Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic What If...? 4a/4

***
Season 4: What If...She Left?
***

He wanted her to beg him to stay.

She told him to go.

He wanted her to cling, to plead, to hold on.

She let him go (free).

He has never known strength like hers, has never imagined a will as great as hers, and knows he will never experience love to equal what she gave him.

(What she gives him.)

Clark holds a silver ring in his hands, bends all his thoughts toward the planet falling away behind him, and prays that his strength is enough to see him through a life without her in it.

***

His heart continues beating.

It seems such a small thing, so normal, so everyday, that it staggers him.

The small Kryptonian globe-ship is traveling so quickly that it takes only an hour to go farther than he’s ever been before. Past Nightfall, past the distance he traveled toward the sun to tear the Nazis’ radiation from his cells (a process not quite as painful as the one awaiting him, when Earth’s last gifts drain excruciatingly slowly from him, taking away his invulnerability, his flight, his senses, maybe even the perfect memories he is clinging to so desperately). Farther than he’s ever been (if he doesn’t count his first trip here, so many years ago, a helpless infant that he wishes, selfishly, had faded from every other Kryptonian’s memory, forever outside their attention, forever safe).

And yet, even divorced from the planet that sheltered him, his heart continues to beat. A solid thrumming in a rhythm he knows. A rhythm made all the more familiar by the flights he’s taken through space when all he could hear was the rush of his pulse in his ears.
Beating, beating, beating, nudging up against bone and muscle, straining for the ring hanging from his neck.

It is all he can hear as Zara teaches him the Kryptonian language with its deceptive simplicity, it’s lack of ornamentation, its dozens of words for duty and responsibility and its single word for love. His Kryptonian heart pounds in a counterpoint to the alien syllables, straining back toward its adopted planet and the multitude of languages each with multiple words for the love he’s left behind (the love of family, the love of friends, the love of the woman he doesn’t think he can survive without). Clark memorizes and learns and throws himself into this training, hoping that he can save this remnant of Krypton by communication, by hope, rather than military might or royal lineage.

(He learns because he wants to tell Lois he loves her. Wants to swear himself to her in the language of his birth so that there can be no room for doubt or misinterpretation. Wants to pour his love into her through word and deed and thought so that at least a part of him can remain with her.

So that he can pretend he has not abandoned her entirely.)

The language settles in his mind, vowels and consonants, verbs and nouns, thoughts and feelings not his own.

Not of it is enough to drown out the relentless drumming of his stubborn heart.

It is all he can hear when Zara declares him passable and Ching breaks his grim silence to lead him to another room where there are staffs he calls drei. He talks of nobility and danger and tradition, words that pile up like baggage in the corner of the room, heavy and stifling and everything Clark wants to avoid. This is the man who tried to silence his own heartbeat simply to prove a point. The man who advocated killing that alien assassin without blinking an eye.

Clark takes the weapon Ching hands him, and he tries (he has to, because what is the point of leaving everything he cares about behind if he’s only going to give up immediately), oh, how he tries, but the brutal totality is anathema to him. His heart flinches away from the violence of the weapon, his mind flees back toward the quietness of his parents’ lessons about restraint, building up boundaries and lines around himself.

Ching glowers in discontentment. Zara watches silently.

Clark focuses on the feel of the organ pounding behind his breastbone and wonders if a Kryptonian heart can transform itself, like a phoenix rising from ashes, into an Earthen heart.

***

Earth is far behind them now. Clark stares at the choice laid out before him and wonders when it will stop being a choice (when it will become, instead, a regret).

Superman’s Suit is bold and bright and the very first thing about him that Lois loved.

Clark’s suit is muted and quiet but restful and the thing that eventually won Lois over.

The third choice sucks the light out of the room in ebony shadows and bounces it back in the regal blue making up the crest (familiarity made alien). Not the crest of hope. Not the symbol of help.

A royal house.

A dictatorship.

A prison and temptation and corruption all bound together in a mess he doesn’t think he (Superman or Clark Kent or Kal-El) can ever untangle.

Clark turns away from the choice and wraps his hand around the ring hanging from his neck.

His body is adorned with bruises from Ching’s punishing training, he feels drained somehow, and every thump of his heart feels as if it might be his last (it yearns for all they leave behind), and he is afraid he is forgetting everything. Afraid that with every inch of invulnerability, every measure of flight, every super sense, he’s also losing the perfect memory that ensures he carries Lois with him wherever he goes.

Not gone yet, though.

His heart beats, and she is there with him, inside him (Lois, Lois, Lois).

(He has a reason, still, to fight, to try, to stay alive, to hope.)

Around his neck hangs Lois’s ring. In his pocket he has a glass vial filled with soil lifted from the cornfields of Smallville.

Lois. Earth.

He clings to them with everything he is, and dresses himself in the costume of a dictator.

***

The beat of his pulse tingles at his fingertips, throbs against his wrists, feathers along his throat.

(He misses the feel of her hand in his. The excited way she’d grab hold of his wrist when inspiration struck. The tickle of her hair just under his jaw when he held her close and she pressed closer.)

The ship with its appearing and disappearing rooms is swallowed up in the maw of a bigger ship, a palace with a grand hall and too many faces and hanging flags that shift to mirror the crest on his own suit (not the red and blue with its reminders of his mother’s nimble hands and his father’s quiet pride and Lois’s unquestioning acceptance; not the concealing disguise of Clark Kent with his humanness and his job, his friends and his fiancée; black, instead, like the void enveloping him and blue as royal as the king they want to fashion from his puppet limbs).

Clark lets the alien formulas and sobering implications dance around him. He lets his hand be bound to Zara’s (wonders if she can interpret the name, the denial, his pulse hammers against her, slower rhythm). He lets them move him and nudge him and push him, a form of clay pliable in their hands.

(He wonders what they will say when they burn the outward clay away to reveal the steel within, bound up in his molten heartbeat. No puppet taken from a strange land, but a statue, already shaped, already cast, already set in stone.)

Union.

The Kryptonian word for marriage.

Clark’s arm goes rigid against Zara’s. He still possesses his powers. His cells are still gorged on the radiation of a gentler sun than theirs. He could, he knows, tear himself from Zara’s weaker hold. Could walk away from their useless plucking at his limbs. Could rip the bulkheads apart and flee this ship in an ebony and blue blur.

He could, he thinks with his heart rushing loud in his inner ear, still change his mind.

Go back. Back to Earth with its golden prairies and azure seas and proud cities.

Back to his parents and his friends and the only life he’s ever wanted.

Back to Lois.

(He is deafened to the Kryptonian marriage ceremony by the thunder of his yearning heart.)

Clark holds his every muscle in statue-like rigidity.

And he does not run.

He does not flee.

He stays.

He lets go.

***

There’s a bridal bed. Clark stares at it from his hunched position in a chair (his self-imposed prison), and remembers another bridal bed. Another marriage ceremony riddled through with deception. Another wedding night where nothing was as it seemed and confusion prevailed.
He thinks he would take that clone back in Zara’s place.

(At least with the clone, there was not the last remnants of a people depending on his sacrifice.)

“Your heart is not in this,” Zara observes after a long time, in English, as if reaching out to him.

Clark can’t move. Or rather, he could, but he refuses. He will stay here, shackled to this chair, until some form of reason or logic returns to the proceedings.

“My heart,” he says, “is back on Earth. This…this is all just window dressing to get us where we need to go. Right? That’s still our plan--to save New Krypton from this Lord Nor and then to let me go home?”

His mind strains past the distraction of his heart toward Zara. The language was easy to learn; the telepathy not so much. Still, he does his best to read this woman who will be, in the eyes of New Krypton, his bride. If he cannot trust her…if she will betray him… Well, he needs to know now, before his cells are weakened and his place here becomes no longer a choice but a prison.

Zara moves to stand before him. “I will do anything necessary to save my people, Lord Kal-El. As I know you will do whatever you must to return to the planet you call home. If we cooperate, we can each fulfill our goals.”

“Then I have your word?” He looks up to meet her gaze (and he cannot read her mind, but he can read her eyes, can see her wonder and her zeal and her resolve). “One day, this marriage will be dissolved and I will get to return home?”

“If,” she says, “in return, I have your word that you will do whatever is necessary to save New Krypton.”

“I will do everything I can to save your world.” Clark takes a deep breath. “And then I return to mine.”

“Partners,” Zara says.

For the first time since the doors shut them up together, Clark rises to his feet. “Partners,” he says, then adds, “Not in bed. But in our goals.”

“Agreed.”

This time, when she takes his hand and he feels his pulse fluttering against hers, they don’t need officials or a knotted sash to complete the moment.

Finally, for the first time since he gave his farewell speech to the crowd at the Daily Planet, since he hugged his parents goodbye in Smallville and kissed Lois in her apartment for what cannot be the last time, Clark allows himself to think that this is not the end.

(He allows himself to accept the terrifying truth that his heart will not cease working outside Lois Lane’s orbit.)

***

“A wedding gift,” Zara says. “Or a seal on our agreement. Whichever way you look at it, we must leave now.”

Clark’s brimming full of questions, but the sight of Ching guarding the door to their bridal chambers (the sight of fragility lurking there in his dark eyes before he blinks himself back to impassivity) has stemmed them all. So it is in silence that Clark follows Zara down corridors Ching claims are clear. It is in silence that he sees the small globe-ship where he left behind his Clark Kent clothes and his Superman suit and the last moments he will get to be truly himself.

It is in silence that he allows Zara to think them an entrance and pull him into a room. Not the room where Zara drilled him in alien syntax. Not the room where Ching tested his fading invulnerability by training him in the use of a Kryptonian staff weapon. A new room, one Clark has never seen before.

It doesn’t surprise him. This thought technology the Kryptonians possess seems boundless, and he is only surprised that Zara has brought him to a room with nothing in it but two long boxes that look like nothing so much as coffins.

“These are the escape pods,” she says in a cool tone. “They store up to forty-eight hours of air, and we are nearing the danger mark. Clark, please focus. Once we open the pod, you and I must distract anyone we meet in the corridors while Ching ensures safe delivery to our chambers. Do you understand?”

“No, he says truthfully.

Zara moves to stand just in front of him, her feet set, her shoulders squared. “I agreed to this against my better judgment, but I saw no other alternatives. Do not make me regret this.”

“Regret what? I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Remember your promise,” she says cryptically.

Then she turns to the box.

Clark looks back toward the door (or at least where the door was a moment ago). When a loud hissing noise fills the room, momentarily drowning out the sound of his heartbeat, Clark turns toward the opening pod.

He’s confused. He’s unsure. He’s wary (it was only a few days ago, after all, that Ching was ready to sacrifice innocent lives for his own goal).

The cover of the pod swings aside. There is a form lying inside, pale and slender and so, so familiar. Dark hair that feels as silky as the wind. Skin so soft when he caresses it. Hands that fit just so in his.
(And always, always showing up where she should not be.)

“Lois,” Clark says.

And his heart (so stubborn, so frail) stops dead in his chest.

***

When Clark first became Superman, he felt like a player entering a stage in the middle of a play and having no script. It was as if he had stumbled his way into a place where there was no direction, no preparation, and far too much pressure. Under the eyes of a crowd, he shifted and fidgeted and stumbled through lines that either seemed too absurdly stiff or too mundane to be part of the legend of Superman being crafted all around him.

He’d felt as if he were lost in a dream where everyone else knew a secret he didn’t.

As afraid as he’d been of losing himself, though, he kept going. Kept crossing his arms over his chest (to hide his vulnerabilities). Kept widening his stance (to keep them from bowling him over and leaving Clark Kent forgotten). Kept smiling that formal smile and playing a part everyone else had made up for him (rose to fit their expectations so that they’d never look behind the cape to the ordinary man in his shadow).

Now, he is lost again. Superman fades and shrinks away, and if even he is small and overshadowed, then Clark is even further away (hiding in the darkness of his own mind, shrinking away from the telepathic advances of the crowd staring at him). Kal-El is nothing more than a projection dressed in black and blue, a disguise cardboard-thin and formed of expectations.

(Clark has learned, though, just how strong that disguise can grow to be. He knows that Kal-El can become a person every bit as fully shaped as Superman.)

Zara sets her wrist against his, their fingers entwined.

Partners.

Not spouses. Not married. Not personal.

But partners nonetheless.

Clark smiles a formal smile and pretends he doesn’t mind when the people in front of him fall to their knees. He keeps his shoulders squared and his chin up, and he plays the part they expect him to play.

(He lies. Even here, among his own people, he is alone, a deceiver set apart by the lies he must tell, and maybe it has never been his secrets that make him a liar; maybe it is just who he is.)

(He lies, because Lois’s life depends on the strength of this deception, and so no matter that he feels like he is transforming into Lex Luthor, all power and entitlement and deception, he will do whatever he must.)

The crowd stares at him and Zara and chants their names. The Elders stand near him and watch with judging eyes. The soldiers hem the crowd in to keep them calm.

All eyes are on him (which means it’s safe for Ching to carry a drowsy Lois back to the bridal chambers unwitnessed).

In the hollow shell of his disguise, Clark tries to find something to hold onto.

He can’t.

Everything around him is lies and masks and thoughts he cannot read.

***

Alone in the room with his wife, his fiancée, and a man who could be ally or enemy, Clark feels overwhelmed in a mélange of emotions so great they sweep him up and spin him endlessly in their wake. Kryptonian language swirls through the air around him, thick and clustering like fruit of which he only plucks a few here and there. Just enough to get the general idea. Just enough to realize that it is not only his emotions that are carrying him in a direction not his own, but the situation itself.

Only one thing is clear: there is no going back.

Lois is along for the ride like it or not. His powers are too faint now to carry them back such a great distance even if he had a safe way to transport her. Worse, New Krypton is uninhabitable for her, but seeing as the mothership belongs to the House of Ra, and now of El, she will have to live aboard it indefinitely. They will find reasons for Clark to visit often, unless it is too dangerous and then he will simply have to stay away because (this above all he understands, this cluster of words sharp and poisoned) if Lois is discovered, she will die.

Clark is used to being a man divided: reporter and superhero. Friend and secret-keeper. Human and Kryptonian. Yet for all that, he doesn’t think the distinction has ever been so absolute as now.

A part of him sits on a chair (his former self-imposed prison become his haven) pulled up beside the bridal bed he swore he would never occupy. He stares at the woman lying beneath luxurious covers, sleeping fitfully. This part of him has her hand clasped in his and heartbeat pulsing in his ears, and he is jubilant. Relieved. Impatient for her eyes to open so he can drink in all of Lois Lane, rediscover everything he has just spent the last days simultaneously trying to cling to and to let go.

But beyond that, lower and heavier, there is another part of him that is horrified. Petrified. Trapped.

He swore to himself he would not be a puppet, would not act unless it was right, would not allow himself to be irreparably tied to this strange world.

But now there is a hand (impossibly fragile) resting in his. There is a heartbeat (achingly ephemeral) dependent on him. Lois is strong and capable and brilliant, but she is Human and mortal and even further out of her element than he is.

Her life is, as it never has been before, utterly reliant on him.
So he will dance to whatever tune they play. He will earn her oxygen and food and lighter gravity with his obedience to Zara and Ching’s demands. He will transform himself from a man of steel to a puppet made of malleable strings.

What other choice does he have?

He cannot lose her (the perfect hostage).

***

Lois wakes just as they’re leaving the solar system behind. Clark has only a moment to watch space recede into an aqua and silver rush of power, to wonder if it is only his imagination that he feels denser, heavier, slower, weaker. Only a moment, than Lois’s groan demands all his attention (the sight of her eyes fluttering open makes him feel, so abruptly it staggers him, as if he might begin floating, as if he can still break walls and bend bulkheads should she ask it of him).

“Clark?”

If she did not need him so badly to be strong here, this would break him. Would send him toppling forward, his strings cut, his steel melted, only his finite, mortal self left behind to fold beneath the pressure of his joy at hearing the voice (the way she says his name) that he half-believed he would never hear again.

As it is, it takes all his willpower to keep himself upright, though he bends enough to lay a kiss to the hand cradled between his (to the place where a ring belongs).

“I’m here, Lois,” he says (she must never be allowed to feel alone, not when he is here; because he is all she has left now that Earth is so far removed from them). “I’m right here. And so are you. Here. With me.”

She smiles at him, clearly having anticipated his response to finding her along for the ride. He hands her the bottle of water Zara left on the table for her, helps her drink through the straw, and tries very hard to bottle up all his words (his questions; his exclamations; his thanks).

“So,” she says when he sets the water aside and takes her hand once more in his. “I know you’re probably not happy with me, but I had to do this. I couldn’t let you go off all alone. Clark, you’re so strong, but you’re strong because you have people you love, people who love you, who believe in you, who can let you be yourself. On New Krypton, if you’d gone alone, you wouldn’t have any of that. And even the strongest man can’t be strong all the time. Besides,” she tries a mischievous grin, “you know me. You really think I could pass up a story like this?”

“But…what about Perry? My parents? You said you’d take care of them.”
“I know, but…” She takes a deep breath and sits up straighter against the pillows. “They’re strong, too, Clark, and I know they would rather someone be there for you than to sit and worry at their sides. And I told Jimmy that I was going undercover with Clark.”

“It’s so dangerous,” Clark can’t help saying. “If they find you here, they’ll kill you. And you can’t leave this ship. You’ll never even be able to set foot on New Krypton. If anything happens to this place, you could--”

“Clark,” she says (does she know how wonderful it is to hear his name, here where he’s resigned himself to being a shell of a character he doesn’t know?). “I had to come. I couldn’t stay behind. So, please, don’t be too upset, all right?”

And how can he be? How can he be upset when seeing her lying in that escape pod, even motionless and pale, was the greatest moment of his new life as Kal-El?

(How can he be angry with her when she has no one else besides him? When she left everything behind to be with him?)

“I’m not angry.” He moves, then, breaking his vow, and sits beside her on the bridal bed, close enough to put his arm around her shoulders and rest his forehead against hers. And he tells her a truth (Clark’s truth, even Superman’s truth, but not Kal-El’s). “I’m so glad you’re here.”

And then another truth (a truth that supersedes all his identities).

“I love you.”

He leans in to kiss her.

***

But there is no kiss.

(He wonders if there will ever be another kiss.)

***

Zara and Ching rise from the corner where they secluded themselves, and interrupt the moment.

“I’m sorry, husband,” Zara says coldly, “but certain proprieties must be kept. Infidelity is allowed only in the most extreme of wartime situations, and even then only with licensed concubines.”

“What?” Clark and Lois demand together, perfect synchronicity that makes his heart sing.

“I agreed to bring Lois only because she insisted that if I didn’t, she would coerce you into staying on Earth. However, there are still rules, and codes of conduct. Lord Nor has a great deal of support, even among the Council of Elders, and one slip could lose us any advantage. Kal-El, our marriage is a great coup. We cannot afford for anything to jeopardize that.”

“I didn’t say it exactly like that!” Lois sputters just as Ching stiffens even further (if that’s even possible) and says, “The Lady Zara deserves a husband who supports her in all ways.”

“Our marriage is only for show,” Clark says, his eyes fixed on Zara. “That’s what we agreed.”

“So we did. But you also promised to do whatever it took to save New Krypton--and that includes your fidelity.” Something in his expression must move her, though, because she softens and adds, “I don’t like it either, Kal-El, but we’ve made our choices, this is the situation, and we have no choice but to follow it through to the end.”

“Wait.” Lois shifts on the bed until she’s nearly kneeling. “You’re married? You two? Already?”

There’s something shaken in her eyes, a dark stirring of loss he doesn’t like. Clark grabs her hand and lifts it to place over the chain around his neck, reminding her of what lies beneath the stiff royal uniform (the truth beneath the mask). “It was a political ceremony,” he assures her. “And it will be dissolved as soon as we stop Lord Nor.”

“Well, then.” She shakes her head slightly, swallowing hard. “What are we waiting for?”

***