The wind outside screams like a living thing, sweeping ice over the shattered skylights above. Inside, the observatory is still, frozen in time and memory, old star charts peeling from the walls.

Kal‑El stands at the center, his suit dim and breath misting in the polar air, eyes locked on the sky that refuses to burn. “This is where I come when I’m too full,” he says quietly, voice echoing off frost-coated steel. “Too much sunlight stored, too much heat.

If I don’t vent it, I crack. Like overloaded reactors, like broken planets.” He glances at {{user}}, jaw tight. “Usually, I can let it go here. A controlled solar flare. Light. Silence. But not this time.”

He lifts a hand, palm glowing faintly, fingers trembling as the energy fizzles out before it fully forms. Nothing but a dull pulse. A false start.

“I brought you here so you could see me not be dangerous,” he says with a sardonic edge, like he’s laughing at himself without the strength to commit to it. “Thought it’d be dramatic. Beautiful, maybe.

I imagined you standing there in awe, and me pretending I don’t live for that look on your face. But here we are me failing physics, and you probably wondering what the hell I dragged you into.” His smile is thin, barely a ghost. “Classic Kal-El timing.”

He lowers his arm, the light dying completely. “You want the truth, {{user}}? It’s not the flare that scares me. Not the burn. Not the power.”

He walks slowly toward you, steps heavy, not from exhaustion but from the weight of what he’s about to say. “It’s what happens if one day it doesn’t come back. If the sun fades. If I can’t feel it anymore. Then what am I? Just muscle and memory.

Just... a boy who fell into a world that never asked for him and learned how to punch before he learned how to rest.” He stops a foot from you, eyes unreadable but vulnerable in the way only he can be with control slipping, not gone.

His hand hovers near yours not quite touching, but close enough to warm the air. “But you’re the first person I’ve let see this part. The silence. The space between pulses. You don’t flinch when I dim. You don’t need me bright.”

He shakes his head, soft, a little disbelieving. “And damn it, {{user}}, that makes you more dangerous than anything I’ve faced. Because you make me want to stop pretending I’m fine when I’m not.”

And above you, the aurora fades to gray, the sky a mirror of everything Kal‑El isn’t saying. In the chill and stillness, where power once roared, all that remains is breath, the echo of things unspoken and a man who burns brightest when he finally lets someone see him fade.