Superman Training

Once upon a time, two cousins spent a whole day learning together.

The invitation came on a Friday evening, delivered by Superman himself — Clark Kent by day, reporter for the Daily Planet in Metropolis, who appeared at Kara's window still wearing his work tie under the cape.

"Tomorrow," he said. "Kansas. Martha's expecting us for lunch."

The Kent farm sat in the middle of miles of flat land, the kind of flat that seemed impossible until you were standing in it and could watch a rainstorm approaching from ten miles away. It was a white farmhouse with a red barn and fields that stretched in every direction, and Martha Kent was waiting on the porch when they landed.

She was a small woman with silver hair and kind eyes, and she looked at Kara for a long moment before pulling her into a hug. "Welcome," she said simply. "You must be hungry."

She was.

They ate at the kitchen table — real Kansas sandwiches, enormous and stuffed with everything — and Martha told a story about Clark at twelve accidentally pulling the barn door off its hinges while trying to be gentle. Clark looked at the ceiling. Kara laughed until she was out of breath.

Then the lessons began.

Superman had thought carefully about what to teach first. He was a journalist by training and a hero by practice, and his teaching style was methodical — he began with the things that would prevent the most accidents.

Flight altitude: commercial aircraft flew between thirty thousand and forty thousand feet. Those lanes were off limits. Always. There were instruments and schedules and pilots who could not see a Kryptonian coming at speed.

Sonic boom control: at supersonic speed, the air pressure waves of flight produced a shock wave that rattled windows and frightened animals and woke up sleeping children across fifty miles. There was a technique — a precise tensing of every muscle in the body simultaneously, creating a kind of pressure shield — that suppressed the boom and let you fly at full speed quietly. It took six tries before Kara got it. On the seventh attempt, she crossed the Kansas sky at twice the speed of sound and the farmhouse below stayed perfectly silent.

Martha looked up through the kitchen window and gave a small approving nod.

X-ray vision was next. Superman sat Kara down in the east pasture and explained it carefully. Before you learned the control, he said, the vision simply went: through walls, through floors, through earth. You saw plumbing and wire and everything that things were made of all at once, and it was — he paused — a lot. He had spent a week in Smallville at age thirteen seeing directly through every single wall in the school and it had been deeply uncomfortable.

The mental technique was like choosing which window to look through. Kara practiced for two hours: scanning the farmhouse for one specific thing — a chair, a book, a particular cup on a shelf — without letting her vision spread to everything else. By the end she could aim it like a flashlight.

Then Superman led her to a remote stretch of Wyoming, a wide red-rock valley where the nearest person was fifty miles away.

They sparred.

The first round lasted approximately eleven seconds. Kara came in fast and direct — WHOOOOSH — every bit of her speed behind her, and Superman stepped aside at the last second and guided her momentum into the sandstone wall of the valley.

KRAANG.

She came out of the rock in a small cloud of red dust.

"You telegraph your approach," he said pleasantly.

Kara shook sandstone out of her hair. "I almost had you."

"You did not almost have me."

"Let's go again."

The second round lasted nearly four minutes, which surprised them both. Kara had spent the interval between rounds thinking about his technique — the pivot, the shoulder angle, the way he used momentum rather than blocking it — and she changed her approach entirely. She varied her angles. She used misdirection, faking one direction and going another. She came at him from below on the third pass, which he was not expecting, and for one genuine second he was off-balance and scrambling.

He recovered. She did not win.

But he looked at her differently after, with something in his expression that was very close to respect.

"You have good instincts," he said.

"Thank you," said Kara. She knew he meant it.

They sat on the rocks in the Wyoming afternoon and Superman said the harder thing: the thing he had been working up to all day.

Being invulnerable, he said, meant something that took a long time to fully understand. When an ordinary person came to a danger they couldn't face, they could turn away. They could say "I can't help, I'm sorry," and leave, and that was a reasonable and human thing. A Kryptonian didn't have that door.

When there was a burning building, you went in. When there was a person in the path of something terrible, you stood between them and it. Not because anyone was making you. Because you were the one who could, and that meant you were the one who must.

He said he had spent years finding the balance. Being needed everywhere and being one person. He said — and Kara noticed that he said this quietly, like he wasn't sure he should — he said he still hadn't fully figured it out.

Kara looked at him.

"That's the most honest thing you've said all day," she told him.

He smiled at that. A real smile, small and tired and genuine.

They flew back to the Kent farm for the last of Martha's cookies.

Kara flew home to Midvale in the early evening, three cookies wrapped in a napkin in her cape pocket — the cape pocket was not designed for cookies, but it managed — and the long flat Kansas landscape turning gold below her.

Her cousin had been a stranger her whole life. He had grown up while she was traveling through space, and she had arrived to find someone she loved who she did not know yet. Today she had started to know him.

He was the one other person in the universe who understood exactly what it felt like to look at Earth's sky and feel it was home.

That was worth more than any training.

She was still smiling when she landed in Midvale.