*13*
The fields beyond his parents’ house are just as they were when he was growing up. The same straight lines. The same sound of soil trod under his weight. The same distances stretching out around him. The same silence filled, nonetheless, with tiny resonances of life: insects burrowing below and flying above, wind sheering across the plains, birdsong, people just far enough away not to intrude on his senses. And the sight of his house standing on the horizon, flanked by the barn with its old, flaking red paint. Inside that house, he knows, his parents are sitting down to lunch. His dad is intent on his sandwich while his mom chatters on about her latest art project. There is a comforting pattern to the sounds they make in the background, a tapestry of movement and sound and sights that blanket all of Clark’s childhood memories.
He’s always wanted that same comfort, that same kind of pattern, for himself. And since he met Lois, he’s wanted to make a tapestry of interwoven lives with her, faster-paced and riskier, maybe, but stitched together with the same kind of love and care and trust.
Well…he’s going to have to give that up. All of it. The idea that he can find love in this life, on this world not his own, with a people he’s not connected to by anything other than chance. The dream that Lois will ever be a permanent part of his life. The hope that someone will love him simply because of who he is (in all his facets and guises and names).
It’s just him now. Him and his parents.
He knows if he walks across these ancient fields with their tiny green sprouts, and enters that house with all its memories, his parents will welcome him. His dad will smile and tell him about the plans he has to paint the barn. His mom will tell him he looks hungry while she makes him a sandwich. They will touch him and pull him into their presence and blanket him in love.
He needs that. He craves it.
He cannot move.
There is a crater spreading out around him, a result of his spiraling plummet down from the heavens (a shooting star reenacting his arrival here so long ago, only this time, there is no one to find him and choose to love him). He couldn’t seem to control the descent, had only known that he could not stay up there in the cold, airless dark anymore. He’s not even sure how long it’s been since he left Lois behind in his apartment. All he knows is that he cannot go back there. He cannot face the rubble of a life he doesn’t think he has the strength to live again.
It’s time to move on.
Only, he’s never moved on without talking to his parents first.
And he can’t talk to them.
His legs won’t move to help him stand. His arms won’t push him upright. His voice won’t emerge from his sore, throbbing throat. He can only sit huddled in on himself, silent, a pathetic mess, a tiny disruption in the orderly life around him.
He screamed himself hoarse in the atmosphere. If he cried in that vacuum, he’ll never know, the tears wicked away before they had a chance to be (symbolism he doesn’t care to delve into at all). He tried to tell himself to go, to descend back to the Earth, but he never quite could manage it. No call for help reached him. No gentle whisper spoke to him. Nothing could puncture the void around him. It was welcoming at first, but then constraining. Claustrophobic. Eventually, he grew desperate. A strange compulsion grew in him to hear his name again. He felt as if he had been forgotten completely, erased from the Earth, as if leaving her atmosphere had stripped him of all his years of adopted belonging.
So he floated downward and listened harder than he ever had before. For his name. For someone calling for him. For someone wanting to talk to him.
And all he heard was Superman.
No one said Clark. No one called for Clark. No one needed Clark.
Only Superman.
Until one man. The same voice he’d heard so many times before. Just as frightening as every other time.
“Ah, Clark, another one down. There’s just never too much of a good thing, is there?”
He’d been up far too high for anyone to see him, drifting across the heavens above the East Coast. No one could have possibly known he was there or calculated what volume to speak at to reach him. Wherever his stalker was, he had to have been talking to himself.
Clark zeroed in on the sound as soon as he heard his name, but strangely, by the time the sentence was finishing, by the time the world had resolved from multi-colored topography to Stryker’s Island, just off the coast of Metropolis, the voice was gone. The man’s breathing had stopped. Vanished so quickly Clark couldn’t imagine what could have stopped it (couldn’t think what manner of death was so abrupt and so final). He’d flown quickly, invisibly, across Stryker’s Island, over the deserted grounds of the old prison, through every rusting cell, along each ravine, but he found nothing (not even a body) save the scent of crackling ozone wisping through musty air.
Another dead end.
A reminder, though, that Clark isn’t the only one in trouble. Superman, too, has his problems, and his are far more dangerous to his parents (the only ones in this world who love him whether he wears a cape or not).
He fled, again, into the black sky. Maybe for minutes, maybe for hours, Clark doesn’t care. He only knows that he finally felt himself waver, his strength flicker, and he fell, wavering and only half-controlled, toward the far-distant ground. Guiding himself in the direction of Smallville, keeping his landing to only this ten-foot shallow crater, seems to have sapped him of the last of his resolve. So here he is, collapsed and broken two miles from his parents, utterly useless, utterly despondent. He wants to call out to them, but his voice is raspy and weak. He wants to go to them, but his limbs are heavy, drained of all strength.
And what does it matter? Why did he even come here? If his parents see him, he will have to tell them--tell them that he’s made a terrible mistake. Tell them he was wrong. Tell them they are still in danger because for all his superpowers, he can’t find a single man (who disappears in an instant and knows his name and seems to want only to taunt him).
Tell them he’s failed. Superman holds too much risk and Clark holds too little value, and it’s better that he just go back to being a nameless, purposeless drifter. A ghost, flitting across Earth, touching but never quite belonging. Alive, but never quite living. Loving, but never quite loved.
Alone, tired, hurting, Clark wraps his cape around himself and curls into the smallest shape he can make. In another moment, he will be strong for his parents. He will do his best to put a good spin on things for their sake. He will let them hold him so that he can let himself actually fall apart (without being afraid that he will never be able to pull himself back together).
In a moment.
***
His dad finds him that night, while walking back to the barn with the dusk turning the air purple and blue. Clark only knows Jonathan is there because there is a gasp and then the ground shakes beneath his ear, and heavy footsteps pound down into the shallow crater.
“Clark!” his dad shouts. “Clark, my boy!”
Warm hands fall on his shoulders and tug him into his lap. Clark pries his eyes open and looks up into his dad’s familiar face, marred by panic.
“Dad,” he croaks. “I’m sorry.”
He should have just walked into the farmhouse. He should have made himself be stronger. He shouldn’t have scared his dad.
“Clark, what’s wrong?” Jonathan asks. “What is it? What happened to you? Is it the man who knows your name?”
And Clark is ashamed. It’s not Kryptonite, or a government agency, or his stalker, or any of the other nightmares his dad is imagining. It’s just a woman (the woman he loves even though his heart feels like it’s etched through with riven lines of fire and blood that spell out her name). It’s just his broken dreams and hopes and heart.
“I’m sorry,” he says again.
His dad tries to tug him up, and Clark doesn’t have the heart to disappoint him. From somewhere, he dredges up a smattering of strength and drags himself to his feet. Once there, though, he finds himself listing. He’s grateful when his dad wedges himself under his shoulder, even more grateful when he doesn’t ask any more questions.
Together, in silence, they stagger across the nascent fields. Clark’s only aware of how cold he is when he finally registers the heat emanating from his dad, enveloping him in warmth, making his teeth start to chatter in contrast.
“Oh, Clark,” Jonathan whispers when he feels the tremors. There’s a tremble to his voice; Clark doesn’t need superhearing to detect it.
“It’s over, Dad,” Clark finally manages to say, knowing he deserves something. “I told her and it didn’t matter. She just doesn’t love me. I don’t know why I ever thought she would.”
Jonathan doesn’t say anything as they leave the fields and head past the barn (Clark’s heart is like Kryptonite burning down through his ribcage). But when the light on the porch reaches out to welcome them inside, he tightens his arm around Clark (Clark almost breaks, then, but he can’t, not while his dad is already bearing so much of his weight). “I love you, son,” he says, simply.
That’s all.
It’s too much.
Clark shatters, and everything goes black.
***
“What’s wrong with him? It isn’t Kryptonite, is it?”
“I don’t think so, Martha.”
“Then what? Here, wrap him in this. He’s so cold!”
“He was just laying there. How long was he out there?”
“Get me that hot water bottle from that chest, Jonathan. I don’t know what’s wrong with him, but we have to get him warm. Maybe we should light a fire and heat up some bricks to put around him.”
“Why was he just laying there? Why didn’t he come to us?”
“He did. He’s here, isn’t he? But why is he like this? If it’s not Kryptonite, then…what else can hurt him?”
“Martha…he said he told Lois. He said she didn’t love him.”
(Clark stirs, shaken, flinching. The touch of a warm, soft hand on his brow calms him. The deep hum of a man sitting at his side soothes him.)
“Oh no. Oh, Clark, my beautiful boy. Why, Jonathan? I don’t understand. Why does he have to go through this?”
“Shh, Martha. You’re right. He’ll be okay. He will. I’ll light a fire. Just let him hear your voice. Let him know we love him.”
(Clark sinks deeper into the sound of her voice, crooning out the lullaby of her familiar, beloved I love you, and lets the world fade away.)
***
The first thing he becomes aware of is sunlight. It is draped over him like a blanket, soaking into his porous skin. When he twitches his hands, he feels that there are no blankets. He is dressed in only a pair of sweatpants, and tilting his head without opening his eyes lets him know that there are no curtains over the window letting in that rejuvenating light. He’s in the living room, on the couch; it’s the only room with windows large enough to let in this much sunlight, and the couch is a familiar texture beneath his bare skin.
He slept here before, those few nights when Lois took his bedroom and he imagined an ordinary life.
Shivering suddenly, Clark shakes his head, forcefully, and does his best to think about something else. It’s strange to feel goosebumps rising along his arms, to shudder beneath the chill that seeps through him, negating the effects of the solar illumination.
“Clark?” His mom’s voice is soft, calming, but there is a catch to it that hurts him and fills him with guilt.
Ashamed but wanting to comfort her, he turns his head and finally opens his eyes (finally lets in the world again, with all its pain and heartbreak and regret). “Mom,” he says. His voice emerges clear, though perhaps a little weak. “I’m sorry, Mom. I shouldn’t have worried you and made--”
“Oh, Clark, don’t worry about us.” She abandons her rocking chair and kneels at his side, stretching her arms to give him an awkward embrace that permeates through him as ably (and just as restorative) as the sunlight. “We’re just glad you came home. Always come home, Clark--no matter what, all right? Just always come home to us.”
He doesn’t have anywhere else to go. He has no one else to worry about.
Shaking away his thoughts again, he clasps his mom and eases her up with him as he sits upright. “I will,” he promises. “Thank you for being here.”
She sits at his side, gives him a slightly less clumsy hug from this position, and rests her head on his shoulder. Clark breathes her in, her scent (so familiar he isn’t even sure how to identify the individual components), the feel of her, the tickle of her hair on his cheeks, the welcome warmth of her closeness driving away the chill invoked by the thought of Lois.
“Where’s Dad?” he asks when his shivers have abated.
“He went out to try to cover up that crater. We weren’t sure when you’d wake. We didn’t think it was Kryptonite, but…well, we didn’t figure the sunlight would hurt anything.”
Clark flinches at this reminder of their fear, and sighs. “I’m sorry,” he says again. “I don’t know what was wrong. After Lois…after, I just…I don’t know. I don’t even know what day it is. I just…started flying, and I didn’t stop. Until…until I couldn’t anymore, and I tried to come home, but I…it was like all my strength just ran out.”
“Oh, Clark.” There’s a strange mixture of relief and grief in her voice, her expression, the tilt of her hand as she cups his jaw in her hand. “That’s not so hard to figure out. Heartbreak can do strange things to a person, even a person who can fly.”
He’s silent for an instant, another instant, but it’s his mom’s eyes (blue and gray and full of love; the same eyes that coaxed him into confiding his fears about his developing powers and teased him when he had his first crush on Lana Lang) that finally compel the words to burst forth. “I told her. I told her, but she’d come to break up with me, and it didn’t change anything.”
She nods, then strokes his face again (a gesture he remembers well from childhood, and might have squirmed away from in other circumstances; but now it is more than welcome, almost necessary). “Would you have wanted it to?” she asks him, gently. “I thought you didn’t want her to love you for Superman.”
“I don’t,” he admits. “I didn’t. But I was going to tell her, and then when she said it was over before I could, I just…I thought it would be enough. She felt something for me, Mom, I know she did--I can’t have imagined these past weeks! She did care for me! And I thought…I hoped that the only reason she didn’t love me yet is because she knew I was lying. If I took that away, if I told her the truth, she’d have everything she felt for Clark on top of everything she could have for a man who didn’t lie to her.”
He’s pulled away from her, sometime during that clumsy speech, and now stands in front of her, the sun cascading down his back. Martha just looks up at him, calm and reassuring. If she tells him he was wrong, if she shakes her head at him, he thinks he might collapse again. He thinks the weight of all his regrets and should-haves, could-haves, maybes will topple him to the floor.
But she doesn’t say anything. Only sits there and watches him, waiting, listening.
“She already knew,” he finally says, and his shoulders slump. He holds himself upright solely so his mom will not have to catch him. “She doesn’t feel anything at all for Clark Kent. Everything I thought she felt, all those moments I thought…they weren’t real. She only gave me a chance at all because she found out I was Superman. And I guess…I guess it wasn’t enough. I’m not what she wants.”
A brief flash of something very like anger passes like lightning across Martha’s face, but she swallows and it’s gone. When she stands, she does so slowly, cautiously; when she reaches for him, it’s instinctive, familiar.
“I’m so sorry, Clark.” She goes up on her tiptoes and lets him collapse down into her arms for a brief, cleansing hug that does more than all the who-knows-how-many hours of sunlight.
“I’m the one who’s sorry,” he murmurs into her hair with a weak effort at a chuckle. “I never should have told her. It puts you and Dad at--”
“No.” Martha pulls back, limitless resolve layered through her expression and the strength of her grip on his arms. “No, if she was going to tell anyone, she’d have done it already. It’ll be okay, Clark.”
“Yeah,” he says (and tastes the lie, heavy like ashes). “Yeah, it’ll be okay.”
***
His dad, when he comes back in, clumps right over to Clark and his mom, huddled together in front of the window, bathed in afternoon sun, and puts his arms around them. He’s sweaty and covered in dirt, his forehead streaked with a smear of mud, but Clark lets himself (for just a moment) pretend that he is small again, young enough to believe his dad can still fix everything for him, and leans into him. He breathes in deep of the smell, as familiar as his mom’s, flavored with dirt and plants and hard work.
“Dad,” he croaks, and has to work very hard not to grip too tightly.
“Son,” Jonathan says. He’s always been a man of few words, content to sit back and listen to Clark and Martha talk for hours, watching them with a small smile on his face, only every once in a while teasing them with a sentence here or there. He’s never needed more than just a few words, not when this one syllable can be filled with more eloquence than Clark manages on a good day of writing.
Clark breathes in, breathes out, and begins to remember (to believe again) that he is loved.
***
“I think my stalker is like me,” Clark says. He didn’t mean to speak, but his mom is stacking her and Jonathan’s empty plates to take to the sink, and her sleeve falls back to reveal the glint of Jimmy’s signal watch. It’d be nice to just get to hide out here until he feels more prepared to face the world, but as has already been proven, he doesn’t get what he wants.
The toast in his hand crumbles, giving him excuse to look away. It’s the first time he’s left the living room, and he’s surprised at how strange it seems to be clothed in flannel instead of sunlight (to be sitting at the same dinner table he’s sat at countless times before, as if nothing has really changed at all; as if he still possesses his cracked and beating heart).
“Like you?” Jonathan asks, Martha stilled behind him. “What do you mean? You think he’s Kryptonian?”
“I thought Jor-El said you were the only one to make it out,” his mom adds, brushing her free hand over his wrist, a warm touch to combat the cold truth behind her reminder.
“I don’t know if he’s Kryptonian.” Clark watches the yolk from his uneaten eggs soak through the crust of his crumbly toast. “But he moves too fast. And he seems able to know where I am, even when I’m not visible to the human eye--able to get to wherever I am when I respond to a crisis. And he’s somehow able to leave before I can pinpoint him whenever he says my name.” He pauses, swallows, drags a finger through the drying mess on his plate, and says, “I tracked him to Stryker’s Island earlier, and unless he can either move as fast as me or teleport, I would have cornered him. So I think, Kryptonian or not, he’s…different.”
“Well, maybe that’s why he’s keeping track of you,” his mom says with a sudden burst of hope. The dishes make a clatter when she sets them down in the sink, as if to underscore the thought. “Maybe he’s just trying to get up the courage to come clean himself.”
Jonathan’s already shaking his head. “Then why doesn’t he just come talk to Clark? Why follow him around and let him hear him? No, something’s suspicious about that.”
“I don’t know.” Clark shrugs (hard to do, to shift all that weight of regret and risk it crushing him). “At Stryker’s, I zeroed in on him as soon as I heard him--I singled out his heartbeat, and it didn’t recede or move or alter. It was just…gone.” He meets his dad’s gaze for only a second before looking away, flicking through memories he usually does his best to pretend he doesn’t have. “And nothing ever dies that fast and that silently without something left behind to show for it.”
“So he’s still out there,” Martha sighs.
“And I don’t know how to find him. All I know about him is that he’s male. I’d recognize his voice by now, but--”
“No, didn’t you say you heard his heartbeat?” Jonathan leans forward intently. “And didn’t you once tell me you could always recognize your mom and me through our heartbeats? Like fingerprints, you said.”
Clark hesitates, caught by the idea. “That’s right. I mean, I might get the worst headache ever by listening closely enough to pick out heartbeats, but it’ll be worth it if I can finally pin this guy down.” He frowns, then, abruptly restless. “I guess I should start in Metropolis.”
His parents exchange a look (one he’s used to seeing between them whenever they want to bring up something he doesn’t want to talk about). “Speaking of, honey,” his mom says, falsely casual as she sits at his side (trapping him between her and his dad’s love and focus). “What are you planning on doing? About Metropolis, your job, your friends, your apartment…”
As suddenly as it came, his drive and desire to move drain out of him. He’s once more heavy, anchored to the earth in leaden chains, too ashamed to look up from his cold breakfast to see his parents’ reaction. “I don’t know if I can go back,” he admits, then, slower, “I don’t know if I want to.” He forces a laugh that sounds hollow, matches it with a brittle smile. “I mean, what’s there for me?”
“Uh-huh.” Martha watches him, Jonathan’s hand wrapped around hers. “What’s your name?” she asks him, gently (it hits him with all the force of Nightfall).
“Clark.” The word, the name (the wish; the threat, even, when spoken by his stalker), is dragged from him unwillingly, but it’s a thousand times easier to say than Superman.
“Exactly.” Her smile is sad, sympathetic. Unrelenting. “That’s who you are, and you can’t stop being who you are, no matter how badly you feel right now.”
“I don’t think I want to be Clark anymore!”
He winces as soon as he hears his own confession. An apology dances on the tip of his tongue, but his mom only smiles at him.
“Why not?”
“Because…” He’s going to suffocate, to calcify, fossilized right here at the kitchen table that still bears his clumsily etched initials under the tablecloth, so he gets up and moves, paces back and forth (awake and alive and afire with hurt). “Because it’s too hard! Who am I kidding? Trying to juggle two identities is ridiculous--I’m always running out on Perry and Jimmy, on Lo--” He swallows, hard. “It’d be simpler to…to just be one person.”
“Clark.” His mom is there, standing in his path (seeing right through him). “Why don’t you want to be Clark Kent? The truth.”
“Because she doesn’t love Clark!” The truth is ripped from him, searing and twisting through his throat, scratching and flaming across his tongue, cold and heavy as it falls to crash like rubble between him and his parents. “She can’t love him. She’ll never love him. At least Superman is…” He trails off, unable to even finish that (pathetic, shameful) thought.
“At least Superman’s someone she loved,” his mom finished for him, and he can’t deny it. “Clark, honey,” she says, infinitely tender, inescapably tenacious, “do you really want to pretend to be something to earn love? Do you really think that’s the right thing to do?”
His knees give out. He drops back into his chair, steadied by his dad’s hand on his shoulder. “No,” he says heavily. “No, I can’t do that. It wouldn’t be fair to me. Or her. Or you guys.”
“Besides,” Jonathan says, breaking the silence after a moment, “if she doesn’t love Clark Kent, she doesn’t deserve Superman.”
There’s a lump in Clark’s throat as he looks up at his dad, who looks back unrepentantly (a smile hidden in the corner of his mouth). His mom opens her mouth, but then says nothing, just takes her seat again, completing their familiar circle of three (with no fourth to be added, no one else at his side).
“She kissed me,” Clark whispers, staring once more at his uneaten breakfast. “Why would she do that if she only came to tell me it was over?”
“Maybe…” Martha gives Jonathan another one of those looks, but his dad doesn’t seem to have an answer. “Maybe you should talk to her again, Clark. If you don’t understand what happened, maybe there’s something--”
“No.” Clark stands, looks down at his parents (offering sunlight and acceptance, unconditional love, their presence and their wisdom). “No, she said it was over. She said she didn’t want to prolong things. I have to move on.”
Jonathan stands, then, too (ready, maybe, to catch Clark if he starts to fall again). “And how are you going to do that?”
“However I can,” Clark says (and the truth tastes just as ashen as a lie).
***
