Author's note: This section of the story is set after the close of the movie "Superman Returns". That is, Superman has been away on a trip to Krypton for five years, and has come back to Earth to find that Lois Lane has a son. And he is that child's father.

Credit also to EllenF for her excellent fanfic, "Shades of White" (see her website at ellyfanfiction.blogspot.com ) where I stole the idea that Clark's hands healed overnight.

The flashbacks in this chapter reference the "Smallville" TV show episode "Perry".

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Aha! cried the inner reporter part of Perry. It was the part that recognized scoops, sifted out self-justifying shadowings from truthful fact, teased out hidden stories from mouths previously silent as the tomb. Perry suddenly felt more confident. They were on familiar ground.

Before he could start, Clark took the conversational lead.

"Perry?"

"Yes?"

"I'd like to ask you a few questions first." A firm tone, one that Perry wouldn't dream of disobeying.

"OK."

Clark fiddled nervously with his coffee cup, avoiding Perry's glance. "How did you figure it out?" He looked up and smiled at Perry. "I mean, about my second job?"

Perry answered honestly. "I was watching TV, they were playing Superman footage, and suddenly I just realized that Superman, um, looked familiar. I mean, it was obvious. He was you, just without the glasses."

"Um," said Clark. He took a sip of coffee and asked another question. "Perry, do you remember why you came to Smallville the first time? I mean, back when you were working for X-Styles?" Clark referred to the tabloid TV show, fabled for its "freaks and geeks" emphasis.

Perry frowned. He hadn't thought about that in years. He said slowly, "Well, I needed some quick crap to round out a show, and about three seconds on the Web showed me I could get filler here. You know, meteor freaks, strange powers, et cetera."

"And how did we meet?" Clark persisted.

"You…you…" Perry tried remembering. However it was they had met, it was in a gray fog at the back of his mind. He just couldn't recall it. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten that."

"And weren't you going to do a story on me?" Clark said intently.

That cleared away some of the fog. "Yeah! I was!" Perry said.

In an even tone, Clark asked, "Why?"

"Why? Uh, you were…um…" Perry floundered for an answer. It wasn't there.

"You don't remember, do you?" Clark asked.

"No," Perry confessed in a low voice. "I guess the drinking really got to me…you know, I was having blackouts at the end."

"What if I told you that you were doing a story on me because you saw me doing some weird stuff?" Clark challenged.

Perry closed his eyes. Something here seemed familiar…something teased at the edges of his brain. Without opening his eyes, he said, "Weird stuff? Go on."

Clark continued. "Stuff like appearing in front of you on the road, so that you ran into a telephone pole to keep from hitting me."

Perry rubbed his forehead. Now that Clark had said it, the memory sprang to vivid life. He'd been seriously drunk, and handling a map, a cell phone, and his flask all at once. Then this kid just…appeared…and he'd swerved in a panic.

"And a tractor falling out of the sky," Clark said, with a hint of a laugh.

God, how could he have forgotten that? He'd just raised his flask to his lips to take a drink when a thunderous crash announced the arrival of a tractor. Falling from the air, and shattering into a million pieces on landing.

"How could I have forgotten that?" Perry whispered. He shook his head in dismay.

Clark didn't respond to Perry's comment. "You remember the whole bungee-jumping off the bridge thing, don't you?" he prompted.

"I do remember that," Perry said stoutly. "I was faking a suicide attempt – I thought you'd show your powers." And why hadn't he? Perry asked himself. He'd have to ask Clark about that. But the fact remained that, at that time, Clark hadn't displayed any superpowers at all. Perry could still remember his shame at the thought that he'd almost killed them both. "You hung on a rope to save me….Your hands were bleeding…" And that's when I decided to change my life.

"But do you remember shaking my hand the next day, when you were leaving on the bus?" Clark said intently, leaning forward.

No, actually, Perry hadn't remembered that till Clark mentioned it. But now he did. "Your hands…they were healed," Perry said slowly.

Clark leaned back in his chair. "What made you realize…you know, about me, Perry?" he asked.

Perry stared back at him for a moment. "I saw some Superman footage on TV – a retrospective about all his – all your – greatest feats and rescues. And it was you. I mean, it was obvious." He frowned. "Why didn't I notice that before?" He turned to Clark. "Clark, ask me about people in the newsroom."

"Den McClain," Clark said obediently.

"Has a gambling problem, is in debt up to his eyeballs," Perry said.

"Louie Whitaker," Clark added.

"His mother just had a stroke, he and his wife are working on some long-term care," Perry said absently.

"Cheri Lemon," Clark continued.

"Our Mystery Diner – the word's getting out, though, and she won't be able to be a Mystery for much longer," Perry said. Irritated, he added, "She likes Thai food, always gives those restaurants a better review than they deserve." Then Perry said wonderingly, "I thought I knew a lot about the reporters in my newsroom. How come I didn't notice that Superman was working two desks over?"

Clark smiled slightly. He scratched his head. "Well, Perry…"

"Yes?"

"Three reasons." Clark ruffled his hair again, brought his hand down to his glasses and removed them. "First, Superman is an alien without friends or family. He wears a fancy getup. He doesn't have pictures of his mother on his desk. You really wouldn't expect him to be working two desks over." He leaned a little forward. "And people see what they expect to see."

"That's the truth," Perry conceded.

"Except you, Perry," Clark said. "You're a noticing kind of guy."

Perry shrugged.

"Secondly," Clark continued, "I've put a lot of thought and work into differentiating my two personas. Superman stands up straight, he's pretty humorless, doesn't say much. He's a little aloof. He talks in that deep baritone. And Clark – well, you know me, Perry. I slouch, I speak in kind of high tenor, I make small talk in the newsroom. I fall down a lot. I drop stuff. My tie falls into my coffee. I keep a picture of my mother on my desk." He smiled. "And I use my abilities to appear a split second after Superman leaves, so people think we're there the same time."

Perry hadn't thought about this, not being on the street chasing the Superman interviews. On reflection, though, he figured it would work. Subconsciously, people "knew" the impossibility of the quick change, even though consciously they understood that Superman had super-speed. But, since everyone saw Clark as human, they never gave a thought to the fact that he and Superman never appeared together – because Clark made it seem that they did.

"And thirdly…" Clark said, almost reluctantly.

"Yes?" Perry asked intently. His reporter instincts were tingling. "What?"

"Well…um…" Clark placed his glasses gently on the table. "You've been made to not notice." His gaze skittered away.

"Made notto?" Perry asked. He had a bad feeling about this.

Clark leaned back in his chair and sighed. "Look at the glasses."

Perry picked them up, ran his hands over the dorky black frames, looked through the thick lenses, grimacing at the blurry field of vision produced by the strength of the prescription. "OK, I've looked. What?"

Clark gave a thin smile. "They're sort of like me, Perry. An outward simplicity conceals inner complexity."

Perry must have gawked in incomprehension, because Clark leaned forward again and began speaking more rapidly.

"Advanced Kryptonian technology, Perry."

Perry gave Clark a disbelieving glance. "Go on."

"These glasses make it impossible for anyone to notice the resemblance between Clark Kent and Superman," Clark said flatly.

"OK," Perry said slowly. Glasses as a disguise? What a lame idea. Frankly, he would have laughed Clark out of the newsroom for saying that. If it hadn't been for the nagging in his mind – how had he failed to notice that Superman worked for him? Failed to notice it for not months, but years?

"I mean it, Perry," Clark said. "They put out some sort of field, or rearrange reality, or do something. But the end result is that no one connects Clark Kent and Superman. And biometric computer programs don't link the two. Fingerprints, retina scans, facial recognition programs – because of these glasses – " he gestured toward the innocent-looking frames – "Clark Kent's identity is secure. It works for profiling too," he continued. "Why doesn't anyone put Superman sightings on a map with pins? Why haven't they discovered a concentration around the Daily Planet building? Why no statistical analysis of Superman's appearances and rescues?" He pointed again at the glasses. "They make it so people just don't think about doing that."

Perry stared at the glasses. "How does it work? How do they do it?" he asked, a tinge skeptically.

"At first, I didn't know," Clark conceded. "When I took my five-year trip to Krypton – or where Krypton had been – " he grimaced. " – I had a lot of time to study. I learned a lot. I don't think I can explain it, Perry."

"Why not?" Perry asked, in his best bulldog-newspaperman voice.

"You ever taken a foreign language, Perry?" Clark asked.

"Yeah, why?" Perry asked, stumbling at the rapid change of subject.

"Then you know you have to study it for awhile, and after some time, if you get good, you eventually start thinking in it." Clark gestured to the glasses. "And sometimes there's a concept or object in the other language that we don't have in English." He smiled. "Since humans have a commonality of interests and possibilities, usually English just borrows the word for the new concept or object, when we need it."

"Uh-huh," Perry agreed.

Clark continued. "So, I learned to think in Kryptonian on my five-year mission. By the way, do you know that there was only one planetary language on Krypton?"

"No. Go on," Perry said shortly. Inwardly he was interested and he made a mental note to pump Clark about Krypton later on.

"Anyway, I learned how the technology behind the glasses actually works," Clark said. "But all the concepts behind it are in Kryptonian, and I can't translate them into English. It truly is alien technology. We just don't have the ideas, we don't have the right mindset, to understand it."

"I'm grateful for that we," Perry said wryly.

Clark looked abashed. "Well, I think of myself as an Earth native," he said softly.

A ghost of memory from the past swept through Perry's mind. "Clarke's Law," he murmured.

"What?" his companion asked.

"Clarke's Law. Those glasses are it," Perry said. "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Suddenly he found himself believing what his reporter had said. Absurd as it sounded, the glasses could serve as a disguise.

"Yep, that's it," Clark agreed. "And Kryptonian technology is pretty advanced. It amazes me sometimes, and I've become pretty familiar with it."

Perry gave a small chuckle. "I'd rather believe in magic glasses than believe that I was so stupid that I didn't notice you, um, were moonlighting for all those years."

Clark shrugged. "I'm sorry, Perry. You were made to not notice. Believe me, without that backup, I wouldn't have dared to go public."

Perry sat, thinking, for a moment. Thoughts clamored for attention. He grabbed the biggest one. "So why am I noticing now?" He stared Clark straight in the eye.

To his credit, Clark didn't flinch from the editorial glare. "Because I turned it off for you, Perry."

Perry leaned back and nodded slowly, mind awhirl. "Turned it off?" he murmured. Suddenly he found himself growing angry. "I'm sure that was great fun to you," he said bitterly. "Look at all the little humans missing the obvious. Just play with their minds, why don't you?"

Clark looked stricken. "It's not like that, Perry!" he cried.

"Uh-huh," Perry said skeptically.

Clark almost sputtered in his attempt to convince Perry. "It's really not like that! I didn't know at first – I didn't know!" He halfway got up out of his chair. "Jor-El just gave them to me and told me to use them! I didn't figure them out till now!"

Perry stared at the alien, refusing to think of him as Clark Kent right now. All he could feel was white-hot anger, growing larger as Perry realized slowly how much had been taken from him. He slammed his coffee cup down on the wooden table and got up. Clark made an abortive move to get up as well, stopping when Perry glared at him. Pacing around the room, Perry asked, "So I've been made not to notice. And I think you've taken some of my memories as well –isn't that true?"

Clark recoiled. Later on, Perry would laugh at the sight of the Man of Steel squirming in his chair.

"Yes," Clark said, almost too softly for Perry to hear. "I'm sorry." He tore his gaze away from Perry's and stared down into his coffee cup, his shoulders hunched, head down.

Perry thought about throwing something. He hadn't been this angry in a long time. He found himself grasping his coffee cup, knuckles white. He looked over at Clark, who had raised his eyes from his rapt concentration of the wood grain of the table. Clark sat quietly, making no move.

The anger drained from Perry as he realized that if he threw the cup at Clark, the younger man would not dodge, would take it. And it wouldn't hurt him anyway, Perry thought. At the thought, a reluctant smile twisted his lips. Am I in kindergarten here, anyway? Throwing coffee cups!

Clark interjected a murmured comment, solemnly. "I ask your forgiveness for that."

Perry made himself sit down. What Clark had said came back to him. He was still angry, not ready to forgive, yet. But enough of his ire had faded that he was willing to listen.

"Jor-El? You didn't know?" Suddenly, crazily, Perry found himself recalling I Love Lucy. In a fake Cuban accent, he said, "Clark, you've got some 'splainin' to do!"

Clark shrugged, and un-hunched slightly, realizing that Perry was at least willing to talk to him now. "OK, Perry," he said softly. "But I'll warn you now, it's a long story."

"I'm not going anywhere," Perry retorted. Then they both smiled as they remembered how they'd gotten to Smallville. That was the weirdest thing, thought Perry. How he could tell that he and Clark were thinking the same thing at the same time? Clark was alien and he was human. And yet they thought alike.

"You want more coffee?" Clark asked. At Perry's nod, he got up and poured. "Dinner? We never got to eat at the Delmar."

"You putting this off?" Perry challenged him.

"Um, yes," Clark admitted. "But I'll bet you're hungry." As if in reply, Perry's stomach gave a low growl. "We can get some carryout. I'll tell you over dinner. Chinese?"

Perry shrugged his shoulders. "Sure. But I eat meat. Don't get me any of that vegan crap that Lois likes. No tofu."

A ghost of a smile played on Clark's lips. "Cashew chicken? Mongolian beef? Pepper steak?"

"They all sound good," Perry agreed. "I like egg drop soup."

"OK," Clark said.

Perry had a second thought. "Will they deliver out here? To the farm?"

Clark cast a mischievous glance at Perry. "Oh, don't worry about delivery, Perry. I'll go and pick it up." There was a blur and a breeze. Perry's mouth dropped as Superman stood in front of him. "From China." And he was gone.

Perry stood, dumbfounded, as the screen door slammed closed. "That son-of-a-b!tch."