The Reveal
-- Or --
How Clark Should Respond to Lois' Irrational Tirade
by MrsMxyzptlk
"Lois, we've been dating for a while now," Clark started, "and I feel like we've gotten close enough, and our relationship has gotten serious enough, that there's something I should tell you if we're going to be able to continue."
Lois looked at him askance. "That... sounds bad."
Clark sighed and gave her a little smile. "It's not bad. Exactly. I don't know whether
you will think it's bad, but it's not. It just... is."
She just gave him an expectant look in reply.
He took a deep breath to steel himself, then blurted out, "I'm Superman."
"Yeah, right."
"What? No, I'm serious!"
"Clark, if you're going to make a big production like this and make me think we've got some big issue to address but then just make fun of me, I don't want to put up with you. I've got better things to do. I thought you, of all people, wouldn't tease me about my old crush on Superman."
"I'm not teasing!"
"Whatever!" she exclaimed as she threw up her hands and turned to storm off.
"Lois," he called in his Superman voice. "I'm telling the truth."
That brought her up short. She turned back and saw him pull off his glasses, then float up two feet in the air. Her jaw dropped in shock. "Clark...?"
Returning to his regular voice, he replied, "Yeah, it's me." He put his glasses back on and floated back down, then thought better of the glasses and pulled them off again. "So... you believe me now?"
"Um, yeah. I guess I have to after that." She stared at Clark in shock for a few moments more before her expression changed to confusion, then anger. "You've been Superman this whole time, and you didn't tell me," she fumed. "Why didn't you tell me? Don't you trust me? I thought I meant something to you, Clark -- Superman -- whoever you are! You've been lying to me for years! For the entire time I've known you! Did it amuse you to go behind my back like that? To play me for a fool?"
Clark was gobsmacked. He had not been sure exactly what sort of response he should expect from Lois, but this was a bit extreme. He floundered for something to say to interrupt her increasingly angry tirade, but she just kept yelling.
"How could you lie to me like this, Clark? Why didn't you tell me?!"
Clark finally snapped out of his stupor and said, "I did tell you!"
"No, you didn't!"
"What are you talking about? I told you just now!"
"But why didn't you tell me before?!"
"Why should I have told you before? And that doesn't matter. I'm telling you now."
"So you had no reason to tell me before? You just don't trust me!"
"Of course I trust you, or else I wouldn't have said anything, and I've never laughed behind your back about this! I never lied just to spite you, Lois."
"Yeah, right! You lied to me constantly, every single day."
"I wasn't lying to you specifically. I was protecting my identity from everyone. Not you. Everyone."
"Yeah, well I'm part of 'everyone'."
"Lois, will you just listen for a minute!"
"No, you listen, Clark! I think I deserve better than this from you!"
"You deserve... ?! This isn't about you! None of this is about you! All of this is about me! None of my reasons for keeping this from you are about you."
"How can your reasons for lying to me not be about me?"
"Will you listen to yourself?" Clark sighed and covered his face with his hand. "We're not getting anywhere." He dropped his hand, looked at her, and asked, "Can we be civil here?"
"I can be civil," Lois insisted defiantly.
"Ok, then. Can you just give me a minute to explain without jumping down my throat?"
She huffed and folded her arms. "Fine. Talk."
"As I said, none of this is about you. It's entirely about me. I didn't go into our association as collegues, or our friendship, or our relationship looking for the 'right time' to tell you. I only really started to seriously consider it after we had been going out for a few months. I was thinking about the future and what I wanted it to look like, and I realized that if our relationship was going to be able to go the way I wanted it to go, I would have to tell you at some point."
"You started dating me without even considering telling me?"
"Yes."
"Why? How could you even do that?"
"You have to understand, this isn't something I tell people."
"Yeah, I get that you have to keep it a secret, but from your girlfriend?"
"You're not getting what I'm saying. This isn't something I tell people. Ever."
"... Ever?"
"Never. I'm not constantly evaluating my friends for when I can tell them. I just don't tell anyone for any reason. I have never told anyone before."
"How can you just not tell anyone? Does anyone else know?"
"Just my parents, and I didn't have to tell them. They knew before I did."
Lois just stared at him for a moment, then said, "Ok, you're going to have to explain that one. In fact, how are they even your parents? Or do they have powers, too? Or are they just posing as your parents? Are you even from Smallville? Or is the whole town in on it, and you're not actually from Krypton? And--"
"Lois," he interrupted, "I haven't lied to you about my life. Nor Superman's. But I did let everyone assume that Superman arrived on Earth right before I went public."
She raised an eyebrow and gave him a skeptical look. "Ok, so how long have you been on Earth, then?"
"Almost my whole life. My spaceship crash landed in a field near my parents' farm when I was a baby. The ship was just big enough to hold me; no one else came. My parents found the ship and took me home and adopted me. We didn't know where I actually came from until that whole mess with Bureau 39."
"Wait -- Trask was right?!"
"What do you mean he was right?! I'm not planning on taking over the world or hurting anyone!"
She shook her head and waved her hand to dismiss his comment. "No, of course not. But he was claiming that you knew something about Superman and that 'the alien' had taken you over or something. He was digging
in Smallville, for crying out loud."
Clark's shoulders dropped and his whole demeanor drooped. After a moment, he replied, "A family friend found some kryptonite in his yard and sent it to a lab. Trask got ahold of it and traced it back to Smallville. That's what they were digging for. But they were onto the town even before that. My dad buried the ship not long after they brought me home. When we went to look for it later, after I had moved to Metropolis, it was gone. I found it again in Bureau 39's warehouse. I managed to take a piece of it when we were snooping around, but they cleared the place out before I could go back for the whole thing. That piece I grabbed gave me some information about where I came from. That's how I know that I'm from Krypton."
"So why were you sent here?"
"To save my life. My father was a scientist, and he knew that the huge earthquakes they were experiencing were precursors to the whole planet breaking up. I don't know why he only had the resources to build a baby-sized spaceship and why he and my mother couldn't get away with me, but as far as I know, I'm the only survivor."
Lois swore. "Clark, I'm sorry. I... I don't know what to say."
He sighed. "There's not much
to say. I can't really miss people I never knew, and I liked growing up with Mom and Dad in Smallville. I like my life here. I'm sad that they're gone, but I can't exactly regret it."
After stewing over the information for a minute, Lois asked, "So why Superman? Why hide? Why not tell a friend, at least?"
"You have to understand what it was like. What it's still like. I was always different. Some of my powers came in gradually, like my strength and speed, and some appeared later. I couldn't fly until I was eighteen, but I don't know whether that's when I gained the ability or if I just hadn't figured it out until then. But I was always more or less invulnerable. And not many kindergarteners can bench-press a pickup truck.
"We didn't know where I came from or why I had powers, so we didn't know whether someone was looking for me. For all we knew, I was some Russian experiment, and if anyone found out where I had ended up, it would start an international incident. Tensions were already pretty high from the space race and the cold war. I didn't want to be responsible for World War III. But even more than that, we figured that if anyone found out, if the government found out, then I'd be taken away and end up a lab rat. 'Dissected like a frog', my dad used to say.
"So my parents taught me to hide what I could do. I watched all the other kids and figured out how to act normal. How to take a punch without breaking the other guy's hand. How to fake a cold when a virus was going around. How to not react to all the things I could hear going on in the next room, or the next building, or the next town over. When I was ten, I asked my parents for glasses so that I would look nerdier. No one thinks you're super strong if you're a four-eyes."
"So you decided not to ever tell anyone," Lois said consideringly.
"Exactly."
"So having a girlfriend changed your mind, then?"
"Um, no," Clark said, embarrassed. "Not at all. I mean, you're not exactly my first girlfriend, Lois."
"So if you didn't ever tell your multitude of exes, why tell me?"
Clark blushed. "See, that's almost harder to say than telling you I'm Superman. And it's not a
multitude of exes... "
"Clark..." she growled, "Spit it out."
"Ok, here goes." He took a deep breath, then continued in a rush, "So I was thinking about my future and how I want you in it, and how if our relationship is actually going to work long term, then sooner or later I'd like to marry you, and I can't in good concience keep something like this from my wife, but I can't in good conscience propose to you without telling you that I'm not exactly human and that I kind of have a side-gig because that's not fair to you to ask a question like that without giving you all the information, but I hadn't actually expected to bring up the 'M-word' yet, so please don't freak out and don't consider this my real proposal yet, but if you actually do want to talk about it, then I'm up for that because I think I'm pretty sure about you, but I understand if you're not sure about me, especially after today, so I'm not going to push you on it."
Lois' jaw dropped. She floundered for words for a minute before managing, "Uh, wow. That I did not expect. I mean, the Superman thing was very, very unexpected, but that? That is a whole other level of unexpected."
"Yeah, I know. So if you want to avoid the topic, I understand. But I guess it's good to get this out in the open, too."
"Clark, I reeeally don't want to discuss you-know-what."
"Yeah, I get it. But I don't exactly think it's bad that you know that that's where I'm going with this relationship. That's my end-game, as long as things keep working out between us as well as they have been."
"So what was your intended timeline?"
"I don't have one. I'm playing this by ear. I guess I figured that I would know when it felt right to bring it up. Now that the topic is out there, I guess I'd like you to consider whether that's something you'd be interested in. At some point. But I'm not going to push. Besides, now we need to figure out how to make things work now that you know I'm not two people."
"Yeah, that's going to take some getting used to. So. I'm dating Superman."
Clark shrugged. "More or less. But mostly you're dating Clark."
"Of course I am," she said as she walked over to him and put her arms around his neck. "But as long as I get the perks of dating SuperClark, I might as well take advantage..."
He raised an eyebrow. "Perks?"
She smiled. "A moonlight flight around the city?"
He smiled back. "Lois, as long as you don't flip out at me again for being Superman, I'll fly you wherever you want."
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