Okay, remember how I've been listing disclaimers for these parts - they totally apply for this one:
"All opinions, attitudes, and characterizations expressed in this fic belong solely to DJ and should not reflect in any way on Sue - poor Sue" -- Ha ha ha!
Also, everyone reading please keep Sue in mind. She is
still sick - poor thing. Feel better, Sue!
And here we go -- hope you enjoy!
From Part Two:
“I can’t ‘spin’.” He sighed and sat down on her bed again. “My powers don’t seem to be working properly right now.”
“What do you mean not ‘working properly’?”
He winced. “Not at all.”
“Really? I guess that would explain why you couldn’t get out of that closet by yourself then.”
“Yeah.” His wince turned into a grimace. “I don’t understand any of this.” He spread his hands in front of him, gesturing at the DVD box. “But putting that to the side, what happened to my powers? How did I get here? And how do I get back?”
Sue’s head was beginning to hurt again. This situation was a little more difficult to solve than just your every day, run of the mill, plot hole. She could write herself out of a corner any day of the week, but take her pen away from her and where did that leave her? She was used to writing *about* Clark, not conversing with him. And he had caught her off her game.
She needed a shower to clear her head – in more ways than one. When she was sick, she always felt a little more human after she had a shower.
“Clark, stay put, I’m gonna take a quick shower and then we can try to figure this out.”
***********
PART THREE
***********
Sue stepped out of her shower, wrapping one towel around her body and another around her head. She had never really bought into the premise that you could get sick from a wet head – but she was pretty sure a wet head didn’t help someone who was already sick.
She had opted not to take a cold shower for that same reason, even though she probably could have used one.
As she moved to her mirror she noted with satisfaction that she looked much better than before, her cheeks even had a little color in them. She wasn’t sure if that was because Clark was sitting just outside the door - on her bed - waiting for her to come out, or if it was simply due to the effects of the hot water.
She wiped under her eyes, making sure that the darkness she saw there was from being sick and not from any traces of old mascara – no such luck. She should have known - she hadn’t even worn any mascara since she’d been sick. Oh well, the damage had been done anyway. Clark had already seen her at her worst – sick, frumpy, and wallowing in a bottle of Nyquil.
Sue gave herself one last glance and then stepped away from the mirror. She’d look even better once she dried her hair, applied a little make-up, and put on her “good jeans” – the ones that hadn’t shrunk because of repeated trips through the dryer and so still fit nicely...
Jeans? Crap! She hadn’t brought any clothes into the bathroom with her. She had been in such a fog that she had completely forgotten that she’d need clean clothes to put on after her shower. Ugh!
She looked down at her pajamas lying rumpled on the floor in one corner and curled her nose in disgust. She didn’t want to put those back on, not after she was nice and clean.
But she couldn’t go out there in nothing but a towel, could she?
Well, Clark had answered his door for Lois in nothing but a towel, after all. And it wasn’t like she had planned this. She didn’t do it on purpose.
Would he buy that? Did she?
Sue sighed softly to herself. She was now relating her life to a television show.
She walked to the door and put her hand on the doorknob. Should she make an announcement? Give him fair warning? ‘Clark, I’m coming out in nothing but a towel.’
No. No that just seemed silly. They were both adults. She would just go out there like it was nothing out of the ordinary and grab her clothes... and then scurry back in here as fast as she could.
Sue turned the knob and lightly threw the door open. “Hi, Clark, just gotta get some...” She broke off when she saw him toss her writing notebook a couple of feet away from him on the bed. His face had guilt – the color of crimson – stained on it.
She looked away before he could meet her gaze. Oh god. What had he been reading in there? Which story? Which part of which story?
Duh.
She knew just which snippets that notebook contained. It was obvious from the look on his face and the shade of his skin what he had been reading. How long had he been reading it? The whole time she had been in the shower? She had taken a long shower, he could have read a lot in that time span.
Sue wanted to crawl into the deepest, darkest hole she could find. How embarrassing! It was one thing to share the stories she wrote online – it was a completely different thing to have someone happen upon them like this... Especially when that someone was Clark.
It had been bad enough when she had misplaced her notebook a few weeks ago and had been afraid she had left it at work. She hadn’t even wanted to *imagine* that someone might have found it.
Luckily it had turned up – no harm done. Until now...
Well, what was done was done, and saying something about it was only going to draw further attention to it. “Just let me throw on some clothes and dry my hair and I’ll be right back,” she told him, noting with pleasure that he had averted his eyes and his blush had deepened.
**********
Sue definitely felt more human now. She was clean, she felt fresh – she could even breathe better. Now she could handle things. Now she could get down to brass tacks and figure out what had happened and how it had happened.
This time when she came back into her bedroom, Clark was sitting innocently on the end of her bed, staring thoughtfully down at something in his hands.
As she came closer, she saw him quickly pocket a small black box. She knew what it was. So, was this incarnation of Clark from season three? Before he had proposed to Lois?
“It’s a very pretty ring,” she said softly. “Have you asked her yet?”
Clark looked up at her, his eyes wide and soulful. “How did you...?” He shook his head. “Yes. Yes, I asked her.”
“And she turned you down.”
He nodded, sighing softly. “She said she needed some time. I gave her time but then...”
“You broke up with her for her own good.” Sue was getting a serious case of déjà vu.
“How do you know all that?”
Hadn’t they already been through this? She pointed towards the DVD’s.
“No,” he told her, picking up her notebook from where it still sat on her bed. “How do you know this?” He held up her notebook.
“Excuse me?”
“This is your notebook, isn’t it? Did you write what’s in it?”
Her face flushed furiously. “Yes. Look, I...”
“Are you psychic?”
“What? No! No, I’m not psychic,” she assured him. “I just wrote stories based on what I knew about you and Lois.” She gave him a small smile. “Glad to know they were so close to how you really felt, though.”
“Close? No, they weren’t close,” he said with an odd expression on his face. Sue couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. She had been told that she wrote good characterizations, it was a little deflating to hear this coming directly from Clark.
“No,” Clark continued. “They were exact. Every minute detail of what I read was exact - every reaction, every feeling.”
Sue felt her eyebrows shoot up. “But that’s not possible. *I* wrote these stories. That’s all they are, just stories – from *my* mind.”
Clark was shaking his head. “No, Sue. I lived these moments. I had these thoughts. I felt these feelings.”
That was the first time Clark had said her name, “Sue”, and it sent little tingles all through her. She had been trying her best not to act like a star struck fan and drool all over him, but that single utterance from his lips was almost enough to do her in. She had to fight for control of her mind. How was this possible? How could he have lived the things she had written?
She needed to test that theory a little further. Test his knowledge of what she had written. A few choice scenes popped into her mind and she dismissed them quickly before they were allowed to blossom onto her face in the form of a blush. After a few moments she had her question.
“What happened after you broke up with Lois?”
“Don’t you already know?” he asked defensively.
“Just go with me on this, Clark. I’m trying to help you.”
He sighed and let his gaze drop down to his lap. He wouldn’t look at her as he said his next few words. “It broke her heart. She wouldn’t talk to me. She stayed coldly aloof. It was awful.” When he looked back up at her, his eyes were full of pain.
Sue felt sorry for him. She truly did. It was one thing to watch the episodes or read stories about what an idiot Clark had been, but to see him here, like this. To see the hurt in his face, the agony in his eyes – it was a little humbling. “I don’t mean to sound insensitive, but that’s not what I meant. What happened... later?” Sue asked, fishing a little further.
“Perry sent us out on assignment together. He was thinking of trying this couples’ therapy thing with Alice. We camped and hiked.” He grinned. “Lois complained that I wouldn’t use my super powers to cheat so that she could beat the other couples.”
A creepy feeling was crawling up the back of Sue’s neck.
Clark rubbed his temples. “What was the name...? Elliot Outfitters. That was it.”
No. No it couldn’t be! “So you don’t remember anything about a place called the Larry Smiley Institute?”
Clark frowned. “Well, actually, now that you mention it, yeah. It does sound familiar.”
This was getting too weird. “What do you remember?”
Clark closed his eyes. “Larry Smiley ended up being crazy, right? He thought he could flood the Earth. Lois and I figured out what he was up to when we found that old book in his office.” He smiled again, a little bigger this time. “Lois was upset because Larry didn’t think we were compatible.” His forehead wrinkled in concentration and then his eyes flew open. “We kissed! We made up! But – I don’t understand. How...?”
Sue held up a hand to silence him while she thought. Her head hurt. How could he know what had happened at the Larry Smiley institute *and* what was happening in *her* story? They happened at roughly the same time. Her story was a ‘rewrite’. This didn’t make any sense.
“So where were you right before you ended up in my closet? What’s the last thing you remember?”
“I had been at that retreat, camping with Lois. But then I was back at my apartment.” His eyes glazed over for a moment. “I can’t really remember any of the details. It’s hazy.”
“But that doesn’t make any sense! You were camping. You had *camping* stuff on. Not a dress shirt, tie and slacks!” she exclaimed in frustration, pointing at his clothes. That couldn’t possibly be the last thing that he remembered.
He looked down at his clothes and shrugged. “Don’t ask me. All I know is that’s the last thing I remember.” Then he frowned and shook his head softly. “No. That’s not true. I also remember packing.”
“Packing?” she asked. Then she had a thought. “You weren’t possibly packing a pillow for Lois and grabbing that ring box?”
“No. No, I was packing for our trip to the Larry Smiley Institute. I remember. We were going to leave the next day.” He reached up and rubbed his temples. “That doesn’t make any sense. Why would Perry have sent us to both places? How can I remember doing both? Am I going crazy?” He eyed her curiously. “What happened right before I showed up here?”
“What happened to me?”
He nodded.
“Not much. I was home sick from work. I had taken some Nyquil, popped in a DVD and fallen asleep,” she paused as realization dawned on her. “Until the doorbell woke me up. I had gotten a delivery. A pen.” She reached over and grabbed the pen from where she had left it lying. “This pen.”
Clark took the pen and examined it. “Doesn’t look like anything special.”
“No, but I got the strangest card with it and I have no idea who sent it.”
“What did the card say?”
Sue looked around until she spotted the card. She picked it up and read the card out loud.
“To a good friend: May your writing never cease - may your joy always increase. If your heart is wanting and it lacks desire, if you find your circumstances are quite dire – you’re but a pen-stroke from igniting a fire.”
“Weird, huh?” she asked him.
“Yeah. What were they trying to tell you?”
“I’m not sure.”
“So that’s it? That’s all that happened?” he sounded disappointed.
“Well a friend of mine sent me an instant message.” Off of his confused look, she continued, “It’s like e-mail but you don’t have to wait for it. You can see it instantly and can converse.” He nodded his understanding. “Anyway, she was just checking on me and I told her I wished I wasn’t sick. But here’s the weird thing – she asked me what I *really* wished.”
“And what did you say?”
Sue blushed and hesitated for a moment before answering, “Um, that I had Clark Kent in my closet.”
He looked at her in astonishment, and then a blush began to creep across his face as well.
“It’s not what you think. I mean, well, maybe it is. It’s just that there’s been this long running joke that I had Clark Kent hidden away in my closet. And I was just teasing her... And, oh, I really wish I could hide somewhere right now.”
He flashed her a smile, his blush deepening, and then he cleared his throat. “And that’s the last thing that happened before you woke up to find me in your closet?”
“Yeah,” she said, nodding. She looked down at the pen in her hand again. “Wait. I wrote that sentence down with this pen.”
“Which sentence?”
“Uh, you know – the, uh, closet sentence.”
“I thought you said you typed it to your friend in that message?” he asked, looking confused.
“Yeah, I did. But I was playing with my new pen and I wrote that sentence down before I typed it out to her.” She opened her notebook to the page she had written it on and showed it to him.
“Write something else with it.”
“Huh?” Sue looked up from her notebook to see Clark staring at her intensely.
“Write something else with it. You know, “wish” for something else.”
“No. That’s crazy. You don’t think...” she broke off, realizing that he was serious. “This pen doesn’t grant wishes. That’s just...”
“Impossible?” he asked. “Just like it’s impossible that you would wake up to find *me* in your closet?”
She nodded, speechless.
“Look, Sue...” There was her name again, making her feel all giddy. She tried to focus so she wouldn’t miss what he had to say. “I can’t stay here. I need to get back to my life - I need to get back to Lois. There’s so much I need to tell her, apologize for. And if there’s a chance that pen could do it, then I say we test it out.”
Sue looked down at the pen she held in her hand. “All right,” she said, not able to repress the disappointment she was feeling. Now that he was *really* here, there was so much she wanted to ask him. There were so many things she wanted to know. How he had really felt during certain periods of his relationship with Lois – like when Lois told him that she just wanted to be friends and then asked him to fetch Superman for her and finally ended up accepting Lex Luthor’s proposal?
Part of Sue was sorry that Clark hadn’t come from later in the series – maybe even from sometime in season four – then she could have asked him what he had been thinking during that whole “clone/amnesia arc”. And there were other things too, things she wanted to know...
Her thoughts were interrupted when Clark took her hands in his. “Sue, please, you have to help me. Help me get back to Lois.” She looked down at their joined hands and was amazed at the difference in size. His hands made hers look so small and delicate. His hands were so strong, and yet there was such gentleness in the way he held her hands in his.
She could only imagine how Lois felt when Clark held her with those hands, touched her with those hands. How it felt to have him cup her face before he kissed her.
Sue looked up into his dark eyes and smiled softly at him. “You want me to *test* the pen?” He nodded.
She knew she really shouldn’t write what she was thinking about writing, but she just couldn’t help herself. This would be her only chance, and it was the chance of a lifetime. She just had to know...
She had to know what it would feel like to be kissed by Clark.
She picked up her pen and put it to the paper, holding the notebook at such an angle that he couldn’t see it. She wrote her sentence and then put the pen down, laying the notebook face down on her bed.
Clark reached out to pick up the notebook, but Sue reached out to stop him. “No.”
“No?” he asked. His face was very close to hers and it caused her to swallow involuntarily.
“I mean, it might not come true if you see what I’ve written. You know how they always say that a wish won’t come true if you tell someone what you wished for.”
Clark’s eyes seemed to darken a little, all of the sudden, and it made her stomach do a long, slow slide. “Is that what they say?”
She nodded at him.
“What else do they say?” he murmured softly, moving a little closer to her.
Her mind whirled. “They say that opportunity often knocks but if you’re not listening then it’s really just noise.”
“Really,” he said, his voice growing huskier. “I haven’t heard that one before.”
Sue’s mouth felt suddenly dry. Clark’s lips were just inches away from hers. Oh god. Maybe that pen really was magic. “That’s because I just made it up,” she said softly.
She watched his hand as it reached up to clutch her face tenderly. She felt the softness of his skin against hers, the warmth of his breath as he drew her in closer. She closed her eyes.
**********
To be CONCLUDED (I think - I think I can wrap this up in one more post - <g>)
