He floats to the Daily Planet rooftop, beautiful, serene, quietly majestic, and has almost landed before Lois starts shouting.
"Get the hell away from us!" She shields Jason, or hides him from his father's lonely eyes, behind her back. "Just get the hell away from us."
Still approaching but rapidly slowing, Superman answers flustered, confused, "But I…I don't… have… anywhere…anywhere else…"
"I don't care! Go!" A demanding finger accentuates her point and she blatantly ignores his expression.
He turns in midair and drifts no more than a foot higher, gaining no horizontal distance from her, before he tilts to the left and crashes sideways onto the roof.
Lois stands frozen, her emotions stuck switching gears, until her son screams, "Mommy!" with his shrill, young voice. She runs the few feet to her once-lover.
With his knees and arms bent and the cape covering his crumpled form, the man on the ground looks less an unstoppable powerhouse than Lois has ever seen him. She reaches over him to grab the inside of his arm and flip him. She's not prepared for the sight.
"He's bleeding?! How?!"
Behind her, Jason is sobbing uncontrollably, five year old eyes are too young to watch a man die, but she can't concentrate on him right now, even if the mom inside of her is screaming at her to get him the hell off this damned roof. There's someone else who needs her more.
"Superman? What the hell happened to you?"
"Kal-El," he manages to croak, pain being the expression she previously ignored so studiously.
"What?!"
"My name is Kal-El." Getting the four words out as an un-fragmented sentence costs him and Lois can tell his consciousness is slipping away.
"Your name is Clark Kent," she spits at him, angry again.
"No…" He turns away, back to his side and pushes a hand against the roof. "Please…I just…need…" Belatedly she realizes he's trying to stand.
"Just need what? You can't stand up, much less fly away into the frickin' blue yonder."
"Please," he repeats, giving her the pleading puppy eyes she's seen on her coworker, only they're more pure, more sincere. "No…hospitals."
"Then what am I supposed to do? It's not like I can fly you to the sun." She's supporting some of his weight, not much because she's still royally pissed about his lies, but she's not cold-hearted enough to let him crawl his way to the edge and fall to his doom, though the thought does cross her mind. I need Superman, dammit. I hate irony.
"Call…Bruce Wayne…Tell him…Boy Scout…needs his help…Please." She's not sure what he's asking for anymore—forgiveness or aid.
"Bruce Wayne?!" Again with the puppy eyes, although the luster in them is quickly drying up. "Fine."
He fishes a cell phone out of the buckle in his belt but drops it when he finally loses the battle with consciousness.
"Bruce" is the second listing in his contacts.
Lois learns that a helicopter ride with a terrified kindergartener, a rapidly fading superhero, and a playboy billionaire is not all it's cracked up to be. And as much as she hates it, she's worried. It is, after all, the father of her child lying paler than usual across her lap with his blood making her fingers red and sticky. His curl, the one she'll never admit to wanting to twist around her finger, flops like a failed perm against his forehead and there is something decidedly wrong with the tableau it creates.
Superman should be flying them to wherever the hell they're going, but he is again relying on human means and Lois, personally, hasn't been a big fan of helicopters for five years. Losing your net will do that to you.
Mr. Wayne has been less than forthcoming about their destination, but his concern for Superman is genuine if muted. Lois wonders if he knows the secrets she's discovered and if so how long he has known and if not if she should tell him just to throw a wet-blanket on Clark's little rescue. She knows she won't. Tonight the man in the cape and ludicrous underwear-wearing choices will be only Superman—a name she's not so sure he deserves, but damned if she can take it back now.
Jason, inevitably, falls asleep about the same moment Lois realizes they're making quite good time to Gotham City. Duh, it's only where Wayne lives. Lois blames her stupidity entirely on Clark; he could do with some more blame. She resolves to be super pissed at him when he wakes up, so he damn well better wake up.
It occurs to her as they hover over where she assumes Wayne Manor must be, the darkness isn't precisely helpful, that the notoriously puff-headed Bruce Wayne knows how to fly a helicopter and that he responded immediately to a call for aid from Superman and that ClarkKent (or is it Superman (she supposes it all depends on whether Bruce is privy to the charade the man maintains)—Clark is going to have to talk a lot more than he was accustomed to when this was over) has Bruce Wayne's phone number. The journalist in her is dying to needle the why's and how's out of Mr. Supposed-Playboy (because she can't be sure of that now what with Clark being Superman and all), but the woman in her is busy beating the journalist senseless, much to Bruce's unwitting good.
With a heavy thud, they are earthbound again and Bruce is carrying Clark/Superman to the gargantuan house as Lois scrambles to grab Jason, hop down, and follow them. A suspiciously knowing butler opens the door to allow Bruce to stride through easily and Lois to stumble through gracelessly before showing them to a lush bedroom, ready-made with bed turned down and medical paraphernalia laid neatly out.
Bruce lays Clark gently, surprisingly so as Lois is still unfamiliar with the concept of an injured Superman despite his rendezvous with Central Park not long ago, on said bed and strips the top half of the suit back remarkably effortlessly. Although not unused to blood and guts, Lois gasps when the full-extent of Clark's injuries are exposed. His beautiful chest, the one she vaguely remembers, is torn to shreds as is his suit and she hazily wonders how she missed that. The now full-blown distress written on the man about to play doctor startles her into nearly dropping her son and at that reminder she lays him down tenderly on a chair gestured to by the butler, pausing a moment to stroke his mud-brown hair back from his face.
"Alfred?" Bruce asks, clearly at a loss for how to deal with such monstrous wounds. The butler comes to the side of the bed across from his master, to the patient's left.
"First, we clean him up. It's impossible to tell what the damage actually is with all this blood," he instructs, before turning to the unconscious man on the bed. "What have we gotten ourselves into Master Clark?" At Bruce's sharp look, he explains, "She knows. She's been muttering his name since you got here."
Lois puts her hand to her mouth and, sure enough, her lips are moving and when she tries to stop them, "Clark Kent" only becomes louder until she shouts, causing Jason to stir but not wake, "Clark Kent don't you dare die on me! You've got a lecture coming that will shame your mother, dammit!" In a smaller voice, she adds, "I've been practicing."
"Miss Lane, perhaps it would be better if you were to remain in another room during this," Bruce suggests, as he hurriedly rubs as much of the blood as he can off his friend while Alfred puts pressure on all the visible incisions.
"Like hell," she tells him.
A quirk of his mouth is the only indication that he heard her.
Before she knows it, Superman's chest is held together with stitches and the moans she didn't notice at the time they escaped his desire-worthy lips are playing on loop inside her head. Her son slumbers on, twitching occasionally as he is wont to do. His father doesn't move and Lois is cranking out threats as fast as she can think of them, ordering him to wake or else. Alfred has retired, some time ago she thinks, but Bruce maintains his vigil, sitting on the edge of an uncomfortable looking chair with his chin resting in his intertwined hands. His stillness is disconcerting.
Lois begins to count the number of breaths Clark takes, timing a minute with her wrist watch. Thirty-one, thirty-two. Wake up, you big dumb alien. Thirty-three, thirty-four. I'll kick your ass from here to Smallville and back if you don't wake up damn soon. Thirty-five, thirty-six. I am going to kill you if those big blue eyes of yours don't turn my knees to jelly in the foreseeable future. Thirty-seven…
At dawn, though how he knew Lois doesn't know, Bruce opens the heavy drapes to allow the startlingly bright sun to shine on the sleeping alien in his bed. With a gasp and a shudder, Clark sits straight up, cerulean eyes shocked to the size of large marbles, and then he remedies his too-soon maneuver with an inelegant flop back to the luxurious pillows behind him.
Lois nearly faints on the spot.
"Damn you, Clark Kent," she begins, all kinds of angry, but an exceptionally scary look from Bruce cuts her short and she has to admit to admiration for there are few that can silence her, much less with a singular look.
Clark answers Bruce's look with one of his own, but doesn't question. He seems, strange for such an eloquent writer, to be out of words.
All three adults let the silence go far past the point of awkward, Lois enjoying every minute of the discomfort she knows it will afford Clark/Superman/Kal-El/Whoever-The-Hell-He-Is.
"Good morning!" A small voice pipes up, and the grown-ups all turn to it to see a sleep-gruntled little boy sitting haphazardly halfway-on, halfway-off the chair in which he'd been sleeping. "What's for breakfast?"
As though on cue, and, truthfully, probably waiting to be needed in some fashion or another, Alfred enters, takes his child guest by the hand and leads him promptly to the kitchen and a better breakfast than his mother can ever dream of preparing. Lois watches Clark watching Jason as their son leaves trustingly with the elderly gentleman letting loose a giggle at something Alfred has said and offering a wave to his mother and the man whose identities he's known for quite some time. She thinks that maybe she's seen just the slightest bit of heaven now, for the look on Clark's face is indescribably beautiful and makes her want to cry. He turns to her, as if to share his joy, but her expression drips with poorly-concealed fury and he hangs his head feeling he deserves it, and far worse, for hurting her. His nobility, because she can read him like a book, only serves to anger her further.
Bruce retreats to his chair, unwilling to leave his charge alone with such a volatile woman especially when she is prone to not thinking. He will not allow Clark to be hurt, as he knows Clark would allow it, for the sake of Lois Lane's misguided rage.
"So, Clark," she begins again, knowing that by sitting Bruce is signaling her to have at it, as it were, but also knowing that boundaries have been set, "when exactly were you planning on telling the mother of your child that you were a lying piece of shit?"
Clark flinches, as predictable as the day she met him, but remains silent, fearing for his life and rightfully so. An angry Lois Lane is a force to be reckoned with indeed.
"Was your grand plan just to let me figure it out and try to fix it then? That was tremendously stupid. No, galactically so." She stands and commences to pace at the foot of the bed. "Were you not man enough to tell me the truth? Did one petite woman with about as much power as a Kleenex compared to some scare the great, powerful Man of Steel? Did you enjoy fooling me? You got to sweep me off my feet at night and listen to me babble about yourself during the day. Should have done wonders for your ego." With each passing word, though not unexpected, Clark becomes quietly horrified. "Oh, no, don't tell me, you were protecting me. Of course," she smacks her forehead loudly in a mock "Ah-ha!" moment. "Duh, that's what Superman does—he protects and saves. Just who the hell do you think you are?! You had no right to be my lover or my best friend when you wouldn't even tell me they were the same damn person! You had no right to decide what was best for me! You, an alien, dictating my life!"
Bruce is out of his chair and taking over her line of sight before she has a chance to remember he's in the room at all. She steps back, afraid of the look in his eyes. This guy's unhinged.
"Don't," he growls but gets no further.
"Bruce," Clark interrupts, seemingly using all the energy left him to say that simple word. His friend backs down, but not without thoroughly, silently warning Lois to watch her tongue.
With great effort, Superman lifts his head, meeting the definition of murderous glares with weak, half-lidded cerulean orbs. He takes a few moments to recover, breathing shallowly. Lois waits, somewhat impatiently, for him to speak again, anxiously anticipating shooting him down. But she is famous for her impatience and lives up to her reputation.
"Clark—" she begins, ready to eagerly tear into him another time when he does, for the second time, a most un-Clark-like thing. He interrupts her, which is as good as signing his own death warrant as all who've ever graced the bullpen know.
"Please don't call me that."
"You prefer Superman?" she sneers, marking this assumption down on her list of things to rake him over the coals for.
He flinches and puffs out a hard breath as a result. "No." If she didn't have firsthand knowledge of his incredible acting abilities she would have sworn that that arrogant thought hadn't occurred to him.
"Then what?"
"Kal-El. Please call me Kal-El." He doesn't look at her as he makes this plea; in fact, he seems distracted by his mangled chest. After an incredulous moment, he touches his chest gently, stares intently at his fingertips, and remarks, "I'm bleeding."
Bruce has him lying back in an instant and begins to remove the heretofore unnoticed bloodied bandages, while barking orders into a handy intercom. "Fresh stitches, Master Bruce," Alfred suggests. "Knowing Master Clark, he's already popped most of the bloody things."
"Thank you, Alfred," Bruce answers sarcastically. "Just keep the boy out of here."
"Of course, Master Bruce. I wouldn't dream of returning him to his injured father's bedside. He's much too young." Lois is momentarily stunned to silence, which only seems to happen with things pertaining to her boy in blue; she knew that butler was more than he seemed.
"It hurts," Clark gasps causing Lois to roll her eyes and smirk. Serves him right. Never hurt a day in his life—pfft. This is karma. Although…he did fall out of the sky after lifting a million or so ton continent out of the ocean with an open stab wound in his back, Lois. I'd bet that hurt. Since when are there two people in my head? Shit.
With a bitter laugh that Lois will recall later and shudder at, Clark continues, "Guess I should be used to that by now." Three grunts and one inexorable moan later and Clark's stitches are redone as Lois finds herself cleaning old blood off a chest that never should have been bloody. Clark lies so still beneath her she considers making a statue joke, stale as she knows it would be.
She contemplates her next move long enough to make him squirm but not talk and decides that anger would be unconvincing with her hands currently dancing (she's not sure who's giving them those orders—must be the other chick inside her head) lithely across, around, and over his chest. Questioning, the reporter in her shining through, seems the best course of action. She begins with possibly the most banal one.
"Why Kal-El?" And it's a Kodak moment when he realizes that her hands aren't going to withdraw and that she's asking about the one name with which she should have no concern.
"It's my birth name—my Kryptonian name." He pauses, giving his upmost attention to ignoring those playful hands of hers and to remembering what it is he's trying to say. "I…feel…more like Kal-El than Clark. Or Superman." He doesn't have to inquire if that makes any sense. He, of all people, knows too well that it doesn't, but she nods. So, definitely not the most banal question. She should probably pursue this.
"You're three people." Maybe he's misunderstood the nod. "Huh?" At another, more energetic time he would have chuckled at the regularly brilliantly articulate Lois Lane reduced to a befuddled "huh."
"Two more than I'd like to be," he confirms.
"Then, why? I mean, why pretend to be Clark Kent? Why not just be Kal-El?"
"I am Clark Kent. Sort of. Clark Kent and Superman are just exaggerated expressions of my personality. Parts of it, anyway. And, Clark Kent protects Kal-El, and the people around him—me. Oh boy." He raises a hand to his eyes and rubs them, a gesture he is obviously not familiar with. "I don't know how to explain this. I've never had to. Um…can I start at the beginning?"
Again, Lois nods. "I think you should."
"I've always been stronger and faster than normal. I flew the first time, actually I guess I hovered, when I was fourteen. It was the same moment my glasses became a costume rather than a necessity. When I was growing up, Smallville had its own set of 'super-villains,' as it were, and I got my start against them. It was natural to me. As natural as I was unnatural." He looks to Bruce, who's as engaged in his tale as Lois is and Kal-El realizes that no one knows his story in full. He glances away. "Learning you are an alien is not the best way to begin life as a teenager. Learning that you are the last of your kind, and thus utterly alone, is prime material for permanent psychological damage." He shakes his head, swishing his tangled locks back and forth. "Sorry. I'm not usually like this." He proffers a half-hearted crooked grin with the joke, but the seriousness of his previous statement is not undone by his attempted levity and his enthralled companions do not respond in kind.
"Anyway…my parents were always terrified that someone would come and take me away. I was the ultimate science project; specimen might as well have been stamped on my forehead. They instilled this fear in me, and I live with it to this day." His eyes, so crazily blue, twinge slightly as nightmares he's known all his life debut for Lois and Bruce. "I was fourteen when my world turned askew and in high school all any teenager wants is to fit in. I was the definition of outsider; I knew it even though no one else did. I became very adept at hiding my alien-ness. Which, looking back, probably wasn't the best course of action. I never had a friend who knew.
"It became apparent, after my globe-trotting and the training session I underwent at the Fortress under the direction of the A.I. that resembles my birth father, that I could not continue my heroics as I had and I could not discontinue them. I needed the world to accept me as an alien, but I needed to maintain my humanity. So, where there was one, there became two: Clark Kent and Superman. I knew neither could be completely me, because they had to be completely different, so Clark turned into a clumsy, klutzy, generally uncoordinated goofball and Superman was this powerful, suave, speech-impaired…hero. I didn't realize that between the two, there was no me, only pieces." His hands seem to find each other very interesting, they twist and turn over one another, fingers knotting only to unknot and their motion does not stop until Lois' slightly frantic hand covers them for just shy of enough time to provide any comfort.
"I fell in love with you, Kal-El did I mean, the first time I saw you, Lois. And at first, I was content with you loving or being enamored or whatever with Superman, but I persistently wondered if you loved the man, as you no doubt believed you did, or the powers—the very alien-ness I'd spent a lifetime coming to terms with. For as long as I wondered, I couldn't outright tell you that Superman equaled Clark. I…wanted you to fall for him, too, even if he was just as much a mirage as Superman. You couldn't know Kal-El until you knew my secret. And besides, Clark Kent protected you, somewhat, from Superman's enemies. It wasn't the ideal situation, but it was one I could live with." He sighs and the wind, mild by his measures, blows his bed sheets into a snarled mess of cotton. A cough results and he hugs a pillow to his chest to ease the pain of the action. Lois' body doesn't release the tension she's unaware of until he settles back again. His color is still wrong and, if she wasn't so flabbergasted by the story, she would put more effort into contemplating the source of his injuries than she is at present—which is to say she's not, although he seems inclined to dismiss it as per usual.
"Barely," he continues. He's long since forgotten his audience; his story is compelling even, perhaps especially, to himself and to speak it, plainly and truthfully, is powerfully cleansing. "I was miserable and when the opportunity presented itself to have a relationship with you, I jumped as eagerly as I've ever done anything. When it fell apart, I lost it. The blame lay with Superman, ironically, but the supposed discovery of Krypton still sent me into the depths of space searching for what I knew wasn't there. I had to see it. I had to, Lois." His handsome face and startled eyes turn to her, still seated at his side close enough to touch but not, and he's desperation personified. "I had to make sure there was nothing left, that I was truly alone. I had to leave—I was dying, Lois. Us having been us and then not being us and not even having the Lane-Kent partnership be like it had been was killing me. I had to go. Earth pushed me and Krypton pulled, I couldn't have escaped it if I'd tried." He stops, panting hard and hurting from the strain, although he doesn't realize it, so trapped is he in his past.
"I didn't know you were pregnant.
"I never would have left if I had. I never would have done what I did. I would have stayed."
He returns to himself, gently, and continues his narrative once more. "When I got back, everything had changed. You knew Clark even less than I suspected, and you outright hated Superman, or almost did. I still loved you more than anything in this world or any other, and I still wanted you to love all of me, as unlikely as that looked. Above all else, I wanted you to be happy, and you seemed to be with your little three person family. Richard is a good man. I was willing to bow out quietly."
"But I told you Jason was your son and you still didn't feel the need to inform me that you were you?"
He looks her square in the eye, leveling with her, sincere and ashamed. "That wasn't that long ago."
"You should have told me immediately!"
"I didn't know how."
And she is silent. For a moment or two. "Didn't know how?" she begins faintly before acidic laughter controls her airway. "Didn't know how?! There are a million ways! How about taking your glasses in hand and saying 'Gee, Lois, I'm Superman! Don't know how you missed it all these years but I guess you're just unbelievably stupid! Isn't that swell?' Or maybe you could have jumped off the Daily Planet in front of me and hovered there instead of falling forty stories to your death! Anything but forgetting to button your shirt sleeve and letting a little blue show through!"
"So that's how you found out…"
"Yeah, you bastard, that's how!" She is standing by now, arms illustrating just how infuriated she is and she is distantly surprised that Bruce remains sitting serenely in his chair.
"I'm sorry. I wish I'd been able to tell you, so you would have understood. Well, you would have had the chance to understand. I appreciate your anger; you have absolutely every right to be mad."
"You bet your big red boots I do!"
"I'm sorry," he reiterates. "I'm so, so sorry."
"As you damn well ought to be!" The only thing keeping her from beating the shit out of what's left of Superman on that damn bed is the implied threat of Bruce's presence, serene or not, but Kal-El will not go unpunished for his offense. No one holds a grudge like Lois Lane.
Indeterminable minutes pass and she, inevitably, cools down. "Jeez, Clark," he winces, "Kal-El," she corrects with a none-too-kind face as she sits again, this time at his feet, "you're kinda screwed up."
"Kinda," he agrees with a self-depreciating laugh. "I do have my moments." Within instances, he is asleep, to Lois and Bruce's amusement. Lois returns to the chair she'd inhabited when she was counting breaths and mulls over the multiple parts of Cl-Kal-El's big divulgence.
She doesn't notice herself failing as well, the total twenty-six hours of being awake finally taking its toll. She isn't aware enough to hear, much less remark on, Bruce's comment.
"I don't like you, Ms. Lane, and I've always thought Clark was nuts."