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Home Is Where The Hurt Is: Martha Kent
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No. This is wrong, all wrong. Every bone in your body strains against the injustice. Every drop of blood boils at the sheer horror of this situation. Every cell comprising your heart seethes with terror. Your son, your baby, and you’ve never been in this situation before, never faced a microscopic evil you can’t fight, never contended with viruses. You’ve been blessed and blessed and blessed again, and now it feels like you’re paying for that with injustice heaped upon indignity.

Clark, Clark, my boy, you want to croon. But you can’t. Even if he weren’t dressed in the Suit right now, your vocal cords have joined the revolt and tears are spilling out of your eyes like expendable reinforcements, and you should be strong for him, for Jonathan, for Lois, but you’re weak, so weak, because your son is Clark Kent, kind and good and so strong, but now he’s been felled, brought to his knees and set afire with fever you know these puny washcloths can’t fight, and…and…

And he smiles at you, so brave and so afraid, and how can you fall apart when his love is stitching you back together with a speed only he can attain? Mending you faster than you can tear at the seams.

“Thanks, Mom,” he says. Armor for your soul. Strength for your bones. Cool water for your own raging fever of denial.

A smile and gratitude amidst pain he’s never felt and sickness he’s never become accustomed to, and you would face this day a thousand times over if he looked at you just that way every time. If he smiled and called you mom. No bacteria or germ or fever can possibly conquer so much brightness. You know it. You cling to that knowledge. That faith.

Clark is the sun, shining brilliantly against all the darkness of the universe, radiating compassion and heroism to soak every passing body with healing rays, beaming out love to keep you and your husband and your future daughter-in-law alive and well.

Nothing can take out a sun. Anything that tries will only create a supernova to make him stronger and more powerful. He’ll survive. He’ll endure.

You promise yourself these things, but in the back of your mind, cowering in a lightless corner, you remember that Clark is only yours because something happened to his people. His world. His sun?

And if it can happen once, such unstoppable catastrophe, can’t it happen again, here, on Earth, in this bedroom with the quilt you made and the picture you took and the son you love more than life itself?

No. No, it can’t. That’s only fear speaking. Clark is more, is different, is yours. Not a sun, but your son. And that, that means he cannot die. He will not die.

But still your tears fall.

Still your heart beats.

And it will continue to do so, you know in the most elemental part of your being…so long as Clark’s does too.

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