3.
"You always understood that we were going to leave someday," Rhys's mother sighed. She had started to become tired and faded, as if staying in one place was slowly sucking the life out of her. "I'm sorry, Rhys. I need somewhere new."
He cut off the part of his brain that was emotional. "... My home is here," he said stonily, robotic.
He and his Mom looked at each other. It wasn't really a fight - they didn't believe in dramatic fights - but resentment festered underneath the surface.
"Will you not come with me, then?" said his mother, and Rhys couldn't tell if she sounded sad, rhetorical, or sarcastic. He was not adept at picking out such nuances.
"You are my mother and I want you to be happy," said Rhys coldly. "Of course, I will go. That was never the point."
He turned around and left, slamming the front door shut a little harder than was necessary and grabbing his bike. He needed some air.
Amelia looked after him and thought that fighting with Rhys was actually worse than fighting with a human. What was to be done, she thought, with a person who wouldn't yell their feelings at you? What was to be done with a person who simply looked?
Rhys found the old man sitting at the usual bench overlooking the ocean. He settled down beside him. They were silent for a while. Normal humans could always tell when someone else was upset, an art Rhys had never mastered.
"We are moving," he said at last, in rough Icelandic. "My mother wants us to move to Portugal. I know nothing about Portugal."
"So are you never going to try anywhere else because you don't know anything about it?" said the old man gruffly. "Perhaps you will like Portugal. It could be a place to reinvent yourself."
"Iceland is my home."
"Sentimentality doesn't suit you. What is the real problem?"
Rhys sighed, leaning forward, elbows on his knees, unknowingly copying his mother. "My mother will always want to move somewhere else, and she has the money to do it. I just... keep picturing a life of always moving somewhere else."
The old man paused. "Only until you are eighteen," he said.
Rhys's eyes creased in pain. "I cannot leave my mother. She needs me."
"Ah. Then you will always be alone," said the old man simply.
"I'm fine with being alone," said Rhys, an unfamiliar, hot emotion riding inside his chest. He felt a little bit like he felt when the other kids threw rocks at the spokes on his bicycle wheels. He watched the ocean move about.
"You're fine with it now," the old man predicted.
"What are you trying to say?" Rhys turned around at last to look his mentor fully in the face.
"That you are a child with a full life ahead of you, and you should openly go where life takes you," said the old man. "But you do not have to follow your mother around for your entire life. Does your mother follow hers?"
"... No," said Rhys.
"Then do not despair. As an adult, you can do what you want. It is not forever," said the old man. "Now. Before you leave Iceland for good, how would you like to go sailing?"
So Rhys went out on the boat with the Icelandic man who had been the only friend he had. He held onto a rope unsteadily, life jacket on, the sea wind whipping his face. And the old man taught him basic sailing techniques, how to stay steady on an uneven surface, what fish to look for, what to do if you fell over into the cold water below.
Rhys looked out over the building-lined coast and said goodbye to Reykjavik.
They moved to a village in the warm, dry Algarve area, near the sea, a move based in Amelia trying to appease Rhys. It was a single-story villa, small garden. Rhys had to get used to everything from the landscape, to the food, to the weather, to the small vegetable garden his mother grew. His mother became vibrant again, their brilliantly colored surroundings giving her new life.
The nearby beach was white and sandy, the entire lagoon filled with pine trees set atop soft red and yellow sandstone cliffs. Rhys made friends at the daily fish market in the village, bartering and haggling and chatting with fishermen's wives, and also with children at the lagoon. They didn't go to school together, but accepted him as a distant friend after he took up their challenge, walked up nauseously and dizzily to edge of the cliff, and had the guts to jump in anyway.
The seawater was a deep blue-green and incredibly warm, the sun sparkling onto it. He would walk out onto the beach in nothing but shorts, somehow never getting a sunburn, and splash around in the water with the other children.
This, of course, required Rhys learning Spanish and Portuguese. His mother said these languages came as easily to him as the Icelandic language had, and Icelandic never faded from his vocabulary from disuse. His photographic memory did help, but he and his mother were starting to suspect ease with languages was another of his intellectual gifts. He was in the unusual position of helping his mother learn language, teaching her using English, becoming a soothing mentor figure when she felt overwhelmed by all the changes.
Rhys learned that he could adapt anywhere, and was much happier for it.
The hot summers were worlds apart from Iceland, and even the wet Mediterranean winters carried warm tropical storms, not cold subarctic ones. The wind, at least, was familiar, though unforgivably hot.
Rhys became comfortable walking around in little clothing and his mother sometimes had to scold him to put more on. The warm weather made him lazy, and he spent many an afternoon curled up in the sunshine in shorts with a book.
While Iceland had mainly sported heavy Viking era meals - lamb, potatoes, fish, seafood - Portugal was good for pastries, espresso, yogurt, soups, cheeses, rice puddings, custards, and tarts, though seafood was still a constant. And wine was much more plentiful than vodka. He formed a taste for good espresso while in Portugal.
He continued his increasingly advanced home schooling, but his mother also took him on a tour through various pieces of ancient art and old architecture around Portugal, teaching him art history and meaning. She drove him to the ballet and the theater in nearby major cities, and introduced him to poetry and story writing. That her son be creative and expressive was very important to Amelia.
Once, after visiting an old Church and looking up at the angels painted onto the domed ceiling, he said into the echoing silence, "I wonder if I'm an angel. Like them, I have special powers."
"Well, you did come from the sky," said his mother unexpectedly, and he looked down.
"Mother," he said at last, frowning, "how did you find me? Why can I do what I do? And why do I need to hide?"
She sighed, looking sorrowful. She took him home, and told him quietly the whole story of his alien origins, of how she had found him. In the end, as he was sitting there stunned, she pressed the metallic tablet from his biological parents into his hands.
"This is the tablet I translated," she said. "It's the only words you have from your world. Would you like me to explain them to you?"
She took him through what each character signified, and he sat there many an afternoon running his fingers along the grooved hieroglyphs for countless hours afterward, until he'd memorized every nuance of his parents' last message to him. Kal-El, they had named him. His name was Kal. He was alien nobility.
He was not an angel, but he felt just as strange - just as different. He understood, for the first time, why he was fascinated by the stars. It was because he came from them.
