The very first week at Smallville High taught Alex Carter three essential things.
First: Chloe Sullivan was brilliant.
Not just the casual, effortless intelligence of someone who happened to be naturally smart…
but the relentless, razor-edged brilliance of someone who treated every single unanswered question as a deeply personal insult.
If he was to compare her with someone there is one such name that came to his mind, that is Hermione, even better.
She absolutely devoured information.
She cross-referenced everything.
She built intricate theories with the careful precision of an architect and the paranoid obsession of a conspiracy theorist.
If Chloe Sullivan had been born in the Marvel Universe, she would have easily given Nick Fury nightmares.
Second: Clark Kent was kind to the absolute point of stupidity.
In the span of just five days, Alex watched him help a struggling freshman carry her books across campus, eagerly volunteer to stay late and stack heavy chairs after a school assembly, hand his lunch money over to a kid who claimed he had forgotten his wallet…
the exact same kid who pulled the trick three times…
and genuinely apologize to a senior who had deliberately shouldered him hard in the crowded hallway.
Clark Kent seemed to absorb human cruelty the way a dry sponge absorbs water.
He just soaked it all up and kept right on smiling.
It was, Alex quietly reflected, simultaneously the most admirable and the most deeply infuriating quality he had ever encountered in another person.
Tony Stark would have had three sarcastic remarks ready and a multi-million-dollar lawsuit filed before the shoulder check was even fully over.
Sebastian Shaw…
the old Sebastian, the Supreme Sorcerer…
would have simply petrified the senior and left him frozen solid in the middle of the hallway as a very public example.
But Clark Kent just apologized.
Third…
and this was the one that mattered most…
Chloe, Pete, and Clark were an impenetrable unit.
A totally closed system.
They had deep history that predated Alex by several years, and they guarded it instinctively.
It wasn’t that they were unfriendly.
Far from it.
Chloe assigned him stories for the Torch and readily included him in discussions about the paper’s layout.
Pete cracked jokes in his general direction and freely shared his chips at lunch.
Clark asked him polite questions about his classes and genuinely seemed to care about the answers.
But whenever the three of them were together, a wall instinctively went up.
Not deliberately.
Not maliciously.
It was just the unconscious closing of ranks that always happened between people who had known each other since early childhood.
Inside jokes that Alex didn’t understand.
Shared, fleeting looks that silently communicated entire conversations.
The subtle way Pete and Clark would quickly glance at Chloe before saying certain things, silently checking if it was safe to speak freely.
They weren’t necessarily hiding anything specific from Alex.
Not yet.
They simply hadn’t decided to let him fully in.
Alex understood completely.
He had been the outsider before.
Back in the Marvel Universe, it had taken many long months before Tony Stark truly trusted him.
Before the Avengers fully accepted him as more than just a powerful curiosity.
Deep trust was always earned slowly and lost quickly.
He could afford to be patient.
What he could not afford, however, was to be irrelevant.
Tuesday…
Second Week of School
“Do you know anything about the Scarecrow?”
Chloe dropped the dark question casually while they were hanging out in the Torch office after school.
She was updating the Wall of Weird with a brand new clipping…
something bizarre about a cow that had been inexplicably found on the roof of a barn in Grandville, three counties over.
Alex looked up from his messy desk, where he was currently editing a painfully boring article about the school’s new recycling initiative.
“The Scarecrow?”
“It’s a Smallville High tradition.” Pete leaned back comfortably in his creaky chair with his arms crossed.
“Every year right before homecoming, the football team grabs some random freshman and strings him up out in Riley Field. Paint him up like a scarecrow. They call it harmless hazing. I call it flat-out assault.”
“It’s completely barbaric,” Chloe added, not even turning around.
She forcefully pinned the clipping to the corkboard and stepped back to critically survey her work.
“But try getting Principal Kwan to actually do anything about it. The football team brings in more money than every other program in this school combined. They’re basically untouchable.”
“Has anyone ever gotten seriously hurt?” Alex asked, his tone carefully neutral.
“A kid named Jeremy Creek,” Clark said very quietly.
He was sitting by the dusty window, his long legs stretched out, a thick textbook open on his lap that he clearly hadn’t been reading.
His blue eyes had gone completely distant…
it was the distinct look of someone actively accessing a memory they absolutely did not enjoy.
“The day of the meteor shower back in ’89,” Clark continued, his voice tight.
“Some seniors from the football team grabbed Jeremy and strung him up out in the field. When the meteors hit…”
He trailed off, staring out the glass.
“He’s been in a deep coma at the medical center ever since.”
The cramped room went totally quiet.
Alex let the heavy silence hold for a long moment.
Then, he finally said: “Twelve years in a coma from a hazing ritual that the school did absolutely nothing to stop. And they still do it every single year.”
“Welcome to Smallville,” Pete said, and there was absolutely no humor in his voice.
Alex immediately filed the information away.
Jeremy Creek.
Twelve-year coma.
Direct meteor exposure.
Electrokinesis.
According to his perfect memories of the television show, Jeremy would be waking up soon.
Very, very soon.
And when he finally did, twelve years of boiling rage and meteor-mutated electrical power would come violently waking up with him.
The very first Freak of the Week.
Wednesday
Alex was walking slowly back from the public library when he suddenly felt it.
A pulse.
Faint, but incredibly distinct.
Like the deep, rhythmic throb of a bass note heard through a thick wall…
something felt more in the chest than actually heard by the ears.
It strongly resonated against the small piece of kryptonite he kept carefully hidden in his backpack, the two alien energies seemingly speaking to each other across the distance.
He stopped dead on the sidewalk and closed his eyes.
His magical senses were weak…
frustratingly, pathetically weak compared to what they had once been.
Back in the Marvel Universe, he could have easily traced a unique magical signature across entire continents.
Here, he was violently straining just to pick up a localized signal from across town.
But it was definitely there.
A brand new source of meteor energy.
Not an inert stone buried deep in a field…
this was alive.
Moving.
Actively radiating power with the raw, chaotic intensity of something freshly awakened.
Jeremy Creek had woken up.
Alex calmly opened his eyes and continued walking down the street.
Alex wasn’t here to fundamentally rewrite the story.
He was here to carefully operate in its margins…
to firmly occupy the dark spaces between the scenes that the cameras never bothered to show.
The dark corners.
The quiet, messy aftermath.
Clark would step up and save the day.
That was his essential role.
Alex would simply clean up the mess.