Author's Note: Season 11? What Season 11? This story takes place after Clark becomes Superman but before the "seven years later". It assumes that Lex was first elected president in 2014 and the 2018 headline was announcing his decision to run again.

What might have been and what has been

Point to one end, which is always present.

Footfalls echo in the memory

Down the passage which we did not take.

Towards the door we never opened

Into the rose-garden. My words echo

Thus, in your mind.

But to what purpose

Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves

I do not know.

I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where

And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.

Burnt Norton, T. S. Eliot

To his surprise, Lois took to the boy. His memories of her did not indicate an affinity for children, nor they for her, but apparently that had been due to a lack of shared genetic material. The boy adored her as much as she adored him, and he found himself frequently – and discreetly - speeding out in front of the boy's way as he ignored Clark and barreled forward to greet his "aunt" when they came to visit him.

The boy also stayed with them often. He was not entirely sure how this happened. It wasn't as if his parents needed the child-care. He suspected a combination of pleading, bribery, and manipulation on Lois' part. Perhaps there was some begging on the boy's part, too. Certainly no other baby-sitter could be as simpatico as Lois. They shared the same tastes in food ("Seriously, a little raw cookie dough never hurt anyone, Clark. If anything his immune system needs more exposure to this stuff. It's never going to develop if they keep feeding him all that organic crap."), in martial arts ("Yes, I know he's only two, but real Jedi's begin their training when they're not much older."), and expediency ("They're putting way too much pressure on him with this potty-training business. He needs to figure it out at his own pace. If he wants to take off his clothes, strap on a diaper, and do his business, I say let him do it.") For his part Clark banned projectile-weapon toys from the house and let Lois answer the "So how'd it go?" questions at pick-up time.

One of the few real difficulties in taking care care of the boy was that while he stayed with him Clark couldn't patrol. The boy was an endless source of questions and "What's that?", "Why?" and "Where Uncle Clark?" were his three favorites. Despite his clear preference for Lois, the boy nevertheless always wanted Clark around: to answer his questions, including the ones about where Clark had been; to make them waffles in the mornings when he stayed overnight; and to be the bad guy when he and Lois battled evil (Lois, of course, found that to be no end of hilarious). The answers and the waffles weren't difficult, but the physical play was hard. The boy was in constant motion, even when he wasn't pretending to be the Green Arrow or Impulse (Lois always insisted that she got to be Superman), and it was difficult to predict his movements.

In addition, the boy was very small. That was problematic. Although his parents always insisted the boy was at a healthy size for his age, he'd always been small. He'd come early, at 32 weeks and was only four pounds, 10 ounces, just 2100 grams, when he first saw day. He'd spent the first month of his life in the NICU and the first time Clark had held him had been through the openings of his incubator, cradling the boy's head in one hand and his bent legs to his chest in the other. The nurse kept encouraging him to use a "firm touch". "Pretend your hands are the walls of his mother's uterus", she'd said, having no idea, of course, exactly how firm his touch could be.

The end result had been, in the end, him on a chair outside the NICU, sucking in ragged breaths and watching Lois' face crumple at the touch of her tiny cousin while Chloe hovered over him, in her hospital gown and robe, asking if he was going to be okay. It was irrational, he knew. Evander Holyfield in his prime would have been just as helpless before him as the boy was, but repeating that fact didn't seem to matter. One day the boy would have his growth spurt and go through puberty and come into the height and muscle his father's genes promised. For now though he was so little he was terrifying.

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It was during one of the boy's mysterious appearances in their apartment for the weekend that Lois suggested they drive out to Crater Lake. Perry was antsy and she thought there would be a better chance of peace and quiet if they were a few hours out of town that Saturday. He agreed, reluctantly. Lowell County was an inconvenient location for maintaining a low profile. People in Smallville remembered Lois now, ever since the Inquisitor began running their series claiming she'd gotten her interview with Superman by sleeping with him, that she was Superman's girlfriend, and that she was carrying Superman's child. It had become difficult to run into Fordham's or even The Beanery without someone recognizing her. Lois, of course, took it all in stride and was even a little miffed when people weren't able to connect her to "the" Lois Lane, but even when they couldn't, they always remembered him. "Clark, how's your mother doing?" they'd ask, or "Clark, you wouldn't believe what Ben's kid is doing with the old place!", or "Clark, I just saw Sam Ross the other day, he's got another little one on the way. When are you two gonna think about having some kids?"

The problem wasn't the conversations themselves. They were usually a mix of the gossipy and the awkward, the expectation being that he would manage to remember and discuss the lives of people he hadn't seen since graduation. That he could handle. Six years at the Planet had taught him how to smile and nod with the best of them. The problem was extracting himself once they'd begun. In Metropolis no one cared if he suddenly pulled out his phone and muttered, "You know, I've got a call to make / meeting I'm late for / source I need to meet", because everyone had somewhere to be and something else they could be doing. In Smallville, abruptness was next to rudeness and he had offended more than one of his father's old friends when the sound of squealing brakes or crying children had pulled him away. Not immediately away, however. Not anymore. Even in backwater Lowell County people would notice if he disappeared right in front of them, now that "vigilantes" and "capes" had become "superheroes".

However, Lois had riled the boy up by telling him they were going to go where Uncle Clark had played when he was the boy's age and after that the boy could talk of nothing else. Lois had told the boy so many stories about "Uncle Smallville" growing up the cows that said "moo" and the pigs that said "oink" and the chickens that had said "bawk! Bawk!" even though there had been no hogs and no chickens on the Kent farm. The boy loved those stories; he probably thought every night at the farm Uncle Clark had bounced with the bunny and strutted with the duck like something out of Barnyard Dance. Lois managed to distract him on the way out by playing Wall-E on the media player in their rented mini-van, but as soon as they pulled into the parking lot he was at it again.

"Uncle Clark play here?" the boy demanded as soon as they unstrapped him from his car seat.

"Yes," Lois answered.

The boy began to run toward the bright purple-and-green playset the county had installed a few years before (and which Clark would have demolished if he'd ever played on it at the boy's age), but Lois grabbed his wrist. "You gotta hold my hand," she told him.

The boy pouted, and grabbed Clark's hand instead. Clark took it carefully and deliberately slowed his breath. If he concentrated no one would get hurt.

"You play here?" the boy asked him directly, pointing at the playground.

"Yep," Clark lied.

"Mama play here?"

"Sure," Lois said.

Clark didn't remember Chloe doing anything that could be called playing at Crater Lake, but of course, that didn't mean she hadn't. She and Pete might have come here sometime.

"Papa play here?"

"No, papa played in your house," Lois told him.

"Did you play here?" the boy asked Lois, suddenly discovering helping verbs.

"No," Clark answered."

"Hey!" Lois objected. "I played here sometimes. I played with Uncle Arthur," she told the boy. "We went swimming in the lake."

Clark grunted and Lois laughed. The boy, however, immediately wanted to know if they could go swimming now.

"Nah, it's way too cold for swimming," Clark told him.

The boy whined a little hearing that, so Lois yelled "I'll race you to the slide!" and began jogging at a pace so slow the boy looked as if he really had super-speed as he ran ahead of her.

"You slow!" the boy yelled back as he reached the slide.

"Oh yeah? I'll still beat you to the top!" Lois yelled back.

She almost did, Clark noted. The boy of course wanted Clark to play whatever game they had going on that involved scrambling all over the playground without touching the ground, so Clark did. Gingerly. He gently held the boy up so he could cross the monkey bars and the balance beam without touching the "lava" beneath them. There were so many other children though, scrambling around, crawling under and climbing over him that eventually his breathing began to pick up again and he had to go sit on one of the benches to calm it. Lois looked at him curiously but didn't say anything. If she did ask, he'd tell her how cute she looked playing with the boy. She really did, he thought – it wasn't hard at all to imagine the little kid she'd been, red-cheeked and high-spirited.

Sitting on the bench also allowed him to extract himself easily when the inevitable call came. Oliver's first question was how the boy was doing, and the second was whether Clark was watching the news.

"We're at the park," Clark told him.

"Lex is putting Oakland under martial law," Oliver answered. "He's moving tanks in as we speak."

Intervening in the never-ending sit-in, or occupation, or whatever it was in Oakland was an old argument, and one Clark didn't have any interest in today. "We voted," he replied.

"Goddammit, Clark. He's got tanks in there. How long do you think we have before he goes from detaining them to killing them?"

"You're the one who insisted on consensus. I'm not the one you should be talking to. Either change the rules or get Dinah on board. Right now I gotta go claim a picnic table for lunch."

"Fine. Give him a hug for me."

"Okay," Clark said. Clark tried to keep the hugging to a minimum. He hugged the boy every time his parents dropped him off and every time they picked him up and every time they tucked him into bed. Planned hugs like that were alright, but spontaneous hugs, like the ones preceded by his usual crash-landing into Lois, were unsafe and therefore discouraged. However, a small hug while they were both seated at the picnic table was doable, so that's what he did.

"That's from your dad," he told the boy as he set his phone on the table.

"Papa?" the boy asked. "Papa?" he repeated, grabbing Clark's phone. Fortunately the phone wasn't programmed to call anyone named "Papa". Lois traded the boy the phone for some yogurt and told Clark to put it away.

"What did Oliver want?"

"Oakland."

"Did you tell him to talk to Dinah?"

"Yeah." Clark took a bite of potato salad. "Who's covering that?"

"Not me!" she sang out. Perry wanted her close to Metropolis and Superman.

"No, really, who's got it?"

"Taibbi, I think."

"Yeah, he would." Perry would never pull Taibbi off and put him on.

"Bunny!" yelled the boy. Clark followed the general direction of his waving arm and saw a tiny rabbit that was the exact shade of the leaf mold on the ground freeze at the unwanted attention.

"Where?" Lois asked.

"Bunny," the boy repeated uncertainly, waving his arm harder. Recovering its wits, the rabbit leapt behind a nearby bush.

"Wow. You got good eyes, Robbie," Lois said. "I couldn't see it until it ran."

The boy stood up on the picnic bench. "Where he go?"

"Bunny's gone, kid. He went home."

"Home?"

"Yeah." Lois jerked her thumb at the bush. "It's probably his nap time."

"Bunny sleep?"

"Yep. Bunny sleep."

"Why?"

"Bunny's tired," Lois said. "Like you. I bet you're tired."

"No!" the boy bounced on the picnic bench, adamant. "Not tired!"

"Okay, okay. Not tired yet."

"NO!" the boy yelled. "Not yet!" He jumped off the bench and made for the bush. Lois grabbed him.

"Rob, buddy. Bunny's sleeping. We gotta protect Bunny while he's sleeping. Make sure, uh, the Gray Fox doesn't get to him."

"Who's Gray Fox?"

"He's one bad fox, lemme tell you," Lois answered.

The boy nodded solemnly. Then he turned to Clark, and, raising an imaginary bow, yelled "Stay away, bad guy! Phew! Phew! Phew!" With every "phew!" he released an imaginary arrow.

Clark had his role down cold. Grabbing at the invisible arrow in his chest, he flinched mightily, grunted, and fell off the bench.

"You dead, bad guy!" the boy announced.

"No, I'm not," Clark said, opening his eyes. "The Green Arrow never kills bad guys. He arrests them."

"I 'rest you," the boy informed him.

"No, you don't! You'll never catch me!" Clark scrambled to his feet and ran away at a much more respectable pace than Lois had, circling the bushes while the boy yelled behind him "I get you!" If they were lucky the boy would fall asleep on the way home. When the cooler was repacked he slowed so the boy could arrested him and then accepted Judge Lois' punishment condemning him to carry the cooler back to the car.

As he walked through the parking lot, he could hear the boy's grunts and whines as Lois wiped his hands and face down, and also Lois' "Hey!" when the boy decided he'd had enough. As he lifted the hatch he heard some scuffling and then the boy announcing: "Bunny's sleeping." As he closed the hatch he heard Lois reply, "What the – ? Oh, gross. Put that down, Rob-" which cut off to a muttered "dammit" as the boy scampered away. As he turned back to the picnic area he saw the boy running toward him, a tiny rabbit swinging limply from his hands. The boy saw him and smiled, lifting the rabbit as Lois dodged a couple of grandparents pushing a Graco stroller. As the boy reached the parking lot Clark smiled at him and the Ford Explorer in the last space backed out.

Backed out, and then braked, as the driver realized the truck had hit something.

Lois screamed.

Clark took a step.

And then another.

And then Clark broke into a run, a real run, toward where Robbie lay on the pavement and the hysterical Explorer driver clutched her face and the Graco-pushing grandfather was kneeling down and the terrified rabbit was running madly away. He stumbled over the older man, accidentally knocking the driver into her back fender, and scanned Robbie's body. There were no broken bones he could see, no cuts, no bleeding, no hair-line fractures, no muscle tears, no hemorrhaging.

There was no pulse, either.