Chapter Text
If asked, Clark is only slightly embarrassed to admit that when he read Desolation Angels as a teenager — angry, confused, and different than his peers in so, so many unspeakable ways — he wanted to work as a fire lookout.
Two to four months completely alone in the tree-lined wilderness seemed like an unattainable dream. Even with all the wide open space of Smallville, he could still hear it. Hear everything. Heartbeats and breathing and crying and yelling and all those messy human noises that got so loud it made Clark pray for silence. Pray to never hear anything ever again than endure one more moment of it all.
He wanted solitude. Peace. And a fire lookout seemed more his speed than a lighthouse keeper. At fourteen, he hadn’t even seen the ocean yet.
Clark Kent is, to his parents’ best estimate, twenty-nine years old. He has a bachelor's degree with honors from the top journalism program in the U.S. that he has never used and ten years of experience as an EMT, firefighter, and fire lookout.
No matter the crew, Clark always ends up with a nickname that is some variation of ‘Lucky.’ Clark did his best with each new job. To fit in. To be normal. To be human. To be thoroughly unremarkable.
He wasn't very good at it.
He makes impossible saves and the wind always seems to be in his favor. He has never lost another crew member or a civilian to the flames on any of his calls. He is always cajoled into posing for the charity calendars and ends up on the cover. His crews always love him. Or at least they love the parts of him he lets them see. No one… no one knows… knows about that other part of him. Or that he is an alien his parents found during a meteor storm in a corn field in rural Kansas.
Clark transfers to a new station roughly every two years, usually moving states when he does. He always says it's because he's looking for a change, but the truth is that if he stays longer than that, they might start to notice. Start to get suspicious about how he never sweats, how he is never bruised, and how his skin doesn't even flush when he's next to towering flames.
He always makes sure he gets his three months off every summer to head out here to the wilderness and keep the forests from burning down.
He doesn't have his next job lined up yet, but he isn't panicking. He doesn't have many expenses and he could go until next year's fire season without working if it came to that. His folks have made it very clear his childhood bedroom will always be open for him.
It's a twenty mile hike to his tower. It's one of the most remote ones in the region, maybe in the entire U.S. It's quiet. Well, not exactly, quiet. There are bears and bison and wolves and all sorts of chittering wildlife, but only serious hikers make it this far out in the back country and they’re not usually looking to socialize. It is so blissfully calming it feels like his brain is getting reset. The sky is beautiful at every time of day and night.
Clark wakes up on another beautiful Tuesday morning on July 14th, 1987. He crosses yesterday out with a big red X on his novelty Grey Ghost calendar like he does every morning. It's been a little over a week since the fourth of July and he's only had to tell off three folks near the very edge of the forest for lighting fireworks. Did he enjoy popping up behind those drunk teenagers in the middle of the night? Yes, yes he did, but he’s not going to say it out loud.
Technically, Clark isn't supposed to leave his post until his appointment is finished at the end of the fire season. In reality, he flies to Smallville twice a week, every week. Once on Sunday morning for breakfast and again on Wednesday night for dinner. While he is there, he keeps an ear trained for the sound of a fire out in his region. In the ten years he has worked for the Forest Service as a fire lookout, Clark has only had to fly back early from dinner twice to call something in and one of them was a false alarm.
He follows his usual routine this morning. He rolls out of bed. Still in his sleep clothes, he walks out of the building onto the catwalk. He keeps one hand on the railing as he walks the perimeter of the lookout and scans the forest for anything worth reporting. There is nothing.
He boils some water and makes himself a mug of coffee using the instant coffee his Pa always makes sure he's supplied with. He eats the peach cobbler muffin his Ma sent him back with just two days ago as he fills out the weather report. He eats better than his coworkers. Much better. He feels a little swirl of guilt about that sometimes; he's not even sure if he needs to eat, but it helps pass the time and it tastes delicious.
He checks in on the main radio channel like he is required to every morning. There is another channel for inane chatting, but Clark never puts it on. He is friendly enough during check in, but he doesn't need to combat the loneliness or isolation like some folks do.
He likes the quiet. Likes being able to drink the boiling water without thinking about it, likes not having to think about how much he's supposed to struggle to lift something, likes not having to pretend stubbing his toe hurts, likes not having to pretend that the ring of the alarm doesn't.
He likes hovering around the open building and during the night he likes flying up into that crisp, clean air to bask in the starlight and wonder where he's from.
This morning is just like the last one and the one before. Steady temperatures. A storm rolled through on Sunday night and things are still pretty damp and there are no signs of fire.
He takes his shirt off and lounges out in the sunlight on the top of the lookout in his running shorts, drinking in the heat while he finishes his second cup of coffee.
When he was younger, he can't remember exactly when, fourth or fifth grade, maybe, in some school assembly he learned it took eight minutes for the light of the sun to reach earth.
That stuck with him. If the sun just disappeared, it would take them eight minutes to notice.
If he knew… if he knew, if he could hear it or sense it before the others, he wonders what he'd do. Fly home, probably, not make a big deal about it. Just fly home and act like everything was normal. Tell his Ma and Pa how much he loved them. How much he appreciated everything they had done for him. Recognize the, frankly, crazy choice they made to protect him at all costs. The risk they took in bringing him home. He could have been a brood parasite or a Communist experiment for all they knew, but they brought him home anyway and they made him their son.
If the sun was going to disappear and he knew it, he'd make sure his parents were comfortable until the end.
Clark looks up from his notebook where he's rambled about that and space and what it must feel like slipping past the atmosphere. He's never flown that high before, but he's thought about it. One day, maybe.
There are also two pages of notes about that outline of an idea of an autobiography of an alien. He tears it all out, crumples it into a ball in his hand. He jumps down from the roof and enters the cabin. It’s a large one room building with windows in all the walls; the Osborne Fire Finder takes up a good chunk in the center of the room. There is a desk pushed up against one wall covered in books and the main radio. His bed is shoved over in the corner in front of the window with the best view of the park. The sink and propane stove are on the opposite side of the room. He tosses the nonsense in the potbelly stove over near the door. He’ll make sure to burn it before the end of the season. It's in good company with other abandoned projects.
When he was younger, Clark dreamed of being a writer. A journalist, like Upton Sinclair or Nellie Bly. He wanted to help shine a light on injustice. He wanted to help make the world better. But then he started to… he started to do this thing where if he heard something bad happening, he had to go fix it.
He moved quickly, fast enough he was no more than a blur, and he'd go help. He'd pull people out of buildings before the department arrived, he'd rush people hundreds of miles to emergency rooms, he'd dig people out of the rubble of fallen buildings and landslides. He'd slow down trains and catch cars plummeting off of embankments.
He'd do whatever he needed to help keep people safe.
He did it quickly, and quietly, and fled before the people he saved had time to process what had happened. There were a few videos of him by now, the clearest was still a streaking blur of red and blue. That one had caught him when he was still sleeping and he was wearing the red and blue flannels his Ma gave him for Christmas two years back.
He ended up on Unexplained Mysteries with Robert Stack chatting about the supposed miracle. An angel, perhaps, his writers had made him theorize, or something else unexplainable? Of course it was up to the viewers to help him decide.
He wasn't sure how he could balance all that with a 9 to 5 office job. What if someone died because he was in a meeting? Or he got stuck at the water cooler with a chatty coworker?
At least on a call he was helping someone.
He takes a seat in the chair in front of his radio and flips through his notebook to review yesterday's notes before tossing it back on to the table. He finds his Walkman and swaps out Three Imaginary Boys for Born in The USA.
His Pa had picked him up two new cassettes to add into his rotation. He hasn’t had a chance to listen to the Kate Bush album yet, but he’s looking forward to listening to it while stargazing.
It was a bright morning, clear skies and strong sunshine. He changes into his uniform pants, but doesn't bother with a shirt or shoes as he walks back outside.
On the deck, he settles into the adirondack chair he’d built for himself seven years back. No one had ever commented on it, so Clark kept it there. He opens a thick astronomy textbook and settles in as Bruce Springsteen crooned through his headphones.
Clark is able to read quickly, but it's just that - reading. It only worked when he knew all the words and concepts. When it came to subjects he was unfamiliar with, he often found himself pausing frequently to dig out another book and reference it to get a better idea of what was going on. He really ought to have taken a few more science classes when he was at Met U, but he was so determined back then to be a journalist he hadn’t considered anything else.
He has equations scrawled in loose scratch paper inside the text book. They take the coordinates and angle of his crash site and the rotation of the earth and tried to work backwards to know where he came from. He is fairly certain he has figured out a general direction, but that still tells him very little. It was more than nothing, though, so that was at least a start. He flips the cassette when the last song of Side A plays and gets back to reading.
Around noon, Clark takes another active scan of the region, records the weather, and checks in on the radio to the other lookouts.
Ma had shoved over a few paperbacks she’d enjoyed and he packs one in his bag along with two water bottles and another muffin.
He goes for a hike down to the river where he slips his bare feet into the river and reads through the book his Ma had lent him. He hums a tune to himself. The one he’s never been able to place before. The one that’s been stuck in the back of his mind for as long as he can remember.
Across the river he watches a pair of bear cubs wrestling while their mother watches them from the river where she fishes. They're grizzlies and if Clark were human, he ought to have been getting the hell out of there.
He isn't though, so he takes his time watching the sunset and finishing his book before he heads back to the tower.
When the night has fallen and the moon is out, Clark flies. When he was younger, anytime he got even half a chance, he'd fly like it was his last opportunity on earth. Like any day soon he'd realize it was all a dream and wake up. Then he’d be stuck with his feet on the ground for the rest of his life.
Unless he is saving someone, he doesn't fly so much as float nowadays. He lifts himself up into the cool night air, and then settles lying facing up to the heavens, Walkman balanced on his chest, arms folded behind his head, and stares up at the stars.
Tuesday is a normal day, like the last day had been and the day before that and the month before that. Just like tomorrow will be and next month will be until Clark returns to civilization.
He is wrong, of course, but Clark doesn’t know that as he settles into his bed to sleep. He has no idea what the universe has in store for him.