Two Weeks Later
The group home was a two-story wooden building that had once been a crisp white, but was now the dingy, faded color of old newspaper.
It sat on a gravel lot right at the edge of town, flanked by empty fields and a rusted water tower.
Seven kids lived there, ranging in age from nine to seventeen.
All of them were under the care of Mrs. Elaine Henderson…
a stout, grey-haired woman who ran the place with the grim efficiency of someone who had long ago accepted that the world was deeply unfair, but steadfastly refused to stop trying anyway.
Sebastian liked her.
She didn’t ask him difficult questions when he returned from the hospital.
She didn’t hover over him.
She simply handed him a glass of water, told him that dinner was served promptly at six, and that his room was the exact same as before.
His room was a closet-sized space containing a single bed, a wooden desk with one leg slightly shorter than the others, and a dusty window that overlooked the gravel parking lot.
Daniel Whitmore’s earthly possessions amounted to a cheap backpack containing two changes of clothes, a worn-out copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, and a wallet with seven dollars inside.
Seven dollars.
That was the entire net worth of the boy whose life he had inherited.
Sebastian sat on the edge of the bed that first evening and began to plan.
He had several immediate problems.
First: his magic was pathetically weak and regenerating at an agonizingly glacial pace.
He estimated that at the current rate of natural recovery, it would take years to reach a level where he could cast anything beyond basic parlor charms.
He desperately needed to find a way to accelerate his growth.
Second: he had no money, no tangible resources, and no identity beyond that of a forgotten orphan.
In the Marvel Universe, he had been able to build his life around Alisha…
his mother, his absolute anchor.
Here, he had no one.
Every single thing he built would have to come from absolute scratch.
Third…
and this was the big one…
he needed to figure out exactly which universe he was in.
Kansas.
Smallville.
A group home.
These details definitely told him something, but not nearly enough.
There were multiple distinct versions of the DC Universe.
The comics.
The animated shows.
The movies.
The Arrowverse.
He needed more information.
The very next morning, Sebastian walked into town.
Smallville was exactly what the name suggested…
a small farming community nestled in the heart of Kansas.
Main Street was a quiet stretch of two-story brick buildings housing a hardware store, a cozy diner called the Beanery, a pharmacy, and the offices of the Smallville Ledger.
Beat-up pickup trucks outnumbered cars three to one.
Everyone seemed to know everyone else’s business.
He walked past a gas station.
Then a feed store.
Then, he spotted a billboard.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
WELCOME TO SMALLVILLE, KANSAS Pop.
45,001 The Meteor Capital of the World!
Meteor Capital.
Sebastian stared blankly at the sign.
His mind began to work in overdrive.
He walked much faster now, heading straight toward the town’s small public library…
a modest brick building right next to the post office.
Inside, an elderly librarian barely even glanced at him as he settled into one of the ancient computer stations in the corner.
He typed quickly.
Smallville Kansas meteor shower.
The search results loaded on the screen.
October 1989.
A devastating meteor shower had struck Smallville, killing dozens of people and completely destroying large sections of the town.
The catastrophic event had been widely covered at the time, but largely forgotten by the outside world in the decade since.
He clicked through old, scanned newspaper archives.
The Smallville Ledger had extensive coverage.
Grainy photos of burning cornfields.
A completely destroyed church.
The main street cratered and smoking.
And there…
a photo of a young couple standing in front of a pickup truck, holding a small dark-haired boy.
The caption below it read: Jonathan and Martha Kent with their newly adopted son, Clark.
Sebastian leaned back in his creaky plastic chair.
Clark Kent.
Adopted.
Found during the meteor shower.
The Smallville TV series.
Not the comics.
Not the big-budget movies.
Not the Arrowverse.
It was the early 2000s television show where a young Clark Kent grew up in small-town Kansas, secretly fighting meteor-infected freaks while desperately trying to hide his alien nature from the rest of the world.
Sebastian closed his eyes and let the full, heavy weight of it settle over him.
He knew this story.
In his very first life, he had watched the show.
Well, not all of them…
he had stopped watching after the sixth season.
But he remembered the broad strokes…
Clark’s god-like powers developing slowly over time, his deeply complicated friendship with Lex Luthor, the meteor freaks that terrorized the quiet town week after week, Chloe Sullivan and her Wall of Weird, Lana Lang and the green necklace, Pete Ross.
He remembered exactly how it all ended, too.
Clark ultimately becoming Superman.
Lex transforming into his absolute greatest enemy.
Good people making terrible, life-altering choices simply because they were lied to by the people who claimed to love them the most.
It was a story entirely about secrets.
About what happens when you hide the truth from the people closest to you until it eventually poisons everything.
Sebastian had lived through something strikingly similar back in the Marvel Universe.
He had kept massive secrets from Tony.
From Wanda.
From everyone he cared about.
He had learned the incredibly hard way that some secrets protect people, and some secrets completely destroy them.
This time, he was going to do it differently.
He opened his eyes and checked the digital date on the corner of the computer screen.
July 23, 2001.
The first episode of Smallville…
the pilot…
took place right when school started in the fall.
That gave him roughly six weeks.
Six weeks to prepare.
August 2001…
Five Weeks Before School
Sebastian fell into a brutal routine.
Every single morning at five AM, he quietly slipped out of the group home while the other kids were still fast asleep.
He ran.
Not the casual, leisurely jogging he had done as Sebastian Shaw back in New York…
this was brutal, punishing work.
He pushed Daniel Whitmore’s weak, terribly underfed body to its absolute physical limit.
Three miles the first day.
He vomited twice in the bushes.
Four miles by the end of the very first week.
His legs screamed in agony, but they held.
By the second week, he was consistently running five miles before dawn and immediately following it with intense bodyweight exercises in the empty field behind the water tower.
Push-ups.
Pull-ups on the tower’s lowest crossbar.
Squats.
Core work.
His new body responded much faster than he had expected.
Daniel Whitmore had been horribly neglected, but he was young.
Fifteen years old.
The adolescent body naturally wanted to grow.
It just needed someone to aggressively push it.
Sebastian pushed it mercilessly.
He had learned through two previous lives that magic alone was simply never enough.
In the Harry Potter world, his rigorous physical training had saved him against Death Eaters when his wand was knocked away.
In the Marvel Universe, his extensive combat conditioning had kept him alive in desperate situations where raw magical power couldn’t help him.
Here, with his magic currently hovering barely above the level of cheap parlor tricks, his body was his primary weapon.
But he certainly didn’t neglect his magic entirely.
Every evening, long after the group home lights went out, Sebastian sat cross-legged on his small bed and meditated.
It worked as both an alternative to sleep and a way to avoid wasting valuable time.
He carefully drew his awareness inward, feeling out the tiny, flickering flame of his magical core, and actively practiced circulating the incredibly thin mana of this universe throughout his body.
It was agonizingly slow work.
In the Marvel Universe, the ambient magical energy had been wonderfully rich and abundant…
like breathing deep in a room completely full of pure oxygen.
Here, the mana was sparse and wild…
like trying to catch smoke with his bare hands.
His core was steadily growing, but at a rate that would realistically take years to reach any sort of meaningful level.
Still, he relentlessly practiced his spells.
Not casting them…
he couldn’t afford to waste the precious mana…
but meticulously rehearsing the wand motions, the complex mental frameworks, and the precise configurations of will and intent that made wandless magic possible.
Lumos.
Alohomora.
Protego.
Stupefy.
Expelliarmus.
Petrificus Totalus.
Wingardium Leviosa.
Accio.
Reparo.
These were his tools.
The basic, fundamental spells of a young wizard…
the ones he could reliably cast with his current reserves without completely burning himself out.
Each one was a surgical instrument in his hands, perfectly honed by literal lifetimes of combat experience.
He also practiced Occlumency every single night.
It was the crucial mental discipline that actively protected the mind from outside invasion.
It had successfully saved him from Kilgrave’s terrifying pheromone control back in the Marvel Universe in the starting.
In a world where meteor freaks with telepathy and terrifying mind control absolutely existed, it wasn’t just a luxury.
It was a vital necessity.
On the eighteenth day of his grueling training, Sebastian made a discovery.
He was running his usual morning route right along the edge of Riley Field…
one of the many vast, endless cornfields that completely surrounded Smallville…
when he suddenly felt something.
A faint pulse of energy, raw and incredibly sharp, emanating from the ground.
He stopped.
He walked straight off the dirt road and into the towering field, carefully following the distinct sensation.
After fifty yards, he found it…
a small, glowing green rock, roughly the size of a walnut, half-buried in the dark dirt.
Meteor rock.
Sebastian crouched down and studied it intently without touching it.
His mystical senses…
dampened as they currently were…
could clearly feel the strange energy radiating off the stone.
It definitely wasn’t magical energy in the traditional sense.
It was something else entirely.
Radioactive.
Alien.
Wrong in a way that made the hairs on his arms prickle.
But underneath all that wrongness, there was raw, thrumming power.
Unstructured.
Chaotic.
Like pure lightning trapped in crystal.
He carefully pulled his sleeve down over his hand and picked it up.
Nothing happened.
No sudden mutation.
No painful transformation.
The stone was warm through the fabric in his palm, but that was all.
He wasn’t a native of this world.
His body had absolutely no connection to the catastrophic 1989 meteor shower.
The kryptonite…
because that is exactly what it was, he knew that much…
didn’t affect him the way it so violently affected Clark Kent or the meteor-infected humans of Smallville.
But he could feel its raw energy.
And his magical core, hungry and totally starved, immediately responded to it…
eagerly reaching toward the green stone like a dying plant reaching toward sunlight.
Sebastian held the alien stone for a very long time, simply thinking.
He couldn’t absorb the energy directly.
The kryptonite’s radiation was far too chaotic, far too alien.
Trying to pull it straight into his magical core raw would be a lot like trying to chug gasoline.
But there might be a way to properly filter it.
To somehow process the dangerous raw energy into something his magical core could safely consume and use to grow.
That was a problem for later.
For now, he safely pocketed the stone and seamlessly continued his run.
He would need to collect more of them…
that much was certain.