"Responsible"
Chapter Two
Kal-El stood up and sped away. He reached the Fortress in record time without causing any sonic booms on the way. As though he sensed his turmoil, Jor-El did not interrupt as Kal-El paced the floor of the Fortress as if he was possessed.
It was Kal-El in all his strength and confidence and not a broken Clark Kent who finally spoke.
"I cannot bring Jimmy back from the grave for her, Father. How do I stop her tears?"
"Her happiness is important to you, my son?" the question echoed calmly through the Fortress.
"You loved an Earth woman once, Father. You know the pain she felt when you told her she could not leave with you. I felt what her pain did to you. I cease to function when her tears are all I can see. Although he cannot admit it to himself, Clark Kent has loved her for a long time. He could never let her go. It is why he failed at every other relationship he pursued. She was always more important than anything or anyone else in his life. He feels responsible for her pain and as he cannot help her he ceases to exist. I have no hope of defeating Zod if his weakness controls me, Father."
"How do you feel about her, Kal-El?"
His mind focused on a conversation in the barn loft between Clark and Martha after she'd succeeded in freeing him from the Red Kryptonite poison in his system that had caused him to crash Lex and Lana's engagement party.
"If you hadn't shown up in time I'm not sure what I would have done to Lex.
How'd you know what to do…?" Clark had asked Martha.
"The last time you had some kind of Kryptonite in your system, you had to sweat it out
Weakening you seemed to be our only chance."
"I just can't believe all those things I did…" he had replied, the shame evident in his tone.
"I can." Martha had replied.
"I guess I can't blame you for being mad at me too." Clark was still not sure she would forgive him.
"Clark, you've walked around here for years bottling everything up; basing every decision on what's best for other people. You never stop to think what's best for you."
He was shocked at her conclusion. "Mom, you don't think I really meant those things I said about you and Chloe?"
"I think there was a grain of truth in all of it. Every time you've been affected by Red Kryptonite, it hasn't changed who you are; it's just stripped away your inhibitions. I think you need to start being more honest about how you feel."
"So, you're saying that I want to kiss Lois, and keep Chloe in my back pocket while the whole time I'm still in love with Lana?" He couldn't believe he could be such a heel!
"You're the only one who can sort that out."
Clark had never truly sorted it out. Kal-El on the other hand had not shied away from the truth Clark could not or would not face.
"I had no trouble letting her know I wanted her many years ago, when Clark's friend drugged me with a Red Kryptonite stone. She is the bravest Earthling I have met. She has protected and saved Clark many times, Father. She has even come to you for help to save him and Kara. What courage it must have taken to face an alien power she didn't know or understand. I would be proud to do anything necessary to bring her happiness."
"Kal-El, you must first prepare to save the planet from Zod. If facing her tears interferes with this mission, you must learn to think of it as the first step towards this goal of bringing her happiness."
"Thank you, Father."
"Be careful, my son."
He sped out of the Fortress and soon found himself back at Jimmy's grave.
"I promise you after I have defeated Zod, her happiness will be my next mission," he swore quietly, a solemn oath from the heart of a very troubled Kal-El.
He sat down on the ground and concentrated on all the ways he had learned in the last month to control his emotions, to look at all possibilities before acting on those emotions. He had learned he needed to use those emotions logically as part of trusting in his natural survival instinct and his knowledge; to not reveal any weakness.
Kal-El faced the problem that he had left the Fortress much too early. There was still too much to learn. Too much he did not yet understand. He knew his problems stemmed from years of denying who he was. The combination of the Kents, in their constant and daily efforts to protect him, and the artificial intelligence his birth father had created, in its earlier constant and misguided efforts to make him accept his destiny and deny his human-learned existence, had only led to an enormous self-doubt. This doubt had often become an unbearable and sometimes even insane ache to be 'normal.'
He had never truly learned to accept his version of normal, and to grow into one complete being, to accept all his traits both natural and nurtured. His life had been a constant battle of which side should be in control and which side did he want to live with. His existence had become a mountain of guilt for all the mistakes he'd made. He thought of himself as two separate entities and lately that had turned him into a soul divided between his good intentions and the evil that had been the end result.
That end result of death and destruction had finally been more than his nurtured side could deal with: to know he could not always save those he was responsible for, not even the ones he loved, people he would outlive and lose anyway, no matter what he did; his denial became complete: human emotions led to dangerous mistakes and must be stopped and thus Clark Kent 'died.' And the previously often-believed evil side, Kal-El, took over; the logical thinking, guilt-free, no-conscience, attachment-free and emotionless Kryptonian who was better equipped to single-handedly save humanity anyway…
Clark had been wrong; it was impossible to 'separate himself' the way the Red or Black Kryptonite had been able to. Kal-El hadn't trained enough to be in complete control yet. But, unless he could gain immediate access to a trained psychiatrist who could understand Kryptonian logic and make immediate sense of the confusion he felt, he knew he didn't have enough time to master this control. Zod would not wait for him to train to become a better fighter.
So he would do the only thing he could and work with what he had learned so far: that as he tried to gain this much needed control, he had found that thinking of himself only as Kal-El kept him more focused. In the last month nothing had disturbed that focus; not until he'd seen her tears. All his hard-won control had evaporated.
As long as Clark did not face his need for Chloe, his need for human compassion, those tears would continue to be his weakness. He did not know how to make Clark see that the love he denied could be his biggest strength. Until he discovered a way to make Clark accept this reality, he must concentrate every minute to gain complete control; which meant he had to leave Clark Kent dead.
---To be continued---
