The weekend arrived in Smallville, bringing unusually clear weather along with it.
The sun shone brightly over the fields, but inside the Blake farm, the atmosphere was charged with a very different kind of tension.
It was a highly important day for the family, or at least it was for one of the boys.
John stood in front of the main hallway mirror, adjusting his shirt collar for the fifth time in ten minutes, filled with a blend of pure nervousness that he couldn’t shake off.
“Look at that, who would’ve thought…
the great John Blake, shaking like a leaf over a simple date,” Brandon mocked, leaning comfortably against the doorframe with his arms crossed and a grin from ear to ear.
“Shut up, Brandon.
It’s my first official date with Kyla.
I have to make sure everything is perfect,” John retorted, turning around to glare at him.
Then, narrowing his eyes, he continued in a biting tone, “Though I don’t know why I’m telling you these things.
You wouldn’t understand.
After all, certain people in this house don’t even get the chance to go out with a girl.”
“Hahaha, hilarious,” Brandon replied, letting out a dry laugh at his brother’s poor attempt at a provocation.
“Just admit you can’t get one and leave it at that,” John insisted, egging him on.
Brandon rolled his eyes, letting out a frustrated breath.
“Drop it already.
I’ve told you a thousand times: I’m not interested in any girl from school, I don’t have time for those foolish things.
All I want is to finish classes quickly so I can get the hell out of here and join our parents on their adventures.”
Deep down, Brandon was telling the truth.
Currently, no girl at the high school had caught his attention.
Furthermore, although he hadn’t said much when he heard the news that they would be moving to that mystical island, on the inside, he was dying to leave already.
However, he held back because he knew complaining would be in vain; he had no choice but to bite his tongue and finish high school just as his father had proposed.
Laurel and Karen, who were passing through the hallway at that moment, couldn’t help but smile at the typical brotherly scene, though they didn’t pay too much attention to the argument.
Karen walked over to John with a firm step, adjusted his shirt collar with deeply maternal affection, and gave him a gentle pat on the shoulder.
“You look great, son.
I bet that girl, Kyla, will like you for who you are, not for how well you fold a shirt collar.
Go enjoy yourself,” Karen encouraged him with a knowing wink.
Laurel didn’t say a word, but the warmth of her smile was more than enough to give him that final push of confidence.
After receiving a couple more pieces of advice and Brandon’s inevitable parting teases, John finally took a deep breath.
He subtly activated his speed so as not to kick up a dust cloud in the living room and dashed out of the house toward the Kawatche reserve, his heart pounding a mile a minute in his chest.
As the house settled into a relative calm—with Karen training Kara in the backyard to help her measure her strength and Laurel reading peacefully on the upper floor—Conner sat in the living room, thinking about what to do to kill time.
‘Let’s see…
John must be on his date by now and Brandon went to hang out with Clark…
I have absolutely no idea what to do,’ Conner thought, feeling a bit bored.
After pondering it for a moment, he decided it was an excellent opportunity to go and talk with Raven.
It was something he had been trying to do over the last few days, looking to earn her trust in an organic way.
Of course, their previous interactions had been short, barely a few casual words, meticulously making sure not to pressure her or invade her space. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Conner went to the kitchen and prepared two cups of his indispensable black coffee with milk—one of the few habits he still kept from his past life.
He went out to the front porch and, just as he had anticipated, found the grey-skinned young woman sitting on the wooden steps.
Her knees were pulled up to her chest, and the hood of her dark blue cloak covered half of her face, keeping her gaze fixed on the horizon with a deeply melancholy look.
Without breaking the harmony of the silence, Conner approached and sat on the step a couple of paces away from her, placing one of the steaming cups on the wood beside her.
He took a sip from his own cup, content to just contemplate the landscape alongside her without forcing any words.
Raven didn’t move.
The silence stretched on for several seconds, thick but strangely comfortable, until the girl locked her dark eyes onto the cup.
She glanced at Conner out of the corner of her eye and, after another brief hesitation, extended her pale hand, took the porcelain, and took a small sip of the coffee.
“Thank you…” Raven murmured in an incredibly soft, muted voice.
“Don’t mention it,” Conner replied, keeping his eyes on the horizon.
“I don’t know the exact reason that forced you to leave your planet, Raven…
but I know it must be pretty damn hard to have left your home behind and find yourself in a completely new world overnight.”
Conner paused for a long moment.
His gaze darkened slightly, and he continued in a voice that, for the first time, sounded genuinely lonely and pained:
“And it’s even harder…
knowing that you can never go back again.”
At that exact moment, Conner wasn’t thinking about Krypton.
His thoughts had suddenly traveled to the Earth of his first life.
Even if this universe also had a planet called Earth, it wasn’t the same one.
To him, it would never feel the same; the weight of nostalgia for an unreachable past was something he carried in absolute secret.
Hearing that shift in tone, Raven stared at him.
Being such a sensitive empath, the sudden wave of anguish, loneliness, and real pain emanating from Conner’s aura hit her full force.
She felt a knot form in her stomach; she wanted to say something to comfort him, but her lack of experience in social interactions left her not knowing what words to articulate.
Sensing the girl’s worried look, Conner took a deep breath, stabilizing his mood in the blink of an eye.
He looked at Raven and flashed her a bright smile to show her he was perfectly fine.
“As you might know, I’m not originally from this planet either,” Conner continued, recovering his serene tone.
“The girls and I come from a place called Krypton.
We managed to escape just before its total destruction and settled permanently on Earth.
Even though it was a tough process at first, over time we managed to consider it our second home.
I hope the day comes when you can do the same.”
Upon hearing the words “total destruction,” Raven visibly tensed.
Her pale fingers gripped the porcelain cup so tightly that the air around the porch seemed to turn cold for an instant due to her mystical fluctuation.
“Why did you help me?” she asked suddenly, staring straight ahead, afraid to look him in the eye.
“You don’t know who I am.
You don’t know how…
how dangerous I really am.
If you did, you would never have me in your house, let alone near your family.
I am a walking hazard.”
Conner let out a small, calm laugh, shaking his head with total indifference toward her warnings. This chapter is updated first at g.com.
“Well, I don’t see any danger.
I just see a beautiful woman, scared and lost, who for some compelling reason had to leave her home.” Conner laughed lightly and added jokingly, “Besides, you’ve already seen how our family is made up; we’re a nest of super-strong aliens.
I’d say the one who’s actually in danger here is you.
I’m surprised you haven’t run away from us out of pure fear yet.”
For a fraction of a second, Conner caught the distinct impression that the corners of Raven’s lips curved slightly upward into a subtle smile, though he wasn’t sure if it had just been his imagination.
Raven let out a long, heavy sigh, letting her shoulders drop and her posture relax completely.
“Azarath…” she confessed in a thread of a voice, carrying a sadness that seemed etched into her soul.
“That is the name of the place I come from.”
A sudden silence settled between the two.
Conner, determined to keep the thread of the conversation going and resolve one of his biggest questions over the last few days, asked curiously:
“Why did you choose Earth out of so many worlds in the cosmos?”
“Earth isn’t a completely alien place to me,” Raven explained, taking another sip from her cup.
“This is the homeworld of my mother, Arella.”
Before Conner could process the piece of information or say anything else, Raven continued, opening up for the first time:
“From the day I was born, I received a prophecy…
I am destined to become a living portal that will bring an interdimensional demon named Trigon into this plane.
I escaped to Earth to leave my destiny behind.
I decided to distance myself from Azarath to avoid that prophecy being fulfilled at all costs.”
With Raven’s words echoing in his super-hearing, Conner’s transmigrator mind began analyzing the information at top speed.
‘This version…’, Conner concluded to himself.
‘The background of the monks, the bond with her mother Arella, and her decision to actively flee to protect her world look a lot like the Raven from the 2003 Teen Titans animated series.’
However, after thinking about it for another second, he shook his head mentally.
At this stage, it didn’t make much sense to burn himself out trying to decipher exactly which version each character resembled in this chaotic universe.
Kara was the best proof of that: despite following an origin story identical to the Smallville series, the final result had been completely different, and now she was dealing with severe amnesia.
Of course, Conner preferred to attribute that change to the Butterfly Effect caused by Karen and Laurel taking her out of the ship ahead of time.
“Well,” Conner said, standing up with a light smile while stretching lazily.
“I hope that silly curse of yours ends right here.”
He comforted and encouraged her with total tranquility, though in the back of his mind, he knew perfectly well that things with Trigon wouldn’t be so simple in the future.
Raven stared up at him from the step as he turned and walked at a relaxed pace toward the front door.
“Conner…” she called out to him just before he pushed the wood open.
Conner stopped dead in his tracks and glanced at her over his shoulder.
“You are a very strange man,” Raven stated, watching him with unyielding seriousness.
“But thank you.”
Conner simply nodded his head and went inside the house, highly satisfied with the massive progress he had made.
Though, in the back of his mind, he couldn’t help but complain with an internal pout: ‘How the hell am I strange?
I’m a perfectly normal guy!’