trajectory CHAPTER THREE: PARALLEL

You wouldn't have known I was here if I hadn't gotten tangled in the chicken wire. Call it an accident of fate, providence, divine intervention, or coincidence. Whatever the label, Jonathan Kent was never so thankful to have left a chore half-done. You wouldn't have known I was here. The boy would have come and gone - the unnamed missing piece to the puzzle of their life would have literally passed right through the middle of it, had it not been for one, small, unimportant moment in which the dull but insistent throbbing that pulsed through Jonathan's back won the greater of his attentions, and he left the remainder of his work until the morning.

You wouldn't have known.

Jonathan shuddered and watched the boy as he meekly followed Martha to the kitchen door, his sweater-clad arms clutched around himself more for protection than for warmth. His eyes, sunken but bright, darted over the pre-dawn landscape of the Kent farm as the sun's first rays were evidenced by a soft glow rising in the distance. He looked delicate, almost like porcelain - though quick and alert - his head in constant motion like a mother bird guarding her nest. He was cloaked by fear and uncertainty - traits which shrouded him like the mist that crept among the trees of the nearby woods in the early morning. Like the fog, he stayed low, his spirit almost visibly hugging the ground as if he half expected that at any moment he'd be torn away from it.

But for all the quiet suffering portrayed on his doll-like visage, he bore remarkable strength. It was undeniable - he was sure-footed, though cautious, and while he looked almost malnourished, he showed no sign of weakness. He moved furtively, but purposefully, and something burned in his eyes behind the pressing weight of whatever life had taken him away.

The life that had evidently pushed him back.

The three traversed from the barn to the house in silent wonder; Martha and Jonathan musing in awe over the return of the boy - almost as sudden and jarring as his first arrival had been, since they had imagined it for so long. But to the young man - the one to whom the Kents should have been strangers - having grown up somewhere beyond what they saw as their meager influence, the wonder was not as encompassing as he'd expected. His journey was quick and deliberate, and though he knew not what he'd find at its end, he'd expected the unexpected. Something unknown, something foreign - something alien to him. But this…

It was familiar.

It was exactly what he'd always had.

A tear slipped over his cheek, remorseful, disappointed. "This is your home?" he asked brokenly.

"And my father's before me, and his before him," Jonathan nodded, though he sensed it brought the boy no comfort. He reached a tentative arm out to the woolen shoulder of the worn sweater, but his fingers were still several inches off their mark when the boy dropped back a step, eyeing the open hand distrustfully. Jonathan withdrew it and offered an apologetic half-nod in its place, pressing his lips into a thin, regretful line.

The boy lifted his face to the house, then turned a slow circle as he surveyed all that he could see in the light of the slowly emerging sun. It didn't make sense; he was so certain he'd seen other things as he traveled, so sure he'd find such things here. Why was I called here, to a place no different from where I was? He made no effort to hide the second tear that slipped from his eye. In truth, it had been years since he even noticed them when they fell; they were so recurrent. Though they were usually more bitter. "Is every place like this?" he wondered aloud, his words as distant as his hope.

Martha smiled warmly and gingerly approached the child - he really was no more than that - and spoke to him for the first time. "No, it isn't," she said serenely. "It's like no place else."

The boy shook his head and faced the sun as it climbed the ladder of clouds in the east. "I came from a place like this. I ran from a place like this. It was the only place I ever saw, and I thought… I thought it would be different outside. I thought it would be different here."

Jonathan was awash with guilt, empathy and anger. Part of him had always known that care of this boy had been charged to him, and each year that passed with the child's absence was marked by Jonathan as yet another year of failure. He longed to embrace him, now that he was finally here - where he always should have been - but dared not reach out again.

Martha dared, however. As deep as Jonathan's pain over the missing boy was, her pain was born of something deeper, more visceral, something carnal and instinctive. Life had left her greatest dream denied, then showed it to her for only a moment before cruelly ripping it away again, leaving a rift in the fabric of her heart that she could not mend. She had not the means. Until now.

"What is your name?" She asked him evenly, in careful measure. She stepped closer.

The boy turned to her and assessed her shrewdly, as if he possessed some faultless means of judging her heart. He seemed to find her in earnest. "Callen."

"Callen," she repeated, closing the distance between them and extending both her arms at a painstaking pace, despite their hunger. When he made no move to retreat, she raised a hand to each side of his face - he flinched, but only for an instant, arrested as he was by the tenderness in her eyes. Her hands held his face, and he himself gripped her forearms, concurrently panicked and placated by the gentle touch.

A lonely tear rolled over his cheek to meet her palm - the long-waiting hand of this mother, who had only now met her son.

"Callen," she said again, her voice constricted by the ardor of her soul. "You will never have to run from here."