Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic The Longest Road: The Long Road Home - Part 25

From last time:

“The holiday season is about more than gifts and parties,” she began. “During this time of year, in the cold of winter, we’re reminded of the fact that the warmth in our lives is the product of human kindness and compassion. This year, the people of Indonesia need your help. Hundreds of thousands of victims of last week’s tsunami are still without homes, food, clothing, and medical attention. Relief agencies are working around the clock to help them, but they can’t do it without your assistance. Please, give whatever you can. More information on how to donate can be found at the web address on the bottom of your screen. Thank you. And happy holidays.”

“All right, we’ve got it,” the director said with a smile as he removed his headphones. “Great job, Ultrawoman. We’ll get this cut and to the networks as soon as we can.”

She gave him a faint smile. “Thanks,” she said. Lois was anxious to get away. She wanted to get back into the field, back to the real work that only a superhero could do. Over the last four and a half years, however, she’d learned that the power of her celebrity could be almost as beneficial as her superstrength and invulnerability. A superhero could draw a lot more attention to her pet cause than an ordinary reporter could.

Over the years, she’d come to use her fame more often than Clark ever had. She knew he found the whole business a bit unseemly and bewildering. He was, despite the peculiar extracurricular activities he engaged in, a very private person. But while Ultrawoman steered clear of partisan politics, she was far more comfortable in the bully pulpit than her husband had ever been.

“I have to go,” she said to no one in particular before lifting off for the massive windows above the newsroom floor.

********

New stuff:

Superman is Right. Do Not Forget Indonesia

The editorial page of this newspaper has always been full throated in its support of Superman. This moment is no different. Yet even as we welcome the Man of Steel back to Metropolis with joy and enthusiasm we are mindful of the fact that he was absolutely correct in reminding people that we cannot let our attention be diverted from Indonesia.

The harrowing and heroic images of rescues in the first hours and days after the tsunami have largely been replaced by ones of heartbreak and sadness as rescue work transitioned into recovery and rebuilding. Even as rescue crews from every corner of the planet answered the call for help, the world’s work in Indonesia is only beginning. Without sustained assistance in access to food, medicine, clean water, and sanitation, the many hundreds of thousands of survivors of the worst natural disaster in decades may still succumb to the tsunami’s lasting, devastating effects.

As is so often the case, children have been hardest hit by this tragedy. Orphaned or separated from their families, they struggle to survive without their natural protectors and care takers. The world’s focus must remain on caring for the most vulnerable victims of the tsunami, who are especially likely to succumb to disease and malnutrition in the aftermath of a disaster. These children are also often the targets of traffickers, who would exploit their precarious situations to inflict unspeakable crimes on the innocent, compounding the misery of a natural disaster with entirely man made viciousness.

The call has come from every organization responding to this tragedy. Please give and give as generously as you can. The images of heroic rescues, not just by superheroes and trained professionals, but also by ordinary Indonesians, struggling to help their families, their neighbors, their friends, and perfect strangers, have moved the entire world. These feelings of compassion and sympathy must be converted into concrete action and there is no simpler or more effective way to do so than to open your wallet to one of the many reputable agencies and charities at work in Indonesia. In this season of giving, please remember those who have lost everything and are struggling each day to simply find enough to eat and who wait for days, despite terrible pain from traumatic injuries, for the necessary and lifesaving medical attention that only foreign volunteer medical staff are capable of providing.

Much has been made of the timing and nature of Superman’s return. In the opinion of this editorial board, it was nothing short of a miracle. We have full faith that Superman’s prolonged absence was justified by the crisis on the planet that was once his home. He has made clear through not just words, but deeds, that he now considers Earth to be where he belongs. His arrival at the moment he was needed most was an answer to the desperate prayers and pleas of so many people.

Many other news sources have paid a great deal of attention to the Man of Steel’s own reaction to the suffering he encountered in Indonesia. Speculation followed that Superman was not up to the challenge of a full blown disaster like the one he faced—that perhaps what he had seen in his absence during a civil war had somehow rendered him unfit to return to duty. We could not disagree more. While this may be dismissed as knee jerk cheerleading, it is an undeniable fact that Superman performed not only heroically, but with an unparalleled technical skill and professionalism in Indonesia – providing assistance that no ordinary rescuers would have been able to, regardless of their equipment or training. That he and Ultrawoman were seen momentarily overcome by grief does nothing to alter this truth.

Aid workers, volunteer doctors, and rescuers all around them, too, were overwhelmed by the pain and tragedy they faced. Their reactions, however, drew no derogatory speculation, perhaps because they are not famous, but also because we understand their pain to be human. We have wrongly grown to expect our superheroes to be above ordinary emotions. They may not be from this world, but the compassion they extend to others is the very essence of humanity. Superman’s seemingly endless capacity to care for others is as much a superpower as flight. But the physical invulnerability that earned him the nickname “the Man of Steel” does not extend to emotional invulnerability. After all of these years and so many countless rescues, he still feels the pain of ordinary people and is moved to ease that pain. It must be a tremendous burden for him. But it is no less than a blessing for the rest of us.

Martha folded up the editorial that some of the more cynical and disreputable cable news pundits had already dismissed as “the Daily Planet’s love letter to Superman.” Ironically, it was indeed a message written from Lois Lane to the man she loved, but it wasn’t merely a personal missive; Lois wrote it on behalf of most of the world’s population to the hero they had all come to believe in. He would need that support, not just from the people who loved him personally, but from the millions upon millions of strangers who cheered for him and looked up to him. For the most part, the editorial was very well received. The fact that Lois was its author was not public knowledge. In fact, it had been the managing editor, Mike Burns, who had taken to the Sunday morning news programs to discuss the Planet’s unabashed support for the Man of Steel’s return. Of course, that didn’t change the fact for Martha Kent that her daughter-in-law remained at the vanguard of not just protecting Superman, but protecting everything he stood for and represented. Not for the first time, Martha thanked whatever twist or turn of fate had brought Lois Lane storming into her boy’s life.

She looked up at the sound of footsteps behind her. Clark walked into the den, carrying two cups of tea. He held one out to her as he sat down on the sofa beside her. “Have you seen Lois’s editorial?” she asked.

Clark merely nodded with a faint smile, but the look in his eyes told her how much it had meant to him.

“She’s right, you know,” Martha continued.

“She usually is,” her son agreed. “She’s amazing. She’s beyond amazing.”

“She is. And so are you. Otherwise, how could she love you so much?”

Clark shook his head, in that slight, bemused way of his before taking a sip of tea.

“I know you think I’m biased because I’m your mother, but from the moment we found you, we knew we were raising an extraordinary person.”

“Was it because you found me in a spaceship?” he asked.

She swatted her son’s jean-clad leg. “You were the answer to our prayers, but it didn’t take us long to figure out you were so much more than that. It had nothing to do with your powers. Even when you were a little boy, you had the biggest heart of anyone I’d ever met. Your father and I both knew that in raising you, we were doing something more important than anything we could have imagined. And we couldn’t be more proud of the man you’ve become.” She took one of his large hands in hers, wistfully remembering her son as a baby – when he could wrap his entire chubby little fist around just one of her fingers.

He smiled at her. “I love you, Mom,” he said.

“I love you, too, sweetie.”

********

It was strange to feel the cold, but not its biting sting. For years, vulnerability meant that he experienced the frigid chill just like any other person. And he’d spent weeks as Nor’s prisoner, ill and exposed to the elements, feeling a cold that seeped its way into every cell of his being, burrowing deeply until it seemed like he could feel nothing else.

Now, he could feel the snow on his hands, could distinguish the sensation from heat. Yet neither one could harm him. His fingers weren’t numb and red. They didn’t tingle and ache with stiffness. The cold was there, but it couldn’t hurt him. He pulled the rope on his son’s sled as the boy squealed in delight. Glancing back, he could see that his son’s cheeks had turned ruddy, his little nose was red.

“All right, buddy, time to go inside,” Clark announced.

“No, Daddy. I wanna keep sledding,” Jon pouted.

Clark stopped pulling the sled forward. “It’s getting cold and it’ll be dark out soon,” he said. “We have to go inside now.”

“No, Daddy, I don’t want to!” Jon replied.

Clark sighed inwardly. He could dig a city out of mud and lead a civilization into war, but he couldn’t win an argument with his pre-schooler. His pulse had started thundering and he willed it to slow. He needed to calm himself down. “Jon,” he began, keeping his voice even and firm. “It’s too cold, we have to go inside.”

“No!”

Sighing again, Clark picked up his son and carried both the little boy and the sled back toward the house. Jon cried loudly, but Clark merely set his jaw grimly and continued carrying his son back up the hill to the farmhouse. It had been six months. He wasn’t new to parenting any more. He couldn’t claim that Jon was still getting used to having a father. By this point, he needed to be able to handle this sort of stuff. But he still couldn’t keep his son from throwing a tantrum. True, Jon rarely misbehaved, but when he did, Clark had no better strategy than waiting his son out.

Jon’s cries became a rather pathetic whimper and his teeth began to chatter. Peering over the top of his glasses, Clark used a surreptitious dart of heat vision to warm his little boy up. Resolutely, he continued to trudge toward the house. The sky had grown gray and a sharp, gusting wind sliced through the air. At long last, he made his way up the porch steps, leaving the sled behind. He stomped on the mat, knocking most of the packed snow off his boots, before opening the door.

He placed Jon on the ground as the door closed behind them. Jon immediately started running toward the stairs, tracking snow across the hardwood floor as he ran. “Jon!” Clark called after him.

Jon ran headlong into his grandfather and would have fallen to the ground had Jonathan not caught his grandson in his large arms. “Where are you off to?” Jonathan asked with false sternness as he hoisted Jon up in his arms. Jon said nothing and buried his face in his grandfather’s shoulder.

Having taken off his coat and boots, Clark walked toward his father. “Sorry, Dad,” he said ruefully as he looked back at the trail of slush and snow. “I’ll get this cleaned up.”

“Jon, you know we don’t run inside the house with our boots on,” Jonathan said, his mild tone taking the sting out of the chastisement. “It makes the floors messy.”

“Okay, Grandpa,” Jon replied sullenly. He rubbed at his red nose with one mitten-covered hand.

“Good. Let’s go make some hot chocolate for us and Daddy.”

Clark grabbed a mop and began cleaning up the floor. He felt an irrational twinge of irritation and jealousy at the fact that his father could calm Jon down without even trying. From the kitchen, he could hear grandfather and grandson chatting happily. He didn’t bother to peer through the wall, he knew what he would see on the other side – his father carefully warming the milk for hot chocolate while Jon sat at the table, telling his grandfather about the really, really big hill he’d sledded down.

A lifetime ago, he’d had the luxury of being a patient man. The demands of New Krypton had robbed him of that. But it didn’t matter to Jon that there was a perfectly good reason why his father didn’t have the temperament he’d once possessed. It angered Clark to know that the man he’d been five years ago would have been a much better father than the man he was now. ‘Whatever happened to getting wiser as you got older?’ he wondered bitterly.

He finished cleaning up and put away the mop. Walking toward the window that looked out onto the porch, he stared out at the tracks he and Jon had left in the snow, the only disturbances in the pure white landscape stretched out as far as an ordinary person could see. The trees, barren and leafless, were nonetheless draped in the wet snow that clung even to the thinnest branches. The gray of their trunks stood out in stark contrast to the snow in the pale moonlight. Fat new flakes had started to fall and soon, the footprints that father and son had left would be filled up and wiped clean from the fields.

“Hey handsome.” He shook his head to clear the cobwebs, wondering how his wife had managed to sneak up on him. Standing behind him, she slipped her arms around him, placing her head against his shoulder. He held her hand against the thick flannel shirt stretched across his chest.

“Hey,” he replied softly, brushing his thumb against her gold wedding band and engagement ring.

“Did you guys have fun?”

“Yeah,” he said, without elaboration. He was tired of repeating the same well-worn line about his personal frustrations. With some reluctance, he slipped out of her arms and turned to face her. “I’ve got an appointment. I’m going to fly a patrol afterward, so I’ll be a bit late.”

Clark could see her hesitate for a moment and then open her mouth as if to speak. He knew she was going to ask if he wanted her to go with him, but thought better of it. Instead, she merely nodded, clearly aware that the last thing his fragile ego needed was a conversation about whether he was well enough to fly a routine patrol without adult supervision. “Okay,” she said at last. “Be careful.”

He gave her a weak smile before heading toward the kitchen, where Jon was dropping a handful of tiny marshmallows into his hot chocolate. “Daddy has to go out for a little while,” he said as his son looked up at him. Jon frowned, said nothing, and turned back to his marshmallows.

Clark bit back a pained sigh and turned to walk upstairs. He knew there was really no reasoning with an upset almost four year old and he had no right to be angry with Lois for wondering, silently, if he was up to patrolling on his own. Hell, it was only a few weeks ago that a cry for help had caused him to do an admirable impression of a rock trying to fly. He’d blacked out, midflight, falling toward the earth as though he had no powers at all. And his emotions—raw and overwhelming—had been exposed for all the world to gawk at in Indonesia. The speculation as to his mental state had been unkind, but it hadn’t been inapt.

As he launched himself into the air, heading east toward Metropolis, he realized that he was a man craving redemption, but didn’t really know from whom he was seeking it. His wife? His son? The entire planet? Didn’t they all have cause to be upset with him? Weren’t they all entitled to more than he’d been able to give? And now, he was being pulled in so many different directions, trying to make amends to each of them. Failing miserably just as often as not.

********

It was late when he finally slipped into the bedroom. She woke with the sound of the window creaking open. Cold air flooded into the room, but of course, it didn’t bother her. Lois sat up, letting the bed sheets fall away from her body. In the darkness, her husband smiled at her, still dressed as the iconic, larger than life hero. She pushed away the bedclothes to stand up and cross the room toward him. He drew her into his arms, his cape falling around to cover her. With nimble fingers, she undressed him slowly, welcoming him home the way he had done on so many occasions in the last few months. She’d never been one to keep the home fires burning while a big strong protector man fought the frightening world outside, but this—taking care of each other—seemed right to her. Maybe it wasn’t how they had envisioned things when they’d first started imagining their future together, but even if Superman had only been back a few weeks, sharing this responsibility, just like they had shared their work at the Planet, felt natural.

His cape fell away from their entwined bodies as they moved slowly toward the bed. Her husband’s hands moved deftly, but his kisses were soft, patient, unhurried. There was none of the frenetic need that characterized their lovemaking when his spirit was troubled. He smiled at her contentedly and she saw a glimmer of something in his expression that hadn’t been there in years – something that had once belonged to the man she’d agreed to marry so long ago.

During the many months of their sometimes frustrating engagement, when her rather disastrous prior experiences and his, well, lack of prior experiences had convinced them to wait until their wedding night, she’d often thought about what sort of lover Clark would be. Of course, she knew that he would be thoughtful, considerate, attentive to her every desire and need. But would he be hesitant? Confident? Would he be just as collected and controlled as the public Clark Kent was? Or did those hints of passion she could feel simmering just beneath the surface portend of things to come? Despite the sometimes torturous waiting game they’d played, she hadn’t been above using their engagement to well…investigate her soon to be husband. She knew how to drive him to distraction. And how to drive him crazy. She knew the exact places where his invulnerable body was somehow ticklish to her touch. Every tiny scrap of information and evidence was carefully constructed to create a picture in her mind of who her beloved would be, once the business suit and the spandex one were both off.

As he threaded one hand through her hair and gathered her close against the hard, muscled curve of his body, she realized that this was exactly how she’d imagined making love with Clark would be all those years ago. It shocked her to realize that this was the first time they’d made love without the specters of fears or regrets or pain—past, present, and future—haunting them.

Their wedding night had been a tearful and defiant goodbye. His homecoming, too, was a fierce and unbending message shouted to the gods and the fates that their painful and seemingly unending separation had done nothing to diminish their love. But even all of these months since his return, sex was never just about something as simple and uncomplicated as loving someone with everything you were.

In his arms now, she felt nothing but love. No fear of loss. No desperate need to find solace. No secret fear that his homecoming had all been imagined, driving her to prove he was truly home. No defiance aimed at a universe conspiring to keep them apart. It was an unfamiliar contentment that washed over her, sinking in deep and then dissolving with everything else that resembled a coherent thought as her husband did the most wonderful things to her.

When she did finally regain some recognition of the world around her—the softness of the pillow under her head, the sound of the grandfather clock on the landing halfway up the staircase, ticking steadily, the weight of her husband’s body on top of hers, the evenness of his breathing—she felt a smile turn up the corners of her mouth. Her heavy lidded eyes opened just the slightest bit so she could look at her beloved, as he lifted his head and gently caressed her cheek.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you,” he replied. Even in the tone of his voice, she could hear a profound change in his outlook, from just a few hours ago. He’d left here dour and frustrated. Now, he sounded hopeful and even happy.

“Good patrol?” she ventured.

“You know me too well,” he said with a smile. “It’s snowing in Metropolis. I saved a car from skidding through the guardrails on Mount Truman. The driver was pretty shaken so I picked up his car and flew them home. His kids thought it was pretty cool.”

She grinned at her husband—a full blown, uninhibited smile. His happiness was infectious. It always was. That simple fact made the rarity of his good moods these days even more acute. He rolled onto his back and drew her into his arms. She placed her head on his chest, feeling his heart beat under firm muscle and scarred skin.

“I stopped by the Planet and talked to Perry between patrols. He wants me to come back as the assistant managing editor and take over for Mike when he retires.”

“What did you tell him?”

“That I’d talk it over with you.”

“You know I’ll support you no matter what you want to do,” she said.

“Well, you’ve pretty much been supporting all of us. I think it’s time I start pulling my weight.”

“That’s not what I meant,” she replied.

“I know,” he assured her. “But we’ve always known that our life, our future is in Metropolis, not a little farm in Kansas. I’m so glad you came here to be with my folks and take care of Jon. And I needed to be here to start getting better, but I feel like I’ve been hiding the last few months. With Superman back, there’s no good reason to stay away from Metropolis, except that I’m scared.”

“Do you want to be an editor?”

“I think I want to give it a try. I can’t be a reporter anymore. At least not now. Maybe in a few years, I’ll be able to go back to it, being at the Planet will at least keep that possibility open. And no more stakeouts means more time with Jon.”

He’d given this a great deal of thought, she could tell. “It sounds like your mind is made up,” she said at last.

“Maybe,” he said. “I don’t want to do this unless you want to, too.”

She drew her fingers up and down the length of his arm, over the hard curve of muscle and soft skin. A thought suddenly occurred to her. “Have you talked to Dr. Friskin about this?”

“Yeah,” he said. “She thought it was a good idea – at least, going to work part time. She doesn’t think I’m ready for two full time jobs yet, and she’s probably right. But she seemed to think that some semblance of a routine, being a gainfully employed, respectable adult again would probably be good for me. What do you think?”

She tried to hide her hesitance. So much had changed in just the last few weeks, but maybe if they took this slowly, making concrete progress back toward normal life would help him. “I think we should talk to your parents. And Perry,” she said.