ISSUE #9 (July 2019)
Written by Emma Woods Featuring: |
"THE ONE THAT I REMEMBER"The Amazon Jungle did not agree with Jerimiah, that was the most recent conclusion he had come to. Exercising every fibre of his will, he refused to begin fidgeting as the humidity constantly provoked his body into perspiring, runnels of sweat beading down his forehead and running through the greaves of his tactical gear.
He did however shift uncomfortably as he turned his gaze upwards, furrowing his brow as the mat black helicopter hovered above the man-made clearing, the tree line blasted back by several hundred yards in order to make way for his team. Across the side of the descending aircraft sat the letters ‘DEO’ in clean, white stencil, an acronym that was not especially well known amongst the general public. It was not clandestine, so to speak, but they were less keen to advertise their existence than say, the CIA. He stepped backwards as the helicopter reached its destination and, moments later, the door slid sideways to reveal its primary occupant, a woman in her middling years whom, if she were troubled by the tropical environment, did not see fit to reveal it. Suited in such a way that was perhaps more appropriate to a board meeting, she was none the less untroubled by the humidity as she marched towards Jerimiah, her expression less than jovial. If anything, she looked bored. “Well, that certainly was banal,” she revealed with a tiresome air and dejection, “I do hope the destination will prove to be suitably more fulfilling, Agent Danvers.” “Director Luthor,” Jerimiah stood taller to attention before a weary wave from his superior reminded him just how much she loathed such formalities. “There have been further developments since you departed National City.” “I should certainly hope so,” Lena replied with a slight air of exasperation, looking off into the middle distance as she removed her gloves. As if snapping back to the hear and now, she returned her attention to the head of the site’s security detail. A smile creased her features, as though she were enjoying a private joke, “Likewise for yourself. Linda is coming along nicely, she’s more than ready for your baby to be born now. I believe an eviction notice will be served if she does not go into labour soon.” Jerimiah, with all of his commendable self-control, resisted the urge to sigh deeply. He did not need to be reminded of his heavily pregnant wife, not when he was stranded in the back end of no-where. “Come, Agent Danvers, walk with me,” Lena Luthor prompted, setting a swift pace as they strode down the forcibly cleared pathway. “Regale me with your progress.” “We breached the outer structure an hour ago,” Jerimiah reported, “our advance teams have already begun to make progress.” “Excellent news,” Lena prompted encouragingly, “and the carbon dating?” “Proving to be less than helpful,” Agents Dangers confessed, “you’ll have to confer with the research team for specifics, but it’s old.” “Old?” Lena cocked her brow, not overly fond of vagaries, “by what measure of time?” “It’s been here longer than us,” he clarified, “much longer.” “We do so like to think of ourselves as the masters of the Earth,” Director Luthor mused, “oft times it appears we are more akin to squatters.” “There’s something else,” Jerimiah paused, uncertain how phrase his next revelation, “we found an inscription.” “Oh?” Lena cocked her head, “do tell.” “With all due respect,” Jerimiah squared his jaw as they approached the site of the structure that had drawn the near undivided attention of the DEO, “you need to see it for yourself.” The Kent Farm… Kara was alone during the late hours of the night, the young women sat before the fireplace whilst the others slept upstairs. She didn’t want to wake them, her cousin and his family, the people who had taken her in when she’d had no-where else to go, and so she kept her silence as she turned the pages of a book. Steaky, the orange furred feline that she had rescued from the river stretched as he settled on her lap, rarely far from her side and, for now, seemed content to enjoy the warmth radiated from her Kryptonian physiology. She did not disturb him, the kitten who had lost his entire family in a single incident, not as she turned one page after another in what her cousin had referred to as an ‘Album’. Kara was familiar with the sentiment, they’d had similar affections on Krypton, albeit in a far less primitive format. The single frame images that adorned each page were comparatively crude by comparison, and yet… She lingered on every photo, her fingers trailing the contours of each picture, the warmth, the love somehow captured in these single, solitary moments in time speaking with an intensity that defied such simple presentation. Her cousin, his wife, his sons, all of them sharing a home, a life, one that they had lived while she had been… Kara didn’t linger on the thought, repressing it from her memory as she moved onto the next page, one after the other, until she reached the here and now. The remaining pages were empty. That was not the only absence from the Album, the future as yet unwritten. There was also a period of time that remained shrouded from her knowledge beyond what she had been told in passing. It was something that she wanted to know, it was something that she needed to know. It was something that she had to see for herself. Smallville… Even now, after all these years, Martha Kent expected her husband to be there when she woke up. Each morning she would reach over to find the bed beside her empty, and the memory would return that he had been laid to rest before her. Every morning, it was the same, and every morning she would re live the pain. Such was the cost of living a full life. She didn’t tell Clark, her son would only worry and, lord above, he had plenty to worry about without adding the concerns of his mother to his own. He was a good boy, a kind boy, and some burdens were for a parent to carry, and not the children. Martha had considered moving several times, a fresh start where they hadn’t shared so many memories and yet, as she moved through the kitchen to prepare herself some breakfast, she knew that she couldn’t leave it behind, there was far too much warmth between these simple walls to abandon. It was their home, and while those first few moments every morning may well be painful, the joy that the day would then later bring made it all the more worthwhile. As the kettle slowly built in pitch on the stove beside her, Martha washed her hands in the sink before she looked out into the yard, an old swing swaying idly from a tree nearby reminding her of her boy. It was from that very seat that Clark had spent many a day pining after a certain young Lana La… Martha blinked as she realised that she now had herself a visitor, Ma Kent uncertain as to whether or not the girl that she now saw had been stood there by the tree earlier. She looked young, perhaps painfully so, her blonde hair tied back in a mousey plat and her slender frame attired in an almost comical amount of plaid clothing, a set of glasses perched awkwardly on her nose. As the visitor inspected the swing with a touch of her finger, Martha could just make out the expression of her features, she looked… lost. “Well,” Martha concluded, pulling her shoal tighter across her shoulders before removing the kettle from the stove, “I suppose she was going to visit sooner or later.” Ma Kent moved out onto the porch and raised her voice in order to be heard, although she knew it wasn’t necessary. “Mightily brisk morning, wouldn’t you say?” Kara looked up, taking in the lady who stood upon the porch. She knew who she was, it was, after all, whom she had come to see and yet, as she opened her mouth to answer, she could not think of a word to say. “You must be Kara,” Martha greeted, her manner radiating mild amusement, “Clark mentioned he would bring you around when you were ready, I suppose you went and decided that for yourself.” Kara parted her lips to reply before, with a slight frown, she pointed to her glasses. “Karen,” she explained, her accent heavy with Kryptonian inflections. To her ears, it sounded clumsy. She was still uncertain as to why her cousin felt that the subterfuge was necessary, but as Kal was helping her to assimilate to her new world, she felt it was best to indulge in the unusual behaviour. “Karen Kent.” “Of course, dear,” Martha smiled, stepping aside slightly in obvious invitation, “now come inside, it’s far too cold this morning for a young lady to be loitering outside without a coat on.” She had finally found him, Kara looking upon the Kal that she remembered, the infant that she had cradled in her arms looking back at her from the picture. He looked so happy, swaddled in his blankets and smiling up at the camera, his little arms held up and his face alight with joy. It was just as she recalled, as though it had happened yesterday, it was as if Kara Zor-El herself had entered the room, and her infant cousin had woken up to great her. In the beginning, when she had first heard the news, Kara had not been convinced that she would care for the new baby. She had been mistaken. She had been so very mistaken… Her fingers trailed the contours of the photo slowly, as though she were etching it into her memory, before she turned the page of the family album. Martha sat beside her, offering commentary when it was asked for, Kara turning one page after the other, watching her cousin grow from one moment to the next. It was surreal, watching the transformation, a procession of moments scattered across years, the baby who became a boy, who then became a teenager and then, finally, a man in his own right. A lifetime that she had desperately wanted to be a part of, and yet had been forced to now watch unfold in abstract. She saw him with his friends, with his first love and, ultimately, she saw him with his parents, the couple that had raised him, the people that had given him their name. The Kents. Jonathon and Martha. The people that had saved him. The Last Son of Krypton. The only son of theirs. She turned to the last page and, finding the image of a man cradling a new born baby of his own, she found herself filled with a sense of closure. Almost. “Why?” Kara questioned, her voice scarcely above a whisper, “why did you adopt him?” “Oh, well,” Martha leaned back, her manner perpetually kindly, “I suppose I’m meant to say something truly profound, am I not? I’m afraid it’s all much simpler than it should be.” Kara looked at her, her mannerisms perplexed. “When we found Clark, he fell from the sky, this little baby lost, alone and left in a field,” Martha explained, remembering the day that it had all happened, the sheer happenstance that she and Jonathon had been driving by at that very moment. “We didn’t know what had happened, we didn’t know anything about Krypton or other people on other worlds, we didn’t know where he had come from. It didn’t matter. It never did, not to us.” Kara’s confusion was only further compounded, the furrow of her brow deepening. “He was our son,” Martha recited as though that was simply that. “Jonathon and I both knew it from the moment we saw Clark. We couldn’t have children, it wasn’t meant to be, and yet here he was, in desperate need of our protection. The how didn’t matter, the why didn’t matter, he was our son. We adopted him, we raised him, we loved him because we loved him.” With all of her heightened senses, Kara searched for some semblance of a lie, even the hint of one, for she found it impossible to believe that the Kents would do all that they did for her cousin out of simple, human kindness. She found nothing but the truth. “And what about you, Karen?” Martha prompted, her tone now laced with concern, “I understand you should have come here when Clark did. Did you find a home?” With that. she looked away, not wanting to meet her eye, moved towards memories upon which she did not want to linger. The fire, the pain, the misery and despair, the screams of the Mountain pressing down on her night after night after night… She cried, a single tear at first, a sob soon following as all she could remember was being lost amongst the stars after watching her world burn. Her cousin had found a home, for that she was truly thankful. Kara had not been so fortunate… Martha held her close without prompting, comforting a teenager as she released her burdens, reminding her with her presence that she was not alone. “That’s it,” Martha consoled, rocking the girl slowly, regardless of what horror it was than pained her. “Let it go…” When Clark arrived, Kara had already been outside for at least an hour. She had been waiting for him, sitting on the swing and watching the world pass slowly by, the occasional car heading towards town. It was cold, but she didn’t feel it, she wasn’t sure that she still could. When Clark paced up to stand beside her, he stood there in a respectful silence, his hands placed in his coat pockets as time ticked over. It irked her ever so slightly just how patient Kal had grown up to be. “Why did they do it?” she asked, the two of them gazing into the middle distance. “Why did they send us away?” Clark didn’t answer, he didn’t really need to. “I know why they did it,” Kara corrected with a note of irritation, “Krypton was dying, I saw it, but what they did, they just flung us out into the stars and what? Hoped for the best?” Kara tightened her grip about the chains that supported her swing, buckling the metal. “You were just a baby; I wasn’t even awake when they put me in my pod. Anything could have happened. It did happen!” Kara clenched her jaw before she exhaled deeply, forcing herself to calm down. Clark did not interrupt, these were the most words that he had heard his cousin string together since her arrival, he wasn’t about to stop her now. “I answered my own question, didn’t I?” Kara queried, turning her head to look at Clark. He smiled, ever so slightly, one that betrayed a hint of sadness. “I think perhaps you did,” he agreed. “I used to think our crest was stupid,” Kara confessed, somewhat ashamed to do so. “I never told mother that, she would not have approved. ‘Vigilance’, ‘Courage’, ‘Vision’, all of them sounded better to me. ‘Hope’ was just so… childish.” After several long moments she inhaled deeply before looking to her cousin, knowing that his patience, his understanding, his kindness was deserving of more than she had been giving. “The Mountain didn’t break me, no matter how it may sometimes seem,” she insisted, her manner poised and her conviction full. Clark still didn’t know what ‘The Mountain’ was, but he took an immediate disliking to its existence. He did not press the matter for the time being. She would reveal it when she was ready. “It stripped away my illusions, it made me understand what was important and what it meant to survive in even the bleakest of environments, it taught me to value life regardless of its appearance or its origins,” she explained, knowing all of it to be true. “It showed me what it meant to abuse power, and ensured that I would never forgive myself if I did so.” She was silent then, alone with her many thoughts, coming a decision. “I used to think our crest was stupid,” she affirmed, admitting her past failures, “I understand now that only the strongest are able to retain it. It’s so easy to give up, too easy…” Clark made to answer, to share his thoughts with his young cousin before something else caught the entirety of his attention. His head snapped up, gazing towards an impossible distance, his ears ringing with the cries of those facing catastrophe, mere minutes away from certain death, those who had but one thing left to cling to. He was not the only one to hear it, Kara now on her own feet to, gazing towards that very same disaster. “Shall we?” the Last Son of Krypton queried. “Lets,” the Last Daughter of Krypton agreed, the duo reaching for their shirts in unison and without hesitation, pulling them open to reveal a crest beneath of their shared parentage. With a thunderclap of sound, they took to the skies together, delivering that which no others could deliver better. Hope. The Amazon… “My brother, you may have heard of him, is an obsessive man,” Lena Luthor recited as she looked up, taking in the visuals before her with commendable grace given their significance. “He would no doubt regale you with why being so is a commendable attribute, in truth it has stunted his growth as a human being. He just, he simply can not let anything go once it vexes him.” Jerimiah did not interrupt, it was not a subject he was familiar with. Diligently he stood beside the Director of the DEO as she stood before the structure for the first time since its discovery, the two of them dwarfed by its sheer scale. It seemed to grow from the very earth itself, so long had the obelisk been present, the foundations indistinguishable from the undergrowth before the foliage parted about the onyx walls of the towering fortress, every inch of its surface otherwise seamless. An entrance had been discovered after a great deal of trial and considerably more error, and even now Agent Danvers wasn’t convinced that they had been the ones responsible for opening it. The first sight inside had stopped them cold, the engraving that dominated the wall unmistakable. “I day does not go by when he does not mention him, did you know that?” Director Luthor questioned, clearly rhetorical. “All that time and effort, and still he barely knows a single thing about the Superman. Were he in my position, I genuinely believe he might go quite mad. My point being, it has always perplexed me that my dear Lex has always failed to ask the most pertinent of questions, always far too concerned with the why and what.” Lena stepped forwards, forgoing protocol to stride inside the structure, her arms folded behind her back. “Now personally, and perhaps it is because of my chosen occupation, I have but one question, and I doubt even Superman himself would be able to answer it. In all the infinite void, across all the infinite variables, how is it that he looks and sounds precisely like us. Remarkable coincidence, truly astronomical.” She stepped back again before turning on the spot, addressing Agent Danvers directly with an air of reluctant dejection. Behind her, embezzled across the wall, stood the crest of the House of El, the ‘S’ that was known across the world by every man, woman and child alive today. “I should have guessed that the answer would be suitably banal. They’ve been here before.” |