From last time:
“I hate not knowing,” she whispered as she lay in his arms.
“I know,” he replied, running a soothing hand up and down her back. Her heart was still pounding from the nightmare and it felt like she couldn’t catch her breath. And no matter how tightly her husband held her, her skin was still ice cold, still prickled by gooseflesh. Clark kissed her forehead and she tilted her chin up to seek out and capture his lips with her own.
She kissed him fiercely, needing the reassurance of just how wrong her dream had been. No matter what happened, Clark was going to be there with her. She knew that. He would never abandon her. He couldn’t. “Make love with me,” whispered against his lips. “Please.”
He kissed her urgently in response and into the early hours of the morning, provided more than adequate proof of just how much he loved her.
********
New Stuff:
He tried not to grip his wife’s hand too tightly now that she was without her powers, but watching as Bernie stuck the enormous needle into the small bump of her abdomen was making him ill with fear. Lois’s eyes were closed and he could see the slight lines of tension crease her face, but she was remarkably stoic about the discomfort he knew she had to be undergoing.
“That’s it,” Bernie declared. “Lois, you okay?”
“Yeah,” she said quietly. He placed the alcohol swab and a pad of gauze over the puncture site and gestured for Clark to hold it there as Bernie dealt with the sample he’d taken. Two minutes later, he returned to the small examining room.
“All right, let’s get your powers back, Lois,” he announced. Bernie turned the Tesla coil toward them and fired it up. Clark felt the warm, strange surge of electricity rushing through his body. A moment later, it was gone. He lifted the gauze and alcohol swab which still lay on Lois’s stomach. The needle mark was completely gone. Lois sat up slowly.
“That’s better,” she announced with a tremulous smile. Now the waiting game began.
“I’ll run the tests myself,” Bernie said. “I think I’ll have the results in a week or ten days, it just depends on how fast your amnio cells replicate.”
“Then let them know I told them to hurry up,” Lois joked half-heartedly. Bernie smiled before leaving to allow her to change back into her clothes.
The next week was going to be impossible to get through, Clark thought ruefully to himself. Most of the newsroom had already decided for itself that Lois was pregnant. She’d only gained enough weight to start showing in the last few weeks, but Lois Lane never gained weight. She had way too much discipline to put on holiday pounds as far as her co-workers were concerned. So the newsroom swirled with gossip about why the parents to be weren’t proudly shouting their good news, even when Lois was far enough along to be showing.
He knew he wasn’t helping matters given the fact that his overprotective tendencies had gone into overdrive. The incident with Ralph at the holiday party was just one example of it. He knew that his wife was more than capable of taking care of herself. Heck, she didn’t need superpowers to deal with someone like Ralph, but he couldn’t help himself. He’d spent too much time in his own head, worrying himself sick over whether he could protect his family. Lois was tolerating the big protector man act better than he’d expected, but he knew it still annoyed her. She’d told him that she understood he wasn’t trying to make her feel weak or helpless, and he figured she had to know that this was about his issues, not some belief that she wasn’t capable of taking care of herself.
Fully dressed, she grabbed her overcoat from the chair in the corner. She reached out her hand to take his and he knotted their fingers together, giving her hand a gentle squeeze. It was back to the office for now. Back to pretending there was nothing going on and hoping—probably in vain—that their colleagues wouldn’t notice the tension that gripped them both.
********
Lois stared at the clock in the corner of her monitor. How was it still Tuesday morning? The amnio yesterday felt like it had taken place a million lifetimes ago. And she was supposed to get through another week like this? That was seven million lifetimes. She didn’t have seven million lifetimes to wait on the knife’s edge. She wanted the answers now. Her half-written column stared at her accusingly. No, that wasn’t fair, half-written was far too generous. She had a few sentences. And nothing to tie them together. There was a theme, sort of, but no point to her writing. She let out an exasperated sigh.
“You okay?” She heard the concern in her husband’s voice as she looked up to find him standing in her doorway. He toed the door closed behind him and walked around her desk to stand behind her. He kneaded the tense muscles in her shoulders gently.
“No,” she confessed miserably. “There’s nothing I can do to make the waiting any easier. I’m even starting to think of asking Dr. Klein if STAR Labs has any promising theories on time travel,” she cracked a humorless joke.
“We just have to keep ourselves busy.” Clark repeated the advice they’d been given over and over by Dr. Klein, Dr. Friskin, and his parents. With the holidays over, though, it wasn’t exactly an easy task. She wished she could add patrols when her mind refused to focus on anything besides the amnio results, but she no longer had that option.
“The layout for tomorrow is coming together pretty smoothly,” he began. “I’ve got to go to Macau for a few hours, but I should be back around one. Let’s go have lunch, spend the afternoon with Jon, and then I can put the paper to bed from home.”
“You sure you can take the afternoon off?” she asked, wondering to herself why she wasn’t jumping at the chance to spend time with her family.
He leaned over and kissed her cheek before whispering in her ear. “I’ll let you in on a little secret; I’ve got these superpowers that make editing and laying out a newspaper a hell of a lot easier than it would be for an ordinary guy.”
She felt a smile spread across her face in spite of herself. There was no doubting that her husband worked hard, but it really did take the investigation into the Triads, his regular Superman duties, and a full-time, high stress job like being the Managing Editor of the World’s Greatest Newspaper to really occupy his considerable talents. And he always managed to find the time to save the world, play with his son, spend time with his family, and of course, make his wife feel like the most loved person in the world. It was definitely a good thing that the two of them only needed a few hours of sleep a night.
But while she usually needed all twenty-one hours of the day they used to produce the world’s best newspaper, rescue cats from trees, avert natural disasters, fight crime, kiss boo boos, read bedtime stories, and spend quality time with one another, superpowers were now more of a curse than anything else. She heard cries for help she couldn’t answer and she drove herself nuts trying to do everything at normal human speed so that she didn’t race through the day, only to find herself with too much time to kill and not enough to do. Clark was still as busy as he’d ever been—busier even, thanks to having to pick up the slack for her and conduct the investigation into the Triads on his own. She hated that she envied that fact. She could have really used some bad guys to fight. Or a beached whale to rescue. Anything to help take her mind off the interminable waiting.
“See you soon?” he asked hopefully.
Lois stood up to give him a hug. “Be careful,” she whispered.
He kissed the crown of her hair. “Always,” he assured her.
********
Superman hovered high above the blinding lights of Macau in the dark of night. The city was trying to give Metropolis a run for its money as a place that never slept. Beneath him, in a dingy all-night noodle shop, Jiang Jai He sat huddled in a vinyl booth, surrounded by men he didn’t seem too pleased to be dining with. The Triads had put the squeeze on Jiang, at once both swiftly cutting him out of the organization and also threatening him with all manner of creative tortures in the event that his activities were linked back to the rest of the syndicate. Even if Clark did nothing more, there was a decent chance the Triads themselves would simply kill Jiang, deciding he was too dangerous a loose end to leave twisting in the wind.
But though the very sight of the man made his blood boil, his job was to bring him to justice, not to take pleasure in vengeance.
His son had almost died. His wife had nearly been killed. Their unborn child was still in danger. A whole building full of innocent children were exposed to mortal risk because of the bastard sitting in that hole in the wall restaurant. Clark felt his hands ball themselves up into tight fists. The muscles in his arms twitched in their tense state.
Down below, Jiang was sweating uncomfortably under the scrutiny of his confederates. Clark could hear the other man’s heart pounding and the shallow breaths that escaped his lungs in gasps. Good. Jiang deserved to be afraid. He deserved to spend every moment from this one until he was finally behind bars, looking over his shoulder, too terrified to sleep, afraid to breathe too loudly for fear of drawing more attention from his former organization.
Jiang was never going to lead them back to the rest of the Triad organization—that much was crystal clear. But it didn’t matter. Even if the Triads continued in their enterprises completely untouched by Jiang’s downfall, Clark was going to make damn sure the bastard got exactly what was coming to him. And Jiang’s demise wasn’t going to be quiet and uneventful. It was going to be a message to every other piece of human scum who even dreamed about getting his hands on a piece of Kryptonite or using little kids as bait for Superman.
This particular late night rendezvous was proving to be fruitless, but that just meant he had to come back. He had to keep leading this double life – in Metropolis, in the light of day, he was the caring and attentive husband and father, the solid and dependable editor, the cheerful and approachable super hero. Here, he loomed in the shadows, watching and listening for anything that could help the Macau police ensure that Jiang never saw the world from the right side of the prison bars again.
In official meetings, he badgered and pleaded with the Macau police to cooperate with American authorities. He mediated information exchanges among the mutually suspicious parties, and he dutifully followed every lead Wan’s investigators asked him to chase down. But on his own time, often when he should have been patrolling Metropolis, he was merely following and watching Jiang. Exercising a superhuman self-control just to keep from swooping down and tearing the bastard limb from limb.
‘Lois would never forgive you,’ he cautioned himself. ‘Not now, not after all you’ve been through together. Not after all you’ve worked through.’
********
He growled as he turned onto his other side, still not able to find a comfortable position, which made no sense, since he was impervious to discomfort. But he wasn’t going to sleep tonight, he knew that already.
“Can’t sleep, either?” she whispered.
“Sorry,” he replied ruefully as he rolled onto his side to look at his wife. “I’m keeping you awake, aren’t I?”
In the darkness, she shook her head. “No, it’s still the waiting on the amnio results that’s keeping me awake,” she replied matter-of-fact-ly. “Clark, what if the results aren’t good. What if our baby isn’t okay? What if I’ve…”
“Shhh,” he whispered insistently as he pulled her into his arms. She buried her head against his chest and let him encircle her in his embrace. He felt her sob and tears stung at his own eyes. God, he hated it when she cried. Clark stroked her hair and searched desperately for something to say. He wanted to tell her it was going to be okay, but he didn’t know that, and she wouldn’t believe him. So for a long while, he just held her.
His entire body tensed at the distant sound of gunshots. Lois went still in his arms. “Go,” she whispered breathlessly.
“I’m not leaving you,” he replied.
“Go,” she repeated, placing her hand on his chest, creating a small but real space between them.
“Lois…” he started to refuse again.
She shook her head, her eyes still brimming with tears, but her voice was steady. “Someone else needs you even more than I do.”
He looked at her helplessly. Opening his mouth to speak, he couldn’t think of a damn thing to say. Finally, he threw back the bedclothes and stood up. He looked at his wife, suddenly so small, so fragile, so alone, lying there in their bed. Every instinct he possessed was telling him to gather her in his arms and hold her until the tears subsided, until she fell asleep, until everything was right in their world again.
She gave him a teary, tremulous smile, screwing up her courage. “Just come back to me,” she whispered.
Clark nodded, unable to speak, and reluctantly spun into the suit and flew out the window, hating himself even as he did. As he cleared the house, he could hear her crying softly. The sound was muffled, as though she was crying into her pillow. His heart crumbled to dust as he kept going, leaving her when she needed him. Much like he had so many years ago.
********
Miriam Friskin looked up from her notepad at the glum man sitting across from her, his shoulders slumped in resignation, his head bowed, his face a study in anguish.
“I’m sorry, I think you asked a question,” Clark said as he finally looked up.
“I just asked how you were,” Dr. Friskin replied with a sympathetic smile.
“I don’t know how we’re supposed to keep doing this. It’s only been three days since the amnio and it feels like hell. Between investigating the Triads, picking up the slack as Superman, and having a regular job, I barely have enough time to be a husband or father. And when I’m not thinking about ripping the guy who did this to us apart, I’m completely obsessing over what we’re going to do if we get bad news. I’m trying not to let Lois see me like this. I know you want me to stop hiding things from her, but you have no idea how much it’s scaring me to see her like this. To see her so…fragile. Lois Lane isn’t fragile. She is the single fiercest, most determined human being in creation and now every time I look at her, I see fear in her eyes. It isn’t natural. It isn’t right.” His voice was agitated, but his face had grown even paler as he spoke.
Dr. Friskin nodded as she tried to take in the entirety of his sudden burst of emotion. “It sounds like you’ve been keeping all of this bottled up,” she observed.
“I’m trying to stay positive around Lois,” he said. “The ultrasound results were really good and we can hear the baby’s heartbeat, so I guess I’ve been trying to convince the both of us that everything’s going to be okay. I know she needs me to be strong for a change.”
“And the Triads?” she prodded as gently as she could.
He shook his head. “I’m not really going to rip the guy apart. But I am going to make sure he spends the rest of his natural life locked in some dark, dank little pit, courtesy of the state.”
Clark walked back his hyperbole convincingly enough. She didn’t think he was a danger to anyone else, but it didn’t mean she wasn’t worried about him. “I’m glad that you came here. Even if you feel like you can’t talk about these things with Lois at the moment, I think it is important that you do talk to someone.”
“I know it’s not your job to tell me what’s right and wrong,” he began. “And I don’t want to hide things from her, but wouldn’t it be worse for me to burden her with this right now?”
“I think you’re probably right that she’s depending on you a lot more than usual right now,” She replied. “But being strong and not being afraid aren’t the same thing. Lois probably knows that better than anyone.”
He nodded silently. “It’s just a few more days,” he said. Dr. Friskin couldn’t tell if the comment was for her benefit or if he was trying to reassure himself. “If everything’s okay, then all of this doesn’t matter. And if it isn’t…” He swallowed hard, a look of pain in his eyes. She knew he wasn’t going to finish the sentiment. She wouldn’t have known how, either.
********
She stared straight ahead, unable to focus on a thing, even when it was her own husband talking. Stephanie, the society columnist, was tapping her pencil annoyingly on her notepad. Ralph’s nose hairs wheezed and whistled with every breath he took. Even Jimmy’s diligent note taking was driving her nuts. Finally, she turned and looked at her husband, wondering why it was he could concentrate on his work. But she knew the answer. He concentrated because he had to. Because at least one of them had to keep functioning.
“Anything from Treasury on the report they’re supposed to produce regarding the free trade agreement with Brazil?” Clark asked.
“Not yet, boss,” Mark Butler replied. “But the unofficial word is that it’s going to be a lot of boilerplate—new market opportunities, synergies from trade with a dynamic, emerging economy—the usual stuff.”
She tuned back out and focused her hearing instead on the baby’s heartbeat. Lois didn’t even know why she bothered coming into work this week. She was beyond useless. Her columns had practically needed complete re-writes by the editors. She hoped Bernie was right in terms of his timing. If he were, that meant they only needed to get through an agonizingly painful weekend and they’d finally have the results. The time couldn’t pass quickly enough.
The meeting must have ended because the reporters and editors around her gathered their belongings and shuffled out of the conference room. Slowly she started to follow them, as though she was passing through a dense fog, completely disoriented and lost. Clark was hanging back, waiting for her. Discreetly, Jimmy pulled the door shut behind him as he left the conference room, leaving them alone. Her husband reached out to caress her cheek and pull her into his arms.
“You okay?” he asked.
“No,” she murmured. She felt like hell. Hell, she looked like hell, too. But that’s what going over a week without sleep could do to you. Even if you were superpowered. Her eyes were darkly circled and half the time red from crying.
She felt him drop a kiss on the top of her head. “I love you,” he whispered.
“Love you, too,” she murmured against his chest.
There was a sudden, sharp rap at the door. “Clark? Lois?” It was Jimmy’s voice. God, that kid had terrible timing. But she knew he wouldn’t be bothering them if it weren’t important. She felt Clark withdraw from her as he stepped back and opened the door.
“I’m sorry, but it’s Dr. Klein on the phone. He said you’d want to talk to him,” Jimmy apologized.
“We’ll take it in here,” Clark replied. The door closed with a soft click. Lois tried to brush away the tears that had started to spill down her cheeks. She’d completely given up on eye makeup – all the crying just tended to turn her into a raccoon. Her heart leapt up into her throat and she was grateful when Clark reached for the phone the second it started to ring.
“Bernie, what is it?” he asked impatiently. She listened to other end of the conversation.
<<I’ve got the test results. Why don’t you come by the lab…>> the scientist started.
“We’ll be right there,” Clark interrupted him. He hung up and reached for her hand. His eyes held a question, silently asking her if she was ready to do this. She nodded wordlessly as she took his hand and they left the conference room for the stairwell.
********
The bitter taste of bile burned her throat as she took a seat in the scientist’s office. God, why did this have to remind her so much of her nightmares? The clock on his wall ticked irritatingly, but the span between each second felt like an hour. As much as the sound was driving her nuts, she kept staring at it, demanding silently that it tick faster, that things go back to normal, that this time-dilating hell they’d been transported to dissolve and leave them back in the real world. The door closed behind them and Bernie stepped around his desk to take a seat. Her stomach twisted itself in a knot and she wondered how she was going to keep from retching. “Lois, your amniotic cells replicated faster than I expected…” he began. Damn him, she thought to herself, why couldn’t he get past the science and just tell them what they needed to hear? Maybe it was bad news, maybe he was trying to figure out how to break their hearts, maybe he was trying to soften the blow. Fresh tears sprang to her eyes and Clark gave her hand a gentle squeeze.
“All of the tests came back normal,” Bernie replied. “Except for the fact that the amniotic cells have both mitochondria and kryptochondria.”
“That means the baby’s okay?” Clark asked, his voice taking on an anxious pitch.
“It’s the absolute best sign we could hope for,” Bernie replied. “I found no evidence of lingering or long-term effects from the Kryptonite exposure.”
Her breath escaped her in a shuddering sob. “Thank you, Bernie,” she whispered tearfully before completely succumbing to her emotions. She buried her face in her hands and wept. After a long moment, she felt Clark’s arms come around her and she realized he must have been kneeling beside her chair. He kissed her temple and held her silently. Her heart was still pounding, her body still wracked by sobs, but she could breathe. For the first time in months, it felt like she could breathe again.
********
“I, uh, I’ll give you two a few minutes,” Bernie said awkwardly, standing and shuffling around his desk.
Clark looked up at the nervous scientist and nodded as he bit his lip, not really trusting himself to speak. “Thank you, Bernie,” he managed hoarsely at last. Bernie gave him a tight lipped smile and retreated from the office.
He framed Lois’s face between his hands and gently turned her chin up. Her eyes glistened and he could see the anguish and grief as they worked their way out of her soul. He kissed her lips softly, tasting the salt of her tears. “I love you,” he whispered roughly.
“I love you,” she replied almost silently, closing her tear-filled eyes once again.
He kissed her forehead and tuned his hearing in to her heartbeat and the baby’s. For a long while, he just listened to two of his favorite sounds in the world, letting them soothe his dark and troubled soul. “She’s going to be okay,” he whispered. “You’ve taken care of her, you’ve protected her. She’s going to be okay,” he repeated.
A lingering sob shivered through her body as she stood up and let him wrap his arms around her. He stroked her hair, rocking her body gently from side to side. It was his turn now to do for his family what she had been doing for them all along. Every invulnerable cell in his body served only those two simple purposes – loving his wife and children and keeping them safe. After a long while, he stood up straight, feeling the amazing relief that came with having the heavy millstone he’d carried around his neck cut loose. His heart was truly light, and he didn’t need force of will to try to be upbeat and positive around his wife. He no longer had to repeat empty platitudes in the hope that sheer wishful thinking would see them through this crisis. She lifted her head from where it had rested on his shoulder and sought his lips, kissing him sweetly. As the kiss ended, he leaned forward, his forehead touching hers. He gave her a wobbly smile and felt his heart skip a beat as she smiled in response. Tears—this time of joy—
pricked at his eyes. God, how he loved this woman.
He heard footsteps in the hallway again. “That’s Bernie,” he said as he cleared his throat softly.
Lois stepped back and tried to brush away the trails of tears that stained her cheeks. “I guess we should pull ourselves together,” she said unevenly. A tiny hiccup escaped her lips and she smiled as color rose up in her cheeks.
He laughed. Heaven help him, for the first time in months, he truly laughed. And once he started, he couldn’t stop.
“Clark!” she yelled at him with a playful smack to the arm. “What’s so funny?” she demanded, but she’d already started laughing as well. He pulled her back into his arms and they laughed together, dragging themselves across the entire emotional spectrum in the last five minutes of soul obliterating insanity. He lowered his head to drop a kiss on her shoulder.
With a slight knock, the door opened. “Are you two okay?” Bernie asked, the concern evident in his voice.
Clark looked up, unable to stop smiling. “We’re fine,” he assured the doctor.
“We are,” Lois confirmed with a nod.
Bernie regarded them with a look of confusion. “Oh, okay, good. Good,” he stammered. “I uh, I realized I’d forgotten to congratulate you,” he said with a half smile. “Mom, Dad, it’s a girl.”
“A girl,” Clark murmured in wonderment. His words of a few minutes before had already indicated that he’d started thinking of the baby as a girl, but now that he had confirmation…wow. ‘Wow’ didn’t even begin to describe it. He grinned like an idiot as he squeezed Lois’s shoulders. “We’re going to have a little girl,” he whispered. He could already see his daughter in his mind’s eye. Wide, luminous, brown eyes, ringlets of soft, raven dark hair, and a mischievous streak a mile wide, her tiny chin jutting out in stubborn defiance, just like her mother’s did. His heart swelled until he thought it might burst in his chest. How could one body, even large and invulnerable like his, be expected to contain emotions this immense? He didn’t know and it didn’t matter, because he was soon wrapped up in a feeling of contentment and bliss so powerful he had to just let it carry him wherever it wanted to. He wasn’t in control of his emotions anymore and he was thankful he didn’t have to be.
