As late summer rolled around, talk in the Kent household began to revolve around more normal topics of conversation. Preparations for the harvest; though Clark would be back at school by then, he assured his parents that no matter where he was, he would zip back to give them a hand with it. Where Clark would be going was also a topic of some concern in the family; he had decided that there were a few too many memories in Metropolis for his liking, and that he'd rather head further away from Kansas. "It's not like I can't come home fast enough if you really need me," he pointed out. He had sent in transfer applications to schools on both coasts, deciding to aim for something in a city environment rather than the noble grasslands of his home. Talk turned to sports; the Broncos' and the Chiefs' chances of reaching the Superbowl were, as always, a matter of concern. Current events; the policies of the Bush administration and Congress, and the inane babble about celebrities and flavors-of-the-week. Everything seemed, once again, to be normal.
Then, with only a couple weeks left, responses began coming in from the colleges. Clark had seen this as an opportunity for a completely fresh start to his life, and as part of that, he didn't want anything to do with the less pleasant parts of his life. Metropolis was something he had come to include in that column. Between Lana's death, Lex Luthor and the fact that he'd spent every day of his freshman year paranoid that someone would recognize him from his summer of partying and causing trouble while under the influence. It was not a part of his life that he was proud of. Half the reason he'd ended up going to Met U was to be closer to Lana – something which was no longer an issue. And now that he could fly, Clark could be home in less than a minute from just about anywhere in the country if he was needed. He needed to start again.
He had sent out half a dozen transfer applications to schools across the country, from Los Angeles to Boston, and met back with mixed response. Some of them offered a curt "thanks, but no thanks;" others were more than happy to accept a straight "A" student from rural Kansas, but weren't able to put up enough financial aid to satisfy his needs. In the end, it came down to two schools on opposite sides of the nation
"Well," Clark said as he sat down at the counter, "I've made up my mind."
His parents turned to him, excited. "And?"
"Not Southern California."
This came as little shock to his parents. After their trip to L.A. two years ago for Martha's aunt's funeral – when Clark found himself clashing with his cousin Phillip and his rather electric personality – Clark had said that he couldn't really ever see himself living there. Great place to visit, but I'd never want to set down roots there, he'd said. "It just didn't feel right?" Jonathan asked.
Clark did, as his father had thought he would, nod in response. "I don't think I could live in Los Angeles – no one really cares there. Everyone's so incredibly apathetic…it's just frustrating. I think I'd go nuts in a month."
Jonathan nodded in understanding. To be honest, he hadn't seen his son out at USC, either; though he wouldn't have minded having an excuse to travel to L.A. every once in a while (particularly in January), Jonathan knew that Clark just wouldn't fit in very well in the City of Angels.
Then again, he thought, they're certainly used to odd things out there.
Martha didn't want to tap-dance around the issue any longer. "So that means…?"
Clark just nodded. "It's New York University."
To be honest, Clark had always liked New York City; it was one of the few cities that felt big enough for him to feel at home there, a place so big that somebody couldn't ever do everything in it. He'd always thought, deep down inside, that it should probably be the place called Metropolis – after all, it was the biggest city in the country.
"I think that it just feels right, Mom. When I went and checked it out…it just felt really good."
"Plus, you'll have Chloe there, too," Martha added.
Clark could have sworn he heard a subtext to his mother's voice, but he didn't call her on it. "Yeah. It'll be nice to have a friend there."
Martha smiled into her shirt, her son's intention noted, before turning back to her family.
"Well, Clark, now that we know where you're going and with the end of summer coming up soon, we still have one more issue to address in regards to your…secret identity."
"What's that," Clark asked?
"How we're going to keep it a secret."
Clark snapped his fingers. "I actually just thought of something the other day," he said. "Hold on." In a burst of speed he vanished up the staircase, only to return moments later with a hairbrush and a suit jacket. As his parents watched, he quickly combed his hair down in front and threw the old jacket over his shoulders before turning around again.
Jonathan and Martha were not impressed. He cocked an eyebrow at his son. "That's your disguise, Clark?"
Clark looked hurt. "Well, yeah – you know, I'd keep my hair looking different, and wear baggy clothes and suit jackets and stuff to hide my muscles." He pretended to flex his bicep, and gave a fake grin as if to convince his parents.
Jonathan chuckled. "Son, it's a good idea, but I don't think that people are that dumb -despite how it might seem sometimes. If somebody saw you on the street, it might work, but for the people you'll be with every day…it's just not enough. I'm sorry."
Clark slumped down into his chair. "Great. Maybe I should just forget the whole damn thing!"
Martha looked at her son. "Now don't give up so easily – we just haven't given it quite enough thought. You've got a good place to start with the change in dress, but you still need something else to complete the disguise. Something that changes your face somewhat."
Clark looked up. "Like a mustache, or something?"
Martha shook her head. "No, that wouldn't work; you'd have to use a fake one, and that would stick out like a sore thumb. You need something else." Her eyes lit upon Jonathan's reading glasses, sitting on the kitchen counter. She scooped them up and passed them off to her son. "Here – put these on."
Clark looked at his mother incredulously. "You're kidding."
"Just try it."
If it'll make her happy…Clark placed the glasses on his face, adjusting them to fit better on his ears before opening his eyes.
"Whoa!" he said as he felt his eyes tense looking through the lenses. He remembered the time during his junior year when an errant heat vision-kryptonite reaction had left him temporarily blinded; he'd had to wear glasses for a couple days afterwards, and he'd felt stupid the entire time. He'd been glad to get rid of the things once his eyesight had come back. Wouldn't it be ironic, he mused, if I ended up having to wear them in order to live my life after all?
Clark glanced up at his parents through the blur. He could barely read their expressions. "Well, what do you guys think?"
His parents nodded. "It works," said Jonathan. "So long as you always make sure to dress down and keep your hair combed down like that when you're not out…super-heroing, with the glasses you could pull it off."
"But," his mother stressed, "you can't ever let on to anybody that you might have another identity – either as Clark Kent or Superman. So long as you don't hide your face in costume, nobody is apt to suspect anything."
"I hope you're right," Clark sighed. "But at least I'll have plenty of time to get my Clark act together before I go out and start playing super-hero."
His parents gave each other a concerned look, something Clark didn't fail to notice. "What it it?" he asked.
His father sighed. "Well, son, when you said you wanted to wait a while before putting on that costume…we thought maybe you were being a little hasty in your decision."
Clark felt the ire rise up his back. "Excuse me?" he asked, a bit of edge coming into his voice.
"What your father's trying to say," his mother added hastily, "is that there's plenty of good that needs to be done out there right now in the world. The kind of things that only you can do."
"We don't want to pressure you, but Clark…you've taken this upon yourself, and this kind of responsibility…it's not the sort of thing to take lightly."
Angrily, Clark leapt upwards out of his chair. "And you think I am? You think I'm just treating this like some kind of big joke – like it's the school play or something? Believe me, I am not. I'm the one with the great power and the great responsibility – I'm the one who knows what it's like, not you! You two always said that I should do whatever feels right to me – to follow my heart and do the right thing. Well, this is the right thing in my mind. This is what's right for me. And that's all I know how to do." Clark's voice began to rise to a shout. "I need the chance to have a normal life for a while. You're both lucky – that's a choice you never had to make! You were just born that way – ordinary!"
A long, deathly silence filled the air of the house as his last words settled in. Martha stared at the floor, shell-shocked; Jonathan, on the other hand, just looked at his son with eyes brimming with sadness and disappointment. Clark felt a cold chill settle over himself as the force of his words caught up with him.
Oh, god. What have I done?
"Just…ordinary?"
Jonathan's voice was barely above a whisper as his eyes seemed to bore deep into his son's soul.
The words came again, louder this time. "Just ordinary? Is that what you really think of us, Clark? After all these years, after all we've done for you, we're just ordinary human scum, is that it?" His almost cruelly even tone began to shift upwards into a shout. "Well, excuse us for being mortal! Excuse us for being vulnerable! Excuse us for not having some higher destiny or falling for a goddamn rocketship for a planet a thousand light-years away!"
"Dad-"
"No, no, Clark! It's good to know what you finally think – after all these years, that your mother and I are just poor peasants working our fingers to the bone like everyone else. We're not good enough to leap buildings in a single bound, so we just have to stay down here in the dirt with all the other animals! Well, I for one am glad I know my place now. Come now, Martha, let's be off – the mighty one here must be tired of our presence by now."
"Jonathan, that's enough-"
"It's never enough, Martha!" He looked towards his wife for a second, his snapping words cutting her off and shutting her down before her argument even had a chance to be heard. "You know as well as I do how hard it was to raise Clark. The sacrifices we had to make. And I'm not just talking about the deals with the Jor-Els and the Lionel Luthors of the world." Jonathan's steely gaze swung back towards Clark, who just stared back with clenched jaw and tightening fists. "Did you know that we had to sell your grandmother's wedding dress in order to pay for your eight-grade field trip to Montana? Or how your mother and I cut back to two meals a day when you were in high school so there would always be enough food for you? Did any of those extraordinary senses ever tell you that? No – because you were always too fucking busy with your own problems to notice!"
"SHUT UP!" The hateful words roared from Clark's mouth in a tempest as he turned and shot from the room like a bullet, sending the screen door flying into the yard as he did so. His slipstream scattered his financial aid applications across the kitchen like autumn leaves. One of them fell into Jonathan's hands, and he grasped it slowly, looking it up and down as he read over it.
Name: CLARK JOSEPH KENT.
Mother: MARTHA CLARK KENT.
Father: JONATHAN SAMUEL KENT.
Date of Birth: 04/30/1987.
Martha always said everyone should have a birthday in the springtime, Jonathan heard inside his head. Didn't Clark always deserve the best?
Yes, he did. And he still does. You have no idea what he's going through, Jonny boy. Right now, he needs you as much as ever, and what did you just do?
You drove him away. And this time, for all you know, he may never come back.
Jonathan looked up at his wife in horror. "Martha," he groaned, "what have I done?"
-------------------------------------------------------Ten miles above Kansas and climbing fast, Clark punched a hole through the atmosphere at speeds even rockets couldn't reach. He felt the wind tear at his face, and he welcomed it – it felt like it was blasting his pain away. The puffy clouds of summer fell far below as the sky around him turned black and the stars begin to shine through, and Clark sucked in one last breath of oxygen before crossing through the imaginary line that astronomers had long since decided would separate the sky from the final frontier. A flash of orange in front of him caught Clark's eye, and he was upon it by the time he realized what it was: an old fuel tank from the space shuttle, long since abandoned into orbit above the earth. Its engineers had intended it to circle the planet for a thousand years before finally falling back to the ground, hopefully burning up from re-entry.
But they never counted upon a twenty-year old Kryptonian plowing through it at forty thousand miles an hour.
The tank shattered soundlessly in the abyss as Clark smashed through it, breaking it into thousands of pieces. Their course changed by his momentum, the fragments would instead float off towards the edges of the solar system. One of the pieces would eventually bounce off the first manned mission to Saturn forty years hence, delaying it for a day as the crew made repairs. Another one went on to land on the surface of the moon, only a mile and a half from the second Watchtower of the Justice League of America; a young man named Tim Drake had happened to be on duty at the time and noticed the impact, but not knowing its history, made nothing of it. And yet another piece of the tank would be found three hundred and seventeen years in the future by none other than Clark himself, having long since given up the identity of Clark Kent on Earth but still calling himself that when no one was around. Upon finding the shattered piece of space junk, the silver-haired Superman couldn't have helped but smile inwardly, wondering if in fact it had come to him by way of his rapid escape from his house after that meaningless fight with his father that they had forgiven each other for within an hour and all but forgotten by the next day. For a second there, a tear welled up on the old man's eye before boiling and freezing in the icy vacuum of space as he remembered the family, the life he had had so long ago that had made him who he was, even in what would have been the year 2324 had the Gregorian calendar still been in use. He may have been born Kal-El of Krypton, but in his heart and soul, he would always be Clark Kent of Earth.
But young Clark, of course, knew none of this as he kept flying out away from Smallville towards the infinite depths from which he had come all those years before. He was half-crazed, in that state of disbelief that comes when one's loved ones seem to have betrayed them.
I can't believe it.
I can't believe it.
I cannot believe it.
The most distant man-made object in Earth orbit, an AT&T communications satellite 32,854 miles above the surface of the planet, flashed by Clark so fast he didn't even notice it. At 250,000 miles an hour, even he couldn't see anything to his sides until it was too late – and he had no intention of slowing down.
I can't believe he said those things.
Because if he did, that must have meant they were already there. How long has he been bottling it up? Years? Decades? That's just like Pa, keep everything bottled up inside himself until it reaches the breaking point-
Wait a second.
Clark stopped accelerating as a thought hit him.
Maybe it wasn't anything so big as that. Maybe he just got mad, and said something he didn't really mean – like I did. After all, they're not "just ordinary," they're probably two of the most extraordinary, kindest, and best all-around people on the planet. But they make mistakes too, just like anybody – even me.
A wry smile cracked across his face. Especially me.
Just like me…they're only human.
As the August sun set over the western sky, Jonathan stared out at it from the edge of his field. It had always been his way; when he needed to think, to reflect or ponder, he had always retreated out to the edge of the fields and stared out at their seemingly endless beauty. It had always reminded him, strangely enough, of the ocean, ever since he had seen the Atlantic on a family trip to Maryland back in 1968. As he stared out at it, he looked upwards at the heavens as a prayer flowed through his mind along a channel that had been used so many times it almost felt like the oath said itself.
God, if you're listening up there…please give me the strength to be a better man, and to help me to raise Clark as best I can. He is the greatest gift you've ever given me, and I thank you for him. Thank you for giving us such an amazing son, and help me to be the best example I can be for him.
The corn around him seemed to rustle for a moment, and Jonathan felt a breeze on his back. He smiled at it, and wasn't at all surprised when the voice spoke from behind him.
"Corn's coming up well this year." In Clark's voice was the implied message: I'm sorry.
"Yeah, it is." Jonathan's tone was apologetic, too.
Clark clapped his hand on his father's shoulder, and the older man turned to embrace his son in a warm hug. Clark was only too happy to return the gesture, and the two men hugged long enough for Martha to come out from the house and join them.
And as the sun finally went over the horizon for over the trillionth time since the world had been created, the Kent family stood together as one, watching it go down – knowing that tomorrow it would rise again, bringing with it the challenges of a new day.
But that was life.