"Challenged" Series ToC -----
The first thing he noticed when he came to was the smell. A complex odor of staleness and rottenness congealed in his nostrils, choking him into an unwillingly-woken state. It smelled like garbage, only worse, as if someone had taken the contents of a dumpster and multiplied it by several thousand…
…Oh.
Well, then. He blinked, his eyes still adjusting to the light, and took in the shapeless mounds of large, black, plastic bags and broken furniture. Squawks and caws filled the air as hundreds of birds enthusiastically pecked at the rotting food piled around him. Apparently, his assessment of the stench was right on the nose, so to speak. He covered his face, only to pull his hand sharply away at the sensation of something slimy. Things were definitely getting worse by the minute. He settled for carefully pinching his nostrils shut with two fingers.
The questions of why he was here and how he got here circled through his mind. His unease grew as he tried to remember, only to realize that he knew absolutely nothing, not even about himself. He looked down at himself. He was wearing tights, by the look of it; the color might be blue, but the stains mottling it left room for doubt. Something flashed through his head.
<Wish you weren’t Superman!>
He stilled, desperately trying to grab onto that flash of memory, but it was gone, leaving only a faint impression of…someone. A woman, he was sure. Brunette, maybe? She was angry…at him? At something he had done?
He frowned. It was too short and faint for him to make any sense of things. There had to be a way out of this place… He stepped forward, wincing as his foot sank into something soft with a wet squish. After allowing himself another quick breath, he plowed on.
Breathing. There was something about not being able to breathe. He was somewhere, and there wasn’t any air, and the device he was desperately trying to breathe from had been broken by…something. He remembered the woman again. She was angry. Furious. He had wanted to apologize to her for something, but she wasn’t there.
Was she responsible for his being here? He looked around at the seemingly endless refuse. Had she put him here, as repayment for something he had done?
<I’m sorry, Lois> he had said, only the words were silent, swallowed up by…something. Nothing. Truly endless nothing.
He looked up. The sun shone brightly down on him, heating the garbage at his feet so that the aroma wafted up to him with full force. <I’m sorry> he had said. Did he somehow deserve being here? Was this her revenge?
“Clark!”
His head whipped around at the sound of a woman’s voice. It had sounded close, though he couldn’t see anyone. It had also sounded vaguely familiar.
“Clark, are you here? Clark!”
Perhaps the piles of garbage were somehow playing tricks with the acoustics, because she sounded much closer than he realized she must be. He could even hear her cough, sputter, and inhale deeply from something that muffled the sounds of her breathing.
Breathing. He had drawn long, slow breaths from some kind of apparatus he'd been carrying. There was a radio in his ear. She had been furious.
“Clark!” she called again, and this time he heard a choked sob. She drew another covered breath.
He had drawn a breath, or at least, tried to. The hose was severed, his air supply spilling uselessly into the void. His lungs had burned, stubbornly trying to pull in oxygen despite his brain’s realization that it was useless. The radio was long gone. <I’m sorry, Lois> he had said.
“Hello?” he called out, wondering who this woman was, and why she sounded so distressed. “Is someone there?”
“…Clark?!” She sounded closer now, and he sensed it wasn’t just an illusion from this place's strange acoustics anymore. “Honey, is that you?”
He fell silent, not sure how to answer her.
“Clark?!” she pleaded again.
“I…I don’t know,” he admitted.
He could hear the confusion in her tone: “What don’t you know?”
“I don’t know…who I am.”
Her footsteps were the same awful mix of crunching and wet squishing as his, as she rounded a torn-up old sofa that was covered in bird droppings and came to face him. She was beautiful, what he could see of her from behind the handkerchief she held over her face. Her dark eyes searched his, glistening as she suddenly dropped the handkerchief and pulled him into a desperate hug.
“Oh, Clark!” She sobbed again. “I thought I’d lost you!”
“I…I’m sorry…” he said, and something deep inside him wanted to say it again. “I’m sorry. I don’t know… Who are you?”
Her hands came up to the sides of his face, and she looked intently into his eyes. “I’m your wife,” she whispered, and then had to pause as she held her breath against the smell. “I’m Lois Lane Kent, and you’re Clark Kent, AKA Superman.”
<…wish you weren’t Superman…> she had said.
“I’m sorry,” he said again as she held him close. “Lois. I’m so sorry!”
“Don’t!” she admonished, pulling back to look at him again. “It’s not your fault you've forgotten. We'll go home, and we’ll work on getting your memory back.”
“I did something,” he protested, once again floundering for that fragment of memory. “Something that made you angry. It was something big, I think…”
She laughed, swiping tears away with her sleeve as her hands were now soiled from touching him. “You did what you had to do,” she explained. “Yes, I was angry, but you wouldn’t be the man I love if you didn’t do it.”
“Really?” he asked, the vision of her rage and pain still the clearest memory of her that he had.
“Yes,” she said, tracing her fingers down his jaw in clear relief that he was standing before her. “I love you, Clark Jerome Kent, with all my heart, mind, and soul. I love you enough to spend hours searching through a city dump based on a homeless man’s report of possibly seeing something land here. And no, you don’t have to say it back,” she continued as if reading his thoughts. “If you don’t remember me, that’s…that’s fine. We’ll work with what we got.”
A faint tendril of memory wound through his mind. “I love you too,” he realized.
She sniffled, only to cough and nearly retch as the nearly visible odor assaulted her once again. “Clark, let’s just go home. Can you fly?”
He looked at her in confusion and shook his head.
She grimaced. “Great. Well, no matter. We’ll get you home, get some showers, and then discuss what we’re going to tell the kids.”
“Kids?!” he echoed.
She nodded, taking him by the hand and leading him away. “Yeah. I’ll explain in the car. At least after this, diaper-duty won’t seem so bad.”
Somehow, he felt inclined to agree. He leaned forward, inhaling the whiff of perfume at her neck like a literal breath of fresh air.
The End.
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FDK ThreadNext Fic in Series: Scraps
