The needle actually stung as the nurse found a vein to take a blood sample to test.
“You’ve never had blood drawn, have you?” the nurse asked, seeing the surprised expression on his face as he watched the needle enter his skin.
Kal-El shook his head. “I’ve been invulnerable since I was about five or six, except when I’ve gotten exposed to kryptonite. And even then, I recover pretty quickly.
Manda took the sample and methodically cross-checked it against Superman’s blood. “Perfect match,” she announced. “We’ll have to draw the blood in here, though, so we can keep you vulnerable under the red spectrum. It shouldn’t take more than ten minutes”
She pulled out the chair that sat beside the storage cabinet and moved it closer to the door. Manda set up the equipment next to the chair and motioned for Kal-El to sit down. “We’re just going to do this as if you were fully Earth normal. I’m going to draw one pint and then we’ll see how you feel. Let me know if you feet faint.”
“I can probably give as much as you need, so long as I can get some unfiltered sunlight in between the donations,” Kal-El told her.
She smiled and patted his hand. “Let’s just follow the protocols to begin with. Then we’ll see how it goes.”
Lois moved her chair closer to him, holding baby Martha close to her chest. “Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome,” Kal-El responded. He watched the blood in fascination as it went down the plastic tube attached to his arm.
“You’ve never seen your own blood before?”
“Not like this,” Kal-El admitted. “I never dreamed I’d ever see this.” He gave her a puzzled look. “They all treat him, and me, like we’re pretty much fully human. Like being Kryptonian isn’t much different than being black or Irish. And they don’t think it’s odd that Clark Kent’s wife is hanging around Superman while he’s in the hospital.”
Lois chuckled. “I was hanging around Superman, in the hospital and out, long before I got married to Clark. I’ve been his chief press contact since almost the beginning. I named him, remember?”
“Nobody wonders about it?” He pitched his voice low, quiet.
“I’ve been accused of betraying my husband with him, yes,” Lois admitted. “But that was when Clark and I were first married, and we were able to prove the photos were faked. Since then, people pretty much understand that I’m a relative, sort of. I’m Superman’s sister-in-law. Clark went to New Krypton with him. He’s his brother, like Ching is. Superman doesn’t have any blood relatives on Earth, so we’re his family. The hospital accepts my authority as next-of-kin since Clark isn’t here and there’s no one else they can call. I admit, it’s a little odd, but we are talking about Superman, after all.”
“And it works?” Kal-El asked. It seemed too simple, too obvious.
Lois considered his question. “Superman appeared in Metropolis as an adult from Krypton, fourteen years ago,” Lois said. “No family, no contacts, no connections. He comes here and makes friends, me for one, and Clark for another. He helps people and disappears, probably to another emergency somewhere else in the world. It’s a big planet.”
Manda came over to check on him. “How are you feeling?”
“Okay, so far,” Kal-El told her. “I was telling Mrs. Kent how strange it feels, you and your team treating him, and me, as if we were ‘normal’.”
“Right now, you are,” the nurse reminded him. “And since treating humans is all I know, I’ll assume you’re human until that assumption stops working.” She smiled and began undoing the tubing from his arm. She put a piece of gauze over the wound and flexed his arm to told the gauze in place.
She took the newly filled bag and placed it on the IV stand with a second bag of clear fluid. The man on the treatment table didn’t move.
“Let’s keep our fingers crossed,” Klein announced as they began the next blood transfusion.
Lois I
Wanda and Martha got most of Clark’s blood off the sofa.
“The carpet’s a lost cause,” the older woman muttered, mostly to herself. “I guess they really should have gone hardwood, like Clark wanted in the first place. A nice light oak, I think. At least we’d be able to mop it down.”
Wanda found herself smiling, wondering if her Clark’s mother was like this woman. Probably. The two Supermen were similar enough even though they were completely different.
Martha stopped, wiping her eyes and adjusting her glasses. “I just wish I could be there for him. It’s so hard.”
“At least Lois is there,” Wanda reminded her.
“But she’s there as a friend, not as his wife,” Martha said. “Superman doesn’t have a wife or a family. Certainly not a mother who’s worried about him.”
“Lois will call when she has news,” Wanda promised.
“I know she will, honey,” Martha said, hugging herself. “I just wish I could be there with her, be there for my baby.”
“What was he like, as a baby?” Wanda asked.
“He was the sweetest little thing, fit into my arms like he was my own. Big brown eyes, always looking at everything. Jonathan and I were so afraid someone would come for him, someone would find out we’d found him in a spaceship. He was so happy and sweet, hardly ever cried and he loved everybody. When he was about three or so, talking pretty good, he would invite the grocery clerks home for dinner. He would tell them what I was planning to cook and he’d just invite them over.”
“Did anybody ever take him up on it?”
Martha laughed. “Heavens no. They all knew he was just being friendly and helpful, even the ones who looked down on Jonathan and me for adopting somebody else’s illegitimate baby, especially one that looked a little ‘foreign’.”
Wanda was horrified. “That was horrible. How could they think that?”
“It was easy,” Martha told her. “When we found him, we had to come up with an excuse for having a baby, since we couldn’t have one of our own. We told everybody he was my cousin’s baby, and that she’d died. We never mentioned a father. So people assumed the worst. I know people said things and Clark heard, but he never mentioned it. But Jonathan and I always made sure he knew how much we loved him and how proud of him we were. I just wish I could be there for him.”
Lois II
“How are you feeling?” Lois asked Kal-El when he came back from a flight to the upper atmosphere to regenerate in sunlight. He’d started to look a little pale before leaving the treatment room after giving blood.
“Better,” Kal-El responded. “How’s he doing?”
“Better,” Lois told him. “The bleeding’s stopped, finally.”
Doctor Klein spotted Kal-El and Lois and came over to them. “I think he’s out of the woods. His blood pressure is coming up and we’re getting ready to move him into the isolation ICU. As soon as we’re sure the poison is out of his body, we’ll go to the yellow sun radiation so he can begin to regenerate.”
“And when will that be?” Kal-El asked.
“Tomorrow, most likely,” Klein told him then turned to Lois. “I’d like to keep him here a couple days at least, to make sure he doesn’t have a relapse.”
“Well, you already know how hard that’ll be, once he starts feeling better,” Lois reminded him. “Since things are looking better, I’ll have Kal-El take me home. I’ll come back later, after I’ve gotten some sleep.”
