*22*
“There will never be a better time,” James says. He’s given up the splint, but still tends to hold his arm close to his side, a constant reminder of just how much he’s had to endure thanks to his proximity to Superman. Clark tries not to look at the arm with its battered, valuable (because of what it has saved and the many times it has called him to get there just before it is too late) watch; he tries to focus on James’s eyes instead, so alive and kindled with hope and earnestness and something deeper and darker. Something that looks a lot like zeal (like the beginnings of fanaticism; like a love that will not be deterred by hurt or danger or impossibilities).
“I know there’s no reason you should trust us, Mr. Kent,” Dr. Irons says, stepping forward and drawing Clark’s attention. “I know that we’re strangers. But we’ve been working on this for months, and Jason Trask’s actions do provide the perfect opportunity.”
Clark likes that these scientists, hunched in their small room over tables and desks and blackboards full of figures and variables and plans, call him Mr. Kent. He likes that they do not crowd him, that they leave him space by the door. He likes that they were worried about James when he walked in with the traces of bruising still evident around his cheek and that they know him well enough to call him James and nod at him respectfully.
He does not like that this feels like an ambush. He does not like that he asked James to find a way to keep his parents safe, and instead they are discussing castles in the air and dangling miracles in front of him as if he can endure having them snatched away yet again. (He does not like that his heart has forgotten how to hope at all, so that he feels only numb, distracted apathy rather than the fizzing sparks of excitement he thinks he should feel.)
Dr. Klein steps forward, taller than everyone else in the room except Dr. Irons, all gangly enthusiasm and nervous anticipation. “This will work, Mr. Kent. There will be people who won’t buy it, of course--we can’t expect to convince everyone--but it will be enough so that you can go back to having two identities.”
“It will be enough to save your parents,” James adds pointedly. “They can live on a farm again, go back to Smallville, not have to live in hiding.”
Clark flinches and tries not to scowl at the unfairness of this ploy. The door is only inches away, but it suddenly seems too far away. There are no windows here, no trace of air from outside, no hint of the sky, and he decides, abruptly, that he cannot stay here any longer. He needs to be free, to be gone. Needs to go answer the hundred cries within a mile’s radius, avert the natural disasters occurring in this hemisphere, stop the countless crimes being carried out right this moment (needs to be Superman, to remind himself that that is all that is left to him now and he cannot pretend otherwise; needs to leave before he lets the impossibilities and hopes and Mr. Kents sway him from the reality he has only just made peace with).
“CK.” James steps in smoothly, slides closer--not quite blocking the door, but interposing his injured shoulder between, and Clark would rather be trapped here forever than to jostle him and cause more hurt to his friend. James reaches out with an arm that had a bullet pass through it (for him), places a hand on Clark’s shoulder, looks him straight in the eyes, and says, so softly, so heavily, “I know you don’t believe this can really happen. But please, please, CK, just listen, all right? The hologram is only a temporary measure--they’re working on a robot, one that can simulate your powers or can type up a story, whichever is necessary. One that possesses enough artificial intelligence to hold up a conversation and looks exactly like you. Or rather, looks like you with just enough subtle differences--a sharper chin, a longer nose, a different angle to your brows--that when you stand next to each other, everyone will see a resemblance. And, more importantly, see the discrepancies.”
“It sounds like science-fiction,” Dr. Hamilton interjects. “But it really is very close to a reality. We have the skeleton and AI done already. With a bit of tweaking to the conversational patterns and the casting of your face and form to make the exo-covering, the robot should be up and running in just a month or two.”
Dr. Faulkner nods. “Until then, the hologram will work to throw them off. It’s made of lights and forcefields, so if anyone tries to touch it, they will feel something. I recommend the hologram play Superman--we can only program it for so many variables, while you can move faster than the eye can perceive to make allowances for whatever happens at the public events. Complicated, yes, but it is a viable solution.”
They’re all looking at him expectantly. Waiting. Watching. Holding their breath. They’re doing an admirable job of appearing professional and detached and polite, but he can hear their heartbeats, smell their sweat, see their pulses beating like panicked birds in their throats and wrists. They call him Mr. Kent, but they know he is Superman, too, and no matter what comes of this meeting James has tricked him into, these four people will always know.
But then, four people instead of billions cannot help but be an improvement.
Right?
Clark swallows, tenses, hates himself for letting himself think, even for an instant, that things can ever go back to the way they were.
They can’t.
They won’t.
He is Superman now, and letting himself contemplate anything else is just going to be too painful when he is inevitably disappointed. (Letting himself remember what it is like to be Clark Kent, without Superman wrapped around his ghost, just makes it harder to be content with who he is now.)
The scientists are still watching him. The robot form, set up on a stand behind them, provides a surreal atmosphere so that Clark wonders if he isn’t just dreaming this all up. He’d confronted Trask, after all, finally come face to face with the man who’s haunted his nightmares for months now and he’d emerged whole and relatively unscathed. His parents are safe (his mom free of all her bandages and his dad taking a few shaky steps each day) and James is alive and Lois is safe (gone, forever, far away from him where she will not be kidnapped because of him anymore, will not have an alien substance forced through her veins) and Luthor is jailed, and everything is going too good. Too smoothly. So maybe it is all a dream. Maybe he is tired of wanting soundlessly, wishing mutely, desiring silently. Maybe his subconscious has finally decided to simply spell out everything for him so that he can have at least a few precious hours when life is not so hard and endless and wearying.
“Thank you,” he finally says (when he belatedly realizes they are waiting for him, even though he is wearing the Superman suit, to say something). “It means a lot to me that you’d put all this effort into trying to help me. But--”
“Clark,” James interrupts, a thread of steel turning his voice hard and implacable. “Can I talk to you outside for a minute?”
Clark sighs, but he cannot deny James anything (does not want to deny him anything, now, when he is still so relieved and happy his friend is safe and alive and no longer needing blood infusions every twelve or fourteen hours). He gives a polite nod to the team of scientists and their robot witness, then follows James out into the hallway. It’s better than the room; there is a window at the far end of the hallway, promising sunlight and an easy exit, and there is no one staring at him. No one except James.
“I know what you’re thinking,” James says calmly. The threat is gone from his voice; in its place, there is only compassion. Empathy. Sadness. (So much worse, because this makes Clark look away and swallow back a lump and wish Superman could leave behind Clark’s sentimentality.) “I know that you don’t want to try this in case it doesn’t work. I know that it’s easier just to keep going with things the way they are than to try again after what happened the last time you came up with a new identity. What I’m saying is that I know this is hard for you, all right?”
“All right,” Clark says evenly, because there is no use denying it, not when James has been there through all the hardest moments, prodding and cajoling and believing.
James nods. His dark eyes are filled with sage wisdom, old beyond years, heavy with a weight even Superman balks at, but he does not look away. “Then I’m just going to ask you one question. Who do you want to be?”
The window fades into a distance that Clark can’t breach. The smells and sounds of the outside world seem to dwindle and die. Everything shrinks away until he is left standing in an endless hallway with too-knowing eyes intent on him. But he cannot voice the answer. He cannot put this into words. He cannot take the mortal wound still bleeding and searing and hurting from the deep, dark place where he has locked it away; cannot take it out and bring it into the exposed light of day where it will be ripped and torn and rent asunder until it can never be hidden again, and the pain finally conquers him.
He cannot let himself realize, again, just how much he has lost. Not now, not when he has survived his final encounter with Lois and heard her walk away and did not stop her. Not now, when he is finally able to wake up each day without gasping at the dull, thudding pain in his chest, when he can be Superman without having to remind himself constantly not to speak. Not now, when he has nothing left to hope for as Superman anymore, and thus, nothing to risk losing.
So he says nothing. But James flinches and looks away, as if he hears everything that Clark cannot (will not) say. Pain, worse than the superficial, physical pain he’d shown when Clark had exploded in from the sky to save him and protect him and rescue him, flashes across James’s features.
“You have to say it,” James whispers. He more than anyone knows that Clark will hear him. “You have to admit it, even if only to yourself.”
“Why are you doing this?” Clark asks him abruptly. He does not like being confronted like this. He does not like feeling, once again (always), as if he is lacking something, missing something. As if he is foreign, alien, incomprehensible to the people of this world. “I told you to save my parents, not me.”
James hesitates for only an instant before those wise eyes crumple and become the wide, shocked eyes of a young man, hurting and afraid and so much more affected now than he was when Clark found him unconscious and bleeding to death on a cold, grungy floor. “Because I miss CK!” he cries out, his voice too loud, echoing through the hallway, piercing against Superman’s super-sensitive hearing. “Because I want Clark back more than anything, and this is the only way I can see that happening.”
Clark feels cold and sick and twisted and small. He feels dumb and slow and lethargic, because he should have known this. He should have seen this. He should have realized that of course James is hurt and lonely and overwhelmed just as much as Clark or his parents are. He should have anticipated this in the same way he had anticipated that James would need the signal watch one day.
“Of course,” he says, and it is not hard to reach out and put a steadying hand on James’s shoulder, offering comfort in exchange for all that he has taken from his young friend. “I’m sorry. If this is what you want, then of course we’ll do it. We’ll try.”
Because he cannot deny James anything, least of all what he most wants. He cannot look at this man who was willing, only weeks earlier, to die for him, and not do everything he can for him in return.
But James is strong and mature and steady once more, stepping back so that Clark’s hand falls away, and he looks at Clark with an expression he cannot read. “No,” he says, slowly, as if speaking to a small child. “No, CK. Don’t do this for me. Don’t do this for your parents. Don’t do this for the world, or for anyone else. If you want to give me something, then just…think about this one thing. Ask yourself this one thing.”
“What?” Clark asks, but he already knows the answer, has already heard James ask it and still cannot face it.
“Who do you want to be?”
The words hit him like weapons. Not Kryptonite, but like…like darkness, like the antithesis of sunlight, like a sucking void that steals away energy and life and replaces it with weariness and vague pain.
“Who do you want to be?” James asks, for the third time, as if the question is simple and the answer clear.
As if Clark has the luxury of choosing.
“When you know,” James continues, (so oblivious to the impact of his own words; so insightful that he turns his back to offer Clark a chance to flee gracefully), “then you can give me your answer.”
The window opens and closes in less than a second, and Superman is free. Alone. Unhindered by gravity.
Trapped. Alone. Weighted down with a burden he cannot escape and a choice he cannot make.
*
“We’re not going to tell you what to do.” Jonathan’s voice is weak and raspy and he breathes in between every two or three words. He has dropped weight and muscle mass and just a bit of the cheerfulness of his presence. But he speaks, and he is able to walk now, a few steps at a time, and he is safe, hidden here in this tiny town in the backwoods of Maine that only the citizens and Clark himself know about. His hand, when Clark takes it, is able to squeeze back now, too, and that makes Clark happy enough to be able to breathe.
“You have to decide this on your own,” his mom adds, when Jonathan falls silent, breathless and exhausted. “We’re happy just to be with you. We just want you to be happy.”
“I am happy,” he says, and wishes they would believe it (if they did, maybe he could finally believe it himself). “We’re safe now--safer, at least, without Trask out there and with Luthor behind bars. We have a system now, and we’ve adjusted. If we mess that up, then…then how will we come back to this when it doesn’t work?”
His mom frowns at him. “Who says it won’t work?”
“This story they’ve concocted is nothing more than a conspiracy theory,” Clark says. He turns to look out the window at the small backyard. It’s nothing much, but there is a bench where his dad can sit in the sun and a small garden where his mom has begun to plant a few things for his dad even though it’s far too late in the year to expect much of a harvest. The window is square and fringed with a white, laced curtain much like the ones they once had in their kitchen in Smallville (like their kitchen in the suite Lois made into an almost-home). Clark wishes the curtain was different, blue or straight or something, just so that it wouldn’t remind him of the homes consigned forever to the past. “Who would believe it?”
“You’d be surprised,” his mom says tartly, but falls silent when Jonathan lifts himself up to speak again. Clark turns, too, unwilling to miss anything his dad will give him.
“They will believe it,” his dad says, “because they want to believe it.”
Dusk lends cascading shadows to his father’s form, cloaking and concealing the bandages, revealing and exposing the strength still there. Jonathan sits on the couch in the small, homey living room (a couch, not a bed, because he does not like feeling lazy and wants to be up and about), and he is hurt and broken and only slowly mending, but he does not flinch or hesitate or look away from his son. Clark feels immeasurable gratitude for that (feels immeasurable relief, that they have not turned away from him or left him or resented him for all that they have lost because of him).
“Son,” Jonathan says in his halting, sincere voice, “you think the world is any happier with what’s happened than you are? You think they haven’t noticed that their Superman isn’t quite the same as he was before?”
“He’s right,” Martha says when Jonathan stops to recover. She looks up at Clark, and there is a sadness in her eyes he doesn’t understand. “Even if people don’t believe it, they will pretend they do. For your sake. And maybe even for theirs, so that they can have Superman’s voice back. So that they can have Superman back, the way he should be. The way he is meant to be.”
Clark feels, at once, both very hurt and very touched. It hurts to think that after everything that’s been done to him, after everything he has done to keep going and all the battles he has fought to make sure he can still be the man his parents raised him to be--it is not enough. But it is nice, on the other hand, to know that the world might want to give back to him (that maybe their adoration and attention and acclamation are just clumsy ways of showing their acceptance and affection).
But he doesn’t know how to say any of that. He doesn’t know how to put any of what he’s feeling into words (and is not even sure that he knows what he is feeling).
“Superman helps,” is all he can say, and wants to laugh (wants to cry) at the realization that he is arguing for the persona he would have gladly given up a thousand times over if only he could be Clark Kent again. But then, he does not know that he can remember how to be Clark Kent anymore. He does not think he can stop being Superman now. He is almost sure that he has become so used to helping and saving and moving (constantly, always, at superspeed, in ways no human can move, a moving man in a world of statues) that he would not know how to be relegated to a slow, sedate, human existence.
(He does not think he can ever trust the world enough to make himself so vulnerable again.)
“Clark did too,” his mom says softly.
It is a truth, and it cuts so deeply that Clark flinches away from it.
Jonathan settles back into the cushions of the couch, lets out a sigh that seems to leave him with only peace within. “I’m glad,” he whispers, so quietly only Superman can hear him. “I’m glad James did this.”
His dad wants Clark Kent back too, he realizes. James, and his dad, and…his mom too?
Clark looks over at her, and finds her looking back at him.
“Help me with these,” she says. She picks up the tray of Jonathan’s lunch dishes; Clark takes them from her and follows her into the kitchen, already decorated and cluttered with bits of the art supplies he’s brought her over the past few weeks. When she takes the tray from him, he reaches out to fiddle with a couple metal filings, their metallic color a stark contrast to the tan flesh of his uncalloused, unblistered palms. He cannot look at his mom as he asks the question he does not want to ask (but he needs to ask it, needs to hear her answer, needs some solidarity in this, because if he cannot make this decision for himself, then he needs to know that he will be making everyone who loves him happy).
“What do you think I should do?”
“I’m not going to answer that, Clark,” she says levelly. But he thinks she has answered it. He thinks the name she chooses to address him by and the way she will not look at him and the trembling of her hands are all answers. “You need to decide this for yourself.”
“Why?” he asks, almost petulantly. “This decision affects all of us--why can’t I ask you what you want?”
Martha turns to look at him, then, and he is taken aback by the fond smile she wears. “Because you always ask that, honey, and for once, we want to be the ones asking you. What do you want?”
It’s funny, Clark thinks (without any inclination to laugh), that they only ask him that question now, when everything he has ever wanted has been taken away from him (or walked away from him of her own free will).
“I don’t know.” He sets down the metal filings with careful gentleness and moves so that he can look out of this window too. Superman likes knowing that the sky is still there for him to retreat to if necessary. (If he is Clark again, he will not be able to find so many ubiquitous exits; he will have to go back to lying and pretending and hiding.) “I’ve gotten used to being Superman, Mom. I like being Superman. He can save so many people and he doesn’t have to lie and he…he’s above it all. He can’t be hurt.”
He regrets the words as soon as he hears them and realizes, too late, what they sound like. He hunches his shoulders, waiting for his mom to grab him or smack him, to lecture him, to remind him of all the times he has already been hurt. But she does none of those things, and when he looks, hesitantly, back over his shoulder, he sees her standing stock-still, frozen, her expression so full of pain that he feels an instant surge of adrenaline.
“Mom?” he asks, alarmed.
When he reaches out and touches her arm, she finds movement again. She steps forward and pulls him into a fierce hug, so tight and all-encompassing that Clark feels as if he is a young boy again, crying because he heard the kids in his class making fun of him behind his back and through three wooden doors. He feels as if she is trying to protect him from everything in the world, trying to pull him into her body and use her own mortal flesh and bone as a shield so that he will be safe. He is not a boy any longer, not young or defenseless, but he welcomes this feeling. He needs this feeling. (He needs to feel like someone will hold on to him and not let go.)
“Oh, honey,” she breathes into his ear.
“I know,” Clark says before she can. “I know Superman is vulnerable in some ways and Clark Kent is strong in some ways, too. I know--”
“Don’t,” she cuts him off, her arms tightening impossibly farther around him. He bends so that she does not have to strain herself (feels once again how incredibly fragile the strong, indomitable people in his life really are). “Don’t explain or apologize, Clark. You don’t have to make sense all the time--life doesn’t make sense. If you feel like Superman is safer, then it’s okay to say so. We’ve always just wanted the best for you.”
Clark lets himself rest his head on her shoulder, lets himself give some of his burden over to someone else. Her scent (metal and sparks and bread and sunshine) infuses him and bears him up until he wonders if he is floating. “I don’t know what’s best,” he admits.
He’d thought he did. He’d thought Clark Kent and Superman could be two different people, encapsulating the best of both worlds.
He’d thought he could live his life without Lois, without a voice, without a home.
He’d thought he could make Lois a part of his home, could forget the past and just find something new.
But he’s been wrong every time, and he just doesn’t know anymore.
“I just want someone to tell me what to do,” he says.
She stiffens in his arms, pulls away, her face downcast so that he cannot see what has her so upset.
“Mom?” he asks, and hates the helpless note in his voice.
She gives him a fake, strained smile that lasts no more than a beat of her rapid heart before she sags and half-falls into the chair at the table behind her. Clark reaches out and takes her hand in his. She needs him, and it doesn’t matter that he doesn’t understand why, only that he is there for her as she always has been for him.
“I’m sorry,” she finally says. “I can’t tell you what to do. I don’t know either. I thought I did before, but that was a mistake, and all of this is partly my fault.”
Clark frowns. “I don’t understand.”
She sighs. “In Smallville, after Trask was gone…I saw Lois looking at you. She looked…angry and confused and…and like she was trying to figure something out. I guessed that she knew, but I didn’t want to say anything in case I was wrong. I didn’t know her well, and you liked her so much, I just…well, I just assumed that things would work themselves out. But maybe if I’d said something--if I’d at least warned you of my suspicions--then maybe we wouldn’t be here right now worrying about all this.”
“Mom,” he says, his voice full of gentle chastisement, and incredibly, he feels almost light-hearted. He is not the only one who carries burdens and second-guesses himself (not the only one who carries secrets inside even when the whole world looks at him and knows him), and strangely, that makes him feel stronger and bolder. “It’s not your fault. Lois has always gone her own way; she wouldn’t have listened if you’d tried to talk to her. And if you’d warned me, I might have made things worse by trying to disprove her suspicions.”
Martha rolls her eyes, squeezes his hand. “I know that. I just…well, I can’t help but wonder, can I? Especially after how things turned out.”
Clark averts his eyes. He has not brought up Lois since Trask, and no one has asked. Maybe they assume he sent her away. Maybe they think she left because of the kidnapping. Maybe they draw all the wrong conclusions (make all the right assumptions). Clark doesn’t care, so long as they continue to keep their silence and do not make him try to explain what he does not quite understand himself.
Martha’s hand under his chin brings his gaze up to her. “Oh, honey,” she says, so full of love and maternal affection that Clark can’t help but take in a breath, trying to breathe her inside himself so that he will have her with him always. “You’ll do the right thing. You always do.”
“What if I don’t?” He tries to smile, but cannot. “What if I make the wrong choice?”
She gives him a real smile. “Clark, haven’t you heard anything you’ve been saying? You’ve already made your choice--you just need to explain it to yourself now.”
*
He hangs in the sky, in that ephemeral boundary between the earth and space above, a symbol of in-betweens and not-quites and almosts. He used to come up here all the time, before, when he needed an escape from Clark Kent. Now that he is Superman, though, he does not have time to come up here anymore. He flew through the skies for weeks while trying to recover from the wounds inflicted by Nightfall (the hurts inflicted by betrayal and exposure and loss and grief and so many other things he hadn’t admitted because they were too big and intimidating and permanent), but always in the daylight, always lower in the atmosphere so that he would not see stars and black space and be reminded of the immensity of that asteroid that had filled all his vision before he’d hurled himself at it.
Now, though, he is once more caught between two personas, two identities, two lives, and so he needs the familiar comfort of this old haven. He needs something to remind him of who he was (Clark Kent, a human but an outsider, separated by the secrets he kept inside and the desire to help he could not completely ignore) and who he is now (Superman, an alien but accepted, haunted by the life he once had and the life he wishes could still be his).
Who do you want to be? James had asked.
What do you want? his mom had asked.
Two questions that should be simple but are anything but. They are complicated and hard and rife with pitfalls and snares that Clark does not know how to avoid or escape.
Superman is safe and strong and secure, but Clark Kent…Clark Kent is wildness and the unknown, danger and hope, messy and uncontained but beautiful and full of possibilities just as much as humanity. And he is only a hope, only a miracle and a castle in the air, but he is human and normal and real and special in an ordinary way, and maybe the answer is simple after all.
He wants this, wants it so badly he can taste it in the thin air around him, can feel it surging through his bloodstream, pumping through his heart with a beat that spells out hope, hope, hope, hope.
He wants it, but he is so very, very afraid.
He has stopped Luthor and faced Trask and confronted Lois (had let her go when every molecule in his Kryptonian body, every cell in his human heart, was screaming at him to hold onto her, to not let her to, to clasp her close and beg her to stay with him and make his life that much brighter and bigger and better), but this…this is harder than all those things, with so much more potential to hurt him. If he lets himself hope, if he lets himself try--if it does not work, and he has to come back to this half-life--then he does not know that he will ever recover again.
He has learned how to be more than content now, is somewhere between contentment and actual happiness, and it is not the golden-touched, idealistic dreams of before, but it is better than anything since that hated story, and he does not want to ruin what peace he has fought for and won.
But the thought that he could go back, that he could be just Clark again…he is breathless with wanting, paralyzed with the force of his sheer, wanton desire for it.
But if he is to do this, if he is to be brave and strong and desperate once more, then there is one thing he needs to do. For himself. For his happiness.
Closure, Lois had said she wanted, and he wants it too. She’d answered the question she thought he wanted to ask, but he’d already known that answer. There is another, though, that he does want to know, the question that had made him hold sharp, twisted, awful anger toward her for that first couple months, and the question that he eventually set aside and forgot because it was easier to forgive her if he did not think on it.
But if he is to start anew, then he wants to know. He wants an answer that he can use to give himself a reason for starting over again. (He wants to know the worst so that if Clark Kent is hurt again, he can already bear the scars and have the calluses to protect himself.)
So he goes to see Lois.
She is working late (just like old times, when he’d let himself believe this city and these people could be his future), and there is no one around, and he has not seen her in so long (four weeks and three days), so he almost comes to a halt when he catches sight of her. She looks good, not so thin, not so tired, not so brittle. She looks almost like she did before, and Clark does not know whether he is happy about that or bitter (and he is happy; he just wishes he could have had something to do with her recovery, like she did his). But he is on a mission, so he lets the world pause around him, and he moves through the newsroom in a blur (outrunning memories, evading pain, ignoring the parallels he could draw). When he finally lets the world come back to motion, he and Lois are standing on the roof of the Daily Planet building.
She is shocked and off balance. It takes her a second (an eternity) to focus on him. He is dressed in the Superman suit (because he has not quite made his decision, not yet, not until he can find a reason not to be afraid; not until he can find something to trust and believe in again); he stays still and motionless, a few paces back from her (because carrying her up here was a bad move and he does not need any more physical contact to distract him from what he needs to say).
“Wh-what?” she stammers.
He does not wait for her to catch up, nor does he explain himself (she hadn’t given him those luxuries, after all, and he does not like to think of himself as vindictive, but maybe he is, a little bit). “You said that you knew the question I wanted to ask was why you wrote the article, but you were wrong. That’s not the question I’ve wanted to ask all this time.”
“Clark!” she snaps, and despite himself, Clark feels like smiling. She almost sounds like she did before his secret ruined everything between them. “You can’t--you can’t just grab me like that! You’re not supposed to connect yourself to me anymore, that’s why I left. Didn’t I do enough damage last time?”
The question twists a cold, sharp blade through his gut, but Clark ignores it. If he does not have this conversation now (if he does not make himself actually voice the words that have been festering inside him), then he never will. And then, no matter what decision he makes, no matter whether this last, desperate chance works or not, he will still only be living a half-life, trapped and haunted by might-have-beens and could-bes.
“What?” he says, matter-of-factly because that is always the best defense against an irritated Lois Lane. “You’re allowed to upset my life for months at a time, but I can’t upset yours long enough to have a conversation with you? A conversation, I might add, that you yourself said I needed to have.”
She blinks, shakes her head to clear it. “All…all right. Then…what’s the question you wanted to ask?”
And finally, even though he is hurt and desperate and unsure, he finds the courage he needs to ask her what he’s wanted to ask since that long ago morning walking into the bullpen and finding reporters instead of friends.
“Why?” he asks, almost frantically, urgently, his calmness (his patience and understanding and avoidance) shattering like ice against concrete. “Why didn’t you tell me you knew? Why didn’t you warn me you were writing the article?”
There is pressure building up inside of him, an ocean, a storm, a tsunami, building and rising and crushing everything in its path until he thinks he will explode. He is trying so hard to remain still, but energy crackles along his veins, sweeping through the marrow-tracks in his bones, and he has to move, except that if he does, he thinks he will never come back to earth again but will remain forever wandering and homeless and adrift.
Her cheeks are gilded with tears, her eyes painted with guilt, and she stands as motionless as a condemned prisoner on the firing line. “Because,” she says, “I knew you would talk me out of it.”
Now he can move. He steps back (a retreat; a surrender; an acquisition of a new battleground), silent, absorbing that. He thinks he’s known it, all along, but he needed to hear her say it. He needed to hear it said aloud so that he could face it.
“I’m sorry,” Clark,” she says (pleads with him, except that he does not know what she could possibly be pleading for when she is the one who first drove him away and then walked away). “I’m sorry I didn’t talk to you. I’m sorry I told the world your secret. I’m sorry I never gave you a chance. I’m sorry I ruined your life. I didn’t say it before because I didn’t think it would matter--I didn’t think you would believe me--and I…I had hoped that I could show you how sorry I was. How much I wish I could undo those days. But I guess…I guess telling you is as close as I’m ever going to get.”
He’s known for a while that she’s sorry. He suspected it when James told him that she was searching for him. He knew it when he saw her and she could not find words (because a speechless Lois is a new thing, as new and different and unique as an apologetic Lois). He’s known that she wants to make up for what she did, and she has said she is sorry in various, small moments. But it is nice to hear it, he realizes, nice to have it all spelled out and laid in the open so that there can be no doubts or second-guessing during the dark, exhausting, lonely nights.
That growing, surging pressure inside him is eased somewhat. Tamed and calmed so that it lies more restfully within him.
“I know you’re sorry,” he finally says. It has been a long time since he has let himself think of those few days in Smallville, but Trask is gone now and so he has been able to remember it recently, has thought back on it, and now that she has said she is sorry, he finds that he can actually bring it up between them. “You said that you didn’t have a good reason for that article, but I remember…Trask said that he would make sure the whole world knew who I really was. When he was fighting me, with the Kryptonite, before you got there, he told me he’d make sure, one way or another, that my story would come out. And I think…I think that he must have told you the same thing. And when he got away, you knew that he would expose me.” He takes a deep breath before finishing (because this is one of his last most deeply held hopes and if she denies it, if she has no idea what he’s talking about, then he does not know that he will be able to find it in himself to hope again). “I think that even though you wrote that article the way you did because you were mad at me…I think part of the reason was also so that you could tell the world before Trask could.”
Her breath is staggered, shaky, so uneven that it almost covers the rapid tempo of her heart. She takes a short, telling step backward, avoiding his gaze. “So what?” she asks, bitterly. “Yes, Trask said that he’d tell the world about you, and maybe I justified writing that article by telling myself it was better if I did it instead of him. But it doesn’t matter. It was only a very small part of the reason, and I can’t pretend otherwise. I can’t just lie and say that my motives were purely altruistic.”
The pressure disappears entirely, so suddenly, so wholly that Clark feels as if the breath he takes in is the first whole breath he has pulled in for months. His hope has not been dashed, and he feels as if his faith in the universe has been restored. (He feels as if maybe he can risk his life and his heart again.)
“You can’t say that your reasons were entirely wrong either,” he points out. “I do know you, Lois. I knew why you wrote the article, I even knew why you didn’t talk to me about it--and I know that you always see what you’re lacking, not what you have.”
“What do I have?” Her voice is hollow, fraught with tears she will not acknowledge. “I’m selfish, and I get angry too easily, and I never think about the consequences, and I’m only sorry when it’s too late.”
Clark lets out his breath in a heavy sigh. “Do you have any idea how many conversations I overhear in a day? Hundreds. Thousands. All the bad and all the good, ugliness and kindness in balanced measures. But through it all, in so many whispered confidences and private confessions and public arguments, you want to know what they all have in common? Everyone, every person in the entire world, looks into the mirror and sees their tiny pieces of imperfection rather than the beauty of the whole.” He can’t help himself; he steps closer, looks down at her. He feels…calm. Relaxed. Sure in a way he hasn’t been his entire life, and he wishes that he could take a piece of that confidence and instill it in her so that she does not have to look so lost. “Sometimes,” he breathes, “I think that that is the greatest tragedy of all in this world.”
And then, because she is staring at him with such wide eyes (because she is too close and too warm and too beautiful; because she walked away from him for a reason he wishes he didn’t understand), he freezes the world. She is caught between heartbeats, between one teary breath and another, but somehow, impossibly, even though she is lost a moment behind him, she seems to cling to him.
Or maybe it is only his imagination.
He places her back where he found her (because he has a meeting he needs to attend and he has made his decision; because stoicism is a necessary façade), and then he leaves her behind. He does not look back. Instead, he looks forward.
To a new life. A new beginning.
An old name.
He has faced the world a thousand times as Superman (his pieces of imperfection). It is time he faces it, for the first time, openly and unabashedly as Clark Kent (the whole that will make all the fractured pieces of himself beautiful and worthwhile).
*
