Chapter Text
It begins in darkness, with a single, pure piano chord ringing out in the silence. A note of promise. A note of a beautiful new day. A gentle, optimistic melody begins to play, a soundtrack for a perfect morning.
In a quiet room in a small farmhouse, a toddler in red and blue pajamas giggles. A tiny cape, fashioned from a worn dish towel, is safety-pinned to his shoulders. He is floating, just a few inches off his crib mattress, bobbing gently in the air like a mote of dust caught in a sunbeam. His mother, Martha Kent, enters the room and sees him. She doesn’t scream or faint; this is not the first time. She simply smiles, a loving, exasperated smile that holds all the wonders and worries of the world, and gently pushes her son back down onto the mattress.
A few years later, the music swells, a cheerful, driving beat kicking in. A five-year-old Clark, a blur of motion, zips through the sun-drenched cornfields of the Kent farm. He’s chasing a Monarch butterfly, his speed perfectly calibrated not to outpace it, his little legs a whirlwind of joyous effort. He stumbles, as little boys do, and tumbles head over heels into a pile of freshly cut hay, his laughter echoing up into the vast, open Kansas sky. The butterfly, its chase concluded, lands gently on his nose.
The music soars with him, the melody full of unrestrained, adventurous joy. By twelve, the world beneath his feet has become a suggestion, not a rule. He soars high above the clouds for the first time, a secret shared only with the sun. The air is thin and cold, but he feels nothing but warmth. The view is a terrifying, exhilarating panorama of the world he knows made small. His eyes are wide with a mixture of fear and pure, unadulterated ecstasy. He stretches his hands out, as if to touch the face of the sun itself, and lets out a joyous, uninhibited “Whoop!” that echoes in the vast, silent emptiness. It is the sound of freedom.
His power became a source of secret, harmless mischief. At eight, on a crisp autumn day, he used his super-breath to gently nudge all the fallen leaves in the Smallville town park into one single, giant, perfect pile, a gift for the other children to play in. At twelve, hiding miles away on a hill during a scout camping trip, he used a pinpoint of heat from his eyes to perfectly toast the marshmallows for his friends, making them all gasp in wonder at the “perfect fire” that never burned a single one. At fifteen, on a sweltering summer afternoon, he saw his mother’s prize-winning zinnias wilting in the relentless Kansas heat. From a perch high in the clouds, he drew a deep, cool breath and exhaled a miniature, contained rainstorm that drifted down to drench only her flowerbed. He smiled as he watched his dog, Krypto, happily lapping at the fresh puddles forming on the thirsty ground.
The exuberant music softens, shifting into a theme more thoughtful, more majestic, a melody filled with a sense of quiet wonder. Now seventeen, he is in a place of his own making, deep in the arctic ice. This is his Fortress of Solitude, but it is not a cold, crystalline palace. It is a warm, shielded biosphere, humming with life. He has filled it with the lost and the broken, creatures he has rescued from harm: a three-legged arctic wolf that now rests peacefully on a snowy ledge, a blind griffin from far-off that turns its magnificent head to track his sound, and a host of other fantastic and mundane beasts living in impossible harmony.
He floats in the center of the cavernous space, suspended in the warm, breathable air. With gentle waves of his hands, he is conducting a symphony of light, shaping the captive auroras that swirl across the ceiling. The colors wash over him—emerald green, violet, and gold. He closes his eyes and just… smiles.
It is a smile of pure, untainted hope. The final, resonant chord of the song hits, holding in the air for a moment before fading into silence, leaving only the image of that smile, and the promise of the man to come.