*18*
She doesn’t notice when Perry gets there, isn’t even aware that there is anyone else at all in this hellish nightmare until she realizes that he’s helping her lift a chunk of metal that dangles dead wires. (Everything is dead around her.) Even when she sees him, meets his sad, tired gaze, she can’t summon enough energy to ask him how he knew to come; all her strength is being poured into her wish that Clark still be alive (and the dimmer, more abstract hope that they can find him and get him out of here before the outside world comes blazing in with sirens and military uniforms and questions).
Her throat is raw; her screaming has long since ceased. Outwardly, at least. Inwardly, her mantra continues unabated.
Don’t die, Clark. Please don’t die.
Don’t be dead.
When they finally find him, unearthing him from his cramped metal and concrete coffin, she thinks all her prayers have been in vain and the world is unfamiliar and alien and less.
Everything is gray, in this new post-Doomsday world, but Superman is still as vibrant as ever. Rich red blood that soaks into the small cocoon formed around his twisted, unmoving body, gleaming against the darkness. Traces of blue and green marring the pallid hue of his skin, and between shreds of his Suit, tiny, nauseating glimpses of white, white bone. He’s full of color, and drained of life, and surrounded by gray. There’s even the remnant of one of Doomsday’s spikes broken off inside him, as if the muted shade that Tempus so desired is rooted there, growing out of Superman, a cancer, a canker, a disease.
Perry’s quick indrawn breath sounds like cannon-fire, impelling Lois to action. Carefully, slowly (so very, very afraid of what she will find at the bottom), she lowers herself down beside this splotch of color, clinging to the edges of the rubble to make sure she doesn’t touch him, or worse, collide with him. He looks waxen and fragile; she thinks even the smallest brush of her hand against him might shatter him.
“Please don’t die.” Only when she hears the words break the self-contained atmosphere around her does she realize that she is the source of them. A quiet plea she could no more help than she can heal all the wounds marring Clark’s body.
“Lois,” Perry says, then, making her jump. A rock skitters out from under her foot, starting an avalanche of scree that buries Clark’s palm. “I’ve got my car a few blocks from here--had to park it when the rubble got too bad. You think we can get him there on our own?”
She stares up at him blankly before looking back down at Clark. Move him? How…how could they… She can’t even touch him!
“Lois!” Perry barks, and she jumps again. Another tiny avalanche, and Lois almost whimpers to see more of Clark’s battered body covered in unfeeling stone. “We’ve got to get him out of here before anyone sees! Help me!”
It’s torture, to finally place her (blood-stained) hands on him, to help Perry shift him. He’s large and heavy and unwieldy, and so impossibly frail. So defenseless. So hurt. (It’s as if the state of his heart after she was through with it has been transposed to his physical body, to match him outside and in.) He whimpers, a quiet, needy sound, when she and Perry heave him up out of the hollow his body formed around him. Worse, the blood that had been sluggishly seeping from the ruin of his chest begins to leak brighter, faster. His skin’s as white as his soul, and she doesn’t know how much more blood even Superman can afford to lose.
“Oh, Perry, he’s…there’s so much blood,” she gasps, wanting him to give her a respite. To tell her it’s all right. To let them stop moving until Clark wakes and smiles and once more walks with that bounce to his step, as if he might lift off from the ground at any moment.
Perry only grunts and tugs at Clark’s limp body without letting up, though Lois can see the track of tears outlined on his cheeks by the wisps of dust and smoke sifting around them, hiding them from view of all the cameras and soldiers holding back until they know what happened to Doomsday. Until they realize that the monster is gone, and barge forward now, when it’s too late, when Clark has already given everything he can give in their defense. And they will see him, will realize that Superman is not untouchable. Maybe they will mourn or try to help, or maybe they will see her and Perry and begin to connect the dots--and out of everything that Lois has stolen from him, she absolutely refuses to strip away his privacy. His one, great Secret (that he offered her so trustingly, so hopefully).
Finally, long moments of eternities later, they have him free of the heap of debris, have him back to relatively flat ground. Perry huffs and bends over to catch his breath, coughing when he gets a mouthful of smoke (some of the hanging wires out there aren’t as dead as the ones Lois found), and Clark’s shoulders slip from his grasp.
His head knocks against the pitted ground. The breath is expelled from his lungs in a soft, soughing sound.
He doesn’t take another breath.
“Clark!” Lois exclaims. She’s there, at his side, touching him, hands grazing over the raw meat where his smooth chest should be, her fingers fluttering here, there, everywhere, in vain. No soft whisper of breath, no rise and fall of lungs, no pulse in his throat. “Don’t leave me, Clark!” she begs him. Commands him. Her voice so shrill, so panicked, it is almost incoherent, but that one plea is all that is left to her. It consumes her entire focus. “Stay with me!”
Perry knocks her aside. His face is flat, expressionless, as he sets his hands down on Clark’s mangled chest and pushes, once, again, again, a steady rhythm that Lois wills Clark to mimic. Their gruff editor bends, pinches Clark’s nose with a red hand, and breathes into his mouth. Lois wants to help, wants to do something, anything, to help, but she can only watch. Frozen, uncomprehending, keening with terror at the sudden inchoate future yawning before her, all empty and desolate.
She wishes this moment would fade and lessen. Wishes it were nothing more than brief flashes she could blink away if she so chose. But instead it is sharp and piercing, and even years later, when the parking garage is rebuilt and the streets of Metropolis are long cleansed of their scars, she will wake from nightmares of this instant, this eternal limbo, where she still lived while Clark was dead. A limbo she will never entirely leave. It is always there, with her, panic and terror and grief so large it can encompass every ocean in the universe.
She doesn’t know how long Perry worked with that forced calm. She doesn’t know how many tears she shed. She only knows that eventually, finally, Clark gasps in a breath of his own, and gags, and chokes, and sags inward. He looks smaller, diminished somehow, as if he is back but left part of himself behind.
Perry sags too, and though his face is hidden, Lois can see his shoulders shaking with the force of his own overwhelming emotions.
“Thank you,” Lois whispers. “Thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“Come on,” he says simply, breathlessly. “We’ve got to get moving.”
Somehow, they maneuver Clark’s impossibly heavy body up between them. Red boots--stained and torn--drag against the ground, but at least they’re moving. At least she can feel the susurration of Clark’s continuing, miraculous breaths against her cheek. That’s all that matters. That trumps everything else--the feel of his blood soaking into her clothes, sticky against her skin, and the fear that threatens to turn her into a gibbering mess, and the wasteland around her. For just a few more beats of Clark’s heart, she would live a thousand more years in this hell.
“There,” Perry gasps out, finally, using his chin to point up ahead. “There’s the car. Let’s lay him in the back seat.”
She wants to wince at the thought (this cannot be good for Clark, none of it; he needs paramedics and doctors and medicine and Kryptonian blood), but gamely struggles onward. His head lolls limply, his limbs splay out in uncoordinated angles, and he groans (a tortured sound that tears at Lois’s insides and haunts her dreams for years), but eventually they have him in the car, crumpled along the backseat. Perry heads for the driver’s seat immediately, but Lois can’t help lingering just to try to right the uncomfortable cant to his neck, to brush his hair back from his eyes, to shrug out of what remains of her jacket and drape it over the awful wounds covering his front.
“Clark,” she murmurs (has no idea what she wants to say; just wants to remind them both that he is still alive, that she can still use his name and he should still respond to it). “Please. Please. I love you. Don’t die.”
“Lois!” Perry barks. “Get in, quick!”
Dimly, she knows she’s grateful that he’s staying level-headed. More immediately, she wants to strike at him, to snarl and hunch over Clark’s form and dare anyone to try to separate them.
But Perry’s right. They have to leave. Her staying here, touching him, isn’t doing Clark any good at all.
It’s one of the hardest things she’s ever done (and she knows about hard, doesn’t she, after everything she’s already done to destroy him), but she lifts her hand from Clark’s brow, and closes him up in the car, and gets in the front seat.
“What are we going to do?” she asks, blankly. Perry’s driving. She knows they’re moving. All she can see is the pallor of Clark’s skin. The mangled remains of his ribcage. The white of his bones. “How can we save him?”
Perry glances over at her (she’s not strong enough to look at him and see whatever is there in his expression). “I don’t know,” he says, and Lois shrinks in on herself. She didn’t realize how much she wanted him to assert that everything would be fine until he didn’t. Until she hears the terror there, hiding beneath his staunch exterior. “We’ll do everything we can, though. He’s strong. He’ll pull through.”
“Oh, Clark…” She breaks, then, as if her spine simply melts away, leaving her bending and bowing, broken and defeated, her hands over her eyes to try to staunch the mortal stream of tears. “He’s going to die, isn’t he? He’s so hurt--Doomsday tore right through his chest. He stopped breathing and he hasn’t woken up and this is all my fault and it should be me not him why couldn’t I save him--”
“Lois! Lois, honey!” Perry is frantic, one hand leaving the steering wheel to pat her back, but Lois is gasping now, hyperventilating, dissolving right here in this seat, with Clark’s dying body just a foot behind her. “Just breathe, Lois! Breathe! He needs you to be strong right now, all right? Keep it together!”
And how can she deny that? After everything he’s done for her, after all the crimes she has committed, how can she fall apart now, when he still needs her?
She can’t. She won’t.
So she forces herself to breathe, in through her nose, out through her mouth, her head against her knees, until the white spots fade from her vision and she can take a breath without sobbing.
“Okay,” she says, over and over again. “Okay. Okay. Okay.”
(Nothing is okay; she’s still lying.)
The gentle way Perry rubs circles over her shoulder blade helps calm her down. Quiets her, until even that verbal breakdown fades. By the time she looks up, pretending to strength and calm, Perry is parking the car in front of Clark’s place.
Lois stares numbly up at the building. She wants to ask why Perry brought them here (how he knew to show up when Clark needed him most), but her world is only holding stable by a single thread; she can’t afford for anything to shake her. So she swallows back her questions and steels herself to move Clark again, this time up a flight of stairs.
*
It’s bad. So much worse than she ever could have imagined. It’s logistically hard, of course, made more difficult by just how heavy Clark is and how limp his limbs are. It’s physically hard because neither she nor Perry want to hurt Clark, but it’s impossible to lift him and carry him upstairs without coming up against wounds and bending him in places that shouldn’t be bent right now. What makes it hardest of all, what makes it torture of the worst sort, though, is the quiet keening sound Clark begins to emit when they hit the stairs. A humming whine that sounds so pitiful, so helpless, that endless tears stream down Lois’s face and Perry’s teeth are probably chipped from how tightly he grits them.
But at least his heart doesn’t stop again. At least he’s still breathing.
This is how Lois learns to measure success: in the flutter of shallow breaths. In the sluggish pulse beneath fragile skin. In the way his eyes roll behind eyelids that betray a mind still working.
For hours (or years maybe; it seems unending), she and Perry do everything they know to do. Perry tells her the signs of shock, and they try to mitigate them, and Lois screams for Perry’s help when Clark’s body stiffens once, as if seizing up. His heart skips beats then, and Perry puts his hands over that gaping wound once more, ready to press against broken bones to make sure that precious heart keeps moving and pulsing, but Clark comes back on his own. That time.
They strip him of the tatters of his Suit. They wash the blood off him as best they can (and pretend they don’t see how more seeps out to replace it). They bandage him, one gash at a time, bandages made out of sheets they tear into strips and soak in warm water. They dress him in Clark’s clothes (Perry says nothing, betrays no sign of surprise, when they fit him perfectly). They work together seamlessly, silently (so they can hear the inhale, the exhale, the pause, the catch, the terror, the inhale, the exhale…), with shaking hands, with unsteady breaths, through blurred vision, past exhaustion.
He breathes. He lives.
And they exist in the terrible, awful medium between each weak heartbeat.
*
It’s dark when his parents arrive. Lois doesn’t think Perry called them (he’s had no time; neither of them dare risk stepping away from Clark lest the change in the air itself disturb whatever tenuous grasp on life Clark still holds) because they look astonished to see Perry and Lois both looking up, startled, from their vigil over Clark. Or maybe it’s the blood that stains the floor, and the bedding, and Lois and Perry. Maybe it’s the first sight of their son, weak and shrunken and at first glance not even seeming to breathe (but he is, Lois has timed her own to Clark’s, no matter how it makes her lightheaded and dizzy). Whatever it is, they stop on the landing, and stare, and then Martha lets out a single, cracked sob, and all but falls down the stairs, not stopping at all until she is at Clark’s side, his hand cradled in both of hers.
Jonathan follows more slowly, carefully, picking his way as if the slightest misstep will cause him to shatter and tumble to the floor in heavy, uneven pieces.
Wordlessly, Lois and Perry watch, but neither of them move. She doesn’t think they remember how. Besides, if they moved, if they added more sounds to the sudden hectic feel of the apartment, it would mask the sound they’re still listening for, their entire beings fixated on the nearly inaudible rise and fall of Clark’s chest.
He is only three steps away from the bed when Jonathan suddenly pauses, mid-step. Lois doesn’t notice at first, her gaze focused on Clark because he’s on the pause, the catch between breaths, and it’s long…so long…panic is clawing at her throat…and there, finally, the inhale. Only then does she look up to follow the direction of Jonathan’s stare.
It’s the Suit, or what’s left of it. A few tattered remnants of blue and red; there is no yellow left at all. Perry had flung it aside as soon as they finally cut the last of it free from where it was stuck to Clark’s gaping wounds, and Lois never bothered to even look and see where it landed. Evidently, though, she should have.
Jonathan looks from the Suit to his son, then to her, then to Perry. There’s a shadow in his eyes (maybe a catch to his breathing, too, but Lois can’t tell, she can’t stop listening to Clark’s), and his hands are clenched into fists.
“It’s okay,” Perry says hurriedly. Lois flinches to hear such a loud, unexpected sound breaking the tense silence. “I already guessed he was Superman.”
“Jonathon,” Martha moans. “Our boy. What’s…what’s happened to our son?”
Without loosing her grip on Clark’s hand, she twists in her seat and falls into Jonathan’s ready, waiting embrace. The stolid farmer bends his own head over his wife, wraps his hand around hers and Clark’s, shutting them both away in a private moment of shared grief. Lois meets Perry’s eyes for only a moment as they awkwardly look away (do what they can to give the parents privacy without actually leaving Clark’s side) before she looks down to Clark.
“Clark,” she whispers, brushing her fingers over his brow (searching for an inch of unmarred skin). “Your parents are here, Clark, okay? You should wake up and say hello.”
Nothing. Inhale, exhale, pause…pause…pause…her heart fluttering so rapidly she thinks it is trying to beat for both of them…pause…catch…Perry is so tense he feels like a statue beside her…inhale.
Another success.
“Please…please, Clark, wake up.”
He’s so small. So weak. So distant from her.
Inhale…pause…this is new, this is not the pattern she is used to, she cannot breathe…pause…his parents are turning, looking, fear scrawled so strongly across their faces that Lois doesn’t need to look to see it…exhale…pause…pause…pause…no, this cannot be the end, it can’t be…pause…catch…all three of them are silent, holding their own breaths, listening, listening, listening…inhale…
One more tiny victory. One more second he is alive.
One more breathless, panicked wait for the next breath.
*
Sunlight, his parents tell them. He needs sunlight to live, to heal, to revive.
But it’s night. The sun has long since set. The morning is hours away. If she weren’t so intent on staying strong for him as long as he needs her, Lois think she would have collapsed then and there, fallen to her knees and wept and begged and shrieked.
It’s not fair. It’s not right. Why is it him in that bed, fighting for his life? It should be her. Doomsday was here for her, that’s what Tempus said, and Tempus only got as far as he did because of her, and Clark went to face his own death thinking she didn’t love him all because of her. This is her fault, and if she could trade places with Clark, she’d do it in an instant. She would have already done it. She would have marched out to meet Doomsday and let him rip her to pieces and never made a sound of protest.
Instead, it is Clark who marched out to meet Doomsday, and let him rend and tear at him, and never complained. Clark who looked at her and said all that mattered was that she was safe. Clark who smiled when she said she loved him (but wistfully, as if at a dream), and told her the same (but simply, as if it didn’t even need to be said), and left to die.
But he’s not dead. Not yet. One breath. One success. One victory. Another. Another. And still the morning seems unreachable. They’ve bandaged his wounds, and Martha unwinds some of the strips tries to hold the ends of skin together as best she can when no needle will puncture his wounded flesh, but none of them know what to do about the hole in his chest or the bones peeking through red tissue. None of them know how to help him. They dither about keeping him bandaged before finally deciding to keep him wrapped up until morning when they’ll see if they should let the sunlight hit the open wounds (in other words, Lois thinks, they put the decision off for later).
Perry talks with Jonathan, explaining how he heard Lois call for Clark over the news, how the newscaster thought she was calling for someone lost in the chaos but Perry put all the pieces together and headed straight for his car. He reassures Martha as best he can and brings her and Jonathan glasses of water. He offers one to Lois, but she only stares at it blankly. How can she drink water when Clark is still struggling for each breath?
Martha and Jonathan bend over Clark and straighten the blankets around him, the way he likes it, they say, and put their hands over his shoulder (Lois tenses so as not to bat them away; he doesn’t need anything else weighting him down--but then, he’s always depended on the love of his parents in a way she can’t understand) and stroke his cheek and whisper quiet words of love and encouragement. It makes Lois wish she had done the same before they got there.
He did it for her, after all. That night in her apartment, when pain beat like a rainshower inside her skull, and he touched her so gently. Lifted her, held her, cradled her to himself. Told her he needed her. Told her he was better with her. Told her she helped him know how to make the world better. He whispered sweet words against her skin, and kissed her hair, and told her in so many words that Tempus was wrong and she was wrong and he needed her.
She wishes she could help him the same way (only he would listen better than she did, he always has, hasn’t he?). Wishes that before his parents had come and filled the air with their own whispers, she had told him how much she admires and respects and loves him.
She certainly won’t get a chance now.
His parents hate her. She wasn’t expecting it, the first time Martha turned and glared at her, such a look of contempt on her face that Lois actually physically recoiled. She’d been so caught up in Clark’s continuing war, so fixated on praying for each breath, that she’d forgotten what she’s done to their son. She’d forgotten that he went to his parents after she trampled over his heart. She’d let herself conveniently forget the fact that she doesn’t deserve to sit here and listen for Clark’s breath and know that he is still, for now, alive.
Martha glares and Jonathan ignores her, and Lois is silent (but refuses to leave her spot at Clark’s side; if she steps away once, she thinks, they will never let her back, and she cannot survive that), and in an uneasy, unspoken truce, they continue to count their tiny, measureless successes. But they do not leave her alone with him. They do not let her sit with Clark by herself, and though she cannot blame them, she wishes they would give her a moment, just one, just long enough to whisper her own private words in Clark’s ear.
(In case it is the last thing she ever says to him.)
Finally, when Perry’s watching the windows for the slightest sign of the rising sun, when Jonathan is making coffee in the kitchen, when Martha is sitting across from Lois and holding tightly to Clark’s hand (Lois’s hand clenches in envy at the sight; she has not touched Clark since she first remembered how much Clark and his family have a right to hate her), her moment comes. Perry calls to Martha to come tell him if he’s imagining things or if that is the sunrise (winks at her over Martha’s shoulder), and Lois seizes this last, unlooked-for opportunity.
“Clark,” she murmurs, and bends so that the soundwave of her voice will caress his skin. So that she can smell the scent enveloping him: newsprint and coffee and sky (blood and pain and sickness). So that she can feel the tiny ripple of his exhalation against her cheek, like a small kiss.
Only…only now that she is here, almost alone with him, she does not know what to say. She does not know what words she can possibly give him that will convince him to keep fighting. To stay here with her. To live.
She closes her eyes and leans her brow gently--so gently!--against his. Imagines that if she opens her eyes, she will see his, looking back at her (as they always are), mischievous and amused, tender and caring. Devoted. “You said you loved me,” she breathes against his skin. “You thanked me for trying to save you. I don’t understand you.”
It’s not enough. Or rather, it’s not the right thing. He knows what he said. He knows why he said it. He knows that she has no right to ask him for explanations.
But even now, listening for that next inhale, all she can think of is that kiss he gave her. The final kiss. The touch of his lips to hers, tasting of copper, sloppy, but still so gentle. Still speaking volumes.
Love and longing and a want so deep she could drown in it.
She’d told him she loved him, but it was as if he hadn’t heard her.
“What if I said that I love you, too?” she asks him. “Would you believe me? Because I do love you. I love you so much more than I ever thought was possible. If you…if you die…” She can’t speak, can’t finish that sentence--that thought. It’s anathema. It’s unthinkable. “You can’t die, Clark. I need you.”
She’s so selfish, even now, while he is dying. She does need him, and she has to ask him to stay with her because he is so good at giving her whatever she wants. Because he always acts as if it is his greatest joy to bring her the things she loves, to make her smile in surprise and delight. Because he is the thing she loves most, and if he really does want to make her happy, he has to take another breath. He has to stay alive until morning, and then beyond that. He has to get better.
Her tears fall to his cheeks, tiny splashes that echo against the quiet of his rasping breaths.
“I need you, Clark.”
Her only answer is a soft inhale…pause…exhale…pause…pause…catch…pause…pause…inhale…
*
The horizon is smudged with pale blue, rosy pink, butter yellow and the sun is casting its first rays upon the damaged city of Metropolis when Clark’s entire body seizes up. Martha’s shrill call for Jonathan, his quiet, pained exclamation for his boy, Perry’s quick intake of air, and Lois’s own blood rushing through her ears--all those sounds overtake whatever Lois might hear of Clark’s own breathing. But she can see.
She can see the muscles in his neck locked tight and straining.
She can see his eyes bulging.
She can see his back arched off the bed.
And she can see, in exquisite detail, the instant it all…just…stops.
His muscles bend and unravel. His body collapses as if he’s a puppet with the strings cut. His mouth goes slack. His eyes are hollow, his cheeks gaunt.
They wait. Silent. Poised. Teetering over an abyss.
There is no inhale. No pause. No catch. No exhale.
Nothing.
And she does not care that his parents are watching. She does not care that she doesn’t deserve this (or maybe she does, but Clark doesn’t). All she cares about is that her universe is shattering around her. All she cares about is that the future she saw, even the grimy and depleted one, will never come to pass now because there is no Superman to found it. There is no Clark.
Heedless of it all, she throws herself forward. “No!” she shouts, and presses her hands over his chest, reaches with everything she is, wills him to take another breath. “No, Clark!” She presses and retreats, presses and retreats, a constant rhythm she hopes is right because her mind won’t hold numbers right now. She bends and places her lips over the mouth she knows so well, breathes out, eager to trade her every breath for him. She will do this forever if she has to, will give him all the air in her lungs, will wear her strength away making his strong, beautiful heart beat, do anything to save him.
He chokes in a breath--the strongest one he has taken since they carried him up the stairs to his apartment--and arches once more. Lois backs up, lets her hands fall away from him, and waits.
He breathes. He gasps. He sputters. He whimpers, a sound utterly chilling in its helplessness.
“Please, Clark!” she begs. “Stay with me!”
His hands tangle in the bedding, a last spasm that rips through his drained shell. Then he stills. There is blood on the bandages. There is bloodshot brown peeking from below his eyelids.
There is no sign of life.
“Clark!” Lois scrabbles for him, desperate and urgent. “No! Clark, please! Don’t leave me!”
She pushes, she breathes, she screams, she thrashes wildly when Perry pulls her away from the body. She goes wild, feral, as mindless and savage as Doomsday, reaching for Clark, struggling until her mentor, shaking with his own sobs, merely encompasses her in his arms and hugs her, tighter and tighter until she tires herself and goes limp, drained of everything but a grief so great she knows she will never escape it.
And still there is no inhale. No success. No victory.
They won so many battles, but in the end, they lost the war.
*
The sun comes up. It casts a golden light across Clark’s body until a sheet is drawn up over him.
The apartment is cold. She shivers in the corner, huddled up on herself.
Martha weeps, a constant sound that feels as if it is the voice of the world itself. Jonathan makes no sound, but he holds Martha and silent tears make a trek across his bewildered face.
Lois leans on Perry, listens to the beat of his heart, feels her head rise and fall with his every breath, and wishes with every cell in her body that it was Clark holding her. Clark with a beating heart. Clark breathing.
She can still hear it, the phantom sound of his intermittent breathing. It rings in between Martha’s hopeless sobs.
Outside, she thinks, the world is turning--the rising sun proves it--but in here, in this tiny pocket of unreality, everything has stopped.
Clark is dead, and there is no more reason to be.
*
One moment, Perry is there. The next she realizes he isn’t. She doesn’t know where he is.
Clark’s body is still on the bed, hidden beneath a sheet. She keeps watching it to see if it will flutter around his mouth. It doesn’t. She keeps watching it to see if it will ever not hurt. But that’s impossible.
A while later, Perry is there. He tugs at her elbow. His mouth is moving. It’s too much work to try to figure out what he’s saying. It doesn’t matter anyway.
“It’s my fault,” she says. “He should still be here.”
Maybe she doesn’t say it after all; Perry doesn’t act as if he’s heard her, just keeps talking. Lois shrugs him away and moves her head so that she can still see the body lying on the bed. She wishes she could pretend she didn’t know who was under that sheet, but she can’t. It’s branded into her every thought, every molecule, a crime every bit as large and pervasive and damning as the life staining her hands.
“I’m sorry,” she wants to say, but she can’t. She’s forgotten how to speak.
She thinks she sees the sheet move, but that’s impossible. Still, she watches intently for some sign that Clark is still capable of accomplishing miracles.
Nothing.
Disappointment overwhelms her.
*
It’s dark again. Perry turned the lights on, but Jonathan turned them off when Martha finally drifted into exhausted sleep. It doesn’t matter. Lois still keeps her eyes fixed on that blanketed form.
Three times. Three times she’s seen it move out of the corner of her eye. Or rather, move so subtly that it seemed to be only something she glimpsed peripherally, because she hasn’t let herself look away from it at all. Three times the area around the body’s mouth has ballooned out a millimeter. Three times she has let hope consume her only to be proven in vain.
Clark’s still dead.
*
Her eyes burn and itch by the time the apartment grows light around her again, but she doesn’t care. She can see the body again. Can see that sheet, off-white with bits of brown and rust-red on it from where it’s sunk against the wounds beneath it. She thinks she should get up and move to the body, take the sheet off and let the sunlight bathe the form beneath, but her joints have rusted and her limbs frozen. She is so cold she will shatter if she moves.
Besides, he’s dead. No amount of sunlight will help him.
So she keeps her silent, motionless vigil.
Perry talks, a baritone drawl that’s familiar and comfortable. Lois lets the sound soothe her even as the individual words escape her. Martha is crying again, quietly, as she fixes a breakfast for Jonathan and Perry.
The food all goes into the trash.
Lois thinks she sees the sheet move.
Four times.
*
Perry has tried to get her to move several more times (three? Four? It doesn’t matter). Jonathan has even broken through the neutral zone between them and tried to get her to drink something. She takes the cup because even in her fugue state, she knows how much it means that he’s trying, but she doesn’t drink it. It seems like sacrilege to even consider letting water past her lips when Clark’s are forever sealed shut.
Martha finally steps over the gulf between Lois and everyone else, too, with a fixed expression on her face. She opens her mouth as if she will speak, but she must be having just as hard a time as Lois is with that, so she lets her mouth close without any words between them. Lois prefers it that way.
Clark’s mother reaches out and pats her, once, very quickly, on the hand, then retreats back to the safety of Jonathan’s embrace. They’re trying. If Lois were able to, she’d appreciate it. Instead, she can only watch that motionless body.
It’s six times now. Six times in thirty-six hours. Is that a pattern? Is that reason to hope?
Probably not.
Lois hopes anyway.
*
She jerks awake when she begins to list, then instantly freezes. It’s dark again, but that’s no excuse. How could she have fallen asleep? What if the sheet moved again? What if it is eight times now? What if she would have finally recognized the pattern?
Panic hazes like lightning through her veins, shooting adrenaline into her system. She won’t fall asleep again.
The moonlight through the windows facing the bedroom cast cold, aloof illumination over the body. She knows they’ll have to do something soon. They cannot let this be Clark’s final resting spot. They will have to make arrangements, take his body back to Smallville, bury him on a hill overlooking the farm he loved so much. He’ll like it there, she thinks, but she still shudders to think of Clark buried beneath the earth.
It’s not surprising, really, that it was the sunlight that helped him. He was so bright. So radiant. Sunlight’s golden child, the sun god, a man with the sun bronzed into his very skin. The moonlight does not suit him, but at least it lets her see him. The earth is alien to him, and it will swallow him until there is nothing left.
He was already buried once. She and Perry dug him out, and for what? So he could die again and again?
A whine from deep in her throat startles her, but she tamps it down quickly. No need to wake Jonathan and Martha; it took them long hours to fall asleep. She doesn’t know where Perry is, if he’s here or if he left again. Whatever, she doesn’t need to disturb him either.
The sheet moves again.
Eight (or maybe nine).
*
Lois’s body finally betrays her, and she feels the apartment whirling around her in a dizzying swoop of color and sensation. She thinks she falls sideways. She thinks another shudder run through her. She thinks the sunlight blinds her as it casts its heavy gold through the windows, because she closes her eyes.
But not before she sees the sheet move again. Maybe it’s because everything is fading around her, or because she has hoped for it so badly, but she could swear the sheet does more than flutter.
She dreams that it shakes and stirs as a hand from beneath its folds searches for the end of it. She dreams that the hand draws the sheet aside to reveal Clark lying there, his eyes blinking sleep away. She dreams that the sun encases him in a brilliant embrace.
She dreams that he sits up and looks at her.
She dreams that he says her name.
It’s such a beautiful, impossible dream that she finally willingly gives herself over to unconsciousness.
*
