*13*
Tha…thump.
Tha-thump.
Tha…thump.
Tha-thump.
Two heartbeats. Separate. Distinct. One so very, very slow, the other too frenetically quick. One heavy and lethargic, the other racing ahead, bounding toward a place not even Superman can go.
“Stay,” Clark wants to say. Needs to say. “Stay with me. Don’t go. I need you. Don’t leave me all alone. Stay.”
But the words do not emerge. They are not even whole, coherent, legible in his own mind, distilled instead into mere emotions and gut reactions, to the overwhelming, cloying feel of desperation so thick it threatens to choke him. It’s a plea he needs to speak, to let out, to put into words so that he can do more than sit here in a chair that might or might not be uncomfortable, in a waiting room that might or might not be too public and open, and try his hardest not to vomit up his invulnerable organs onto the slick tiled floor that might or might not cause echoes of voices and whispers and hushed murmurs to swirl about him, threatening to drown out those two heartbeats.
Tha-thump.
Tha…thump.
His parents. They’re in surgery. Two teams of doctors are fighting to keep them here. To keep them alive.
Those are more words, more concepts, more thoughts he cannot bring into clear comprehension because to do so will mean facing the fact that he might lose them. That they are leaving him behind. He clings to the heartbeats, closes his eyes to shut out everything else, willing those two quiet beats to continue pulsing in his ears.
Tha…thump.
Tha-thump.
But to hear them, to listen to them, he cannot help but tune in enough to also hear the words everyone else are spilling out over unsterilized floors (and why, why, why, can everyone else release what he cannot, open their mouths and hear their own voices and let out the constant, imprisoning clamor chained up within them?). The staff, the patients, the ambulance workers in and out with other victims of the earthquake he should have heard, should have known was coming, should have stopped, should have been there to divert or alleviate or help before he was brought to this moment, in this place, listening to those two contradicting beats…all of these people whisper. Murmur. Speak and gasp and argue and exclaim in hushed voices they cannot possibly believe are quiet enough to keep him from actually hearing.
They’re talking about Superman. About the way he strode in through the door with two broken bodies and begged the doctors to do anything, everything, something to save them.
They’re talking about him.
They’re talking about him talking.
His parents are dying (one heartbeat slowing to a near-stop, the other blurring forward into oblivion), and all these people surrounding him can think about, all they care about, is the fact that Superman has broken his long, impenetrable silence.
The doctors in the rooms where those heartbeats emanate are working as hard as they can, of course (he watches them through the walls, through solidity peeled away to nothing just as he will be stripped down to nothing at all should the divergent pulses in his ears fall silent and still), doing all they can to save his mom and dad. But he can see the sweat beading on their brows. Feel the tremors in the air stirred by their barely trembling hands. Sense their fear and their focus held only through practiced experience.
And closer, back behind invisible walls, in the room with him, he can feel the surreptitious gazes, the stares at the brightly attired (and useless, utterly helpless, completely redundant) superhero sitting like a statue in the waiting room he doesn’t bother to look at (because what lies beyond it is so much more important, so much more precious), his cape hanging about him, lending him a blank, disconsolate, abandoned air.
Superman, they whisper. Not Clark Kent.
Superhero, he thinks. Not son.
They know his Secret, but they don’t know anything, not really, and he is still just as hidden, just as masked and anonymous, as he’s always been. They are standing or walking through or sitting in the same room with him, and they do not see him. They do not care. They do not understand.
And why aren’t they helping? Why aren’t they in the operating room with the surgeons making sure his parents make it back to their suite of rooms (or another suite, another city, another state, another world, he does not care, just so long as they live)? Why can they not see that he would not have spoken, would not have invited their barrages of questions if this didn’t matter more than anything else in the universe?
He needs them (his dad with his supportive wisdom and his quiet, sturdy presence; his mom with her boundless enthusiasm and her eternal, unquestioning love; his parents, the ones he came half a galaxy to find and love because he needs them). He needs them more than he needs air. More than he needs the sun. More than he needs the glasses or the cape or a name or his soul. He needs them because without them he is nothing, and with them he is someone, and in their arms he is alive, and in their hearts he is a man worthy of love, and in their eyes he can believe that he belongs here, even if only for them, for their sakes.
So he needs them to live. The world needs them to live, only he does not think it realizes that yet. Does not think any of the curious and suspicious and awed observers all agape about him have yet realized what will happen to their savior and hero if he loses the very people who are his saviors and heroes, who taught him everything he needs in order to want to be a savior and hero.
Even after they lost his voice, he does not think the world realizes how little there is left of him over all, and how very fragile is what remains (does not think they’ve yet recovered from their shock enough to recognize what it means that he is here and not out there, bringing in more earthquake victims for them to murmur and whisper with).
Tha-thump.
Tha…thump.
“Stay.” And finally the word emerges from his mouth to enter the air, rusty and brittle and so quiet only super ears can hear it. But there. Audible. Legible. Coherent.
“Stay with me. Don’t leave me.”
But of course, they cannot hear him.
He thinks he is about to slide off the chair (not in flight, because why fly when there is nothing to keep him in the air?), about to fall to his knees and press his cape over his face and let out the tears building up like inescapable pressure strong and voracious enough to beat and devour even Superman. He thinks he is about to come spinning to his feet and whirling toward the whole mass of colorful nurses and doctors and crimson-soaked patients and victims, thinks he is about to lift up his fists and shake them at the heavens and scream at them that who cares that he is talking, of course he can talk, why does it matter at all when there are people (more than just his parents, and that should mean something to him, but it cannot penetrate his desperate daze) hurt and dying and heartbeats are getting slower and quicker and the sweat is dripping faster off the surgeons’ brows and the machines are beeping so ominously, and how dare any of them waste time looking at him when they should be helping.
He thinks he is about to come undone, about to come apart at the seams and rip open and spill out all the broken and insignificant and un-special things inside him right out in the open for everyone to see.
But then he hears it.
Another heartbeat. Steady and healthy and well. Quick and agitated and energetic as it’s matched by footsteps rushing toward him. By breathing, ragged and uneven, panting with haste.
And then Lois turns the corner and she is coming toward him. There is blood scrawled across her hands, her knees, her brow, darkening patches of her hair. There is a plastic bag hanging as if forgotten and unattended (like him, in this waiting room, listening to dwindling heartbeats) from her wrist. There is fear and concern and worry and guilt and relief mixed and mingled and crowded like prisoners crushed into a cattle car in her eyes, the corners of her mouth, the set of her face.
But she is here. She is coming toward him. Her heart is beating, the blood is singing through her veins, her organs are smooth and unpunctured, and as bad as this day is, at least there is this. The image of her. Lois Lane. In the same room, the same city, the same world as him (and not running away). Healthy and alive and relatively unscathed.
She hesitates before she reaches him. Common sense, some rational, all-but-forgotten part of his brain whispers to him. After all, if the media were to catch any wind of Superman and Lois Lane being in the same place, spending time together, then all of James’s carefully constructed plans and safeguards and fail-safes will start to crumble all around them (if they have not already; if it is not already necessary for them to have to move from here and try to find echoes of home in yet another empty set of rooms James will find in some other unknown city).
Ordinarily, Clark would care. He would listen to that whisper of rationality, and he would shake his head at Lois and let her fade into the background, because he does not want her to become a target again, does not want to let Luthor think this is a way for him to wriggle out of the charges he is being held under, does not want every reporter to think he is going to start giving out interviews again.
Ordinarily, he would be strong and smart and safe.
But this is not ordinary, and he has never been as strong as everyone needs him to be or as smart as he wishes he could be or as safe as he once thought he was. So he meets Lois’s eyes, and he does not shake his head, does not send her away, does not keep the pieces of secrecy left to him.
He is not sure what his face shows. He is not even sure if it shows anything at all other than a terrible blankness mirroring the blankness inside his soul (tha-thump, tha…thump all that fills him up, all that keeps his own heart beating in empty mimicry). But whatever she sees in him, Lois lets go of her own doubts and hesitations, and she moves to sit in the seat beside him (and if the onlookers are still whispering, Clark cannot hear them anymore). The bag hanging from her wrist plops gracelessly to the tiled floor (finally an echo that does not whisper of Superman’s voice, of the words he spilled out in front of them all).
“James is in with a doctor,” Lois says, looking only at him. As if he still exists. As if he matters. As if he has not come undone. “I may have made something of a scene to make them look at him now, but I don’t care. He didn’t look good. They’re x-raying his arm and skull right now, but aside from a slight concussion and the broken arm, they think he’s going to be okay.”
In a while (moments or days or years, he cannot quite decide, because time seems so measureless, so meaningless right now), he will be relieved to hear that. He will worry about the fracture along the forearm that he saw when he thought to x-ray James before abandoning him in the rubble of their lives. He will want to see James, to reassure his friend that there was nothing he could do (it is not James, after all, who should have been there to save their parents), to accept his apology and tell him that there is no need for it but he forgives him anyway.
Eventually. But not now. Now, he cannot process it. Cannot face it. Cannot tear himself away from those two mirroring heartbeats long enough to consider his reaction.
He does not want Lois to leave, but he doesn’t know what he feels to have her there. He does not want James to be hurt, but he cannot spare any strength of will or any fraction of emotions to be glad that he is not seriously injured. He does not want to be here, but he dares not leave.
He is frozen. Arrested, motionless, hung on a precipice that will suck even him down into the dark, fathomless depths of an endless chasm should he fall. So he cannot move at all. Can only sit there, empty and weightless and devoid of anything at all lest the slightest thought or feeling topple him.
“Clark,” Lois whispers (a whisper that pierces through the rest, that does not rub him raw), and she reaches out, so hesitantly, as gently as he played cotton and seaweed through his fingers, and lays her hand on his shoulder.
He breaks (the minute weight enough to tip the scales). He bends and shudders and falls forward, hunched over, his head in his lap, his eyes squeezed shut against the seemingly hopeless tableaux hiding behind the walls in front of him. “I should have been there for them!” he cries out (and now, where before there were no words, there are too many of them, overbalancing him, weighting him down, crushing him).
“You were--you are!” Lois insists, her hand tightening on his shoulder blade so that he can keep himself, at the least, off the floor, as if she holds up his entire body (his entire weak and wasted form), saving him from splattering against the bottom of that chasm. “You came so quickly, and you got them straight to the hospital--”
“No!” he shouts (and the hospital falls as silent as he should be, their terror like bile in his mouth). He is straight-backed in the chair now (Lois’s hand fallen away, back to her lap, to clutch her other blood-stained hand), staring straight at her. And calm. Calm. So calm. He cannot shout or come apart. Cannot let his own cries drown out the sounds of those all-important heartbeats. He listens, intently, obsessively, and lets them lull him back to a deceptive blankness.
“No,” he says again, quietly, when he is sure his voice will not frighten away the twin beats pulsing through his being. “I should have known.”
“Clark, you did every--”
“I’m Superman now!” he exclaims, and it would be a roar, a scream of defiance, if he were not holding himself so resolutely beneath the tempo of those beats. “I save hundreds of people every day--I should have been Superman for them!”
Lois swallows. Opens her mouth. Shuts it. Swallows again. She does not look away. Does not let him look away. And then, like steel (like she is not afraid of him at all), she says, “They don’t want Superman. They want Clark--they love Clark--and Clark is--”
“Their son,” he says, and the words, spoken out loud, slice through everything he has managed to reclaim. They leave him weak and quivering and broken again. “I’m their son, and I didn’t even know they were in danger.”
“Really.” She gives him a flat stare (and this is the Lois Lane he remembers, the one that seemed to see straight through him even as she dismissed him). “Then why did you get there in such a hurry? How did you find them so quickly? What were you even doing on that exact street?”
“James, he…he used... And my mom said my name,” he manages to say, only because Lois is looking at him, waiting for an answer, expecting him to be strong enough and whole enough to give it to her. He has to look away, has to hold himself aloof from the memory of his mother’s voice, cracked and broken, threading into his ears like the bell tolling someone’s doom (but not his parents’, please not his parents’, let it be his instead).
“But don’t you see?” he exclaims before Lois can reply, leaping to his feet to pace, to walk, to move, but there’s too much wild uncontainable energy surging inside him--too much, and it’ll all come boiling out of him. He’ll hurt someone if he’s not careful, if he doesn’t control himself, doesn’t beat himself back behind the walls he’s created for just this sort of thing. So he takes a deep breath, attunes himself once more to those fragile, stuttering heartbeats, a duet of life, of love, of worth.
Tha-thump.
Tha…thump.
“Don’t you see?” he asks again, sinking back down into the tiny, ill-made chair (his red boot knocks against the poor, abandoned bag). He wants Lois to understand, wants her to see why this matters, why he should have been there before his parents were bent and folded in on themselves. (He wants her to put her hand on his shoulder and hold him together again.) But to do that, he needs to find words, needs to reach back past months of silence and find the eloquence he once aspired to through his writing. It’s been so long, and he’s so rusty, but desperation is a powerful motivator.
“When my spaceship came down,” he says, quietly, in a monotone (because anything else will send him crashing into that endless chasm), “Mom and Dad were driving down an old country road. All they saw was a falling star, a dropped meteor. They could have just kept driving, could have looked back on it as nothing more than an interesting anecdote. But they didn’t. They stopped, and they looked for me, and when they found a defenseless baby in a UFO, they kept me. They…knew…somehow. Knew enough to go looking. Loved me enough to take me in and never seem to regret it even when it became obvious I’m not normal. They knew I needed them…and I should have known when they needed me. I should have…I should have known.”
Tha…thump.
Tha-thump.
He turns his face, just enough to see Lois, just enough to look into eyes he once dreamed of looking into every day of his life. There’s something in his own eyes. Something wet and blurry and stinging. He’s falling apart. He can feel it, all his carefully held walls quaking and tumbling and falling to crash and shatter at her feet. He’s breaking, and he knows he’s looking to Lois to keep him together (though he doesn’t know why she should be the one he turns to; after all, his dreams of a future with her were a long time ago and they will never come to fruition and she should not have to help a fractured Superman, a ghost of a man, a shadow of an alien). He knows he’s looking to her to save him from falling, to keep him from being knocked to pieces by the uncertain hammering of those heartbeats.
“Everyone I save, Lois, everyone who’s been rescued by Superman, and yet when it mattered the most, I didn’t… Don’t they deserve it most of all? How could I not save them?”
Her eyes are soft and luminous (and they will fill his future dreams as well as his past ones, he is suddenly sure), and they do not turn away from him. She doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t try to answer him, or rationalize what happened, or tell him life doesn’t work that way. She doesn’t get up and pull him to his feet and force him to stop feeling sorry for himself and start being Superman again.
Instead, she does what he needs most (what, he only realizes in that moment, is exactly what he wanted her to do, was begging her to do). She stands, and she reaches out her arms and slides them around his shoulders, presses them loose and firm around his neck, and she pulls him up into her.
And then he does fall. He does lose his balance. He does break and shatter and fall apart. But she catches him. She steadies him. She picks up his pieces and cradles them in cupped hands until he can put them all back together again.
She hugs him, and she does not let go, and Clark feels her shirt grow damp against his cheeks.
Lois Lane. The reporter who exposed him. The reporter who ensured his anonymity in public for the rest of his life.
The woman he needs.
The woman he loves (and it’s stupid and impossible and so utterly foolish, but he cannot lie to himself any longer, cannot pretend that he has gotten over her, or that it is possible to ever move on from her).
Her heartbeat thumps against his breastbone, her head fits on his shoulder, beneath the curve of his chin, her skin soaks in the tears he sheds (the first he’s allowed himself in over a decade), and Clark doesn’t ever want to move. He doesn’t want to leave this unexpected, precious refuge. (He doesn’t want to break the moment or move on only to listen to another sacred heartbeat fade and vanish as he stands so helplessly.)
“Clark,” Lois murmurs in his ear. Only one word. Only one name. But it is more than all the whispers and all the murmurs put together. He stands as Superman, red and blue and yellow, and his cape hangs about them both, but she calls him Clark (and finally, here, with her, the right part of him is anonymous and silent).
He wants to tell her how much this means. He wishes he had the words to express how much he needs this (needs her). But instead he is silent. Again. Always. Never able to speak lest he say too much (declarations of love and wishes for a different future and questions as to why she ever wrote a story she had to know would destroy him). Never opening his mouth lest everyone realize just how little, how useless, how paltry any of his words (his answers for the choices he’s made, his excuses for why he thought being Clark Kent more important than the lives he could have been saving all these years, his mute reply for all the accusations sure to be leveled at an alien pretending to be a man) could ever be.
Silence.
It’s fitting. It’s just. It’s so much better for him to be silent than for the heartbeats crowding out the fears clamoring in his head to go silent.
Tha-thump. (His mother, her heartbeat slowing, stabilizing, a breath of relief in the surgeon’s snapped commands.)
Tha…thump. (His father, still so slow, dragging, his surgeon still hard at work, still sweating, still glancing toward the door where he last saw Superman.)
Thump. Thump. Thump. (James, across the building, drowsy, enforced steadiness through drugs as they put his arm in a cast.)
Thump-thump-thump. (Lois, in his arms, quiet, quiescent, as if content to be here, to be with him.)
And his own, but he cannot hear that, not over the sound of the others. Not over the sound of his mother’s surgeon telling him she will need to stay in intensive care for a few days but the surgery fixed the bleeding before it got too far and she should be okay, things look hopeful. Not over the sound of his father’s surgeon asking for another tool, and another, and another, as the clock ticks on and Lois finally guides Clark back to a chair and sits beside him and comforts him with the thrum of her heart and James eventually comes in to sit at his side, his face so very pale, his voice a constant murmur into the cell-phone at his ear as he tries to save their place here and arrange another for them and hold off the media and make this waiting room private and set up a perimeter of protective police officers outside the hospital.
Endless sounds. Noises that make it okay for him to keep breathing. That keep him from being completely useless (so long as that last, slow heartbeat does not fade).
Hours pass. More hours. Outside the hospital, the city tries to come to terms with its new, crumbling appearance and families find one another and emergency workers continue to do all they can beneath silver and emerald light. Inside, Clark tries not to lose hope. Tries to focus on his mother’s sleeping pulse, and James and Lois shoring him up on either side, and the fact that his father is still here.
By the time the surgeon finally comes out of the operating room, Clark is sure that an entire eternity has passed. By the time the surgeon finishes speaking, Clark wishes he could have that eternity back.
*
