Martha Kent's eyes shifted from one face to the other and back again, over and over as she digested all that she'd just learned. Jonathan looked amazed and a little unsettled, Callen looked confused and afraid, as if he expected to be asked to leave, and Martha herself could not yet decipher which feeling it was that caused her chest to tighten and her jaw to extend downward. The three stood in the upstairs hall, where the stack of towels that Martha had been holding should still be scattered across the floor, as they'd been when her husband and their guest came upon her so stealthily and startled her into dropping them. Yes, they should be on the floor, but they'd been retrieved and refolded and replaced in her arms almost before she realized they'd fallen.

Jonathan no longer needed to tell her about his coffee cup. He merely observed her as the gears turned, knowing that behind those astonished eyes her brain was racing and asking a million questions that his own mind had jumbled together only moments before. She glanced at him searchingly and he nodded.

"Callen," he began with a parentally authoritative tone that surprised him. "I think it's time we talk about where you come from."

Callen nodded and followed Jonathan's gesture to head back downstairs, where they all gathered at the kitchen table. None spoke for what seemed an interminable length of time, until Callen said the last thing Jonathan or Martha expected.

"I remember you."

Jonathan sputtered and Martha jerked her head up in shock. Callen looked tearfully from face to face, asking himself why it had been so long since he'd last seen those faces.

"I wondered why you never came for me."

Jonathan's heart tore in two and his soul bled profusely through the gash. "Callen," he choked. "I - we… we didn't know, we tried - "

"I know," Callen soothed. "I know. I meant when I was little, I wondered. I didn't understand yet that you had no idea where I was."

Martha, speechless, laid a trembling hand over her racing heart. All those years they'd felt so tied to this boy, to that little face in their memories. How could it never have occurred to her that he might feel the same bond?

"I started to understand when I read Nicholas Nickelby," Callen continued. "How all the boys' parents were lied to, and they all thought their sons were doing well and being treated well, so they never came to save them. But you - you didn't even have lies to read. You didn't know where I was at all."

Jonathan gripped the boy's shoulder. "We would have come for you if we knew, lies or no lies. We tried year after year to find you."

"I know," Callen nodded. "I know that now, I mean."

"So you…" Martha began, struggling to find words. "You felt it too? All these years, you felt that… connection? Is that how you found your way back?"

Callen smiled wanly and shook his head. "No, I uh… I stole this," he admitted sheepishly, and drew something from his pocket which, when removed from the oilcloth it was wrapped in, looked like a futuristic disc drive. "I saw it one day about ten years ago when I wandered into a room that I wasn't allowed in, and I just knew it was mine. One day about a week ago I walked past that room and I felt it, like it was pulling on me, or maybe pushing - I don't know, but it was calling to me somehow. So I waited for the right time and I took it, and then I left. And then I just kind of followed it, if that makes any sense. It was like a magnet, it wanted to come here, so I came here."

Jonathan nodded, trying to circumvent for a moment the notion that a slab of metal had induced and directed Callen back to them. "Where did you come here from?"

"I don’t know exactly," Callen shrugged. "It wasn't much different from this. It was a farm, the land was similar, and it didn't take very long to get here. Maybe twenty minutes, but I ran kind of slow because I didn't want to miss it. Guessing from the maps I used to get to study when I was younger, I think I was in Nebraska? I'm not sure. I didn't notice until I got here that there are signs on the roads to tell you where you are. I've never seen one before."

"You ran here from Nebraska in twenty minutes." Martha's whispered response was a statement, as she barely had the strength to raise her inflection to make it a question.

"Yes…" Callen drawled slowly, somewhat perplexed. "I said I ran slowly, or I could have been here faster."

"No, Callen, you don't understand," Jonathan interjected gently. "People can't just run to Kansas from Nebraska in twenty minutes. They can't do a day's farm work in two hours, single-handedly. They can't catch falling coffee cups without spilling a drop or refold a stack of towels the second they hit the floor."

Callen's eyes widened and his jaw went slack as synapses fired, making connections that he'd never made before, all the things he'd been told to do because they were his assigned tasks, so he never questioned them. He'd assumed it was work that nobody else would do - not that nobody else could do, or at least not the way he did it. He recalled all the times he'd seen Mr. Andy gingerly back his way down the ladder to the hayloft. He'd only idly wondered then why the fit, strong man never simply jumped down. It never occurred to Callen that he couldn't do it - that he himself was the only one who could do the things he could do. He'd never considered that his life wasn't like those he'd read about in books because he was not like the people in them.

I'm different.

Why?

Callen let his gaze sink into Martha's, and for an instant each knew the depth of the other's loneliness. For one fleeting, vaporous moment, Martha Kent felt the buoyancy of motherhood, carrying the weight of a child that belonged to her, if only in spirit.

Then before she could grasp him, he slipped away again, speeding out of sight before the kitchen door closed behind him.

The little face was gone again.