Not much time. 2006 is the right year. Don't ask...
Thanks to Alisha, Nancy and Beth.
Last time:
Lois
"Did you go to any other 2006s?" This came from Jonathan.
"Yeah," Clark answered. "Four, I think. We're calling this the second one. The third one was bad. Lois had died in that one and we left really quickly. The fourth one had Lois and Joe married with two kids. The fifth had us married but splitting up but thinking about getting back together and one kid. The sixth was the one we wanted to be in." He'd reached over and taken my hand. "We weren't in any of them for more than a few minutes."
"So all but the third had a Lois and a Clark?" Martha again.
"We didn't see Clark in the third one but yeah," Clark told her.
"Hmmm..." She looked like she was pondering something. "So there's a total of six 2006s out there. You went back to a time before the split took place. This was the only 2006 that didn't have a Lois and Clark that was supposed to?"
"As far as we know," I said.
Martha sighed. "Then I bet that's it. Nature – and I'd guess time – abhors a vacuum. Since we're guessing that our Lois and Clark are in your timeline, this would be the only one of the six that didn't have one of you so this is where you ended up."
"So how do we get back?" I whispered, looking at Clark desperately.
"I don't think we do," he said grimly, tears in his own eyes. "I don't think we do."
*~*29*~*
~~~~~
Clark
~~~~~
I was breaking her heart.
Why was it that I always ended up breaking the heart of the woman I loved?
I'd loved Lana and broken her heart.
I loved Lois so much more than I ever had Lana.
And I was breaking her heart.
And if we couldn't figure out a way out of this, I was going to break Lana's all over again.
"There has to be a way," she whispered.
"I don't know what it is," I told her honestly. "If Mom's right... There's no way to get back to our 2006."
"What if she's not?" Lois asked me. "I love you Martha, whichever Martha you are, but who's the expert on time travel? Doc Brown?"
"So what do you recommend?" I asked her. "Jumping back and forth to 1994 or other random years and see where we end up?"
"I don't know."
I wanted nothing more than to take her in my arms and fly off with her, but here... Here and now, Clark Kent was married to Lana, not Lois.
I looked to Mom and Dad. "Any ideas?"
"I'm out," Mom said quietly.
"I don't have any ideas either," Dad said. "Are there any other buttons on that doohickey?"
I pulled it back out of my pocket and looked at it. "There's only one other button on here. It's got IMTH on it, but I have no idea what that could stand for and I'd really rather not destroy the universe or something."
Lois sighed. "So what are we supposed to do? I love Joe, he's been a good friend to me over the years, but I can't marry him in a couple weeks. And I really can't stand the idea of you going upstairs and even just *sleeping* with Lana," she told me. "But I know you and I know you're not going to come within ten feet of me while you're in a universe where you're married to someone else. That's why we took our dinner and rest break when we did – in a universe *after* we got married." She closed her eyes tightly. "And now there's an even greater chance that I'm pregnant and if Lana is pregnant already... then what?"
I groaned. "I don't know, honey, but what're we supposed to do?"
"I don't think Lana could be pregnant yet," Mom told us. "Not based on what she told me today anyway. She said it would be another three or four weeks before she could take a test."
I looked at them. "I've almost always gone to my parents for advice, except for part of the whole thing with Navance where we didn't know if Christopher was my son and that we were planning on divorcing after five years." I sighed. "Help."
Mom and Dad shared a look.
"Follow your heart," Mom finally said. "If it means telling everyone here the truth, canceling the wedding and divorcing Lana, then so be it. Lana and Joe won't be happy if you two are trying to fake a life with them here. They'll catch on sooner or later, if they haven't already. If nothing else, in two weeks, Joe would notice the stretch marks. And if you *could* go from Clark to Joe that quickly, even just to maintain appearances and you both slept with them, you'd have a hard time telling him you're pregnant with someone else's baby, Lois. But at the same time, in your lives, you're married to each other and I can't see the Lois or Clark I know suddenly doing something like that just to keep up appearances, and I can't imagine you two doing it either."
"No," I told her running my free hand through my hair. "As far as I'm concerned Lois is my wife. But since Lana is *legally* my wife in this timeline, universe, whatever, that means we can't be together right now either."
Lois gripped my hand tighter. "So what do we do?"
"Talk to my parents some more," I told her. "Find out more about our new lives and then..." I sighed. "Break it off with Joe and Lana, I guess. Keep researching, trying to find a way back to our world, but..."
"How long does a divorce take in New Troy?" she asked glumly. "And how long after its final do you have to wait to get remarried?"
Mom and Dad both cringed at that. "This is going to take some getting used to," Mom said for both of them. "We love you, Lois, but we really don't know you that well. Not compared to Lana. We've known her her whole life. We talked about this earlier, about what would happen if you couldn’t find your way home. We understand the decision and why it has to be done, but you're going to hurt a lot of people if you do this. I'm not saying you shouldn't, just that you should be mindful of it."
"What if we talked to Daddy first?" Lois said suddenly. "He's always tinkering with inventions and stuff, maybe he can figure it out, or knows somebody who can. Give him a week or something. Tell everyone the truth – Mom, Dad, Joe, Lana, at least. Give him a week to either figure it out or find a friend at some lab or other who can figure it out. Tell them so they're not caught off guard. So Lana knows why you're not sleeping with her. But then... if he can't... *then* we start taking steps, starting with canceling the wedding. We'll know by then if I'm pregnant or not and it gives us a week to try to get their Lois and Clark back to them before we do anything drastic."
"You'll know that quickly?" Mom asked.
Lois nodded. "If I'm pregnant... And I know there won't be any other opportunities for me to get pregnant for a while," she added, looking at me. "But if I am, I'll be absolutely ravenous in a couple days. Well," she amended, "it depends on when it happened. If it happened at home, it could start as early as tomorrow. If it happened while we were gone, while we were in a universe where we were married, it'll be a couple of days."
Mom nodded. "I think that sounds like a good plan. It's not drastic. It gives everyone a few days to adjust before you take any action. And maybe your dad *can* figure it out and this all be pointless."
"You're brilliant," I said softly, putting my hand on the side of her cheek, tangling my fingers in her hair. "It's one of the many reasons I love you."
"Thank you," she said with her characteristic blush.
"So what now? Right now, I mean," I said to all of them.
"We go wake up my parents," Lois said determinedly. "Get Daddy working on this."
"It's the middle of the night, hon," I reminded her with a raised brow.
"And what do you think is going to happen if you don't go up and... you know..." She waved her hand in the air. "I say we go talk to Mom and Dad and then decide whether or not to wake up Lana and Joe and tell them now or wait until morning."
I nodded. "Let's go then." I turned to Mom and Dad. "They're in the Master Suite on the main floor, aren't they?"
"Where else would they be?" Dad asked.
~~~~~
Lois
~~~~~
I raised my hand to the door and hesitated. How did I tell my parents I wasn't really their daughter? Was there a manual for this somewhere?
Determined, I rapped sharply on the door.
I heard Mom's sleepy 'come in' and opened it, with Clark right behind me.
"Lois?" Daddy asked.
I nodded. "We need to talk to both of you."
"Can't it wait till morning?" That was a very sleepy Mom.
"No, it can't," I told her. "Please."
"Is this a long talk?" Dad asked.
"Very long," I answered.
"Joe, would you go make some coffee then?" Daddy swung his legs over the side of the bed and looked up more closely. "Clark?"
"Yes, sir." He glanced at me. "I'll go make some coffee and be right back."
I nodded and he turned to leave.
Mom pulled her robe on and tied it around her, moving to the couch in the sitting room as she did. "Come on in here, honey."
"Mom?" I asked tentatively, afraid of what her answer to my question might be.
She looked at me expectantly.
"Can I sit with you?" I asked, like I had when I was a little girl and was supposed to be in bed.
She had a slightly puzzled expression on her face, but nodded. "Of course."
I practically ran across the room and curled up next to her, her arm around me as I buried my face in her shoulder, tears streaming down my cheeks.
I had dreamed of sitting with her like this for so long. I had missed her for so long.
Daddy came in and sat on the other side of me and I felt his arm around both of us. I knew they had to be worried about me, but words wouldn't come. It might be up to Clark to explain this.
"What is it, Pumpkin?" Daddy finally asked quietly. "Cold feet?"
I shook my head and took the Kleenex – the real Kleenex, part of me noted – Mom offered. "No, but let's wait for Clark to get back. He's a big part of this."
I could feel both of them tense.
"Please. Don't jump to conclusions," I asked, still curled up next to Mom. "Whatever you're thinking, that's not it. Believe me, you'll never guess what it is we have to talk to you about."
They relaxed, but only slightly and a few minutes later, Clark walked in with an insulated carafe of coffee, four mugs and a bunch of stuff to doctor it up with.
He poured four cups, fixed mine just the way I liked it while Daddy did the same with Mom's.
"Thank you," I said as I took it from him. Neither one of us missed the look Mom and Dad exchanged.
I didn't move from Mom's side, but I did uncurl my legs.
"We have a story to tell you and it's going to be hard to believe," I warned them. "Nearly impossible, but..."
"You know Van-El?" Clark interrupted suddenly.
"Of course we know who he is," Daddy said. "And you two have both met him, right? You won your Kerth for your stories on him?"
We nodded.
"Six months ago if someone told you that there was a man who could fly and do all the other things he can, a man from space, what would you have thought?" Clark continued.
"We'd have thought he or she was crazy," Mom responded, appropriately.
"But now, not as much, right?"
"Of course we believe it now."
"You know I trust you guys because you know about me and where I came from right?"
I'd forgotten that they knew.
"Of course." Mom said glancing at me. As far as she knew, I didn't know.
"Well, this is even harder to believe than spacemen," I said quietly.
"What's harder to believe than spacemen?" Dad said, trying to keep a touch of humor in his voice. "Time travel?"
Clark and I looked at each other but didn't say anything.
Daddy deliberately set his cup on the table. "I think you two better start at the beginning."
I sighed. "I don't think the beginning is the place to start. Let's start this morning. When we went to bed last night, we were in one reality. When we woke up this morning we were in a different one. But only me and Clark. Everyone else was the same as they'd always been. We met downstairs when we realized it and this guy opened a... window in the room and told us he lived to ruin the lives of Loises and Clarks throughout universes. He'd gone back in time and changed one thing about our lives – my life in particular – that changed everything for us. He said he'd be back at midnight with a time device for us to use. He said we could go change that one event back or leave things as is, but our lives are very different from what they were before. We want our lives back, but..."
Tears filled my eyes again. "I couldn't bring myself to unchange the change. It was too big a change. Martha and Jonathan can corroborate all this, by the way. Martha caught on that Clark isn't the same Clark and we told them about this earlier. They saw the window appear and the box doohickey fly out of it and heard the guy's laugh. And we left and came back five minutes later. But we were gone like eighteen hours trying to fix things without changing that one thing again."
"I'm going to suspend disbelief for the moment," Daddy said. "Were you able to?"
"You know what," Clark said suddenly. "I can prove it and we can talk while I do." He pulled the black box out of his pocket and punched at the controls. The window opened in midair and he took a pillow and threw it through the window. I think Mom and Dad thought it was just an opening in the wall because the room on the other side of it looked the same, but the pillow didn't come out the other side. Clark punched another button and the window shrunk back into its case. "I set it for ten minutes."
Dad picked up his coffee and took a long slow sip. "Okay. Let's say this is real. Were you able to fix things?"
"Sort of," I told him. "We went back to different key points in our lives and talked to ourselves and convinced us to do what we needed to. By the time we were done, there was a timeline where our old lives existed even though that event in 1995 hadn't happened."
"So what's the problem?" Daddy asked. "Why aren't you there? Or back where you started from?"
"We have a theory. Martha came up with it," I told them. "Every time we changed something, we came back to today. And every time, there was already a Lois and Clark there."
"Except the time where Lois had died," Clark said grimly. "We fixed that one as quickly as we could. We didn't stay there long."
"What?" Mom exclaimed as what Clark had said sunk in. "Lois had died?"
I nodded. "In our timeline, Clark and I went to Bremerton for the Fall Festival. He was sick and it was the day of that horrible storm a few years ago – early November 2002. We barely made it to the cabin. In that timeline, neither one of us made it. I didn't make it at all and Clark almost died but was barely alive when someone found him. We went back and helped us make it to the cabin and keep warm and all that."
"I think I want to hear about your lives," Dad said suddenly. "What life did you two have when you went to sleep last night?"
"Our wedding was last night," I told him abruptly. "Our four year anniversary is next week, but we finally had our wedding last night, Christmas Eve. We have two sons and we may have another baby on the way."
Mom's arm tightened around me.
"I have the stretch marks to prove it," I told them, standing up suddenly and pulling up the hem of my shirt.
Dad sat back slightly. "Okay. I wasn't sure what I expected, but not that. I thought maybe you were making all this up or something, some kind of sleight of hand or something with the pillow. A psychology experiment or something, but you can't fake stretch marks like that and you wouldn't, Pumpkin. So that leaves us with you're telling the truth even before the pillow reappears. But I do have one question."
"What?" I asked, surprised he was so accepting so readily.
"Why didn't you just go change whatever it was that guy said he changed?"
Even more tears filled my eyes. "I couldn't." Clark put his arm around me. "When I was ten..." My voice cracked. "In 1995..." I shook my head and buried my head in Clark's shoulder.
"In 1995," he told them, "the four of you went to the cabin. Ellen, you and Lucy came back early because Lois and Sam were playing a hot game of Monopoly."
"I remember," Ellen said quietly. "Lucy and I had a close call with a tractor trailer on the way home."
Clark took a deep breath. "Well, in our timeline, in our lives, it wasn't a close call. In our timeline, you were both killed instantly."
*****
TBC
