from last time...
~~~~~~~~~~~~
Jor-El smiled, seeming to be filled with emotions as well. He quickly realized himself, cleared his throat and said, “follow me, Kal El,” and started walking away.
Clark followed him, complete trust in the massive, powerful, loving man before him.
“Where are we going?” Clark asked, suddenly feeling like a little boy.
“You’re going home.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~
HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN ME
PART 9
“There you are,” Lois said, entering a hospital room. Henderson looked up when she entered. “The nurse said you might be in here. I guess this is where he was before?”
“Yeah, this was his room before the sun treatment thing. How is that going, by the way?” Henderson asked. Lois noticed that he looked so tired and aged from this one experience. It had clearly shaken him.
“It’s… well, there’s no beat yet. But I really think that there will be,” Lois said, assuredly.
“Well, the heart monitor is not on right now,” Henderson explained.
Lois looked at him, hope written on her face. “But it is set to turn on if his heart beats,” he finished, obviously wishing he hadn’t gotten her hopes up.
Lois gestured toward the television that Henderson was sitting in front of, which was now on the stop function.
“So… is this the infamous tape?” she asked, her voice shaking. She swallowed, trying to summon up courage within her to see what existed there. On that tape. She didn’t want to see it… to see him like that… but she felt that she had to, at the same time.
“The one and only,” Henderson answered. “I had watched the end before, so I didn’t get a chance to see how this all started.” He studied Lois carefully. “You don’t want to see this, Lois.”
“I need to,” Lois answered, and something in her tone… he must have known that she wasn’t going to budge.
He pushed ‘play’.
Lois watched, wide-eyed, as a picture appeared before her eyes. She could see the bright green bars….
And him….
He was coughing. Kneeling.
He got to his feet, and, as if finding every ounce of strength and energy from within him, he ran into the bars, full force, toward the camera. Upon contact, his entire body convulsed sending him back to the floor, hard.
Lois gasped at the sight….
The awful sight…
To see Superman, the strongest man alive, who saved everyone he could because he was so good-hearted, in all that pain was too much to take in itself. But knowing that her partner, her best friend, was the man inside that cage in all that pain caused Lois’s blood to run cold. She couldn’t tear her eyes away from the image, but she couldn’t bear to look at it either. She could hear, somewhere in the recesses of her mind, Henderson’s voice explaining something-or-other, but she couldn’t make it out. She just stared…
Dressed in the suit she knew so well, that she had shamelessly fantasized taking off of him, she watched her best friend fight for his life. Trapped… She watched in petrified awe, even though she knew the horrible outcome, as the images played out before her eyes. He kept picking himself up and thrusting himself against the wall of the cage, but it never opened. It never granted him the freedom he was dying to have.
She wasn’t sure how much time had passed, standing beside Henderson watching the tape, but she wasn’t sure she had blinked the entire time. She just watched as Clark coughed and gasped and tried to shield himself from the Kryptonite with his cape…
She noticed he eventually stopped charging the cage as much, until ultimately he couldn’t pick himself up off the floor. She watched as he fell from his curled up position on his knees down to his side. And then onto his stomach… in the spot and position where she found him. She now knew he had been in that spot for a long time.
“…and this basically continues throughout, I mean it’s a twenty plus hour event. We obviously can’t watch it all,” Henderson explained.
He paused the tape and Lois continued to stare at it, not realizing that the image had stopped. Clark hadn’t been moving anyway, so the image was the same.
“Lois?”
She tore her gaze from the television and looked at him.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost. Geez, Lois, I told you not to watch. You’re white as a sheet.”
Lois was aware that Henderson was leading her to a chair, sitting her down.
“It’s…” Lois said quietly, shaking her head at herself and at the situation.
“I know,” Henderson said sympathetically.
“I want to see the end,” she said, not meeting Henderson’s gaze.
“No, Lois, you really don’t want to—“
“No, I do want to! I want to see the end! Please, I have to,” she said, her eyes pleading with his.
Henderson sighed, clearly not wanting to put Lois through this. But she was adamant and it was very obvious. He walked over to the television and picked up another tape that lay beside it. He took out the tape that was in the VCR and popped this one in.
Lois had only just looked up when she let out a horrified gasp. If Clark was still before, he was the ground now. He was moving no more than the floor he lay on. The cold, cement floor. Lois thought for sure Henderson must have had the tape at the wrong part… that he was already dead in the image before her. And then suddenly…
Organs playing…
Lois remembered jumping off the step in front of the mirrors at that precise moment, on that note. She had probably no sooner touched ground, in hot pursuit of her wedding, to stop it, when his head, a building away and floors below, had shot up. Just as Henderson had said.
The music…
Such a happy song…
She remembered running… knowing she was in love with Clark Kent and she couldn’t marry Lex Luthor.
Running…
She stared at the television. He looked around…
At his prison…
He was trapped. She knew she was crying now, watching him, not holding anything in anymore; not being able to. Then, as if in slow motion, his head crashed hard to the ground, and his shoulders slumped dramatically, never rising again…
He was dead…
Lois could again hear Henderson saying something, but she could only stare at the screen. Clark was dead. On that tape. And in real life, only a hallway away from her. She suddenly felt sick to her stomach.
Clark was dead….
Lois looked at her hands, and shook her head, helplessly. She buried her face in her hands, trying to control herself and her emotions. She was devastated. She had known Clark was dead when she found him. But seeing his last hope of freedom, last breath, last moment… it was more than she could take. She had watched the death of the most important person ever to come into her life… who she realized she loved too late.
She realized then that she had been convincing herself that he was not dead. From the moment she found him, until a moment ago, something had not clicked in her mind. But now…
Clark was dead.
She knew it and felt it. Her mind wrapped itself around the concept; around the fact. He was dead. Lost. Gone.
Gone…
And in that moment that she accepted the truth, something in her died as well.
Suddenly there were no more organs, there was yelling… Lois looked up. Clark was still lying there—dead—on his stomach. She could hear Lex and Henderson yelling. Moments later, the noise sounded more like it was coming from the cellar. Near where Clark lay.
She sat forward in her seat, knowing what was about to happen, but not wanting to miss even a second of what he had gone through.
Suddenly, Lex was in the cellar too, near the cage, from what she could tell.
“Sorry, Superman, no time to chat, so I’ll just take my pound of flesh and be on my way!”
His voice, which now made Lois cringe and shudder was so violent, so uncaring… so evil. She couldn’t believe she had ever agreed to marry him, ever ignored Clark’s accusations, which turned out to be so tragically true. She shook her head sadly, knowing that if she had put her trust in her friend and not in a man she barely knew, this could have been avoided. Clark wouldn’t have died at this man’s hands, teaching her this lesson in the hardest way possible. “Pound of flesh?” she thought. It was Clark Kent in there… the most gentle, most selfless and caring man she had ever known.
Her thoughts were broken as Lex rushed into the frame, a key in his hand. He was frantically trying to open the cage door. He was having trouble, as he was only using one hand… his other hand was holding something, but it was out of frame. Finally he got the door open and lifted his hands. The vision caused Lois’s heart to stop practically. He had an axe. She had forgotten about the axe in all the commotion that had followed. He walked into the cage and held his arms up. He was standing over Clark, ready to… ready to… she couldn’t even think it. And Clark… he was just lying there. Defenseless. Dead. How she just wanted to see him, strong as ever, fly away.
Free…
The sound of a gunshot caused her to jump, her thoughts to leave her head. She focused on the image on the screen. Lex dropped the axe, close to where Clark lay completely unaware of all of this, and then Lex fell to the floor on the opposite side of the cage.
“You can turn it off,” Lois said quietly. “I’ve seen enough.”
*************
*************
Clark put his picture of his mother in the front pocket of his sweatshirt and looked at the dark tunnel ahead. He took a deep breath and turned back to face his father.
“Are you sure I am ready?”
“Yes,” Jor-El said confidently, still standing in the brightness, watching Clark recede.
Clark turned, intending to walk away, but stopped again. He faced his father once more. “What if I get there and I cannot come alive again?”
“It is a chance you have to take; you have to—“
“—have faith” Clark said, finishing the sentence with Jor-El.
“I know,” Clark continued. “But still, it’s frightening.” He looked ahead at the darkness for emphasis. “I can’t see where I’m going. I know you said to follow my heart, but once I’m in there I can go any way. In any direction. What if I get lost in there?”
“You just have to listen for the way. And remember, your mother and I are with you, somewhere inside.”
Clark tilted his head back a little, taking this in.
“And your mom and dad on Earth… and Lois.”
Clark faced the darkness again, a new spate of courage filling him from the inside out. He took a deep breath, squinting at the darkness.
“Thank you for everything you’ve done for me, Father,” Clark said, looking back at Jor-El once more. “I’m ready to go home now.”
*************
*************
Lois looked up and realized that Henderson was no longer in the room with her. It was just her and the television that contained the most horrible images she had ever seen. She tried to will herself to stand up and walk away…
Away from the television…
Away from the agonizing images…
Down the corridor…
And to him.
But she couldn’t. It was as if she was paralyzed. She stared at the blue screen in front of her. He wasn’t even on the screen anymore and she couldn’t turn away.
She tried to remember what Henderson had said before he left the room… because he had, apparently, left the room. Left her there. Just her and the TV. Her and images of Clark dying.
As if she were a robot, she picked up the remote control and found herself rewinding the tape further. She waited and waited… for what, she wasn’t sure. But the tape kept rewinding. Finally, she decided to hit the play button and see what image would greet her.
It wasn’t a surprising image really… it was the same one she had seen on the tape before. Clark crouched down, seeking protection and freedom and not getting it. While it wasn’t surprising, the image still made her stomach muscles contract and her heart rate speed up. She just wanted to turn back time, get the key and pull him out of there. She stared at the television in a daze, lost in daydreams of finding him in time and saving him. Watching him breathe in pure air that existed in his freedom…
Suddenly her head shot up. She furrowed her eyebrows furiously. She was sure the television and her mind were playing tricks on her. But just to be sure… she rewound the tape a little and sure enough…
“Lois, please….” She barely could hear it, but she knew what he was saying. He was lying so still, but he was talking… so quietly…. “I can’t… hold on….”
He was practically whispering, and she wouldn’t have even been able to make out any of his words if… if it hadn’t been for her dream.
Suddenly her mind rushed back to the night before her wedding, when she had woken to his voice… his quiet, helpless voice that seemed to be begging for her to help him. It was as if now, seeing this on the tape, she was trapped in the most intense sense of déjà vu. It hadn’t just been a dream! He had connected with her, while he was dying. But how, she wondered furiously. How had his voice penetrated his cage and gone to her when he could not? She closed her eyes slowly remembering how she had reacted to the dream…
She rewound the tape a little again…
“Lois, please….”
She had tried to shake his voice out of her…
…“I can’t…”
Tried to remember that she hated him…
…“hold on….”
Tried to forget about the dream…
And then she did. She went about her day, and he eventually died in there.
She opened her eyes, not really seeing the image on the screen, but instead a blurry, watery, colorful hell. She couldn’t believe herself… she had turned away from him, from the feeling inside that something was wrong. She knew that no matter what could ever be wrong between him and her, if he had a feeling, a gut instinct, a dream that she was not okay, he would find her and make sure she was. She had ignored his plea, his voice, which was burned in her memory now, its helplessness and fear.
She knew that he really died when her ceremony started. She had that dream around four in the morning, she recalled. Had she gone to find out where he was and make sure he was okay, she may have found him before it was too late. Before he stopped breathing and his heart stopped beating.
But she didn’t…
She shook her head at herself, growing angrier at her actions leading up to this than she already was…
“I let you down… I let you down,” she said to the television. And to herself.
She suddenly bolted out of the seat, and rushed out the door of the room, leaving the television on, leaving it behind…
*************
*************
“Follow my heart… just follow my heart… this seemed so much easier back there, where I could actually see what was in front of me,” Clark said, glancing back over his shoulder. The brightness from where he just came was now only a white speck in the dark cave he was far into now.
He turned slightly, a sudden intense feeling in his gut telling him to do so. He kept walking, feeling confident he would be home in no time.
*************
*************
Lois was running, pulling the sweatshirt over her head and off of her as she ran. She noticed Henderson who tried to intercept her, food in his hands, telling her she needed to eat. She just kept running. She was holding the sweatshirt in her hands now and just kept running…
Running…
Like she did on her wedding day, the moment he died.
“Lois!”
She was successfully intercepted, but too far gone to tell who she had run into. Someone was calling her name, pulling on her arms, stopping her. She looked up… Martha.
“Honey, where are you going? What happened?” Martha asked, alarmed at Lois’s behavior.
“No! No, let me go!”
Tears were spilling out of Lois’s eyes and she was looking anywhere but at Martha, trying to free herself from her motherly grip.
“It’s my fault! It’s all my fault!” Lois cried hysterically. “My dream… and our fight… my wedding!” she wasn’t making any sense and she knew it. She just cried and said whatever fleeting thought jumped into her brain. She wasn’t sure when, but at some point, Martha had pulled her into a forceful embrace, whispering words of comfort. After a few moments, when Lois didn’t cease her intense, hysterical cries, Martha pulled away, still holding Lois’s arms. She looked the tortured younger woman in the eyes.
“Lois, it is NOT your fault what happened. Not unless you coated that cage with Kryptonite… well, did you?” Martha asked after a pause, obviously knowing the answer.
“I might as well have,” Lois said, almost in a whisper. She stopped struggling to get free and met Martha’s gaze. Lois’s eyes held nothing back. They were honest, just as she wanted them to be for what she was about to say. She knew she had to level with Martha Kent. She deserved to know the truth about the woman who her son more or less died for. She forced herself to stop crying, but stray tears still fell as she held the older woman’s gaze.
Lois took a deep breath. “I was there that day that Clark called you on the phone, did you know that?” she asked, although she knew the answer.
Martha was clearly trying to not act too shocked. “He never mentioned it.”
“He didn’t know. I was hiding in that little compartment where he keeps his suits. I had gone over to his apartment… I don’t know why… and I didn’t want him to see me. Clark never knew I was there. I heard everything. I knew his secret and heard everything from his point of view. I somehow STILL managed to convince myself he was a monster…. My heart broke for him in that closet, listening to him talk about how upset he was that he lost me. I understood how he felt. I felt the same way about him! I heard him say he wanted to tell me, and all the reasons he couldn’t and how it just got complicated when I told Superman I would love him if he had no powers and were ordinary, after turning down Clark, of course, making his worst nightmare a reality—“
“—Lois---“ Martha tried to interject, most likely with the perfect motherly thing to say that would reassure Lois that she was not wrong to feel the way she did, but Lois wasn’t having any of it. She didn’t want to be let off the hook.
Lois marched on, as if she hadn’t heard Martha say anything. “—I heard his heartfelt sadness over what was happening with us. And I turned my back on it, choosing to not let him make ME feel bad when I was the one who was lied to. Then there was the night before my wedding. I had a dream, where he called to me, begging me to help him because he couldn’t hold on! I just saw that exact moment on tape. Yes, I was marrying a man who was so sick and evil that he was videotaping Superman’s death. And I saw that tape! He really did call to me, reaching me in a dream, pleading for me to come find him. Again I turned my back on him. I decided that he was a monster, and I continued going about planning my wedding… to the REAL monster! I don’t deserve this—“ Lois said, thrusting the sweatshirt into Martha’s arms. “It’s his favorite sweatshirt. I don’t deserve to wear it. I deserted him when he needed me. Not just once. Not just twice. If we look at our relationship, our friendship, right from the beginning, we’d see that I was always turning my back on him in one way or another hurting him, and eventually costing him his LIFE. I could have looked for him that night. I could have called you. I could have talked to him after that phone call he had with you. Just been there for him and let him explain. I could have let him in, not shut him out, and he never would have been driven to go to Lex’s cellar. Into that cage, that prison!… I could have done a lot… but I did NOTHING!”
Hysterical and bawling now, again, Lois turned to walk in the opposite direction. Away from the door to Clark’s room, away from the sweatshirt, from his parents and from him.
“When I look at your friendship and relationship I see that he’s loved you from the beginning,” Martha said resignedly.
Lois slowed down, as if she wanted to stop, but continued walking, not turning to face Martha. “And I’ll love him ‘til the end… not that he’ll ever know.”
And with that, she kept walking, leaving a perplexed Martha staring back at her from outside her son’s hospital room.
**************
**************
Gone. The connection was gone. He hugged his arms tight against his sweatshirt, looking for that intense connection he had felt when he was back with his father. Something had happened; he knew it. He felt it.
Clark stopped walking suddenly, realizing that he was just walking. He wasn’t hearing anything in his heart to direct him in any which way. He suddenly realized, with a cold chill, that he couldn’t hear anything. His heart wasn’t telling him anything at the moment. Fear gripped him a little and he sat down, his legs feeling too wobbly to stand on just at the moment.
He had never felt more scared and alone as he did sitting there in the dark abyss, hoping and wanting desperately to find his way home.
*************
*************
Lois walked numbly out the hospital doors. She squinted at the rapidly setting sun. It was beautiful; a perfect day. She wished that it would just rain… a nasty rain storm with scary thunder and threatening lightening… then the weather would truly reflect this day. But THIS… it was just cruel, she thought. She shook her head at herself for about the fiftieth time in the last hour. She walked down the front steps of the hospital, taking in the beauty of the approaching dusk. She saw a couple leaving the hospital with a new baby in their arms. They were smiling and laughing, stopping to kiss before continuing on. She realized that this was a truly romantic time of day, on a day like this. Soft breeze, the stars just starting to come out, the moon starting to appear as the sun quickly turned in for the night, letting the soft moon take over its shift of watching over the city. Such a romantic time of day…
She suddenly felt a shiver, wishing she had someone to share this time with. Not just any someone…
She felt bad for yelling at Martha. And she knew she should be inside… by his side, telling him to get better and come back to her and that she loved him. But she just didn’t feel that it was her place anymore. She wasn’t sure that by the time he died, hearing the music that implied she was going through with marrying his captor and killer, he still loved her. He had every right not to.
She knew when she told Henderson to play the tape for her that seeing it… seeing him and his torture… would be difficult and so painful, but she didn’t know that it would magnify for her all the ways she had let him down and hurt him.
Now that she knew, she convinced herself that maybe he would have a better chance of coming back to life if she just left him alone.
**************
**************
Clark hugged his knees against his chest, shivering. He just wanted to go home. He was scared. Everything was so dark and uncertain. He kept trying to listen intently, concentrate… hear. But there was nothing. As he grew more and more scared, he could hear his breathing in his ears, and he was brought back to those horrible final hours in the cage. Darkness… and the sound of his own breathing. It was haunting him, this nightmare come to life, again.
“Mom? Dad?… Lois?” he inquired softly into the nothingness, sounding like a frightened little boy who was lost in a crowded store and just wanted to see the familiar face of his mother.
“Mom? Dad? Lois?” he tried again, louder. He was aware of the tears that fell unchecked down his cheeks. He wasn’t even ashamed that he was crying—a grown man, hunched down, crying for his mother, his father and the woman who just embodied the word ‘home’ to him. He wanted to see them so awfully bad, and that is where his tears came from, and he wasn’t ashamed to admit it. He was scared he would be stuck in the black hole forever and never see their faces again. Never see his life again, which he only just remembered how much he loved.
Never see Lois again.
How he just wanted to hold her and tell her that he loved her. Tell her how sorry he is that he died without ever revealing himself to her. Without letting her in on his world, his loneliness, the reality of his love for her, his complete happiness… his complete being. She never knew and he died before he could tell her. Share with her. Hold her close and tell her that Superman does love her, just as she loves him. Tell her of his hope that someday it would be Clark that she would love in that way. But give her the whole truth to base that feeling on.
“Lois?” he said softly into the dark.
He suddenly realized what must have gone wrong, why he no longer felt connected. Lois must have given up. He shook his head, closed his eyes tightly, willing her to just believe again. Believe in him. Them. And herself.
His head lifted up and his eyes popped open as he heard her voice faintly. He wasn’t expecting to hear it, and he almost felt as if he had his super hearing. It was like a distant call that he would get when someone was in danger. But this wasn’t a scream for help. The distant voice was faint, quiet… and if he tried, he might be able to tell what she was saying…
************
************
Lois found herself sitting on a bench in the courtyard by the hospital. She had completely calmed down since her conversation with Martha. Sitting alone, the gentle dusk breeze blowing her hair lightly, she looked up at a star, which was just peeking through the gray sky above.
“Where are you, Clark?” she whispered. She took a deep, shuddering breath, wrapping her arms around herself. She really wished she hadn’t taken off his sweatshirt. She just wanted to feel again … what it was it made her feel. She looked back up at that same star that seemed to be peeking at her.
*** “You are a strange one, Clark Kent.”
“Am I?”
“Yeah. But I think I got you figured out.”
“Really. Didn’t take you very long.” ***
“You know, when I met you, I thought you were just about the strangest man I had ever met. But at the same time, right from the beginning something about you always made sense to me… even when a huge part of you didn’t make any sense… it was as if I never knew that the most important part of me was missing all my life until finally it was there, making sense out of my life. You were there,” she said softly, smiling a little, remembering her first encounters with Clark. “And I wanted nothing to do with you.” She laughed, remembering how she had treated him in their early days together. “You just… you felt dangerous to me. I marched into Perry’s office, and paid you no mind, the day you interviewed for the job. When Perry pointed you out, and I saw who the new guy might be, my throat closed up and I had to play the ‘I don’t care’ card. I saw a handsome man, acting polite toward me, and I knew myself too well. My history. I know what I’ve done in the past in the presence of handsome, seemingly nice coworkers. I saw you as dangerous… just like them. I could’ve murdered Perry when he assigned us together. I don’t know, he must have had some inkling we’d be good together, editor’s intuition or something. I mean, he didn’t become editor-in-chief because he knows how to yodel…” Lois’s soft rant trailed off as she stared at the star above, as if expecting it to reply or giggle with her, or hug her…
***********
***********
Clark was walking again, slowly. He could feel Lois’s love for him, pulling him home, but he could not hear words. He tried and tried, but only made out a word here, a word there. It wasn’t as clear as before which direction he should head in, so he walked slowly, making sure a feeling of closeness to Lois was always there, leading him. Making sure the connection was at all times intact. Where he was certain before that she had given up, he was certain now that she was thinking about him. And that was taking him back… taking him home.
***********
***********
“And then I got to know you a little, this new guy, this new would-be partner. And it turned out, you really WERE nice, polite… more handsome than I had given you credit for at first glance, which was just a little hard to deal with, let me tell you… and you taught me that I could trust you, practically right off the bat. I didn’t want to trust you, and so I didn’t—or I convinced myself that I didn’t anyway—but in reality, deep down, I just knew. I knew you were special. And very trustworthy. I knew you were different than all of them. It was very obvious to me that you respected me and wouldn’t hurt me. And then it hit me… you were more dangerous than every man who had ever managed to hurt me in the past. By being so different, by being so YOU, you had the ability to hurt me more than any of them. I just… I cared about you, almost immediately. I didn’t want to get attached, to care about someone else, to feel protective of someone else, yet I did. I gave you a hard time, I think, partly because I wanted you to toughen up a little. You were always so naïve. And I felt so protective of you because of that. I wanted you to know what the world was like, well what Metropolis was like anyway. And instead… you showed me. You showed me that good people do still exist, not with your words or by pointing them out, but with your actions. You were this very real, good person, that loved me and treated my friendship like it was sacred, and my partnership like it was buried treasure. I know I never told you that I appreciated working with you. But I did. I never told you this, but the first time I saw our names on a byline, some unspoken puzzle piece fell into place. I had always written good work, but when I would see my stories, I always just kind of felt something was off. But I didn’t know what it was. It scared me to no end when I saw that it was you, or the lack of you, rather. Our names just looked so right. Our work just felt so perfect, so balanced….” She trailed off, still staring at the star, still thinking… “I once had this teacher in college, who loved giving our class group assignments, and she loved talking about the power of ‘synergy.’ She said it was when two people or a group together produced something that was far better than what one member could have produced on their own. I never believed that. Of course, I always had the slacker groups and ended up doing most of the work myself anyway, but that was okay with me. I truly thought that if other people contributed, the final product would have been worse. I thought I was just perfect on my own and would climb the ladder of complete success on my own. I guess what I’m saying is the first time I saw our names share a byline it made sense, what my teacher told me. The article was… well you get it. I’m sorry I never told you how much it meant to have you as a partner. I enjoyed acting like you were a burden, maybe because it kept you working hard to please me. Come to think of it, even after I accepted you as a partner, you still worked hard to please me it seemed. I guess I liked bantering and playfully arguing with you. It kept me on my toes too, working hard to please myself and you. Oh god, I really have gone crazy, haven’t I? I am babbling to a star…”
***********
***********
Clark crept fearfully on in the darkness, slowly. Ever so slowly, grasping to keep his connection with Lois.
“I’m sorry I never told you how much it meant to have you as a partner….”
He stopped in his tracks and his heart felt as though it skipped a beat! He heard Lois talking to him… Then he grew frantic as realization dawned on him. She was talking to HIM. “Partner”… that was Clark, not Superman. He was utterly confused about why she would be talking to Clark. His fear and need to get home was causing his mind to become overly-dramatic and he started to wonder if maybe there was another clone in town. Someone pretending to be him. To be Clark. And she was talking to him! Either way, he realized, she was still saying that his partnership had meant a lot to her. Clone or not, she was talking ABOUT him! The real him! Elated, he started running in the direction that he heard her talking in.
“Son, come back to us…”
His father’s voice.
Clark stopped running, not sure which direction to head in. His heart was pulling him in two different directions. He could feel Lois pulling him in one direction and his parents pulling him in another.
“Clark, we love you.”
His mother’s voice.
“I shouldn’t be here.”
Lois’s voice.
She didn’t want to be there anymore. “No, Lois, don’t leave!”
Two different directions. He shuddered again, not knowing where to go. They were in different places clearly, and all talking to him, beckoning to him.
He felt instinctively that he was getting close now. He could, after all, hear full sentences, whereas before he was walking in the darkness with nothing but feelings and faith leading him home. But even knowing he was close, this feeling of being torn in two directions scared him. Because he knew that if he headed in the wrong direction, even now, he might never get back to his body and back to his life. He would be stuck here…
*************
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“I shouldn’t be here, I should be inside. With you…” she said softly. She shivered a little, and immediately started rubbing her arms with her hands.
“Maybe you’ll feel warmer in this,” a familiar, motherly voice said, causing Lois to jump at the sudden intrusion into her privacy. She looked up, behind her, to see Martha’s kind smile and face. She looked down at what Martha was holding. Clark’s sweatshirt.
“I think I’ll feel a lot warmer in this,” Lois agreed, putting the sweatshirt over her head and around her, not needing to be asked twice. She relished in the feeling of warmth and comfort it immediately provided.
Lois stood up and turned slowly, facing Martha. She sighed, not breaking eye contact with her. “Look, Mar—“
“Save it, Lois,” Martha interjected, holding a hand up. “In case you still don’t get it, I understand. My, you’re just like Clark! You both spend all your time battling with yourselves you just don’t see! All you need is to be together. So let’s go already!”
Martha was putting on a tough attitude, but Lois saw through it. Martha really did seem to understand. She smiled at this woman who was being so kind to her, so understanding, practically welcoming her into their wonderful family.
They began walking back toward the hospital, in a companionable silence. Lois smiled, knowing she was going to see Clark again soon. She felt as though she had been gone too long… she knew she should have waited to feel horrible about her past actions, and been there for him for now, but she had truly convinced herself that he would be better off if she just let him alone. But now… now she felt that she needed to be near him, even if it were to suit her own selfish needs. She knew how much she loved him, and wanted to be close enough so he could feel it.
As they started climbing the stairs, Lois caught site of an image inside the hospital that made her heart practically turn to ice and her blood to run cold. “Lex,” she breathed.
“What?” Martha asked, clearly confused.
But if Martha wanted an explanation, it would have to wait. Lois was bolting up the remaining stairs, two at a time. She yanked the hospital door open and ran up behind the limping man, whose face was obscured, but who she knew well. She grabbed his arm and turned him toward her, not missing his wince, due to his wound. She couldn’t help but smile at the thought that she was causing him pain.
“Lois, I was hoping to find you here. Interesting to see which hospital you ended up at today, my dear,” Lex said in a sugary tone, which Lois knew held more resentment than sincerity. She also noted, with approval, that every word he said was said in a painful voice.
Lois took a deep breath, knowing what she was about to do would be hard, but she had a feeling why Lex was at this hospital, and she had to try.
“Lex, I know that today you tried to k-kill Superman,” she spit out, trying very hard to sound like that idea wasn’t torture for her. “I have to say, I wish you had told me about it, I think I really could’ve helped.”
“Right, Lois, you would have helped kill Superman,” Lex said, quietly, as more of an accusing statement, as if knowing she was lying.
“He broke my heart, Lex! I am completely serious!” Lois said, knowing he was doubting her. “I…” she was looking for a way to keep him away from Clark without seeming suspicious. “I am glad you seem all better.”
“Why’s that?” Lex asked, looking like he was growing impatient.
“Well, it IS our wedding night,” Lois said, her tone suddenly seductive.
Lex had started to walk away, but stopped. He looked at her skeptically, although he seemed a little turned on at the same time…
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