clark," Jessica tried to sooth me, patting at my exposed knee sympathetically. "I don't even remember the last murder in Forks. Does anyone, really?" she asked, looking around our circle. Almost everyone agreed with nods of their heads of dismissive shrugs and rolls of their eyes.

Jessica turned her attention back to me and smiled, "Just you wait and see," she winked.

Things settled after that particularly grim conversation. We talked for a while longer, trading a few stories about the two towns that we all felt were appropriate. The three teenagers from the newspaper club seemed interested in hearing about Chloe, and my work in the Torch, so I agreed to stop by and take a look at the Newspaper Club. It was my junior year, anyways, so I might as well add onto my current journalistic experience before college.

Mike and a few boys were interested in some of my misadventures in Smallville, or all the horror stories that I had to tell about the meteor infected. Since it wouldn't due to hint at all the supernatural activities that happened in my hometown, I tried to downplay the danger and avoid any mention of super powers and mutations.

The girls in the group were more interested in the kind of movies, books, and music that I liked, and a few were even interested in the Chloe and Lana, who I had been friends with for years.

Once all the good weather ended with the dark storm clouds filling the sky, we parted ways while agreeing to keep in touch. I left La Push with several new phone numbers programmed into my cell phone, and returned to my new house to have a brief, quiet lunch with my parents.

True to my word, I kept in touch with the group of teenagers that I'd met at La Push beach. We usually went down to La Push when the weather was good, sometimes swimming and other times trying our hand at sports like volleyball or soccer. When the weather was bad, though, I usually split my time between seeing some action movies at the Port Angels cinema or shopping for books and clothing with Jessica, Angela and the rest of the girls.

My parents quickly found a place in the community. Charlie helped my dad get a job on the police force as a dispatcher because of his heart, and my mom found a job at the only bakery in La Push.

Forks just so happened to be a two restaurant town and single grocery store kind of town, and La Push was a decently bigger in comparison, so the Reservation fortunately had a coffee shop that shared space with their own bakery.

I took a part time job at the grocery market as a stocker, since it was some of the only kind of jobs that I could find as a strong and tall adolescent male. My work ethic was exemplary, impressing my boss. I never complained about my coworkers or my boss, was overly helpful to the customers, and could accomplish the same amount of work that two men my size and age could in half the time.

On the weekend, dad and mom would join Charlie either at his house or at the Clearwater residence. I'd met the Blacks and the Clearwaters, or at least I'd met the elders of the two Quileute families. From what Charlie claimed, the Swans had always had close ties with the resident of the Quileute tribe.

None of the men of the three families could cook, but they all liked their fish fry, so my dad would join Charlie, Billy and Harry at a near by river every Saturday and spend all day fishing. On Sundays, my parents would join the fish fry with the three other families, and would usually head over to either Charlie's house or the Clearwater's house, where mom and Mrs. Sue Clearwater would cook up the fish that the men had caught the previous day.

I'd only met Jacob Black briefly; he was Mr. Billy Black's son, whom I had met when they'd stopped by our house on the way to the market one day towards the end of summer. Dad had called me down and introduced me to Billy's son, Jacob, who was apparently going through a growth spurt and stood about half a foot shorter than I did, which was pretty impressive in itself.

We'd shaken hands and exchanged pleasantries, before Billy got me to promise to visit La Push at some point in the future. I knew that he had two daughters, which were only a couple of years older than me, and he'd hinted to possibly inviting his eldest daughter back home for Thanksgiving. He gave me the impression that he liked me a little too much and that he and my parents were thinking about playing matchmaker.

Despite my rather active social life, I never volunteered to go out with the local teenage demography. When I had the time, I usually spent it up in the attic which was now pretty much fully converted into my room, texting Pete and learning what Chloe and Lana were doing. I'd had to resort to this method, since Chloe and Lana either avoid answers my calls or text messages or were outright hostile whenever they answered.

Despite how friendly all the townsfolk were I still felt very lonely. My parents definitely noticed my subdued depression, and subtly tried to get me to open up and be more adventurous, but I struggled to find the motivation.

Finally, the end of the summer break was in sight, and with it was the promise of the sweet, monotonous release of the new school year. Most kids my age would have dreaded the coming year, but schoolwork was actually kind of relaxing to me.

It wasn't because I wanted to challenge my mind with a mountain of schoolwork like a number crunching mathematician nerd would have, but school was familiar to me, and since I could breeze through most schoolwork while only paying it the minimum amount of my attention, school was more of a release for me. The monotony of it was relaxing, since while in school I didn't have to focus on all the troubles that still awaited me back at home and in my real life.

I missed Pete, and Chloe, and Lana, and Lex. I missed the farm, and the wide open fields of gently swaying corn stalks, and the dry, blistering winds. I even missed the near constant threat of alien interference that would await me back in Smallville.

Smallville was home, and despite how welcoming Forks was to me, it just didn't feel right. It didn't fit me like my hometown did. It was sort of live trying on a new boot while which didn't feel as comfortable as the old, worn in one that had already conformed to the shape of your foot after many years of faithful service.

I should have realized that the monotony wouldn't last, and that I'd soon have new worries…


To Be Continued…?


Preview: "Clark: 2. Cold"