A huge thank you to Carol!
From Chapter 48
“I think this is the place where we kiss,” Lois said. “Or at least I assume that’s why they left?”
“I think so, too,” I chuckled, feeling a strange mixture of amusement, relief, and exhilaration.
“Your parents are so weird,” Lois said quietly as we moved closer together.
“Well, they did raise me,” I pointed out.
“Good point,” she whispered, although I could tell from the look in her eyes she wasn’t thinking so much about my parents anymore.
“I love you,” I said again, quietly this time.
Lois smiled. “You know, despite all the stuff we’ve been through recently, I believe you. Maybe because I love you, too.”
And then, like every time I kissed Lois, the sounds of the house around us disappeared, and all I could hear was her heartbeat in my ears.
Chapter 49
It was about five minutes before Mom and Dad came back into the kitchen. Or five years. I wasn’t completely sure. But I felt like a completely different guy. I had a girlfriend – a really amazing one. She was way prettier than Lana, and yet she didn’t break up with me, constantly thinking she could do better.
More importantly, she knew the truth about me. The whole truth. And she said she didn’t care. Stranger yet, I really believed her. She seemed so sincere. Plus, I felt like I was pretty much getting to be an expert on Lois Lane. I was pretty sure I’d be able to tell if she was lying.
I hadn’t ever really imagined… Well, that wasn’t quite true. I had fantasized about this. In the same way little girls daydream about their Prince Charming, when I was a teenager and realized how different I was, I had dreamed about finding a girl, pretty of course, who would be okay with it all. Who wouldn’t be grossed or weirded out by how strange I was.
Still, I had thought that’s all they ever would be – fantasies. I didn’t think I’d ever really find someone who could do that. And I never imagined there was any possibility that that someone would be someone I loved so much, and not just because she accepted me for who I was, but because I just honestly loved her. I just hadn’t expected that at all.
It was all a little hard to take in really. So when Mom and Dad came back in, I took the opportunity to sit down.
“So where are you from?” Mom asked Lois as we all took seats around the table. “I think Clark said you were from Metropolis?”
Lois nodded, “A different area of the city than where the university is, though. A bit more suburban. Have you ever been to the east coast aside from dropping Clark off. Wait? Did you drop him off?” She looked at me. “Did you fly yourself to college?”
Mom laughed. “He wanted to.”
“We took care of that quickly enough,” Dad added.
“Just ‘cause Clark may be a different species doesn’t mean his childhood has been that different. We weren’t letting him go off to college without having us help him move his stuff,” Mom said.
“When did your childhood start?” Lois asked me. “I mean here.”
“Here?” I asked, confused.
“Here,” Lois clarified. “As in Earth or Kansas. Here.”
I shrugged. “Before I remember,” I told her.
“When we found Clark, he was about six months old,” Mom told her. “At least that’s what we estimated.”
“But you must have thought he was… well…” Lois blushed as she mumbled, “normal, back then.”
Mom nodded. “Well, we weren’t really sure. We did find him in a spaceship.” Lois’ eyes bugged out at this knowledge, but Mom continued before Lois could ask more questions. “And he was normal. Mostly. Up until he was a teenager. He didn’t ever get sick, but we didn’t really notice that much. And he got hurt less than other children, but he did get hurt.”
“My invulnerability didn’t kick in until later,” I told her.
“So you’re invulnerable, huh?” Lois asked.
I shrugged. “I guess. I don’t know for sure, but I haven’t been hurt by much of anything since I was about twelve. And by the time I was sixteen, I was trying. Looking for things that could hurt me.”
“So if I were to punch you right now, it wouldn’t hurt?” she asked me with a glint in her eye.
“It might hurt you,” I told her with a smile.
Lois didn’t reply, just looked me up and down. Recognizing where this was going, I stood. “Okay,” I told her. “Take a shot.” I relaxed my muscles so she wouldn’t get hurt and waited for it.
Lois looked at me skeptically for a moment, then reached out and punched me. She didn’t punch very hard, and I had the feeling Lois was holding back. She wasn’t completely sure she believed the invulnerability thing or something, I guess. But when I didn’t react at all, she punched me again, harder this time.
“You didn’t even flinch,” she said awed. “I knocked some guy out last year using that move.”
“You knocked a guy out?” I asked. I didn’t really see Lois ever resorting to violence.
“He was picking on my little sister and wouldn’t stop,” Lois shrugged.
We sat down, Lois looking at me more closely. “So,” she asked slowly, “when you said you tried, what do you mean? What sorts of things did you try?”
Mom shuddered – she was remembering some of them, I’m sure. She had not been happy with my decision to try to define my limits, although she had understood my motivation.
“I started with small things,” I told her. “I tried cutting myself with a knife. I mean, part of what had tipped me off was that I had never cut myself, even when it seemed like I should, but I started by making sure I wasn’t missing something. But then I moved onto bigger things.”
“Like?” Lois prodded me.
Mom wouldn’t even look at me, and Dad looked at some point over my head when he said, “One day, Martha and I came back from shopping to find Clark running in front of the tractor – while it was moving.”
“Are you insane?” Lois shrieked at me. “What if you were wrong? You could have killed yourself.”
I shrugged, “Maybe. I guess. But I really wanted to know. How else would I be able to define my limits?”
“And you weren’t wrong?” Lois confirmed.
“It rolled right over him,” Mom said. “I’ve never been so scared in my life. I don’t think I believed he really was impervious to any thing before that. I was sure that despite the fact that he had fallen from the hayloft without getting hurt, the tractor was just too much. Or the hayloft was just a fluke or something.”
Dad nodded. “I actually closed my eyes while I yelled at him. I was sure I was yelling at a flattened Clark.”
“Flattened?” Lois said with a smile. “Like a Clark pancake.”
Dad nodded, still not smiling. “Just like that. And not breathing.”
“But I was fine,” I added in, trying to get my parents off of this morbid tone. “It was like I hadn’t been hit at all.”
“Really?” Lois asked. “Just like not being hit?”
“Well, no, in that I remembered being hit. It was more like… like I had been run over by a matchbox car. Or a Styrofoam version of the tractor I guess, ‘cause it was still full sized.”
“Wow!” Lois said, smiling again. “So, what about the other stuff? What else can you do? How’d you find out about them?”
“Most of them just happened,” I told her. “I can hear really far away. I guess I started noticing it in school – sometimes my mind would wander and I’d hear what was going on in other classrooms.”
“But we tested it here on the farm,” Mom said. “Jonathan walked further and further away until Clark couldn’t hear him. We used walkie talkies so Jonathan would know when to come back.”
“Well, actually, I started driving at some point. When I got to the end of the farm and Clark could still hear me, I came back and got the car. I was nearly in town before he started having trouble.”
“I don’t hear as well in Metropolis, though,” I added. “I guess it’s all the ambient noise or whatever, but I can’t hear more than a few blocks away normally.”
“Oh,” Lois said, sarcastically, “just a couple of blocks away. Pitiful really.”
We all laughed before I moved on. “I can see pretty far, too, but it’s pretty clear how I figured that out. And I can see through things. That one was weird – when it first came in, I couldn’t control it at all and it sort of came in and out. I’d be looking at something and then suddenly I’d be looking through it. For a long time, if I was looking through something, I couldn’t not look through it.”
“And the flying?” Lois asked.
I shrugged. “Didn’t I mention this before? I just started hovering one day in my sleep.”
Mom laughed. “I guess he fell when he started to wake up and the noise woke me. I came in and found him in the middle of his floor. He was so confused! He kept trying to tell me he was dreaming and I kept telling him he was awake. It wasn’t until the morning that I even knew why he kept saying he wasn’t awake yet.”
“After Mom left and I realized I was actually awake, I spent all night trying to control the hovering. It was the last thing to come in, so I had gotten pretty good at controlling things by then.”
“You mean like you do with seeing through things?” Lois confirmed.
I nodded. “I do it with everything really. I can see clear to the Irig’s farm out the window, but I’m not looking out of the kitchen.” I gave an example. “Or I can hear things nearly in town, but I’m not listening to anything outside this room.”
“Is that how you keep from running off all the time?” Lois asked.
I nodded. “I promised Mom and Dad that I wouldn’t do the Boy in Black thing during class. That’s not what I’m in college for.”
“The Boy in Black?” Lois asked. “Is that what you refer to your rescues as?”
Mom got up and pulled out the book where she kept articles where I was mentioned out of the kitchen drawer. “You can look through these. He’s always referred to as the boy in black, so we started calling it that.”
Lois flipped through, looking up at me after seeing the first two or three. “You’ve been doing this for years!”
I nodded. “Pretty much since I realized I could fly.”
“You just decided…”
“At first, I just used the flying to get away. It felt so freeing to be up in the sky where no one else was. A way to escape the pressure. Typical teenage pressure, I guess,” I admitted.
“Made more intense by knowing you were different,” Lois nearly whispered.
I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess. Anyway, at some point, I ended up flying clear to China, and after that I realized what I could do if I was willing to use my powers.”
Lois nodded, looking through the clippings. “Use your powers?” she finally asked. “Do you use them for anything besides getting places?”
I flushed, but Dad took over anyway. “Not often. He can’t,” he gave me a pointed look while he said it. “Clark knows that it’s important that he act as normal as possible in front of other people.”
“So he doesn’t get caught,” Lois said.
“Right,” Mom said. “Not that he’s always good at it,” she joined the pointed look Dad had given me.
“Sometimes,” I told Lois, “I stretch things a little. It’s just… there’s so much more I could do if I could help out in the open.”
“It must be hard to hold yourself back,” she said, placing a hand on my arm.
Mom sighed. “I had a thought about that.”
“About what?” I asked her.
“I’ve been thinking since you told us about writing that article for Mr. White,” Mom said. “What could we do as damage control if he were to decide to investigate? I know he’s not likely to,” she cut off my objection, “but if he were.”
“And?” Dad prodded her on.
“What if Clark came out, so to speak?” Mom asked.
“Came out?” I asked, but I noticed Lois nodding.
“Just admit that you have all these gifts,” she said, looking at Mom to confirm that they were both thinking the same thing.
“He can’t do that!” Dad nearly exploded.
“Well,” Mom said, “I wasn’t thinking it would so much be Clark doing it.”
“It would be like Spiderman,” Lois added.
I gave her a look. Was it weird that I had been wondering if I could live a life like Spiderman recently, and now she was drawing the same correlation? That was what Mom and Lois were talking about, wasn’t it?
“Spiderman is a fictional character,” I pointed out softly. I wanted them to knock my objections down. If I could make this work…
“Who cares?” Lois said. “That’s not the point.”
“No,” Mom said, picking up speed now that she saw someone else was buying her idea. “The point is about having a secret identity. Someone else who would be the Boy in Black.”
“But what if someone made the connection?” Dad asked.
“Who would?” Lois asked. “Who would expect that this man with special abilities, this… super man, so to speak, was actually just your average college kid?”
“Particularly Clark,” Mom said. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but Clark, you are always so unsure of yourself. You…”
“Don’t look super?” I asked with a smile.
“Exactly.”
“That could be your new name,” Lois grinned at me.
“What?”
“Superman,” she told me. I rolled my eyes at her. I was not going to use a name that sounded so…arrogant, I guess.
“Do you think we could make this work?” I asked Mom and Lois, ignoring Lois’ silly suggestion. “’Cause if we did, I could really use my abilities.”
“No!” Dad said. “It’s too dangerous.”
“I actually think it’s less dangerous than what he’s doing now, Jonathan,” Mom said.
Lois nodded her head. “There’d be a lot of press about it for awhile, but then people would stop asking. They wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a secret identity.”
“You could write it up!” I said, maybe a tad too loudly.
“What?” Lois asked.
“If we do this, you could write my ‘coming out’ story. You could even say you found this man after following the story I wrote. But if you wrote this story, Perry would almost have to give you the internship.”
“And he’s not likely to take the spot away from you,” Lois nodded. “That could work. But first we need to work on you. It’s more important that we find a way to do this that doesn’t put you in any danger.”
Mom nodded. I could see Dad was still uncomfortable, but I ignored that for now. Once he saw it working, he would be on-board. I hoped.
