- Chapter 25
Lois couldn't help but frown as Bruce turned and walked away, leaving her standing there to drink her drink and ponder his offer to go back to Metropolis. Were the city not a shell of its former self and the paper simply having a down swing she would have been more than happy to go back, but the city was different now. When it had lost Superman it had lost its heart, and while that made her sad, she had no desire to go back to the scene of her biggest professional failure. Not being able to convince the people of Metropolis that they had to believe in Superman no matter what would always be a regret, one that she didn't imagine she would ever be able to shrug off, no matter how much she wanted to pretend she didn't care. Walking back up the driveway, Lois finished her drink as she walked back into the house, taking her empty glass and dumping it in a garbage can in the kitchen. Thinking about making another drink, she decided not to, desiring to actually be awake on their drive home later on rather than nodding off and leaving Clark to drive while listening to her snore. Plus, she had to take advantage of her precious free time, the little she had when she wasn't surrounded by her tiny Kents. Grabbing another disposable cup, Lois poured herself a glass of water and walked back into the living room, stopping as she spotted Vicki and Jeff sharing a moment together with none of their friends in the middle of. It was just the two of them, in love and taking a moment to be happy with each other, probably because they were going to have a baby. She remembered when she had liked to steal a few moments now and then with Clark while they were at work, surrounded by even more people than Jeff and Vicki were now. Now it often felt like seeing him in bed when they were going to sleep was stealing moments. "They're good together, aren't they?" Looking over at a woman that had stepped up on her right, Lois nodded and smiled.
"They are, and I'm happy for them. I'm glad Vicki found somebody to jump into a life with." Realizing she hadn't yet met the woman next to her, Lois held out a hand. "I'm Lois," she said, smiling.
"Lois Lane," the other woman said, nodding and shaking her hand. "I love your work. I used to peruse it when you were at the Daily Planet, but when you moved to the Times Vicki made us all start reading everything you did. Said you were too good to miss, and it didn't take more than a column to realize she was right. Sam, by the way," she said, "Sam Parkes."
"Sam, ok. When Vicki has mentioned her large new group of friends, she usually mentions you and Beth as being the ones she has conversed with the most, the ones she shares the most with. It's nice to put a face to the name, same as I was able to with Beth."
"It's nice to know that she mentions me. Acclimating can be a problem when you're new into an established group of friends, but Vicki seemed to take it all in stride. I don't think Jeff was entirely truthful with her when explaining how all encompassing and time consuming our group can be. Our birthdays, kids birthdays, watching each others children so couples can have a date night, various holiday get-togethers and all the other things that go with friendship. With us you have to be all in or you're toast, and she went all in. And we're all glad she did," Sam added with a smile. "With some people you don't just marry the guy, you marry his family. For her, you don't just marry Jeff, you marry his friends, too."
"That was, fortunately, a problem I did not have." Crossing her arms, Lois smiled as she continued to watch Vicki and Jeff, Vicki swatting at him after he whispered something in her ear. "Clark and I knew each other years before we ever got together. My cousin Chloe and he became friends when she moved to Smallville, Kansas, a farm town two or three hours outside Metropolis. I lived with him and his family for a while, and got so close that by the time Clark came back from traveling the world after college that I considered his mom a surrogate mother. She was all ready family before I ever became family." Sighing, Lois looked down at the floor before looking up to talk to Sam again. "I miss what they have," she said, nodding towards Vicki and Jeff.
"When it's still new and exciting," Sam added.
"When the problems don't seem so big," Lois said quietly before thinking. Swiping at a damp corner of her eye, Lois tried to smile at Sam. "Sorry, not sure where this came from."
"It's ok," Sam said. "I know we just met, but I'm a good listener if you need somebody to talk to. You could call me a professional listener, actually, and if you're a friend of Vicki's then I consider you a friend of mine, and I like helping my friends."
"Thank you, but I just..." Lois trailed off, biting the inside of her cheek. "I don't want to dump my problems onto somebody else. We all have things we have to work through, myself included."
Sam put a hand on Lois's back gently and started guiding her towards the door. "Come on. We'll step out front and talk for a few minutes. You'll feel better, I promise." As they walked out front and got to some chairs, they sat down, Lois resting her elbows on her knees.
"I really don't want to impose on you, Sam. You have to listen to people go on and on about their problems all week every week. I appreciate the gesture, but really, I'm fine."
"There are therapists that do the work because they're curious about what makes the human mind tick. There are therapists that go through the week waiting for the weekend so they don't have to listen to people talk anymore." Sam smiled as she laid a hand on Lois's shoulder. "I became a therapist because I wanted to help people feel better. I would always see people struggling with issues when I was younger and I would want to help, but I didn't know how. So when I was trying to decide what to do with my life in college, I thought about what would give me the most pleasure in life. Helping people by letting them get things off their chests, helping my friends if they were struggling with something... it makes me happy. So please, allow me my happiness so that I can help you have your own."
"Well, when you put it that way..." Taking a deep breath, Lois attempted to collect herself a little bit, and also tried to figure out what exactly she could and couldn't share. "Clark and I... well, we've been together for a while, but the heat in our relationship never wavered. From day one of the relationship we were all over each other. But since Clark got back from..." Pausing, Lois knew she couldn't divulge anything Superman related, but a scenario popped into her head that was close enough that maybe Sam could give insight in that way. "Here's the story: Clark wasn't hurt and hit with amnesia in the Metropolis bombings. He went to East Africa to cover a story, to do an exclusive interview with the leader of a notable rebel faction. It was front page kind of stuff, and while I would normally do that story, Clark was more familiar with the area because of his time traveling after college. So he goes, but he never makes it to the interview. He was captured by the government and imprisoned, except nobody knows this. I get word he no-showed the interview roughly an hour before the bombings and my house is attacked and burned down. So it's all hush hush, nobody knows, and now he has disappeared. Well, after the bombings and my ridiculous day, when I finally confer with my editor, we cook up the story that Clark was in the city and nobody has been able to find him. We don't want it in public that he's been captured because we don't even know who has him at that point."
Taking a second to think about what she was saying, Lois realized that had she chosen it, she might have been able to go into writing fiction, or maybe improv. This was some of the best storytelling she had ever done. "So, long story short, we look for him for months. I found out I was pregnant during this time, which just adds another level of stress on top of first losing my husband, my house, then Superman disappearing, then losing my job. So, after I give birth to my youngest, Devon, I'm trying to be a single mom to three children and basically just hold myself together. Two friends at this time have tracked down a credible lead, but decide not to share it with me. They find who is holding him, and are able to pay a ransom for his release. That's a situation where having friends like Bruce Wayne and Oliver Queen comes in handy," Lois said, smiling.
"I should say so."
"So they get him out, and one month to the day after my daughter was born Clark knocks on the door to the apartment in Smallville we were living in. The reunion is... well, it wasn't one of those things where you jump into each others arms and everything is suddenly perfect. I was holding the baby when answering the door, so that news got broken pretty quickly, and he was kind of in shock about it. I had to get used to him being around again, and though we got back into a routine, it felt different. Clark was there, but he wasn't always there." Frowning, Lois didn't know if that was a good enough description for what had been going on, but it was the best she could do. "The strangest thing was that when I was ready to have sex again a few weeks later, he didn't take any of my hints, didn't jump at any of the innuendo that had always worked before. This was in... June, around the first time I met Vicki at the Kerth Awards. This continues for months, until after we moved to Connecticut. I finally lost it one night, questioning if he even found me sexy anymore, if I was a woman to him anymore or just his wife. He apologized, and since then we've been regularly having sex, except... except it's like when he had first come back. He's with me, but he isn't really there. The intimacy that was always so strong in our love life is gone. He goes through the motions, and it's still pleasurable, but it's not what it was. It's just sex. Before he was captured we always made love, corny and dumb as that sounds. Even when it was early on in our relationship, there was always a tenderness in the way Clark looked at me, in the way he touched me. Now... now he could be having sex with anybody, from the way he acts. It's like he realized he had a duty to try and keep me sexually fulfilled rather than wanting to actually be with me."
"Did Clark ever tell you about what happened to him when he was captured?"
"He told me some," Lois said, sighing as she sat back. "He told me that there was torture, sometimes daily, but he spared me the gory details. I don't know how he got through it, how he was able to keep going, but he came back to me. I'm so unbelievably thankful for that, for his being home and alive, that I'm mad at myself for even considering this an issue. I feel incredibly selfish, after everything he went through, to have complaints about our relationship. I'm ashamed that I broke once, that I lost it about us not having sex, and after doing that now I'm complaining about the quality of the sex? I mean, what the hell is wrong with me that I can't just be thankful and adapt?"
"It can be hard to adapt to good when you had excellent," Sam said. "And there's nothing wrong with you. You want the relationship that you had before Clark was captured. There's nothing wrong with that. You might have to adapt, but that doesn't mean sacrificing your own happiness. Has anything else about Clark changed? Is it just your sex life, or has there been a change in his personality, his demeanor, anything like that?"
"He's still my Smallville, but there is a little bit of difference. Clark was an optimist, a believer that given the opportunity a person will always do the right thing. It was annoying when I first got to know him, but as time went by it was something I grew to love about him. He never thought the worst of people and would always give them a chance to redeem themselves. Now... he's still an optimist, but he's more guarded. Another thing is that he doesn't go into our basement. At our house in Metropolis he had a pool table and a television down there, a place he could retreat to watch sports or a place to relax. He won't even go down into the one we have now." Lois frowned, surprised that she hadn't thought about that much until now. She had noted it, but it had never occurred to her that it could be related to anything else.
"Does he have nightmares more than he used to?"
Lois nodded. "He could always get by on less sleep than most people, which really came in handy with our first two children, but now his sleep is more fitful, and he has woken up suddenly from nightmares more since coming home than in the rest of our relationship."
"I don't want to give you a diagnosis, obviously, because I would need to talk to Clark before anything, but from what you describe, I would urge you to have him go to somebody to get checked out for post traumatic stress. Usually when people come home from an ordeal like what he endured, getting into sessions with a therapist should be step one. It doesn't sound like he ever sought counseling, though, so I would talk to him about it. He may not want to but tell him all the things we've talked about and how it's making you feel."
"Post traumatic stress," Lois said quietly, closing her eyes and smacking herself in the forehead with her palm a few times. "God... My father was a General in the Army and talked about losing good men to PTSD. I should have... how did I miss that? I've known soldiers that came back from combat and exhibited the exact same symptoms, but put them right in front of my face and I totally miss it."
"Don't be hard on yourself, Lois. We see change in the people we love and just attribute it to life. Sometimes we need a third party to point out things that we already knew but couldn't see because of our own feelings. Experience or no, PTSD presents differently in everybody and with something like this, the symptoms can be attributed to other things. It's not an easy problem, but it's a workable one. Have Clark talk to somebody. I promise that it can help." Sam smiled at her, taking her hand into her own, and Lois felt her give it a reassuring squeeze. "Do you feel better having gotten that off your chest?"
"I do," Lois conceded. "But I won't really feel better until Clark feels better."
"You told her what?" Clark asked, looking away from the highway in shock at what Lois had just told him. He couldn't help but stare for as long as he felt comfortable on the empty road as they drove back from Gotham to Stamford. They had left less than an hour ago, and after spending the first half hour of the drive in comfortable silence Lois had started talking about how much she had enjoyed the party and getting to know the people around Vicki. She had yet to talk about Vicki being pregnant but he knew there would be something coming on that topic at some point. But then she had dropped a bomb on him, that she had talked to Vicki's psychologist friend Sam about what had happened to him, or at least had related similar events.
"I told her something as close to the truth as I could present, Clark."
"Why didn't you talk to me?"
"Clark, I want to talk to you. Every day I try to make myself bring up the things I talked to Sam about with you but I chicken out because I am scared that I will make things worse, that I'll hurt you."
Rubbing a hand over his face, Clark started running his tongue along the backside of his teeth, trying to think of what it was in their relationship that could have piled up so high that she felt the need to talk to somebody else because she was afraid of talking to him. Was it something to do with his capture? He couldn't think of anything off the top of his head, and yeah, he had occasionally zoned out and had flashbacks when he had first come home, but they happened less now, even if they still were extremely vivid. "I mean... I'm sorry that you don't feel like you can talk to me, Lois, because you can. Never be afraid of talking to me, please. Anything you have to say about our relationship comes from a place of love, and I know that, no matter how difficult the topic is."
"Clark... look, I think we should wait until we get home. Tonight, after the kids go to bed, we can sit down and talk about what Sam and I discussed in the comfort of our own home instead of a car while you're driving."
Clark glanced over at her. "I can still multitask pretty well, Lo. Come on. If this is serious enough that you need to talk and confide, then we should do this now, sooner rather than later. I don't want to put this off if you've had trouble bringing it up before." Reaching over with his free hand, he gently grabbed hers and entwined their fingers. "Please. I don't want this to hang over our head while we drive home."
"We've lost something."
Frowning, Clark tried to figure out what she meant. She obviously wasn't talking about a physical item, but thinking about their relationship since he had come back, he couldn't come up with something that was drastically different than from before, except where they lived and worked. "Nothing feels missing to me, Lois. We're together and we're happy. We have the children. We have jobs and a beautiful house."
"I guess I should have been more specific," Lois said quietly. "Something that was always part of our relationship, our physical relationship, is missing, Clark. There was always something when we had sex that made it more than just sex. There was a joy, an almost reverence in the way you treated me and my body, but now it's like you're doing a job, and not one you necessarily enjoy."
"Is this like when I was missing your signals, because I'm really trying to be better about that. Honestly, I just wasn't paying attention, and if I'm doing that again I'll try to be better about it, I promise."
"Clark, you don't look me in the eyes when we make love anymore. You always used to, and I thought it was weird how much you did it when we first got together, how you were always looking into my eyes. I got used to it, though, and came to understand that it was part of how you connected. Nobody in my life had ever tried to do that, tried to connect with me not only physically but mentally. It was like you were trying to see into my soul while everything was bared for you to see, while I was at my most vulnerable."
"I didn't..." Licking his lips, Clark had a difficult time finding the words to respond to what she had said. "I wasn't aware that was something I did. I never thought about how to make love with you, Lois. It always came naturally to me, mostly because I didn't have enough... experience, I guess, before falling in love with you to do anything but what came naturally."
"I know, and I never had one complaint about our sex life, Smallville. From our first time together what came naturally to you naturally made me come," she said, and Clark looked over at her to find her wincing. "Sorry, that turn of phrase sounded better in my head."
Looking back at the road, Clark wished he had a response to what she was saying about their love life, something more than a question bouncing around in his head that was not something he wanted to ask. "Is it not... am I not good anymore?"
"It's not that it's not good, Clark. I get pleasure out of our sex." Reaching over, she grabbed his hand again, much the way he had when he had pressed her to explain what she had been talking to Vicki's friend Sam about at the party. He hadn't even noticed that he had let go of her hand. "The problem is, Smallville, I'm not getting you, not the way I always have before. When we first started having sex again, the first couple times it happened I thought you were just out of sorts because I had gotten mad that we weren't having sex, that you weren't taking any hints, no matter how blatant. But that hasn't changed, and it hurts. I want to have every piece of you, Clark, the way I had before. I know it's selfish, that I'm demanding more of you than you might be able to give after your ordeal, but not having that part of you leaves me sad every time I notice that it's missing."
"God, I didn't... I wish you would have told me, Lois. I didn't even realize anything had changed. I feel like I'm doing things the same as I always have."
"I know, Clark. You would never do anything like this on purpose. And it's not just this. Other things have changed, too."
"I'm afraid to ask," Clark responded quietly, meaning it sincerely.
"Don't be, Clark. We can wait to talk about those things. They're smaller and to be worried about later. And remember: I love you, Smallville. I will always love you. If this is as much as you're capable of giving now, then I still have more than any other woman on the planet, and for that I am grateful."
"But I don't want you to have to settle, Lois. I don't want to give you any less than what I've always given you. If I am, and apparently I really am, I'm not aware of it and that's a problem." Resting his elbow on his car door, Clark propped his head up with his hand. "I thought I came out of what happened relatively unscathed, but I guess not."
"Clark..."
"Have I ever told you how I got through all the pain, all the loneliness?" Lois shook her head and Clark sighed. He had hoped that he would be able to keep everything about his incarceration away from her, every detail hidden so that she would never have to know anything more than the fact that he was captured, held, dosed with kryptonite over and over again then released. Apparently that wasn't working to keep things as normal like he had hoped it would considering Lois was hurting and he was the one doing the hurting. He wished it was easier to talk about, that he didn't have to force every word out, but anything related to his capture felt like he had to yank it out of his body. Painfully. "I lost track of time a while in the bunker. They lined all the walls with lead underneath a sheen of kryptonite to keep me from being able to look through, except the ceiling. They left that lead free so I could see outside and watch the city move on without me, without Superman. The first time I lost track of how long I had been in there was when they..." Clark paused, the experience playing back in his mind. Men with chunks of kryptonite had come into his cell and were holding him down when a woman rolled in an oxygen tank. She had put the mask to his face, and as she did one of the men had kicked him in the ribs. When he had inhaled it was like his lungs had been lit on fire. They had liquified kryptonite, they explained, and had then boiled it and mixed a small amount of the gaseous kryptonite in with the oxygen in the tank, just to see what it would do to him. It had felt like forever before he could breathe again without pain. "Let's just say they got creative with how they would administer what they deemed justice for failed escape attempts. I was out of it for days, and the only way I found out how long it had been was by looking up through the bunker and catching a glimpse of something on the surface.
"After a little while, my mind decided I needed help, and it conjured something up to keep me strong, the one thing in my life that has always kept me strong." Looking over at Lois, he smiled, but she didn't smile back. She looked like she was about to cry, but he continued. He had to get through what he wanted to say, to try and make her understand. "One day you appeared before me while I was suffering through something they were doing to me, telling me to be strong. I knew I was hallucinating, knew that my mind was trying to help me get through what I was trying to endure. For days I wouldn't talk to the hallucination because I didn't want to be a cliché, didn't want to admit that I was hurting that much and that lonely. But my mind played to my love of you. She appeared naked, talking about how I was imagining your body. She started talking about the ways time and childbirth change a woman's body. She said that you probably thought my lasting mental picture of you was at the end of the week you took of maternity leave after Jacob was born, when you were barely sleeping and hadn't showered since getting home from the hospital. I couldn't help myself. I had to tell the hallucination, my own brain, that I could never see you as anything but beautiful." Looking back over his shoulder as he merged onto a larger highway, Clark got the car settled into traffic and turned on the cruise control before going back to his story.
"The hallucination became omnipresent. My Lois Lane stand in was always there, talking to me to keep my mind off the loneliness or try to distract me from the pain. She kept me as sane as somebody talking to a hallucination can be considered. Do you know when she disappeared?" Clark looked over at Lois, whose eyes were covered with a hand. "My hallucination disappeared when you opened the door and I saw you again, my glorious, beautiful Lois, now fully corporeal. You may not have been with me in body, Lois, but your spirit was there, and you kept me alive. The reason I survived to come home to you, Jacob, Cassidy and Devon was because you reminded me to be strong. Even when I had given up, when I was ready to die and felt like I had made peace with the idea of dying, she was there to remind me I had reasons to live." Clark paused, watching the road while only really half seeing it. "I wish you didn't have to hear any of this, Lois. I've done everything in my power to try and keep you from knowing anything about what happened during my capture and incarceration. But if I'm hurting you through my actions and inaction, if I've changed and I didn't even realize it, that means things aren't just bad, they're terrible. Hurting you through my inaction, through my lack of attention and demeanor means that I have to change what I'm doing. Immediately. We'll sit down and talk through what would be best and-"
"Sam said your symptoms sounded like post traumatic stress," Lois said suddenly, cutting him off. She sniffled loudly and started wiping at her now red and puffy eyes, and Clark had to resist the urge to scream at himself for making her cry. Once again his lack of attention to detail had hurt Lois. "She said that wasn't a diagnosis because she would have to talk to you to give you a definitive answer, but she thought you needed to talk to somebody about what's going on."
"Lois, I'm so sorry. I didn't mean to make you cry. I thought sharing that would help you understand how much your love means to me..." Trailing off, Clark let his chin fall to his chest for a couple seconds before training his eyes back on the road. "I wish I could recognize when I'm hurting you, but I seem to have lost that ability."
"Some of these tears are sad tears, Smallville, but not all of them." She looked over at him, a tremulous smile gracing her face. "Some of these are tears from realizing just how much you love me. I never once questioned that you did, but hearing that you attribute your surviving to me, to the love you feel for me? God," she said, a small hiccup escaping her mouth as she started rubbing at her eyes again. "I don't think I'll ever be able to explain how much what you said means to me, Clark. It kills me to hear what happened to you, but if that's what it takes to get you through this I will listen to every second of everything you can remember. I will join you in therapy sessions and we'll talk about ways to try and help you cope with what happened. We will get through this together, because you're my Smallville, and that will never change."
Scratching at her eyebrow, Sam walked up to the front desk of her office and grabbed the chart of her next patient, checking the name at the top so she could go pull her notes and review the previous session before calling the person back. Kent, Clark. Blinking, Sam made sure she had read that correctly before scanning the paperwork, noting that it was indeed the papers they had a new patient fill out before going into a first session, and he had checked 'traumatic event' on the forms where they asked why he had decided to seek counseling. But why had he come all the way to Gotham to see a psychologist? Just because she had been who Lois had talked to? Grinding her teeth together, Sam decided that she would at least talk to him in her office and see if that was why he had chosen to come to her rather than find a psychologist close to home. She surmised he probably thought it would be easier with somebody that had all ready heard a version of events as to what was occurring between he and Lois, along with his other potential symptoms. Walking out into the little waiting room, she held the chart behind her back. "Clark?"
He stood up quickly, knocking over a stack of magazines on the table next to him as he put one down on top of it. Smiling sheepishly, he picked them all up and put them back on the table and pushed his glasses up on his nose as he walked over to her, his hands going into his pockets as his shoulders slumped a little bit. "Hello, Dr. Parkes," he said quietly. "We never got to meet at Beth's party for Vicki and Jeff."
"No, we didn't, but I did get to meet your wife. Why don't you follow me back and we'll talk." He nodded, and as Sam turned to walk to her office she couldn't help but wonder how a woman like Lois Lane had ended up with a guy like the one she was seeing. He was handsome, yes, but he slumped, seemed shy, nerdy and klutzy. Maybe it was an office fling that had turned into more. Putting that out of her mind as they walked into the office, Sam sat down in her chair as Clark took a seat across from her, fidgeting as he did so.
"Sorry," he said, smiling as he noticed her watching him, that same smile he had out in the lobby when he had knocked over the magazines.
"You can imagine my surprise when I saw your name on the chart a few minutes ago. When I suggested to Lois that she have you see somebody about what happened to you I didn't mean that you needed to drive all the way to Gotham and see me. A psychologist in Stamford or New York could help you just as well with a tenth of the drive time."
"I know, but Lois talked about how you helped her feel better and gave her an idea of how to talk to me about things I wasn't even aware I was doing. When we talked about it, she suggested I try you. I work from home and Lois worked it out with her boss that she's able to take an afternoon off each week to work from home."
"Are you sure, Clark? I'd be happy to help you work on your issues if that's what you choose, but if it's going to be overly taxing on you and your family then you're doing as much harm as you are good."
He nodded, smiling. "Yeah, I'm sure. And if we have scheduling problems my mom is a former Senator from Kansas who does a lot of charity work. There's always an organization or event around New York that is happy to include her in the lineup and she can stay with us and help with the kids."
"Okay." Getting up, Sam walked to her desk and grabbed a pad of paper and pen before going back and sitting down, situating herself comfortably. "I'm going to tell you the same thing I tell all my patients. This is a safe place for you where you can share with me things that weigh on you with no risk of judgement. You're here because you recognize that there's a problem and that the problem is something you want to change. It's not going to be easy. It's not going to be you baring your soul, feeling better and walking out magically cured. This is a process, and not a short one unless you choose to make it short by discontinuing treatment. The one thing I will always ask of you is that you be honest. If you're not honest then we're wasting our time and your money."
"Honest," Clark said quietly, frowning. Noting his reaction, Sam couldn't help but frown as well.
"Is there a problem, Clark?"
"This is all covered by doctor/patient confidentiality, right?" he asked, looking up at her.
"As long as you don't confess to a major crime, yes."
Suddenly Clark sat up straight, his whole demeanor changing in the blink of an eye. The man who seemed shy and reserved was gone, and there was no sign of any lack of coordination that had been apparent only a moment ago. He inhaled slowly before reaching up and pulling off his glasses, hanging them off the front of his shirt. "If you require honesty for this process to work then there are some corrections I need to make to the story you heard. It was true, in a sense, but Lois was lying about the circumstances to protect me."
"Why would she need to do that?" she asked, suddenly realizing that Clark without his glasses looked very familiar, but she couldn't place his face.
"Because what I'm about to tell is extremely privileged information. Do you use any recording devices during your sessions?"
"I do, but I haven't turned any on yet." Clark started looking around the room, as if he were scanning every inch with his eyes. "Are you looking for something?"
"Just making sure your office isn't bugged. I like to be thorough about these things."
"What? Why would you think somebody would have my office bugged?" This was probably the strangest first session with a patient that Sam could remember, and she had been through some weird ones over the years.
"You can never be too careful," she heard him mutter before he turned back to face her. He pulled his hands back through his hair, giving it an almost slicked back appearance. "I was captured, Dr. Parkes, but not in Africa. I was in India at the time, helping flood victims. Turns out it was a setup meant to get me away from Metropolis and trap me. It worked, and I was captured and then held in a bunker underneath Metropolis for almost ten months. The people that did this to me knew my weakness and used it against me, to... to torture me while they held me."
"What..." Pausing, Sam tried to process what she had just been told, but she was barely able to wrap her brain around his change in demeanor. His weakness? Why did he say that like he only had one, like there weren't a million things out in the world that could kill him? "Why would you specifically be targeted for capture, Clark?"
"I went by another name when they captured me: Superman."
As soon as he said the name, it slammed home in Sam's mind why he looked so familiar without the glasses. It was Superman. Clark Kent was Superman. She worked her mouth a couple times but found herself unable to form words. He hid in plain sight, and he did it perfectly. The way he had moved before deciding to be totally honest made him seem smaller than he was, his clumsiness selling his the persona of an uncoordinated nerd. The questions that had jumped to mind about why Lois Lane would marry Clark Kent were now gone. Very, very gone. "Why... why are you telling me who you are?" she finally asked, that being the first question to pop into her mind.
"Because Lois is unhappy, Dr. Parkes," Clark said, sitting forward and resting his elbows on his knees. "I know that sounds like the wrong reason for being here, like I want to change for her, but if she says something is wrong, that I've changed, then something is wrong and I have changed. I normally have a good sense of what I'm doing because of my gifts and the way I grew up. I had to. Now I'm doing things differently and Lois had to point that out to me. I'm hyper aware of all my actions and I missed this." Clark paused, but started again before Sam could even think about trying to collect her thoughts. "If what I'm doing is having an effect on her happiness, then I'm doing things incorrectly. If you need me to be completely and totally honest with you for this to work then I'm going to do just that, because nothing means more to me than my wife and children. If Lois has noticed a difference in me, how long will it be before my son notices, or my daughters? I don't want them to wonder what's wrong with their dad, ever. I all ready disappeared from their lives physically. I don't want there to be another interruption in their lives that I cause."
"You have children," Sam said, slumping in her chair a little bit. "I always wondered if it would be possible for Superman to have children with a human woman."
Clark glanced up at her from where he was looking, a curious look on his face before he sighed. "I forgot how much this news is to take. It's been a while since I told anybody." Clark stood up, putting his glasses back on. Sam felt like she couldn't unsee what she had seen, and now saw Superman in everything he did, every move he made. "What time does your last appointment today end, Dr. Parkes?"
"5:30pm. Why?"
"If you have some time after work and you'll agree to sit down with me then we can talk after you've had some time to process what I just told you. It's only been ten minutes since we came in here, which would give you the next fifty to think things through, plus any free time you have around appointments for the rest of the afternoon." Sam watched as Clark reached up and messed with his hair, making it look a little messy, some of it falling down into his eyes. She didn't remember Superman ever having hair that long. "If you don't want to take me on as a patient I would understand. I would just ask that should you make that choice you give me your word that you won't tell people my identity."
"No, of course not. Like I said, anything you tell me here is confidential." He nodded and moved towards the door, causing Sam to get up and walk over to him. As she reached him she noticed that he was slumping again, but now that she knew, it just struck her as odd that Superman would be slumping. "I'll free up some time this evening and let my husband know that I'll be home late. I wish we could have done this now but I just..." She shrugged, not knowing what else to say.
"I understand, and as you now probably understand, travel between Stamford and Gotham isn't as much of a problem as you thought it would be." He smiled and opened the office door. "Thank you, Dr. Parkes. I'll see you this evening."
As the door closed Sam stood there, trying to figure out what exactly had just happened. Moving across her office and sitting down behind her desk, she slumped back into her chair, letting her head rest against the back. "Please," she said quietly, "call me Sam. I like this to feel like a conversation, not an interview."