From last time:
“She’s pregnant,” Bernie said simply.
Clark could feel his heart leap into his throat. He tried to say something but the only sound he could produce was a strangled “huh?”
“I figured you didn’t know,” Bernie continued. “From her hormone levels, it’s likely Lois didn’t know either. I doubt she’s more than a few weeks along.”
The entire room started to spin and Clark leaned against the wall, knowing that without its support, he was likely to fall down. His eyes grew wide and he struggled to breathe. “The Kryptonite…the baby…” he managed to gasp. This wasn’t happening. Not to them. Not now. How completely awful could their timing be?
“Clark,” Bernie began, grabbing Clark’s arm to steady him. “Lois is doing really well; she’s healing faster than any normal human being should, which means we have reason to be hopeful. But it’ll be a while before we know how, if at all, the Kryptonite exposure might have affected the pregnancy.”
Did she know? Could she have known? *Should* she have known? The thoughts swirled around in his head in a confusing storm of recriminations. Had she run back into that building knowing that it wasn’t just her life at stake? Had she risked the pregnancy they’d both wanted so badly in order to protect him? What if the baby wasn’t okay? What if…He felt his body sway as he staggered forward, only Bernie’s presence kept him from collapsing to the floor.
Bernie said something incomprehensible. The words were incapable of penetrating through the thick fog around Clark’s mind. He stumbled and fell into the chair Bernie was guiding him to. There, he sat and stared blankly ahead, his eyes seeing nothing.
********
New stuff:
The inside of her mouth felt like it was stuffed full of cotton balls. “Clark?” she managed to croak despite the gummy sensation of a dry tongue and a parched throat.
“It’s Bernie, Lois. I’m here,” she heard Dr. Klein say.
Lois blinked her eyes open to find her doctor pouring her a cup of water. She reached out to receive it from him. An IV needle stuck out of the back of her hand. Well, she didn’t need to see that to know that she was still vulnerable. Her leg burned and throbbed with a pulsing ache.
“How are you feeling?” Bernie asked.
“Trust me on this, don’t get shot,” she said. “But I’m okay. How’s Jon? How’s Clark?”
“They’re both fine,” Bernie assured her. “Clark is awake and alert. His hands are still healing, but he should be good as new in a day or so. Jon’s asleep. Rehydration therapy, some sunlight, and little rest are all he needs.”
“Thank god,” she breathed.
Bernie started to cut through the bandage that was wrapped around her leg. “I want to change your dressing and see how you’re healing.” She craned her neck to get a look at the site of her gunshot wound. It was bright red and swollen and bunch of jagged looking stitches held the puffy, discolored skin together. “Lois, this is amazing,” Bernie said.
“Really?” she replied, wondering if they were looking at the same mess.
“Your body looks like it’s about a week into the healing process and we performed surgery maybe eight hours ago. I imagine your skin will push the stitches out by tomorrow.”
“That’s good to hear. So does this mean my powers aren’t gone forever?”
“No normal person could heal this fast. You’ll be super again before you know it,” he assured her. “But I’m afraid I’ve had to take you off your pain medication.”
Which explained why her leg hurt so much. She sensed his nervousness and it made her uncomfortable. “Not exactly what a gunshot victim wants to hear, Bernie,” she tried to joke.
“Given the nature of your injury, the benefits far outweighed the risks. And frankly, we weren’t aware of the risks at the time…”
“What risks?” she demanded. “Bernie, what are you talking about? What’s wrong?”
He gulped visibly and she could see the beads of perspiration on his forehead. “You’re pregnant,” he blurted out inelegantly. “I took you off the narcotic painkillers as soon as I figured it out, which was a few hours ago. Such a short exposure is unlikely to result in harm, especially this early in a pregnancy, but better safe….”
“Pregnant?” she could scarcely whisper the word. “God, Bernie, the Kryptonite…” she could hear her voice break as she spoke, tears flooding her eyes. What had she done?
“Lois, we don’t know that the Kryptonite had any effect. You’re healing faster than Clark is, which I assume means you were exposed for a significantly shorter period of time than he was.”
“I have to know. How do we find out? What kind of tests can you run?”
He shook his head ruefully. “It’s too early to tell,” he said. “We have to wait until you’re further along. Otherwise…”
“Otherwise I’ll be jeopardizing the baby even more, right?”
Her physician regarded her with sorrowful eyes. “Lois, it’s too early for an amniocentesis. There’s nothing I can do until then.”
She closed her eyes, feeling tears slip down her cheeks. “Does Clark know?” she whispered.
“I told him a little while ago,” Bernie admitted.
“That’s why he isn’t here, isn’t it?” she asked softly. She fell back against the pillows, suddenly lacking the strength to even sit up. “He must hate me.”
“He was terrified for you. And I think he’s in shock. But he doesn’t hate you. You know that. He’s been sitting with Jon. I’ll let him know you’re awake.” With that, her awkward physician retreated from the room. Lois stared up at the ceiling through tear-filled eyes. She’d had no choice, she told herself, trying to stiffen her spine. She hadn’t known she was pregnant. She hadn’t even missed a period yet. There’s no way she could have known.
Except that they’d been trying for a baby.
For about three weeks, another part of her mind countered. But the last time, they hadn’t needed three weeks. One night was all it had taken. She knew that Clark had once feared that they wouldn’t be able to have children. Apparently fertility was not one of their problems, she thought somewhat darkly to herself.
But what else could she have done? She couldn’t have left Clark to die in that building alone, too weakened from the first bomb to defuse the second before it could kill him. Given what she’d known at the time, she had done the only thing she could have. She’d gone after her husband because he’d needed her. Because the people evacuating out of that building had needed her.
What if she had known? What would she have done? Would she have chosen to save Clark, to risk jeopardizing the baby’s health for his life? What mattered more to her, the husband who was her entire world, or the potential life they’d created together? She closed her eyes, tossing her head to let the tears seep into her pillow as she sobbed quietly.
The sound of her crying muffled his footsteps as he entered the room. “Lois?” she heard him say her name with such sadness in his voice.
“Clark?” she cried out.
“I’m here,” he said as he rushed to kneel beside her bed.
She reached out for him before realizing that the bandages prevented her from even holding his hand. He kissed her forehead and she reached out to touch his face. She felt the moisture on his cheeks and realized that she wasn’t the only one crying. He turned his face to drop a kiss against the palm of her hand. “Are you okay?” he whispered hoarsely.
“I’m so scared,” she confessed miserably.
“So am I,” he admitted.
Her husband pulled a chair up next to her bed and for a long while, they sat in silence. She let her hand rest on his forearm, above the bandages covering his hand. She wondered if his hands still hurt. He’d been exposed to the Kryptonite far longer than she had, and her leg still ached and throbbed. He cleared his throat softly, causing her to raise her eyes from his hands to look at his face.
“Did you know?” he murmured. There was only one thing he could have been talking about.
“Of course not,” she replied in a harsh whisper. “Do you think I would have kept that from you?”
Her response caused him to hang his head. Her mouth twisted into a frown. This wasn’t supposed to be about making each other feel bad. They weren’t keeping score on some sadistic ledger. But his question had hurt at least as much as the Kryptonite had.
“No,” he admitted. “I just…” He tried to run his hand through his hair, the bandages preventing him from doing so. He growled in frustration. “I’m sorry,” he said at last.
But she could hear it in his voice. He was holding back. He was thinking the same thing she was – that she’d put the pregnancy in terrible risk. That she could still miscarry. That their child could be born with awful medical problems. That the baby could suffer because of what she’d done.
And it would be months before they could know. Months of unspoken fears sitting heavy in the air between them. Poisoning everything they touched.
********
His doctor finished cutting through the dressing on his right hand. Clark let the torn bandages fall away and started to flex his fingers. He looked down at his hand. The burns had healed to nothing more than bright redness on his palms. The cuts were almost completely closed. Bernie moved swiftly to his left hand and removed those bandages as well. It had been less than twenty four hours and he was almost completely healed. A far cry from any of his recoveries on New Krypton. He held still long enough for Bernie to apply a sterile ointment to his palms and dress them with much smaller, less cumbersome bandages.
Bernie stepped back and shook his head. “Just keep them clean and dry. By the afternoon, your hands will be fine. I wish I could patent your body’s healing process.”
Done with his physical exam, Clark pulled his t-shirt on over his head. The previous night, not being able to pick up a glass of water, or brush his own teeth, or hold his son’s hand, had driven him crazy. Getting out of Bernie’s lab could not come soon enough as far as he was concerned.
“Is Jon awake yet?”
“Let’s go find out,” Bernie replied. Clark followed him into Jon’s small room.
His little boy lay in the bed, his eyes closed. Clark couldn’t help himself. “Jon?” he whispered quietly. “Jon,” he replied, his voice still soft and low.
His son finally opened his eyes and blinked as he looked around his unfamiliar surroundings. “Daddy? Where are we?” he asked.
“We’re in Dr. Bernie’s office,” Clark explained with a quick half-glance at the doctor. “You weren’t feeling well, so we had to come here.”
“Where’s Mommy?” Jon asked.
Clark sat down in the chair next to Jon’s bed. “Mommy got hurt. But she’s going to be okay.”
Jon’s eyes grew wide. Clearly, his father’s words had not mollified him. “I want to see Mommy,” he insisted.
Bernie stepped forward, pulling the stethoscope out of his lab coat pocket. “Tell you what, sport,” he began. “I just want to make sure you’re doing okay, then we’ll go see your mommy. How does that sound?”
“Okay, Dr. Bernie,” Jon replied somewhat warily. Mercifully, Bernie made the exam as quick and painless as possible, taking Jon’s temperature and other vitals in just a few minutes. He’d told Clark earlier that because Jon’s first blood test had been clean, there would be no more need for needles or anything else to frighten the boy.
When Bernie had finished, Clark helped Jon out of the bed. He was still nowhere near full human strength, but at least he could lift his son up. Jon looked at the bandages on his father’s hands. “Daddy, did you get hurt, too?”
“It’s just a little owie,” Clark assured his son. Holding Jon’s hand, he led the little boy to his mother’s room.
Lois turned toward the door and smiled at them as they entered the room. His wife’s eyes were bleary and she looked more tired than he could ever remember seeing her. Perhaps the Kryptonite had taken more out of her than he’d originally thought. “Hi sweetheart,” she said to her son as she reached her hand out to him. Jon wriggled free from his father to run to his mother.
“Careful,” Clark cautioned. Jon ran up to her bedside. Clark could see Lois wince as she shifted in order to kiss the top of her son’s head. She touched his face gently.
“Are you feeling better?” she asked.
“I’m okay, Mommy,” Jon replied. “Daddy said you got hurt.”
“I’ll be fine,” she assured him.
“When can we go home?”
“Well you and your daddy can go home now,” Bernie began. “But your mommy needs to stay here a little longer to rest.”
Jon frowned at his doctor. “Why can’t she rest at home?”
“Dr. Bernie has to take care of her still,” Clark told his son. “Tell you what, why don’t we go get some breakfast and let Mommy rest for a little while. Then we’ll come back and see her, okay?”
“I’m not hungry,” Jon protested.
Lois stroked his hair. “If you don’t eat, you won’t get big and strong,” she told him gently. “Go eat breakfast with Daddy. I’m going to take a little nap and then I’ll see you when you get back. Okay?”
“Okay,” Jon acquiesced.
“That’s my boy,” Lois said. She kissed his forehead. Clark placed a hand on Jon’s shoulder as he leaned down to kiss his wife.
“We’ll be back soon,” he said softly.
********
“Lois, I don’t like having this stuff in the office,” Perry muttered into the phone as he stared at the two misshapen lead blobs sitting on his desk.
“I know, but we don’t really want it at STAR Labs until the three of us are gone,” came Lois’s reply.
“Won’t the police be looking for it?” he asked.
“The scuttlebutt is that the Kryptonite was destroyed. Bill Henderson is doing what he can to spread that message lest some other maniac decide that they want to kill us.”
He nodded to himself, glad to hear that problem, at least, had been taken care of. “Have they ID’ed the shooter yet?”
He heard her sigh on the other end. “No,” she replied. “And I doubt they will. But I’d bet my job at the Planet that he was with the Triads.”
“Well, he’s certainly not going to tell us anything,” Perry replied ruefully.
“He died?” she asked.
“A little after three this morning,” he confirmed.
“I know I’m not supposed to want people dead…” she began.
“He tried to kill your son. No one would blame you if you danced on his grave, honey,” Perry said firmly.
“Yeah, well, it might be a while before I can manage that.”
“How’s the leg?”
“Dr. Klein thinks I should be able to walk on it by tonight,” she replied, much to Perry’s relief.
“Take all the time you need in getting back to work,” he said.
“What exactly are you planning to tell people?” she asked.
“I’ll figure something out,” he said with a mental shrug. “Don’t worry at all about it. We’ll hold down the fort while you two take care of yourselves and your family.”
“Thank you, Perry,” she replied.
“You don’t have to thank me, darlin,’” he said gruffly. “But the Planet and I should be thanking you for keeping the building from getting blown up again.”
“We must have saved the company a fortune in jacked-up insurance premiums,” she said.
Perry laughed in response. “Tell me about it. Get well soon, honey. I’ll talk to you again tomorrow.”
“Thanks, Perry,” she replied. With that, he hung up the phone. He hoped it was just the exhaustion and the pain from the gunshot wound that had made her sound so down on the phone. He couldn’t begin to wonder at the panic she and Clark must have felt, knowing that Jon had been in danger, under both of their watchful gazes, in a place where he should have been safe.
********
Lois peeled away the bandage covering her thigh. Her leg still hurt, but it was now nothing more than a dull ache, like an old muscle pull. It didn’t feel the way a day-old gunshot wound, untreated by painkiller, should. She thought she could detect the slightest puffiness, but her skin was no longer discolored and the wound had closed completely. No scars. No bruises. The stitches fell apart and fell out of her skin as soon as she touched them, her body having healed completely. She flexed the muscle a few times. It was still tender, but before getting Clark’s powers, she’d felt worse after a long, hard run.
Spying the change of clothes that had been left for her, she decided to test out her leg. Carefully, she swung her legs over the side of the bed and planted her feet on the cold ground. She stood up, feeling distinctly sore, but walking across the room to grab the sweats that had been left for her wasn’t particularly difficult. She sat down to get dressed and was relieved to find that her in-laws had been thoughtful enough to bring her good, thick socks. The cold lab floor wasn’t particularly pleasant on her bare feet.
Properly dressed, she reached for the door to her room. Bernie had upped the security to this lab so that no one except him was allowed in it, he’d assured them. They were free to walk around here without worrying about bumping into any absent-minded scientists or daring truth-seekers trying to figure out what had happened to Superman and Ultrawoman. Pulling the door open, she was startled by Bernie’s presence just on the other side. “Wow, looks like someone’s feeling better,” he exclaimed.
“Yeah, I feel a lot better than I thought I would,” she said. “Not feeling terribly super, though.”
“The powers will come back quickly,” he told her.
“You sound pretty sure about that,” she replied.
“I’ve got a theory,” he said.
She narrowed her eyes. “You’ve been saying that a lot lately.”
“You didn’t feel as bad around the Kryptonite as Clark did, did you? Dizzy, nauseated, weaker than normal, but it didn’t make you want to curl up and die, did it?”
She frowned, wondering how Bernie had figured it out. “Like I said, he was exposed a lot longer than I was.”
“But the first time he was exposed to Kryptonite, it had totally incapacitated him. It drained you of your powers and made you feel sick, but I don’t think it can kill you. Or Jon.”
A palpable sensation of relief rushed over her. She hoped desperately that Bernie was right and that Kryptonite wouldn’t have the same effect on her son as it did her husband. “Why?” she asked simply.
“Kryptonite is harmless to ordinary humans. It only affects what makes Kryptonians different from Earth humans.”
“Which is what?” she asked, her inquisitive impulses going into overdrive.
Bernie rushed over to the whiteboard on the wall. “Do you know what mitochondria are?” he asked.
She strained to remember something that must have had to do with biochemistry, which she had last studied in high school. “Part of a cell, right?”
“Right,” Bernie replied enthusiastically. “They turn sugar into energy. Without them, we couldn’t live.”
She shook her head, not following his logic. “And what does this have to do with Jon and me being less vulnerable to Kryptonite.”
“Mitochondria have their own DNA separate from the rest of the cell. If I did a regular DNA test on Clark, it would come back normal, because his DNA is pretty much like anyone else’s. But if I tried to do a mitochondrial DNA test on him, it wouldn’t work because he doesn’t have mitochondria.”
“He doesn’t?” she asked, still trying to figure out where Bernie was going with this.
“He has something else.” Bernie drew a large circle on the board, with a number of little jelly bean-shaped things inside it. “This is a normal human cell,” he said. He drew another circle, this time coloring in the jelly bean-shaped things with the marker. “This is one of Clark’s cells. Instead of mitochondria, he’s got what I call Kryptochondria. They can turn both sunlight and glucose into energy. It’s how Clark’s powers work and why the sun recharges them. They’re also destroyed by Kryptonite radiation, along with the DNA that creates them in the little plasmid rings floating around in Clark’s cells.”
“So Jon’s cells don’t look like either one, then?” she ventured.
“That’s right!” Bernie exclaimed excitedly as he drew yet another circle, this one with some white and some darkened jelly beans. “Jon inherited mitochondria from you and Kryptochondria from Clark. Just like Clark, you and Jon, if exposed to Kryptonite long enough, could have all of your Kryptochondria destroyed. That would kill Clark. But it would only permanently remove your powers or Jon’s.”
She stared at the oddly spotted circles on Bernie’s whiteboard. They were starting to make a bizarre sort of sense to her. “So the worst thing Kryptonite could do to Jon is permanently take away his powers?”
“Precisely,” Bernie said.
“So I have the dark beans…the Kryptochondria, too? How?”
Bernie shrugged. “That’s what I can’t figure out. Apparently, when they’re excited by a massive electrical current, the Kryptochondria in Clark’s body can ‘jump’ to another person he’s touching. Not enough of them move to cause him any harm, but once in the new person, they multiply and enter every cell, resulting in a complete copy of Clark’s powers. I’m even less sure how they manage to all jump back with a reverse course of electricity.”
She drew in a deep breath, vacillating over whether to ask Bernie the question that had been bothering her since he started on this convoluted explanation. Finally, she just decided to go ahead and ask. There was a good chance that there was little he could tell her, but not knowing was killing her. “So if your theory is right, does it tell us anything about my pregnancy?”
He scratched at his chin. “It might,” he said, infuriatingly. “I have to caveat this by saying that for obvious reasons, we’ve never exposed a pregnant woman to Kryptonite before. We don’t know what sort of effect, if any, it might have on the development of a normal pregnancy. In terms of what kind of effect it might have on Clark’s child, we know that the amount of damage done to your body by the Kryptonite was limited. You retained some level of Clark’s powers, even if it just meant accelerated healing. That means your body was probably still protecting the pregnancy. It’s also possible that the fetus’s Kryptochondria might have been destroyed, leaving the pregnancy perfectly normal.”
Her leg was starting to cramp up from the effort of standing. Finding a desk chair, she pulled it closer to Bernie’s whiteboard and sat down. The mindless task gave her a few moments to try to digest what her doctor was telling her. “So you think this baby might not develop Clark’s powers?”
“It’s hard to say at this point. We’ll be able to tell more later on in the pregnancy, but we’ll have to transfer your powers back to Clark in order to do an amnio.”
“And that’s months from now?” she asked, already knowing the answer.
Bernie nodded. “I’m afraid so,” he said. Her spirits deflated just a little. She was thankful to know that Jon was protected against the worst effects of Kryptonite. But another child was growing inside her, one she’d already exposed to extraordinary danger. How was she supposed to spend months not knowing the extent of the harm she might have already caused?
********
Clark stared down into his half drunk mug of tea, not really expecting the leaves to hold the secrets to his future. He started to lower his glasses to reheat the now-cold tea before remember that his heat vision still didn’t work. The man who’d tried to kill an entire newsroom full of children—inadvertently including the child of the city’s two superheroes—was dead. He found, oddly, that he didn’t care. The man’s death brought him neither joy nor sadness. Certainly not the conflicted feelings Nor’s death had brought him. As far as Clark was concerned, the bomber’s shooting by one of Metropolis’s Finest was an entirely fitting end to that monster’s existence. He hoped the young cop who’d had to shoot him wouldn’t feel nearly as tortured as he himself had when he’d killed Nor. The Triads—and he had no doubt it was the Triads—were still out there, but how could he think about anything besides his family right now?
“You okay, son?” his father asked from across the table.
“Yeah,” he replied absently without looking up.
“Jon should be up from his nap soon. You want us to come with the two of you back to STAR Labs?”
He shook his head. “You guys should get some rest,” he said, knowing his parents had been up most of the night. An uncomfortable silence descended upon them. He fidgeted restlessly, his thoughts wouldn’t leave him in peace.
“Lois is pregnant,” he said at last, if for no other reason than to replace the quiet tension with some other form of awkward discomfort. He heard his father sigh.
“Is she okay?”
Clark shrugged, unsure what to say. “It’s too soon to tell.”
“How far along?”
He laughed humorlessly. “Can’t be more than a few weeks,” he said. “Dr. Klein found out before we did.”
“Lois is a strong woman, but…”
“But a baby is a baby, Dad,” Clark interrupted. “Even our baby will be as helpless and defenseless as any other and Lois ran headlong into the jaws of death…”
“Without having any idea she was pregnant,” his father interrupted in turn, his tone taking on an unusually stern edge. “And she did it to save your life.”
Letting his chin sink to his chest, Clark dragged a trembling hand through his hair. “I know,” he whispered, shamefacedly.
“What I was going to say,” Jonathan continued. “Is that she’s strong, but she’s going to need you. As bad as you think this is for you, it’s worse for her. Your mother and I tried to have children. She miscarried three times. It tore her apart. And even though she knew it wasn’t rational, she blamed herself. She beat herself up over the fact that her body couldn’t do what it was supposed to do. If god forbid something goes wrong with the pregnancy, you know Lois is going to blame herself. How is she supposed to get through that if she thinks you blame her, too?”
“I know she isn’t to blame,” he said softly. “I know she had no choice…”
Jonathan stood up, picking up his mug as he did. “Then quit sitting at this table, go hold your wife’s hand, and be the husband you promised you would be in your wedding vows.”
