Thanks - as always to Nancy, Alisha and Beth!
Last time
~*Clark*~
"Are you okay, Clark? Really? And where's Lois?" She looked concerned and maybe even a bit worried.
"She's around here somewhere, I guess," I told her. "I'm just glad you're okay. I was worried..."
"Of course, I'm okay," she insisted. "But we should get upstairs. Let me go."
"Not yet." I put a hand on the side of her face and leaned down, catching her off-guard with a kiss.
She pushed hard against me, struggling until I moved back.
When I did, she looked shocked – appalled even. She wiped at her lips with the back of her hand.
"Clark Jerome Davis Kent, what the hell are you doing?"
*~*2*~*
~~~~~
Lois
~~~~~
Why was Lana pushing Clark away and what was she saying?
I wasn't sure why, but she looked like she wanted to slap him.
Why would she want to slap Clark?
And what was up with her hair?
"Lois," Clark hissed, looking around. "Where are you?"
"Right here," I said, coming around the corner. "I didn't figure you'd want me around."
"What's going on, you two?" Lana asked, her arms crossed in front of her.
Clark ran his hands through his hair. "I woke up with Lois this morning," he finally said. "We have no idea how or why we were together..."
"Because your wedding was last night?" she said more than asked, one eyebrow raised.
Clark looked at me. I was sure my eyes were as wide as proverbial saucers.
"What?" I asked. "Wedding? The wedding's not for two weeks."
Lana looked at me like I'd grown a second head. "No," she said slowly, as though talking to a petulant child. "The wedding was last night. Here. You and Clark had your real wedding and then Bernie and Ashley got married real quick afterwards and then there was the reception and I thought you two were going to the cabin for the night, but Martha said you'd decided to stay here instead – she didn’t say why." She crossed her arms in front of her and looked from Clark to me and back again.
My jaw had been dropping farther the whole time she spoke. And who were Bernie and Ashley? The only Bernie I knew was Bernie Klein and he certainly wasn't married. "So Clark and I got married last night?" I asked skeptically. I knew Lana and I didn't always get along, but for the most part we were friends. If this was some kind of practical joke... I just didn’t get it.
She stared at me with one eyebrow raised, a smirk crossing her face as she seemed to decide to humor me. "No. You didn't get married last night. Your fourth anniversary is next week." She looked back and forth between us again. "Okay, you two, what's going on?"
Clark and I looked at each other and I shrugged. "I have no clue," I told both of them. "Where's Joe?"
Lana shrugged. "I think he said he and Debbie were going to her folks today. Why would they be here? Chad and I are here because the flight to Smallville isn't leaving until this afternoon."
"Chad?" Clark asked her.
"My *fiancée*." Both of our jaws dropped. "The one who'd *actually* slug you this time if he knew you kissed me," she told Clark.
"What?" Clark whispered. "Fiancee?"
"Yeah, you were there. Corn Festival a couple months ago. He won the toss off. Asked me to marry him. Said he'd wanted to deck you. Lois asked me to be a bridesmaid." She looked from me to Clark and back again. "What's going on?"
Clark looked pale – something I hadn't actually seen before – and like he needed to sit down. "Fiancee?" he whispered again.
"Yeah. Chad. The pediatrician. Dated your cousin Kim in high school. Last name Andrews. Wedding is in June. You promised to come." She was getting more annoyed with every word.
Clark sank to the floor against the wall. He looked up at me. "I feel like I’m in Bizarro World."
I nodded, leaning against the other wall. "I'm with ya."
"What?" Lana looked at both of us. "Will you two please tell me what's going on?"
Clark ran his hands through his hair again. "When I went to bed last night," he said slowly, "I was upstairs in the same room I woke up in. But it's different. It looks different. And I was with Lois."
"Of course you were," Lana said, exasperated.
"No, you don't understand. When I went to bed last night, I was with my wife, but not Lois."
Lana's eyes narrowed. "What?"
"I was with you," he said, looking up at her. "We've been married three and a half years. We're trying to get pregnant. Lois is marrying Joe in a couple weeks. *That's* what I remember from going to bed last night." He looked back at me. "Is this some kind of weird waking dream?"
I shrugged. "I have no clue."
"Clark, we broke up four years ago when you married Lois." Lana sat on the floor on my side of the wall, facing Clark. "She was pregnant with Christopher – your baby. Latislan. Navance. Any of this ringing a bell?"
"Isn't Navance the dictator in Latislan that was overthrown and assassinated last year?" I asked her.
"Yeah," she replied. "The one who was after Christopher. You named him after Chris and Jonathan."
Christopher?
Right. Clark's first adopted dad. I knew that.
"So I was pregnant with Clark's baby and we got married?" I asked slowly. I looked at her. "Please. Humor me."
Lana gave another exasperated sigh and apparently decided to just that. "We went to Europe with school. The three of us and Joe. You two ended up in Latislan somehow – I still don't know how – and while you were there, you found out you were pregnant. Navance claimed the baby. Clark said he was cruel and said the baby was his to try to get him to back off. The only way to invalidate Navance's claim was to get married. So you did. You thought you were going to get annulled or whatever when you got home, but he changed the law so you had to stay together for five years after the baby was born." She looked at me. "You don't remember any of this?"
I shook my head. "I remember going to Europe, but I've never been pregnant in my life. Much less with Clark's baby. You two have been joined at the lip as long as I've known you. Please," I asked earnestly. "Just tell us."
She took a deep breath and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling as though praying for patience. "When we started college, we were. But then you were Clark's roommate..."
"What?!" Clark and I said together.
Lana nodded. "I never got that whole story either, but you were Clark's roommate and you went to Bremerton together for the Fall Festival. Clark got sick..."
"I can't get sick, remember?" he said suddenly.
Lana just looked at him and went on. "Clark got sick. You tried to make it to the cabin but the car got stuck and you barely made it. You managed to get a fire started and all of your wet clothes off. Sam found you naked together the next morning. You told everyone that's when you got pregnant but you really thought it was the guy who'd drugged you at the toga party a couple days earlier. You said later that you still don’t really remember being together at the cabin, but you're pretty sure Clark is Christopher's dad."
"I would *never* cheat on you," Clark said adamantly.
"Normally you wouldn't, but you were hypothermic and both of you nearly died," Lana said.
"But that's just it, I can't *get* sick," Clark insisted again. He looked at Lana. "You know that."
"What are you talking about?" she asked.
He looked nervously from me to her. "I'm from Krypton, remember?" he finally said. "I can't *get* sick."
"Krypton?" I asked. "Isn't that where Van-El's from?"
He nodded and I sank to the floor next to Lana.
~~~~~
Clark
~~~~~
Apparently, I'd shocked both of them. But Lana had known about me for years. Or I thought she had.
"You're Superman?" Lana whispered.
"Who?"
"Van-El's Kryptonian superhero brother. Superman," she repeated.
What on Earth was she talking about? I shook my head. "No. We'd talked about it – about me being a superhero, too – but you didn't want me to risk me or you if someone found out who I was. I understood that. The only people who know about me are my folks, you and Sam and Ellen."
Lana's face paled. "Ellen?" she asked.
I nodded. "Lois' mom."
She looked back and forth between us. "Um, Clark, Ellen and Lucy died in a car accident when Lois was ten."
Lois looked like she felt sucker punched. "What?" she gasped.
Lana nodded. "I think it was in November when you were ten – I remember you telling us about it, just a bit, when we went to the cabin for Thanksgiving our freshman year. You and your dad were coming back from the cabin after them. They were hit by a tractor trailer and killed instantly."
"I remember that," Lois said. "But they weren't hit. They were run off the road, but they were okay. Weren't they?" she asked, fear creeping into her voice.
Lana shook her head. "No, they weren't."
Tears were rolling down Lois' cheeks as she looked at me. "Where are we, Clark?"
I shrugged. "I have no idea." But at least she wasn't freaking out about her work partner being an alien.
No.
That would be better than finding out her mom and sister had been dead for over a decade.
"What about Dave?" she asked suddenly.
"Dave?" Lana asked.
"My half-brother. Mom's son she had her senior year in high school. Jimmy's adopted brother. And Jimmy. He's married to Lucy and they're having a baby." She looked frantic.
Lana sighed again. I could tell we wearing her patience thin, but she was still humoring us. "Jimmy's brother died waiting for a bone marrow transplant," Lana said gently. "Your dad didn't know about him until after your mom died. He didn't look for him until several years later, but by then it was too late. And Jimmy..." Lana shrugged. "He's probably here somewhere, but he's not married. I'm not sure he's ever had a serious girlfriend." She looked from one of us to the other. "Are you guys being serious? You don't remember any of this? Not Christopher or Nate?"
"Nate?" I asked.
"Your son. He's seventeen months old. The one who's been sick."
"Sick?" Lois asked. "If he's Clark's son and Clark's... Kryptonian, how can he be sick?"
Lana shrugged. "This whole Kryptonian thing is new to me, too, though I guess it doesn't really surprise me. It explains a few things like Clark backpedaling when he'd say he'd seen his parents and changed it to talked to them or something. But Nate..." She explained how the valve between his stomach and esophagus didn't work right and how he'd had successful surgery to fix it.
"Well, I wasn’t invulnerable when I was a kid," I told them. "I threw up all over my dad on his first date with Mom, but that was the last time I've been sick." I looked at Lois. "Where *are* we?"
She shrugged. "You're the alien. I guess we could go all sci-fi and say we're in an alternate universe or something, but that doesn't seem likely. Although, I would have said flying aliens were pretty unlikely until a few months ago and now I'm sitting in front of one. You do fly, don't you?" she asked.
Trust Lois to make that leap of logic. I nodded. "Since I was eighteen."
"So that leaves us with 'alternate universe'?" Lana asked. "You guys are from some alternate dimension, like something out of 'Star Trek'?" She sounded dubious. "Did you hit your heads last night or something?"
"No," I told her. "We didn't hit our heads, but what other explanation is there if we're not dreaming? So what do we do?"
Tears filled Lois' eyes and spilled onto her cheeks. "Go home," she whispered.
"How?" I asked. "We don't know how we got here. Wherever here is."
Lana was giving me a pointed look and then glanced at the tearful Lois. I think she expected me to comfort Lois, but that didn't seem right to me – though it must have to her, if she thought I'd been married to Lois for nearly four years. Finally, she sighed and put an arm around Lois' shoulders. "It's going to be okay."
"How is it going to be okay?" Lois asked. "We don't know where we are or how we got here. My fiancée is with someone else apparently. My mom, sister, and brother are dead and so is my niece or nephew because my sister is. I'm married to *Clark* and we have two kids I've never met. How *exactly* is it going to be okay?"
Lana didn’t say anything, but I heard something.
"I think they're coming this way," I told them.
"Who?" Lois asked.
I looked over the top of my glasses at the staircase. "Sam, Mom and Dad, and two little boys. The one who was in our room this morning is dragging them this way."
"Probably Christopher," Lana said.
I nodded. "I think that's what she said."
"She who?"
I shrugged. "She said she'd told him to leave us alone and apologized to 'Mr. and Mrs. Kent'."
"Probably Jessica," Lana said. "She's your nanny. Her room is on the other side of the boys'."
"Nanny?" I asked with a raised brow.
Lana nodded. "I guess Sam paid for all the security upgrades and a nanny while Navance was after Christopher. Once he died last summer, you two decided to keep living here and kept her on rather than finding daycare for the boys."
Right. Nanny. Boys. Married to Lois...
We could all hear them heading down the stairs.
"Christopher," Mom said, sounding a bit exasperated. "What's going on?"
They all appeared in front of us. The grown-ups looked back and forth between Lois and Lana and me. They looked like our families.
"What's wrong, Princess?" Sam asked Lois.
"Dat no' my mommy," the little boy said, his arms crossing in front of him. "Dat no' daddy, eit'er."
"Don't be silly, Christopher," Dad said. "Of course that's your mom and dad. They just look upset."
He shook his head vehemently. "No. No' Mommy an' Daddy."
Dad rolled his eyes and Mom frowned.
Lois and I shared a look and she shrugged.
I sighed. "He's right," I finally said. "We're not his mom and dad."
"Then who are you?" Sam asked, a note of amusement in his voice.
"The best explanation we've come up with so far is an alternate universe," Lois said quietly.
"Really?" Dad asked, with a raised brow.
"Baby in a spaceship?" I retorted. "Really?"
All three of them immediately looked at Lana. Well, that answered that question. Sam knew.
"She knows," I told them. "See, I thought she was my wife and had known for years."
Mom shook her head slightly. "What?"
I sighed. "When we went to bed last night, I was married to Lana and Lois was engaged to Joe. This morning we woke up together. Here."
"Wherever 'here' is," Lois added glumly. "I want to go home. I want my mom."
Sam glanced at me. "Sweetie, Mom died a long time ago."
Lois shook her head. "Not my mom. My mom and Lucy and Dave are all alive. Lucy's married to Jimmy and they're having a baby. I want to go home. I want my family."
Sam's face paled. "Your mom's alive?"
Lois nodded.
Sam sank to the floor next to me. "Oh, my."
*****
TBC
