Summary: A school project makes a young Clark Kent despair over his missing past.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. I make nothing. All characters, plot points, and recognizable dialogue belong to DC comics, Warner Bros., December 3rd Productions and anyone else with a stake in the Superman franchise. I don't own the lyrics to “Out of Thin Air” either. They belong to David Friedman, Disney, and anyone else with a stake in the Aladdin franchise.
This story is in response to the 2020 Kerth Challenge #2, which specified that the next song the author listened to Is the title of the fic and has to relate to the plot in some way.
Note: The song “Out of Thin Air,” comes from the Disney movie, “Aladdin and the King of Thieves,” in which Aladdin discovers that his deceased father is (Spoiler Alert!) actually alive but abandoned his family when Aladdin was a baby. Aladdin sings about his heartache in growing up without knowing his father in the song.
***
“Clark?” Jonathan called softly, concern weighing down his words, as he padded his way across the yard to where the lone tree stood, which housed Clark’s “Fortress of Solitude.” He paused at the base of the tree and looked up. “Clark? I know you’re up there, son.”
He sounded tired, to Clark’s ears. But, then again, why wouldn’t his dad be tired? He’d left before Clark had departed for school to help Wayne Irig build his new barn. And he hadn’t been home when Clark had arrived back home after school either. He hadn’t witnessed Clark throwing his backpack into the corner of the living room and high-tailing it out to the relative seclusion of his tree house – a haven Clark’s gangly, tall frame was rapidly outgrowing.
“Sorry, no one’s home,” Clark sulkily replied, burying his face in his folded arms as he sat with them propped across his knees. He frowned at his choice of words. Now that he’d said them, they sounded so juvenile, not at all the way a teenager should talk.
“Come on down,” Jonathan offered, gently coaxing his son. “Tell me what’s wrong. Your mother says you’ve been up there ever since you got home from school. You’ve missed dinner already. And your mother’s peach cobbler. Come on down,” he repeated softly. “It’ll be dark soon.”
“So what? I’m not hungry and I can see in the dark just fine,” Clark snapped bitterly. “I’m a freak, remember?” He winced at the harshness of his own words, but he knew inside that it was the truth. He was a freak who could do things no one else could – or should be able to – do. “Just leave me alone, Dad.”
He could imagine the way his father would be continuing to look up with a pained, confused frown on his face, his hands on his hips. He hadn’t meant to wound his father with his words – they had been meant solely for himself – and Clark did feel bad about any hurt he might had caused his father. But he just wasn’t willing to face his parents yet.
“Clark? Did something happen? Was it another one of your abilities? Are you able to do something new?” Jonathan gingerly prodded, in a low enough tone to ensure that his voice wouldn’t carry on the light breeze in the open fields.
“No,” Clark sighed. “Just leave it alone, Dad. I don’t really want to talk about it.”
“Now, Clark, you know bottling it all up inside never does anybody any good,” Jonathan softly reminded him. “In fact, it usually causes more trouble than it’s worth.”
Clark sighed again. Maybe his dad was right. But that still didn’t make it any easier to confront what had made him so upset.
“Come on down, son. Or I’ll come up,” Jonathan lightly teased.
A minute smile tried to tug at the corners of Clark’s mouth, but Clark refused to allow it passage. He knew Jonathan wasn’t lying. He really would climb up into the treehouse and then cram his tall, adult body into the small, singular room. And then, later, after he crawled back out of Clark’s little hideaway, Jonathan would suffer from an aching back brought on by having been bent over for too long.
“You’ll hurt your back,” Clark reminded him with concern.
Again, Clark could see in his mind the way his father would be shaking his head. “It’ll be worth it,” Jonathan countered.
“Forget it. I’ll come down,” Clark defeatedly replied.
He didn’t wait for a response; he knew his dad wouldn’t give him one. So, Clark roused himself off the dusty floor and wiped his hands on his pant legs. The blue denim fabric was now filthy; he would have to throw them in the wash tonight if he wanted to wear them again tomorrow. He ducked through the doorway and looked down. Normally, he’d just launch himself off the small platform to the ground, since he didn’t have to worry about breaking a leg in the process – another one of his so-called ‘gifts’ was his inability to be physically hurt in any way. But his mood was too dark for that. He turned around, placed his hands and feet on the wooden beams nailed into the trunk that served as steps and slowly descended.
He looked morosely at his father, waiting for Jonathan to take the lead. Jonathan didn’t disappoint when he gestured to the sagging, worn wooden bench by the small pond some distance away from the house. Clark nodded only once, then stuck his hands in his pockets and shuffled sluggishly behind as he followed his father’s footsteps. The bench wasn’t large - really just meant for two people – so Clark was forced to sit shoulder to shoulder with his dad. For a long few minutes, they sat in silence; Clark squinting off into the westering sunlight as the warm early October day threw out its last golden shafts of light. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to breach the quiet or if he wanted his father to.
“Care to tell me what’s eating you?” Jonathan offered up in the next moment, almost to Clark’s relief. “You know you can tell me anything.”
Clark nodded but his frown didn’t fade. “I know.” He took a deep breath and let it out in an audible sigh. “It’s just…I don’t know how to put it into words.” He slouched lower in his seat, as though if he minimized himself, he could also shrink his feelings and problems.
“Start from the beginning,” Jonathan encouraged, putting one big hand on his son’s smaller, but muscular, shoulder. “What happened to put you into such a bleak mood? Don’t focus on the feelings right now. Just the facts.”
Clark nodded again. That made sense and it gave him an easy starting point.
“Well…” he began, dragging the word out as his mind involuntarily put him back in Mrs. Silverstein’s classroom. “It’s like this. I have some homework to do this weekend.”
Jonathan chuckled slightly. “You’ve never been distressed over homework before,” he pointed out. “In fact, you’re usually done with it within about ten minutes of walking in through the front door. Even that pre-Calculus stuff that looks Greek to me.”
Clark’s frown twitched as it deepened. “I know. But this is…different.”
“Oh? How so?”
“We’re talking about family in class and Mrs. Silverstein wants us to create a family tree,” Clark explained, gesturing vaguely with his hands, as though trying to conjure up the expected poster board full of names, interesting facts, and connecting lines from the ether.
“Well, that shouldn’t be too hard,” Jonathan said thoughtfully, scratching uneasily behind one ear, as if anticipating Clark’s next response. Clark noted in his mind how his father had paused before saying anything at all. “Your mother has records of both sides of the family going back five or six generations.”
“But I’m not from either side of the family,” Clark said quietly, unable to meet his father’s gaze. “I’m a foundling. Someone’s cast off child. Maybe their mistake or a great shame to them. I don’t have a family tree.”
“Yes, you do, son,” Jonathan assured him, putting his hand back on Clark’s shoulder. “We may not share blood, but you are a Kent, through and through.”
Clark shrugged out of his father’s gentle touch. “I know that, Dad. And I know you love me. And of course, I’ll do the family tree with our family’s information. But…” He sighed and fell silent.
“But it feels different,” Jonathan supplied as sighed in turn. He took off his glasses, cleaned an imaginary spot off of the right lens, and replaced the frames on his face. Then he leaned forward a bit and clasped his hands together as though in silent prayer.
“I’ve always dreaded the day when you’d have to make a family tree,” he admitted in a near-whisper after a long moment. “Ever since you started school, I’ve held my breath against this assignment. I knew it would stir up questions that your mother and I can’t answer.” He sighed again as he paused. “As you’ve gotten older, I guess a part of me relaxed a little, thinking that the chance of this assignment coming to pass was getting slimmer and slimmer.”
Clark nodded. His father’s concerns made sense. But that didn’t stop the hurt from tearing up his heart.
“I wish I knew where I came from,” Clark confessed as the twilight crept over the land and the sunlight became little more than a faint orange glow on the horizon. “I wish I knew something – anything – about my roots. What state I was born in, if not Kansas. What my birth mother and father’s names were. Why they abandoned me. Were they in trouble? Was my mother afraid for her life as she ran away from something or someone? Was she just too poor to take care of me? Did she just not love me?”
“It’s not possible that your parents didn’t love you,” Jonathan asserted with such conviction that he surprised Clark.
“How can you know that?” Clark asked wonderingly. He sliced a hand through the air as he gestured toward the house. “You found me on your doorstep. No note to explain why I was there. No shadowy figure running off into the distance to avoid being seen. Not even a nametag to say who I was.” He was well aware how angry and bitter his voice had become. “It’s like I came out of thin air.”
“I know your parents loved you,” Jonathan repeated. “Whatever their reasons for giving you up, they made sure you lived. That’s love, son. Selfless love.”
“Pfft!” Clark snorted in disbelief. “Anything could have killed me. What if you hadn’t found me until I’d died of exposure? What if I’d starved to death while I waited to be discovered? What if some wild animal had gotten to me first and attacked? That’s not love, Dad. That’s someone looking after their own self interests.”
Jonathan turned to him and took him gently by the shoulders to peer into his face. “No, it’s not. It may seem like it but…I believe your parents did the best they could by you.”
“The best they could? Dropping me off on some stranger’s doorstep was the best they could do?” Clark gaped, incredulous. “For all they knew, you could have been horrible people who would have beaten me to death or starved me or even ignored the fact that I was even outside their door. They knew nothing about you but they gave up their infant son to you!”
Clark’s ire was rising and he closed his eyes as he tried to master his emotions. He still didn’t totally have his newest curse - his heat vision - under control yet and it flared into life sometimes as his anger got the better of him. He didn’t want to accidentally incinerate his father.
“I’m sorry,” he apologized after a few pounding heartbeats. “It’s just…you and Mom are wonderful parents. I couldn’t love you any more than I already do, even if I was biologically your son. But there’s this part of me that…well…wonders. Whose blood do I share? What were the people who gave me life like? Do I look like them? Could they do the things that I can do? Is that why they got rid of me? Did they know I was different? Did they not want to deal with it?”
Clark tried to slow down his babbling but couldn’t. “I don’t mean to sound ungrateful for having you and Mom as my parents. You’re the best I could ever have wished for. But this project…it just drives home how much I don’t know about who I am. You and Mom know exactly where you came from. You talk about how you come from a long line of farmers or about how Great-Uncle So-and-So fought in this war or that war. Mom can talk about how Grandma used to run the bakery in town and how every one of the women in her family has handsewn their own wedding gown.” He put a hand on his own chest, over his heart. “I can’t say that. Yes, these people are my family. But it’s not the same. I don’t even know if any of my actual blood-relatives are alive.”
He closed his eyes again, this time blinking back the sting of tears. He balled his fist then relaxed it, trying to rid himself of some of the pain in his heart. He dropped his head in shame as he made his next confession. “It’s no secret that I’m adopted,” he said, choosing his words carefully. “You’ve always been open with me about that. And I’ve never made it a secret at school. But some of the guys in my class…”
“Someone giving you a hard time about it?” Jonathan astutely guessed, slipping into what Clark called “Papa Bear” mode. He was fairly bristling with anger that someone would dare bully his son over anything, let alone something as wonderful as having an adoptive family.
Clark nodded once. “Billy Butcher and Nick Goddard,” he confirmed.
“What did they say?” Jonathan asked with a steeliness in his voice and a cold glint in his eyes.
“That I’d never be able to complete the assignment. That I’d fail because I don’t have a ‘real’ family. That it must be hard knowing that my parents never loved me.”
“Sounds like I need to have a long talk with Duke and Victor,” Jonathan said flatly, referring to the boys’ fathers respectively.
“Dad…no. It’ll just make things worse,” Clark pleaded, shifting uncomfortably in his seat. “I’m already the weird kid at school. I mean, I have my friends and I might ask Lana out on a date in the future…I think she’d say yes. And I have the guys on the football team but…I’m still the guy who rushes off home as soon as school or practice is over. I’m still the guy who has had lots of unexplainable things happen around him. I’m still the fifteen-year-old near-hermit who turns down more offers to hang out than I accept…all because I can’t trust that one of these stupid powers of mine might slip out at an unexpected moment.”
He stood and paced before the bench in an effort to clear his racing mind a little. “I don’t want to bring any more attention to myself. All I want is to be normal, Dad! I hate who I am! My abilities make me a ticking time bomb!” He spun around to face the still, serene water of the pond. Not a ripple was to be seen on the glassy surface. “And no, I don’t want to hear about how I’m getting them more and more under control all the time. I just want a normal life. No powers. No missing past.”
He loosened some of his self-control then and pounded a fist into a large rock that stood nearby at the water’s edge. The rock exploded into a hundred jagged fragments that sailed through the air and pelted the pond like hail. A hundred loud, wet, thunks rang out as the pieces of rocky shrapnel slammed into the water and sank in a hurry, throwing up brief fountains of sparkling water droplets into the air as they did so.
“I’m the freak with no past who popped out of thin air,” he repeated miserably as he plunked himself back onto the seat of the bench.
For a long time, his father was silent. Jonathan’s brow was furrowed deeply, as though he was locked in some serious internal debate with himself. When he did speak, it wasn’t at all what Clark had expected.
“Clark, come on over to the house. I need to get your mother. It’s high time we told you the whole truth.”
“Whole truth?” Clark parroted, blinking in surprise.
Jonathan merely nodded with a barely audible, “Mmm-hmm.” He stood up and wordlessly started for the house, Clark following like a silent ghost in his wake. When he reached the house, he turned to Clark. “Stay out here,” he instructed. “I’ll just be a minute.”
Clark mutely nodded and did as he was asked. He didn’t even bother to mount the steps up onto the porch. Instead, he sat on the bottom step and turned his gaze upward to the darkening sky. The first stars were beginning to peek out in the bruised blueish purple heavens. Clark inhaled deeply as he inspected the thick clouds just on the edges of the horizon, almost beyond the scope of his increasingly more powerful, telescopic vision. A storm was on the way. But if that storm would be a gentle rainfall or a howling gale, he couldn’t tell.
Behind him, the screen door squeaked as his parents opened it and came out of the house. Clark stood without them having to say a word. For a couple of heartbeats, all his did was close his eyes and take a deep, calming breath. Then he opened his eyes and turned to face them.
“Come on, son,” Jonathan offered, sweeping a hand in front of him, to the three white wicker chairs on the porch. “Have a seat. We have a lot to talk about.”
Clark nodded again but found his voice unwilling to venture a response. Again, he obeyed without a protest, mounted the sturdy wooden stairs that he and his father had just replaced that summer, and sat in his usual seat while his parents situated themselves in theirs. For a moment, no one said anything.
It was Martha who broke the silence.
“Clark, your father and I…we’re not sure how to tell you this,” she said softly, her eyes shining with some inner turmoil.
“There’s more to your adoption…to how we found you…” Jonathan uncomfortably added as he shifted in his chair.
“What more can there be?” Clark finally asked as he rediscovered his voice. “How complicated can it be when I was left on your doorstep?” He peered at his parents more closely. “Unless…do you actually know who left me here?”
Martha shook her head. “I’m sorry, but…no.” She fidgeted with the apron she was wearing around her waist, balling it up between her shaking fingers.
“Mom? Are you alright?” Clark asked, noticing how ill at ease she was.
She waved off his concern. “I’m fine.” She took a breath. “The thing is, Clark…the story about you being left on our doorstep…it isn’t quite true.”
Clark furrowed his brow. “What do you mean? You…lied to me?”
“Not just to you,” Jonathan cut in, trying his best to explain. “To everyone. The adoption court. Our family. Friends. Everyone in Smallville. It was necessary, to keep you safe, even if I don’t ordinarily condone lying.”
“Keep me safe? From what?” Clark wondered aloud.
“Everyone,” Jonathan said simply.
“Dad, you’re not making any sense,” Clark grumbled, running his hand through his hair – a little quirk he’d picked up long ago as he playacted at being a normal kid.
“You were never left on our doorstep,” Martha repeated, still clearly agitated, as though remembering that night more than fifteen years ago still held some kind of fear for her. “We found you in Schuster’s Field. In a crashed capsule.”
“We’d thought it was a meteorite,” Jonathan clarified.
“Whoa, whoa, what?” Clark gaped, his palms out in a ‘stop’ gesture. “Meteor? Capsule?”
Jonathan nodded gravely. “We were on our way back home from town. It was starting to get dark, like it is now.” He motioned to the sky, where a few more shy stars had come out to shine. “We were driving alongside Schuster’s Field when suddenly something bright streaked across the sky, low and fast.”
“We thought it was a meteorite,” Martha said, jumping in to fill in the gaps in her husband’s story. “So, we stopped the car and went to investigate, since it looked like it had probably come down in the field.” She shrugged. “I don’t really know what we expected to do if we found it. It wasn’t ours for the taking. But it seemed like the right thing to do at the time.”
“We hiked all the way out to Rocky Cove,” Jonathan said, and now the lines of worry in his face had smoothed out a little as his memories turned fonder. “But there was no meteorite. It was this odd-looking little capsule or spacecraft. We’d never seen anything like it, save for maybe in a bad sci-fi movie.”
“When we opened it, we found you,” Martha breathed in awe as the memory of finding their miracle son washed over her.
“We didn’t know if you were some kind of Russian experiment, or maybe one of ours, or if you were from somewhere…a lot farther away,” Jonathan said meaningfully as he silently pointed upwards.
“What we did know was that we wanted to protect you at all costs,” Martha added determinedly, much more like her old self, Clark noted. “As soon as we saw you, we knew you were meant to be our son.”
“Especially in light of how we’d only just gotten the news a week or so before from our doctor that we’d never be able to have a child of our own,” Jonathan lamented.
“And how we’d just been in town visiting the Bartleys, to ask them about the adoption agency they’d used to adopt their daughter, Susanna,” Martha gently said, a touch of sadness in her words.
Clark understood her pain. Maybe not exactly how she felt, he noted. He never would, unless he were to experience the heartache of infertility too. But that seemed so far in the future that he really couldn’t think of that in anything other than the most abstract of terms. Even so, he did know how much it hurt his parents that they’d never been able to provide Clark with a sibling.
Maybe that’s for the best, what with my weird powers and all.
The thought zipped through his mind at lightning speed, but it still surprised Clark. He’d always been content enough to be an only child, but he would have welcomed the companionship of a sister or brother.
Would I have accidently hurt them with my abilities? Would they have resented me for taking up so much of Mom and Dad’s attention as I try to get them under control?
“In any case, no matter where you came from,” Jonathan was saying as Clark pulled himself out of his inner musings, “we knew that if it got out that you were found under such…extraordinary circumstances, scientists would want to seize you and stick you in a lab somewhere…”
“And dissect me like a frog,” Clark interrupted, finishing his dad’s oft-repeated warning.
Clark was used to reciting the words by rote, but this time, they struck him in a way they never had before. He wasn’t just a fifteen-year-old who could bench press his dad’s combine machine. If what his parents were saying was true…
“I’m an alien, aren’t I?”
The astonished words tumbled out of his mouth before he was aware that he was speaking. He watched with a sinking heart as his parents exchanged a helpless look.
“We don’t know,” Jonathan confessed.
“We don’t care,” Martha insisted at the same moment.
“Your mother’s right. It’s never mattered one bit,” Jonathan confirmed with a solemn nod of his head.
Clark shook his head as he tried to give some order to his racing thoughts. “So, let me get this straight. I dropped out of the sky in a space ship. You found me and decided that some unattended alien would make a great son. You lied to everyone, including me, about where I came from to stop me from being taken away and experimented on. No one was ever the wiser and I happily grew up being more or less just like everyone else…until I started being able to outrun the local trains, see through walls, and hear things that are miles away.” He slumped in his chair and ran his fingers through his hair again.
“It’s a lot to take in,” he said to no one in particular.
“I know,” Jonathan offered sympathetically.
“Why didn’t you tell me before?” he finally asked in a small voice, looking into the distant heavens with a new interest. What star was his? Could he even see it from Earth?
“We were never sure when the right time would come…if there can ever be a right time for something like this,” Jonathan explained quietly. “And…I guess we wondered if it would ever really matter, in the grand scheme of things. We don’t know for sure where you came from. You didn’t have a note with you. And even if you had, if the language it would have been written in would have been anything like the markings we saw on the outside of your ship, we wouldn’t have been able to read them.”
“There was nothing at all?” Clark asked, not daring to hope that there was any kind of overlooked clue to tell him who he’d once been or about the people who’d birthed him.
Martha shook her head regretfully. “Nothing. Just a soft, dark blue baby blanket that you were wrapped in.” She sighed. “You were wrapped so carefully…it was clear that whoever had put you in that capsule had loved you dearly. I don’t know how I know this but…I’m certain it was your mother who’d swaddled you for your journey.”
“Can I see the blanket? Do you still have it?” Clark wondered.
Martha nodded. “I kept it safe, knowing that one day you’d ask.” She stood and smoothed down a crease in her apron. “I’ll be right back.”
In the next moment, she was gone, the screen door swinging closed in the wake of her passing. The porch light flickered on – she’d hit the switch on her way in. Clark sat in quiet contemplation as he awaited her return, not knowing what – if anything – he could or should say to his father. Less than three minutes later, his mother reappeared with a length of carefully folded vibrant blue material in her hands. She opened the door and brought it directly to her son.
“This was the only thing you had with you,” she said simply as Clark took it and unfolded it.
In the center of the infant sized square of fabric was a red and yellow near diamond shape with a stylized S in the middle. Clark ran his fingertips reverently over the symbol. He knew what a significant moment this was, and how hard it had to be on his parents, as he touched the only physical link he had to his past.
“I wonder what it means,” he murmured to himself as he traced the curves of the S.
“I wish we knew,” Martha said in a butterfly light voice, and Clark could tell that she sincerely meant it.
For a few heartbeats, he hugged the blanket to his chest and inhaled deeply, trying to discern any kind of lingering scent that might tell him something about his first home. But there was nothing – only the familiar smells of the farmhouse where he’d grown up. It didn’t surprise him, but he was a little disheartened nonetheless.
With an effort, Clark tore his eyes from the material. “Thank you, for showing me this.” He choked back the surge of emotions in the back of his throat. Then he put the blanket aside, stood, and crossed to his parents. “I love you guys, you know that,” he told them as he gave them each a hug. He knelt before them, to look into their eyes. “I’m sorry. I know all of this…can’t be easy for you. To see me questioning where I came from. To see me wondering about the people who gave me life. But…they’re my parents. Maybe not my actual parents – that’s you guys as far as I’m concerned – but they’re still linked to me by blood.”
“We understand,” Martha told him, gently caressing his cheek with one hand. “We don’t blame you for wanting to find out more about your roots. And we wish we could help you.”
“You’re our son, through and through,” Jonathan assured him. “Nothing will ever change that.”
“And you’re my Mom and Dad,” Clark answered with a smile – the first one to cross his lips since he’d been given his family tree assignment that morning in class. “No matter who gave me my life, no matter what the reason was for giving me up. You’re the ones who have always been there for me. You’re the ones who’ve taught me to be the person I am.”
He stood and paced to the edge of the porch to look out into the now pitch-black fields of their farm. There was no moon, only the tiny pinpricks of silver starlight amid thin shreds of swiftly moving clouds, but Clark wasn’t interested in using the limited light to peer at the tall stalks of corn they had yet to finish harvesting. He was once again regarding the vast, mysterious universe beyond the reaches of the Earth’s atmosphere.
“I know I shouldn’t have let the comments at school get under my skin the way they did. But it gives me a great idea about how to present my family tree,” Clark said, nearly to himself. He turned to his parents. “My real family tree. The one I’m hoping you can help me with the information for, Mom,” he said with a smile. “Family isn’t who you share genes with. It’s who loves you, plain and simple.”
Jonathan laughed heartily. “That’s my boy!” he said with a pleased grin.
At the same moment, Martha replied, “I’d love to help.”
Clark felt a beginning of a chuckle tickling the back of his throat and he let it out, though it was restrained and low, not at all the deep belly laugh of his father. “It’s funny,” he mused after a moment, shaking his head to clear out his sudden lightened mood. “I started the day feeling miserable, my missing past making me feel like I’d popped out of thin air. Now that I’ve talked to you, I still don’t have any answers but…I’m okay with that. Because now I know I came out of thin air…in the best possible way, into the best possible family I ever could have wished for.”
The End.
