Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Man Or Monster? 7/8

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Chapter 7: Shadow Of A Man
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The sun was almost gone, falling away beyond the edge of the world, slipping out of reach and leaving Superman consigned to the shadows. He stared after its last fading sliver regretfully and wished he’d come to a bit earlier, just enough to recharge himself by way of that tiny window so he could fly--or at least run with superspeed--after that sun, chase it and catch it and beg it to return him to his ordinary strength. To make him Superman again so he’d be invulnerable when he faced the apartment where he’d died.

“We’re almost there,” Lois said, tightening her hold on his hand when he stumbled in the darkness. He didn’t know where she was taking him--they certainly weren’t anywhere near Clark’s apartment--but he followed her without comment anyway, unable to even think about letting go of her or turning away from her. One more night, he promised himself, and then he would go. He’d make a place for himself somewhere else, somewhere distant, where no one around him would be connected to him lest they be hurt to control the superhero.

Inwardly, he snorted. Apparently he’d be living in the North Pole, because that was the only way he’d be able to ensure that no one around him was hurt when others like Luthor came after him. More white, there, snow and ice and glaciers, more white than even STAR Labs possessed, so maybe he wasn’t free of his cell yet. Maybe he wouldn’t ever be free again, because Clark Kent was the only escape he’d ever had and that key had been melted down and destroyed.

Lois stopped, making Clark stop too and look up. They were standing in front of her silver Jeep; it was so familiar, so much a thing that Clark and Lois had done, returning from their adventures to her vehicle and driving back to the Planet together or to his apartment or to hers, that Clark smiled, melancholy drifting over him like his own private raincloud.

“Here.” Lois took a breath, and then, finally, she dropped his hand. He’d known it was coming, so it shouldn’t have surprised him, but it did, a bit, to lose that contact between them, that last bridge connecting them no matter the events of the past day. She reached out to open the door for him, as if she thought he were too weak to do it himself--and maybe he was, he realized when a spasm arced through him as he climbed in. He tried to hide the shift in his breathing, the way he tightened his arm against his side in an effort to stifle it, but he wasn’t sure how successful he was. He didn’t usually *have* any pains to hide so he didn’t exactly have practice doing it.

Lois frowned, worried and tense, her hands fluttering about him, before she shut the door and walked around to get into the driver’s seat. Clark watched her the whole way, afraid to take his eyes off her lest she disappear. She’d already done so much for him, already helped and protected him, already lied for him, and he was afraid that if he looked away or blinked too long, he’d open his eyes and find that she was gone, dismissing him from her life with a last good riddance as farewell.

But she was there, sitting across from him, driving him to Clark Kent’s apartment without a word of complaint. Saving him again and again even though he knew she was angry with him. Even though he’d ripped away her best friend, her hero, and her almost-fiancé all in one night. Still there, still helping, still as alive and vibrant as she’d been since the moment she tore into Perry’s office and his heart.

He was pretty sure he was falling in love with her all over again, as if his heart were afraid he’d gotten too used to the feelings he’d had for her already and needed to refresh them, to slather a new, revitalized coat of love atop all the other existing layers. He didn’t mind; it built him up, layered him through with frame after frame after frame of different types of strength and cohesion, defined him and diffused the intensity of his emotions, gave him a point of focus, a goal, a purpose, allowed him to keep his little breadcrumbs of hope.

It was a long drive and he didn’t want to say anything in case it would start them fighting again--didn’t want to have to hear her call him Superman again--so Clark studied his surroundings with absorption. It might, after all, be the last time he got to drive with her, so he needed to memorize it, needed to etch it into his mind’s eye so that he could take it out, in the lonely days when he was holed up in his lair in the North Pole, and see it all around him, pretend he was living it again.

Everything was as he remembered it--he’d already memorized moments like this, better ones, when he was Clark and she was his friend, laughing at him and teasing him, and the future was as bright as the hope in his heart. Everything the same…except the blood staining the backseat.

Splashes of blood, drip-dripping in dried, crusted form over gray upholstery. Blood matching that on his cape, on his Suit, on his skin. Blood sinking into everything around him until he thought that every color in the world was either the red of blood or the green of pain.

“Lois…” he began, but then stopped, because the answer was obvious. Blood, and he was sure these bloodstains would match the ones on Clark Kent’s floor. She was always so careful of her Jeep, always certain to make sure Bobby Bigmouth didn’t let any of his payments fall on the floorboard or stain the seats, but now…now Clark’s blood was all around him, and the stench of it was suddenly enough to make Superman almost overwhelmingly nauseous.

He wanted to apologize for ruining even this, wanted to let her know how very sorry he was that he’d tainted absolutely everything in her life--wanted to thank her, as sincerely and deeply as he had Bernard Klein, for not giving up on him--but his voice had abandoned him. Which, in the grand scheme of things, probably didn’t matter that much, he supposed. Superman didn’t need to give speeches or make conversation; he just needed to be strong and fast and *there*.

But Lois’s hands were clenched around the steering wheel so tightly that white was peeking out, white like in that tiny cell, so when they pulled to a stop outside his apartment, he gathered his courage and reached over and put his hand over hers. “Thank you, Lois.” Weak, pitiful words for all he wanted to say, but at least he could say them. At least they didn’t get stuck inside his throat, jumbled up and clogged like a traffic jam even Superman couldn’t sort out.

She took in a sharp, shuddering breath, and for an instant he thought she was going to burst into tears, or maybe explode, disintegrate as he’d thought he might do at that fountain, shatter and come apart in a cyclone of her own, all brilliant violence and crackling intensity. But she didn’t do either one of those things. Instead, she took in another breath, and another, until she steadied them through sheer force of will; then she met his gaze and gave him a smile so forced that he literally flinched away from it. “We’re here,” she said.

His hand dropped away from hers as if burned. He kept forgetting who he was now, *what* he was. Kept forgetting that there were lines drawn between them now and he couldn’t cross them anymore.

Kept forgetting that hope was just another form of punishment, a method of torture more insidious and pervasive than even Kryptonite.

Getting out of the Jeep was less painful than getting in had been, which made him breathe a quiet sigh of relief. But standing there, next to something so clearly Lois’s, and looking up at the apartment that was so wholly Clark’s, he felt a pain hit him anyway, a sharp, grinding *ache* that started somewhere beneath the pit of his stomach and worked its way up, twining around the last vestiges of Clark Kent’s mortal wound and climbing, clawing upward until it found his heart and wrapped it up in a crushing hold, like vines blotting out the sun.

He’d wanted a night to remember, a night to pretend, but now he realized just how bad an idea that was. One night to pretend was only going to make it worse when the pretense was ripped away. One night to spend with Lois still being his friend was just going to remind him of everything he could never have again, and he wondered at his earlier self, at how sure he’d been that it was better to risk everything with a confession of love--and of alter egos--than to continue on as her friend without saying anything. Surely, *surely*, it would have been better to say nothing. To keep living his life as it was. There were other ways he could have tried, other things he could have said, and maybe none of them would have worked, but he would have still been Clark and he would have still had Lois as his friend, even if she was prickly and distant.

But then, if he’d done things differently, if he hadn’t been there to draw Luthor’s suspicion, who was to say that Luthor wouldn’t have turned his fatal attention to Lois? Who was to say that things wouldn’t be *worse* now? Clark Kent was dead and Superman wounded--his weakness now public knowledge--but Lois was safe, and she wasn’t dating a monster, and Luthor couldn’t hurt her anymore. So maybe, in the end, it had all worked out for the best. Clark was gone, but he’d died saving Lois, and that seemed a more than fair trade.

So, with that thought in mind, he was able to straighten and take firm, steady steps toward the door. Lois hurried to his side and slipped her hand around his arm, and even though he didn’t physically need the support up the steps, he relaxed into her touch and savored the moment. She seemed unusually small, walking beside him, her head bowed down so that all he could see was her dark hair, tousled and knotted with blood and dirt and salt water from the ocean, and he wished he could put his arms around her and hold her close, shelter her from the entire world, from everything that had happened. He wished he could take all the pain bleeding out of her, dab it away and clean her wounds and stitch them tightly together, bandage them and tie those bandages with neat, precise knots, then kiss her until she was better.

Wished she would let him do all those things.

But Superman couldn’t afford to have another weakness, and the last thing Lois needed was to have her name synonymous with Kryptonite, to have every criminal in the world suddenly decide to get their hands on either her or the deadly green stone to stop or control Superman. So he couldn’t heal her, couldn’t protect her from everything. But he could give her a pale smile when she looked up at him worriedly, could open Clark’s front door for her and lead her into the apartment that, only hours earlier, he’d used to try to explain to her who he was.

It wasn’t as painful to see the place he’d made his own as he’d halfway expected. Maybe the remnants of the Kryptonite exposure were making it easier for him to feel emotionally disconnected, or maybe he’d already mourned as much as he could bear to for now, but he looked over the living room with its comfortable couch and its eclectic decorations, and he didn’t break down. Just looked, and was glad that he’d been able to live here as long as he had. He’d never known for sure whether he’d be able to have a normal life, whether he could make it in Metropolis as a reporter for the best newspaper in the world, but he had. For a while, anyway, and that was enough to make him feel some measure of satisfaction, even if it was a satisfaction threaded through with regret that there couldn’t have been more.

He was always wanting things he couldn’t have, he reminded himself, and he worked harder at simply being grateful.

It was Lois, actually, who faltered at the sight of the bloodstains in the middle of the living room, splashed beside the coffee table as if he’d simply had an accident with a glass of red wine. But red wine only called up the memory of Luthor offering him a tainted glass, made that pain clutch his heart in a tighter hold, and Clark firmly shut the door on that line of thinking.

“It’s all right,” he murmured, much more content to focus on Lois than the ache inside him and the memories cluttering up his mind, shadows reaching out insidious fingers to poke and claw their way into every particle of his thoughts. From somewhere he found enough courage to reach out and wrap an arm around Lois’s shoulders, supporting her, but the courage tremored and drew back a bit when she let out a tiny gasp--not quite a sob, not quite a word, not quite a plea for help, but utterly and wholly heartbreaking--and leaned almost her entire weight onto him.

He felt suddenly guilty for asking to come back here. It was here she’d first realized Luthor wasn’t the man she thought he was, Clark reminded himself, and where she’d watched her former partner fall. Here where she’d pulled the poison out of Superman and swore her help to bring down Luthor.

The emotions, the memories, clashed and merged and conflicted until Clark could only sink tighter into that cloak of apathy, numbed to the enormity of his grief and his elation, his regret and his relief. He’d split himself in two, drawn a line between the halves of his whole, and he wondered why it should be a surprise that now he found himself being driven to madness by divergent thoughts and reactions.

Lois let him help her to the couch, where she sank down with a weary sigh. Clark sat with her, reluctant to pull away. He’d never seen her look so fragile; he was afraid that if he stopped holding on, if he dropped his arm from around her, she would simply sit there, lifeless and still and so *not*-Lois. She needed him, needed him in a way she hadn’t since Trevino had threatened her life, since terrorists had taken over the Planet, since…since before he’d ruined everything by telling her he loved her and making her think her friendship wasn’t enough.

“It’s all right, Lois,” he murmured again, and felt some tiny measure of peace slither through that cloak of apathy, struggling to reach him. The world was silent and removed, all cries for help muted, and he himself useless now--a dead human and a powerless superhero--but *Lois* needed him. She *needed* him, now, here where no one else could help save her. No one else could pull her closer and let her fall into his arms and cradle her close and rest his cheek against her hair and feel her body shake with the sobs she couldn’t quite contain any longer.

Only him. His last few moments alone with her--not nearly enough to last a lifetime, but all he had. After this, there wouldn’t be anything. After this, there was only Superman and a world in constant need of a superhero.

But for now, there was Lois, and he needed her just as much--*more*--than she needed him.

“I’m here,” he whispered, smoothing a hand down her hair. “It’s okay.”

He lied, of course. He wasn’t really there to stay, wasn’t really himself, and nothing was okay at all. But these were the types of lies he could speak without sacrificing his conscience or becoming a monster, soft and tremulous lies, warm and comforting, like coats offered to partners who shivered in the chill of dark garages, like coffee heated by surreptitious glares. Lies that didn’t hurt but helped. Lies that comforted. Lies that promised that one day things would be better and in the meantime they could endure.

“Clark,” she sobbed into his shoulder, a whisper of breath past his neck, an echo shaped into a name that carried only bittersweet pain. Nothing more, just his name. As if she’d finally realized that her partner was gone forever. “Clark!”

As if she mourned him.

“It’s okay,” he said again, once, firmly. He held her even tighter to himself for a moment, until her sobs retreated, until her breaths came--shuddering and quick and staccato--but softly. And then he pulled away, let his hand lingeringly part from her shoulder, and he stood. His tattered cape hung disconsolately about his form, armor no longer needed, battle-worn and war-stained, a remnant of a time he didn’t want to remember. And yet…what use in changing? Even if he had the strength to shed the vestiges of this cocoon, even if he could remain upright and whole long enough to pull on another Suit--identical save in use and brightness--what good would it do? He’d still be Superman, scarred and haunted, and she would still be out of reach.

“Coffee,” he said aloud, not quite able to look at Lois, staring back up at him. “You must be exhausted. I know I am and I was unconscious for part of it--you’ve been awake the whole time.”

“Coffee.” Lois said the word as if it were alien to her, as if she didn’t consume enough of it on her own to keep whole plantations in business. Her smile was as unexpected as it was bitter. “Haven’t we done this before?”

He wasn’t sure if she meant that morning, before Luthor’s visit, when he’d put on the pot of coffee now stone-cold on the counter, or if she referred to the precious mornings when he’d cajoled her into staying long enough to drink a cup of coffee here rather than picking one up on their way to the Daily Planet. He wasn’t sure which he *wanted* her to mean.

Instead, he ducked his head and focused all his attention on the coffee pot and the sink. “One more time won’t hurt,” he said, but this was a lie that carried far too much hurt in it to be acceptable.

Because it already hurt.

Because it already made him inwardly bleed to think that this *was* their last time sharing a pot of coffee. Superman didn’t drink coffee, certainly not with reporters who made a living interviewing him and writing stories about him. Superman didn’t have an apartment to sweet-talk investigative journalists into staying in for a few extra minutes. Superman didn’t…Superman didn’t want to think about this any longer, about being only the shell of a man.

“No.” Lois’s whisper cut through the space between them, wistful, almost *longing*. “I guess not.”

Only when the scent of coffee covered up the lingering stench of blood in his nostrils, when the sound of it percolating covered up the immense, deadening silence of the world, could Clark turn from the particulars of his kitchen and look back at Lois. He was almost taken aback, almost scared, to see that her eyes were fixed on him to the exclusion of all else. She stared as if she were seeing him anew--no, as if she were memorizing him much as he’d been memorizing her for so long. As if she knew these were the last few aftershocks of Clark Kent playing out in front of her.

He’d been running for so long. *Reacting* so long when what he wanted to be doing was *acting*. First he’d fallen prey to letting Luthor play his games, then he’d been shocked into a premature declaration of love by hearing of Luthor’s proposal, and now he was slipping away, watching himself fade, because Luthor had stabbed him. Luthor had been the mover and shaker between them, Clark realized, and now that he was gone…well, now all Clark could do was make a pot of coffee and pour it in a mug and flavor it as Lois liked. All he could do was enact routines that had become habit.

Superman would be more proactive from now on, he decided, though he wasn’t quite sure how. Clark Kent could have written stories that addressed problems before they were unsolvable, while Superman could only respond to crises already in progress, reply to calls for help already winging their way through the skies to his ears. But somehow…somehow he had to do something. Something for himself. Something that changed the course his life seemed set into.

And in the end, of course he knew what that was. It was so obvious, so clear, that he thought he must have been building himself up toward it since first hearing those terrible, nightmarish words, thought he must have been formulating the words needed to combat the accusation, to state his case, make his plea, before leaving once and for all, all night long. It would be a fitting few last words to leave on.

But deciding to say something and actually *saying* it were two very different things.

He let himself delay by handing Lois her coffee--letting his fingers not-so-accidentally brush hers--by wrapping his hands around the aromatic heat of his own and settling himself--with a swallowed back sigh of relief--back on the couch. But once seated, he found himself staring at the black surface of his coffee and wishing he could inhale courage as easily as he did the wisps of steam rising to coat a sheen of sweat over his upper lip.

The coffee rippled, stirred beneath the force of his sigh, and he hastily looked elsewhere lest his hands shake even more and spill the coffee all over his lap.

Unfortunately, his gaze fell on the floor, then. On the bloodstains marring the perfection of his apartment.

Clark’s blood.

Life-blood of a man who’d died to call forth a superhero he couldn’t be anymore. Not fully. Not the way he needed to be. Not enough to take the place of the man who wasn’t enough.

A man who might not have been enough for Lois to love, but who had nonetheless loved and lived.

“Lois,” he said, surprising himself with the sound of his own voice. With the steadiness of that voice and the finality with which he set aside his coffee mug like the unneeded distraction it was. There was no point in delaying any longer. All he could do was move forward, and that clock was still ticking away, an endless counterpoint rumbling through his mind to hide the silence of the world. “Lois, I’m not a monster. I’m not like Luthor.”

“Oh, Clark--” she began, shifting closer to him, her own coffee shaking in her hands.

“No, Lois,” he interrupted. His voice was too loud in his ears, undiluted by the noise of a city, of a country, of a world. Just him, his words, falling between him and Lois like tiny, broken pleas. “Clark wasn’t either. He…*I* did lie, but…I did it to protect, not to benefit from the lies themselves or the pain I caused. I hated lying, and I never meant to hurt you--I just wanted to protect my parents, and you and Perry and Jimmy and anyone who knew me. Knew Clark Kent,” he amended before she could remind him that Clark was dead. “And I didn’t lie about the important things, about the things that *really* mattered.”

The breath he pulled in, like a runner gasping in a precious amount of oxygen before he reached the finish line dead last, seared its way through him, burning and twisting until he expelled it back out into the air around them, shaped into words. “Clark was just a man, and he made mistakes, but…he *tried* to do good, Lois. He wanted to be a good son, and a good reporter, and a good friend, and a…” But that way lay yet another reminder of the unrequited love he’d already spilled between them, already used to rupture the friendship they’d once shared, so he cut himself off, turned himself down a different path, the only one still open to him. “And Superman *was* a mask, but he was a mask for helping people, for saving as many as he could even when it wasn’t enough. He was--*is*--a…”

But how could he finish that sentence either? It was already bad enough eulogizing himself--how much more conceited would it sound--how much like *Luthor* would he sound--if he called himself a hero?

He searched for the right words, reached out toward them desperately, forlornly, uselessly because they skipped away from him, too nimble and quick to be caught so easily.

Lois, though, wasn’t waiting for him to catch them, and words were never fast enough to escape from her. “Oh, Clark, I’m so sorry,” she said again.

It was the last straw. Or maybe it was hearing her apologize while using the name of the man he used to be--the man he’d do anything to be again--that broke his hard-won composure.

“Stop!” he exclaimed, scrubbing his hands over his face, missing the feel and the placement of his glasses, the weight of them to remind him of gravity and the constraints of humanity. “Just stop apologizing--this isn’t your fault, you don’t have to--”

“Yes, I do,” she interrupted, so sure, so certain, so immovable that Clark was frozen, staring at her, wishing for the thousandth time that he could be half as self-assured as she was. “I do have to apologize, because what I said was wrong. I was trying to say something important, something else, but it came out all wrong.”

His heart was stopped inside his chest, like a watch gone dead. It was going too fast, rabbiting off inside him so that he had to reach up a numb hand and place it over his own chest to make sure the panicking organ would stay in its place. It was lost, removed so far away from him he didn’t know that he would ever find it again. “What came out wrong?” he managed to ask, distantly, wistfully.

Her face threatened to crumple, more tears glinting like moonlight over waves reflected in the bottom layer of misty clouds. “You’re not a monster, Clark!” she exclaimed, as if it were obvious. As if she had never said it. As if he had not had to feel his whole self shiver from earthquakes to his soul at the thought that he might be as bad as his arch-nemesis. “Lex had power and he hid it and he lied, but you’re nothing like that. You’re right--you don’t lie, Clark, not really. You show who you are every day, in every move you make, every word you say, everything you do. You have a closet, and you don’t show it to everyone, but you *are* a hero, and you don’t have to wear a cape to be one.”

“Lois,” Clark whispered. He wondered if he was dreaming. If he was still lying in STAR Labs, his skin ripped and torn, his injury sliced open to reveal the green rotting away inside, while scientists murmured and worked above him. If he was still slumped on the blood-stained floor now beneath his feet, bleeding out, hallucinating to escape the pain and pretend he hadn’t made a mess of everything.

“You *could* have been just like Lex,” Lois said, slowly, wonderingly, “and if you were, it wouldn’t have been surprising at all. You could have used your powers for anything, Clark--could have gotten everything you could have ever wanted--money or fame or power or fear…or me.” Her shame-faced chuckle made his schizophrenic heart writhe inside him.

“Lois,” he began, turning toward her instinctively, but she was shaking her head, denying him the opportunity to help her, to save her from her obvious inner turmoil.

“But you *didn’t*,” she proclaimed, as if knighting him. As if proclaiming him to the world, just like she’d done before, the name *Superman* plastered over every Daily Planet paper for weeks, casting him in light and goodness so that all of the world had been eager to welcome him and had forgotten to be afraid of him. “Instead you use what you have, what you can do, to help people.” Clark stared, caught between awe and concern, as she brought up her hand to impatiently brush away the tears leaking from her eyes. “Superman is the man I admired most and Clark is the man I trusted most, but before last night, I didn’t even know what all that meant--didn’t know all the *reasons* I had for admiring you and trusting you. I still don’t, not fully, but I do know that you’re the best man I’ve ever met. You’re strong with integrity and you have a truly good heart--a *pure* heart--and on top of that, knowing all that you do, all that you face…” Her breath was shattered into a thousand pieces, fractured in her throat and emerging pained and bleeding from her mouth. “You’re not a monster. Not at all. You’re a hero. A *super* hero.”

His thoughts had each been given wings, tiny fireflies cluttering up the inside of his mind and ricocheting from one side to the other, capricious and unknowable. But that was his problem, he thought--he’d been thinking too much for too long, letting his mind spiral farther and farther away from him until he was left stuck and abandoned in a mire that threatened to suck him under its cloying, suffocating hold. But he didn’t *want* to think right now, didn’t want to reach out and try to capture the thoughts glowing like heated fireflies, didn’t want to analyze or consider or break down.

He just wanted to let Lois’s words sink inside him so deeply that he could never be without them. Wanted to imagine them burrowing under his now-pervious skin, lining the interior of his skin with silken, gleaming armor, turning him to steel, bearing him up, protecting him. Her words--her belief, her faith, her *forgiveness*--were warm and vibrant, bursting with colors and scents, with textures and memories, so tangible that he knew they would be enough, all on their own, to turn the North Pole into something a bit more livable, to push back the white and bring in the earthier, more brilliant colors.

Gently, inexorably, he reached out and smoothed his fingers over hers. “Thank you, Lois,” he said warmly, and from somewhere, he found a smile, hidden inside him like a treasure, one well worth uncovering and dusting off for Lois.

She stared at his words, gaped at his smile, frowned at his relief, which was so much like her that Clark’s smile became just a bit more real. “For *what*?” she demanded, her voice as broken as his cohesiveness. “For breaking your heart? For making you think you could possibly be a monster? For treating you like—”

“For believing in me,” he cut in quietly. It was easier to smile, this time, which only made sense. Practice made perfect--his coaches and his teachers and his parents had all told him that, over and over again so that he was surprised it didn’t still ring in his ears every day. He was hoping the smile would calm her, would drive away her tears and maybe, if he was honest, get her to smile back at him so he could have that memory to add to his ever-growing collection.

She didn’t smile, didn’t do anything but bring up her hands and use the ends of her sleeves to ineffectually wipe at the tears rippling along her cheeks.

So he smiled again, leaned a bit closer, took in a quick, sharp breath when he caught a scent of her--not nearly as clear as when he wasn’t suffering from the effects of Kryptonite, but *there*, making her suddenly more real to him now that she registered on so many senses at once. “You believed in Superman from the very beginning,” he said. He’d wanted to tell her he wasn’t a monster just so he could put it into words for himself--he hadn’t expected her to say anything in response, certainly had not thought she would call him a hero, would separate him so firmly from Luthor and Claude and Paul and whoever else had hurt her--but this…this he wanted to say for *her*. So she would know what she had meant to him, what she had birthed in him. So she would know that maybe Luthor had fooled her, maybe Clark and Superman had hidden from her, but she…*she* was a hero, too.

“You believed in Superman,” he said. “I was so afraid people would be terrified of me or mistrust me for being an alien, but you accepted me immediately, and you gave me an ideal to strive for, a hero to emulate.” His smile turned more wistful, his heart now a straining weight in his chest, seeming to grow more noticeable and present as the pain left over from the Kryptonite faded into the background. “And you let Clark be your partner, let him be your friend. That was a gift, Lois, and I want to say thank you.”

He wasn’t expecting her to start sobbing uncontrollably, bringing up her sweater-covered hands to try to stem the flow, hiding the haunted, *wounded* look painted over her face.

“Lois?” he asked, all traces of his burgeoning contentment scattering into a million pieces. He brought up his hands but couldn’t decide where to touch her--couldn’t remember how Superman had touched her when Clark wasn’t prominent--so they fluttered uselessly from shoulders to hair to elbows. “Lois, what is it? What’s wrong?”

“Why are you saying goodbye?” she cried. “I know you can’t love me anymore, and I can’t blame you if you hate me, but please…please don’t leave!”

“I’m not,” Clark promised her immediately, unable to keep the words back, and he forgot who he was and wasn’t anymore, forgot about images and decorum--and why should he care, anyway, when this night was for pretending just for a bit longer?--and he gathered her into his arms, wrapped them tight around her as if they were still capable of protecting her. She clutched at him immediately, like she’d been waiting for him, pressing herself as close as possible, until she was nearly in his lap, and Clark felt more whole than he had in days. “I could never hate you, Lois,” he whispered into her hair. “And I’m not leaving.”

She quieted, stilled, pulled back enough to look up at him, so tremulous and hopeful. “You’re not?”

“No,” he said. “Superman will stay in Metropolis. It is, after all, where he was born.”

And she burst into tears again, burying her face in his neck.

“Lois?” he asked uncertainly, frantically. He was holding onto her, trying to comfort her, but inside him there was only confusion. He’d thought he knew her so well, thought he could give her what she wanted, what she needed, but he had no idea at all why she was crying and wrapping herself so close to him. He had no idea what she wanted, what she was thinking, what she saw when she looked at him. She wanted him to stay and he was, and neither of them were in danger anymore, but still she was crying and…and oh how he wished she were crying for Clark Kent, but he was trying very hard not to strive for the unobtainable, so he ignored that longing.

“Superman will stay,” she repeated, almost unintelligible through her tears. “But how will I tell Perry and Jimmy that I drove Clark out of Metropolis? How will *I* live without--” And she dissolved into tears again.

Clark stared ahead, at the walls where Clark’s trophies hung. He sat on Clark’s couch, in Clark’s apartment, holding Clark’s partner. And he couldn’t feel, couldn’t let himself realize what was tremoring through him lest he crumple and fall. Lest he turn to stone and sit there, a monument to who he’d once been, to the hero he could have still been if his heart had only cooperated.

“Lois,” he said, slowly, emotionlessly. If he could have wished for one thing in that moment--more even than wanting Lois to love him--it would have been to change the past, to make these words a lie. “Clark is dead.”

Lois went motionless so fast he was afraid she had stopped breathing. He pulled back to peer down at her anxiously, curiously. She met his gaze through a sheen of tears, like a gauze curtain separating them. “What?”

“Clark’s dead,” he repeated, because maybe it would stop hurting if he said it often enough--practice made perfect, after all. “Luthor stabbed him in front of two witnesses. You yourself said no human could possibly have survived that wound.”

After all the strange things he’d seen in Metropolis, after discovering he himself was an alien sent from a destroyed planet, he supposed he could believe in nearly anything. And if so, then he was pretty certain the rapidity with which Lois’s emotions changed should have convinced him shape-shifters were real and possible and one was sitting beside him. But she was Lois, the woman who meant everything to him, and he could smell her perfume, could all but hear her heartbeat, could see her--all her idiosyncrasies, the uneven pattern of her breathing, the exact shade of her dark eyes--so even though her expression metamorphosed from grief to astonishment in only a millisecond, he couldn’t doubt that it was Lois Lane staring up at him so wide-eyed.

“Oh!” she gasped, her tears vanished as quickly as if they had stolen his superspeed for themselves. “*That’s* why you’re leaving?”

He must be feeling better, he decided, because he felt a stirring of offended frustration rip through his resigned calm, his cloaked numbness. Even now, after everything, she still didn’t understand what Clark meant. He’d thought she was beginning to, thought her beautiful words etched into his mind were proof enough that she’d begun to see him as who he really was. But no. Of course not. Because Superman was staying, and she might be sad to see Clark go, but apparently that was only because she hadn’t yet realized that he was dead--hadn’t yet realized that he was leaving because there was no other choice, not because he’d decided to. As if it made it okay, now that she knew there was a *reason* for it, a reason beyond her or a desire to flee the consequences of his truth.

And that *hurt*. It hurt like tiny stinging shards of Kryptonite slashed through his exhausted heart.

“I told you,” he said shortly, “Superman isn’t leaving. But Clark doesn’t even exist anymore. He--”

“No!” Lois’s smile made him reel back, his hands falling away from her. She smiled, and she laughed--*laughed*, as if Clark Kent were only a joke, a prank that could be set aside when his purpose had been fulfilled. He went stiff and cold--as cold as he’d been flying her away from the hundreds of lifeboats following a rescue crew back to shore, so cold he all but saw frosty mist fall away from his mouth--when she hugged him, a tight, spontaneous hug that was over almost before it even began, her hands moving from his neck to his shoulders to his arms and back to his shoulders as she laughed up at him.

That rage he thought he’d quenched, the fury that had made him squeeze his eyes shut lest his heat-vision explode from him without warning, surged through him again. Good thing he didn’t have his heat-vision back, he decided. Good thing he could fall back beneath the canopy of feeble protection offered by his cloak of apathy, because Lois laughing about the demise of Clark Kent was perhaps the worst moment of his entire life--both of them, all of them, the worst moment that either Clark Kent or Superman could bring, superseding any and all other capitalized events.

“This isn’t funny,” he stated stiffly. He stood, abruptly, his hands tingling, his arms and his legs and his *head*, everything tingling and burning with the amount of control it took not to say something--*do* something--he’d regret. After everything else, after all the bad moments with Luthor, Clark had never once thought that Lois would hurt him so badly. “Clark Kent may not have meant much to you, but he was all that let me be normal. He’s *me* and now *I* can’t--”

“No, no, please, don’t! Let me--I’m sorry!” Lois jumped to her feet, placed herself in his path, her hands outstretched like an angel defying the forces of evil. “No, Clark, I’m sorry, that’s not what I meant! Please stay long enough for me to ex--”

“I can’t!” Clark cried, throwing his own hands up in a gesture of submission. Defeated even as he begged for leniency. “Look around you, Lois! This isn’t real anymore, none of this! This apartment can’t be mine--the job I loved can’t be mine again--it’s all gone! You and…and my parents--how am I going to tell them they’re going to have to publicly mourn me? I don’t understand how you can laugh about this--”

“No, no, you don’t understand! Clark’s not dead!” Lois shouted over him, and he was struck as dumb as he was deaf. “He isn’t dead,” she said more softly. “He’s in hiding!”

There was a ball of ice in his stomach--not that sharp-toothed creature that had been nibbling away at him. Not the sinking weight that had tried to drag him back down to earth when Lois had equated him with Claude. No, it was ice, cold and crystalline-sharp, emanating frost that reached to every one of his extremities. “Lois,” he said softly, because he didn’t know how to process this himself, didn’t know how to even begin to plan how he was going to tell his mom and dad the terrible news--didn’t know, above all, how to make her realize the truth about his identities and the tragedy inherent in the mortal blow Clark had taken.

So all he could say was her name, weighted in icicles, heavy and cold like a body buried beneath six feet of snow.

“Lois, there were witnesses--”

“No!” she said, almost petulantly, and he half-expected her to stamp her foot. She reached out and clasped his arms in her hands as if she meant to shake him. But her laughter was gone, her smiles chased away, and earnestness adorned her face like glitter, making her gleam with inner starlight. Her words spilled over themselves in their haste to be uttered, rapid and eager and unbelievable. “Clark, listen--Superman was hurt, stabbed in the stomach, and I couldn’t let you die so that meant they had to know there was a wound to fix--but you had already told Henderson that Lex had stabbed Clark. So I told them all that Superman and Clark both knew Lex was going to come after you, and you arranged a meeting--Clark went to Centennial Park, and you both warned me, and Superman flew Clark to a safe location where Lex couldn’t find him. Then Superman came here and he dressed in Clark’s clothes and waited for Lex to come--and everything would have worked out, but you didn’t know Lex had Kryptonite, so you were hurt, but you woke up and still went after him, and please, *please* believe me--Clark isn’t dead, he’s just in hiding until Superman can go get him from wherever you hid him. Hid *you*, I mean.”

She stood there before him, holding onto his arms as if to keep him in place--as if she needed physical contact to ensure he stayed always near her--and she stared up at him beseechingly, breathless and waiting and watching. Hair almost black in the close, dim ambience of the apartment where they’d spent so many hours together. Eyes so dark and yet brilliant with that light inside that drew him as surely as the sun. Small and fragile and weary and broken and wounded--but so very strong, so incredibly fierce, so indelibly lovely.

She’d always been the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen--prettier than Lana, than Lori, than Cat, than *anyone*. Beautiful, but so much *more*, and in that moment, looking down at her and feeling as if he were about to come apart at the seams--as if he were only now taking his first breath since that Kryptonite blade had plunged inside him--he felt as if he could see all that *more* illuminated in her. As if she had flipped a switch to turn on the lights, and now everything she was, everything she hid away inside her so she couldn’t be hurt, everything that captivated him and kept him hoping and hoping and *hoping* even when there seemed to be no reason, was now on display.

Unveiled before him.

Unmasked to him.

Vulnerable.

Trusting.

Afraid.

Just like him.

“It’s okay,” Lois said, and for the first time he believed her. She wasn’t telling him comforting lies, wasn’t speaking out of a misunderstanding of who he was. She was telling the truth, and she was right…and she had saved him. Saved *Clark Kent*.

Not Superman.

Not Luthor.

Not Metropolis.

She’d saved *Clark Kent*. The hack from Nowheresville. Mr. Greenjeans. The lunkhead from a small town that wasn’t on the map.

*Him*.

“It’s okay, really, Clark,” she assured him, and she wasn’t using his name to make sure he listened to her. Wasn’t using it just so he wouldn’t get mad at her and fly off. She was using it because that was who he was, and she was talking to *him*. “They believed me, I promise. I know it was dangerous to let people know that Superman can pass for Clark, but…you were going to die and I…I couldn’t let Clark go. And Lex was the only one who’d seen you both close up, but he’s dead so that doesn’t matter. His two henchmen had never seen Clark *and* Superman close up--they won’t know enough to realize it was really you. So…you see, it’s all right. You don’t have to leave. You…you don’t have to disappear, Clark. You can stay.”

Words escaped him. Speech escaped him. And he didn’t care--words weren’t enough. No language in the world--none of the hundreds that he knew, or any of the rest of them for that matter--could possibly say what he felt. What he thought. What he *knew* when he looked at her.

She’d never needed physical contact to make him stay, but sometimes touching her was the only way *he’d* been able to remind himself of who he was. Sometimes a hand against the small of her back, the curve of her elbow, the angles of her fingers, had been all that kept him together when he returned from disasters that had gone wrong. Sometimes touching her was all that let him get behind her walls, make her stop and look at him and *see* him.

So he hugged her.

He leaned forward and he wrapped his arms, slowly, gingerly, around her waist, and he pulled her close, closer, so close that he felt as if he could dissolve his physical form and wrap her up in armor, in a red cape that would protect her and hide her and keep her whole and well and beautiful and unscarred by the cruelties of the world and the monsters it contained.

She came willingly, so soft and pliable that he thought, for an instant, that perhaps she was the one who would dissolve, a sheen, a mist, a private atmosphere he could carry with him everywhere.

“Thank you,” he breathed. And he buried his head in her hair, in the crook of her neck, and felt eight months’ worth of tension ease inside of him. Boneless and relaxed and so very loose as self-control and fear and decades’ worth of repression slipped down from the tip of his head to pool at the soles of his feet, ashes drifting harmlessly away beneath the continued flow of Lois’s breathing. “Thank you, Lois.”

“Oh, Clark,” she said, and he was.

He was Clark. That tension was gone, and with it the key to Clark Kent’s prison. He felt himself released to flow back into every inch of his being, to reclaim the body Superman had haunted, the ghost of Clark Kent in corporeal form. He didn’t have to reclaim Clark, didn’t have to wrap him around him like a cape--that was for Superman, for the disguise taken from other’s advice and opinions and ideals and used to fashion a paragon that could be draped over an ordinary man’s frame. But Clark was *him*, written on every cell, layered into every joint, lined through every vein, coated on every inch of skin, a galaxy of molecules within him that found cohesiveness and form and being as Clark Kent.

Maybe the minutes were still ticking by, seconds tapping their way into infinity, but Clark didn’t hear them, didn’t count them, didn’t heed them. He had a lifetime now. More than enough. It didn’t matter if he stood here for hours holding Lois and remembering everything he loved about being Clark, didn’t matter if he stayed in this apartment until the sun came back ‘round and found them--because it was all his, the apartment and the day and the future.

But finally Lois’s breathing shifted, and Clark found that he could loosen his arms from around her, and he could take a deep breath and contemplate an existence more than an inch away from Lois Lane.

“You are Clark,” Lois whispered, and she went up on her toes and kissed him on the cheek. A slow, lingering kiss infused with strength and delicacy, with her perfume and the scent of saltwater, with everything he wanted and everything he had. A kiss that made him shudder and hunch in on himself, trying to capture every nuance of it.

Because maybe…maybe he could have it all. Maybe all these signs Superman hadn’t been able to read were spelling something out very clearly for Clark. Maybe…maybe Lois didn’t care about Luthor--*he’s dead*, she’d said, as if it didn’t affect her at all--maybe she didn’t want the superhero over all--*I couldn’t let Clark go*, she’d told him, when Superman had been dying in front of her--and maybe, just maybe, he hadn’t messed everything up after all. Maybe Clark was worth everything to someone besides just him and his parents.

Maybe…

He shuddered again, his hands tense against her back--a different kind of tension than the one that made invisible ashes at his feet, a *better* one.

He almost kissed her. He would have, would have been brave and foolhardy and reckless even though he was Clark instead of Superman, would have tipped his head so gently and pressed his lips against hers…except she moved.

Away.

She stepped back, her hands falling away from him, and her expression was neutral, disengaged, *numb*. “Well,” she said neutrally, “I should go. Get cleaned up, you know. And you…you probably want to do the same.” Her hand darted out, smoothed down the edge of his Superman crest--he leaned into the touch, ever so slightly, craving that instead of the weakness Kryptonite left him with--and then was gone, drifting back to her side, leaving him once more alone. Bereft. “I’ll just go, then. Get changed. Maybe call Perry and give him a head’s up.”

*Don’t go.*

The words hovered behind his lips, prisoners caged in flesh and blood and bone. Sincere words, ripping their way out of him and clamoring to be released into audible form. Desperate words, because she’d already left him once and he didn’t think he could bear it again. Useless words, words that had been layered through everything he’d told her for weeks now and still she was walking away.

She backed away, nervous and edgy, refusing to meet his eyes. He took an impotent step forward, his hand raised halfway toward her, but she only backed up further.

“Lois,” he said. It wasn’t the plea he wanted to speak, but at the same time, it was. Her name. All he had to offer her--but she’d given him back *his* name and it was the greatest gift he’d ever been given.

The backs of her feet stumbled into the bottom stair leading to his front door. Her hands gestured anxiously between them. Still, she wouldn’t look at him. “Maybe I…maybe I’ll bring back some dinner?”

“Yes!” Clark grabbed at the lifeline--he didn’t have Superman’s superspeed, but he recognized a last chance when he saw one. “That…that sounds good.”

“Okay.” She was at the door, her back to him, and he felt like he was falling again, falling without flight, spiraling away, when she turned back to him. “You’re…you’re okay. Aren’t you?”

She’d known his Secret for twenty-four hours. She’d seen him weak and exposed and at his lowest point. He’d stood before her unmasked, completely open, and told her exactly who he was. He’d admitted to every secret he kept--his alter ego, his origins, his love for her, his fears. She knew him better than even his parents, from the obvious to the surprising, from the worst to the best. He should have never had to lie to her again.

But he opened his mouth, and he lied, and it came out more easily than any lie he’d ever spoken before.

“Yes,” he said, with a smile to coat it, to make it go down easier, like honey surrounding a bitter pill. “I’m okay.”

Because he couldn’t chain her. He couldn’t bind her. He couldn’t force her to anything. He *wasn’t* a monster, but after all, he was a liar, and what better lie to tell her than one that would let her go free and be happy? In all the day’s catastrophes, he’d allowed himself to forget one thing--Lois Lane didn’t love Clark Kent, and though she admired him, she didn’t love Superman either, not anymore.

She’d asked him to stay, and he would--of course he would, this was his home and he’d promised her. So here he was, Clark Kent, Superman in his spare time, right where he’d been the entire time Lois had known him. She’d asked him to stay, but he had the feeling she had no idea what to do with him now that she had him.

And he…well, he had no idea what to do, period.

How ironic, he couldn’t help but think as the thud of the door closing on Lois Lane echoed through the apartment that was his once again. How ironic that the last twenty-four hours had begun with a capital letter and ended with a period.

***