II
Kal-El

I could take a blow to the head without losing my mind, but Clark's always seemed to be in the last place he looked, and I wondered what happened to him this time.

He took me by the hand, not by the wrist, and pulled me out of the doorway again. When I recoiled, he tightened his grip on my hand and made to drag me down the street.

"Stop," I said, and I was thinking about hitting him this time. But he stopped, and looked at me like he knew what kind of damage I was thinking of, and like he didn't believe I could inflict it. Daring me: daring me to defy him.

Who are you, I wondered again, that you'd look down on me now, even as you're asking my help?

"I don't want to have to hurt you," I said, with a cool look at our clasped hands — but if he caught the veiled threat, there was no indication: still he watched me with those non-communicative, hollow eyes; no smirk, no glare, no acknowledgement that this could have been part of a game we used to play.

So, "Look," I said, changing tack, "if you want my help you are going to have to help me."

We stood there for a moment, my hand in his, matching stare for stare. He was looking into me, weighing me up; for a brief moment I wondered if he thought about things in the same way as the Clark I knew.

What would the Clark I know do, if this was our first meeting?

And then he let my hand go, and let his fall to his side, still watching me: truce, Lois Lane. And now I had to decide what to do with this person that I knew and didn't know in an instant, and what could I do? I had to keep him with me, and then maybe I would figure him out — and then maybe I could help him.

I shouldered his role now, and took his hand, leading him back into the apartment block and up to my apartment, sat him down in my kitchen chair and crossed my arms.

"What happened to you, Clark?" I was the watcher now, not the watched, "Why are you acting like this?"

"Why do you call me Clark?" he said, which, I supposed, ruled out identity theft.

"Because it's your name." I took a chair, and sat down across from him, and silently, and maybe for old time's sake, I added 'Amnesia Boy'.

He tilted his head to the side, still studying me, "I am not Clark," he said, "Clark is gone."

The thought flashed up briefly in my mind: that maybe I should take him to a psychologist, someone who knew how to help better than me.

But then I dusted off an old memory: wrapping Clark in a blanket and taking him to the hospital. That was our first meeting; I knew better this time than to palm him off on a scientific establishment which had seen none of the things I was thinking of.

And, the way he had gripped my hand as though he would have fallen off the surface of the planet if he let go, I didn't think he would let anyone else try to help anyway.

"Why did you come to me?" I said, "How did you know me?"

"I have met you before."

He was so like Clark in that moment, when his eyes seemed to know me: there and gone again, with all the memories of our friendship, blink and you'll miss it.

"Do you remember Kara?" I said.

His hands clenched, his face flickered: the first emotion he really showed, subdued and dark. "My cousin," he said.

I wondered for a moment if Kara might have done something to Clark. But her silence at the end of the line when I had asked about him was so complete — not like she was hiding something, but like she had nothing to hide and nothing to tell.

I was tired. How could I be so callous, so callous that I would dispell a cold thought through cool analyses of Kara's behaviour rather than trust in my relationship to her, and her relationship to Clark. Tired, and so, so like a reporter.

He was placid again. And what was almost more unsettling to me than this aversion to the girl who could be his sister was his indifference to mentions of Lana, Chloe and even his parents, with no indication that he either knew or cared about them.

And though he said he knew me, I wondered if he cared.

"Who are you?" I said again.

"My name is Kal-El."

Kal-El.

"I know that name," I said, "people came looking for Kal-El in Smallville during the last meteor shower." And I found a space ship there once too.

A thought fell in my stomach, making my skin prickle: irrational but horrifying. I saw in front of me a shell, and inside something strange and unknowable, unseen: "Do you take people's bodies?"

I asked it without meaning, heard my voice as from a great distance, strange and troubled.

"No," he said, and I tried to believe it. "No, Lois Lane." He said it more forcefully the second time.

I looked into his face again, and his eyes in their sockets — still unknown, but maybe not unknowable. I managed a smile.

"I need your help," he said, and I knew my smile was wry at that: I'm trying to help you now, Clark.

He stood up now. "My planet is gone," he said, looking down on me, "but it will see a resurrection through me."

"So," I said, "you are not human," and I wondered what this person who both was Clark and wasn't, who talked about the recreation of dead civilisations with scientific dispassion, was asking of me.

"But you know I won't believe you if you say it like that," I said, and I stood up to face him, waiting to learn that he had forgotten himself again, and that this was some invented past: coping through delusion.

Because, I may have brought up the possibility in my own mind first, but he had made it real.

Can he read my mind?

"I can do things," he said, "that your people can't even dream of."

My people.

Clark always had an outsider complex.

"You grew up in Smallville," I said, "you would be abnormal if you didn't have a meteor power."

I probably wasn't far wrong. No scientist had ever come to Smallville to take a survey. For all we knew, half the population were living with meteor infection, maybe hearing some of the things being said about them and crying out in silence: not me, I'm not like that. I sometimes wondered.

He was still analysing me, casting that cold, appraising stare over me again. What would it take, his eyes asked, What would it take to convince you?

"Come with me, Lois Lane," he said, and held out his hand.

Was this how it was to be — each taking turns to lead the other until we had walked around the world hand in hand? Then would we understand something?

I took his hand, and he led me to the roof of my building.

That was when I realised it was raining: battering the window in my kitchen, streaking through Clark's hair and down my face. Cold, hard and real; each streak shining silver against the black sky.

I watched him walk to the edge of the roof, and then reach out for my hand again. He pulled me to the edge next to him, and I breathed in against the vertigo — vertigo, and the sense that I had played out a scene like this before.

For a sickening moment I thought we were going to jump. Then he raised his hand, and pointed up into the sky.

"There," he said, his hand warm against my side, "that's where my planet used to be."

"There's nothing there," I said: no star, nothing.

"It's all gone," he said, "the star exploded," and when he looked at me, I knew he couldn't lie.

I stepped back, and looked at him: tall and stoic, a dark monument to a world which died maybe a thousand years before I was born — who came to me, and asked for help through Clark's lips.

"Where is Clark?" I said: where is the man I was waiting for? — why have you come instead?

"He is gone," he said again, with finality, and I closed my eyes.

"I want him," I said, and I felt the rain slide down the cracks in my clenched fists.

"It's not your choice," came the forceful reply. I opened my eyes. His jaw was set, his eyes almost glowing with his vehemence.

How could you? I thought. How could you come to me like this, looking like him.

He caught my fist when I threw it, and then held me against him so I couldn't move: my grief and my frustration all burning me up from the inside.

"I need your help, Lois," he said, his breath against my ear, his voice so gentle I could believe he was Clark and hate him for the deception. "My planet is gone — its principles, its ideology. But people listen to you, Lois —"

"You want my people," I was shaking, "to give up their principles, and their ideology," I started to laugh, bitter and so, so tired," and you want me to convince them to do it. Why? Why should I?"

"Because," and he let me go, stepping backwards towards the edge of the roof, "my people's ideas did not deserve to die with them."

He was soaked now: his dark hair plastered down to his forehead, but his eyes burning brilliant with conviction.

"If your people had been so enlightened," I said, coolly, "so enlightened that you'd force their culture on mine, they wouldn't have died in the first place."

I didn't know how true it was.

He blinked, and then his lip twitched: a smirk, finally an expression, but cold and vicious. "Lois Lane," he said, "I don't need your help."

And then he stepped backwards, and fell off the roof.