Clark has few bad memories of the Kent farm.
On the mantle, his mother has collected them, dozens of them, over the years. He picks one up and runs his fingers over the edges of the frame. It's one of him and his pa, out on the tractor when he was ten, matching grins on their faces. He smiles at that, the familiar image. He remembers that. The way his mother held the camera up and told him to smile, and he was half-focused on that, half-focused on the tractor.
"Clark?" Ma asks, a wrinkled hand on his arm, and he realizes that he's just closed his eyes.
"Just reminiscing," he says. Her smile is warm and gentle. "I miss him so much," he says.
"I know," she says, pulling him into a hug, because she's his mother, and that's what mother's do.
Clark remembers the cornfields, stretched out in the distance. He liked to think of the corn as a maze, liked to weave in and out of it, hiding from Pa. The sun would slip through the stalks, and he would laugh, because there was a pure, simple happiness to those moments. That pure, simple joy of living, of being alive.
He has a new desk at the Planet, smaller than his last one, and he tries to fill it up, make it feel a little more homey, but it never quite reaches the same feeling as Lois'. It always looks empty in comparison with hers, not enough discarded papers, lying scattered across his desk, not enough writing implements, occasionally remembered, occasionally forgotten, not enough sheer force of personality that Lois carries along with her.
It's good to be back, though things aren't quite the same as they used to be.
There is always music to the Daily Planet, an orchestra of people, telephones, television screens, computers. Clark used to know its songs, its melodies, but things are different now. The instruments have changed. The rhythms have changed. Clark doesn't know them anymore.
But he tells himself that he will learn them again.
Clark remembers late nights at the Planet. It hummed then, a sleeping giant. The janitor down the hall liked him, occasionally waved as he buffed the floor. Lois would frequently stay late, and Clark would time himself to the steady click-clack of her typing. He would want to sleep, to curl up and feel the Planet wrap itself around him, but there would be a siren, a scream and he would be out the door.
There are no suns that feel quite Earth's sun. Clark thinks this when sits in one of Metropolis' parks during lunch, feeding some of the bread from his sandwich to the pigeons. They flock to him like, a sea of gray wings, and it's something rippling and alive and moving. Clark likes that. He likes that they're alive, that they breathe and walk and fly.
Clark lived for five years without it. He doesn't want to do that again.
Clark remembers clouds of pure white, that gave way when you flew through them. He remembers the smell of the oceans, the slide of rain across his skin. He remembers staring at the blue sky above him, as far as his eyes could see. It was limitless then. Sometimes, Clark thinks it still might be.
Clark is sitting at a desk in the Planet making his way through notes when Jason pulls on his pant leg. The boy is still a little quiet, but Clark thinks that Jason might be warming up to him.
"Hello," Clark says to him, smiling. "Anything new?"
Jason nods, and something in Clark's heart swells up, ready to burst. This is son. Someone he wasn't around to remember, someone he wasn't around to know. Jason holds out a drawing of Clark, a stick figure in a suit and glasses.
"Thank you," Clark says, taking the picture from him, and an oddly shy grin spreads across Jason's face. Clark inspects it for a moment. The ideal place to put it would be against a wall, but there are none next to Clark's desk, so he leans it against the photograph of his parents. "There we go," he says, smiling at Jason, because at this moment, it would be impossible not to. This is my son, he thinks. The thought still fills him with an odd glow.
Jason nods and runs off. Clark watches him go.
The smile on his face does not leave for hours.
FIN.