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It’s pretty damn clear, the moment the ship opens up, that the occupant isn’t human. Not fully human, at least. It may look a whole lot like a human baby, shape-wise, but no human baby ever glowed like there were fairy lights under its skin, all red and blue and yellow splotches.
“Huh,” Jonathan says. “Hell of a thing.”
That about sums it up, Martha thinks.
The space baby is sleeping, which is pretty impressive, all things considered. It just fell out of the sky in some ship that looks kind of like one of those fancy painted eggs with all the gold etching and whatnot, except this one’s all in silver. In Martha’s experience, which is admittedly not much, babies wake up if you fart too loud near them. Not this one. She’d worry it was dead if she couldn’t see its chest rising and falling and the glow dimming and brightening with each breath.
“Well, shit,” Martha says. “What do we do now?”
Jonathan shrugs. “Hell if I know.”
~x~
They keep the baby.
Neither of them is particularly surprised by this outcome – they did always want kids, it’s just the mechanics of it never worked out. Plus, everyone in Smallville knows that if you have a stray cat getting in your garbage or a dog that needs rehoming or a runt goat you can’t sell, you call the Kents. Sometimes Martha thinks they must have a big red “S” on their chests, one that lets the whole world know the Kents are suckers for critters in need. It’s not the worst reputation to have, all things considered. Martha just never thought it would net them a space baby.
They get a nursery set up in their bedroom. There are too many fears, spoken and not, that something will happen to this fragile little being when they have their backs turned for either of them to be okay with leaving the baby to sleep in another room. They already had a big panic when the baby couldn’t eat, just kept spitting up milk and wailing like the world was ending. They thought for sure it was going to die. It came from another planet – what if there was nothing on Earth it could eat?
Then Martha realized (a bit belatedly, in her opinion), that maybe this space kid wasn’t a mammal. It didn’t have nipples, after all. Maybe it wasn’t meant to digest milk.
Space babies apparently really like mashed peas, both to eat and to smear on every available surface.
~x~
They give the kid a different name than the one he grows up to have. Martha and Jonathan have had way too much experience with coercive gendering to try to give the kid a gender, but they can’t exactly call it “the kid” until it can pick a name of its own. They make it clear that this is not a name that the kid is limited to, that people can change their names as many times as they want or even have more than one name at once. It’s a talk and an understanding they wish their parents had had with them.
But those are old hurts, and Martha and Jonathan both take an almost spiteful pleasure in being the kinds of parents they should have had. It’s not like the kid suffers for it.
When the kid explains his gender feelings with careful words and asks for a new name, Martha and Jonathan help him pick.
They settle on “Clark”.
~x~
Clark’s breaths always come a little too slow, sound a little too labored. He wheezes in his sleep and when he runs. It’s not just milk that makes him sick, it’s a whole variety of other things – wheat and roses and strong scents and melons and car exhaust and bright lights. As a baby, he throws fits and screams himself into exhaustion if the Kents take him into town two days in a row. As a child, he still gets twitchy when he’s in public for too long, scratching his arms long past the point of raising red welts and lapsing into complete silence for hours when he finally gets back home.
Even as year after year passes and Clark’s still alive, the fear that this planet will eventually kill him lingers.
~x~
“Snakes don’t belong in the house, son,” Jonathan says, keeping his voice as calm as he can as he surveys the scene in the kitchen before him. Martha is out with the goats. He wishes they could trade places. She’s better with this sort of thing.
“It was lonely,” Clark says insistently, with all the conviction his six-year-old body can muster. He has the snake, a pretty impressively sized black rat snake, set up in the recycling bin, which he emptied all over the floor before filling it with ripped-up grass and leaves. One of the cats, Mellie, is batting a pop can around under the table.
“Snakes like to be on their own,” Jonathan says. “They like to have their own spaces, their own routines. I think this one’s pretty darn confused right now. How would you feel if someone scooped you up and put you in a recycling bin?”
“It’s not a recycling bin any more. I made it a house. Like the ones at the zoo. A,” Clark pauses, scrunches his face and pokes out his tongue a little the way he does when he’s working hard at remembering something, “terrarium.”
“Clark, this snake is a wild animal. It’s not meant to be inside, in a bin. Or a terrarium,” Jonathan adds when Clark opens his mouth to protest. “If you really want a snake in the house, you can do research on how to care for them, and we’ll talk about it again in a few years.”
Clark squints at him. “How many years?”
“When you turn ten.”
Clark gasps. “But that’s forever from now!”
“Zookeepers have to train for years to work with snakes at the zoo. Steve Irwin trained for years. You don’t want to go into this not knowing what you’re doing, do you?”
Clark tilts his head. “I guess not.”
“Alright, then. Let’s get this guy back outside, and put it as close to where you found it as you can.” Jonathan pauses. “Where did you find it?”
“In the barn.”
“… Let’s put it somewhere else.”
When Clark learns he’d have to feed a snake whole rats or mice, he changes his mind about wanting one. He doesn’t begrudge the snakes their food needs. He could just never handle meeting those needs. He tells Jonathan he wants a triceratops instead, since they’re herbivorous.
~x~
The Kents thought the glowing, the other minor anatomical variations, the enhanced senses, were the extent of Clark’s differences from humans. As little sense as it made for a space baby to look like a human baby, as the years pass and he doesn’t pupate or hatch into something else, they come to terms with the fact that Clark is, for all intents and purposes, not that biologically different from humans. Right up until Clark jumps like something stung him during dinner one night when he’s ten, and then starts screaming bloody murder. Before Jonathan can ask him what’s wrong, Clark covers his eyes with his hands, screams louder, and runs out the front door.
“I’ll get the coats,” Jonathan says, because it’s late November, it’s dark out, and there’s snow on the ground. Martha nods before following their son out the door.
Jonathan pulls on his coat, then piles Clark’s coat and Martha’s coat into his arms before pulling on his shoes. Martha will keep up with Clark until he wears himself out or finds a place to settle where he feels safe. All Jonathan has to do is follow the footprints.
He finds Martha standing at the foot of one of the big pine trees near the north fields. He can hear Clark crying somewhere up in the branches.
“Clark?” he calls up. “It’s your Pa. I’m here now. I’ve got your coat. Do you want me to toss it up and you catch it, or do you want to come down for it?” Clark doesn’t respond. “Okay. I’m going to put it over one of the branches so you can come get it if you want to, alright? You let me know if you want me to toss it up there instead.” He turns to Martha. “He say anything to you?”
She shakes her head. “Not a thing.”
“Shoot.” Jonathan hands Martha her jacket.
They wait there a while. One of Clark’s first therapists said that they should make him use his words during a meltdown, make him explain his feelings in a normal way instead of throwing a fit. She wasn’t Clark’s therapist any more after she said that. It’s Clark himself who said that most of the things he did during a meltdown, he did to try to calm himself. The rocking, the tree-climbing, the curling into a little ball, those were his ways of getting back to a place where he could explain what was going on. That made a whole heck of a lot more sense to Jonathan than what that nonsense therapist had said.
He never did like therapists. Always seemed so smug when they told you about your own self, like they knew you best.
A branch creaks. “You okay up there, little cat?” Martha calls. “Not going to drop and need me to catch you?”
Clark’s voice comes back, small and shaky. “I only ever fell out of a tree once.”
“Well, I’d like some warning if this is going to be time number two,” Martha says.
“It’s not.” A few more branches creak. Snow drifts off the disturbed pine boughs to dust Jonathan and Martha’s hair. Jonathan spots Clark’s bare feet first, then his legs up to his waist, then the rest of him as he leans down to retrieve his jacket.
Clark looked scared. Seen-my-own-ghost scared. He pulls on his jacket, which is puffy and purple with little snowflakes on the hems, and sits down on a branch. He takes a deep breath. “I saw your skeletons,” he blurts. “And your organs.”
Martha and Jonathan exchange a look. “In your imagination, or for real?” Martha asks. It wouldn’t be the first time Clark scared himself daydreaming, though this is certainly the most extreme reaction they’ve ever seen.
Clark furrows his brows. “Why would I imagine that? I don’t want to see your insides. I just did.”
“Just checking,” Martha says. “Well. You see our insides now?”
“No,” Clark says. “I think… I think I can turn it on and off. That’s what I was practicing. Up there. Tree insides aren’t as scary as people insides.”
“Bet not,” Jonathan says. “You see anything cool in the tree insides?”
“I saw some bugs hibernating under the bark.”
“Well, that sounds pretty neat,” Martha says. “But I bet it was scary, seeing our insides when you expected to see our outsides.”
Clark wraps his arms around his knees. Jonathan resists the urge to tell Clark to keep at least one hand on the branch underneath him, for heck’s sake. Clark’s balance in trees is uncanny, and he has trouble distinguishing between angry voices and worried voices even when he’s not coming off a meltdown. Telling him to hold on would do more harm than good. “It was scary,” Clark confirms in a small voice.
“I’m sorry you had to go through that, son. Now that we know you can see things’ insides, how about we come out here sometimes so you can practice it on trees, get used to it so it doesn’t ever turn on by accident again?” Jonathan can almost hear the gears turning in Clark’s head as he considers the offer. He looks interested, but something is holding him back.
Clark bites his lip. “Am I scary?” he says.
Jonathan’s whole chest feels like it’s being squeezed like one of those weird toys Clark has, the ones that look like tubes filled with colored water and little plastic dealies.
“Oh, baby, no,” Martha says. “You’re not scary. You just have eyes like an x-ray machine. That’s a pretty cool thing to have.”
Clark considers this, then drops the six feet to the ground and takes about ten years off Jonathan’s life doing it. Clark may stick the landing, but Jonathan doesn’t think he’s ever going to get used to watching his baby hurtle towards the ground like a rocket.
“Do you think the cats ate our food while we were gone?” Clark asks.
“Probably didn’t eat the potatoes,” Jonathan says. “But I get the feeling the chicken’s done for.”
~x~
Clark is small for his age. Not short, exactly, but… small. Knobby in the knees and elbows, his ribs showing a little when he inhales, skinny and scrappy and full of energy. His face reminds Martha of a kitten. He’s got big eyes and big ears and he’s absolutely adorable, in that uneven, disproportioned way of baby things. He’s forever skinning his knees and scraping his fingers. Between his sweet face and sweet attitude, he’s very popular at the farmer’s market she takes him to twice a week, and everyone, Martha included, tries to find things to feed him that he’ll eat and will maybe make him put some weight on.
She doesn’t know if it’s a trait of his whole species, whatever they are, or just a trait of Clark, but he has an absurdly fast metabolism. She sends him to school with snacks weighing down his pockets so he won’t sugar crash between meals and have a meltdown. But no matter how much they feed him, it never seems to have much of an impact on his growth.
Until a few months away from his twelfth birthday.
“Ma, I feel taller,” Clark says when he comes down in the morning, and Martha almost drops the fork she’s using to flip the turkey bacon.
“John,” she says. Her husband looks up from his latest gas-station novel. “Look at Clark.”
“Well, hell,” Jonathan says. It’s an understandable reaction, but Martha still gives him a Look for swearing near Clark. The hypocrite. After all the trouble he’d given her for her bad language, too.
Clark has grown an inch since the last time they measured his height, which was three weeks ago. He definitely looks taller than he did yesterday.
“My bones hurt,” Clark says, eyebrows furrowed.
“I’ll bet they do,” Martha says. “They’ve been working hard.”
~x~
The growth spurts continue in this manner, long periods where Clark gains a little weight but otherwise remains the same size, and then seems to gain height overnight. His bones hurt awfully, and the Kents’ fears that something about this planet is wrong for him return with a vengeance.
“What if it’s the gravity?” Martha says one night, out by the barn after they’re sure Clark has gone to sleep. That boy’s hearing was uncanny even before he started getting superpowers, and though he swears he doesn’t listen in on purpose, she never had managed to really convey the importance of minding his business. Probably because she isn’t exactly leading by example.
“How’s that?” Jonathan says, taking a long hit before passing Martha the pipe.
“Different planets all have different gravity. Astronauts are all real fragile when they get back to Earth from space, on account of the gravity difference. It messes with your bones and muscles, like.” Martha makes a gesture. She’s not sure what she’s trying to convey with it. “What if it’s the gravity here, messing with his bones?”
Jonathan exhales slowly. “Don’t know much we could do for that.”
Martha takes a hit, holds her breath in before letting it out in a slow stream. “Wish I’d gone to medical school,” she says.
Jonathan snorts. “Sorry, I know this is serious,” he says when Martha glares at him. “Just. You know you don’t mean that.”
“If I’d gone to medical school, maybe I could’ve found a way to get him all his vaccines, actually know things about what healthy’s supposed to be for him and figure out what’s up with his growing now instead of just leaving creases in the spines of all the medical books at the library.”
“Martha,” Jonathan says, “if you’d gone to medical school, followed your parent’s plan for you the way they wanted it, not only would you have been miserable, but you wouldn’t be the mother Clark needs. You’d be too burned out for it.”
Martha sighs. “Damn if I wish I couldn’t do something, though.”
“I know, Marty. Me, too.”
They sit back and watch the stars in silence. Martha wonders if one of those stars is the sun in the solar system Clark came from, wonders not for the first time what could possess someone to strap a baby into a spaceship and fire it off into the unknown. She thinks of Exodus and Moshe and a basket on the Nile, also not for the first time. Wonders if Clark escaped something awful on his home planet only to die a slow death on hers.
When they go back inside, Martha steps quietly into Clark’s room. He’s sprawled over the bed, one arm beneath his pillow, legs akimbo. He’s glowing in time with his breathing, just like he did when he was a baby. She kisses his forehead, then places her hand against his curls. “Y'varechecha Adonai V'yish'm'recha.”