*17*
There’s a pie warming in the oven; Clark can smell it, sugar and fruit and just a hint of spice. It’s quiet here, comfortably soothing with nothing to break the relaxed atmosphere. A breeze comes in through the open door to the balcony and plays along the nape of his neck, his cheek, his arm. He takes a deep apple-scented breath and leans back against the couch. A basketball game is playing on the television, but it’s muted and he pays little attention to the score. Instead, he lets his eyes flutter shut, and rests his head on the pillow behind him.
He’s tired, so tired he can’t even remember why he feels a little sore, a little--a lot--worn. Superman rescues, probably, or maybe Perry sent him to cover a few too many stories. Not that it matters. The world is still and quiet and calm. All is well. He can just relax here.
“Clark!”
The feminine scream jerks him fully awake, but when he looks around, there’s no one there. The sunlight still falls across the floor, the air is still drenched in the aroma of bubbling apple pie filling, and the TV still shows the Nets. It must have been a dream, he decides, the remnant of some nightmare. It’s over now. He’s safe. Everyone’s safe.
Slowly, contentedly, he flops back onto the couch, stretches to every side, and closes his eyes again.
“Help me! Please help! Save him!”
That same voice, more screams. So desperate. So panicked. So afraid.
Groaning, Clark rises to his feet, ready to don his Suit and fly off to the rescue. Except…
Clark shakes his head, paws at his ears, extends his hearing--tentatively, and then all at once--as far as it will go.
There is nothing. A bit of birdsong, the same kind he used to wake up to when he was a boy, chirps that rise and fall, appear and flutter away outside his window. Beyond that, the world is silent. Far too quiet. Clark turns and searches for the remote, then, wanting to turn the volume of the TV on. Wanting some confirmation that he isn’t deaf.
Before he can find the remote, though, the TV flickers on its own. Or maybe it changed a while ago and he is only just noticing it now. The basketball court is gone, and so is the scoreboard, the players, the gymnasium. Instead, it shows a desolate city street that looks as if it has survived an earthquake.
Clark blinks, as if he can feel the dust from that street in his own eyes; and behind his eyelids, as if it is printed there indelibly in his mind, there is a gray monster, jagged and savage and looming over him. Its deafening, guttural shriek blasts through his hyper-focused ears, and Clark cries out, reeling backward, clutching his head with both hands.
But the cry fades, just as the voice did, and the birdsong is still there, undisturbed and unafraid.
When Clark risks another cautious glance to the TV screen, he sees that same street, still filled with rubble and crumpled cars. Only this time he catches a flash of movement. A tiny form picking through the debris, tearing at large pieces that mark what used to be a large building. A parking garage, he thinks rather abstractly.
It’s a woman. Small and dark-haired, her clothing ripped in several places, and two bloody handprints on the back of her shirt (handprints that might, he thinks, match his hands exactly).
“Clark. I love you.”
The world shakes around him. Clark hears a whimper, finds himself pressed up against the wall, vaguely aware that the keening sound he hears is coming from his own throat. He can’t smell the apple pie anymore. He wonders what happened to it, where it went, who ate it without him even noticing.
He doesn’t want to look at the television again. He likes it here, in this apartment that’s the first place he’s settled down in since high school. It’s warm and cozy and filled with things that each have a story he likes to remember, and it’s his. The birdsong reminds him of being safe and protected as a child, of summer days playing with Pete and Lana, spring days spent at his father’s side, helping with the planting. The ghost of that pie’s scent, gone but still there in his mind, brings back all the times he sat at the kitchen table and spilled out his dreams and his fears to his mother.
He wishes she were here now. Wishes his dad would tell him everything’s going to be okay.
Shakily, Clark reaches up to check his glasses, an automatic movement that’s become habit whenever he feels nervous or unsure. They’re there, just where they should be, but he stops mid-motion when he sees his arm.
It’s covered in blood.
Gasping, shivering, he holds both arms away from his body, stares as if he has never seen them before. There’s a gash running all along his right forearm, dripping blood onto the floor. The sleeve of his shirt hangs from his left shoulder, allowing him to clearly see the bruises turning his elbow black and the tiny slashes all along the skin, as if he’s been thrown through glass. His knuckles are torn, shredded, three of his fingers hanging as if broken.
But…but this doesn’t make any sense. He hadn’t noticed this at all before! Only…when he looks to the couch, he sees the rust stains along its length. The sight of it reminds him of those faded handprints on the woman’s shirt, and against his will, his eyes dart back to the TV.
She’s not alone anymore. There’s an older man there, his face streaked with dust, his hands wrapped around a pole he’s using to leverage up some debris.
Perry. But what is Perry doing on the news? Why is he there, alone, on that street that looks like the middle of a warzone?
“In every possible future, there is always, Clark, a Doomsday.”
Sudden fire spears through him and Clark curls in on himself, falls to his knees, wraps his arms around his middle. There’s more blood there, sickening rents in his flesh, and he thinks he catches a glimpse of white bone around the mess of his ribcage before he squeezes his eyes shut and tries to focus on the birdsong. Somehow, it doesn’t surprise him at all when he realizes that the birds are gone. The pie is gone. The sunlight has gone cold and sterile, and its light does nothing to warm or strengthen him, only illuminates the heavy cloud of concrete dust filtering through the air to choke him.
Coughing and hacking to try to catch a breath of clear air, Clark drags himself into the bedroom. Away from the dust. Away from the TV. Away from the pain.
“Please don’t die.”
The whisper is soft and gentle, more welcome than any amount of pleasant chirping. It threads its way around him, soothes the pain covering him from head to toe, eases the effort it takes to breathe in and out.
“Lois,” he whimpers.
And he cannot see the television, but it doesn’t matter. He can see the scene plastered across his own mind, rooted in every thought he possesses, flashing over anything else.
Lois standing in front of him, handing him something that seems unimportant now, and in her eyes so much fear and concern and…and…something else. Something he’s seen before. Something that’s made him catch his breath and put his hand over his chest to keep his heart in place. Where has he seen it before? What is it?
Ah, yes, he remembers, how could he ever forget? Lois was with him, beside him on the couch, and she told him he was the most important person in her life, and he told her he loved her, and she kissed him. She kissed him and pulled him down into spiraling, whirling sensations he’d never known existed but has dreamed of nonetheless, and he’d whispered that precious, most vulnerable, most important secret again, and she’d looked up at him, all soft and tender and warm. And fond. Affectionate. Caring.
And he’d believed (let himself believe? fooled himself into believing?) that she loved him. That she couldn’t say it, but she betrayed it with every move she made, every look she gave him, every caress she bestowed on him.
But that was before. Before the revelation and the end. Before the confession and the confrontation. Before…before…
Agony lances under his skin, like fire, like green glowing radiation, and Clark screams, curls into a ball on the cold floor and tries to hold himself together. Tries to staunch the bleeding from his chest and the mercurial ebbing and flowing of his pain. Tries not to see that metallic, mindless monster that had fixated on him.
Ripped into him.
Torn at him.
Thrown him from one torment to the next.
It was so cold, every time Clark touched it (to hit and grab and throw and hurt, violence like he has never known before), a cold that went beyond mere temperature. As if the beast was the antithesis to the sunlight, as if it drained all the solar energy from Clark’s cells with every touch, every blow, every slash.
No, Clark thinks almost incoherently. No, please, no more. I can’t do this anymore.
He cracks his eyes open, and watches his blood trickle along the floor. Watches as it pools along the cracks of a tiny crater that seem to profile the edges of a pair of feet.
“It’s over, Clark.”
He doesn’t want to be here anymore (where he can hear her voice delivering that terrible sentence). He doesn’t want to do this anymore. He’s scared and alone and hurting, and it’s not a comforting silence anymore; it’s a terrifying quiet that threatens to sink into his bones and still his heart.
“Please,” he whispers, or thinks he does. But he doesn’t even know what he’s begging for, and he didn’t actually say anything at all, because his voice is locked away inside him, and the silence is of his own making.
*
It’s late and the bullpen is almost empty. Clark likes the bustle and energy of the day, but he also likes it like this, where he can think easier and worry less about what all the people might be seeing when they look at him. His desk is arranged just as he likes it, and his chair is placed just exactly so that he can always see Lois’s desk at the edge of his vision. He can hear Perry muttering to himself over a story he’s editing, and Jimmy’s breathing steadily at his desk, and the scent of old, strong coffee completes the scene.
Clark stretches his arms over his head, then lets them fall back to his keyboard. He’s not paying attention to the screen in front of him, though (if he were, he might wonder about the image of Perry, frantic and worried and stained with dust and blood, reflected over it), but watches Lois. She’s been avoiding him, and he wants to know why. Needs to know why, so he can correct the problem and help her.
A flicker to his right catches his attention. He jerks his head that way, but there’s nothing there.
“We’ve got to get him out of here before anyone sees! Help me!”
Inwardly sighing, Clark tenses at the sound of those familiar words and raises his hand to his tie (for some reason, the movement makes his fingers ache, but the sensation passes before he can do more than casually notice it). Then he blinks, shakes his head, wonders why he thought he’d heard a call for help when everything is calm and quiet.
He gets up, takes a deep breath for courage (chokes at something thick and cloying in his throat, tastes metallic salt against the roof of his mouth), and approaches Lois.
“Oh, Perry, he’s…there’s so much blood.”
The world blurs around him. The colors of this newsroom that’s grown so familiar and comforting to him seem to fade and haze under the imagined sound of that scared voice. But he blinks, and Lois is in front of him, letting him get close to her, saying she has something to tell him, inviting him over for dinner.
“It’s not enough.”
His heart seizes up in his chest. For just an instant, he thinks it has stopped beating altogether. For just an instant, everything goes white and sparkly and numb. Then he hears the blood rushing in his ears, feels spikes of agony scrape along his bones, almost thinks he groans when pulling in a breath that tastes of grit and blood and terror.
“I’ll pick up some groceries--my treat,” Lois says, and Clark is once more perched on the edge of her desk, watching her walk away. The pain fades, the colors go back to normal, and his heart is beating steadily, if a bit rapidly, in his chest.
This time, watching Lois walk away from him doesn’t send a pang of panicked fear through him; it makes him smile to himself and turn back to his desk with an extra bounce to his step. There’s still so much chance of heartbreak (he’s not so distraught that he doesn’t notice Lois didn’t give much of a hint about what she wants to tell him), but there always has been when it comes to Lois Lane. Just coming to Metropolis was a gamble; fixing his gaze on Lois was a risk. It seemed so easy, so full of potential, at first. But she shot him down as easily as if she broke the hearts (and Clark’s pounds unsteadily, as if flinching from a remembered pain) of enamored young men every day, and walked away from him on Luthor’s dance floor, and then confided in him about her own broken heart. And he decided it was better to let her realize she could trust him first. And then came Superman--
“I’m starting to think it was a mistake to give up on Superman.”
—and unflattering comparisons and swooning over caped alter egos, put-downs for boring partners, and that just friends label he thought he’d never escape.
No, in Clark’s most honest moments, he can admit that for every moment of joy Lois grants him--
“Ever since then, I’ve always wondered what it would be like…to say good night every night.”
--there is an accounting in pain and disappointment.
“Why me? Why did you pick me to lie to, Clark? Out of all the people in this city, why did you have to make me look like the fool?”
“You all right there, CK?”
Startled, Clark looks up (away from the reflected image of rubble and blood and Perry and Lois’s faces swimming over him), and gives Jimmy a sheepish smile. “Guess I got a little caught up in daydreams--thanks for waking me up before Perry caught me.”
“He is taking the phrase ‘on the warpath’ a little literally,” Jimmy says with a laugh. Reassured that Clark is fine with talking to him (much as Clark tries to convince Jimmy he always enjoys the younger man’s company, this is an insecurity seemingly engrained within him), he steps closer. “So Jack and I were going to watch the game tonight--you want to come with?”
“Thanks, Jimmy, but Lois and I have plans.”
“He said I just had to make you happy for a while and then break it off.”
“Oh!” Jimmy raises his eyebrows, obviously amused (or worried? does Clark only imagine the flicker of caution there? did he ignore it on purpose?). “Hot date, huh?”
Clark gives him a quelling look but can’t hold it for long. “I guess. I think she’s planning on cooking.”
“Lois Lane? Cooking?” Jimmy laughs, but he doesn’t sound as if he’s joking. (He doesn’t look as casual as he’s trying to make himself appear; as Clark thought he was.) “You’re a brave man, CK.” He pauses (is that a measuring look in his eyes? is he trying to gauge whether Clark will listen to him or not?), then adds, “She must really have something big planned. I remember Lucy said that TV dinners are as far as Lois ever goes in the kitchen.”
“Well,” Clark teases (ignores…misses?...the warning), “she didn’t say that we weren’t having TV dinners.”
Jimmy looks at him for a long moment (is that sadness there? does he know? did they all know?). “I hope it’s everything you want it to be, CK,” he finally says.
There was more, Clark knows (though he can’t explain how), but it’s gone, shaken and rattled and burned away in the sudden baptism of cruel sensations bombarding him on every side. The newsroom is washed out, washed away. Jimmy vanishes, left behind in the searing wash of Clark’s desperate escape from the life that has hurt him so badly.
He reaches out, searching for something to hold onto, something that will ground him and stop the way his vision is going around in circles. Whatever he grabs, it’s hard and solid, angular--the edge of his desk.
“Don’t leave me, Clark! Stay with me!”
No. No, that’s not what she said. She said, “Don’t give up on me,” and he’d thought she meant on loving her, but what she’d really meant was on helping her with another of her crazy stunts. Come and help me sneak into the lair of the guy who just about killed us, Clark. Come with me while I confront the megalomaniacal murderer, Clark. Come and give me everything you are so I can break your heart and earn you the consolation prize of a statue hundreds of years in the future, Clark.
He loses his grip on the desk, and his knees give out, leaving him in a heap on the floor. He’s lying in a pool of blood, and it hurts too much to breathe, and there’s a monster coming for him. He has to get up. He has to climb to his feet and stop the beast from killing anyone else.
It’s going to hurt. He knows it is. His body is already cringing in anticipation of the next blow. But he’s Superman. He’s Superman and this is what he’s here for, it’s all he has to offer the world, the only thing the future will remember him for, and there is no one else.
“Clark. Please. Please. I love you. Don’t die.”
*
“Rise and shine, son!” his dad calls, and Clark groans and nestles deeper into his blankets. A yawn overtakes him, and he can’t help but stretch out to the ends of the bed. The blankets slide away from him as he unconsciously rises into the air. The scent of bacon and eggs and coffee bring him completely awake, and Clark feels a smile overtake him. No matter how often he visits, his mom still insists on making him a full breakfast--and his dad certainly doesn’t complain.
The stairs are cool against his bare feet, well-worn from the thousands of times he’s made this trip to the kitchen. His mom smiles brightly at him, the sunlight behind her casting a halo across her hair. “Good morning, honey,” she greets him. “I already poured you a glass of orange juice.”
His dad’s sitting at the kitchen table, sipping from a mug and skimming the newspaper in front of him. Clark’s lips curve upward at the familiar sight, and he feels his entire body relaxing, his super-senses all but fading, his muscles unwinding, even his bones seeming to become more limber, less constrained. When Clark drops into the seat beside his dad and leans his elbow on the table, he can feel the etching of his name where he’d burned it there with his heat-vision to show his mom just how well he’d learned to control his latest power.
Everything around him is infinitely familiar, intimately recognizable. His mom, ruffling his hair as she sets a plate down in front of him. His dad’s low voice as he mentions what he plans to do in the west field. The scent of breakfast, of corn and wheat and prairie. Of love and belonging and family.
“Martha…he said he told Lois. He said she didn’t love him.”
Clark starts, his hand knocking over the orange juice. It puddles on the table between his and his dad’s plates, bright and smarting of citrus.
“Dad,” he rasps, and flinches again at the sound of his own voice. It’s hoarse, strained, as if he has not spoken in days. As if he has screamed himself raw. “Why would you say that?”
But Jonathan just looks up at Martha and shakes his head sadly. Like he didn’t even hear Clark (but his parents always listen to him).
“At least Superman’s someone she loved,” Martha says, and smiles at Clark, as if the words don’t carve furrows through his soul.
Suddenly, the scent of the bacon makes him sick. Roasted flesh, seared and blistering. His stomach roils, and Clark rushes to the sink. He vomits, chokes, hacks up blood and dust and blood and grit and more blood. His sides ache as if banded about in pure steel, and he has to hold his arms to his side to keep his ribs from grinding one against another.
When he looks down, trying to find out why he hurts so badly, he realizes he’s in the Superman suit. But…why? Why did he dress in this instead of the comfortable, worn clothing he still hasn’t completely moved out of his old bedroom?
“If she doesn’t love Clark Kent, she doesn’t deserve Superman.” His dad’s gaze is steady, somber, and Clark remembers, then, how this conversation goes.
“She kissed me,” he says, because that’s what he did before. “Why would she do that if she only came to tell me it was over?”
She did kiss him. He remembers it. Remembers the anxiety and the hope and the nerves and the giddiness all vying for control inside him, and the way she lunged forward and slanted her mouth over his. It was quick and desperate, and even then, it hadn’t made sense to him.
“Clark. Don’t hate me.”
A groan is pulled from deep inside him at the sound of that voice, so small and desperate. He promised her he couldn’t. He remembers making that promise, can all but feel the words in his mouth, shapes that make him shift and move his tongue, as if he can rid himself of them this far after the fact. He promised her he wouldn’t hate her, and he thought it was a safe promise, one that would never be broken--could never be broken.
But that was before, too. Before the truth from both of them. Before Tempus in his Kryptonite cage. Before the…the beast that…the creature with its claws…
Clark shudders, so deeply, so involuntarily, it feels almost like a seizure, rippling through his body like a tidal wave. His entire chest burns with remembered, all-too-new pain.
“I wish this was real. I wish…I wish you could really be mine.”
The blue sleeves banded about his arms feel wet, sticky. They aren’t quite the right color either, and Clark turns a bit away from his mom to hide the stains from her. Only, his mom isn’t there anymore. The kitchen is empty. He is alone.
“I am yours,” he murmurs. He is so cold. So cold his bones shake and rattle inside his skin. So cold that his teeth are chattering and his lungs are iced over and his Suit is useless to protect him. His cape drapes itself around him, settles over his prostrate form as if it is a shroud, but it does not warm him.
“Lois, get some blankets! I think he’s going into shock.”
Perry’s voice is strange here; he’s never been to Smallville. Never visited the farm. Never seen where Clark grew up, and where he still flies to when he needs to remind himself what matters most.
He hurts, but it’s so overwhelming, so inescapable, that he doesn’t bother to catalogue it. Just sinks into it.
“Do something, Perry, please! Please help him!”
“Lois. I am yours,” he says again through lips that are turning blue. He knows what comes next. Remembers confessing to her sleeping form, draped over his body just like his cape is now. He doesn’t want to say it, though. He wants to go back to before, when he knew Lois so well and didn’t question her all the time. When she showed him she loved him and he didn’t know it was only for the future’s sake.
He wants to fast forward to a time when she is in the past and he has moved on and it doesn’t hurt so much to remember her.
(He wants to go to sleep, to fade, and not wake up. He wants to give up.)
He wishes he were strong enough not to say it…but he isn’t.
“I just wish I could be sure you were mine too.”
*
Sometimes when he wakes he is in his apartment. Sometimes he’s in the newsroom. Sometimes he’s at the farm. Once, he’s on a rooftop while Lois tells him I didn’t take you seriously, Clark, but that doesn’t last very long because he loses all strength and plummets to the earth far below and wakes in Smallville, stays long enough to feel the embrace of his parents before he is yanked back into the cold darkness where his body aches so much he feels as if he will shatter if he moves.
He always has his glasses on (at least, he thinks he does), but whenever he realizes he’s bleeding, he’s back in the Superman suit. Strange snippets of things come to his attention before drifting away again. He hears Perry snapping out orders and Lois crying. He feels blankets over his legs and a washcloth on his brow. He hears moments and statements and confessions from the past interspersed between things he doesn’t understand, like Perry saying I already guessed he was Superman.
Always, he is given a moment of respite, and then gradually, inexorably sucked back into his nightmare. Always, he tries to cling to the moments of comfort and calm with everything he is, and always the flashes of that gray monster, the beautiful things Lois (the in-between Lois, the one he doesn’t understand) says, are what smacks him back into incoherency.
But he can only run for so long. He can only lie to himself so many times before he knows that it is him trying to keep himself safe and protected from the harsh truths.
So finally, eventually, he doesn’t look away from the television screen. He sees the beast closing in on him. Feels its claw sink into his chest and rip. Hears its guttural shriek as it falls (not falls; is pushed into, by him) into oblivion. Struggles against the chilling, deadening grasp it has on him.
He feels it die, its hand going limp not quite as cold around him.
He remembers falling, sliding, fetching up against a wall. Remembers the tremor that followed and the piece of the ceiling that tumbled and crashed into the portal frame. Remembers the blue glow winking out as if it’d never been. He remembers trying to stumble to his feet and curling up in agony around the ruins of his chest, and he remembers choking on the dust that suffocated him. He remembers being buried alive. He remembers not being able to move (except he always could in his dreams, always woke and stretched out his limbs) and going mad with panic.
He’s not surprised when he opens his eyes this time and finds himself in a little hollow carved out of the rubble by his own body. The rocks around him are pulverized, shattered on impact with his alien musculature, but he is still trapped. There is no light. No sun. No warmth.
He’s going to die here. Alone. Buried. He used to have nightmares, when he was little, of being trapped in a tiny dark place, and now he realizes that he’s come full circle. Or maybe he is still developing more powers, and those nightmares were just a glimpse of the future. Despite everything Tempus said, and all the things Lois saw, maybe this is where he was always going to end up.
“Your parents are here, Clark, okay? You should wake up and say hello. Please…please, Clark, wake up.”
The voice, alto and melodic and a source of both comfort and terror, weaves its way into his prison. Clark’s used to it now. Used to not knowing where she is, or why she says the things she does when none of them are applicable to his unending torment.
He licks his lips and swallows the blood he finds there, a vain attempt to wash away some of the gravel he’s constantly afraid he’s going to choke on. As dusty as it is, the concrete can’t lap up all the blood he’s losing; he can feel it underneath him, a sticky, liquid bed.
It’s strange, not being able to just stand and shake away the debris around him. For all the familiar sights and sounds and scents his photographic mind is granting him, it’s this that is unfamiliar to him--being trapped.
Or maybe not. If his long, tumultuous relationship with Lois has taught him anything, it is that he is helpless before her.
“I’m sorry, Clark.”
She told him right from the beginning. That’s what he can’t escape from. That night she came to his apartment and started him on the road leading to Doomsday, she told him, in veiled words and couched tones, in sideways glances and speeding heart. I’m sorry, she said, and meant it. I want to try, she said, and she did. She gave it her all, and if it wasn’t enough…if she still can’t love him…
Clark’s thoughts stutter to a halt. That’s what he can’t quite get away from either. I can’t make excuses anymore, she’d whispered, and she’d kissed him. And before, the way she looked at him, the same look she gave him when she stood amidst destruction and gave him the key to salvation and told him she loved him and begged him not to die.
She lied. She lied when she said she wanted to try to find an us with Clark. But she told the truth when she said I didn’t know it could be like this. She wasn’t telling the truth when she said It’s not enough, but she wasn’t lying when she said I’m sorry on the rooftop.
“You’re so good, Clark,” Lois says, and he fights to blink his eyes open, to look up where there should only be black rubble and find her standing over him, her eyes soft and her expression gentle. “You’re so good, Clark, and I can’t get in the way of that.”
“Lois!” he gasps, and maybe he hates her, just a little bit, maybe he is still furious and betrayed and bewildered, but he doesn’t want her to leave him. He is afraid and he is broken and he is dying, and he does not want to be alone.
And this is why he closed his mouth and soldered his teeth together and buried his voice deep inside him. This is why he could not speak, why he could barely look at her, why he did not want her to be near him.
Because the minute she is here, the instant he opens his mouth, the wrong thing comes out.
(It already did, when Doomsday was falling at him, and death was nipping at his heels, and there was no more time.)
“I love you, Lois.”
He expects her to fade. To vanish. Or worse, to turn and leave him of her own volition.
She does none of those things.
Smiling a small, secret smile, she reaches her hand down to him. Daringly, timidly, Clark slides his hand into hers, and then gasps when she pulls him to his feet. Inexplicably, there is room now, as if rock and stone and reality all bow and retreat before her. She is warm, and Clark shudders to feel the suggestion of heat so near him. He wants to stretch out to prove that he can, but at the same time he wants to bend and fold in around Lois, cradle her warmth to himself and protect it from their bleak surroundings.
But he does not like that smile on her lips. It’s mysterious, ambiguous; it hints of secrets. It reminds him of the after-Lois. The stranger-Lois.
He wants his Lois. But he also wants the in-between Lois. He knows that now. He wants all the moments he’s treasured, all the progress he’s watched in awe, all the kisses and sweet things, to be real. But if he takes that in-between Lois, if he accepts her as the Lois he loves, then he has to take the after-Lois, too, because she’s inextricably tied up with that in-between.
And he’s just not sure he’s ready to do that.
“I wish it was enough that I loved you,” he tells her, because now that the worst is out, he can’t lock his voice back up.
“What if I said that I love you, too?” she asks. Heat still radiates off her. She’s so alive, so vibrant, so full of color and breath and health. Clark feels like a wraith standing beside her, hunched and gray and on the edge of death (maybe dead already, he can’t tell). “Would you believe me?”
He forms his own smile, sardonic and as close to jaded as he has ever come. “I want to. And that’s what scares me. Last time, I wanted to believe you so much, I walked right into your trap. I can’t do that again.”
“Because I do love you,” she continues, as if he hasn’t spoken. “I love you so much more than I ever thought was possible. If you…if you die… You can’t die, Clark. I need you.”
“I thought you said the world needed me,” he snaps, then recoils, afraid she will disappear, taking all the light and warmth and space with her.
But she stays there, so close he could embrace her if he didn’t think his arms would go right through her. And she’s not smiling anymore. She’s crying. There’s dried blood smeared across her temple, and salt stains marking tracks down her cheeks, and bruises under her eyes, and her hands are shaking.
“I need you, Clark.”
He reaches for her, then, because not to would be a repudiation of all that he is.
But when his hands reach her, he is yanked away.
“Lois!” he calls, but she’s already gone.
*
He’s standing on a street. No, he’s hovering over a street. Below him, there is a creature, alien and inhuman and vicious. Clark is shaking, his flesh tight, the hairs on the back of his neck standing straight up, but none of that compares to the bolt of sheer terror that overpowers him when the beast turns and looks straight at him.
This, then, is the end. The way out. The key to the cessation of his nightmares.
He must face Doomsday again. Once and for all.
“And in every universe,” he hears Tempus say, gloating and triumphant, “for every Superman--no matter what suit you wear or name you go by--there is always this monster waiting in your future.”
Doomsday roars at him; Clark feels the foulness of its breath wash over him, tainting him.
Below, the street is stained with the blood of the beast’s helpless victims.
“A mindless savage beast, bred and birthed for no other reason than to kill you. In every possible future, there is always, Clark, a Doomsday.”
The creature is being led, somehow, as if scenting Clark’s past presence there, toward the Daily Planet, where Perry and Jimmy are. It would be easy, oh so easy, for the beast to turn, instead, toward Smallville. Toward his parents.
“Did I mention he’s from Krypton too? And he hates your kind, can track them to the ends of the universe, even, which means it won’t be any problem for him to sniff you out, walk in your footsteps--or flight path, as the case may be. Killing and destroying everything that gets in the way.”
No choice. No other way.
But he doesn’t know where Lois is. She could be dying right now, her throat crushed beneath Tempus’s hands. She could already be gone, cast adrift into the infinite chaos of time.
Doomsday grabs him, snatches him clean out of the air and tosses him with savage intent, and Clark is embroiled in a battle he knows he will never escape.
He fled, and ran, and tried to hide in memories of better times and safer places, with the people he loves and cares for. But in the end, none of it matters. This is still the only way out. This is still his future, his fate, and his legacy will be marked in cratered impacts along downtown Metropolis.
“Because in every universe, no matter when or how it happens, Doomsday is always, always, the death of Superman.”
Superman throws himself at the monster, meets him head-on, hears the air crack around him with the force of their collision. Everything goes white.
*
“Please, Clark. Stay with me.”
(He whimpers, whines deep in his throat, scrabbles at the covers desperately. Her hand covers his. Blood leaks from the bandages wrapped around him, everywhere she looks, his body ribbed and striated in white and red. He is constricted, bound; he cannot move.)
“Don’t leave me.”
(He already has.)
*
