Thanks Nancy for smiling at the right parts and picking at the parts that needed it. I'm sure that everyone by now knows that *** means a flashback. So the logical conclusion is that parts without *** are not flashbacks.
PART NINE
I sat on a stool in STAR labs, trying not to make eye contact with anyone else. I needed to be alone with my thoughts. It had been extremely awkward sitting in Jon’s apartment waiting for Ellie to come. Jon kept shooting nervous glances in my direction, and I had no idea how to even begin to explain what had happened. Mercifully, Ellie had shown up in record time, and quickly convinced Jon to come to STAR labs with her. I had called Lois and Clark, and we all met at the lab, including Jay, who had learned of the events upon his arrival. During the entire time we had been waiting, I couldn’t help but think that this could be my fault. Really, why else would Jon have been targeted unless it was meant as a warning for me?
Ellie exited the small examination room and came up to Lois, Clark, Jay, and me. She seemed pale, and she clutched her pen and clipboard in her hands with a tight grip. She took a shuddering breath before beginning to speak to us.
“As far as we can tell, it’s the same thing that happened to Jay,” she told us in a shaking voice. “We can’t do a lot of the tests that we did with Jay because… because he’s…” She shook her head slightly, and then went to make a notation with her pen. But she pressed too hard and the pen shattered in her hand. Ink oozed over her fingers. She cried out in frustration and sent the fragments skittering across the countertop. Her parents were instantly by her side, comforting her.
I remained frozen in my seat, feeling like a complete outsider. I had only really gotten to know Jon’s family in the last few weeks, and Jon didn’t even remember me anymore. Did I really have a place with these people? I heard the rush of water coming through a tap and I turned to see Jay wetting a rag. He wrung it out and brought it over to Ellie.
“Here,” he offered it to her quietly.
“Thanks,” she whispered. She took the cloth and scrubbed the pen ink from her hands. Then she took a deep cleansing breath and returned to business. Her resilient personality displayed itself once again as she bounced back and focused on the task at hand. “Based on the questions we asked him, we think he’s lost about seven months of his memory. But we can’t really tell for sure. None of the advanced scans we were able to do on Jay will work for Jon. His invulnerability makes that impossible.”
Seven months? He had lost that much? That was before we even met. I supposed I should’ve seen that coming when he didn’t recognize me earlier, but it still came as a shock. He had really forgotten everything about us.
Then Brad also exited the room where Jon was being examined. “Lucy’s just finishing up with him,” he told us. “It’ll only take a bit.”
“When can I see him?” I asked. Lois and Clark had checked in on him while Brad, Lucy, and Ellie were running tests, yet I had stayed out of the way. I didn’t want to make it even more confusing for him. But now I really wanted to see him again and see how he was doing.
“We should probably discuss that,” Brad commented. “What are we going to tell him?”
“The truth,” Lois said firmly. “We can’t lie to him about the situation, that’ll only make him more confused.”
“It’ll be a big shock to him…”
“But he needs to know,” Lois insisted. “Let me talk to him and explain the situation. Then you can come in and see him, okay, Kaylie?”
“Okay,” I whispered. As Lois went off to talk to Jon, everyone else kind of split off in different directions. I just sat in my seat, still trying to take everything in.
Clark approached me and sat down beside me. “Are you okay, Kaylie?” he asked.
“Yeah, sure. Why wouldn’t I be?” I told him sarcastically. “My fiancé has completely forgotten that I exist. That’s what every girl dreams of, isn’t it?”
“Kaylie, trust me. I know how difficult this is for you,” he told me sincerely.
I smiled wryly. “Why do I get the feeling that you’ve been through something like this before?”
Clark chuckled. “Well, Lois and I have been through a lot, that’s for sure.”
“And here you are, bailing us out of trouble when we need it.”
“Well, with all the work my parents put into keeping our relationship afloat at the start, I guess you can say that we’re paying it forward.”
“I can’t believe you’re still willing to even talk to me after what happened to Jon.”
He frowned. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
“I put your son in danger!” I exclaimed, finally letting my fears out. “Someone must’ve found out about me and tried to get to me through Jon. I screwed up somewhere along the way and now Jon’s paying for it.”
“Kaylie, this isn’t your fault,” he told me insistently.
“Of course it is.”
“No, it’s not. Think about this: There’s no way that Jon would willingly allow someone to wipe his memories. If he was targeted as Jon Kent, he would just use his powers to escape. They wouldn’t be able to see it coming. But if he was targeted as Supernova, all they would need was a chunk of Kryptonite to neutralize him. He’s made more than enough enemies as Supernova. You know that as well as I do after the Sproxton case.”
“Well, yeah, I do. I-I just got…” Now that Clark had mentioned it, it made complete sense. Why hadn’t I thought of it before?
“I know, Kaylie,” he told me sympathetically. “Blaming yourself for something that isn’t really your fault is a habit I’ve had a lot of experience with too, believe me. But you and Jon both have high risk jobs. You can’t blame yourself for everything that goes wrong.”
“You’re right,” I admitted. “I guess with everything that’s happened today I’ve just… It’s just… It’s hard, you know?” I was horrified to realize that there were tears springing up in my eyes as my voice cracked.
“I know.” He put an arm comfortingly around my shoulder, and I swallowed my tears.
“Kaylie?” Lois came up to me. She and Lucy had both left the room so I guessed that they had run all the tests they could. “Are you all right?”
“I’m fine,” I told her hastily, blinking to clear my eyes. “Are you done talking to Jon now?”
“Yeah. He wants to see you.”
I nodded and then stood up to go into the little room.
* * *
As I stood in the doorway, I became painfully aware of the fact that I hadn’t showered yet today. And I had just thrown on some random clothes on my way out of my apartment. I had never liked the shirt I was wearing, and I remembered that I hadn’t put on any makeup. It was hardly the first impression I wanted to make on my amnesiac fiancé. Maybe I could just sneak out and pop into the bathroom to tidy myself up…
But that plan quickly ended when Jon became aware of my presence and turned in his seat to look at me. I guess he would just have to put up with my appearance as it was.
“Hi,” I said nervously.
“Uh, hi. K-Kaylie.”
I walked across the room and sat down opposite him. “So… how are you doing?”
“I-I’m fine. You know, aside from the whole,” he gestured to his head, “memory loss thing.”
“Right. Of course. I should’ve… I mean, of course aside from… from that.”
“Yeah.” The two of us were silent, not really sure what to say. Honestly, what is the rule for polite conversation in this situation? Jon was sitting on a table with his head bowed. His shirt was only partially done up, and I realized that I could see a fair section of his chest. Hastily, I brought my eyes up to see his face. That was *definitely* not a way to make a good first impression on him. I stared at his lost expression. He looked at me as if he were searching for something. Some trigger for lost memory, perhaps? Whatever he was looking for, he couldn’t seem to find it. Finally, he spoke up. “Uh, Kaylie?”
“Yeah?”
“I should probably ask you… I mean, I probably should’ve asked my mom this, but I wasn’t really thinking about it at the time. And… well, we’re… engaged so I’m *assuming* we’ve… And based on some of the things you said in my apartment this morning I… I guessed that… But you can never be completely sure, so I thought I’d just ask you… Jeez, this is so awkward. I don’t even know how to…”
“It’s okay, Jon,” I interjected. I could already feel my cheeks heating up at where this was going, yet he did have a right to know. And it was bound to come up anyway, so it was probably better to just get this over with as opposed to skating around the issue… “To answer your question, yes, we have been… intimate. But of course I don’t expect anything now,” I added hastily. “To you I’m a complete stranger, and you wouldn’t… well, you’re not that kind of person. And, you know, I’m not that kind of person either. And it would just be weird. For both of us. And seeing how we were both… you know, before we… Well, it’d be just strange to have to… do anything that…yeah.”
Jon gaped at me openly, then finally rehinged his jaw to speak. “Um… I was actually talking about whether or not you knew I… if you knew um, *everything* about me…” The penny finally dropped. Supernova. He was talking about Supernova.
“Oh.” Duh. Of course. Why would he ask his *mom* whether or not we had had sex?
“But what you said is also good.” He rushed to say. “I mean, it’s good to… to know…what we’ve…”
The poor guy. Here he was meeting his fiancé for the first time that he can remember, and I’m sitting here regaling him with tales of out sexual exploits.
“To answer your question, Jon… Yeah, I know. That you’re Supernova.” I was too embarrassed to go into our whole convoluted history right now.
“Oh. Good.”
“That doesn’t scare you, does it?” I asked anxiously. “You know that you can trust me with that, right?”
“No, it doesn’t scare me. Well, not really,” he reassured. “I mean, my family seems to trust you, and I obviously did enough to… you know, propose to you and stuff.” He looked down at his hands.
“This must be so weird for you,” I sympathized. “As far as you’re concerned, you gained a fiancé overnight.”
“Well, it hasn’t been all that bad,” he told me. I could detect a little glimmer in his eye that had been missing up until this point. “This morning I woke up with a beautiful woman pounding on my door demanding to know why I hadn’t spent the night with her.”
I gave a crooked smile. “You might not remember it, Spaceboy, but I’ve been aggressive from the moment we met.” I hadn’t called him Spaceboy in a while, I realized. The novelty of knowing his real name hadn’t still completely worn off, and that left little room for nicknames. But with the recent events, the name seemed to fit again.
“You know, that brings up a good point,” Jon commented. “How did we meet? And could you also explain to me why a school teacher is helping my mom with an investigation?”
Oh, boy. This was going to take a while.
* * *
It had been a difficult day for Jon. A bit of an understatement, perhaps, but true nonetheless. Kaylie had filled him in on the highlights of their relationship up until this point, and he was still trying to process the whole thing. He had started dating her as Supernova? Had he been completely crazy?! Actually, it had seemed like the entire world had gone crazy and he was the only sane one around. How could he have lost seven months of his life?
But there were little clues that made him realize that everyone was right, and that something had happened. The weather, for one, was undeniably late summer. Aside from time travel, memory loss was the only real explanation available. And plus, there was the slight headache he woke up with this morning, and the very fuzzy memory of last night. And it wasn’t just last night that was fuzzy. It seemed like his whole brain was a little overdone. He had to work extra hard to bring up basic things like his PIN number, and he had had difficulty concentrating all day. Ellie had drilled him relentlessly on childhood trivia, and he found that a shocking number of memories were significantly less clear, and some of them gone all together. It was a side effect of the device he had been subjected to, his uncle had explained. Apparently, there was a hope of the process being reversed. This was a hope he clung to, desperately. If the process could be reversed then he wouldn’t have to feel so terrible. Then he wouldn’t feel so empty and confused and lost.
He hadn’t gone into work today. He wasn’t up to the strain of pretending that he remembered the last seven months. Jim, of course, didn’t push the issue when Jon called in sick. But Jon almost wished he had. It seemed like everyone was tiptoeing around him, trying to treat him carefully so as not to shock him. But all that did was remind Jon of what had happened to him. And of course, in the midst of all this confusion, was Kaylie.
His fiancé. That should’ve terrified him under normal circumstances. Although it had been almost a year since his disastrous relationship with Amanda, he still hadn’t thought he was ready to start another serious relationship. Yet here he was. Engaged. And although it scared him, there was something else he was feeling that wasn’t fear. That was quite different from fear, actually. But he couldn’t trust his own instincts on this. He needed to talk to someone who knew what had been going on in his life for the past seven months. Someone who wouldn’t try to spare his feelings.
Jon made his way up the walkway leading to the tiny house Ellie was currently renting. Although its location on the outskirts of Metropolis wasn’t exactly convenient, the price had been right and the place had a quaint charm that appealed to Ellie from the moment she saw it. And her abilities meant that transportation was never really a problem. Jon rang the doorbell, and waited for her to come and answer it. He always made a point of always coming to the front entrance and ringing her doorbell in the vain hope that she would some day return the courtesy. That day had yet to come.
It took her a bit longer than normal to answer the door, and by the time she finally did, Jon had worked himself up into a nervous frenzy.
“Can I come in?” he blurted out. Not really waiting for a reply, he entered the house and started pacing back and forth in the living room.
“What’s going on, Jon?” Ellie asked with concern.
He stopped pacing, spun around, and faced her. “Have I gone completely insane?”
“What?”
“I’m just thinking about this whole Kaylie thing, you know?” he said as he returned to his pacing. “And I can’t remember anything about her, right?”
“Right…”
“But I can’t help feel this… connection between us,” he admitted. “And I just can’t understand it.”
Ellie thought for a moment. “Well, it could be your subconscious remembering Kaylie,” she finally suggested.
“Huh?” Jon asked blankly.
“It’s like this,” Ellie explained as she led him to a seat. “All the memories you have of being with Kaylie are lost for the time being. But you really loved her, so maybe there’s a part of your brain that remembers that love and that’s what you’re feeling. It’s like even though you’ve intellectually forgotten your love, you still spiritually love her.”
“Wow, I would’ve thought that would be a little deep for a hardened scientist like yourself,” he teased, feeling a little unsettled at the idea she had presented.
“A good scientist is willing to look at things from all angles,” she replied haughtily. “Now is that all the reassurance that you need, brother dearest?”
“Yeah, I guess,” he replied slowly. “It’s just…”
“What?”
“Well, I told her that it didn’t bother me that she knows that I’m Supernova. But the thing is… I’m not sure if I can really trust her,” he admitted. “I barely know her!”
“You can trust her,” Ellie reassured, instantly seeing what he was really having difficulty with. “With everything, Jon. She’s not going to be another Amanda.”
“Do you like her?” Jon asked. Ellie and Amanda had never really gotten along very well, and in hindsight, Jon could tell that that should’ve been an early warning sign.
“Yeah, I like her,” Ellie replied. “But the important question is if you like her.”
Jon thought back to the cute expression on her face when she had gotten so embarrassed earlier, and the way she had patiently explained their relationship without showing a sliver of frustration. “Yeah. I think I do.” At that admission, Jon allowed himself to relax for the first time that day. He was able to really take in his surroundings, and that’s when he realized something disturbing. “Ellie, there’s someone hiding in you closet.”
Ellie instantly turned beet red. “Oh, yeah. That’s… that’s Jay.”
“Kaylie’s brother?”
“Yeah. You know how he got the whole memory treatment thing too, right? Well, we’re trying to find a way to hack into his subconscious and find any clues. You might as well come out, Jay,” she raised her voice so he could hear. “Jon knows you’re here.” The door to the closet slid open and the same man that Jon remembered meeting earlier in the day stepped out, looking a little sheepish at being found out.
“So, why was Jay hiding in your hall closet?” Jon asked, still confused.
“We were… trying a new technique,” Ellie rushed to say.
“-for the memory thing,” Jay added.
“Yeah, the memory thing.”
“In the closet?” Jon asked disbelievingly.
A beat of silence.
“We needed a dark space,” Jay provided.
“Yeah,” Ellie chimed in. “And the sun just kept streaming in through the blinds so he had to go in the closet.”
Jon suspected that there was more to the story, but Ellie was silently pleading with him to believe her with her eyes, so he decided to go along with it. Obviously he was missing out on something here, but the promises of tonight overshadowed the curiosity he felt with this situation. Tonight, he had a date with Kaylie.
