the shadow child CHAPTER SIX

From my distant perch, I have vast perspective. Across the stretch of humanity that I observe, one thing is constant.

The need to define love. The exhaustive search for an answer to that ageless question.

What is love?

I know.

Love - in its truest and purest form - is the unfaltering willingness to do even the most difficult thing you can imagine for the sake of another's wellbeing, even if it costs you your own.

I know of nobody more loving than my father. I was never so proud to call him that as when he and my brother erupted through that window and hurtled toward the rooftop below, the cascade of glittering glass raining down with them. I felt fear in that moment, and almost selfishness too. I felt Julian beside me and we watched them fall together, knowing my brother would survive and being almost certain that my father would too, but doubt had crept into me - I don't know how, I didn't even recognize it, but it gripped me and for a moment I feared that the power Jor-El gave to my father would fail, that it would be taken from him too soon. In that instant I also understood the rapturous zeal with which Julian had watched his own brother descend earthward from the sky. Watching death race up to meet someone that you long for - the one thing that can bring that person to you - it's intoxicating, and for a breath of a moment I hoped it would happen. Though it would have left my mother alone and my brother without his guidepost, I hoped that my father would die.

But only for that one, terrible second. Then I saw the smile that spread over Julian's face like a pollutant oil - because he was happy for me, and envious - and I was disgusted by how close I'd been to being like him. I understand his hunger, but I am not a Luthor. The possibility of having my father present with me brought me a flood of things I'd never known I could feel - hope, fear, longing, revulsion, guilt, regret. I only felt them in that interminable fraction of a minute while my father and my brother tumbled downward, plummeting toward uncertainty.

Then I remembered.

That is my father, falling to what could be his last breath.

That is Jonathan Kent. Husband, father, a man who knows love. A man who does not know selfishness. A man who would dive from a skyscraper window and through a skylight if it meant saving his son from destruction. A man who would put his own fate in the hands of something he couldn't see just to have the chance to redeem his son. A man who could look into the demon behind his son's eyes and dare it to kill him. A man who believed in the power of the love between a father and son enough to know that it could overcome such possession.

I am a son of Jonathan Kent.

This is how I know love.