Little Sky (put your tongues back in your mouths and get your minds out of the gutter)

Clark slumped before the computer and restrained an impulse to put a fist through it. He settled for rubbing his eyes instead. Languages! The eight languages of Krypton's history were child's play compared to Latin and Greek. Granted that the symbols and roots were so thoroughly ingrained in a dozen modern languages that he would never learn German (Caesar, Kaiser) or Spanish (and who put genders on inanimate objects anyway?) or even French (were they competing with Welsh for most incomprehensible spelling?) without them, but if Greek hadn't been the roots of everything from Russian to math, he would have said to hell with it and set out to rule the world by starting with teaching everyone a logical language.

And Wynter had threatened him with the Arabic languages if he fell behind again. He shuddered. No doubt Lucy Karp (Tanenbaum had been put on his reading list as a prelude to legal studies) was based on an actual Special here, who was making him pay for his sins.

A gentle hand laid on his shoulder and thumbs massaged his neck. Clark started, and then went limp. He hadn't had a neck rub since, well, ever in his life, that he remembered. He recognized Little Sky's scent before he blinked up and saw her. "How did you do that?"

"Do what?" She moved her hands to his shoulders and worked them in light circles. Clark melted. She was, he thought, still incredibly beautiful, but there was none of the aura of sheer sexual attraction that had so unnerved him on their first meeting.

"Make me, well, feel that. I don't actually feel much any more. I mean, I can feel a touch, but it doesn't, um...." I am digging myself into a hole here, Clark thought, and wisely shut up, even as his body took over and automatically leaned back into her hands.

Sky laughed lightly. "It's part of my talent, Kal-El. My heritage is the power of the elements, in the oldest sense. I am one with the flow of life and nature, the daughter of the Mother Goddess. The fire and wind and rain are not the only currents which speak to me. So does the blood and," she stroked his spine and he shivered all over, "the lightning within."

"I'm not from this planet," he muttered, making no attempt whatsoever to move away.

"You are alive, my friend. You are here among us. You, yourself, have brought forth life from the land of this world, with your own hands and work. That makes you part of this world, no matter what others you also belong to." Working on a farm counted toward being human? Clark thought muzzily. "Call it a Special's mutation talent, or call it the ancient power of a direct line to the spirit of living Gaia, but I know that you are one of my own -- our own -- because you share the aura of the Mother's touch."

"Oohhh," Clark mumbled, relaxing more completely than he had in, well, his whole life. "Does your power include turning invulnerable aliens to jelly? Because you just did."

Little Sky chuckled in a low suggestive voice completely at odds with her light laughter, and bent to brush his neck and ears with her lips and a whisper that held no words, as she reached to the chair's controls to recline it. Clark barely retrained himself from jumping through the ceiling, and that only out of fear of smashing her head. "Don't do that!"

"Sorry." Her hands shifted to stroking his head, a purely maternal gesture, despite the fact that they were closer in age than even he and Lex were. (Maternal. When was the last time his mom had ever comforted him like that? -- Clark's mom, not Kal-El's mother, who had barely ever even touched him, and damnit, that lack of something he probably never would have had anyway hurt way worse than it should have, since he had only barely been hatched when he had been sent away -- what the hell? where had that thought come from?)

Clark suddenly felt as dizzy as if a green rock had been strapped to his head. He dropped his face into his hands, carefully controlling his breathing. "Not -- your fault."

"It most certainly is my fault, because it is something I alone did, and on purpose, though it is not something that I usually have to apologize for." She lifted his head with her fingertips, massaging lightly and in soothing motions against his temples. "Even John, even Lake, permit us the enjoyment sometimes."

"Permit...." Clark decided that languages weren't so bad after all, if this was the reward for studying. He leaned back and let go. "Enjoyment...." His eyes drifted closed.

"Yes, Kal, enjoyment," she said softly, keeping up the slow gentle pressure-point touch to release tension. "This is a very beautiful world, if you will let it be. Earth welcomes you, and loves you. Sometimes she speaks to me in frightening storms, or burning drought, or terrible fires. Sometimes the crashing of her continental plates destroys so much that even I must cry, why? But in the end, our mother nurtures all life, and all that can be. Earth is the home of all possibilities. Birds that swim, fish that fly.... Earth is your home, too. You are just one of our many wonders." She moved her forehead very close to his, not touching, just enough to hear his breathing even out towards sleep. "If you were not one of us," she said softly, pushing the chair's control to lean it back, "I would not be able to touch you."

Clark murmured something that might have been "touch" if he hadn't been halfway to REM cycle. Leia Makani, wind of heaven, Little Skylark, *touched* him with the gift she had been called "freak" for until she became one of Baron John's: the power of Earth.

The feeling of belonging to Gaia. Of being one with the land and sea and sky.

Leia Little Sky released him and retreated silently when he started to snore.

Wynter and John and the South America team were arguing fiercely over the information coming in from seventeen channels when Sky barged in. She didn't bother to knock, her ability to sense earthquakes coming (and sometimes ease them a little) put their discussion at only about a 3.5 on the Richter scale. "Who wants to hear about Kal-El?"

John turned to the rest of the team. "The Kryptonian's information is not restricted from you, but you people are going to have to put the Ecuador operation together with what little info we have, as of ten minutes ago. Get moving." They did. "What now, Sky?"

Skylark helped herself to a chair. "Well, Dylana and Nicole were right, no surprise there. The boy is so close to emotional collapse that it's a wonder he's not catatonic. Wynter's lessons are the only thing he's scheduling his life around. Not that he appreciates it all that much, Wynt," she smiled lightly at the younger boy. Wynter growled. The partner of the winds and waters was one of the few people for whom he didn't dare put a mechanical shark in her bunk. She might return the favor with a real one.

John steepled his fingers and frowned at her, which reminded Little Sky where she was and who she had interrupted. "Yes, Dylana couldn't help but notice the physical instability, as well as some residual radiation damage. How about the rest of it?"

Sky shook her head. "It took everything I had to get his interest when he first got here, and he didn't have any defenses at all then. Now he's got walls up that even I can't get through. Goddess, John, he opened a vault in Lab 8 with his bare hands, just to see if he could feel anything! He was only mildly surprised that I could give him a neck rub, when I was channeling enough life force to get YOU into bed."

John smiled slightly, and Wynter whooped. "You're on! Let's see you try it."

"Wait a few years, Wynt, and I'll show you. John, sir, there's really nothing else I can do. He doesn't respond to the usual cues. He's as highly arousable as any teenager, at least he responds with the usual reactions to stimuli, but the interest is, well, feigned. As if he's only feeling something because he's been told he should."

"He's not human," Wynter pointed out.

"Don't start, Wart. He's as human as they come. He grew up on this planet."

"That's what I mean," Wynter clarified impatiently. "Emotionally, all he knows is what he's been taught by humans, until that all-gods-damn download screwed up his head so thoroughly. He responds to the cues he's learned. Feigned, as you said. But physiologically, he has nothing in common with us except general shape. He's no more physically human than Nicole. If he can interbreed with humans, I'll eat a sample from Lab 8. He doesn't HAVE an instinctive sex drive or preference, because there's nothing and no one on this planet he can reproduce with. All your mother nature's turn-on power does to him is frustrate him.

"By nature, he's as likely to be turned on by a dolphin as by anything you or Kurt could do. At least a cetacean is closer to his strength class."

"And while he has remarkable self-control," John added quietly, "There are few forces that could withstand his loss of it, for whatever reason."

Little Sky considered that. To her senses, Kal-El was just another boy, one laboring under a terrible burden. She had to remind herself that he could also be terribly dangerous, even without meaning to. Most of the rest of them were dangerous only on purpose.

"So what next? Randal?"

John made a small motion of his hand. "That's up to Randal, of course. But William has already reached the same wall you have." He smiled a little, not pleasantly. "Kal-El survived on his own all these years by being a tough nut to crack. We should not be surprised that it's working against him, and us, now." John turned away, his attention going back to the information feeds that even Wynter had trouble keeping up with. The other two recognized the signal for "get back to work," and stood. "But I'll talk to him tomorrow," John promised.