They named him on a Tuesday.
Not because anything demanded it, but because silence, after a while, starts to feel like avoidance.
The storm had passed during the night, leaving the fields soaked and flattened in places, corn bent low as if it had tried to kneel and failed. The woman stood at the kitchen sink, staring out the window while the kettle screamed itself hoarse behind her. The man sat at the table with his hands folded, eyes fixed on the small shape sleeping in the basket they'd set near the stove.
The child did not move.
He hadn't cried since they'd brought him inside. Not when they dried him off. Not when the thunder cracked so hard it rattled the cabinets. Not even when the woman startled and nearly dropped him the first time she lifted him.
He breathed steadily. Calm. As if panic were a language he simply didn't speak.
"We can't keep calling him niño," the woman said finally, switching the kettle off without pouring the water. "Or the boy."
The man nodded once. "People will ask."
"People always ask," she said. "A name gives them something to hold on to. Keeps them from holding on to us."
That was the truth of it.
They had learned, over years of living quietly, that the right kind of normal could protect almost anything.
They tried a few names. The woman spoke them softly, testing how they sounded in the small kitchen. Some felt too sharp. Some too heavy. A few carried memories they weren't ready to reopen.
The man watched the child as they talked, waiting for… something. A flinch. A sound. A sign.
Nothing.
"He looks like a Daniel," the woman said at last.
The man repeated it. "Daniel."
The word fit easily in his mouth. Solid. Ordinary. The kind of name that belonged to a hundred boys in a hundred towns, written on lunchboxes and school forms and birthday cards. A name that never asked anyone to look twice.
They leaned closer to the basket.
"Daniel," the woman said again, a little firmer now.
The child's eyes opened.
Not wide. Not startled.
Just open.
Dark eyes, clear and steady, met hers without fear. Without confusion. He did not cry. Did not reach out. He simply looked at her, as if the sound had completed something that had already been waiting.
"Well," the man said quietly, a tension in his chest easing. "Guess that settles it."
And so he became Daniel.
Later, when paperwork was filled out and questions were answered with careful half-truths, he would take their last name too. It slid into place without ceremony, as if it had always been meant to.
Daniel Reyes.
A name that belonged anywhere.
Daniel learned the world the way most children do—through repetition.
Through the slam of the screen door when the wind caught it just right. Through the creak of the third stair that everyone forgot about until it complained. Through the low murmur of the radio in the evenings, voices talking about places far away like they were just down the road.
Earth announced itself constantly.
It did not wait for permission.
He learned to walk early, but not so early that it drew comment. Learned to speak late, but clearly, carefully, as if words were tools meant to be used sparingly. When he fell, he stood up too fast. When he scraped his knee, the blood stopped almost immediately.
The woman noticed.
The man noticed.
They said nothing.
Fear, when it came, arrived quietly and stayed quiet. They learned to live with it the way people live with bad weather—by closing windows, reinforcing habits, pretending it wasn't there until it passed.
Daniel grew.
The sun mattered. He did not know why at first, only that yellow light settled into him differently than shadow did. It didn't excite him. It didn't overwhelm him.
It completed him.
He felt stronger each day, not in leaps but in increments so small they felt like thoughts finishing themselves. Every second offered the same choice, calm and persistent.
More.
He did not take it.
Not because he couldn't.
Because he was watching.
He watched how people broke in quiet ways. How pride hurt more than hunger. How kindness often came disguised as routine. He learned that miracles were dangerous things—not because they failed, but because they drew eyes.
The first time he understood restraint wasn't during some grand moment.
It was in the barn.
The fence post came loose too easily in his hands, sliding free of the mud with a sound that didn't belong to effort. The man froze, stared, then looked at Daniel—not with fear, but with calculation sharpened by love.
They didn't speak of it.
That night, the man said only one thing, standing in the doorway of Daniel's room.
"You don't have to be everything you can be," he said quietly. "Just be good."
Daniel lay awake long after the house fell silent, staring at the ceiling, listening to the way the world breathed around him.
Good, he learned, was not weakness.
It was control.
Years passed. The town changed. Faces aged. Daniel didn't—not in ways that mattered. When questions sharpened and looks lingered too long, he understood what had to happen before anyone said it aloud.
He left the way he'd learned to do everything else.
Quietly.
With gratitude.
With a name that let him pass unnoticed into the wider world.
By the time another Kryptonian child would one day arrive beneath the same yellow sun, Daniel Reyes had already learned the hardest lesson of all:
That being early meant learning patience before power.
And that the right name could buy you time.