From last time:
“You two have really outdone yourselves,” Jonathan said with a laugh.
“And the bedroom and the kitchen have a southern exposure,” Lois explained. “So you’ll get plenty of light.”
“Honey, we love it, we really do,” Martha assured her.
“Mommy, I love it, too!” Jon declared, still hanging on to his father’s neck.
“That’s wonderful, sweetie,” she said with a smile.
“Mommy, can we get a puppy?”
“Not so fast, little man. This is a big enough change for us right now and I don’t want to potty train a puppy with all these new carpets.”
“Can I have a brother?”
Clark met his wife’s gaze, suddenly bewildered. He could see the surprise in her expression and knew it mirrored his own. “Uhh…” he began incoherently. He put Jon back down on his feet and knelt beside his son. “Your mommy and I want you to have a little brother or sister one day. But right now lots of things are changing.”
“Maybe for my birthday next year?” Jon said with a hopeful look on his face. Clark couldn’t help but smile. He tousled his little boy’s hair and kissed his forehead.
********
New stuff:
He padded silently through the house, running his hand along the banister he’d built and walking down the stairs he’d installed. His wife and son were both sound asleep upstairs, as were his parents. The house was still and he was alone with his thoughts. He couldn’t wrap his mind around the directions his life had taken. From dungeons and dank holes in the ground to a mansion of a townhouse in Parkside Hill. Was the human mind even capable of reconciling these disparate realities?
Lois had already flown a patrol over the city just a short while ago, but that didn’t mean there weren’t other parts of the world that could use some attention. He made his way back upstairs to the library annex. With a quick spin into the suit, he took off, careful not to speed up until he was well clear of the house.
After a quick patrol in Houston, he flew back over the city he called home – stopping to help when he was needed, simply enjoying the scenery when he wasn’t. As always, the city’s bright lights were his inspiration. Its skyscrapers were his playground. The stars only he could see his companions. Even late at night, the city had a pulse—a rhythm like a heartbeat, steady and pervasive.
Clark flew a slow loop over Hobbs Bay before turning northward again toward the Upper West Side and Parkside Hill. It was only an hour or so before sunrise when he slipped back into the house. He walked across the oversized master bedroom to the bed and climbed in beside his sleeping wife. She curled up next to him almost as though by instinct and he couldn’t tell whether she was still asleep until she murmured: “busy night?”
“Sort of,” he whispered as he kissed the top of her head. “I figured I’d fly a patrol. It’s probably good for people to see a lot of Superman around here.”
“Couldn’t sleep, huh?”
He chuckled softly. “Nope.”
“Everything okay out there?” she asked softly.
“Nothing major,” he replied.
“That’s good,” she said drowsily.
“Mmm hmm,” he replied. It had felt good to be helpful. To have people happy to receive his assistance, but not surprised by his presence. It had been but a few months since his less than triumphant return and already, his hanging around Metropolis had become ordinary, commonplace even. He couldn’t quite put his finger on why, but it was like he was happy to be taken for granted for once.
The soft, steady sounds of her breathing let him know that his wife had fallen asleep. Her head on his chest, her expression content, she brought a smile to his lips. “Goodnight, sweetheart,” he whispered. Clark closed his eyes, knowing the sound of her heartbeat would soon lull him to sleep.
********
Jonathan held the cab door open for his wife. A gentle spring breeze moved the warm evening air. Martha took his outstretched hand, smiling as she stepped out of the taxi. “Thank you, dear,” she said. “And thank you for a wonderful evening.”
“My pleasure,” he said with a smile. Martha took his arm as they walked back to the house. It had been Clark’s idea to get the theater tickets for their anniversary. They’d gone to see A Midsummer Night’s Dream at Washington Center. He’d liked the play well enough, but much more, he’d enjoyed seeing the look of wonder on Martha’s face at the sets and costumes and the pageantry of it all. Over coffee and tiramisu at a nearby Italian restaurant, she’d raved about the production. And he’d loved her enthusiasm. It had been a wonderful evening.
He opened the door and turned on the lights. The weeks and months had made the apartment feel like home. On occasion, he still missed the farm and the quiet of a Kansas night. But Metropolis had its advantages, even for him. His family was here, of course, and the Historical Society kept him busy a few days a week.
He closed the door behind them and pulled Martha into his arms. “Happy anniversary, sweetheart,” he said.
“Happy anniversary,” she replied.
********
“What do you think about the story on the State Senate scandal?” Clark asked as he stood up straighter. He looked down at his wife as he put his hand on the back of her chair. She stared silently at the mockup on her desk, apparently deep in thought.
“It’s got to go above the fold, but I think the pay to play allegations in defense procurement should be your lead story,” she said at last.
He frowned as he looked down at the layout board. She was right. It didn’t surprise him; after all, she was usually right. “I agree,” he said at last. “I’ll have Jerry re-work this with the procurement scandal as the headliner.” He reached across her desk to grab the mockup board when the distant sound of sirens caused them both to still. Clark could hear the distinct sounds of the different sirens used by police cars, ambulances and fire trucks. Whatever it was, it was big.
Lois stood up swiftly. “Meet me there,” she said as she gave him a quick kiss and rushed off toward the stairwell. He didn’t even have time to respond before she’d gone. He shook himself mentally before jogging toward layout. With terse instructions, he gave the designers their marching orders and took off in pursuit of his wife.
In the sky, he silently cursed to himself. Half of Fifth Avenue was closed today for a street fair. Traffic was jammed up everywhere and the emergency vehicles were stuck in the clogged intersections, far north of the accident, which he’d pinpointed in the Dutch Tunnel—near the Financial District, downtown. He slowed down as he approached the tunnel and flew in cautiously. From the noise and chaos, whatever had happened in there was an unholy wreck. There was no smell of leaking fuel, though, which meant there was no immediate fire hazard. Deep in the tunnel, he spotted Lois, working to free the injured. He flew in to join her.
‘Unholy wreck’ had been an understatement. A delivery truck had turned on its side, blocking both lanes of traffic and colliding with at least three other vehicles, including a passenger van. A number of cars behind the initial wreck had slammed into the mess, only adding to the damage and confusion. Thankfully, the delivery truck had been carrying nothing more hazardous than magazines, but the accident itself had seriously injured a number of people based on Clark’s very quick initial assessment.
The sound of weakened metal groaning echoed in the tunnel as Lois tore into a damaged car like it was made of paper. Drivers far behind the accident, unaware of what had happened, were still laying into their horns. The sound was driving him crazy. He looked up from where he’d just pried the door off a sedan to see Lois floating slowly overhead, an injured man in her arms. He pulled the driver out of the sedan, not conscious, but she was still breathing. Beth Israel was the nearest hospital, he told himself, mentally orienting himself to the grid of the city he knew so well. With extra caution, he carried the woman through the darkened tunnel, toward the welcoming light of day.
Once outside the claustrophobic confines of the underground passageway, he rose up in the air, quickly locating the hospital and flying his charge directly there. He dropped the woman off in the emergency bay with a promise to return. There were at least a few dozen others injured, he’d surmised from his first pass at the accident.
The emergency vehicles still hadn’t arrived at the tunnel exit by the time he’d returned, though the sirens did sound closer than they were before. Lois had disappeared once again into the tunnel to find other injured motorists and he followed suit. Once the most critical cases were taken to the hospital, though, he was going to turn his energies toward getting the backed up cars out of the way so that rescuers would have an easier time approaching.
They each made several more trips to the hospital before the emergency crews finally arrived on the scene. Clark turned his attention to moving cars and wrecked debris out of the way so the rescue workers could do their jobs. <<Superman, give me a hand, please?>> he heard Lois whisper from within the tunnel. He rushed inside to find Lois leaning into an SUV. A very pregnant woman lay across the backseat, well into labor.
“Everything okay?” Clark asked.
“Yeah, but we’re going to be a while,” Lois replied. “That’s good, Diane, keep breathing. Just like that, deep breaths in, cleansing breaths out.” She turned back to Clark. “Can you get the rest of the injured out?”
“Of course,” he replied, trying to keep his Superman voice. Clearing out the cars would have to wait. He and Lois had already evacuated the seriously injured, but he turned to getting the less serious cases out of the tunnel to the waiting paramedics just beyond the exit. Once the injured were cleared, he created a path through the remaining crushed cars to let those who were physically fine but trapped in the tunnel get out.
A few minutes later, he returned to the SUV and tried to calm the pregnant woman’s husband down as he paced in the tiny space between his car and the others wedged in the tunnel.
“We were in Jersey,” the man muttered. “Her water broke. We have a birth plan!”
“Everything’s going to be fine, sir,” Clark replied. “Your wife is in very good hands.”
“But this isn’t in our birth plan!” He stopped pacing and reached into the open window to the backseat of the SUV and took his wife’s hand. He started to mimic his wife’s breathing pattern.
“One more big push,” Lois instructed the woman.
The first sound of a baby crying filled the tunnel. Lois detached her cape to wrap up the tiny infant. Clark watched as she smiled at the helpless little child in her arms. It took no effort on his part to imagine her holding Jon like that. Or to imagine her holding their future son or daughter. Though she hadn’t said anything about it in months, he knew it was what she wanted. When she thought he wasn’t paying attention, he would see her pause and look at babies wistfully. He could hear it in the reverence in her voice when she talked about what Jon was like when he was a newborn—the smell of his hair. The softness of his skin. The warmth of his smile. Another baby was what he wanted, too. But suddenly, seeing the very maternal side of Lois Lane, infant in arms, he wondered if he was really ready for that. Or if he’d ever be ready. The feeling hit him hard in the gut, causing his muscles to clench in response. The cold knot in the pit of his stomach seemed to grow and tighten. The suddenness of the realization blindsided him. Why hadn’t he been able to see that it wasn’t a matter of when they’d be ready for another child but *if* he’d ever be ready for it?
“Congratulations, mom and dad, it’s a girl,” Lois announced as she handed the child to her mother. Clark quickly wrapped an arm around her husband as his knees buckled.
“Whoa there, big guy,” Superman said.
“Thanks,” the man said with a nervous shake of his head. He steadied himself against the car and looked down at his wife and daughter. “She’s beautiful,” he whispered in quiet awe.
“She is,” Lois replied. “This may not have been in your birth plan, but you’ll have a wonderful story to tell your little girl.”
Clark couldn’t help but return his wife’s smile. For a fraction of a moment, the doubts subsided. The nagging sense that the future was too big and imposing for him to deal with retreated and gave him leave to think about the present. “I’m going to get some paramedics in here to take a look at your wife and daughter,” he said, though the man was so engrossed in admiring his child, Clark didn’t believe he’d heard a word of it.
But as soon as the paramedics were tending to the happy family, the gnawing sense of doubt intruded once more. He’d cryptically informed Ultrawoman that he was needed elsewhere; assuming she would figure out that he was going to get the story into tomorrow morning’s paper, which meant he needed to interrupt the staff in Layout. Lois had stayed behind to help with the cleanup of the accident. They both knew it would be much faster having a super-powered being to clear the bent and twisted wrecks from inside the confines of the tunnel.
After giving a few quotes to the gathered news media outside the accident site, he returned to the Planet. The paper’s city beat reporter, whom he’d spoken to minutes before as Superman, was calling in the story. Cark hoped to make it home in time for dinner before his appointment with Dr. Friskin that evening, but he knew that wouldn’t be the case. With a quick call to his parents to let them know he would be late, he returned to the pressing matter of getting the paper to bed.
********
“Busy day, Clark?” Dr. Friskin asked as she ushered him into her office. He must have looked as haggard as he felt, he realized, for her to have noticed so immediately.
“Yeah,” he agreed.
“Congratulations to you and Lois, it seems like your efforts today averted what could have been a catastrophe.”
“Thanks,” he replied with a terse nod. When his therapist said nothing in response, he could tell it was the cue to elaborate. “The accident in the tunnel was a mess. It took a long time to clear out.” He sat down on the leather couch as Dr. Friskin took her usual place in her chair, crossing her legs and balancing her notebook on her lap.
“Did you have any difficulties dealing with it?”
“No. Yes. Sort of,” he replied unhelpfully. With a sigh, he continued. “The rescues went okay. It was kind of chaotic, but once we’d assessed the situation, it wasn’t hard to figure out what to do. Lois and I triaged the situation on the ground and evacuated the most badly injured. The street fair on Fifth Avenue and traffic meant it was a long time before rescue crews were able to get there. By that time, we’d already evacuated all the serious injuries.”
“So what made today difficult?” she prodded gently.
“Lois delivered a baby at the accident site,” he said as he tried to gauge his shrink’s reaction. “I know she’s done it before and I’ve done it before, but something about it just…I don’t know why, but I was terrified.”
“Did everything turn out all right?”
He gave a jerking nod in response. “The mother and the baby were fine. Heck, the biggest concern was the father possibly fainting.”
“But you were frightened by what happened?”
“No. I don’t know. I wasn’t frightened, exactly, by what happened. Like I said, we’ve both done this before. It was more our reactions. How natural it was for Lois. How unnatural it felt for me.”
“Do you feel that Lois is more parental than you are?”
Clark shifted uncomfortably in his seat. “Sometimes,” he confessed. “I know she’s been at it a lot longer than I have, and she was actually a parent to a newborn and I wasn’t, but it’s more than that. I know she wants another child. I do, too. And we both said we weren’t ready to take that step, but I think she is and I know I’m not.”
Dr. Friskin scratched away at the pad. She was silent for a long moment as she frowned down at her notes. “Why do you think that is?”
“It would be easy to say that it’s the move, the new job, the new routine. We’ve been in Metropolis less than six months, but things with work are going better than expected. With my parents living with us, Jon is really happy. We don’t worry about childcare or having to have strangers watch our son. Even being Superman has gotten better. But this is different.”
“How?” she asked simply. Would that he knew how to answer her question.
He sighed in frustration. “I don’t know. I just know that when I saw her today, holding a baby was like the most natural thing in the world for her and somehow, the idea of having another child terrified me.” He hung his head, shamefaced with the admission. “You know that Jon wasn’t planned. But he is the best thing that’s ever happened to me. And I know how lucky we are to have him. The man I was when Jon was conceived was a good person. Jon deserves to have a good father and I try every day to be that. Choosing to have another child is different…” he drifted off, not sure what he was trying to say.
“And you wonder what business a man who has taken life has in creating life.”
He was pole-axed by her comment. She was right, of course. And in so few words, she’d sliced straight to the heart of the issue. “Yeah,” he stammered ineloquently. “I do.”
“Clark, for all intents and purposes, you function extraordinarily well for someone who has gone through what you have. You’ve succeeded beyond any expert’s wildest hopes or predictions. But there’s a difference between the ability to live in the world and the ability to live with yourself.”
What she was saying made sense, but it only served to depress him further. If all the progress he made was just for show, if it was just about playing the roles he was expected to play, what hope was there for him to ever feel like himself again?
Dr. Friskin folded her hands over her notepad. “Did you take philosophy in college?” she asked.
He shook his head for a moment, puzzled by the non-sequitur, before answering. “Sure.”
“Do you remember the thought experiment about the railroad tracks and the looming train?”
“Yeah,” he replied, recalling to memory the hypothetical his freshman philosophy professor had posed about a runaway train, barreling down on ten innocent people standing on a railroad track. He asked the students to choose whether to let the train hit the people or divert it to another track, where it would only hit one person.” He recalled the professor asking the question a hundred different ways – what if there were fifty people on the first track? What if the one person on the second track were a criminal? What if it was someone you knew?
“I’m guessing you never gave the question much thought?” she asked insightfully. Why would he have needed to? He would have been able to easily save all the people – no need for an internal struggle about human beings as ends not means or whether the number of lives saved mattered in determining the greater good. The questions simply didn’t apply to him.
“What about on New Krypton? Any parallels there between the decisions you faced and that analogy?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” he replied with a shrug, stiffly resisting her line of questioning.
“You told me a while ago that you regretted not killing Nor when you initially had the chance. Now, even though you know intellectually that killing him was the only reasonable thing you could have done, you continue to beat yourself up over it.”
“Look, it was Nor on one track and seven hundred innocent people on the other, I chose,” he said forcefully. “Nor lived. They didn’t, because I didn’t have the guts to kill him at the time. And in the end, it didn’t matter because I had to kill him anyway. Both times, I chose who lived and who died. I took life, I’m living with the consequences of that. I just wish I didn’t have to make my family live with them.”
“You didn’t make that choice, Clark. The other track was empty when you let Nor live. There was no one standing on it. No one in immediate peril. You had the ability to take another man’s life and you chose not to. You spared the life of a man you believed to be a monster because you didn’t believe it was your right to take human life. He had different opinions. He was responsible for the deaths of those people. Not you. And when he shot you and forced you to choose whether to die or to kill him, that was on his head as well. You never had to think about these messy questions of ethics before because they don’t apply to Superman. But they did apply to Kal El. And you cannot hold a mortal man to the standards of a demigod.”
“I’m not a god,” he responded. “And I should have been able to uphold the values I’d lived by my entire life.”
Dr. Friskin took off her glasses. “Clark, you’ve said that you’re living with the consequences of your actions, but you’re not. You’re trying to hide those actions. To pretend they never occurred because they don’t fit with who you want to be. That isn’t unreasonable, but it also isn’t healthy. I can’t tell you how to get right with yourself, but I can tell you that until you do, it will find ways, some obvious, some insidious, to infect your life and keep you from being happy. It will also force you to continue hiding significant things from your wife and that isn’t healthy in a marriage.”
********
For hours, he flew over the city in pointless circles, quietly fuming over his session with the therapist. In a foul mood, he’d broken up a gang fight and hauled a drunk out of his car before he could ram it into a telephone pole. He knew Lois would be wondering where he was; he’d missed dinner and missed putting Jon to bed. In all honesty, he was still out here, flying around on a warm, early summer night because he didn’t know what else to do and he was too afraid to go home.
He didn’t want to talk about what had happened that day. He didn’t want to face even the remote possibility that Lois would want to talk about delivering the baby. What it had been like. What it would be like for them to have another child. He didn’t want her to notice his current lack of enthusiasm for the subject and he wasn’t sure which would be worse, having her think he didn’t want another child or having her realize that the possibility scared the hell out of him.
The sound of distant gunfire in tinny pops that echoed loudly startled him. ‘Dammit,’ he cursed silently to himself as he turned toward the source of the gunfire. In the vacant alley beside a bodega in Suicide Slum, he found the gunman, holding his pistol to the head of a trembling man, whispering apologetically in Cantonese. From the smell of the fried food and the nearby overturned bicycle, it wasn’t hard to deduce that the thug had decided to hold up a delivery man on his way home from a long night for his tip money. Delivery guys like him could be counted on to carry a lot of cash and given the fact that many of them were undocumented, to be afraid to go to the police.
The robber cocked the hammer on his pistol as he held it against the other man’s temple. “I know you’ve got more money than that!” he shouted, obviously looking for another way to impress his anger on the man, since the three rounds he’d put in a nearby brick wall hadn’t done the trick.
Feeling his body shake with rage, Clark dropped down behind the gunman and pulled the pistol from his hand, crushing the weapon as he did so. With his other hand, he grabbed the thug by the collar and hoisted the surprised man into the air, letting his feet dangle comically as he struggled to get out of the Man of Steel’s formidable grasp.
“You think you’re a god?” Clark demanded through gritted teeth and a tightly clenched jaw, subconsciously echoing his therapist’s comments earlier that evening. “You think you have the right to go around terrifying people? To decide who lives and who dies?” He could hear the fibers in the man’s shirt tearing as he kept him aloft by his clothing alone. He reached into the criminal’s windbreaker and pulled out the thick stack of ones and fives, surrounded by a rubber band, and handed them back to the deliveryman. The struggling felon cursed Superman loudly, but the target of his insults was completely deaf to the criminal’s fulminations. He wasn’t the only one unable to get the Man of Steel’s attention, though. Clark didn’t bother to check the victim’s condition and barely heard his rapidly repeated words of thanks.
Grabbing the robber’s arm somewhat roughly, Clark ignored his protestations and dumped him off at the nearest police station. He realized belatedly that he needed to go back and find the victim to try to get him to cooperate with the police. By the time he returned to the alley in Suicide Slum, however, the deliveryman was long gone. Now, all the police would be able to get the gunman for was the illegal weapon and the shots fired.
Shaking his head at his stupid error and trying desperately to calm his still-racing heart, he finally turned toward home. He landed in the annex behind the library and changed out of the suit. Padding softly down the stairs, he turned first to his son’s room. He found Jon fast asleep in bed. Walking quietly into the room, he kissed the top of his son’s head.
“I love you,” he whispered and looked down at his little boy, noticing for the first time that his vision was blurred by a film of tears. He had to do better.
Jon deserved better.
He silently retreated from the room without waking the little boy. Turning to his own bedroom, he was disappointed to find it empty. All he wanted to do was crawl in bed and have his wife wrap her arms around him. Scanning the house, he located Lois at the kitchen table, staring at the screen of her laptop.
He quickly dismissed the idea of going to bed and waiting until morning. This couldn’t wait. The longer he delayed it, the more likely it was that he’d chicken out. With his heart pounding in his ears, and a giant boulder lodged in his dry and scratchy throat, he walked downstairs.
********
Lois glared at the entirely subpar paragraphs on her screen, blithely staring back at her, taunting her with their mediocrity. God, she hated writing about campaign finance reform. The sound of footsteps on the staircase interrupted her foul ruminations. She watched as her husband, dressed in sweatpants and a t-shirt, walked into the kitchen. She was angry at him. Frankly, she was pissed off. She had been giving him as much space as any woman could give her husband and he seemed intent on keeping her in the dark as long as possible—his overly long patrols, his quickness to dismiss her concerns when he had a nightmare or reacted badly to an emergency, his irritating adoption of her habit to drown oneself in work to avoid dealing with problems.
She didn’t mind making excuses for him at work or with Jon when Superman was needed. Hell, she expected him to do the same for her. It was part of the deal, part of their life together and it always would be. But when Jon had to go to bed that night without seeing his father all day—for no discernible reason as far as she could tell—it annoyed her.
He’d made real progress, of that there was no doubt, but months ago, they’d hit an impasse. There was something else he was keeping from her. Something immense. And just like his hiding Superman from her when they’d started dating, this one issue was growing to fill every void and was busy crowding out the good in their lives.
She turned her withering stare from her computer to her husband, prepared at long last, to let him know exactly how she felt. To let him know her patience had finally run out.
And then she saw the look on his face.
He was pale, his expression drawn and his eyes red from crying. Wordlessly, he sat down across from her at the table and looked downward. She closed her laptop. For a long moment, neither said anything. His elbows on his knees, he stared down at his folded hands. She remained across from him, not sure if he wanted her to close the distance between them or if he needed the space. She fidgeted restlessly, one thumb absently stroking the skin on the back of her other hand between her thumb and forefinger. The sensation could only do so much to calm her nerves. What was wrong? Why wasn’t he talking to her? Before she could ask, he finally started to speak.
“I’m going to tell you something I don’t want to. Because once I do, you’ll look at me differently, and things between us will never be the same. Every cell in my body is telling me not to do this, to just bury it and forget it and move on. But I can’t.” He turned his eyes upward and she could see that they were bright with unshed tears. A ragged sigh escaped his lips, his shoulders shuddering.
“Nor’s followers broke him out of prison just after he was sentenced. They shut down the main colony and killed hundreds of people in fires and explosions that were just meant to be distractions. I was evacuating civilians from the shelters. I’ll never know if it was just bad luck or fate or…” he dragged a shaking hand through his hair and dropped his chin to his chest, his gaze fixing itself on the floor. “Nor was trying to escape through the same corridors. He saw me and shot me in the arm. I tried to draw his fire from the civilians by running down another hallway. He followed and shot me again in the back.” His voice was flat and lifeless, an unaffected monotone.
“He must have thought I was dying. He stood over me to gloat and I shot him. I killed him.” Leaning forward, he tented his fingers in front of himself and finally raised his eyes to look at her. “Lois, I killed a man,” he whispered. The ghost of that bastard haunted her husband’s eyes. She could see straight through to the shattered fragments of his soul, the pieces he’d been determinedly holding together.
Standing swiftly, she moved to the other side of the table. She threw her arms around his neck and pulled him close to her breast, wanting desperately for him to know the depth and ferocity of her love. Her heart beat roughly against her ribs, thundering loudly in her ears, overwhelmed by its need to protect him. Screwing her eyes shut tightly, she stroked his hair.
“Please,” he whispered, his arms tightening around her waist. “Please.” She felt him trembling in her arms and her own body absorbed the shiver. It rippled through her, seizing muscle and bone, eating away at her soul, wrapping its icy hand around her heart, threatening to hollow her out. To leave her brittle and insubstantial and frozen. But she had to absorb as much of this pain as she could. She had to let it wash over her and engulf her. She had to let it fill her lungs and race through her veins. She had to draw the poison out of him. He’d borne it silently for so long.
“It’s all right, sweetheart,” she murmured. “You did the right thing. You came home to me. I love you. I love you.” Lois repeated the words, a furtive prayer offered in the quiet and desperate hope that what connected them was the same thing that could heal them. She repeated them because it was all she could do to keep from cursing that monster Nor and everything he’d done to Clark. Everything he’d taken from her beloved. That tiny little benediction was the only shield she had against the white hot point of rage that lay poised to pierce her soul.
She rocked gently, her body swaying with him in her arms. Their breaths came as heaving, labored sighs, drawn shakily in and shuddering out in unison. “Oh god, Lois,” he sobbed.
“It’s all right, I’m here, I’ll always be here,” she said, reaffirming the most sacred vow she had ever made.
‘I will love you ‘til the end.’
