The subject did not know what parents were. She had no frame of reference to what a father was or what the word mother meant. She knew that the scientist had used his own DNA to develop her embryos in the Genesis chamber. She knew the scientist had a partner, who she would later learn was his wife. After a few cycles, she would come to understand that the child the two had was not like her, not a creature kept in a room of chrome walls and wires, not an experiment tested and molded and tested again, but was their child, their son.
The scientist's wife rarely visited the lab. Soon after their child's birth, she came to the lab, cradling the infant in her arms to speak to the scientist. When he began crying, she rocked him and cooed to him, "It is alright. Mother is here." The subject had been so entranced by them, by the wife's flowing golden hair, her pristine white robes, the child's rosy skin and dark tufts of hair, that she was unprepared for the scientist needle stabbing into her arm. Tearing up, she turned to the wife, hand reaching out, and spoke to the wife for the first time.
"Mother?" The wife stilled, and her head tilted up in the subject direction, but her gaze only glided over the subject, and back to the whimpering child she held. The wife left almost immediately, pausing only to excuse herself to the scientist without a single glance back.
The subject's shoulder ached, and her tears spilled down her cheeks as the scientist took yet another sample. She quieted herself only when the scientist threatened to lock her in the dark room, back in with the previous subjects. She tried not to flinch while the scientists' icy blue eyes warned of what would happen if she spoke to the wife again.
Less than one cycle later, the scientist began to act erratically. He had always been efficient and purposeful, but he had become desperate and forceful in his research. Research that did not seem to include the subject. He kept her in the chrome room, where she could see his frantic work from a small window in the door. She watched as he swept through data crystals and ancient texts, looking for a solution but never finding one until one day he stopped, straighten, and called for his wife.
The moment he spoke to her, she began to cry, and in a fearful thought, the subject worried that the scientist would blame her for the wife's distress. But the wife continued to cry for the next few days, and they never looked to the subject, instead working tirelessly to build their ship, a ship far too small to carry two adults.
The day they finished the ship, the planet shook. The subject was scared and weak. The scientist had forgotten to give her food or water in his focus on the ship. She had even braved the possible punishment and pounded on the door, but no one heard her. When the aftershocks rolled through, she fell hard on the ground and found she did not have the strength to move.
She tried to block out the echoes of voices, of crashing and clanging equipment from the lab, and ignore the vibrations of the shaking ground. She silently told herself not to cry, to slow her heart like the scientist always tried to teach her. When an explosion rattled the entire lab, she bit her tongue through.
After hours of noise, the lab fell into an ominous silence only broken when the door opened with a bang, hitting the metal-coated wall. The subject, heart racing, looked up to see the wife and a halo of flickering white light behind her. The wife waited not a moment before lunging forward, picking up the subject, and carrying her small body out on her hip.
The subject, in her shock, could not even process the feeling of being held in such secure, warm arms before she found herself placed in the black cradle of the ship. She was cramped behind the dark-haired child, swaddled in a red and blue blanket, her knees pressed up to her neck. She tried to hold onto the wife, but she pushed her back down. The curved doors of the ship began to close as the subject struggled to speak. The wife's voice stilled her attempts.
"I'm sorry…You did not deserve what was done to you, and you do not deserve what is to come. This is as much as I can do now to make up for everything. But please, if you can, protect my son. He is, no, the two of you are all that will be left." Her fingers traced the lines of the sleeping child's brow.
"I am not your mother," she continued, looking the subject in the eye, "but I should have been."
The ship closed around the subject and the child; rows of highlighted script rolled past the subject's wide eyes. The ships hummed around her, and the child whined in his sleep. The wife's glistening dark eyes flashed in her mind, and slowly she reached out and touched his soft cheek. His face turned onto her hand, and he sighed, quieting into deep sleep again. She kept her hand there as her eyelids dropped and her breath settled. A low deep voice played from the inside of the ship.
"Kal-El, my son, on the third planet from the star Sol…."
She woke to bright yellow sunlight piercing through her eyelids. She winced and tries to block its rays with her hand, only to lose balance and fall out of the ship onto dirt-covered ground. All around her were flattened leaves in a wide circle up to tall green plants, over twice her height. She pushed herself to her feet and tried to stand, legs unsteady from disuse. A giggle caught her attention, and she swirled to see Kal-El toddling through the plants away from their ship.
Heart in her throat, she tripped forward. He was all that left of Krypton. A defenseless child on a planet of strange and untrusting beings. The only real companion she had ever had. She raced after him.
She caught up to him as he stood smiling next to a large vehicle made of rusted red metal. She wrapped her arms around him and pulled him back from the unknown object. He only smiled up at her, tiny hands patting her forearms in reassurance. Voices sounded from the vehicle. It shook and clanged as the beings inside it moved and climbed out of the open sides.
And the man and a woman, eyes wide, stared at the two children and minutes later at their crashed ship with utter shock. Soon the woman shook herself and the man out of it, wrapping the subject and the child in a blanket while the man loaded the ship on another truck's flatbed.
"Look at them Jonathan, they must be brother and sister," Kal-El's hand gently pulled at the woman's red hair.
"We can't keep them, Martha. What would we tell people? That we found them in a field?"
The woman stared down at Kal-El's face and then over to the subject, gently reaching out to tuck back her dark hair, revealing her bright blue eyes.
"We didn't find them. They found us."
Author's Note: For future chapters, do you prefer a first-person or third-person point of view?
