From Last Time:
“Come on, Lois,” Maura said in her irritatingly cheerful voice. “Dave’s right and it is an amazing book, so we’ve done our job in giving it a plug on the show, now let’s get down to the real news…your husband reappears, practically out of thin air, after four years. He tells us nothing about the Kryptonians or their supposed war. I mean, does he know when Superman is coming back? People are dying to know. They’d be hanging on his every word, if he would just tell us something!”
“I’m here to talk about the book, about what we can learn from Kinwara, and how we can prevent tragedies like it in the future. My family is off limits. I believe my agent made that perfectly clear to your producers.” Lois could hear the edge in her own voice.
“You’re a journalist,” Dave interjected as though she needed the reminder. “You’d be doing the same thing in our position.”
She blinked hard, taken aback by the comment. “No I wouldn’t,” she countered. “Have you stopped to ask yourselves what the social value of this line of questioning is? There’s no public right to know, no political or social issues at stake. You’re just trying to manipulate…no, you know what? We’re done.” She stood up abruptly, unclipping her microphone and dropping it on the table. Lois turned and walked off stage without so much as a single look back at the hosts or the cameras. She could hear Joan—somewhere in the bowels of the studio—screaming bloody murder at someone, hopefully one of the show’s producers.
What a fantastic way to begin her book tour.
********
Clark watched the television in stony silence, his jaw clamped shut. “Turn it off, please,” he said through clenched teeth. His father wordlessly lifted the remote and turned the program off.
“I can’t believe the nerve of those people…” his mother began.
“I can,” Clark replied. “I’m just another story to them. But now that story is all about how I’m hiding behind my wife.” He got up and walked out of the den.
********
New Stuff:
It was like a car wreck, Lois thought bleakly as she opened up yet another browser page and loaded another newspaper website. Her fiasco of an interview was everywhere and people couldn’t help but gawk, stare, and comment. The commentariat seemed evenly divided among those who thought she was a hypocrite, those who thought her interviewers were unprofessional – likely because their competitive instincts had led them to seek out a potential vulnerability in an opponent—and those who were just happy to use the entire drama as a springboard to talk about Clark.
Lois put her laptop down on the couch and picked up the remote. She hesitated for a moment, wondering if she dared to turn on the television. Almost cringing, she pushed the ‘power’ button.
“Lois Lane is a big girl and a cutthroat competitor. It’s disingenuous and downright hypocritical for her to hide from questions. If she can’t stand the heat, she should stay out of the kitchen…” She scowled at the television. She’d never been able to stand Michael Woods, the political columnist from that third rate rag of a paper, the Metropolis Star. Lois’s more spotlight hungry colleagues were gathered around a table on one of those morning news programs on LNN, happily picking over her like a carcass.
She was almost surprised to see Diane Herr from the Tribune also scowling at Woods. “Look, we’re not talking about a politician who parades around his family as a demonstration of his values and then uses them for cover when he’s caught in an affair. Lane has never exploited her family for her career. She’s a serious journalist…”
“Whose personal life is a serious story as far as the rest of the world is concerned,” Bruce Bennett of LNN interrupted. “I’m sorry, but she doesn’t get to duck that because she finds it inconvenient. This is just the sort of prima donna behavior…”
“That’s outrageously sexist, and you know it!” Herr cut him off. “If Lois were a man, protecting his wife from this kind of unwanted publicity you’d all be lined up behind him.”
Dear god, make it stop, she thought wearily to herself. She turned off the television. This wasn’t over. It wasn’t anywhere close to being over. She had book signings today in Los Angeles and San Francisco.
********
He was in a particularly foul mood as he knocked on Dr. Friskin’s door. Lois’s interview the night before was still weighing heavily on his mind. With that one stupid line of questioning, he’d been transformed into Lois Lane’s pampered and protected poodle—too afraid to show his face in public, constantly hiding from harsh questions and even his own shadow. Of course, none of that had anything to do with Superman, so he was going to have to pretend he was in a bad mood for all the ordinary reasons he was in a bad mood these days.
They exchanged the usual pleasantries as he entered her office, but he could feel his stomach twisting itself in knots. He’d dodged and evaded the tough stuff for about as long as was possible. There was nothing left to talk about except the stuff he really didn’t want to talk about. He took his place on the leather couch and stared straight up at the ceiling. It took a moment for him to tune out the sounds of the city, but he managed to focus.
"Now, we've dealt with a great many things, but we've studiously avoided certain subjects and we have some very large gaps in the story you've told me. I think it's time to start filling those in, don't you?"
His shrink was an evil mind reader. "Am I supposed to answer that honestly?" He sighed.
“We don’t have to get through it all today, but it would help if we could get started,” she explained patiently.
Clark closed his eyes and took a slow, deep breath. “I wasn’t anywhere near the fighting most of the time,” he began. “I had armies and generals to handle the actual combat. But I gave orders that got good, decent people killed. And sometimes, I found myself in the middle of the fight. I watched people die in battle. People I couldn’t help. People who had counted on me to lead them. You’d think that after a thousand condolence letters, they’d get easier to write. I saw my cities destroyed and innocent civilians slaughtered. I tried to help but there was almost nothing I could do. My efforts were like a joke. If I’d had my powers….”
“Do you consider the efforts of firefighters and police officers to be a joke?” she asked.
“Of course not,” he practically spat, offended by the suggestion.
“Isn’t that because you don’t hold them to the same standards that you hold yourself?”
“Yeah, but…” he began lamely.
“It’s not their fault they’re not all powerful, just like it wasn’t your fault that you weren’t all powerful. So why are you trying to compare what you were able to do there to what you could have done here?”
“I don’t know; I guess I’m just not used to having those normal limitations. I have to hand it to you,” he said to his therapist with a wry grin. “I don’t know how people go through their whole lives like that. Four years of aches and pains and the constant specter of mortality were more than enough for me.”
“You mentioned the ‘specter of mortality,’ was your life ever in danger?”
“Yeah,” he admitted with a weak nod of his head. “I was wounded in an early battle, not long after I got there. The wound was minor, but there was a lot of house to house fighting. A lot of casualties. A lot of them civilian.” He told her about the first battle at Terian. He told her about the first time he’d shot someone. Clark had only wounded the rebel, but it had shocked him nonetheless.
“I was naïve to think I could have anything to do with that war without becoming violent myself,” he said bitterly. Clark drew in a shaky breath. “It’s hard to hate what you’ve done without hating who you are.” He repeated the words he’d heard so long ago. Words that still haunted him.
********
He was out on the porch, leaning against the rail, when she descended toward the farmhouse. “How’d the book signing go?” he asked.
She stopped on the step and looked up at him. “Fine,” she said before spinning back into her regular clothes. It could have been a lot worse. At the signings, she’d had a lot more power to simply state she wasn’t going to engage a particular line of questioning and move on. There had been massive crowds at both bookstores, but she knew a large percentage of those present were only there to witness the next evolution in the budding controversy.
“Did you see the papers?” he asked, his brow furrowed. It was an odd question; he knew that she had seen the headlines and stories already. As if it had been possible to avoid them.
“We just have to ignore it,” she said with a shrug.
Clark snorted. “I guess that seems logical from your standpoint. You’re not the one they’re making out to be a damn china doll.”
“No, I’m the one they’re calling a diva, junkyard dog, and hypocrite all in the same breath.” Why on Earth was she rising to the bait? Her brain kicked and screamed and yelled at her to stop.
He stood up straight, his posture stiff. “Lois, don’t you get it?” His voice took on a tight, strained quality. “I’m finished in this business. Who’s ever going to take me seriously again?”
“These people are idiots, Clark,” she said. “They have the attention span of gnats and, in a week, they’ll move on and forget all about this.”
“Who’s going to allow Clark Kent, alien abductee, to interview them? How do I go on a stakeout when the entire country knows who I am? And who in their right mind is going to let me stop a hostage situation when I can’t even stop my own hands from shaking?” he demanded angrily. “But I guess it doesn’t matter, since you can take care of all that stuff now. You certainly don’t seem to need my help.”
“Don’t you dare,” she whispered. She was near tears, but the tone of her voice was a warning. “Don’t call me a liar, Clark Kent. You know that I couldn’t count the number of nights I cried myself to sleep because I needed you. Because I was lost and afraid and I couldn’t figure out how to make things work without you here.”
The muscles in his neck twitched and flexed as he clenched his jaw tightly. His hands were balled up in fists by his sides, something he did when he was desperately trying to control the tremor. He looked away from her. “A reporter is all I ever wanted to be. What am I supposed to do with the rest of my life?”
“You have to give this time,” she insisted. “You’ve been home a few weeks.”
“Sure. Time fixes everything,” he replied sarcastically with a shake of his head. “You have no idea what I’ve been through.”
“Because you won’t tell me!” she snapped, blinking back hot tears. “I can’t do this. I’m not going to engage you in a knockdown, drag out fight every time you get pissed off about something.” She walked past him into the farmhouse, trying to slow her thundering heart.
********
After checking in on Jon, she flew out almost immediately for a patrol. She’d only done a few sweeps over Metropolis, however, when she found herself floating over his old apartment. Lois dropped down onto the balcony and let herself in, changing back into her regular clothes. She rarely came here anymore, even though she’d bought the place a few years ago when Clark’s landlord had sold the building to a developer who’d turned all the units into condos. Everything in here belonged to Clark. Everything was marked permanently with his impression. His game ball. Pictures of him and his parents. Odd little statuettes, curios, and knickknacks from every place imaginable.
Lois walked to the mantle and picked up a picture of the two of them together. God, they looked so young. And happy. She touched the cool glass over her husband’s image. He smiled at her like nothing in the world could trouble him. Replacing the frame on the mantle, she stepped back and sat down on the couch. Her eyes closed as she thought about the fight she’d just had with Clark. A lump formed in her throat, making it hard to breathe. She bit her lip to stop it from trembling as she drew her legs up onto the couch. Curled up rather pitifully, she finally allowed the sob to escape her lips. In the empty apartment, in the place where ages ago, they’d planned their bright and hope-filled future together, she cried.
********
God, he was an idiot, he thought as he sat miserably at the end of the bed. He looked down at his hands, wondering what on Earth made him take his anger out on Lois. Why did he feel the need to test the limits of her now superhuman patience? He hadn’t said it outright, but there was no need to. In no uncertain terms, he’d blamed her for his situation. As though she’d had a good alternative to explain his absence over the last four years. What had he wanted her to say, that he’d just skipped town? That he’d run out on her? That would have worked out well for him, especially after it became obvious she was pregnant. And what possessed him to portray her incredible efforts to provide the best life for their son as some sort of conspiracy against him?
He’d picked a fight with her because he was too afraid to fight back against the ones who were actually leveling criticism against him. Because he really had no defense against the charge that he didn’t want to talk to the media. Because he knew that unlike the unforgiving public, Lois would pull her punches.
He was the worst kind of coward.
Clark stood up and crossed the room to the dresser. Hesitating for a moment, he opened the lid to the metal chest and looked at the collection of small globes inside. He picked up the first globe and activated it, watching silently as the images of his parents and their firstborn child burst into life in front of him. Each time he’d viewed the recordings before, he’d been awed by how his birth parents had persevered in the face of the certain death of their planet. They had saved Kryptonian civilization along with several million lives, including his own. They did it knowing they wouldn’t live to see the results of their efforts. Now, as he watched the two people so obviously in love with each other, who so obviously adored their infant daughter, he wondered how they’d survived—how their marriage had survived—not only the death of their little girl, but the literal end of their world. Why were they so strong? Why was their relationship so strong that it could endure the sort of heartbreak that put everything he’d suffered through in stark perspective?
He felt the sharp sting of regret. His birth parents looked so young, so happy, as they doted on their daughter. He wished he could have known them. He wished he could have spared them the devastating loss and heartache they had suffered in the last years of their too short lives. And yet, how could he even contemplate the idle notion of alleviating the pain of others when he was causing his own wife and family so much misery?
********
“Thank you for seeing me on short notice, Dr. Friskin,” Superman said somewhat grimly as he entered the psychiatrist’s office. Clark usually dreaded his regularly scheduled appointments, so making extra ones really wasn’t on the list of things he wanted to do. Lois was halfway across the country, signing books or doing a radio show or another panel discussion at a college, he couldn’t remember which. They hadn’t spoken since the night before.
“It’s no trouble at all,” Dr. Friskin assured him as she ushered him inside. “What seems to be the problem?”
Clark sat down on the edge of the couch, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “I think my marriage is falling apart,” he said. Clark paused; it wasn’t like his relationship with his wife was fraying at the seams of its own accord. This was definitely his doing. “No. I think I’m destroying my marriage,” he corrected.
“You said before that you didn’t speak to your wife about the last four years. Is that to blame for your current problems?”
He wanted to deny it. “Yes,” he heard himself say.
“So you’re concerned that your relationship with your wife is being irreparably damaged because you have been withholding information from her. And you believe that providing that information to her would also irreparably damage your relationship. Is that right?”
The proverbial rock and a hard place, he thought glumly. “Yeah. So what do I do?” he asked rather helplessly as he looked down at the carpet.
“I’m afraid I can’t answer that for you,” Dr. Friskin replied. “But you should ask yourself how you imagine your relationship with your wife developing, given the fact that you haven’t told her about something you think would cause her to see you very differently.”
Clark could feel his features forming a frown. “You’re asking me why I think it’s okay to build a marriage on a lie, aren’t you?”
Dr. Friskin shook her head. “No, I’m suggesting you reflect on how you and your wife have changed over the last few years and how those changes might affect your relationship going forward. Your relationship has been on hold, even though your lives haven’t been. It probably isn’t possible to pick up where your marriage left off, as though the last four years never happened.”
“I hate lying to my wife,” he said simply. “And I hate myself for getting mad at her for not understanding what I’ve been through when it’s my fault for not telling her. I know I have to talk to her, I just don’t know how.”
“And we can work on that,” Dr. Friskin replied gently. “It might not be necessary—or even helpful—for you to discuss every last detail with her, but you both need a frame of reference to understand each other.”
“You make it sound simple.”
“It most certainly isn’t. The anger and anxiety you’re experiencing and the nightmares suggest that you need to think a great deal about your own frame of reference and how you might better understand what you went through.”
“So I guess we’ll be spending a lot of time together, then?”
“Well, unless you’d consider group therapy…” she ventured.
It was out of the question. “Absolutely not,” he replied forcefully.
“Well then, since you’re already here, why don’t we get back to what happened on New Krypton?”
********
Silence reigned over the room for a long while as she took her careful, detailed notes. She tried to keep her expression one of detached calm, though it was difficult. The mental images of reverse hangings, beatings, and mock executions that he described were chilling and the way he told it only exacerbated that fact. She watched as he fought to describe things he had so clearly been working tirelessly to repress. But the only emotion he ever displayed was anger. After a long, pregnant pause, he finally continued.
“I controlled nothing. I couldn’t even choose to sit down or stand up. I was never allowed to sleep longer than a few minutes unless they beat me unconscious. Nor seemed to take a lot of pleasure in proving to me that I was only alive because he hadn’t yet decided to kill me. That there wasn’t anything I had that he couldn’t take away from me. Eventually it worked. At some point, I stopped being a man.”
“You felt emasculated?” she ventured.
He snorted derisively. “If you’re looking for some deep seated misogyny, it isn’t there. Most of the strongest figures in my life have been women. I didn’t feel emasculated. I felt like I was less than a person. I was like some pathetic animal, cowering in a corner, waiting to be put out of its misery.”
His response illuminated the profound effect the experience had had on him. He wasn’t nursing superficial wounds to a sensitive male ego. As she’d surmised from his recounting of events, he’d experienced carefully crafted and executed, full-scale deindividuation and dehumanization. She made a note to ask him about those strong figures in his life that he’d mentioned. Who were they? What part did they play? “How did you deal with that feeling?” she asked.
“I didn’t,” he said. “I wanted to die. The day I left, I’d promised my wife I was going to come home. But sometimes the only thing I could think about was how much I wanted it all to end.”
“But you did come home, Superman. You survived, and not many people would have been able to do that.”
She watched as he shook his head. “Plenty of people have been through a lot worse and dealt with it better than I did. You hear stories about people who spend months and years in concentration camps and POW camps. I barely survived a few weeks…”
It was a different twist on survivor guilt, but the effect on him was the same. He compared himself unfavorably to those he believed had fared worse than he had. “You shouldn’t be quick to underestimate the effects of solitary confinement. Most people who endure such prolonged trauma don’t suffer alone. Prisoners help each other keep their sense of humanity. Isolation is the torturer’s force multiplier and often has even more of a dehumanizing effect than physical abuse or deprivation,” she explained. “What you’ve described to me ranks right up there with the worst I’ve ever studied. These techniques were designed to push every last person beyond the breaking point—to shatter the human psyche. It takes a remarkably resilient person to come through such an ordeal with their sense of self intact.”
“I don’t feel remarkably resilient,” he said grimly.
“I won’t claim to know what you’ve been through, Superman. But in my experience, when people deal with these issues, things get better. Not all at once, and it isn’t always a smooth journey, but things improve. In the mean time, I think you should start to think about things you feel like you can tell your wife about your experiences, things that will help her understand your experiences. You’ve been apart without contact for four years and she’ll want to understand what’s been happening in your life.”
“All right,” he said, his tone one of resignation. Superman gathered up his cape as he stood. “Thank you for your help, Dr. Friskin.”
She rose from her chair and followed him as he headed toward the window. “Of course. I’ll see you again Wednesday,” she responded.
********
The little boy’s breathing, deep and even, was the only sound in the otherwise silent room. Clark watched his son sleep, watched the rise and fall of his small chest. He wanted to be a good father. More than anything else, he wanted to be there for his boy. He’d been going to therapy for weeks now, painfully chronicling the history of his physical and mental torment on New Krypton. At Dr. Friskin’s encouragement, they’d progressed to various forms of cognitive therapy, trying to train his body and mind not to overreact to every stimulus. He was meditating again. Not too deeply or for too long. It wasn’t as though he knew how to achieve the sort of meditation that would completely separate him from his emotions or memories, but he didn’t want to push it anyway. The one thing he wasn’t doing was talking to his wife about any of it.
He heard footsteps behind him and turned to see his mother approaching. She silently handed him a cup of coffee. “Good morning,” she whispered.
“Morning,” he replied softly before taking a sip. It was still before dawn and he had a full day ahead of him, helping his father prepare for the harvest. Clark had told Perry that he intended to stay in Kansas through the busy fall season to help around the farm. After that, he’d think about going back to Metropolis and the Planet. The farmhouse was too small for three generations of Kents and Smallville was suddenly too small of a town. There wasn’t even the hope of peaceful anonymity here. Besides, it would be good for him and Lois to find a place of their own. A house where they could raise their son. It would be good to do that before Jon started nursery school the following year.
As the royalty checks rolled in from Lois’s book, it became clearer and clearer that they wouldn’t have trouble affording a house. He’d been a bit stunned to learn just how well she was doing financially. She’d tried to demur, saying that her first book had sold well in part because of her connection to Superman and that she’d just invested the revenues prudently. But as absurd as it may have been, he was kind of bothered by it. He didn’t begrudge his wife her success, but what did he bring to the relationship these days? They weren’t equal partners financially. She was shouldering all the superhero burdens, and she still took the lead in parenting. What did she need him for?
“Is Lois still out?” his mother asked.
He nodded. “She’s finishing up putting out the wildfires in California. Is Dad up?”
“His back’s still bothering him,” Martha responded.
Clark frowned. His parents were getting too old to run this whole farm. “Tell him to take it easy; I’ll milk the cows.” He didn’t want to take over the farm, but at least this season, he could do the heavy lifting around here. Then they could figure out a more long term solution.
********
From across the cornfields, she could see her husband stacking bales of hay. He moved with easy grace, his t–shirt stretched tightly across the broad muscles of his back and shoulders. He may have been a superhuman figure from a world billions of miles away, but he was still her farmboy.
He looked up as she approached. “How’d it go?” he asked.
“The fires are all contained. The firefighters and National Guard are mopping up,” she replied. “I reek of smoke, though. I’m going to run up and take a shower.” After cleaning up, she went downstairs to find her husband taking his boots off as he came into the house.
“All done?” she asked.
“Yeah,” he replied. “It’s good to feel productive again.”
She walked toward the kitchen, intending to prepare a pot of tea. “Perry called last night. He wants to talk to you about coming back to the Planet.”
“And do what? Be the Planet’s mascot?”
“It’ll just take some time to work things out,” she replied, trying to sound hopeful. She put the tea kettle on the stove and removed a couple of mugs from the cupboard.
“I’ve been home for months,” he said curtly as he sat down at the kitchen table.
“This is complicated for everyone…” she began.
“How complicated is it? I’m not the first man to come home from war. I fought. I got wounded. It’s happened to plenty of people before me and they managed to go back to their lives just fine.”
“Those aren’t battle scars on your back,” she said as she turned back around to look at him. Lois had thrown down the gauntlet. It was a step she’d been avoiding since he’d returned home. She watched as his posture stiffened. He was preparing to shut her out. “Something happened to you out there, something you can’t forget no matter how hard you try. Something that keeps you from sleeping at night. That keeps you from talking to me. I’m not stupid, Clark. Whatever you think you’re protecting me from, it’s not working.”
He stood up, backing away from the table. “I was ambushed and shot,” he said, his voice betraying nothing. “I was taken prisoner by Nor. He held me for six weeks and four days. And he tortured me for every moment of it. He strung me up. He starved me. He beat me unconscious because it amused him. If Ching and a commander named Talan hadn’t found me, Nor would have killed me. There. Now you know.”
Each word cut her deeply. She said nothing, stunned not by the particulars, but by the fact that he’d told her anything at all. For so long, he’d kept her completely in the dark. It didn’t matter how much it hurt, how his torment was now something she could imagine. She would find a way to be strong for him, to shoulder whatever part of the burden he’d let her take up.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you. I’m sorry for everything you went through. I’m sorry you went through it alone.”
“It’s over,” he said. “I try not to think about it.”
The sharp whistle of the tea kettle shattered the fragile silence that had settled between them. Without saying another word, he turned and walked out of the kitchen. Numbly, she watched him go, ignoring the shriek of steam rising up behind her. She wiped away a tear. And then another.
