Thanks - as always - to Alisha, Nancy and Beth.
Last time:
Clark
She turned to me. "I can't do this, Clark. Not here."
I couldn't help it. I pulled her in my arms and held her close to me. "We'll find them, honey, I promise."
I didn't look at my parents but I could imagine and when I finally did, they looked about like I expected.
Fuming.
I sighed without letting go of Lois. "Have a seat and we'll tell you everything," I promised.
We sat in the seating area of their room. Lois sat in one chair and I sat in the other.
"What's going on?" Dad asked, quietly. Quiet Dad was worse than yelling Dad any day. In any universe.
"We're not who you think we are," I said quietly.
"Then who exactly are you?" Mom asked with a raised brow.
I looked at Lois and took her hand. "I'm Clark Kent and, this is my wife, Lois Lane-Kent."
*~*21*~*
~~~~~
Lois
~~~~~
I wasn't quite sure how I'd expected Clark to tell them but that sure wasn't it.
The silence in the room stretched on into seeming eternity.
"Would you mind repeating that?" Jonathan said slowly.
Clark sighed. "I know it's hard to believe, but it's the God's honest truth. The way we remember it, last night, Lois and I had our official wedding, we went to sleep together in the room next door and this morning I woke up in there with Lana. Lois woke up in the room she'd lived in growing up."
"Why were you staying here if you just got married? Why weren't you at a nice hotel or something?" Martha asked.
"We didn't just get married," I told them. "We just had a wedding. We've been married almost four years."
Martha and Jonathan exchanged looks.
I sighed. "It's a very long, very convoluted story."
"We have time," Jonathan interjected, before I could go on.
Clark grimaced. "I'm afraid I don't look very good in most of it."
I squeezed his hand. "You made up for it. Well, you're still making up for it. You were supposed to bring me breakfast in bed this morning." I smiled slightly through the tears.
"Let's start with why you were staying here on your wedding night." That came from Martha.
I took a deep breath and started. "Like I said we've been married almost four years. It was a... shotgun wedding, for lack of a better term."
"You were pregnant?" That came from Jonathan.
I glanced at Clark. "That's part of the long, convoluted part of the story," Clark told them.
"Was she pregnant with your baby?" Martha asked incredulously.
"Long and convoluted, Mom," Clark said, slightly exasperated.
"Anyway," I interjected. "We were flying to the cabin for the night and the farther away we got, the more uneasy I became. Clark left and came back here and Daddy set up the security grid again."
"Security grid?"
I nodded. "We had heavy security for a long time and it has nothing to do with Clark's identity," I told them, preempting their next question. "Daddy set it up again, two of the bodyguards who'd worked with us for a long time had come to the wedding and said they'd stay, but after Clark got back, I was still so..." I looked at him, hoping for the right word.
"Agitated. Anxious. Completely freaked out."
I nodded. "That sounds about right. Clark brought us back here and we stayed the night here. Next door, in the room that's been ours for three and a half years since we moved in with Daddy." I glanced at him. "You two – Clark's parents – whatever, weren't in this room. You two and Granny Kent were over in the apartment you stay in whenever you're here."
"Then who was in here?" Jonathan asked.
Clark squeezed my hand slightly as I spoke. "Our sons."
Jonathan swallowed visibly and Martha blinked rapidly. "What?" they asked in unison.
"We have two sons," Clark told them. "Christopher Jonathan is three and a half. Nathaniel David is nearly eighteen months."
"You'll forgive me for having a hard time believing all this," Martha said.
"Get your laptop, Clark. One of the pictures you showed me earlier should help us prove it."
He nodded and disappeared. He was back a second later and handed me the laptop. I scrolled through the pictures until I found the one I was looking for. One of me and Joe on the beach – the summer before based on the date. I was wearing a bikini.
"Look at this picture."
"You and Joe," Martha said, unimpressed.
"Look at the swimsuit," I prompted.
Clark glanced at me, puzzled, then looked at the picture more closely. "I don't recognize it."
"That's because I haven't worn a two-piece in years." I stood up and tugged my shirt up. "Look."
They all turned and looked at my stomach – something that had embarrassed me for years.
Stretch marks and all.
Martha nodded slowly. "I see what you're saying."
I swiped at my cheeks. "I miss my sons. I miss my husband, but..." I went to sit down, but Clark took my hand and pulled me next to him on the loveseat.
Clark took over. "We woke up this morning and... I told Lana I couldn't sleep and went downstairs to get online, look at the pictures, all that kind of stuff, see if I could figure out what was going on. After Lois woke up, we went down back stage and tried to figure it out together." He sighed. "This is more hard to believe stuff. This guy stepped through a door that just hung in the midair. He said he lived to ruin the lives of Lois Lanes and Clark Kents in all universes and he'd made one... small change in this universe, our universe, changed all sorts of things and not just the Lana and Joe stuff."
"What else is different?" Jonathan asked. He still didn't look like he believed us.
"My family mostly," I told him.
"What about them?" Martha looked at Jonathan as she asked.
"Mom, Lucy, Dave..." The tears came again. "Mom and Lucy died in a car accident when I was ten. Daddy didn't know about Dave until after that and he didn't look for him until years later. Until years too late. I would have been a match for him, but we didn't know. We work with Jimmy and we figured it out eventually, but he's single, dates some, but hasn't found anyone special."
"And Van's not the only superhero," Clark told them. "I'm a superhero, too. Superman – Lois named me. Ber... Van and his girlfriend, Ashley, got married last night after our wedding. They're good friends of ours."
I smiled as I remember their faces as they left the reception.
Jonathan ran a hand over his face. "Wow."
"*That's* the understatement of the year," I told him. "And this guy said at midnight tonight we'd find a doohickey like the one he had down behind the stage and we had a choice to make. We could go back in time and make sure the accident happens or we stay here. We choose between a life with our kids and our marriage and our life together and a life with my mom and my pregnant sister married to one of our best friends and my half-brother still alive."
"It's an impossible choice," Clark continued. "For both of us."
Martha stood up and started pacing. "Tell us the whole convoluted story while I think. There's an idea... It's... right there. And I know I shouldn't believe any of this, but Chris and I found a baby in a spaceship. Is this any harder to believe than that?" She turned to Clark. "What about Chris?"
"He died the night you got married," Clark told her quietly. "You found me, went to Oklahoma to get married and he died in a fire at the Irig place, saving Josh."
She nodded. "That's about right."
"Well," I said. "If this guy's right, then everything was the same until my mom and sister didn't die."
Martha started walking again. "Okay. Convoluted story, from the beginning."
~~~~~
Clark
~~~~~
It was hard enough living through it the first time. I hated telling most of this story because I was a heel.
I held Lois' hand a little tighter, took a deep breath and plunged in. "It started when Lana and I moved to Met U. A couple days after we got there I finally met my new roommate. It was Lois." Mom stopped pacing to stare at me. I nodded. "I know. It's weird. There was a paperwork mix-up and Lois couldn't move home. Her dad's girlfriend had made that clear." They looked shocked at that, too. "Ellen had been gone for eight years by then," I reminded them and the look slowly disappeared. "Lana was one of our suitemates and wasn't happy about it, but..." I shrugged. "That's what it was. On Halloween the four of us – me and Lana, Lois and Joe – went to a frat party and we all got separated. I found Lois behind a couch with a guy who had drugged her. She didn't *think* anything had happened – that I'd gotten there in time... But she refused to go to the Emergency Room in the Ellen Lane Memorial Medical Building and she never went to get tested or checked or anything."
This part was hard to tell them. "We went to Bremerton, New Troy for their annual Fall Festival two days later. Have you ever come across anything that hurts me?" I asked them.
"The last time you were sick, you threw up on me," Dad said.
"On your first date," I finished with a slight smile.
"That's right."
"Well, in Bremerton, I passed out."
Mom stopped and stared at me. Dad's eyes grew big as saucers.
"I'll tell you about it later so you can be on the lookout for it when we get this all straightened out," I promised. "Anyway, I came to a few minutes later and we headed back to Metropolis. It was the really bad snow storm a few years ago. Worst in over a hundred years. We made it almost to the cabin and got stuck. Lois practically carried me through the snow. There wasn't any power at the cabin and I passed out again. Lois built a fire, called her dad, stripped our clothes off and prayed we'd make it through the night.
"Lois thought she'd had a dream about the two of us that night. I thought I dreamed about being with Lana, but she kept morphing into Lois and the longer it was, the more it was Lois with me and not Lana. Sam made it up there the next day. We ended up stuck for a week and went home and back to our lives."
"So you found out you were pregnant, figured it wasn't a dream and got married?" Dad asked.
"No," Lois said. "I didn't know I was pregnant for a long time, ten weeks almost. We went to Europe with Lana and Joe and a bunch of other kids from school. While we were there, I saw Mindy, Dad's girlfriend. She was supposed to be in Little Rock, not Paris. Clark was with me when I saw her and he wouldn't let me follow her by myself. We ended up stuck in the cargo hold of a plane full of guns on its way to Latislan. When we got there, I got caught. I'd been sick for a few days – delayed morning sickness – and knew I couldn't stop it so I ran out, hoping Clark wouldn't get found. I managed to tick off General Navance, the local sociopathic dictator, and I ended up in the hospital when I kneed him and then passed out."
She sighed. "That's when I found out I was pregnant. Navance claimed the baby and the only way to negate his claim was if I was married, so Clark made arrangements without telling me about it until after they snuck me out of the hospital."
"Did you realize who the father of your baby was?" Mom asked softly.
Lois shook her head. "We thought we were wrong about the toga party. But Clark married me anyway. We were going to get annulled when we got back, but Navance changed the law so we had to be married for five years after the baby was born. He made all kinds of vague and specific, real threats so we stayed married and lied to everyone. We told everyone it was the cabin, but we really didn't think it was Clark's baby."
"I broke Lana's heart," I told them quietly. "And I almost cheated on my wife that day. I didn't love Lois; I loved Lana and I was saying good-bye to her and it was so tempting..." I sighed. "We kissed that day and another about a week later, but that was it. I wasn't alone with her, ever, after that. We went to Smallville for Spring Break and Mom made me tell her everything about myself. That's when I found out Lana was sleeping with Tim and that drove another wedge between the two of us."
Lois picked up the story. "A few months later, Daddy found out about the continuing threat. We moved in here and these three rooms were converted into a very secure wing for us, the baby and a nanny Daddy would pay for while we were working or at school. Christopher was born in June. In early September, Clark finally stepped up as a dad to Christopher and they've been practically inseparable since, but us... We were one of those relationships that was one way in public and another in private. We spent a lot of time alone together, ignoring each other. We were at the cabin for our anniversary when I told Clark I couldn't do it anymore, no matter what the danger to me and Christopher."
"She scared me," I told them. "She hadn't told me – for good reason – that she'd been on anti-depressants since her check-up. She said she'd never been suicidal but wondered if the world would be a better place without her. If it would be better for me and Christopher and everyone else. I finally snapped out of my funk and we started being friends again."
"What about Lana?" Dad asked.
I sighed. "She and Tim were going to have a baby but she was in an accident and the baby didn't survive. We both felt horrible for both of them, but there wasn't anything we could do for them. Us contacting them would have just made it worse." I sighed. "It was a pretty good year for us. We were friends; we could stand being in the same room together. We knew about Jimmy by then and we all hung out a lot. Then Pop Pop died." It was still hard to talk about. "The story about Americans and Navance and a baby had come out at the time, but our names had never been released. They were released the day of Pop Pop's funeral." I looked at Mom. "Our family didn't react well to news trucks at the cemetery and things went back downhill for us – in part because I was in shock over losing him," I admitted.
"I'd realized the year before that I was falling in love with him," Lois said softly. "And then Daddy had a heart attack a few weeks later, but that night..."
I was glad she was telling this part of the story.
She took a deep breath. "I asked him to help me forget for a while and... Nate was born a month early eight months later." She swiped at her cheeks. "He's had health problems – a hard time gaining weight and had surgery when he was three and a half months old. He was doing better until he got sick last summer but he's great now. It was a long, hard road, but he's doing great."
I took over again. "Last summer, Navance was killed when the government was overthrown. Lois thought I was going to leave and that had always been the plan. When the five years was up or when he died, we'd get divorced and I'd beg Lana to take me back." They didn't look happy about that bit of information. "But I realized something Nana and Pop Pop always said. Love isn't who you can live with..."
"...it's who you can't live without," Mom finished for me.
"Right. Van-El had made his appearance and I talked to him about it all – Krypton, superheroes, Lois. Then Lois was on the colonists' transport and nearly got blown up. Eventually, I managed to convince Lois that I meant it; that I'd fallen in love with her somewhere along the way. I asked her to marry me all over again. I became a superhero, too, and last night we had our official wedding here at the house. This morning we woke up in Bizzaro World."
Mom had continued pacing, listening, but thinking as well.
She stopped and looked at us. "I think I've got it."
*****
TBC
