Second Choice: 6/?
by Nan Smith
Previously:
"Oh my god," Lois whispered. "Clark, do you see? That red thing was a continent. It was showing you another world!"
Almost instinctively, he extended a hand. The glowing sphere moved slowly and gracefully to settle in his palm and the glow began to fade. "Krypton," he repeated in a hushed voice, awed at the implications of what had just happened.
"What?"
"It showed us Krypton," he said, cupping the globe in both hands. There was nothing unusual about it now. It was merely a ball with Earth's continents pictured on the surface.
"How do you know?" Lois asked. There was no disbelief in her voice; only curiosity.
"It told me so," Clark said. He lifted his gaze from the sphere and looked at Lois, a faint tingle running up his spine. "It spoke to me -- in my head. That was Krypton -- the planet where I was born."
**********
and now, part 6:
Hunting for Lois like this wasn't getting him anywhere, Clark decided after another twenty minutes of futile searching. He glanced at his watch. There had to be a better way. Smallville wasn't that big, but looking for her on foot was tortuously slow and inefficient. If he hadn't had the underlying feeling that Lois needed him, and that the need was urgent, he wouldn't have been so worried, but the sensation had been growing for some minutes that there was more to her unusual disappearance than met the eye. Why hadn't he insisted on speaking to her this morning before school? Sure, when they’d met a few minutes before the first bell, she'd turned the subject away from herself with the usual superficial chatter that she always adopted when she was dealing with a problem that she didn't want anyone else to know about, but that very circumstance should have just put him more on his guard. Instead, he did what he usually did, which was to give her space, even though he'd been worried about her for several days. Well, if he could manage to find her, this time he was going to try to worm the problem out of her. She had to know that there wasn't anything that she couldn't safely talk to him about.
He headed back toward the school and partway there darted into the narrow gap between Butler's Feed Store and Harkin's Liquor. As soon as he reached the gravel covered area behind the stores, he ducked into a storage shed and an instant later emerged from its rear to shoot straight up into the air faster than the human eye could follow. The grey clouds of a typical summer storm were beginning to gather in the west and streamers had started to creep across the sky. The sunlight had become dimmer and if he went high enough, he could scan the whole area with his telescopic and x-ray vision without being spotted by anyone on the ground. If she was anywhere around, he would find her.
**********
After their discovery of the strange globe, they had climbed out of the storm cellar and walked slowly back to Lois's car. Actually, it was her mother's car but Ellen's license to drive had been lifted in Metropolis for driving under the influence. Lois had flatly refused to drive her to the Department of Motor Vehicles in the nearest city to apply for one in Kansas, so the only driver with a valid license in their family was Lois. She prevented her mother from starting up the car by the simple expedient of disabling the ignition when she wasn't going to be around for a while, since Ellen Lane, when in a state of impairment, could not be relied upon to stay out of the driver's seat, license or no.
Once inside the car, Clark had removed the globe from beneath his shirt and they looked at it again.
"This is incredible," Lois had said finally. "It *told* you that you came from this Krypton?"
He nodded, turning the object over and over in his hands, trying to examine it with his special vision. "I can't see any operating mechanism inside," he said after several moments. "It seems to be solid crystal all the way through. I can't see any way it could possibly float in the air the way it did."
"Well, if it's from Krypton, too, maybe they have some kind of technology we don't understand," she said. "They must have, if that little ship got you across millions of miles of space to Earth. Besides," she pointed out with a pragmatism that made him grin, "*You* floated in the air the other day, and I don't see any wings on you. Didn't it tell you anything else?"
He shook his head. "No. Just -- Krypton, and I somehow knew that it was where I came from."
"Telepathy?" Lois asked. "You say it 'spoke' to you in your head. If that's not telepathy, I don't know what else to call it."
"Neither do I," Clark said. He examined it for another minute. "Now I've got a couple of answers and a whole new slew of questions."
"Well -- maybe it's not ready to answer them yet," Lois suggested. "Maybe it'll tell you more later."
"I hope so," Clark said. “But I hope it doesn't take too long to make up its mind."
After that, Clark practiced his new power of flight whenever he could do so without being seen. He flew at night, long flights to distant places on the planet, seeing the wonders of the world with his own eyes instead of through books, movies or television. He practiced acrobatics in the air and precision maneuvers of every kind until he was completely confident that he could handle his ability to fly with the same skill that he controlled the powers that had appeared earlier. He kept the mystery sphere in the foot locker that he had acquired years ago to hold his most treasured possessions and every night before he went to bed he took it out and held it in his hands, hoping against hope that it would speak to him again. But it gave him no sign of life except a faint white glow whenever he picked it up, as if to show him that it was alive and waiting for the right moment to speak. At least that was what he hoped. He reported the lack of progress to Lois every morning, and she always counseled patience. "Wait. Maybe it's just waiting for the right time."
And their friendship had continued to grow but Lois still dated other guys, never giving him any indication that it might be acceptable for him to ask her. They studied together and ate lunch together. She even told him about her mother's problem and her hope of getting her into some kind of alcohol rehabilitation facility when she turned eighteen and was legally an adult, when she could take responsibility for her sister and keep her out of the grip of Social Services. In the meantime, she took care of Lucy, made sure she did her homework, got reasonably nutritious meals and stayed mostly out of trouble. Clark thought that she was considerably more of an adult than her mother but the law was the law. With his superhuman speed and photographic memory, he researched every law book in the Smallville library and told her what she needed to do when the time came -- but her eighteenth birthday was still over a year away. Clark had turned eighteen at the end of February but her eighteenth birthday was not until the summer of next year, which meant she was fighting a holding action while trying to maintain her grades, freelance for the newspaper and keep her small family together for Lucy's sake. Clark couldn't see her without thinking how incredible this human dynamo of a girl was but he ached to take the stress lines from her face and the burden from her shoulders, especially on the rare occasions when things became too much and she ended up crying on his shoulder. He couldn't do nearly as much for her as he wanted to do. Lois, of course, wouldn't allow him to do anywhere near that much.
**********
He floated above Smallville at a thousand feet, carefully scanning every inch of the town. The Lane car was parked in its usual spot in its designated parking place by the apartment, so Lois hadn't left town. So where *was* she?
As he scanned the area, his gaze passed over Tuttle Park and snapped back. A single figure was sitting on a bench, and at once he recognized the clothing Lois had been wearing this morning. Her backpack was resting against one leg of the bench and even from this far away he could pick out the tear tracks on her cheeks. There was no one within eyesight of the bench. He could land without any observers but Lois, if he moved fast. Like a striking hawk, he shot downward and came in to a tight, fast landing beside the bench.
The only sign that he had startled her was the tiny catch in her breath when he appeared out of thin air beside her. Quickly, she wiped away the dampness on her cheeks but her reddened eyes and nose told the story all too clearly.
"Clark!" she said in a voice that almost sounded normal. "I didn't expect to see you!"
"I know." He sank down beside her on the bench. "I've been looking for you ever since school let out."
Surreptitiously, she dabbed at her eyes. "What for?"
"Because you've been avoiding me for days and I thought something was wrong, and I was right," he said. "Lois, what's the matter? I'll help you if I can. You know that."
Her shoulders slumped. "Nothing," she said. "There's nothing that you can do this time."
He ventured to put an arm around her shoulders, careful to keep the touch light: the embrace of a friend. "You know you can tell me anything," he said. "You don't know I can't help. I can sometimes do some pretty surprising things."
"Not this time," she repeated dully. "I've done something really stupid, and I'm afraid I've ruined everything."
"That's pretty -- comprehensive," he suggested. "Why don't you tell me what's happened. Maybe I can help. You know there's nothing I wouldn't do for you."
"I know. That makes it worse." Tears were starting to leak from her eyes again and this time she didn't try to hide them. "Oh, Clark! I’ve been such an idiot!" she wailed.
He put his other arm around her as well and held her while she sobbed on his shoulder, various hair-raising possibilities flashing through his mind. "Lois, *tell* me," he pleaded. "I'm imagining all sorts of horrible things."
She sat up suddenly, wiping her face with a sodden piece of crumbling tissue. Almost without thinking, he pulled out his handkerchief and gave it to her. "Here."
She took it, wiped her eyes and blew her nose, seeming to regain a little control with the gesture, but she looked up at him with an expression of utter misery on her face and inhaled deeply. "I'm pregnant."
At first he wasn't sure he had heard her correctly. "What?"
"I'm pregnant," she repeated, starting to cry anew.
"How could --"
"I was dating Ronnie," she said, between hiccups. "And we got carried away. Things had been so awful with Mother, and Lucy was giving me a lot of trouble, and I'd been so worried about that big math test." She hiccupped again. "I'd been studying so hard, and then I took it and passed it with an A. Ronnie took me out to celebrate, and one thing led to another, and --" She broke off. "It didn't mean anything, and it was just that once. I figured it would be all right, but it isn't. He told me yesterday that he'd pay for the abortion but I'm so scared!"
"Oh, honey." Clark put his arms around her again and pulled her against his shoulder. In the face of her self-recriminations and distress, the only thing he could think of was that she was in trouble and that he had to help her. "Lois, it's going to be okay."
"It won't," she whispered. "Clark, I'm so sorry. I know you're disappointed with me. *I'm* disappointed with me. I've ruined everything! I was so stupid!"
"You don't owe me any explanations," he said quietly. "And I could never be disappointed with you. The important thing is what we do now. What do you *want* to do?"
His calm voice seemed to help soothe her somewhat, for the hiccups subsided a little. "I can't get you involved,” she whispered. “It was my fault. I suppose the sensible thing to do is to have the abortion -- only it's been two months." Her hands went protectively to her abdomen seemingly of their own accord. "Its heart is beating. I don't think I can do it. I *can't* do it! I'd be killing my own baby! I can't even kill a housefly, and this is a lot more than that!" She began to sob again. "If I tell my mother she'll just get drunk and if I tell my Dad, he'll probably insist I go through with the abortion -- and I won’t be able to go back to Smallville High next year. Mom will throw me out if I won't have the abortion, and I'll have to work instead of finishing school –- Oh Clark! I’ve ruined my whole life, and Lucy’s life --!”
“No you haven’t,” Clark said firmly, making up his mind. Now that he was aware of it, he could hear the tiny flutter, as fast and light as a butterfly’s wings, of the baby’s beating heart. He took one arm from around her but only to take her hand. “It makes things a little more difficult, that’s all, but the two of us can handle anything if we work at it. Will you marry me, Lois?”
It seemed as if she were struck speechless. “What?” she gasped.
“I know you don’t love me,” he said quietly, “but I love you. Anyway, we can worry about what to do about that later. If you marry me, then I’ll be part of your family and I’ll have the right to help you handle things. Will you marry me?”
She burst into tears. “If you love me, why didn’t you ever ask me for a date? I thought you just wanted to be friends!”
“I didn’t think you wanted me to,” Clark said.
“Of course I did!” she wailed. “Oh Clark! If I’d been dating *you* I’d never have gotten into this mess!”
“Well, we’re going to fix it,” Clark said firmly. “All you have to do is say yes. Please say yes, Lois.”
“But you’re graduating next week! If you marry me, how are you going to go to Midwest U?”
“Do you think I can’t?” he asked. “With everything you know about me, do you honestly think I can’t handle college and a family, too?”
“But you shouldn’t have to,” Lois said. “I made the mistake. You shouldn’t have to suffer for it.”
He shifted his position on the bench, turning her to face him and resting his hands on her shoulders. “Why do you think I’d be suffering? If I hadn’t thought you only wanted to be friends, you wouldn’t be in this situation. You said so yourself.”
“But I didn’t mean --“
“The only way I’d be unhappy,” he said firmly, “would be if I knew you were struggling and I wasn’t there to help you. We can make it work, Lois. And if you only want to be married to me long enough to finish school and -- well, get your life straightened out, you only have to tell me so.”
“How could you think I’d do that?” she said indignantly. “Has anybody ever told you you’re an idiot?”
He had to work to keep from smiling. That almost sounded like the Lois he knew. “Sure. You did.”
“Well, you are. I’m tempted to say yes, just so I can teach you to be a little more cynical -- but it won’t work. Nobody’s going to give us a marriage license. I’m underage. I can’t get married without permission and I know Mother and Daddy won’t give it.”
“We’re not going to ask them,” Clark said. “Remember how I read every book about law in the library? I remember everything I read. I happen to know that there are a couple of states where they’ll let you marry me without your parents’ permission. All you have to do is show a judge proof that you’re pregnant.”
“Really?”
“Yep. We can get the pregnancy test done this week and then we’ll get married as soon as we can right after graduation. You’ll be an emancipated minor after that and no one can tell you what to do.” He shifted his grip from her shoulders to her hands. “Please, Lois. Marry me.” He hesitated. “You don’t even have to worry about -- afterwards, if you don’t want to. I won’t ask for anything else. I just want to be able to help you.”
She looked doubtfully into his face. “Do you know the statistics for teen marriages?” she asked unexpectedly. “More of them fail than succeed.”
“It figures you’d know that,” he said with a wry grin. “Statistics don’t mean anything for individual cases. And I’ll bet you know that, too.”
She nodded. “Yeah.” She hesitated. “Suppose I go along with this. How am I going to go to school? If I show up pregnant, won't Social Services get involved? And if they find out about Mom and Lucy -- I guess,” she added, “I could wait until after the baby’s born.”
“You don’t have to,” Clark said. “You can handle night school, can’t you?” He hadn’t released her hands. “We’ll work it all out; I promise. Together the two of us can do anything.”
“You seem awfully sure,” she said, but he could see her resistance was weakening.
“Of course I’m sure,” he said, squeezing her hands. “I’m talking to the woman who taught me to fly.”
**********
tbc
