Title: The I's Have It
Author: SarahC.
Rating: PG
Summary: A re-write of the S2 episode, 'The Eyes Have It' in which Clark lets something slip-- and everything goes from there.
Feedback: yes, please! smile
Author's Note: I am so sorry for dropping off the face of the earth, as it were, but the holiday season kept me insanely busy so it's taken until now to finally finish up this part.
I was originally planning to have the 3rd part be the last but I've decided to split it up into two for length reasons. Part 4 should, barring any unforeseen acts of God, be posted within a few weeks.

Part Three

Clark hovered outside of Lois’s broken window, before he made a quick decision and landed in the alley beside her building and spun into his street clothes. He paused and then smiled as he kept his glasses in his pocket, not bothering to put them on, since there was no need to now, and hurried inside to Lois’s door.

Lois opened it immediately upon his knock. “Clark! I thought you were going to come in through the window.”

He shrugged and smiled. “I decided to come in the normal way.”

“I was just telling Martha and Jonathan what happened,” she explained as he stepped inside.

Martha leaped up and hurried to him the moment he appeared. “Clark, honey, so you’re alright now?”

He smiled and bent to kiss his mom’s cheek. “Yeah, mom, I’m fine. Back to normal. I tested out my x-ray vision on the way back from the police station and it’s normal too. Nothing to worry about.”

“Well, thank goodness,” Martha exclaimed fervently. “I was so worried.”

“I know you were. I was too,” he admitted.

“And Dr. Leit?” Jonathan spoke up.

“Is in jail,” Clark answered, “Along with his henchman. They’re likely to stay behind bars for a good long while.”

Jonathan nodded in satisfaction while Lois and Martha both smiled.

He met Lois’s eyes over his mother’s shoulder and felt a surge of warmth and sheer relief at being able to be completely honest with her now. No more misunderstandings, no more lies to come between them anymore… He knew, now, better than ever after this weekend, just how loyal a friend Lois was and how trustworthy—and he hoped, he suspected, her feelings for him were close to, if not the same as, what he felt for her… But they did need to talk—and if he knew Lois, she would still want to ream him out for not having told her the truth months ago.

He put his arm around his mother’s shoulder as he smiled down at her. “Oh, Mom, I was wondering on my way back, do you guys have your return tickets to get home or do you need a ride?”

“We didn’t get return tickets because we weren’t sure how long we would need to be out here,” Martha answered.

“I’ll fly you home then,” Clark said.

“Oh, thanks, dear. You take your dad home first; Lois and I will just chat for a while. I’m sure we’ll have lots to talk about.”

Clark wasn’t quite sure he liked the innocent smile on his mother’s face but couldn’t deny her request, only glanced at his father. “Ready then, dad?”

His father nodded and Clark stepped back from them to spin back into his suit, glancing quickly at Lois once he was done in time to note the quickly-concealed, open-mouthed look of shock on her face and he grinned at her.

Jonathan had already moved over to the window and opened it and in another moment, Clark had his arm around his father and they were off in the air, with a wave of goodbye for Martha and Lois.

Clark hadn’t missed the look his father had given him and so he wasn’t entirely surprised when Jonathan cleared his throat a little when they were well above the city lights.

“Um, Clark?”

“Yes, Dad?”

“Earlier, Lois mentioned that you were supposed to be spending the weekend with Mayson Drake and when we stopped off at your apartment to drop off our luggage, Jimmy told us that you were away this weekend too. Care to explain what happened there?”

He sighed. He should have expected this, he knew. “It’s a little complicated but basically, Mayson came over to the office a couple days ago and confessed that she liked me and then she must have asked me to spend the weekend with her.”

“You agreed?” Jonathan’s voice was purely curious and held no hint of condemnation or anything but Clark grimaced anyway. “I don’t mean to criticize and you’re a grown man, son, but we know how you feel about Lois and you’ve never said that you felt anything similar for Mayson Drake.”

“I don’t, Dad. Mayson’s a friend; I like her but that’s all. And the thing is that I, um, agreed to spend the weekend with her without knowing what I was agreeing to.”

“How did that happen?” Now Jonathan sounded amused.

“I was listening to Lois’s phone call so I had tuned out to what Mayson was saying and when she finished, I just agreed thinking that was the safest thing to do. And then later, when she mentioned something about picking me up, I was going to tell her but Lois was leaving to go meet Dr. Leit in the graveyard because he’d been the one on the phone and I was in too much of a hurry to follow her, plus Perry was there, so I couldn’t and then I forgot about it.”

“You should tell Mayson the truth about how you feel, son, and not allow her to hope, you know, unless you’re willing to give up on Lois entirely.”

Clark looked at his dad with a slight smile. “You know I couldn’t give up on Lois, Dad. She—she’s Lois—and there’s no one else like her…” he added softly, honestly.

Jonathan smiled. “That’s been made clear to me and your mother, even if we hadn’t already known it.”

“You’re not going to give me the ‘dissect me like a frog’ speech?” Clark asked.

Jonathan shook his head. “You’re a grown-up, Clark, and if you trust her, then we trust your opinion. Besides, we know how Lois feels about you and she’d never do anything to hurt you.”

Clark smiled as he and his father landed gently in the front yard of his home. “Thanks, dad.”

Jonathan, characteristically, shrugged off the thanks and only made a slight gesture with his head as he said, “You should probably get back to pick up your mother before she has time to tell Lois every embarrassing story she knows about you growing up.”

Clark grimaced. “Oh God.”

Jonathan chuckled. “You saw the look on your mother’s face. You should just be thankful that your mother doesn’t have any of your baby pictures to show Lois.”

Clark gave a visible shudder and lifted off the ground to hover a few feet in the air. “I’ll see you soon, Dad.”

Jonathan waved one hand and then stood watching as his son flew up and away, until he was just a speck of color and then gone altogether. He had seen Clark fly more times than he could count but it was the only one of Clark’s powers which never ceased to amaze him, the careless defiance of gravity.

He paused, remembering Clark’s explanation of how he’d ended up agreeing to spend the weekend with Mayson, and when he stepped inside the house, he was chuckling to himself.

~~~
Left alone, Lois smiled rather uncomfortably at Martha, who smiled serenely back, seeming completely untroubled. After a moment, Lois spoke up. “I hope you know that I would never tell anyone about Clark’s secret. I- I can understand why he wouldn’t want people to know and I’d never jeopardize him in that way.”

Martha leaned forward to put a hand on Lois’s arm briefly. “Oh, I wasn’t worried about that, Lois!” she exclaimed breezily. “I thought Clark should have told you the truth months ago and I’ve been wondering why he didn’t.” She paused and then asked, the smile fading slightly, “Are you angry at Clark for not telling you?”

“I-no- well, yes, I was, at first, and I guess I still am but I can understand that he wouldn’t want people to know because he’d never have a moment’s privacy.”

Martha nodded, her smile fading although her expression was still pleasant. “Plus, I’m afraid we might have made things worse because Jonathan’s told him his entire life that if anyone ever found out, he’d be locked up and dissected in a lab like a frog.”

Lois gasped a little. “But that’s terrible! Why would anyone--” she stopped, remembering the Superman protesters and even Mayson’s distrust of Superman and, worse, Jason Trask. She suppressed a shudder at the thought of that madman—although, come to think of it, he’d been right to think that Clark had some special connection to and knowledge of Superman!

“I wonder, now, if we didn’t make a mistake in emphasizing secrecy so much, if we didn’t hurt Clark somehow by making him feel like he could never really be accepted for who he really is. But we were so afraid, you see. We found a baby in a space-ship and he was ours, our son, and we just couldn’t bear to lose him.”

Martha’s words startled Lois enough so she thoughtlessly blurted out the questions that were beginning to well up in her mind, now that all the worry over Clark’s blindness had been allayed. “So you and Jonathan aren’t from Krypton? You found Clark as a baby? He really did grow up his entire life in Kansas?”

Martha smiled slightly, a hint of mischief entering her blue eyes. “Oh, in a lot of ways, Clark really is a farmboy from Nowheresville.”

Lois colored hotly at hearing some of her early words to Clark repeated back to her. “He told you about that?”

Martha laughed. “Don’t worry about it, Lois, we thought it was funny and Clark rather enjoyed it as well. We’re not that sensitive about where we’re from.”

Lois’s blush wasn’t subsiding. “I’m so sorry! And I hope you know I haven’t really thought that about Clark—or you—for a long time now. It’s just—Clark really does seem so much like a small-town kind of person. He trusts everyone; he doesn’t even like to lock his doors when he leaves his apartment! And he’s always polite and patient and usually cheerful, not like city people.” Lois stopped, realizing she’d been babbling when Martha’s smile widened.

“Clark loves to hear you babble,” Martha commented, inconsequentially, and surprise kept Lois silent for a minute, before she recovered.

“Lucky for him that he does because he’s been on the receiving end of it more times than I can count,” Lois responded lightly, trying to hide how flustered she felt at the knowledge that Clark apparently talked about her to his parents a lot. She cringed at the thought of some of the stories he could tell—had he—surely he hadn’t, he wouldn’t—have told them about the dance of the seven veils… She’d never be able to face Martha or Jonathan again if she thought they knew of that episode!

Martha sobered. “I wanted to talk to you before Clark returns because I thought you would have a lot of questions to ask about Clark, now that you know.” She paused but continued on with a slight smile at Lois’s unabashedly-eager nod. “We did find him as a baby in a spaceship. Jonathan and I certainly don’t have any super-powers; we’re just ordinary farmers from Kansas. For years, we thought he might be some sort of Russian experiment or something. It was a relief to discover a year ago where he was from.” Her expression softened and her gaze drifted to look unseeingly at a painting on the opposite wall as she continued, and Lois could tell that Martha was probably re-living some favorite moments of Clark’s childhood. “Clark seemed pretty normal when he was growing up, except he never seemed to get sick or hurt really. One time, he fell off a bicycle and broke his arm but the arm healed in the space of a week, which did seem strange, but we never mentioned it. And then—and then, when Clark was in middle school, he started developing his powers. It was a shock, at first, when he discovered each new one. I still remember the way Clark ran shrieking into the house when he set some hay in the barn on fire and then put it out with his breath, turning it into hay-icicles.”

Lois laughed and Martha smiled but then the smile faded as she continued on, more soberly, “It was a hard time for Clark. He loved sports but he quit playing them entirely for about three years in junior high and the beginning of high school because he was terrified of hurting someone accidentally with his powers, since he didn’t quite know how to control them yet. He withdrew into himself a lot, cutting himself off from his friends. He decided on his own and announced to us one morning that he would never tell anyone about what he could do—although I admit we encouraged him to make that decision with all our talk of what people would do if they knew about what he could do. He spent a lot of time on his own, brooding, in those years. We worried about him something terrible during that time, but he never gave us any trouble, still did his chores and kept his grades up—but we could see that he wasn’t happy. He built a tree-house for himself which he called the Fortress of Solitude and he practically lived in it for a while…”

Martha’s tone was matter-of-fact as she spoke, making it clear she wasn’t telling Lois this out of any desire to make Lois pity Clark, but Lois felt her heart clench with pity and sympathy for Clark as she listened. For the first time, it occurred to her how hard it must have been for him to have all these powers and not be able to tell anyone about them, how difficult it must have been for him to not give himself away, the sort of control he must exercise every waking minute of every day… He was, she had seen it from the first moment she met him, fundamentally an honest, open person, not given to prevarication or deceit of any kind (which she, foolishly, had mistaken for naivete and weakness before he’d proven her wrong)—and yet he had kept this enormous secret for his entire life, really. He could never completely trust anyone, always had to play a part, hide his true self. She thought about the Clark she thought she’d gotten to know over the past year and could only marvel at the realization that he was really an incredible actor, a chameleon. And she had thought he was such an open book…

He must have always felt alone, been lonely, Lois thought with a pang—and from someone who had experienced enough of that emotion to know it well enough never to wish it on anyone, the thought hurt her. To think of Clark, who seemed so friendly and so popular, who made friends everywhere he went, really being isolated and solitary…

“Why did he become Superman then and not just keep on hiding what he could do?” Lois asked, recalling her earlier questions.

“He’s always tried to help people with his powers; it was only when he invented Superman that it became easier because he could help openly without having to worry about not being seen or something.”

Lois straightened, suddenly remembering something Superman had said the first time she saw him. “Then were you the one that made his costume? He- he said his mother made it…”

Martha smiled rather proudly. “Yes, I made his costume. After he suggested the idea, I spent several hours having him try on different ideas, some more ridiculous than others, before we found this one that worked.” Her smile widened and she threw a glance at Lois that Lois could only describe as being distinctly mischievous and filled with humor as she added, “I told Clark when I saw him wearing it for the first time that no one would be looking at his face.”

Lois flushed but then had to laugh given how many times similar thoughts had crossed her mind when she’d first seen Superman—and the body revealed by that skin-tight costume.

Clark came in to Lois’s apartment via the still-open window to find a scene that simultaneously pleased and horrified him.

His mother and Lois were laughing together and just as he landed, Lois gasped out, “You didn’t!”

His mother nodded, still grinning. “Oh, I did.”

They both looked up at him, faces flushed with merriment, and he was suddenly filled with the disturbing certainty that whatever they’d just been laughing over definitely involved him.

He opened his mouth to speak but Lois forestalled him by glancing at his mother and inexplicably (to him, at least) saying, “You were right,” and for some reason, those three words sent them both off into another wave of laughter.

He threw a suspicious look at his mother—what had she been telling Lois?—and his embarrassment made his tone more curt than it otherwise might have been as he asked, “Ready to go, Mom?”

She looked up with a smile. “Yes, Clark.”

She and Lois both stood up and, as Lois appeared to hesitate, his mother rather impulsively hugged Lois and Lois returned the hug. Clark’s irritation vanished, his expression softening, at the sight of the two most important women in his life hugging. And a voice whispered in some corner of his mind, it looks like Mom is welcoming Lois to the family. He hastily cut off that wistful thought; that way lay too many dreams and longings which he really should not think of, not when things with Lois were still so uncertain.

His mother drew back and smiled at Lois, though she addressed herself to Clark. “Clark, you should bring Lois out with you sometime when you visit us.”

He glanced at Lois to see Lois glance quickly at him before she smiled, with obvious sincerity, at his mother, “I’d like that.”

His mother moved to stand beside him and he put his arm around her. He glanced at Lois with a quick, slightly uncertain smile. “I’ll see you soon, Lois.”

“Bye, Lois,” his mother chimed in.

“Bye, Martha.”

He had lifted off to hover in the air before Lois had finished and in another moment, they were out the window and in the air above Metropolis.

“What were you and Lois laughing about?”

“Oh, nothing too important. I was just telling her a little about how you first became Superman.” His mother’s reply sounded rather too airy and innocent for his comfort but Clark refrained from asking again.

A brief silence fell before his mother spoke up again. “She cares about you quite a bit, Clark. I’m so glad you finally told her the truth.”

“I didn’t really mean to tell her,” he admitted rather ruefully. “It just slipped out.”

Martha’s laughter was soft and lingered in the night air around them. “Well, I’m still glad you told her. And I know you are too.”

“Yes, I am,” he acknowledged. “I’ve hated having to lie to her, Mom.”

“Why haven’t you told her the truth long before now?”

“It’s- complicated,” he sighed. “I was afraid, for one thing, of how she’d react and somehow the time never seemed right. And then there’s been the problem of her feelings for Superman and her crush on him—that I, um, have almost encouraged lately with how I’ve acted around her as Superman. But it’s only recently that I’ve started to hope, just a little, that she might be getting to see me as something other than just a friend and I haven’t wanted to jeopardize that. I wanted her to love me as me before I told her.”

“Don’t be silly, Clark,” Martha scoffed. “Of course Lois loves you and I don’t mean as Superman either. She’s loved you for months now, Clark.”

His breath stilled in his chest but he couldn’t believe her words. “No, she doesn’t. Really, Mom, she hasn’t; I’d know.”

Martha didn’t respond but he could sense her disbelief of his words, her skepticism positively radiating off her.

“How angry at me is she?” he asked after a moment’s silence.

“Oh, I think she’ll forgive you,” Martha assured him lightly.

“Yes, but when?” he muttered more to himself than to her.

His mother laughed softly. “It’ll be fine.”

They landed softly in the front yard of his house before he could respond and he released his grip on his mother.

She hugged him tightly, an embrace which he returned, before he brushed a kiss on her cheek and stepped back.

“Goodnight, Mom.”

“Goodnight, Clark. You sure you don’t want to come in for a while?”

He shook his head and she smiled. “Of course you don’t, what am I thinking. You’ll want to hurry back to your Lois.”

He grinned at her, not bothering to deny or confirm her correct surmise. “I’ll see you soon,” he promised, his feet hovering about a foot off the ground, and waited for her answering nod and smile, before he turned his face away, heading towards the stars and back home towards Metropolis. From the ground, his ears picked up her softly-spoken words as she turned to go inside his house. “Oh, my boy…”

Unconsciously, his expression softened as it usually did when he thought of his parents, but then his thoughts moved, inevitably, back to Lois and the talk (fight?) they were going to have. His expression became slightly grimmer as he continued his flight—towards home and towards Lois.