SOLAR ENERGY

There was something amazing and infallible about the sun, even to him.

It started out as a pet project, as an answer to a simple question he had been afraid to ask as long as he could remember.

Why?

Why am I this way? Why did you take me in?

Of course, with every answer he got he only ever seemed to earn more questions. Some questions he felt were ones that could remain unanswered.

Am I truly the last?

But even as he found himself questioning more and more, and subsequently becoming less and less satisfied with every given answer, he still found his biggest and most glaring question unanswered.

Why am I this way?

Because you're an alien from a red sun planet called Krypton, and yellow solar radiation causes you to have great powers.

After Zod's murder. The answer he'd accepted so readily then (because the ability to know something rather than nothing was liberating on a scale even he hardly understood) seemed so thin now. And still, he was afraid to truly pursue the answers to the questions he had, not necessarily because he was afraid of what he find, but because he'd spent thirty years denying himself the allowance of investigating. Long term habits like that were hard to break.

Lois Lane had no such compunctions.

"So you get your powers...from the sun?" Lois asked dubiously, her eyebrows cocked and her lips pursed in the way they did when she was curious about something. If one was her enemy, it was a look to fear.

"That was what Jor-El told me, and it's something that I've always found true," Clark said. "I always feel strongest when the sun is at it's height, or when I'm above the ozone layer." Acknowledging his strength was not something he ever had to do, it was something he simply knew, instinctively, unlike the rest of his senses. He controlled himself with an iron will karate masters would approve of.

It was something his gut told him everyone would fear if he ever spoke of its true berth.

"Not too worried about skin cancer, are you?" she drawled, running her hand over his arm, as if she could divulge the secrets of his flesh simply by looking hard enough.

"I don't know," he said simply, "I've never gotten a mole or anything."

"Hmm…" Lois said. "So, you've never gotten sick?"

"Apparently I was constantly sick as a baby," he said. "Earth's air wasn't suitable for me, at least, that's what my mother thought. I can remember being sick when I was very young...I can remember that kid of misery."

"I was thinking more along the lines of common cold then pneumonia, but okay," Lois sighed. She flopped backwards into the chair she had been sitting upright in. She had her thinking face, and Clark tried to resist the urge to lean over, cup his hands around her stubborn, beautiful face, and kiss her. But Lois was the kind of women who hated to be interrupted when she was thinking, so he steeled his will and refrained.

"Solar energy at its best, I guess," she finally sighed. "Though i wonder what the sun has to do with the air."

"A lot," Clark sighed. "The thinner the air is, the more the sun affects me, but only to a point." I think breathing is optional for me, he didn't say. That was too different, too alien, even for the women he had grown to adore, he thought. "It's an absorption thing, maybe?"

"You really know nothing about this?" Lois asked, incredulous. "This is your body we're talking about. A phenomenal one, of course, but also a complete mystery."

"Anything I could have learned about Krypton was destroyed with Zod." For no the first time, he mourned the loss of Jor-El's key. The man had been steadfast, and clever.

"But Zod wasn't destroyed— at least, his body wasn't."

Clark nodded, steepling his fingers beneath his chin, his jaw tightening in contempt. He'd managed to trace the seizure of the body from the police to various government to Phillpus Labs— a subsidy of LexCorp. And he questioned, how could a private company obtain hold of something so clearly desired by a government that was half-leery of him?

"You told me, once that the only reason you survived the destruction of the world engine was because of daybreak." Lois tapped her finger consideringly against her lip, as if it were a pen and she was outlining the evidence from her next big bust. "Do you think Zod could've—"

"He's dead," Clark cut her off gently, but firmly. "I could...I…"

Lois's eyes were kind. "I'm sorry." she said. He smiled a wan smile that she barely returned.

With the appearance of Zod and his insurgents, something in the back of his mind that he had been missing his entire life was suddenly there. A connection of sorts, a sense that he simply couldn't ignore that eerily whispered Zod's own words.

You are not alone.

And as they'd been killed off in one fell swoop, that feeling had diminished to a single pinpoint, a single point centered around the man that had become nothing but his enemy. And with an effortless wrench of his arms, that light had flickered out like a candle in the wind. Suddenly, but lingering .

"So, the sun," she said, hastily getting back on topic.

Clark shrugged and offered a slightly more genuine grin, "What can I say?"

He was reminded of the blinding beauty of the young star from space, the burning welcome, the sense of fullness and energy just standing in its presence gave him, the way he unerringly knew its position in the sky, the way it gave the ability to always be able to find it— if he so wished, it would never be night for Clark Kent.

"I guess, for me, it's the best medicine."

A little more lighthearted this time around~ Happy New Year my friends!

YellowWomanontheBrink

January 1, 2018

2:01 AM