Last Son
He floated, turning slowly, watching the distant stars wheel about, and he tried to remember what breathing was like.
The radiation of the long ago supernova had faded, even from his sight, and he could hear its ions reacting two galaxies away as its great dying scream was heard in the blank darkness beyond the remains of the solar system. The last of the sun’s energy was stored in him, as he had bathed in its death, even as it tore the planet he had known as home, and the people he called friends, to dust beneath his feet.
He played at watching X-rays for a while, peered at the tiny intricacies of scant molecules, and then smiled as the reflex of breath came back to him. He took in a deep lungful of superheated vacuum and held it. Breath he didn’t need.
For thousands of years, under hundreds of names, while those he knew and loved bloomed and fell like autumn leaves around him, he had pretended to be one of them, this stranger from another world. And now, when the ability to breathe was denied him by the cold darkness of space, he found that simply breathing was another pretence he no longer had to endure.
He breathed out, and watched the motes of matter he exhaled. He cast his vision about, counting the blasted dust and particles around him. There was enough, he thought, to make another world, given time. He thought perhaps he might start that tomorrow; to move about the system and gather back the broken parts of home, heat them with his gaze and watch them form again the gravity that held a world together.
Tomorrow, then, he would begin. He had nothing left but time, after all.
Alone, he closed his eyes, the last son of two sundered worlds, and floated in the dust cloud of a shattered home, and he tried, at last, to dream.
Nicolas Papaconstantinou
Oh, lovely.
It’s almost hard to believe that you crafted that one in the time provided, sir. It’s neat and a great homage, without, you know, getting us into any trouble.
It reminds me a little of an old Dave Gibbons/Ted Mckeever collaboration, but I like the image of your character slowly rotating in space a lot!
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Matthew Hartwell
I always feel bad for Supes. Beautiful melancholy, Andrew.
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Matthew Hartwell
Have you ever read the Garth Ennis Hitman issue where Tommy and Supes bond? It’s got this sort of feel and tone. Which is to say, this is up there with one of the best single issues of comics I’ve ever encountered.
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Cyn
Lovely indeed.
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Matthew Sonter
Hi Andrew, you evoke the mood here very effectively, and the detail of the breathing reflex fits in really well. And I dig the Superman as creator angle too.
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Andrew Cheverton
Thanks, all – I’m glad you liked this one. The concept of Superman literally outliving the end of the world was where this started; the notion that he could also put the world back together grew out of the writing of the fifth paragraph. It’s a better idea, I think, and one I’d have liked to expand upon, given more time.
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Budgie
As a rule, I don’t read anyone else’s until I’ve written mine, simply because I don’t want to take the chance that I’ll end up unwittingly being ;influenced’ by someone else’s take.
(Did that the second week and had to kill a story idea because in different words, I’d had EXACTLY the same idea as someone else.)
This time though, I love how we’ve both taken the same basic idea (a LONG lived hero) and spun it off in entirely different directions…
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Andrew Cheverton
Budgie – I sometimes think that the best way to write a long-lived character is to find some angle that’s not been done before, if there is one.
Matthew/Nick – you know, I have both those comics, and I’m going to dig them out and read them again later.
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