I'm back! I'm back! And I'm done!! Well, just about, anyway.
I've only got one scene left to write, and it's just a matter of getting the words out of my head.
Thank you all SO much for your understanding and patience!
Table of Contents from part 29"Elle, are you going to be okay here alone? I... well, the doctor..."
She looked up to find Lois motioning to the doorway, apology written on her face - for what, exactly, she wasn't sure.
"They said I can go in and see Clark now... Will you be okay?"
For all the vehemence she'd spouted earlier, Lois was apologetic now. Elle could see the warring in her eyes.
"Yea-" Elle squeaked, then cleared her throat and tried to convince her heart to stop racing. "Yeah. I-I'll be fine. Go."
Lois gave her one more glance, a sympathetic one, and hurried out the door of the waiting room.
and now...~~~Part 30~~~
Clark dragged his eyes open and looked around blearily. Pain. Shoulder. Hospital. Pain. He couldn’t remember much else.
No... he could. His mind was just foggy, as if his thoughts were wading through wet cement. He remembered the ambulance, Lois, the hospital, and...
Doctors asking questions. Surgery. Asking questions about surgery. And how they should do it. They had asked if drugs would work. Pain killers, anesthetics... anything. Because they'd been worried about adverse effects, not knowing what a Kryptonian might react to, might develop complications from, might die from. Well, he hadn't known either.
He'd told them to try. Strong drugs. Something. Anything to stop the pain.
But he knew now. Oh, yes. They didn't work. Hadn't worked. He could still feel the scalpels, forceps, needles... all of which may as well have been more bullets. He could still feel a phantom knife digging for the bullet. Pushing and ripping. Muscle and flesh. He'd screamed, yelled, managed to crush the metal side rail they'd let him hang on to with his left hand before he'd passed out from the pain. The echoes of his cries and the vague images of doctors with painfully sympathetic faces still stirred in his head.
The pinching heat in his shoulder throbbed, almost violently whenever he tried moving. He squeezed his eyes shut against the biting pain. And suddenly he was seven years old again. Mom was holding him, rocking him, shushing away the hurt feelings and bruised ego. Mom protected him. Told him he was special. Told him it wouldn't always hurt so bad. Told him he was brave.
"All great men were different, extraordinary," she'd said.
He opened his eyes, blinked, and the image was gone. Extraordinary was far from great right now. A normal, human man would have called for the nurse by now - more vicodin, percoset, anything. But not Clark. Not even when he was lying there just as vulnerable as the next guy. An ordinary guy... but so far from being human.
Damn the irony.
So, no medication. He'd have to settle for not moving. It hurt the least when he lay stone-still. He just needed time to rest. Rest and... sun! He needed sun. Then he'd heal faster. Theoretically, anyway.
Hopefully.
He'd never been exposed to Kryptonite for so long before. Not for the hours it must have been. Lois had mentioned vague memories of a long ride in what must have been the back of a van, but neither of them really knew how much time had passed from the Apollo to the cell, nor when the Kryptonite had been removed. Knowing how long wouldn't help anyway, not when it'd been almost a full day since he'd last seen the sun.
Added to the surgery. The bullet. All the physical exertion. The pain.
What if it'd just been too much? What if there was a limit to how much he could handle before his powers just didn't come back at all? What if...
He closed his eyes and shook his head mentally. That wasn't something to think about now. Someone should come by soon, and they could open the blinds, get him some sunlight. Then, he would be able to see. He'd be able to guess more accurately.
In the meantime, he should just lie still, breathe slowly, and... His breath caught.
Lois was here. He could feel her, a faint fluttering and a warm tingle in his chest fighting against the pain.
It had to be Lois.
He heard the sound of rubber soles quietly making their way toward him. The warm feeling spread a little further through his chest. A smile tugged at the corners of his mouth. If he could just concentrate on the feeling... maybe the throbbing would subside.
The shoes had stopped moving. There was a gentle scrape of wood against linoleum. And then it was silent again, though if he concentrated, he could almost make out the sound of her breathing.
"Hey," he murmured, then gave her a weak smile.
"Oh. You're awake." She sounded a bit startled.
He opened his eyes slowly and shifted his head a bit so he could see her more clearly, wincing at the movement. She was staring across the bed at his shoulder and the bandages that peeked out from under his hospital gown.
Then, after a long moment, her worried eyes met his. "Does it hurt still?"
"Nah." He grimaced. "Not so much anymore."
He watched her brow furrow as she bit her bottom lip, as if she was scared to know the truth even though he knew she could see it in his eyes.
The soft fluttering in his chest mingled with a growing anxiety; his or Lois's, he wasn't sure. He'd be fine. He had to be.
"I'll be okay, Lois. Just give it a little time."
She looked doubtful.
"Promise. I'll be good as new. I bet there won't even be a scar." He smiled again for her benefit.
The sadness and worry still hadn't left her eyes, but she didn't argue with him.
It would help if he could know for certain. Reassure her. He started to reach for her, but the muscles only tensed before the stabbing pain shot straight to its mark. His face tightened, eyes closed, and he held his breath. Don't move. Don't move. Why had he moved?
He released a slow, cautious breath. The throbbing lessened some, but now it was playing in tandem to the pounding in his head. Just breathe. In and out. Slow breaths.
His eyes edged open to find a horrified Lois. A horrified Lois, whose eyebrows quickly sank and furrowed, her mouth closing into a frown. "How much is a little time, Clark?" her voice was soft, worried.
He dropped his gaze. "I don't know."
She reached for him this time, laying a gentle hand over his, somehow knowing what he'd wanted just a moment ago. "Is there anything I can do to help?"
"S-sun," he stammered instead of nodding. "I need sunlight."
Lois looked slightly puzzled for a moment, but then stood and headed towards the window anyway. "I guess I sorta miss the sun, too," she commented as she drew the blinds open to let in the early morning sun. She continued, her voice quiet, almost distant. "You don't even realize you miss it until you've been away from it too long."
The rays began to soak in. An inner warmth rushed through him, a slight tingling that left him lightheaded, as if he'd stood too quickly. She was right; he hadn't realized how much he'd needed the sun until he'd been deprived of it.
He watched Lois as she stared silently out the window. She’d guessed wrong, but he could tell her about the sunlight later. Right now he needed to rest.
***
Elle shivered again. It'd been *hours* since Lois had gone to go see Clark and left her alone. She glared at the clock. Well, at least the 53 minutes had *felt* like hours instead of just one. Time ought to be flying, slipping out of her grasp, considering she was expecting the detectives, ATF, police, the doctor - *someone* - to come barging in any second. But, no, time was torturing her slowly. Every noise she heard from beyond the thick wood of the waiting room door made her tense. Her horrid bad luck would probably win her a visit from the detective before the doctor even showed his face to let her know how Pete was doing.
The officer who'd escorted her to the waiting room had told her someone would be back to question her soon. Agent Hendricksen... Hydrason... something like that. He'd said the agent would just need to ask her a few things. Interrogate her. Arrest her?
They wouldn't arrest her, right? Yeah, she'd killed someone, but... he'd been about to kill someone else. And he’d been a bad guy. That had to count for something, right?
They had let her stay here, though. That had to be a good sign. Sure, there were cops at every exit, or so the officer had told her there would be, but they were letting her sit and wait for Pete on her own.
And that was a good thing, only... why was she waiting, anyway? It wasn't like she and Pete were best mates or anything. She couldn’t care less if he died.
Something lurched in her chest, and she cursed it. What the hell did her heart know? Everyone knew that relationships built on time spent together in dangerous situations never worked. That was the classic movie cliché. It just didn’t fly in real life.
Not that she’d been entertaining the idea. She hadn’t. Elle cleared her throat. Nope, she was merely waiting for Pete because...
Because it was a better alternative than sitting in a police station, getting asked a million questions she didn’t even know the answers to. Like who Pete Romero was. Agent in the ATF. Well, that could be a line of crap. For all she knew, he could be with the FBI, NIA, DEA. Any combination of letters, really.
Or maybe he’d been a double operative, working on Luthor’s side the entire time. Or Nigel’s side. Maybe Nigel’s whole plan had been to get Lex out of the way and take things over for himself.
He’d been arrested, though, hadn’t he? He’d been safely led away in handcuffs. He was most likely in a jail cell now. There was no way he’d be able to hunt her down and finish the job. He couldn’t have even known what hospital they’d gone to.
She flinched at a sudden commotion outside. But the door didn’t open.
She just had to calm down. Breathe. Hospitals were busy places. She took a deep breath, and edged back in her seat, her side brushing against the armrest and raising the edge of her shirt. Sighing, she moved to pull her shirt back down, and she felt it then. The wire. The bloody wire.
She still had the recording device! She had shoved the microphone end of the wire in her pocket after she’d run into Clark Kent, and she’d forgotten about it.
With any luck, the device would have still picked up what was said even though she’d been obstructing the microphone. This was good. Very good. She didn't have a clue how to get the thing playing, but this had to be a good thing. She had evidence against Luthor, and if for some reason she did get into deep trouble for shooting him, she could use this. Leverage. Bargaining. What did they call it here in the States?
Immunity! That was it. She could bargain for that.
Not that she'd done anything wrong... But cops weren't trustworthy. Not always. And it was true that she *had* been working for Luthor, which could only stir up trouble. She should hold on to it for now. Just in case.
In fact, she should hi-
"Ms. Daly?"
Elle startled and made sure the wire was still hidden. She cleared her throat and looked up. Brown coat - trench coat. Not a white one. Her heart picked up the pace, thrumming a bit faster. It wasn't the doctor.
"Ma'am?" There was a hint of impatience in the man's voice.
"Yeah? I mean, that's me."
She held her breath while he reached in his breast pocket. A badge appeared in his hand, a shiny one not unlike Pete's had been. She swallowed roughly.
He held out the badge in her direction for a second. "Special Agent, Henderson, with the ATF." He tucked the badge away and produced a notebook in its place.
She let out a lungful of air slowly, quietly so Secret Agent Man wouldn't hear and think she was nervous. There was nothing to be nervous about. The notebook was peculiar, though; he ought to have known what he was going to say to her when he walked in. Maybe it was a scare tactic or something, one of the things that cops did to make suspects nervous enough to spill the beans.
Finally, he made a faint grunting noise that almost sounded like a scoff, and he stuffed the notebook back from where he'd gotten it. "Agent Romero is still in surgery, but the doctors think he should be fine." He paused, presumably waiting for a response from her.
She only nodded.
"Meanwhile, Ms. Daly, I'm afraid you'll have to come with me," Henderson said gruffly, then motioned for her to get up.
She swallowed her heart back down since it'd decided to climb into her throat. Nothing to be nervous about. She hadn't done anything wrong. Not really. If you didn't count the killing thing, which she didn't.
She stood slowly, hoping the trembling didn't show. Only guilty people were nervous, right? She sighed with relief at the distinct lack of handcuffs in the area and followed Henderson out of the waiting room.
TBC... on Saturday!
