- Chapter 30 - Homecoming -
Walking, carefully placing one foot in front of the other, Kal-El tested his new body gently. He didn't push for speed or stretch his senses. .
He moved tentatively through the late afternoon heat like the newborn that he was. The wind blowing against his face felt alien. But the wind wasn't alien. The body of his rebirth, the filter through which the wind reached him, was the alien. He just needed to get used to its sensations. Worlds better that the numb Over Council prison, the new body couldn't yet be called home.
He curled and uncurled his fingers. "It doesn't feel like my skin."
"Anyone who touched you would disagree. You just feel skin differently now," the Eradicator explained. "You don't have to be so cautious. If you fall you won't break anything. I'm a competent craftsman."
"I want to run," Kal-El said. The wind couldn't remain alien if was whipping over his face and in his hair.
"Have fun then. I need to follow up with Reo and Luci and Ford. If she followed my instructions, Reo should be gestating by now."
Kal-El turned to the Eradicator without further response to her encouragements and explanations. Her silly breeding project did not interest him. He would be surprised if Clark had impregnated a random alien, but then, who knew what the brain damaged husk had gotten up to in his absence.
Tradition, fun, and a chance to dance, homecoming promised a lot, and Lana had technically enjoyed her first such dance as a freshman. She was the freshman princess, dancing the night away with the star of the football team. Clark missed out on the dance she promised him that night. He'd been strung up as the scarecrow. Though she had nothing directly to do with that incident, shame twinged in her. His freshman year had not been kind or easy even before his abduction. Maybe he would ask her for a dance tonight?
Her new dress wasn't nearly as fancy as the one from last year. She hadn't been elected to the float and wasn't required to wear a full length formal, frilly getup. Tonight she had selected a nice navy dress that hit above her knee.
Pete would hopefully appreciate her choice. Deciding whether to pull her hair up or leave it down, Lana found herself wondering if a certain freshman beau would appreciate her appearance as well. Ensconced in a relationship with Chloe, he wasn't likely to spend the night examining her like he used to, but Lana couldn't help speculating. She could always ask him to dance with the logic that she owed him one.
Lana cocked her head critically. Sweeping her hair back made her neck look longer and her earrings dangled prettily off her lobes. She began pinning her hair up, decision made. Whoever noticed her, she was going to have fun tonight, at least as much fun as she had in her crown, dancing with Whitney.
She turned up her squat white boom box, and the Smallville High fight song filling her room. The game announcer's voice rang out over the rumble of the crowd. Pete would be playing, or keeping the bench warm for at least another hour. Rather than watch the game and the halftime presentation with the homecoming court, Lana had elected to stay home and relocate to the dance after the competitive portion of the evening had ended.
"How did I ever win this silly election?" Clark asked. He allowed Chloe to straighten his tux's black tie. "I don't even talk to my classmates."
"Your abduction last year made you a minor celebrity at school. Not talking to everyone made you mysterious. And your alien genome made you pretty." Chloe sighed and arched an eyebrow. "Perfect storm to create a homecoming beau, trust me I've had this discussion with people who pay attention to these things."
"Pretty?" Clark asked. "You're the pretty one. I look strange in this costume." He pushed a strand of blond hair behind Chloe's ear and surveyed her. Her cream colored dress hugged her torso with a soft flair just past her hips. He liked how the dress moved with her. Her comfort in her clothes, in her skin, set him at ease. She knew him and could still stand by his side, touch him, and not fear the alien that bruised her a few short days earlier. "So, I stand on the field, escort the freshman princess, and escape after halftime."
"I'll be there, and we'll figure out the rest of the evening together."
"Thank you."
Lex stood in front of an obese balding scientist and waited for the man to begin briefing him. "I want to know what they are. Can you tell me that?" Clark's lead box from the explosion of energy had contained three blue stones, crystals. Lex couldn't believe they weren't in some way significant.
"Yes and no, Mr. Luthor. They're very similar to meteor rocks, but different. They radiate minutely like meteor rocks, but on a different spectrum. They're lower energy. And, it's the damndest thing, but their radiative patterns vary depending on the stimulus they experience."
"I followed most of that, but back up a bit. Why is a varied radiative pattern interesting?" Lex asked.
"Radioactive things radiate at the same rate no matter what you do to them. Heat them, bombard them with particles, they continue to radiate as their atoms determine they should. Short of atom smashing, we shouldn't see radiative variance."
"Simpler," Lex commanded, with a frustrated gesture.
"This is going to sound crazy, but I think they're trying to communicate with me."
"You're serious," Lex said after a moment. "Show me."
Luci leaned against the wall of Reo's workshop and stared up at the heavens. She still felt a tiny trill of agoraphobic terror sitting out in the open. She wished she could go back home, to the safe tunnels of the mining station, to the comforting custody of her parents where she wasn't responsible for the survival of herself and her brother.
It hadn't been so long, a few weeks since she left, but Luci hadn't thought of On-Lea seriously in a while. Her odd plans about reviving a dying race seemed silly when she thought about them now. Clark didn't want to be perpetuated. Reo didn't want to assist. Ford had never really signed on. They would be gone from Earth before On-Lea ever returned.
Then what? The galaxy was at war. Where were they supposed to go? Reo couldn't be trusted. Humans couldn't be trusted. How was she supposed to decide what to do?
With a burst of unexpected wind, Luci was no longer alone, and her assumptions went out the window. The tall, black-haired woman she knew only as On-Lea, surveyed her coolly, all earlier pretense at maternal coddling abandoned. "A workshop? Reo-Ra defied me," the woman said without preamble. She crossed her arms over her chest. "That was unwise. Take your brother and return to Martha and Jonathan. I must speak with your friend Reo in private. She may not be continuing in my project."
"Okay," Luci said. She scrambled to her feet. The hair on the back of her neck stood straight up and she backed toward the entrance that would lead to Ford. She's going to kill Reo, Luci thought with odd clarity. We can't let her kill Reo. "Reo tried really hard to do what you told her, but Clark was distracted by his blond human. She really tried."
On-Lea's unflinching, immobile stare continued to follow her, and Luci finally just ran to get her brother.
Eight teenagers, four girls in dramatic full-length dresses flanked by boys in formal tuxes, stood in a simple line on the fifty yard line of the Crow's football field. The grinning teens waved and posed, oblivious to the uncomfortably self-conscious alien escorting the freshman princess.
Martha stood next to Jonathan, surrounded on all sides by red-wearing Crows fans, friends and neighbors and students. With their secrets and their unique son, sometimes they felt an insurmountable distance between themselves and these normal people. Today things were different. Clark's classmates had voted him onto the football field, had made him part of their homecoming celebration. With everything they had gone through and were continuing to go through with him, their son was another one of the kids tonight. He had been recognized and honored and his parents were proud of him.
Martha waved, hoping to catch Clark's eye. "He looks so nervous."
Jonathan nodded. "He's okay. See his backup?" Jonathan pointed and Martha followed the interplay. Clark turned regularly to the blond awaiting him in the visitor's end zone.
"Young love," Martha said with a smile. "He's still going to be grounded for a month after tonight, I don't care how cute the two of them are."
"Let's hear it for the Smallville High homecoming court!" the game announcer called.
Martha and Jonathan clapped along with the rest of the crowd.
Kal-El ran, his legs pumping like pistons, effortlessly propelling him where he wanted. He visited home, combed his way through the fields of his youth. He visited Pete's brick two story house, Chloe's white clapboard home, even the Talon. He didn't enter the dwellings or even slow enough to risk being seen. He circled the landmarks of his friends and family, verifying that his mind remembered and they remained where they belonged. He stopped running outside Lana Lang's home. He stepped gingerly onto her porch, his mind crunching data in a foreign but increasingly comforting manner. Only one heart beating, one lung inspiring, one human, noisily metabolizing, would she look the same with his new eyes?
He focused them through the wooden walls and floor as though they were glass. Delicate and tan, her long legs greeted him first. He followed their smooth curves up past a form fitting navy dress. His eyes lingered on the curve of her neck and her jaw. Hungrily he drank her face, the features so much the same that he gasped in air, that his new body didn't require.
Not caring whether he was disrupting Clark's life, Kal rang the bell and waited.
Mesmerized by her graceful walk, he watched Lana move down the stairs and across the entryway. The door opened and a puzzled smile spread over her soft pink lips. "Clark, what are you doing here? You can't have been off the football field five minutes. Is something wrong?"
"Nothing is wrong." Kal didn't try to explain his arrival as he had no idea what she was referring to. "You look beautiful."
Lana pushed at her hair, suddenly self conscious. Hadn't she been contemplating catching Clark's eye and stealing him away from Chloe for a dance or two? Now, as though summoned by her plotting, he had arrived on her porch. "I was about to head to the dance. Pete will be waiting for me. He's my date."
"Pete." Kal-El said, not allowing his anger to show overtly. How dare Pete pursue HIS Lana? It was unconscionable. Best friends did not betray in this manner.
"Shouldn't you be with Chloe?" Lana asked, her smile dying as Clark withdrew from her a step. With the problems Clark had experienced after his abduction, she didn't like to see him confused. Maybe something was wrong with him? His clothes were even rather odd, black and synthetic and far more snug than Clark favored. "Should I call your parents?"
"No, I'm where I want to be." Kal stepped forward and very gently, as though he was afraid he might misjudge his strength and break her, he kissed Lana on the forehead. "You have fun tonight on your date. I'll be back when we're free."
Leaving the black tie and formal jacket behind in Chloe's car, Clark linked hands with his best friend and walked under the stars, far from the gymnasium and the formal dance they were expected at. He lifted her effortlessly past a patch of mud and deposited her on the dock that cut out over Crater Lake.
"Now that you've got me all the way out here, what are you going to do with me?" Chloe joked. She expected maybe a kiss, but Clark dropped her hand and put a step of distance between them.
"I want to tell you what happened up there," Clark said, "the part I haven't told anyone since returning. I want you to know it."
"You don't have to..." Chloe stopped at the vulnerable look Clark turned on her.
"Before we go any farther, I need you to know." Clark turned away and told his story staring up at the stars. "Out there my race was powerful, a ruling race. When we were destroyed it created a vacuum in the leadership. To prevent war, the galactic government came looking for a survivor of my race. They found me, Kal-El, the last of my kind.
"They copied me into a complicated machine. The copy of my mind is still up there, helping rule the galaxy. My mind from before is still alive and whole and forever separated from this body. Your friend is out there. Martha and Jonathan's son is out there. I'm just the body left behind."
Chloe felt her heart wrench at the thought of another Clark trapped a million miles away, ruling the galaxy. She grabbed the Clark in front of her by the arm and forced him to look at her. "You're not just his body. You're Clark too. It isn't fair, what happened to him, but it isn't your fault."
"Do you hate me for not telling you sooner?" A tear slipped down his face. "My parents are going to hate me when I tell them. They won't be able to look at me when they know."
Chloe was tempted to shake the alien pessimist in front of her. "Stop it. Just stop it. You're wrong. No one is going to hate you. How many times have the Kents told you they love you? It isn't your memories they love. It's your soul and that hasn't changed at all."
Her certainty eased his mind and the tight pain in his chest receded. Clark leaned down and kissed Chloe hungrily. They sank onto a padded dock bench, cuddling close in the chill evening air. Their kisses graduated into clumsy explorative caresses that only ended when Chloe bumped her head and Clark got his leg caught in the arm rest of the bench.
"There has to be somewhere more comfortable to continue this," Chloe giggled, rubbing the back of her head. Sitting side by side, Clark wrapped a warm arm around her and smiled sheepishly.
"Are you okay?"
"Yeah." Chloe rested her head on her boyfriend's shoulder and sighed contentedly. "I wouldn't mind just sitting here a while."
Author's Note:
A short epilogue to go; I'll be posting it in a couple of days.
Peace!
