TO WAKE FROM DREAMS
PART 9
Clark landed on his balcony and entered his apartment. Quickly and quietly. Through the back. In hiding. Something he’d become quite accustomed to in his life… especially in the past month and a half.
It looked different than he remembered it from a month ago, when he’d slept there.
He looked around, sunlight cascading over his place, highlighting all the things he had been missing.
He supposed when he’d been there that night, he hadn’t noticed much. It was nighttime. It was dark. He hadn’t turned a light on. He had been completely drained. And he’d been there just to be there. Not to look around or to notice anything.
And in the morning he’d left quickly.
He took a step in. One red boot. The next.
He furrowed his eyebrows and looked around at the kitchen and the living room. He knew one thing for sure.
This was not the way he’d left his apartment the night he’d been killed.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Perry, I’m sorry I worried you. I already said that. But honest, it was just my emotions combined with bad expiration dates from stale and old food. I’ve been feeling pretty queasy all week. I need to go grocery shopping,” Lois explained, walking with Perry, who had insisted she do so because he said she looked like she really needed some fresh air.
“Lois, you could have malnutrition. Or at the very least, a stomach bug. The stomach flu. Something,” he said, his hands in his pockets, looking at her sideways. Studying her without being obvious.
A good reporter at heart.
Undercover and concerned. Acting casual.
“Perry, I really don’t think so. I think…” she trailed off. “I don’t know what I think,” she said, finding her thoughts moving at a dizzying pace that even she couldn’t get into her own head and make sense out of things.
“Your color looks a little better right now, but you still look a little green around the gills, honey.”
“I still feel a little nauseous, Perry, but it’s not unusual. I told you, I’ve been feeling like this all week. And this was the only time I got sick. I think I was just a little overwhelmed. You know I don’t like to even think about working anywhere else, don’t you?”
“I know, honey. I don’t like to think about it either. But I also don’t think your talent should be wasted or that you should spend the rest of your life holed up somewhere grieving. It’s a waste. I want you writing. Working. When you’re ready, that is. And wherever it is that you need to be, I’ll support it. As long as you stay…”
“… stay…” Lois said, urging him to continue.
“… in touch,” he finished, emotionally.
“Of course! I really am sorry I disappeared like that.”
“We were worried. We missed you. We wanted to help you. Lois, I think of you as mine. Like a daughter, I mean,” he said, looking at the pavement, stopping.
“Oh, Perry,” Lois said, tears falling for the first time in over a month for a reason besides the loss she felt so deeply. “You’re like a father to me, too. And you’ll always be one of my best friends. I will keep in good touch no matter where I go,” she promised. “I don’t think that’ll be anytime soon, though, so don’t worry.”
Lois looked away from Perry when she realized where they were.
Metropolis Hospital.
She looked back at Perry, wondering if he had intended them to go there. One look into his eyes and she knew. He did.
“Perry, I am not going to the hospital,” she said, almost laughing. She dried her cheeks with her sleeves. “I’m okay,” she said.
He did not look convinced.
“I promise!”
“Lois, honey, please.”
She looked at him, prepared to protest again. But when she saw the concern in his eyes and thought about how she had worried him for so many weeks and had not been a good friend to him in that time, she sighed and gave in.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Lois. He could sense her there. Smell her distinct fragrance. See her fingerprints all over the place.
Without a doubt he could tell she had been there.
He looked around and saw how messy the place was. It didn’t seem as if she’d stopped by for a minute or two. It looked like she’d *been* there. Like she… well, almost like she lived there.
She had clearly made herself pretty comfortable. Had she, he wondered, stayed there overnight a few times? Gone there to be close to him in her own way?
He sat down on the couch and put a hand through his hair, sighing. No wonder she wasn’t moving on or getting better. She kept going there. Trapping herself in him. In memories of him and of that time in her life in which they knew each other and were best friends.
She couldn’t begin to get over it if she was trapped like that.
He thought, for a moment, that maybe she had gone there at first, but hadn’t been back in awhile. But he immediately shook his head.
He could tell… could *sense*… that she’d been there recently. This morning, even.
And he’d seen her earlier. That look on her face.
It all made sense now.
She was trapped. It was written all over her face. She was wrapping herself tightly in memories to the point where she was draining any life that was left in her out.
She needed to know the truth. He was only too upset to realize things had come this far already without her knowing.
“Why didn’t I tell you?” he wondered as he headed into the bedroom to lie down for a moment. To wait for her to return.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“Tell me what?” Lois asked.
“What?” Perry asked, as if breaking himself out of a trance he’d been in.
Lois looked around the waiting room. She saw a man standing nearby, talking to someone.
“Nothing. I think I overheard someone else talking. I thought they were talking to me. Momentary confusion. I’m here. I’m fine,” she said nervously to Perry, who looked at her like she had ten heads.
That voice, though… it shook Lois to the core. She hadn’t overheard anyone; that much she knew. And she’d known, the moment she had instinctively answered Perry, that it had not been Perry’s voice.
It had been Clark’s.
She knew it.
His voice was in her head.
Ever since his death, his voice had been in her head constantly. She could remember exactly what it sounded like and thought of it often, never wanting to forget.
But sometimes, it felt closer to her than those other times. Sometimes it felt like he was whispering in her ear in a quiet, quiet room. And sometimes the message didn’t make any sense, which made her think it was more than her subconscious at work.
She didn’t know what was going on. It rattled her completely. And it soothed her at the same time.
“Lois Lane?” a woman’s voice called.
“Okay, Perry. A full exam, as promised, and then you’ll believe me that I am okay?”
“I’ll believe you then,” he promised, as she walked away.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Lois. She was everywhere. He could sense her and feel her and smell her everywhere. She had been sleeping in his bed. He knew that.
The moment he had lain down, he had realized it.
She had been sleeping there a lot.
He turned and saw the pillow next to the one he was lying on. A small dent in the pillow. The sheets flipped from when she had gotten out of bed.
Lying there, he felt sort of strange. Like he could feel something pricking at the corners of his subconscious.
Something like déjà vu… only something more than that.
He looked at the ceiling, feeling tired.
But the moment he decided to rest and he closed his eyes, they shot wide open again.
And he remembered what it was he’d been forgetting.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
“So doctor, can you please explain to Perry White that I don’t have the stomach flu or a stomach bug or malnutrition?” Lois said, sitting up, since the exam was over.
She had used the opportunity to have a complete exam, since she had been due for one soon anyway. And the doctor had declared a moment ago that she did *not* have any of those things Perry had been worried about.
“I’ll definitely tell him that,” Dr. Morgan said, putting a strand of her chin-length gray hair behind her ear, smiling. “Just as soon as I tell you what you do have.”
Lois felt nervous for a moment. If the doctor was going to tell her she had something horrible, something fatal, like cancer or something, she didn’t know what she’d do! She would WISH she had the stomach bug, for sure. As soon as her worries surfaced, though, they vanished a little. The doctor was smiling, after all. And doctors do not tend to smile before breaking something like that to someone. Unless they were trying to lessen the blow or something… make you think it’s nothing to worry about…
And the nerves were back, full force.
“What is it?” Lois asked, using every fiber in her body to restrain herself from grabbing the woman’s neck.
Dr. Morgan’s smile grew wider. “Why, you’re pregnant,” she said.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
Oh god. Oh god. Oh god. Oh god…
Clark was pacing around his living room. Only one thing was clear to him, and because of that one thing, he could only say, over and over, one thing.
“Oh god.”
They had made love.
He was sure of it.
That night. The night he had gone to sleep at his apartment.
She’d been there!
Every night after that night he had thought about it. But he had thought it a dream.
Hell, he had been dreaming even as it happened! Or he'd thought he'd been dreaming...
He hadn’t slept at all, pretty much, the week before, and had been beyond exhausted when he’d climbed into that bed.
How hadn't he noticed her when he climbed into the bed?!
He started to tremble as it all came back.
In the recurring ‘dream’ he had every night after that night, he had been lying there, darkness all around. He had reached instinctively for her, knowing, somehow, even in his sleepy state, she would be there, and she had come to him and rested in his arms. And then she’d whimpered and said his name.
And they’d kissed.
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