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Jon's head was pounding. His skull feels fit to burst where it had hit the solid, super heated earth.
He can’t move yet. His head feels anchored to the ground. Too full of something heavy and thick. Like his mind was floating… Or something in some sort of reverse boat. If he moves now, it’s all gonna slosh over the sides.
He doesn't think that would be a good thing.
How long had it been since he’d been hit?
Jon isn’t sure how he’d known time so innately before dad- before Ultraman brought him here.
His internal clock must be broken. Maybe it needed help. Someone or some event to wind it every day. The sun rising, setting, bright neon numbers shouting at him to wake up. Maybe without those reminders, it was a good trashed.
A whole lotta good that does him when he hasn’t seen his alarm clock since this whole thing started. It might still ring in the morning, had he forgotten to turn it off in his excitement to leave?
Jon could smell something. It smelled like the time his dad had burnt out the batteries in the solar charging flashlight. Acidic… but he’d only done that once, this was so familiar, the origin just at the tip of his tongue.
Mom had probably turned it off the next day. At least he hopes.
It seems too weird to think of them in his room now. Have his parents changed anything about it yet? Does he want them to? Leaving a kid’s room untouched like some sort of sick time capsule doesn’t sound very healthy. Still, what else do you do?
Jon’s eyes stung, he almost wanted to laugh.
It sounds like a Batman thing.
Grandpa wasn’t supposed to take him for more than the summer and that deadline had long since past, for all he knows, his dad might have curated a shrine by his door.
Nose burning as the smell grows stronger. His eyelids feel like lead as he tries to keep them open. He wants to look at the sky, maybe then he’d know how long it’d been but dark soot floats above his face, seeming to only thicken the higher he looks. A hazy mass stretching out above. Ash collects on his lashes, his eyes watering in pain as he keeps staring as falling black spots gain shape. His head pounds.
Mom would be so proud of him, remembering not to sleep, not to let his eyes close while he’s like this.
He wished he could tell her. How well he knew his limits. How well he knew them even in this place where his dad’s gifts weren’t with him. He’d wanted to try again.
Try to move.
Try to fly above the black mass that came in and out of focus above him.
To try the strength of his fists against a rock.
Against him.
Jon can barely feel his hands, the rest of him feels so far away from his head and the pulsing of pain that broke against his skull, but he still knew. He'd never be able to hit back. Not while Ultraman wore his dad’s face.
He misses them, now more than ever. He wished he could just listen to them.
The air was heavy and wet. It felt like his lungs filled with more water than air.
...Why couldn't he do anything?
Jon never liked to hear about the weird and confusing things people did to their bodies, but being half-human himself, his mom in all her worldly wisdom thought he ought to know anyways.
She never wrote many cultural or human interest articles these days but her talent for researching the strange and the people that go beyond has never left.
And Jon was subject to it all.
“You’re a growing Kyrptoian-Human metropolis kid” she’d say, “If you don't end up with any of the classic superpowers you should know your limits, Jon. Your human ones.”
It had frightened him at night. The thoughts of contortionists bending their bodies like a Mr. Plastic doll or that man who swims in shorts in the arctic. They were human, fully human, and yet. Even with a dad who could fly to the freezing fortress of solitude for a quick trip and never worry about his attire, it somehow seems more frightening, more surreal than anything dad did. He couldn't imagine his mom doing something like that, right? They had to be metas. It somehow felt safer if they were. Less frightening if these were only one-offs and yet, it wasn’t and that scares him.
He couldn’t breathe through the thickness of it.
He couldn’t move away from the sensation of drowning with his head still anchored to the ground.
He couldn’t breathe.
His nose and throat clouted with wetness Jon knew he couldn't drink.
Mom's stories thrum in his head alongside the pain. He could taste the bitterness of copper now. Something wet and sticky was dripping somewhere near his left ear. The sound was too loud.
Drip.
All humans were held to the rule of three.
Drip, drip.
Three minutes without air.
Drip.
Three days without water.
Drip.
Three weeks without food.
Drip.
It was too loud, that ear still hurt from when da-
Drip.
From when Ultraman hit him.
Drip, drip, drip.
He'd never felt so human.