From Part 8:

The memory of Lois’s face, shattered and hurt, was a constant torment. He would never forget the moment she told him he was not the man she’d thought she knew. It was worse, somehow, than anything he had feared, and the worst of it was that he had no defense. How could he expect her to have known him when he hadn’t truly known himself?

“My name is Clark Kent, and I’m Superman.”

He whispered the words to the baby in his arms, and this time, when the tears filled his eyes, he didn’t fight them.

_____________________________

Part 9:

After Clark left the hospital, he went by the Daily Planet, only to find that Lois had called in and taken another day of leave. Perry wasn’t happy when Clark wanted to do the same, but he allowed it, after threatening to make Clark work every major holiday for the next two years if he and Lois didn’t “sort whatever this is out and get back on the beat.”

Clark promised he’d try, but he had no idea what he was going to say as he approached Lois’s apartment door. He could hear her moving around inside; there were slightly alarming noises coming from the kitchen, he thought, but whether she’d unlock her column of shiny locks for him he didn’t know.

Well, if she wouldn’t, he could always try the window, he thought bitterly, but perhaps that would be locked now, too.

He knocked softly, and the clanking in the kitchen ceased. He listened, and he heard her heart race into a frantic rhythm, but she didn’t approach the door. He knocked again, louder this time, and heard her footsteps approaching. The sound of those locks turning made his own heart stampede in his chest, and he gripped the doorframe so tightly he felt the wood crack beneath his fingers. He dropped his hand quickly as the door swung open.

Lois looked pale and grave, and he was reminded that he’d seen that look the day before, only he hadn’t been able to understand it then. Her distance made sense now, and in a way it was a relief, in the same way that having an illness diagnosed is a relief. You might still be just as sick, but at least you knew why.

“I expected you sooner,” she said flatly, stepping back to let him in. She had changed into jeans and a t-shirt and put her hair up in a messy ponytail. She looked like a younger version of the Lois who had confronted him at the fountain several hours before, and fragile, somehow, as if she might break into pieces if he touched her.

“I... didn’t know. I didn’t know what you wanted me to do.”

“It’s a little late for that, I think.”

The barb found its mark, but he didn’t react to it. His eyes swept over her apartment. It looked like her kitchen had been ransacked, with every cabinet hanging open and the contents spilling out onto the countertops and floor. Food, pans, dishes, cleaning supplies – they were strewn everywhere.

“I’m cleaning,” she said bluntly, following his gaze. “When I’m upset, I clean things.”

“I remember.”

“Because I wouldn’t want you to think I was packing or anything. Moving without telling you. I wouldn’t want you to think that.”

“I apologized for that,” he told her quietly. “And I meant it.”

“Right.”

He’d been blinded recently, and he had stayed in this very apartment, stumbling and crashing around, damaging one thing after another without meaning to. He felt a little bit that way now. Clumsy and awkward, and everything he said seemed to be wrong, seemed to provoke her. He had no idea how to navigate the many obstacles between them without damaging something irrevocably.

“I’m sorry, Lois. I’m so sorry for every stupid thing I’ve ever done, and I know there have been a lot of them. But these last few days... all I wanted was to give you what I thought you deserved - a normal boyfriend who wasn’t running out on you all the time.”

“No you didn’t.” Her eyes flashed fire at him, and he knew that he’d put another foot wrong. “You wanted to weasel out of telling me something you knew I had a right to know. You thought if you just got rid of Superman, you wouldn’t have to deal with him.”

He was honest enough to admit that there was some truth to that, but it wasn’t the whole truth. He just wasn’t sure, after so many years of guarding his secret, that he knew how to be open about the Superman side of himself. He knew he had to, that at this point total honesty was his only recourse, but somehow knowing it didn’t pave the way to actually doing it.

“Can we sit down?” he asked.

She nodded and gestured him to a sofa. She took the one opposite, reaching for a throw pillow and hugging it to her chest in a self-protective posture that hurt him to see.

He rubbed his cheek and tried to figure out where to start. “I guess the first question is how long have you known?”

“I would have thought the first question was how did I figure it out?”

“Well, they’re kind of the same question, I guess. Could you really tell from reading my press release?”

She nodded. “It was like, as I read it, I was hearing it in your voice. I don’t know how to explain it any better than that. Suddenly, I just knew.” She gave him a pointed look. “And you have that Emerson quote taped to your desk.”

He did, he realized. The clear tape was curling, leaving a sticky spot right next to his keyboard. He fiddled with it all the time when he talked on the phone, scraping at it absently with a thumbnail, but the words themselves had been there so long he’d quit seeing them. “I didn’t know you’d ever noticed.”

“I guess I can see why you wouldn’t have a lot of respect for my powers of observation,” she said bitterly.

“I didn’t mean it that way.” He gave her a pleading look. “What do you want me to say, Lois?”

“I don’t know.” She hugged the pillow closer and seemed to fold herself around it. “I spent all day yesterday imagining this conversation, but... I never could imagine what you could say that would make this make sense.” She paused and looked away from him, her eyes straying to the window. It was open, he noticed, the curtains stirring slightly in the wind. Lois took a deep, shuddering breath and looked back at him. “Ever since we met, or at least ever since I took the time to listen, something about you has always made sense to me. I trusted that, even when I knew there were things you weren’t telling me. I trusted you. But now… it’s like I never knew you at all. And I don’t know what there is to say about that.” Her voice broke slightly, and she wouldn’t look at him.

“You do know me, Lois,” he insisted. “You’ve always known me better than anyone. You practically invented Superman, you know. I never could have been Superman without you.”

“But you were.”

“No.” He ran his fingers restlessly through his hair. “I don’t know how to make you understand it, but no. I was never Superman without you. Not for one day.”

“But you were going to just… kill him off. Without telling me. You were going to do that.”

He shook his head. “I don’t think I was, really. Even if I hadn’t found the baby last night… I don’t think I could have gone through with it. I think I just needed a… a vacation from the idea of being Superman. It was incredible, thinking about that. Thinking about just being Clark.” His voice softened, and he realized he was still susceptible to that particular fantasy. Maybe he always would be. “I think all along I knew it couldn’t really be the way I was dreaming it would be, but I wanted it, Lois. I wanted it for me, and I wanted it for you.”

“But you didn’t ask me what I wanted.” She looked at him accusingly, and he began to fear that he would never find the right words to make her understand. Maybe it really was too late, he thought. Maybe he’d made such a mess of things that the right words simply didn’t exist.

“No,” he agreed wretchedly. “And that was... well, obviously, it was wrong. But I knew you would never let me do it if I asked, and you were so tired of me running off. Justifiably so. But as long as Superman was in the picture, it would just keep happening.”

“So you didn’t think I’d understand, is that it? Just how self-centered do you think I am, Clark? Did you really think I’d get mad at you for leaving me to save someone’s life?”

“Not… not at first, maybe,” he said carefully. “But Lois, you don’t know what it’s like. Being Superman means that I can’t keep the promises I made to you. I can’t promise to sit through a meal or a movie. I can’t promise that we won’t be interrupted at work, or on vacations, or even when we’re... well, if we were making love.”

“And you didn’t believe I could love you enough to put up with that?” she asked in a small voice.

“You might… for a while. But what about in ten years, or twenty? Think about that, Lois - twenty years of me running off in the middle of things. No one should have to be that patient. And if we tried, if we were together, and one day I looked at you and saw that you… that you… regretted….” He trailed off, unable to put that particular fear into words. His gaze strayed to the window, the window with its gently billowing curtains, and those curtains seemed to beckon to him – to taunt him with the possibility of escape from this conversation that was hurting them both.

“And then there’s the lying,” he said quickly, feeling that he needed to get it all out, and quickly, before he lost his nerve and gave in to the impulse to fly out that window. “Being with me would mean you would have to lie for me every single day. It’s awful, all that lying. I hate it, but I have to do it. I’ve been doing it all my life.”

Lois was looking at him as if she’d never seen him before, and perhaps she hadn’t, he admitted to himself. Normally, he had to fight to get a word in edgewise with Lois, but today she sat, looking pensive, like a juror who hasn’t quite made up her mind about the defendant. He took a deep breath and went on. “My parents found me in a field. I was just a baby. A little older than the one I found – about four months, they thought. And they found me and took me home…”

Suddenly, he was awash in the mental image he’d created of his mother’s hands lifting him from that tiny blue spaceship. He didn’t know how to tell Lois about that – how to make her see it, too – to see how serendipitous it was that Martha and Jonathan Kent had been there at that moment to find the small refugee from the planet Krypton and carry him home. Had Clark arrived minutes earlier or later, his parents never would have seen the light in the sky, never would have investigated. He would have died in his little ship, or worse, been found by Bureau 39 or some similar organization, and Clark Kent would not have existed. His bare-bones narrative didn’t even scratch the surface of what he felt about that moment, but the words to describe those feelings wouldn’t come.

“They couldn’t have children of their own,” he told her, after taking a moment to steady his voice. “They told everyone in Smallville that I was the illegitimate child of one of my mother’s cousins. Then they realized that story wouldn’t work with the family, so they told them – my grandparents and aunts and uncles – that they had adopted me the regular way. No one ever questioned it. But that’s when the lying started, Lois.” He looked at her beseechingly, wanting her to understand. “Before I could talk, I was already living a lie. And I had to keep on living it, as I got older and it became obvious that I wasn’t like the other kids. Then I invented Superman, and the lies became bigger, more dangerous. You have no idea what it’s like to live with that day in and day out.”

He sprang up from the sofa and began pacing in the confines of her living room. “How could I ask that of you? How could I expect you to take that on? I can’t change who and what I am, but I thought that if Superman were out of the picture, at least I could offer you something somewhat... normal.”

“But you’re not normal,” she said in a low voice, still looking down at the pillow in her hands.

He flinched as if she’d slapped him. “No,” he agreed hollowly. “I’m not normal.” The words were like acid on his tongue. Not normal, not normal, not normal... He almost didn’t hear the next thing she said.

“If you’d been normal, you’d have probably used Superman to get me into bed two years ago.”

“I... what?” He stared at her. “Lois! I would never do something like that.”

“But you could have, and you knew it. If you’d been normal, you’d have probably done it. Except that if you’d really been normal, you’d have run as far away from me as you could the first week we met. No normal man has ever been able to stand me as long as you have.” Her lips twitched. “That should have been the giveaway, now that I think about it. You’d have to be invulnerable to put up with me.”

That little twitch of her lips captivated him. Was that the start of a smile he had seen? Was it possible that all this talk of his not-normal-ness was actually a good thing? He felt as if his brain was working at half-speed; he’d been doing most of the talking, yet he still couldn’t seem to follow the conversation. “So... you’re not mad?” he ventured.

“Oh, I’m plenty mad.” He winced, and she went on. “I just couldn’t care less whether or not you’re normal, and I can’t figure out what made you think I wanted normal so badly anyway.”

“You told me... Superman... that he lived above you. That it would be selfish for you to love him... that he belonged to the world.” He paused and cleared his throat, which seemed to have seized up on him while he was speaking. “But I don’t want to belong to the world. Maybe I should, but…” He spread his hands in a helpless gesture. “Even with everything I can do, there’s not enough of me for that. Being Clark Kent – being normal at least part of the time… if I didn’t have that, Lois, I think I’d go crazy. Really. I mean that. I’d be curled up in a ball somewhere, sucking my thumb. So when I felt like I had to make a choice, I chose Clark Kent. I chose the man I thought you wanted, and I chose the man I most wanted to be.”

“But that was a false choice,” she argued. “Don’t you see that?”

“I do now. But at first… it seemed like a dream come true.”

“And what was next in the dream? What was supposed to happen when people started dying because Superman wasn’t there? How long would it take for you to start hating me for that?”

“I would never have hated you! This was my decision, Lois. Whatever repercussions there were would have been mine to deal with.”

She shook her head. “You think that, but it’s not true. My father stayed in a job he hated because my mother didn’t want him to go off on his own and do his own research. She wanted the security of him being in private practice. He agreed, but there was practically never another happy moment in our house. It poisoned everything, her taking that choice from him, and in the end he left and did it anyway.”

“What about her?” Clark countered. “Didn’t she deserve that security?”

“I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe she would say it was worth it even now. But I’m not my mother, Clark, and I won’t be the reason you make a decision like that – the reason you don’t follow your conscience, your heart. You’d wind up hating yourself and hating me. What if someone had died in that fire the other night? Can you honestly say it would have been worth it, staying with me?”

“It was wonderful, staying with you,” he said softly. “It was... like every dream I ever had coming true. But if someone had died....”

“You’d have regretted staying.”

He nodded. “Maybe so. But where do I draw the line? Someone is dying somewhere right now. Lots of someones are dying. Does that mean I shouldn’t be here, having this conversation with you? Does that mean I should quit my job and be Superman full time? Because I thought about that, too – that’s what all that packing was about.”

She nodded. “I figured that out.”

“I hate that idea, Lois. It’s not that I don’t want to help people, but I don’t want to be Superman full time. Superman’s not real. He can’t have a real life...friends and a home. He can’t play poker with Perry or go to ball games with Jimmy. He can’t... be with you.” He took a deep breath. “That’s why it was so hard for me when I was shot by Clyde Barrow. I know I shouldn’t have left you to grieve, and God, Lois – you have to believe I’ll be sorry about that for the rest of my life. But I was almost out of my mind with grief myself. Those bullets might not have pierced my skin, but Clark Kent was dead, and I didn’t know what to do.”

She looked at him with tears shimmering in her eyes. “Yesterday, I had a lot of time to think about this. I didn’t think about much of anything else. And I understood why you hadn’t told me, right up until that day. But that... I don’t understand that, Clark. How can I believe that you loved me, when you let me go through that?”

“How could I let you love a man who didn’t really exist?” he cried. “I had nothing to offer you as Superman. It seemed kinder to let you grieve for Clark, to let you get over him.”

“I never would have gotten over you,” she told him in a low voice threaded with remembered pain. “Never. It would have hurt every day for the rest of my life. You should have told me. That might have hurt, too, but it would have been better than thinking you’d died protecting me.”

“That was my fault,” he said bitterly. “I’d gotten cocky. I thought I could handle anything, could always protect you. It never occurred to me that I could be put in that situation.”

“But maybe if we’d talked about it beforehand, you wouldn’t have been. Or maybe you would have been, but we could have worked together to figure it all out afterwards. Neither of us had to go through that alone, but we did, and that’s why when you say that you loved me, that you weren’t Superman without me, I just can’t believe you.”

“I love you, present tense,” he insisted. “And yes, past tense and future tense, too. And you’ve been the heart and soul of Superman ever since I first put on the suit. But I just didn’t know how to tell you so.”

He was aching to go to her, to touch her, as if his touch could somehow make her understand what he was finding so hard to put into words. But she was still barricaded behind her pillow, and everything about her posture warned him not to trespass. He took a step closer, though, and looked at her imploringly. “I’ve had to carry this secret by myself for so long, Lois. A lifetime. This whole conversation seems surreal to me... that I’m here, saying these words out loud. You can’t imagine how huge that is... how unprecedented. It’s a relief – you have to believe that – but it’s terrifying, too.”

“Why?” She sounded anguished. “What have I done to make you so afraid of me?”

“I’m not afraid of you.” His voice quavered with emotion, and his hands clenched into fists at his sides. “But I’m more afraid of losing you than almost anything else I can think of. And I know that you deserve better than me. I know that you deserve someone who doesn’t belong to the world part of the time, someone who can give himself to you completely. And I can’t do that. I thought I could... I was going to try... but last night, something happened and I realized that I had to keep on being Superman. That he was part of me and always had been, even before I started wearing the suit. I can’t give him up, even for you, and I’m so sorry about that. I know you deserve...”

“Would you shut up about what I deserve!” she cried suddenly, jumping up from the couch. She crossed over to him and thwapped him hard across the chest with the throw pillow she’d been clutching. He blinked at her in shock, and she went on. “Why don’t you let me be the one to decide what I deserve?” She shook the pillow at him threateningly. “You know what your problem is?”

“I... could name a few.”

“That was a rhetorical question,” she said, glaring at him and tossing her pillow to one side. She put her hands on her hips and he knew she was about to light into him, that there were going to be fireworks, but he couldn’t stop himself feeling relieved that she was standing there, so close to him, so fired up and full of passion. He would rather have her anger than that terrible distance between them.

“Your problem is that you see everything in black and white – you always have – and the truth is that almost nothing is that simple. Yeah, there are going to be times when I have to lie for you. Lucky for both of us, I’m good at lying, which you know perfectly well, and the kind of lie I’m going to have to tell for you isn’t going to trouble my conscience in the slightest.”

She looked at him fiercely, as if she were daring him to argue. He didn’t dare, and she blazed on. “And, yes, there are times when you running off in the middle of things really stinks. It’s going to make me mad, and I’ll probably complain about it. I can’t promise that I won’t. But every time you run off, I’ll know where you’re going and why you’re going, and I’ll know that you’re going to come back. It won’t be perfect, but what marriage ever is?”

“Marriage?” he asked, feeling both stunned and hopeful. She could hit him with every pillow she owned if it meant the conversation was heading in this direction. “You’ve thought about us getting married?”

“Haven’t you?” she hedged.

“Only every day since I met you.”

Her eyes softened, nourishing the hope that was growing inside of him. “If that’s true,” she said, “then it seems like you’d have had plenty of time to figure out that it’s not going to be perfect, no matter how many identities you have or don’t have. Trust me, Clark, being Superman is a walk in the park compared to living with me.”

“Living with you....” Just the thought of it made Clark nearly dizzy with desire. Not physical desire, though that was certainly part of it, but just sheer want, as if everything he’d ever hoped for in life was suddenly set temptingly before him. “Lois, there is nothing in the world that would make me happier than spending the rest of my life with you. But... I know I’ve disappointed you... that maybe you don’t feel the same way...”

“See, that’s the thing: You did disappoint me. More than I would have ever believed you could. And yesterday, I could hardly look at you, I was so hurt and angry. I kept thinking you were going to come clean, kept waiting for it. I pretended to send that fax, and I thought you’d stop me, would tell me the truth. Instead you went out for bagels, or said you did, and when you gave me that stupid bagel, I thought, that’s it, that’s the last straw, I’m through with him.” She took a deep breath, “And then, while I was thinking that, you touched me, like this....”

She reached for his hand and raised it to her cheek, and just as she had the day before, she closed her eyes and leaned into his touch. Tears slid down her cheeks and wet his fingers. “And when you touched me,” she said shakily, opening her eyes and looking into his, “I knew that I loved you more than I was angry with you – and I was really angry, let me tell you.”

She reached up and covered his hand with hers, and then she turned and pressed a kiss into his palm. This was grace, he realized, and he felt it wash over him like a cleansing rain.

“Lois...” he whispered.

“You hurt me, Clark. You hurt us. And it may take a while for us to get over that. But we have to, don’t we?”

“Yes,” he said urgently, pressing his forehead to hers. “We have to.”

“Because you don’t fall in love like this every day...”

“No,” he agreed. “Not every day.”

“Just once, maybe, and that’s if you’re lucky.” She stepped into him and buried her face in hollow of his shoulder, where he could feel her breath warm on his neck. He felt her shudder as his arms went around her.

“Only once,” he murmured into her hair, hardly knowing what he was saying, just that he would agree with anything that kept her in his arms, in his life.

“So we have to find a way,” she told his neck tearfully.

“We will,” he promised her. “We’ll find it together.”

She sighed and relaxed into his arms, and for precious moments they just stood there together in the quiet of her apartment. There was still much to say, and perhaps he would always worry for the future, but that was for later. This moment was a gift, and he would not defile it with his fears.

Eventually, Lois pulled back a little bit and looked up at him. “I’m still mad,” she told him, as if for the record.

He felt the smile spread across his face. “You can be as mad as you want.”

“And you were an idiot.”

“Yes,” he agreed fervently. “I was.”

“A complete lunkhead.”

“Lunkhead?”

“Oh, yeah.” She reached up and stroked his hair back from his forehead. “But you’re my lunkhead.”

He laughed, not about to argue with her. If he was a lunkhead, he was her lunkhead. Whatever he was, he was hers.

She smiled back at him. “We can do this, Clark.” Her voice, so quiet yet so certain, finally convinced him that she meant it. They were taking the next step, only this time, they were doing it on solid ground.

He bent to kiss her, tasting the salt of her tears, and he realized that he’d been wrong two nights ago in his apartment.

This was his happiest moment.

_________________________________

Epilogue

The hospital hummed all around him, busy even in the middle of the night, but the room in which Clark stood was dimly lit and quiet. It was soothing, after the fears and anxieties of the previous day, and as he stared down in wonder at the peacefully sleeping baby, he felt something inside him begin to unclench.

The baby was swaddled in the hospital-issue blanket with its turquoise stripes, but one dimpled hand had fought its way free and was splayed like a tiny starfish against the white sheet of the bassinet. Clark reached down to stroke that perfect hand, and the baby’s fingers curled, gripping his finger tightly. He knew that it was only a reflex, but still, with those small fingers clasping his, he felt a fierce joy bloom in his heart.

He couldn’t resist any longer. He reached down and fumbled a little as he lifted the baby into his unpracticed arms. As he settled her more comfortably, he remembered being in the same hospital with another baby – a baby he’d found in a trashcan during one of the darkest, most confusing times in his life.

Baby Jonathan had rescued Superman that night, just as surely as Superman had rescued him, but he would probably never know that. He had been adopted, though Clark didn’t know by whom – just that it was a couple who had been desperately hoping and praying for a child. The little boy would be about four years old now, and as Clark lowered himself into the rocking chair beside his sleeping wife, he hoped that Jonathan was as loved by his parents as Clark himself had been... as loved as his own precious daughter already was.

He looked down at the miracle sleeping in his arms and gently traced her delicate features – the perfect shell of her tiny ear, the sweep of her fine eyebrows, the pout of her lips. Lois thought she looked like him, had insisted on it before she fell into an exhausted sleep, but he thought their daughter was absolutely unique and looked only like herself. It had not been easy, bringing this child into the world, but with the soft weight of her in his arms and her heart beating against his, Clark knew that she was worth everything they had gone through, every tear they had shed.

She stirred a little, wriggling against the confines of the blanket, and her eyelids began to flutter. He stopped the gentle motion of the rocking chair and held his breath while he waited to see if she would settle back into sleep. But no, her eyes opened wider and her mouth formed a small O of amazement, as if she didn’t know what to make of the large man who held her so close.

“Hi,” he whispered, not wanting to wake Lois. “I’m your daddy.”

Her murky newborn eyes seemed to rove away from him before coming back to give him a long, serious look.

He stroked her cheek tenderly, and then, because he had learned his lesson about being honest with the women he loved, he went on, starting at the very beginning: “My name is Clark Kent,” he told her softly, “and I’m Superman....”

The End


Author’s Notes: First and most importantly, a final heartfelt thanks to Sara Kraft for taking the time to beta this for me. Sara, I appreciate your encouragement and your enthusiasm and your red pen more than I can possibly say, and I appreciate your friendship even more than that, which is a very great deal indeed! Thank you for making this a far better story than it would have been if I’d been left to my own devices. sloppy

I did a little more borrowing from the show in this part: Several lines from “We Have a Lot to Talk About,” written by John McNamara, and one bit from “Don’t Tug On Superman’s Cape,” written by David Simpkins. My thanks to these and other authors of the show, who probably don’t even know that I snag lines from them here and there, but if they ever do find out, I hope they’ll take it as a compliment and not sue me into oblivion.

Thanks to all who hung with me through this story, and especially to those who took the time to comment along the way. I know this was angstier than my usual fare, but it was something I wanted to try all the same, and I do hope you’ve enjoyed it.