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It was hard for Clark to feel much of a connection to a culture he had never had the opportunity to interact with. Clark might have been a Kryptonian, but most days he simply felt alien wherever he went. The lack of understanding wasn’t for a lack of trying, though. Clark spent so long trying to come to grips with what being a Kyrptonian meant; what it meant for him.
In the end, he was left with more questions than answers.
Eventually, Bruce asked to take a look at the ship Clark had been found in as a baby, certain it would contain some further information about his people. Clark wasn’t sure what they’d find there that he wouldn’t have been able to find at the Fortress of Solitude, but Bruce was insistent, and Clark decided there was no harm in seeing what they could find.
Most of it was rather uninteresting. Bruce made a few notes about how Kryptonians made their spacecrafts and took a few samples of the metal from the hull. The wiring was fairly typical, as well. It was similar to human spacecraft of a similar size. Nothing unexpected there.
The big surprise came when Bruce noticed wiring connected to a small metal disc on one end of the ship. “It almost… looks like a speaker,” he remarked. “It might have played a message intended for whoever found you.”
Clark shook his head. “Ma and Pa never mentioned anything about that…”
“It seems the speaker was broken on impact, but the rest of the system is intact. If I replace the speaker and reconnect the wiring, I may be able to…” Bruce paused, replacing the speaker with one of his own, and messing around with the wiring.
Music started playing. Beautiful, almost haunting music. It was like nothing Clark had ever heard, but at the same time, it was so familiar. Like an old memory he’d almost forgotten.
Bruce frowned, clearly confused. “Music… why would they send you to Earth with music?”
“It’s a lullaby…” Clark said, his voice soft. “They sent me to earth with a lullaby.”
The music kept playing, gentle and serene. It was calming to listen to, even now. Clark couldn’t deny the effect it had on him, even decades later.
“There’s a motion and audio sensor connected to the same wiring system as the speaker,” Bruce reported a few moments of fiddling later. “It appears that the ship was programmed to play this lullaby if you moved erratically or cried. It was here to comfort you.”
Even with their planet on the verge of total destruction, knowing their lives were numbered not by days, but by hours, Jor-El and Lara chose to save their son’s life, and sent him off into space with a lullaby to calm him as he cried, alone for the first time in his then-short life.
“They loved you,” Bruce said, a hand on Clark’s shoulder. “They loved you so much.”
Clark’s breathing was a little shaky. “I always knew that, but… I suppose I didn’t realise the extent of that love until now.”
Sometimes, the most heart-wrenching love was found in something as simple as a lullaby.