e.t. // (not) Clark Kent
summary: You are a scientist that is assigned to a top-secret government facility that houses an extraterrestrial subject to learn more about where he came from. In this he is not Clark Kent or Superman, just Kal-El. Martha and John did not find him, but the government did.
content warning: themes of imprisonment/captivity (for him), experimentation (nonconsensual, words like probing/injecting/sedation through kryptonite mentioned), dehumanization (he is often referred to as alien), emotional neglect against him by others, mild physical contact without consent (no intention to harm you he was just curious), he cannot speak any language, **no mention of anything sexual until the ending note. **not smut
word count: 2k
pairing: female!scientist!reader x Kal-El the last son of Krypton
— — — — — — — — — — — —
He had fallen from the sky nearly twenty-nine years ago, a blur of fire and steel tearing across the Kansas night until it left a crater in the middle of a farmer’s field. The government had arrived before the news cameras or locals had a chance to take more than a handful of grainy photographs. What they found was a craft unlike anything anyone had ever seen. And inside it? An infant.
The reports described the capsule as self-sustaining and it hummed with a strange kind of energy that no Earth technology could match. Carved into its panel systems was a message, damaged and grainy. It was an echo of a voice in a language no human spoke. It was eventually decoded years later, barely traceable but clear enough to identify one thing: they referred to the baby as Kal-El.
You had heard fragments of this story several times throughout your life, but of course it was all chalked up to be a hoax. Deep down, you didn’t want it to be.
And somewhere deep down inside that same part of you was an unrealistic dream to find out the truth.
People even laughed at you when you told them you wanted to study alien life in college. So your description of your goals quickly turned into a blanket description of what you were really chasing after.
First came your undergrad degree in biology. You smiled as your family took pictures at your graduation, saying how proud they were of you that you were finally ready to enter the real world. That was pretty far from the truth.
You jumped right back into school the next semester to earn your masters in linguistic anthropology. When you called it that, people usually just smiled weirdly at you and nodded, so you usually just said you read a lot about the way people communicate.
You were psyched out of your mind when you landed a rare PhD student position through a corporation called Star Labs. It was boring work to say the least, just five long years of entering information into analogs about various samples from Mars and Venus.
But you never pulled yourself away from the niche obsession you had about life outside of earth. After your long days at the lab, you couldn’t help yourself by indulging in the most ridiculous research, if you could even call it that. You scanned places like Reddit and Facebook for the crazy conspiracies people rambled on about. You half-smiled at people’s theories about Area 51, or the way the had spotted extraterrestrial objects in the sky. You were very educated and had a solid sense of reality, but even after all these years, you couldn’t shake the thrill that these theories brought you.
You eventually completed your dissertation. It was on challenges of communicating with nonhuman intelligence. The committee that examined your thesis were definitely thrown for a loop over it, but by the grace of all things good you passed.
Your family had given up on the idea of you finding a career a while ago. Because who did they know who made a career out of studying aliens? She’s too busy looking up at the sky for UFO’s your brother would tease.
Even you were surprised the day you received the letter in the mail. One of the faculty members who had examined your final dissertation had passed your information along to someone who eventually passed it on to someone else in the government.
At first, you thought it was a joke. Some prank that someone you knew was playing on you. The envelope was sealed and marked with a government insignia. You thought it was a really cruel joke all the way until the point you were sitting in the briefing. Then came the nondisclosure agreements, and you felt your hand was going to fall off from all the papers you had signed. The last paper you received was the contract. It contained all of the information about your assignment, where you would be located to, and what you would be doing. You could barely finish the fine print before you were signing it.
And before you could even consider it a joke anymore, you were being transported from your new living quarters to the one and only Area 51 base. The security check was lengthy, and you were exhausted from just that even though your day hadn’t even started yet.
You were greeted by a man by the name of Dr. Holt. He was the one assigned to show you to your work space and brief you. After giving you a tour of the office area of the facility, he hands you a file.
You’d expected the file to paint him as some kind of monster, something terrifying. And in a way, it did. The earliest reports told of strength beyond human limits. Notes of failed attempts to pierce his skin with scalpels and light that burned from his eyes when he grew agitated with the way someone was touching him. He was contained before he could speak a single word, never learning what it meant to be anything other than something to be watched.
His world became a cell. Bright white walls infused with something called kryptonite. It was carefully measured to be just enough to dull him and keep him tethered, but not enough to kill him. His interactions were limited to guards and scientists in lab coats who never spoke to him. They measured him. Prodded. Observed. But they never looked at him.
Until now.
The program had shifted. You weren’t told exactly why, only that the department you were working under wanted more than physical data. They wanted to understand him. His culture, his language, the scraps of history buried inside his head. And so they brought in people like you, researchers who specialized in anything alien.
You studied the file for days. You read over it at least a hundred times. “Subject 001: Kal-El. Extraterrestrial. Male. Origin: Krypton”. Added to the files were years worth of notes, interactions, tests. Some of them seemingly unethical. There were even pictures of the original crash site along with a small stone like item with what looked like an ‘S’ carved into it.
It had now been a week since you arrived and the department deemed you ready for engagement. You followed Dr. Holt through the many chambers and vaults it took to get to where they kept him.
Dr. Holt speaks casually as you follow him.
“Over here is where we keep our protective equipment. You may put it on now if you would like to,” he tells you, gesturing to what looked like a row of hazmat suits on the wall.
“His file mentioned he tested negative for any human disease,” you say, just thinking out loud. He puts his hands up in a way that seems like he’s telling you he’s just doing his job.
“Very well. You’re not required to wear it,” he says simply. He stops in front of a case that has a code on it. He quickly types it in as the small door opens. He takes out a vile with a sharp needle covered by a plastic cap and holds it out to you. It was filled with a bright green liquid.
“You will be needing this. Keep it in your pocket at all times. These days, he is pretty weak from the Kryptonite, but you might need to inject him with it if you are attacked.”
You slowly reach out and take it, looking down at it before putting it into the pocket of your lab coat.
“Ready?” He asks.
Your eyes snap up to him in surprise. “That’s it?” You ask.
The man just chuckles as he shakes his head. “What, did you think you were coming here to receive training like in the movies? The alien doesn’t speak. He will never speak. The government just seems to like pouring money into useless research. Just go in there and let him get used to you.”
You are a little taken back by his words as your brow furrows slightly. But before you can even reply, he has started the process to open the door with a code, key scan, and fingerprint. The vault opens with a loud beep as you are ushered inside, the door pulled closed behind you.
You blink as bright white light floods your vision. As they adjusted you noticed the walls were in fact laced with a faint, green shimmer.
But none of that mattered once you saw him.
He sat against the wall as his legs seem to bend like he had learned to fold himself smaller inside these walls. His dark hair hung in loose waves over his forehead, and when he lifted his head at the sound of the door, the startling blue of his eyes almost made you forget to breathe.
For a moment, he just stared. Wide-eyed. Unblinking. You’d read about his fascination with people, but reading wasn’t the same as being the subject of it. He looked at you like you weren’t just another uniform, another scientist passing through. His expression softened, and for the first time you wondered if anyone had ever smiled at him in here.
So you decided to, because why not? It would probably be easier to gain some information through the use of human mannerisms. Maybe he would eventually be able to mimic them.
Your lips curved into a small, warm smile. You were nervous, but it was still genuine.
And something in him shifted. He watched in fascination as you decided to do what you would with any other person.
“Hello, I’m-“ but you can’t even get out your name as he has now crossed the small room to make a straight shot to you. His hand grips your face, somewhat roughly as his fingers push against your lips. His wide eyes stare down at you as he feels a wave of disappointment as the words stop coming from your mouth.
You are startled, to say the least. And you were almost certain that there would be someone just waiting to tranquilize him for making such sudden movements, but you realize no one is probably even watching.
For Kal-El, no one had ever spoken to him. Sure, he had heard English from the scientists around him who muttered terms as they jotted findings in their notes. They spoke amongst each other, but he couldn’t understand what they were saying.
Now, he needed to know what you were saying as he naively touched your mouth, wondering how you did that.
Your now trembling hand finds his wrist as you try to pull his hand down. It isn’t until a small sound of discomfort leaves your throat that he drops it. He seems horrified, recognizing the sound as the one he has made many times before as he was prodded and injected with the green stuff he had grown to fear.
Your breathing is slightly heavier as you look up at him, recognizing his facial expression as one of guilt?
So he is smart. And emotionally intelligent, which is more than you can say for most humans you know.
You smile softly again, wanting to calm him.
“It’s okay,” you speak again. “You like to listen to someone speak?”
You know he couldn’t understand. Not yet, at least. You just watch as his face turns to that wide eyed fascination again, but he doesn’t touch you.
You feel absolutely out of your element. You had prepared for years for something like this, except you always understood something like this didn’t exist. Maybe that’s what made it seem appealing.
But now here you were, face to face with what was supposed to be an alien but looked exactly like a man.
Your eyes glanced over his chamber as you tried to find something to do, something to talk about. Is there nothing here they leave him to help keep him entertained?
Your eyes meet him again to see he is still looking down at you.
*You can read part 2 here!
— — — — — — — — — — — —
notes: YOO when I tell you this is literally my baby. I do want to continue it because I love it so much, but I don’t know how I want it to go. I would love to turn it into some wild smut where their sex goes crazy (bc I’m a freak at heart) but I also like the idea of a nice lil slow burn of them learning each other. Please tell me what you think!!
Also, I worked really hard on this and I did do quite a bit of research. I had to look up a lot of things about the reader’s education and also some of the extraterrestrial stuff, so please don’t judge too harshly if something didn’t make sense. But tysm for reading ily muahhh
