From Part 3 –
“I know I can’t ask you to forgive me,” he whispered. “But I would do anything, anything in the world for a chance to fix this. Just tell me what I should do. Please?”
Anything you like, Lois. You can ask for anything you like. Anything…
A long sob escaped her lips. And she knew, right then, that there was only one thing she could say.
“Just hold me, Clark. Hold me and never let go.”
~.~.~.~.~
Part 4 -
For a second, Clark thought he might have misunderstood. She had asked him to hold her when he had half-expected to be told to let go of her. This was his second chance, he knew, and he was being handed it on a silver platter, no less. A chance to redeem himself and make up for his errors.
“Always,” he said softly. He hugged her even more tightly against him, gently smoothing a hand on her back.
Always…
As hurt and angry as Lois had been a moment ago, this one word had the power of melting all the pain and the anguish away. And even though she wasn’t quite ready to blindly forgive everything yet, for just a second she let herself forget and grasp at the dream of sharing “always” with him. Lois wrapped her arms around his waist and buried her face in the crook of his neck, sighing contentedly.
“I’m so sorry I hurt you,” he whispered.
As Clark begged her forgiveness once more, it occurred to Lois that she had hurt him as well over the last year. She had hurt him more than once.
She thought back to that morning in the park when Clark had poured out his heart to her in an attempt to stop her from marrying Lex Luthor. She had turned him down immediately, without so much as a second thought. That evening, she had hurt him even further by telling Superman she would love him even if he were an ordinary man. It was obvious now why he had said that, under the circumstances, he just couldn’t believe her. She had rejected the ordinary man that he was, just a few hours before!
She looked up, an apologetic expression gracing her features. “I hurt you too, didn’t I?” she asked, in a soft, regretful voice. Seeing him frown, as if unsure what she meant exactly, she continued. “Last year… You know, after the Planet blew up? That night I said I’d… uh, I said I’d love you even if you were just an ordinary man.”
“It’s OK,” he said, shaking his head. “You couldn’t have known.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me? That day?” she wondered.
“I couldn’t tell you, then, Lois. I needed to know that you would choose the ordinary guy hiding under the Suit. And… you didn’t… You were after a fantasy. He’s not really me, it’s just… something I can do. And I couldn’t stand the idea that you would have force yourself into accepting someone you barely even tolerated, for the sake of living out that fantasy.”
“Barely tolerated? Is that… Really?” she said, surprised. “Is that what you thought? No… It wasn’t like that at all. It was never like that. It’s just… it was… complicated. For what it’s worth, when it came right down to it and I actually had to make a choice, I picked the ordinary guy. I know it took me forever to sort my feelings out and even then I wasn’t able to face them until the very last second, but in the end, I chose you, Clark. Not Superman’s powers. Or someone else’s billions. I chose you.”
“Billions? What do you mean?” he asked, somewhat startled by her admission. “When was…?” Clark tried to figure it out as he spoke, but he just couldn’t come up with a reasonable explanation. When had Lois ever chosen anyone over Lex Luthor? She would have married the man if he hadn’t been arrested right in the middle of their wedding!
“You know…” She shrugged and looked away, suddenly ashamed that she had waited until the absolute last second to make up her mind at the time. “For richer or poorer, until death do you part? The place where people usually say ‘I do’? I said I couldn’t.”
“Wait… What are you saying?” By now, he was completely taken aback. She’d said what? How was that possible? Could it mean…?
“I couldn’t go through with it. I kept thinking of you and… I just couldn’t say ‘I do’. Not to him.” Lois looked up at Clark, a shy smile tugging at her lips. He smiled back, a mix of happiness and surprise obvious in his eyes. He was about to say something when suddenly he tilted his head to the side, his expression changing to one of careful concentration. Lois frowned as she recognized that look. She’d seen it often; it usually preceded some sort of lame excuse that would enable him to run away from her. Except this time, she had finally understood what it meant. Someone was calling for help.
“No,” he whispered, frowning as well. They were in the middle of a conversation – an important one! Couldn’t the world leave him alone just a few more minutes, he wondered? Just this once?
“What is it? What do you hear?” Lois asked, concerned.
“There’s been an avalanche.”
She quickly let go of him. “Well, go!” she told him. Having noticed his hesitation, she nodded encouragingly, although the movement reminded her how much of a headache she still had. Lois brought a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes tightly, trying to block out the pain.
“Are you OK?” he asked. It was his turn to look concerned, now. Avalanche or not, if Lois wasn’t all right, he wasn’t going to leave her. He’d gotten his priorities wrong long enough as it was. She was far too important to him to keep playing second fiddle to the rest of the known universe. He wasn’t going to be relegating her to second place any longer.
“It’s just a headache,” she replied, “I’ll be fine. Go!”
Clark took a step back, a look of sincere regret in his eyes. Lois nodded again as if to say she understood and forgave his running out on her. He turned and started making his way towards the door.
“Clark?” she called just as he was about to step outside. It was still somewhat strange to call him that, seeing as though he was wearing the Suit… but calling him Superman sounded just too distant now. Besides, it obviously wasn’t his name – she was the one who had come up with it.
“Be careful,” she told him when he turned to look at her. It seemed like something normal to say before the words were out, but once she’d said them she realized how futile it was to caution Superman against getting hurt.
“I will,” he promised, letting her catch a quick glimpse of a warm smile before he disappeared through the front door with a familiar ‘whoosh’ sound.
Left alone in the cabin, Lois took off her coat and boots, feeling rather silly for having put them on in the first place. Running away wouldn’t have solved anything, she knew – it only would have made things worse. No matter… she hadn’t stormed out and things looked much brighter now than they had when she’d first launched into tornado mode. There were issues left to resolve, obviously – she couldn’t let him off the hook that easily, could she? At least now they could try and work through things like sensible adults.
The fire was slowly dying so she threw in some more wood, hoping that it would be enough for a while. Peering out the window at the morning sun, Lois saw her Jeep now looking like it were just a huge heap of snow. She shuddered at the thought that this might have been her coffin. Carbon monoxide poisoning, Clark had said. She’d heard of people dying from it because they’d been sitting in a running car inside a closed garage, but outside in the open? Who knew?
She marveled at the fact that once again, Superman had snatched her from the jaws of death. She remembered several other occasions when he had swooped right in to save her. No wonder he always found her just in time; he basically always knew where to find her to begin with!
Things made so much more sense to her, now that she knew. She finally understood why he had handed in his resignation during the heat wave, last winter; why the pheromone compound hadn’t seemed to have any effects on him; how he had been able to stand up to – and pretty much overpower - that Superman clone.
It was going to be strange to have to think of Clark and Superman as one and the same from now on. He had been two different men for so long – and he really was different depending on which side of himself he was supposed to be at the time. Even the tone of his voice and the look in his eyes was different. While one was serious and strong, detached and authoritative, the other was gentle and lighthearted, caring and considerate.
Everything Lois knew about him – everything she had ever taken for granted about Clark and Superman – needed to be reevaluated. He wasn’t just a partner and a friend, he was the guy who flew in and saved the day. Literally flew in. He was all of that. Everything. She just needed to find a way to put both sides together in her head, now.
The one really disturbing thing was that she’d never noticed anything before; she’d never figured him out. She was an award winning investigative reporter, wasn’t she? How could she have missed all the clues? She’d seen through the flimsy excuses he used to run off at the first sign of trouble – at least far enough to know they weren’t real. Maybe she just trusted that he’d tell her the truth about those eventually?
Lois rolled her eyes as she recalled the time he – as Superman – had told her he read her work. AH! Edited her copy, would have been more like it! In fact, come to think of it, Superman had walked away with a Kerth award, this year. Now that was just plain odd!
Shaking her head at strangeness and the irony of this new situation, Lois went rummaging through her bag for some aspirin and something to change into. A few minutes later, having donned the comfy flannel pajamas she had brought along, she padded to the kitchen, a couple of aspirin in her hand.
She made herself some toast, thinking it would be best not to take the caplets of aspirin on an empty stomach. Unfortunately, her stomach was less than happy to be fed and after a couple of bites, Lois started feeling queasy and lightheaded. She pushed the toast aside, left the kitchen and crawled into bed, feeling utterly drained, miserable and strangely lonely as well.
~.~.~.~.~
When Clark came back, it was late morning already. Lois was in bed, sound asleep, hugging a pillow in her arms. The sight of her there warmed his heart immensely. For the first time since he’d put on the Suit, he was coming back to someone he would be able to talk to about the rescue he had been away on. Oh, he had his parents he could talk to – in fact up until now, he had never had anyone else on earth he could talk to in the first place - but it just wasn’t the same. Grown men did not go running back home to their folks when they’d had a bad day. Especially grown men who happened to moonlight in flashy tights and saved the world on an almost daily basis.
Obviously this wasn’t anything like coming back home to someone, though. This was just him coming back to a place where someone he could talk to just happened to be at the time. But this was Lois and even if it wasn’t the same - and probably just a one-time thing anyway - there was no other someone in the world that he would have rather come back to. Especially right now. For as fast and strong as he was, the avalanche had been a lot more powerful than he. And far more destructive.
Of course, Lois was asleep and talking to her would have to wait, but that didn’t matter. He’d wait. He could survive a few more hours of being alone with his thoughts, his regrets and his feelings of guilt. He had a lot of practice in that department, didn’t he?
He spun out of the Suit and into a pair of jeans and a black woolen sweater before going over to place some more wood in the fire. He had a quick look at the bookcase next to the fireplace and smiled as he noticed a copy of “To Kill a Mockingbird”. He’d read it a thousand times or more, but he picked it up anyway. Taking a seat on the sofa in front of the warm fire, he opened up the book…
“When he was nearly thirteen, my brother Jem got his arm badly broken at the elbow.”
~.~.~.~.~
Clark slowly read through the pages, his mind wandering off every other sentence. To the people he’d saved that morning and to the people whose cold, dead bodies he had dug out from under the snow.
It wasn’t the first time this had ever happened – that he hadn’t been quick enough or strong enough to save everyone – but that didn’t make it any easier to live with. If anything, it got even harder with each new life lost. Living with the fact that there were times when there just wasn’t enough of him to save everyone would never be easy. He’d known it since the start.
But this time it was different and he felt an indescribable amount of guilt over the death of some of these people. If he had been more careful they would still be alive now. This time, he was the one to blame. He had made a bad decision; it had cost them their lives.
He’d barely gotten halfway through the second chapter when he heard the rustling of bed sheets. He tilted his head back and to the side, resting it against the back of the sofa. Lois was waking up.
“Hey,” he said softly as they made eye contact.
“Hey,” she replied, in a thick, sleep laden voice.
Getting out of bed, Lois walked over to where Clark was sitting. She let herself sink into the big comfy sofa. She still felt somewhat queasy, but at least the headache seemed to have passed, she realized with a great deal of relief.
“How’s your head?” he asked. He turned to face her, sitting with his back against the arm of the sofa. As overwhelmed with guilt as he was, seeing her there – alive and well, for one, but just seeing her there at all – helped dull the ache a little.
“A lot better,” she said. He smiled, but Lois noticed the sadness in his expression. “Are you OK?” she asked, frowning. Something was wrong, she thought. He looked about as sad now as he had when she had been throwing all his sins back to his face, earlier. Something must have happened, because she clearly remembered the glimpse of happiness she’d seen in his eyes before he had heard the call for help - when she had started to explain that she had preferred him to Lex, turning Luthor down at the altar, no less.
As much as he wanted to – needed to – talk about everything that had happened, Clark found he just couldn’t. The words wouldn’t come out, the images stayed stuck in his head, unable as he was to describe them and put the feelings into words. He resorted to closing his eyes and shaking his head dejectedly. The book he was holding slid down to the floor.
“What happened?” Lois asked. Clark needed someone to be there for him, that much was obvious. She’d just have to get over the fact that she was a little angry with him still and be that person.
She came to sit closer to him and stroked his arm gently. She knew it couldn’t possibly be enough to soothe him – things had to be really bad for him to look so affected, she guessed. Clark was one of the few people she knew who constantly looked at life in a positive way, with a bright smile on his face. This must have been awful.
“There was this family – parents and two little boys, eight or nine years old – they were out on a cross-country ski trail when the avalanche started,” he explained. “I got them out of harm’s way and left to check if there was anyone else out there. The snow kept on sliding down the mountainside. It looked like it would never stop. And then…” He stopped and looked away, trying to push the images out of his mind.
“Tell me,” she encouraged him when he looked at her again.
Lois never quite recalled seeing him this way before. She had rarely ever seen Superman after a tough rescue, anyway. And Clark just always seemed his usual happy-go-lucky self. Unless… did part of his disguise include keeping up appearances, even through the pain? Was this what life was like for him? Coming to everyone’s rescue and having to turn around and pretend that it didn’t affect him at all?
“I… I thought they would be safe there,” he explained slowly.
Suddenly, Lois understood. Even though he had left this family somewhere they would be safe while he went off to help someone else – probably even digging people out of the snow – they were again caught by the sliding snow as the avalanche continued.
“It wasn’t you fault,” she told him. “It’s not your fault. You didn’t cause the avalanche,” she insisted, when he looked like he was going to tell her otherwise.
“I know. It’s just… they counted on me to take them somewhere they’d be safe. I thought I had, but I was wrong. They died. All four of them. Two little boys and their parents. Dead. I saved them only so they could die five minutes later.”
“You did everything you could, everything you thought you should,” Lois told him reassuringly.
“But it wasn’t enough,” he said, shaking his head again.
Lois had explained to him once that it didn’t matter what he couldn’t do, that what he could do was enough, but it occurred to her that maybe believing it might not be quite as easy to him. She didn’t know how else to convince him of it than to repeat it.
“For a lot of these people, it was more than enough, Clark. You did everything you could possibly do,” she said, as she smoothed her hand on his arm some more.
Clark placed his hand over hers and squeezed it gently. He said nothing, just nodded sadly. The look of sorrow in his eyes was just heart wrenching. He seemed so vulnerable, so alone. What could she do, Lois wondered, how could she help? She had often suggested that she would be there for Superman when and if he ever needed a friend, but now that she found herself in this exact position, Lois wasn’t really sure how to go about it at all. But then it occurred to her that while she might not know exactly how to help a superhero, he was still just Clark underneath and she had a pretty good idea how she could raise his spirits.
She got up to her feet and extended a hand towards him. “Get up,” she instructed him.
He looked up at her, puzzled. Get up? Why? What was she up to?
“Come on, get up,” she repeated, her tone still gentle, but somewhat more commanding this time.
Seeing her move her hand about a little impatiently as if to convince him to take it, he decided to give in and find out what this was for. He got up to his feet and looked at her, still just as puzzled. Immediately he felt himself being pulled in for a hug. He made no attempt at resisting, letting out a long shuddered breath as he felt her arms closing in around his neck. He hugged her back tightly, closing his eyes and letting his chin rest on her shoulder.
“Does this help?” she whispered.
“You have no idea,” he replied, his voice breaking on the words.
For several long minutes she held him against her as she whispered soothing words in his ear. Over and over, Lois told Clark how much good he did, how important he was; she promised that things would be OK and that there would be happier tomorrows; until finally he allowed himself to believe her.
“Thank you,” he whispered softly. “I don’t know what I’d do without you,”
“I’ll never let you find out,” she promised him, brushing a quick kiss on the side of his neck. “You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” she added with a slightly nervous little laugh. “You’ll be stuck with me for a very long time.”
“Will I?” he asked, pulling away enough to be able to see her face. He searched her eyes for a confirmation of what he hoped she meant by that.
“Oh, absolutely,” she said, trying to sound assured even though she was suddenly shaking like a leaf inside. “I love you too much to ever let you go,” she added in husky whisper that she didn’t really recognize as her own voice.
~.~.~.~.~
To Be Continued…
~.~.~.~.~
Bottom Dweller’s Notes:
According to DC lore, Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” is Superman’s favorite book. Actually, depending what you read, you will find that this is Superman’s favorite book and that the movie version is Clark Kent’s favorite movie. Either way… apparently both these guys like the same story – surprising, isn’t it? Hehehe!
The line I quoted is really the first line of the book.
