*11*
James’s admonition gives Lois the strength to rise to her feet, to take just enough heavy, lethargic steps to reach her bed (the guest bed, but she doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon to make room for any other guests so it might as well be hers). She realizes, as soon as she crumples onto the edge of the bed, that she didn’t close the door behind her. Not that it matters; why should she be granted a modicum of privacy when she’s stolen every bit of that same luxury from the Kents? Besides, she finds that she likes the shaft of artificial light stamped across the dark room, a straight, narrow golden beam contrasted sharply against the more diffused, more abstract, silvered light creeping in along the edges of the window. That golden rectangle looks like a path. A road clearly marked. An arrow pointing the way she should go, giving her direction and purpose and hope.
“We know that Clark is important…and we can convince CK of it,” James had said. “What will you do to bring Clark Kent back?”
“Anything,” she’d replied, and now that promise thrums in her like strength, like resolve, like purpose and adrenaline and a reason to keep going. It no longer feels as if she is held together by an invisible body-cast. Instead, she feels as if James (not Jimmy, as she’s been so stubbornly pretending he still is, but James) has reached inside her (with surgeon’s hands; with a blazing trumpet’s call to arms) and threaded her through with silken titanium lines, with artificial bones, pumping her heart full of infused blood so that she is borne up under the power of what lies beneath her skin.
A promise (to fix what she broke).
A vow (to resurrect the man she killed).
A common purpose (to bring back hope and light and sound to the world; to her; to him).
And she thinks that she should be filled with restless energy, with urgent impatience to accomplish this impossible end. But she is not filled with energy. She is not ready to take on the world and wrestle with impossibilities, to battle death and misconceptions and her own guilt. She feels, instead, as drained as if she really has just emerged from surgery and now sedatives are pulling her down into a dark, echoing well. She feels…weary and empty (but a good empty, like a wasted victim finally cleansed and emptied and stripped of a debilitating disease).
“I am going to help you, Clark,” she murmurs into the still air (a reaffirmation of the sacred oath she has made, the order she has just bound herself to), staring at that golden shaft (that promising path). And she wonders if he can hear her. If, somewhere (between rescues as he hovers in the air and listens for heartbeats on the verge of stopping; shoulder-deep in helpless people so in need of a hero that they latch onto him with no care of the price), he hears that whisper. If he stops whatever he is doing and tilts his head in her direction and shivers beneath all the implications of her whispered vow. She hopes, if he does hear her, that it makes his burdens lighter. Hopes he knows she is truly sorry (the remembered taste of peppermint burns on her tongue like fire) and that she will do anything to make amends. She hopes he is happy to know she is here, waiting for him.
She fears that she hopes in vain.
She fears that he feels only a cold foreboding, a shiver down his spine that makes it harder for him to focus on the impossible task he has set himself of saving the world one victim at a time.
And with these dual images stark in her mind, these twin thoughts of Clark’s reactions, she succumbs to the exhaustion rampaging through her unchecked.
And for the first time since her terrible crime, Lois feels, when she wakes up to a hand on her shoulder, actually rested. She feels as if sleep has finally been able to reach past the heavy, cloying barriers isolating her, has reached past and left them as rubble in its wake and swept away her weariness like cobwebs and dust. So she isn’t scared or startled or confused when she opens her eyes and rolls to her back and sees Martha Kent looking down at her, expression shadowed in the dim light.
“Lois?” Martha asks. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” Lois says, and though her voice is rusty, she smiles to know she isn’t lying. She isn’t well, isn’t wonderful, isn’t good as new, but she is fine. She is healing, has repented and seen how to make amends for all the wrongs she’s done, and that is more progress than she made in all those weeks and months sitting so listless and frail at her desk.
“Are you sure? You’ve slept through breakfast and lunch. Are you…” And here, surprisingly, a hint of uncertainty slithers through Martha’s normally unwavering voice. “Are you sick? Do you need a doctor?”
Oh.
No wonder, Lois thinks (with a swift spurt of shame), Martha sounds so worried. No wonder she hesitated before asking this fateful question. After all, Lois Lane going to a doctor in a strange city (she still does not know the name of it) so far from Metropolis can only attract attention. Lois Lane (the reporter who exposed Superman, who discovered his secret before anyone else did, who many still believe to have an inside track on him) showing up on the West Coast would draw so many questions. So much media attention. A multitude of people flocking after her in the belief that she might have uncovered a new world-shaking secret (and she has, one that has done more than shake it, has changed it altogether, but she is jealous of this secret and does not intend to share it with anyone).
Lois Lane here would mean the Kents and James will have to pick up and leave (pack up their scant pictures and the crumbs of their life that they’ve gathered around themselves to dress up the emptiness of their future; pack it all up and leave even more of themselves behind in the process). Start all over again somewhere else. Assume different names. Find a new suite of rooms. Hope this newest setback doesn’t rip away the last few fragments of Clark remaining to them.
Lois realizes all this in an instant (a blinding flash of shock and guilt and terrible responsibility, like phantom pains), and she doesn’t feel fine anymore. She feels awful. She feels lower than the criminals she used to spend so much time seeing locked behind bars. She feels as if she is bathing in peppermint shame.
“I’m fine,” she says again, quickly (the lie returning to the phrase so that she wonders if she will ever again be able to tell the truth). She sits up in bed to prove it, to reassure Martha that she will not be stealing this life, too, from them. “Really. I just…I didn’t get to sleep until it was already light outside.”
“Ah.” The relief that lightens Martha’s voice is enough to make Lois’s tension ease, ever so slightly. “That’ll do it, I suppose. I’m an early bird myself--comes from living on a farm.”
Lois forces a smile, aware that Martha can see her clearly even though the light at Martha’s back (that golden pathway turned into a blinding halo silhouetting this humble, admirable woman) means she can’t read Martha’s expression. “I’m sure. Yet another reason the country life has never appealed to me.”
But that, apparently, is the wrong thing to say (the wrong reminder, of Smallville and green rocks and burning barns), because Martha stiffens slightly (and Lois begins to think that she should adopt Superman’s silence for her own because words, written or spoken, do too much to harm and wound and destroy). “Well,” the older woman says, “I didn’t mean to intrude. But the door was left open.”
“Right. I…forgot to close it. But it’s fine, really. I should be up by now anyway.”
“There’s food in the kitchen,” Martha says, and she leaves, pointedly closing the door behind her.
Slowly (but purposely too, because she cannot forget the sacred trust James has extended to her, inducted her into), Lois drifts to her feet and over to the closet where her few remaining outfits are stored. She reaches out and chooses (carefully, but numbly, without allowing herself to think too hard on it and lose her tiny burst of momentum) an outfit. Coordinated and nice and colorful, purples and tans, flattering (or at least it was before she stopped caring about eating) and comfortable (or at least it would be if she could focus on such trivialities). It’s been so long since she’s taken any special care with her appearance (she tries not to remember the dress she’d seen displayed at that Smallville Corn Festival, the temptation to buy it that she’d ignored in favor of sneaking into Trask’s camp), and it feels alien, anathema to her, that she should worry about how she looks when a few strokes with a hairbrush and a sprinkling of perfume and a clean outfit cannot possibly distract from all the ruin she’s caused.
For Clark, she reminds herself. She cannot expect him to care about himself if she will not bother to care about herself either. Perry sent her to save Superman in order to make up for destroying Clark, but Lois doesn’t want to save Superman (or not Superman only), not when it is Clark Kent she wants to revive and rejuvenate and restore.
When she emerges from her room into the amber-lit living area, there’s no sign of Martha, James is still gone, and only Jonathan is present. He looks up from the cupboard he’s digging through beneath the counter, and offers her a smile. “Good morning, Lois,” he offers, and Lois has to stifle the sudden, surprising urge to hug the sturdy man, to try to soak in some of that strength and forgiveness like Clark soaks in sunlight.
Trembling with the force of denying that urge, she offers a shaky smile. “More like afternoon, I think.”
“Morning for you,” he says with a wink (and if his joviality is a bit forced, Lois doesn’t let herself dwell on it). “Breakfast? Martha left out some bread and honey, and I’m sure I can rustle up some juice for you.”
Opening her mouth to refuse, Lois stops and reconsiders. “All right,” she decides. “That sounds good.”
She’s grateful for Jonathan’s gruff warmth, his steady presence, as she makes and eats a few slices of honeyed toast (taken aback by the pleasure of the taste, so unlike peppermint, exploding on her tongue) and drinks a glass of orange juice (and she finds she doesn’t mind the strong citrus flavor this time).
“So, uh…what were you looking for in the cupboard?” she asks when her breakfast is winding down (when she starts to be afraid that Jonathan will leave her all alone in the draining silence).
“Oh.” Jonathan smiles and holds up a small hand spade. “I try to keep most of my tools up by the garden, but sometimes Martha appropriates a few pieces for her art projects.”
Lois decides not to even try to puzzle out how a spade could be used for art. “Your garden?” she asks.
“Just a small one, more for enjoyment than necessity, but I take it seriously anyway.” Jonathan stops and regards her a moment, then offers, “Would you like to help me?”
It’s every bit as much an inclusion, an induction, as James’s call to arms, she thinks. Every bit as daring and risky as Clark allowing her to come here at all. She halfway expects another load of responsibility to bow her shoulders, another layer of pressure to crush her, but none comes. Instead, she feels as if Jonathan has added more titanium threads to hold her together, poured more steel into her bones, more fire into her blood.
“Yes,” she whispers (so she will not shout). “I’d love to help. Thank you.”
“Everybody needs a second chance at one point or another,” he murmurs, and then he turns and leads her to the elevator.
A tremor of something (fear or uncertainty or maybe just an awareness of the poignancy of this moment, the first time she’s left the suite) surges and trembles inside her. She watches her feet, stares as they pass they threshold of the elevator, one after the other, then looks up to see the double doors slide closed on the setting (bare and homey; scant and comforting) that’s grown so familiar to her. And even though she knows Jonathan would simply tell her to leave if he were kicking her out, she nonetheless feels an instant of loss, of gaping emptiness at losing the little ground she’s managed to gain.
“James made sure we could set aside a bit of the roof for a garden,” Jonathan confides as the red numbers tick upward. He pretends not to notice her thinly veiled panic. “He’s worried I’ll get too depressed if I have nothing to do. And,” he leans closer to her, lowers his voice, mischief sparking in his voice, “don’t tell him, but he’s probably right. A small garden is nothing at all like running a farm, but it’s a fun hobby. And a very nice thought.”
“Is James the one who finds you places to live?” The question is out before she can think better of it (before she remembers what he will think to hear her asking such things) and bite it back.
But Jonathan doesn’t give any hint that he’s nervous about her line of questioning.
“He does what he can for us,” he replies, and it isn’t a full answer, but she doesn’t care (it’s so much better than cold silence).
When the elevator comes to a stop, it opens to a top floor, a hallway and a door leading to stairs that in turn lead out to the roof of a skyscraper she only vaguely remembers seeing from the outside. Lois has chased a handful of people onto rooftops, has set up surveillance on dozens of concrete stretches, but she has never seen a roof like this. It’s green and lush, layered in rows upon rows of ankle-high sprouts, several different kinds, stretching out to every side of her. The concrete is hidden beneath plants, the emerald of life back-dropped by sapphire skies, a familiar scene turned magical.
“This is a small garden?” Lois blurts as she steps out onto the only concrete in sight, a straight gray pathway leading to branch out between the rows of greenery, which are, she notices, set in deep, long boxes of wood--planters of a size that make her blink and gape. Some paths have a sheen of water spraying out from nozzles set along the edges of the planters, sparkling like diamonds in the undiluted carnelian and topaz sun.
Jonathan’s deep chuckle reverberates just behind her, and when she looks back at him, she sees the layer of soft pride coating his features. “We might have gone a bit overboard,” he admits, then grins. “But it keeps me busy and out of Martha’s hair. I know it’s more than we can eat ourselves, but Martha already has plans to sell most of it at various farmer’s markets, and to give some of it away to a few shelters she volunteers at. We’ll see how that turns out.”
Questions leap to her mouth, crowding there like anxious informants, but fortunately, her lack of practice in indulging her curiosity gives her the second she needs to realize the answers herself.
“We’ll see how that turns out,” he said, because they cannot plan too far ahead. Because they have to be careful in what they decide to do and what markets they attend and where they might be spotted. Because their everyday activities can only be planned around constant uncertainties.
The ever-present threat of exposure, of discovery, of ruin, hounds their every decision. Every plan. Every moment.
But Jonathan smiles anyway. He stands there among the seeds of wonderment, of beauty amidst mediocrity, and he has dared to care again, to devote himself to something that might be snatched away from him at a moment’s notice. Has invited his son’s destroyer into this lovingly tended oasis. And he still smiles.
She cannot comprehend it. Cannot understand it. Cannot value it enough.
And she stares at this older, heavyset man, so weathered and beaten, and thinks he is more beautiful than all the lushness surrounding her.
“Can…” She pauses to lick her lips (to gather up courage enough to speak the rest of her request). “Can I help you?”
He winks at her, and Lois has to clench her fists to keep from hugging him (knowing he probably wouldn’t welcome the tactile gratitude). “I was hoping you’d ask.”
She’s never had a green thumb. She can kill even the hardiest plant stuck on the corner of her desk every time New Year’s resolutions roll around. She doesn’t like to dig in the dirt while the sun presses down on her back and insects crawl out from under her knees and straight, healthy rows seem to grow more crooked under her care. She’s not farmer material by any stretch of the imagination.
But she doesn’t care. That afternoon--and the afternoons following after, when she follows Jonathan up to his refuge--are treasured moments quickly stored away as beloved memories. Jonathan’s soft, instructive voice. His dry, warm hands guiding hers in weeding and watering and pruning. His welcoming smile each time she follows him into the elevator. His quiet (as opposed to silence, and she’s not sure how he balances that distinction so well) presence when she doesn’t dare let herself think of anything but the dirt under her fingers. His understated wisdom that brings her, unbidden, countless thoughts of a young, smiling Clark kneeling at his father’s side in a Kansas field or an older, pensive Clark following his dad from field to field, employing terrifying, alien power to grow crops of food, to nurture living, fragile things, to contribute to continued life.
Occasionally, when she stays quiet and manages a few, real smiles, Jonathan will begin to talk, to tell her about how they found tiny, baby Clark in a field after following a blazing trail through the sky. About how they hid him from suspicious government men (Bureau 39, Lois thinks, and for that night, experiences a resurgence in her nightmares). About Clark’s young years, about his earnest desire to help, his terror of isolation, his simultaneous resignation to always being alone.
Small memories. Tiny moments. Quiet confidences. But taken altogether, they paint a beautiful, shining picture of the man she killed. The man she’s come to save. Soft, fond recollections that form a quilt covered over with budding plants and glowing sun and gruff voice and beneath which she begins, slowly, to heal. To recover. To remember who she is under the scars of her crimes and to see what she has become with them, like physical therapy for her soul doled out by the kindest, most patient of therapists.
For the first few days of this new routine, James watches her suspiciously over dinner. Warily, as if fearing she will fracture the tenuous peace this small family has managed to find. Martha is surprised at first, then thoughtful, then, days later, she gives what seems to be (Lois hopes) grudging acceptance, displayed a bit more openly when she freely offers to help Lois get her laundry done in a small room through a door in the kitchen Lois always supposed to be a pantry.
It’s hard to tell what Clark thinks because she sees him only rarely, briefly, and she’s never quite sure when he’s out or when he’s home (and she has the idea that it would only make her feel awful all over again to know how little he allows himself to stop being Superman, so she tries not to think of it). He is always unfailingly polite when he alights long enough to see her, always greeting her with a smile and asking her if everything is all right. He never says anything about her leaving, never asks her how long she’s planning on interrupting his life (none of them ask, and she wonders if they’re that afraid of what she’ll do when she leaves); he makes simple, easy conversation about topics that matter only to him (and to her, simply because they matter to him), bouncing back and forth between a diminished Superman and a wistful Clark.
Not that it is entirely his fault their conversations never go any deeper.
She is awkward with him. Not sure what to say or how to face him after getting such a clear, in-depth look at the ruins left to him. She wants to apologize, but he will not let her. She wants to explain herself (to tell him about Trask’s voice whispering in her ear and tests posed him he didn’t even know about; explain about adjoining tents and overheard confessions and shattered misconceptions), but he has already found and made an explanation for her (as if being a reporter is enough to excuse her actions). She wants to tell him she will not rest until she fixes what she did to him, but she does not want to listen to him try to explain away all the many, many reasons that’s impossible.
She wants to reach past the hybrid-stranger in front of her and pull out the endearing, intriguing, innocent Clark Kent who worked at the Daily Planet so very briefly, wants to talk to him and make him laugh and see him smile with that secret hope…but she knows that is beyond even her.
So she cannot help but be awkward and stilted and unsure every time he gives her that distant smile and lets her hear his voice once more. She cannot help but look at him and hear the echo of Jonathan’s voice in her head, pulling back the curtain on what it must be like to be him, and it is insight given (and sought) too late, but it’s nestled inside her now and she cannot look at this broken stranger and not see that young man so restless and on fire to make his mark in the world (not as a hero; not as a strange visitor; but as a man). And gradually, as the days become a week, and then another week, and then fades into the beginning of a third one, Lois cannot keep her own silence any longer. She can’t keep pretending he is a stranger, or that she is here only to assuage her guilty conscience or find some form of closure. She can’t let him keep walking away from her, not when her promise (to James, and to herself) sits inside her like a story left unwritten, a trail left unfollowed, an investigation left uncovered.
Bravery, she tells herself. She must be brave. Must take hold of that solid, silken strength implanted within her and use it to stand her ground. To look into Clark’s aloof eyes and try to break his silence.
Because he is silent. Still. Always.
He talks, but the words don’t mean anything. He asks her questions, but they are inane. He makes conversation, but it never goes anywhere.
It is only another form of silence, a second wall, and she has made her way past the first, but this second one is even thicker and higher and deeper.
But she is Lois Lane, she reminds herself. And James’s steady looks during dinners, Jonathan’s thoughtful expressions when he doesn’t think she knows he’s watching her, Martha’s worry so sloppily hidden--they all remind her of how much she has yet to do and how little she has accomplished so far. She feels better, feels more in line with her old self (but a better self, a self that would never print the story she did five months ago), but Clark…Clark is still lost. He is still broken.
And he deserves to be whole. Deserves it far more than she does.
So she waits, until an evening when he is home. When he eats dinner and then makes to get up and leave but catches his mother’s eye and instead nods and relaxes (he will go out later, Lois knows, after Martha is asleep; but for now, he will stay to ease his family’s worry). She waits until they have all moved into the living area. She waits until Martha and James are discussing Martha’s latest painting, and Jonathan is engrossed in the news. She waits until Clark looks happy (or as happy as he ever looks anymore, which means he looks contented and tired), and then she approaches him.
“Clark,” she says, and pretends it doesn’t hurt to see the tiny, instant smile that flashes almost every time she uses his name. “I was wondering if I could talk to you.”
His eyes flicker, quickly, emotions trailing through them like comets, burning and dying faster than she can interpret them. But he smiles again (an awkward, polite smile) and nods. “Okay.”
Trying hard to look open and harmless, Lois forces a smile of her own and gestures him after her. She takes him only to the counter; she wants the semblance of privacy without scaring him away.
“Anything wrong?” he asks, watching her perch on the edge of one of the chairs.
“No.” She smiles again (because she doesn’t know what else to do, and this isn’t as easy as she hoped it would be) and nods to the chair adjacent to hers. “I just…wanted to talk to you.” She pauses, narrows her eyes, and decides that challenging him can do nothing worse than return them to the impasse she’s already trying to break. “Do you not want to talk?”
He hesitates and actually seems to consider the question before he gives her another, slightly more real smile. “Talking sounds nice.”
“You do so little of it nowadays,” she says wryly, and manages a real smile of her own (because reminders of his silence used to hurt but now she has learned to accept both it and her complicity in causing it).
He startles her by actually almost laughing himself, a tiny exhalation that carries the hint of a chuckle. “Yeah,” he says, and looks down at his hands.
And then they sit there, and it falls quiet, and neither of them can quite look at the other (except Lois can feel the pressure of three stares, can sense the wary curiosity, the banked suspicion, emanating from the living area).
“Well, this is ridiculous,” Lois finally exclaims. “Surely we can find something to talk about.”
“Like you said, I’m out of practice.” She wonders if she imagines the tiny spark of mischief buried in Clark’s silvery-brown eyes. “What’s your excuse?”
“I’m afraid of hurting you more,” she says bluntly, and sees shock daze him before he blinks it away.
“You shouldn’t be. I told you, I don’t blame you.”
His sincerity shouldn’t hurt, but it does. It hurts worse, she thinks, than his blame would.
“I do,” she says, and she catches his eye and will not let him look away. “I blame myself. For what I did to you. To your family. For what I took from you. And you can tell me that it’s not my fault or that it doesn’t matter, but it does. You’re not happy, Clark!”
His smile is so small, so fake, that Lois wants to reach out and smear her hand over it, erase it from ever existing (so that she does not have to know Clark is capable of even making such an abomination). “I’m happy enough,” he tells her, and then he reaches out with a gentle hand and sets it over one of hers, stills its wild trembling. “And this isn’t your fault. Lois, Trask knew--”
Trask.
It’s been months since she’s heard the name spoken aloud. Since she’s let herself hear it, or think on it, or remember the man who threw her out of a plane and captured her and played her like a violin so that even when he had to disappear into obscurity, his work was still completed.
Months since she let the doors of her mind crack open enough to let more than the lightning-flash of Smallville memories assail her.
The pain stirred up by that name, by the memories associated with it (plastic tied around her wrists and panic stuffed inside her thoughts and his voice whispering in her ear), are so strong and overpowering that Lois can’t help but flinch. Clark notices, of course (because no matter how blind she was concerning him, he’s never failed to take notice of the smallest details about her), and he cuts himself off.
“Well,” he says, forcibly casual, “it doesn’t matter, anyway. The point is that the truth was bound to come out eventually, one way or the other, and this way, at least I got my parents out in time. We may not be…as happy…as before, but we’re content, and that’s not bad, Lois. It’s good enough.”
“Is it?” Lois wonders how this conversation got so far off track; she meant to ask about him and instead once more he is comforting her. She studies him closely (hopes he does not take his hand away from hers) and says, very quietly, “I do have a question I want to ask you.”
She thinks she sees a flash of pain in his eyes. A burst of fear. Maybe it is only her imagination. Maybe it is her own guilt that puts it there. Or maybe he has nightmares, too, about headlines and newspapers and Pulitzer prizes earned at the cost of his own life.
Regardless, she hurriedly adds, “Not for a story, or an interview, or... It’s just a question. And you don’t have to answer it if you don’t want to, of course! Maybe I shouldn’t--”
“It’s all right, Lois.” His hand tightens over hers, heat that spirals through her flesh, past the titanium lines threading her through, refining her in a cleansing fire that takes her breath away and makes her forget what she was planning to say. He almost sounds like the Clark of old as he stares into her eyes, silvery brown shining with as much goodness and kindness as ever. “You can ask it.”
She has to look away. Has to break his gaze and swallow back the flames licking their way up from where his fingertips rest along her wrist. Has to close her eyes and force herself to remember the question she wants to ask him (the last bit of impetus she needs to make herself into the champion James has asked her to be and Clark needs so badly).
“Why didn’t you start over again? Why didn’t you come up with a new name? A new disguise?”
He’s silent so long she’s sure he must be offended. Or hurt. Or wondering why this nosy reporter, this colleague from a place he worked at so briefly, is coming here and asking him stupid questions. Silent so long that she has to look at him again even though her entire body is trembling and there’s a scream inside her warning her she doesn’t want to know what he’s thinking.
But all he does is shake his head. “I have enough trouble with just one disguise--adding another would be too much.”
This is a conversation she should have had with him almost five months ago (though in a very momentously different way). It’s too late now. Too late to make a difference. Too late to stop her from writing an article. Too late to warn him about what she planned to do, outlining the steps and writing that infamous article on the plane back to Metropolis. Too late, but she has to have it anyway. Has to let them both say out loud what he’s known his whole life and she’s known for…well, she’s not sure how long she’s known. Not sure when she first figured it out. She only knows that she figured it out sometime after seeing her name sold out in every language in the world and before Perry told her to come save what was left of Clark Kent.
“One disguise?” she asks him. Tears are building up behind her eyes, a constant pressure like floodwaters pressed against a straining dam, but she pushes them back and watches Clark. She wants him to know that she is listening (now, when it is far too late; now, when she could have let him be and never looked back).
"For a while,” he says, staring past her, as if seeing beyond her (or as if afraid, in his own way, of seeing what he fears is written across her face), “it was my only lifeline--planning someone else to be, someone normal. I came up with names and careers and disguises. I don’t think the glasses would work anymore.” He chuckles (hollowly) and reaches up a hand to the glasses he still wears, even in front of her (and she wishes she could take some form of solace in that, that he does not hide them anymore). “And then Superman came back, and I told myself that the reason I wasn’t going out as someone else was that if Superman disappeared for eight hours a day five days a week, there would be a world-wide search for him, everyone side-eyeing any new employees, looking for a superhero. I told myself I couldn’t because I needed to find a way for my parents to have a life, too. But the truth is…”
Lois holds her breath. Watches him. Cannot look away. Cannot let the tears go (because they would never end).
“The truth is…I don’t want to be someone else.”
“Clark is who you are,” Lois whispers. And it is truth and injustice and her own personal indictment all wrapped into one, and she could spend the rest of her life serving him on bended knee and still never make up for what she’s done.
But he smiles at her. Smiles as if he does not realize, even still, who is to blame for the pain that shadows his every move, colors his every expression, touches his every sparse word. “Exactly,” he exclaims, and she feels like a fraud for making him think she understands him when in truth, it’s taken her far too long (and so many afternoons beneath his father’s gentle tutelage) to come to this moment. This place. This conversation. “I didn’t have to pretend to anything as Clark, not really. I could just…just be me. But being someone else…it’d be as much of a mask, of an act, as Superman is. I wouldn’t be able to be me, so what would be the point?”
“Superman’s what you do,” Lois murmurs, and wins another Clark smile for herself.
“Yes.”
“Do you…do you think you can ever be Clark again?”
Unexpectedly, a hint of confusion ghosts across his face, puts a crease on his brow. “What do you mean? I am Clark. I’ve…I’ve tried to stop, but as you can see”--he fiddles with the edge of his glasses--“I haven’t really succeeded.”
And for the first time, Lois’s heart feels lighter. For the first time she can breathe. For the first time, her smile is real, and she gifts it to him in return for the ones he’s given her, for the warmth he’s infusing through her, for the forgiving touch of his hand over hers.
“Good,” she says, relief making her whole and well and light.
He’s still Clark.
Clark Kent is dead, but he’s still Clark. He hasn’t forgotten, hasn’t given up hope, hasn’t entirely succumbed to the bleakness of this prison she’s delivered him into.
And if Clark is what he wants (if Clark is what makes her smile), then she will bring Clark Kent back from the dead (and erase that horrible accusation from the face of his grave), if it is the last thing she ever does.
*
