From the previous chapter:

"Well, Martha Kent," Clark said, imitating the avatar's precise diction, "you've just discovered that you have control over an alien Fortress containing advanced galactic technology, and that you, quite possibly, could rule the world." He gestured around at the vast structure. "What are you going to do next?" He wasn't even trying to hide his smile now.

I fought off the inane urge to snap back, "I'm going to Disney World!" Then it really hit me. What was I going to do? It was like winning the lottery – and I'd read somewhere that eighty percent of lottery winners were bankrupt within five years. I looked up at Clark again and saw sympathy.

"Stan Lee said it best," Clark said softly. "When he wrote Spider-Man? With great power comes great responsibility." He gave me a rueful smile.

I suddenly realized that Clark had felt the truth of those words for years.

Perry, bless him, stepped in. "I think we all need a little break here." His voice was firm. He broke the locked gaze between Clark and me.

"That's right." Clark stepped back, his face losing the pain lines it held when he stood near kryptonite. He nodded as Perry came up and took my elbow, tucking me close to his body.

"A break is good," I said hollowly, my mind whirling. Perry and I stepped back from the control console as well. The avatar stood patiently, saying nothing.

"I have a suggestion," Clark said diffidently. "You two stay here. I'll fly back to Australia and get our food. We'll have our picnic here."

When he said "food" my stomach rumbled audibly. I was hungry. Maybe that accounted for some of my lightheadedness. Perry lifted his eyebrows at the rumbling but politely ignored it.

"Good plan," Perry said.

"Just two things," Clark replied. I stood straighter and grasped the kryptonite tighter at his tone. Was there a spasm of pain in his eyes at my motion? Did he think that I expected him to hurt me? He made no other sign that he'd noticed my instinctive grasp of the thing that was lethal to him.

"What?" I asked suspiciously.

"Let's ask Jor-El for a table and chairs. Running water. And a bathroom."

I relaxed my grip on the kryptonite and sighed in relief, chiding myself for the ultra-paranoid fears. I had plenty of normal fears. I didn't need to create more. I didn't think I had to be suspicious of every little thing Clark said or did. As I reminded myself for the tenth time, he'd had plenty of opportunities to kill us so far, and hadn't taken a single one. Perry and I were here and unharmed.

Needing a bathroom was just so human and mundane. It wasn't alien at all. In fact, now that Clark had mentioned it, I really had to go. "Great idea," I said fervently. "Jor-El, we're both asking for that. Can you get us those things here?"

The avatar nodded. Off to the side, an area of the crystal bubbled. Sparkling dust hung in the air as deep rumbling – a tiny imitation of that heard when the Fortress was formed – shook the floor.

"Completed," the avatar said shortly.

"Man, this is so Arabian Nights," Perry muttered.

"Yeah, it is," Clark replied. He'd heard the sotto voce comment. "Aladdin's lamp and all that." He frowned. "That's why this is the second thing. Jor-El?"

"Yes?"

"Don't talk to Martha if I'm not here, unless I give permission. Don't talk to me if Martha's not here, unless she gives permission."

This time it was me who blurted out, "Hey!"

Perry had a considering look on his face. "Not a bad idea."

Clark turned to me and said earnestly, "From here on out, we do everything with the Fortress together. You'll know what I'm up to. I'll know what you're up to."

"Well… I guess so."

Clark smiled. "You can keep me on the straight and narrow." Without giving me a chance to reply, he disappeared.

The avatar winked out of existence. Apparently my "I guess so" was considered enough agreement.

I stood there for a minute. "I hate it when Clark does that."

"What?" Perry asked.

"Just super-speeds off and disappears. It's so not fair."

"You just wanted to get the last word."

I hugged him, unutterably relieved at what had happened. I didn't have to kill Clark. I wouldn't have to kill him. I could prevent another Kryptonian domination. "You know me well."

"Well, you'd better get used to it," Perry said. "Now that you own half of this Fortress, you and Clark are going to be spending a lot of time together."

I looked at him in dismay.

Clark came back in about twenty minutes. I knew it hadn't taken him that long to fly to Australia and back. Heck, he'd brought us to the Arctic in less than five minutes. He must have decided to give me some time to cool down. I used the bathroom, glad we'd gotten that through before Jor-El was put on lockdown. I wished we'd thought to ask for soap, though.

I took off Clark's boots and socks and slipped back into my own sandals. I could see the whirling Arctic winds through the vaulted entrance, but here, inside the Fortress, warmth reigned. Perry slipped off his jacket and loosened his tie.

Perry and I sat at the newly created table, exchanging a few desultory words but we soon tailed off into silence. There was something about this place that discouraged conversation. Maybe it was the echoes – or maybe it was the fact that we were humans in a place not meant for our species.

Thoughts whirled through my head. What if Clark didn't come back? We were stranded. The Fortress wouldn't respond without him. What if he just left us here? Why had I so blithely let him fly away? What had I been thinking? As the minutes ticked on, I grew more and more worried.

Clark cut off that line of thinking before I worked myself into a panic, by landing at the door and walking in. He gave us time to react to his presence. He carried our picnic hamper. He paused a moment before approaching Perry and myself, and I realized he was testing for kryptonite.

"We put it away," I told him. There was a flash of relief in his eyes. Why did I feel guilty about that? We were the ones under threat, not him.

Clark nodded and strode confidently to the table, setting our picnic basket there. We automatically fell into the roles we'd taken on. I set out the plates and silverware, and got out the food; Perry fumbled with the corkscrew and opened the wine; and Clark examined the containers, found the appropriate ones, and gave the contents a blast of heat vision. He also chilled the drinks.

I paused for a short grace; then we all dug in. By common agreement we said nothing about our current situation; instead, Perry asked Clark about his week.

"I went to Australia to scout out things for our picnic, earlier this week," Clark began. "I was doing a fly-by over Melbourne and came across a group of survivors."

"Is that unusual?" I asked.

"Actually, it is." Clark suddenly looked as if he regretted this line of conversation. "I've been doing fly-overs above, well, just about all the big cities, and there are almost no survivors outside North America."

"I wonder why."

"I think I know why," Perry announced. "Zod and that robot thing of his – "

"Brainiac."

"Brainiac, yes. They released some bio-warfare agents, killed billions of people in just a few weeks."

Clark looked sick.

"I was at the Daily Planet building – Zod had made it his HQ, it seemed to be some sort of joke with him – and I was there when he dispersed some sort of counteragent. That was to keep all the collaborators and toadies alive." Perry looked grim. "It must have dispersed, at least in the local area. Maybe it spread across the continent. From what you're saying, I don't think much of it got overseas."

"Most of the other people that survived were metahumans," I said quietly. I should know. I'd fought in the Resistance. I'd wished I'd had some of their powers of healing and toughness and survivability. But I was just a regular human.

"You were there?" Clark asked Perry, ignoring my comment. He knew as well as I what the Planet archives showed for that time: issues praising Zod, no dissent allowed. I'd seen articles with Perry White's byline, newspaper stories that were fawning and sycophantic.

"I did what I had to do to survive," Perry said grimly. He looked straight at Clark. "And I don't want to have to do it again."

Clark stared straight back at him. "You won't have to."

"I'm glad to hear that," Perry said, not looking away. Clark's eyes dropped first.

Clark busied himself refilling our glasses. We finished our picnic in awkward silence. As it ended, Clark leaned forward. Perry and I, sitting side to side across the table from him, leaned forward too. It was time to talk.

Perry started. Somehow he'd developed the skill of keeping a meeting on time and on agenda. "Clark, I know that you and Martha must have been thinking a lot about this."

"Understatement," I muttered. Clark nodded his head.

"So, my question, as a regular Earth guy – " Perry smiled at me - "is to ask both of you, what do you want? You've got this….thing here, with almost unlimited power. Heck, it grants wishes. What do you want to do with it?" Surprisingly, he turned to me first.

"I'm not really sure," I said hesitantly. "I guess the first thing I want is for the past three years to have never happened."

"I don't think that's an option," Clark said. Something in his voice raised my suspicions. He was either lying or not telling all of the truth. Well, I was a lawyer. I'd cross-examine him. We'd find out what he was hiding.

"You said that the Fortress in your world threw you into this one, and that Brainiac had gone back in time to make sure you never left Krypton."

"That's right. I defeated him on my world."

"Wait a minute. I'm confused," Perry said. He hadn't been there for all the talks, all the explanations Clark had made in the first two weeks he'd been in our world.

Clark explained. "In my world, there is a Fortress. In my world, or I guess I should say, in my universe, I did leave Krypton. I was sent from Krypton as a baby and landed here on Earth. Martha and Jonathan Kent were my adoptive parents."

"You mentioned that," Perry said musingly. He shot me an odd look. Perhaps he'd ignored that little fact about Clark. Or perhaps he'd just chosen not to bother me about it. It wasn't well known. I'd made sure of that. Clark had told the members of the Metropolis council, but the rest of the people at Metropolis base didn't know that I was Clark's alternate-world adoptive mother.

Clark went on. "I defeated Brainiac in my world a couple of times, but he kept on coming back. He managed to go back in time and through space to Krypton before it was destroyed. It was his intent to prevent my spaceship from departing Krypton before the planet exploded."

"Fascinating," Perry muttered. "Go on."

"I was kind of an ass in those days – " Clark sounded rueful. "I thought it might be better if I never had come to Earth."

"Why would you think that?" Perry was honestly curious.

"Um….a whole lot of reasons," Clark evaded. "I guess the biggest one was that I was, um, incognito as an alien, and I was deathly afraid of the secret getting out. But then situations with the meteor-infected would keep on coming up and I'd need to use my abilities, uh, to keep people from getting killed or whatever. Then I would worry about people seeing me doing that, and the secret getting out, and me being locked in a government lab somewhere. And then I'd obsess about how I wasn't human. I guess I spent too much time thinking about myself and not enough time doing things for other people."

Perry only nodded.

"So, anyway, I was moping around – God knows I've discovered what an idiot I was – and I decided it might be better if I had never made it to Earth. The Jor-El in my Fortress decided to give me a little reality therapy – " Clark's voice was sarcastic – "and sent me to an Earth where I never did make it off Krypton. Unfortunately," here his voice turned hard, "I didn't realize that, although I'd never come, Brainiac did come, the Brainiac from my world, and he brought Zod and the other Kryptonians. And I wasn't here to protect the Earth. I should have been here, but I wasn't."

"Protect the Earth?"

"Perry, this is my world now. I may be Kryptonian by blood but I belong here."

"So, when you got here…"

"When I got here, I literally ran into Lois Lane – we're good friends in my world, but here she didn't know me from Adam and she pegged me as a Kryptonian right away. She had kryptonite on her, and she promptly took me prisoner. I made a deal with the Resistance, helped them overthrow Zod, and well, you know the rest."

"Getting back to the time travel…."

"I don't think you can have the last three years never have happened. Brainiac went back in time, but that was my universe, and he must have created this universe, or at least this Earth, by doing so. Unless it was already here and he just moved in. I just came over from one universe to another, sort of a lateral move. I don't understand multiple world quantum theory, if that's even what it is. All I know is that alternate universes exist, and that I'm in one of them."

"Did Brainiac use your Fortress to go back in time?"

"No, he didn't. My Fortress did pick up somehow on what he did. I think it sent me here to stop him and to learn a lesson – but that implies I was supposed to go back to my world. Well, that hasn't happened. So far. I mean, I've done both of those things and I'm still stuck here."

"Do you know that the Fortress can't send you back in time?"

"I don't know it. You'd – we'd have to ask Jor-El."

"Let's wait a minute before we do that. I've got some more questions."

"OK, Perry."

"I'm assuming Brainiac is gone, in this universe."

"That's right. When we assaulted the Fortress – I mean, the previous instantiation of the Fortress – "

"Wait a minute. Explain that."

"Martha knows," Clark gestured.

I almost fell over. What did he know?

"She was involved in all the planning. Basically, well, are you ready for another long story?"

Perry gestured at the crystalline girders. "Not going anywhere."

"OK. Well, my cousin Kara also escaped from Krypton before it exploded – "

"What are the odds of that?" I asked sarcastically.

Clark looked at me. "Pretty good, actually, since it was my father – I mean Jor-El – who'd come to the conclusion that Krypton was doomed. From what I've heard, the rest of the Kryptonian Ruling Council didn't believe him, and they prevented any general evacuation. My father and his brother were able only to get two small ships off – just me and my cousin Kara."

"OK. Go on."

"Kara's ship landed at the bottom of a river, and the failsafe mechanisms prevented it from opening. She remained in stasis for eighteen years while I grew up in Smallville."

"And she was what? A child?"

"No, she was about seventeen when I was three. Then when she finally got out of her ship – "

"How'd that happen?"

"A dam burst. The river drained." Clark was terse. "She got out, and went looking for me, baby Kal-El, because she didn't know that eighteen years had gone by while she was asleep. But of course I'd grown up by then. I'm four years older than her now, in terms of bio time, you know, since she was in stasis and I wasn't."

"Jeez, this conversation is getting weirder and weirder." I rubbed my temples.

"Talk to me about living it sometime," Clark sighed.

"Um, getting back to the subject?" Perry asked. He had a slight smile on his face. The "weirder life" comment must be cracking him up inside.

"OK. So Brainiac managed to co-opt my world's Kara. He took her with him – he went to Krypton and stopped my ship from launching. She must not have been able to prevent that. Then he must have come here, to this Earth, found the elements, had Kara meld them into the seed crystal. He must have become a co-owner, or co-controller, whatever, of that instantiation of this Fortress." Clark became grim. "I think he killed the Kara from my world after he got control of the Fortress."

There was a moment of silence.

"Then what happened?" Perry asked.

"Well, when I ended up on this Earth, I knew we needed help to bring down Zod. There was a Kara from this universe too. Her ship made it off Krypton where mine didn't. The same thing happened – her ship was underwater, and she was in stasis. We brought her out, revived her. She helped us bring down Zod and Brainiac, but she died in the attack on the Fortress." Clark looked down, his eyes glistening. "Both versions of my cousin, dead."

Perry and I were silent.

Clark gathered himself. "I was wounded in the attack, and Martha didn't come – "

"Metahumans and Kryptonians only," I said. "I did do some pre-battle planning."

"So I'm not exactly sure what happened at the end. I know Zod and Aethyr and Brainiac are dead. I thought the Fortress would still be up here in the Arctic, but that it would be inactive, dead too. When I learned how to fly, I deliberately avoided where the Fortress was. I really didn't want to, um, get near it." Clark grimaced. "I flew over the entire Arctic when I got our lunch. This is the only Fortress now. When did the previous instantiation go away? Right after the big fight? Or later on? Perry, I have no clue why it dissolved into its constituent elements again, and why Martha found an element in Australia." He sounded sincere.

"Didn't you have an element already?" I asked suspiciously.

"Um, yeah. I was flying over Brazil one day, and it called to me."

"Why didn't the one in Australia call to you?"

"I thought I heard something, but Martha found it first." He turned to me. "How did you find it?"

"I tripped over it. Literally." I frowned. "And what are the odds of that? It almost seems Tolkienesque, with the One Ring trying to get back to Sauron. It's like the elements were trying to get back to you, Clark."

"I don't know that I care for the Sauron comparison." We stared at him. Clark shrugged. "OK, but the One Ring was cursed. The Fortress isn't." We stared some more. "Hopefully."

"You've read Lord of the Rings?" Perry asked, distracted for a moment. Then he started chuckling. "An alien read Lord of the Rings?"

"I guess Tolkien's appeal is trans-galactic." Clark started to laugh too. "I read it five or six times. It's a great book. I liked the movies, too. They did a good job on those."

"Yeah, I thought they captured the essence of the books pretty well. It's tough to boil down a thousand pages to nine hours, but they did OK with it," Perry agreed.

Clark glanced over at me. "Martha, I didn't know you liked fantasy."

My lips thinned. "I didn't start reading that genre till after the Invasion."

"Oh." The laughter died.

Perry broke the awkward moment. "So what happened – you know, the big attack where Zod and Aethyr and Brainiac were killed?"

"I only saw part of it. I guess we could ask Lex or someone who survived the attack – what happened? What's the whole story? I never did ask. Do you know, Martha?" Clark turned to me.

"I don't," I said musingly. "I do know a whole lot of wounded came back to the base."

"Zod's human collaborators were mostly guarding the portal at the Kawatche caves," Clark said. "Our people, I mean the Resistance, fought the collaborators. We had planned to get as many of us as possible through the portal in the caves, up to the Fortress to fight the Kryptonians. But the fight with the collaborators was tough, and only a few of us made it to the Fortress. I mean the previous instantiation of the Fortress, not this one." His eyes darkened in painful reminiscence. "Just Kara, me, Lex, Lois, and Chloe. Lois disabled Aethyr with kryptonite and then Chloe drained her. You know that healing power she has?"

I did. Perry didn't, based on his eyebrow lift.

"Think of it in reverse." Clark winced. "Draining out the life force. It was like instant mummy."

"The others?" Perry asked softly.

"Lex stabbed Zod in the heart with a kryptonite dagger," Clark said. "Kara fought Brainiac, took him down with a special crystal her father had given her before she left Krypton. We thought he was dead, but he's harder to kill than that. He stabbed me and hurt Kara, but the two of us were able to….we used our heat vision until he vaporized or exploded or something." His voice was flat. "Kara died, and I was unconscious. I woke up back at Metropolis base." He turned back to Perry. "So you see," Clark said softly, "I don't really know what happened at the end there."

"Martha?" Perry asked.

"Why do you want to know?" I snapped. Talk of those days tended to upset my precariously maintained equilibrium.

He said nothing, only took a long look at our surroundings.

"OK," I said reluctantly. "When they brought Clark back, there was a lot of talking about…"

"Whether you should kill me right away or not." Clark shrugged. "Hey, it's obvious."

"Let's just say there was some heated discussion," I mumbled. It took a bolder face than I had right now to talk so coolly about encompassing Clark's death. "Neither Chloe nor Lex would let us kill you. They insisted that we allow you to speak for yourself. You know the rest."

"The rest?" Perry asked, fascinated.

"I'd use my powers to help and they wouldn't kill me," Clark said bluntly. "That's the basic deal." He smiled sardonically. "Plus, we straightened out my legal status. In the eyes of the law, I'm treated as a human. At least in theory." He smiled again. "Bonus: I got citizenship."

Perry laughed out loud. "You mean you weren't – oh."

"Not born within the country's boundaries."

Perry stared at Clark for a long minute, and said positively, "You'd use your powers to help anyway. No matter what you got out of it."

Clark said nothing. I saw the truth of Perry's statement in Clark's eyes. Some of my confusion abated. The Fortress coming into being had made me distrust Clark, and fear him all over again. But at his non-response to Perry's statement, I knew it was the truth. Clark would try to help. It wasn't his nature to hurt.

I was still a little uneasy, but nowhere near as frightened as I was when I first saw the Fortress arising. I'd realized the essential truth of what Clark said out there on the ice. The Fortress was a tool. It could be used for good or harm, depending on the wielder's intention. And I was one of the wielders, and had veto power over the other.

"So, can I print this story?" Perry asked. "You've been making saves all over the country for the last six months. I think people would like to know."

Clark laughed. "Sure. Maybe it'll help a bit." He chuckled again. "To think that in my world, I spent so much time protecting my secret….and here it is on the front page of the Daily Planet."

Perry stared at him for another long moment. "So, Clark, what do you want? You're the owner of this Fortress, you could do anything, really. What do you want?"

Clark ran his fingers through his hair. I forgot about his ludicrous costume - the spandex suit with the El emblem on the chest, forgot about his bare feet (he hadn't retrieved his socks and farm boots from where I'd left them.) At this moment, he seemed a regular human, sad and tired.

"I'd like to go home," he said. "When I saw this Fortress, I was thinking, maybe I can go home, back to my world. Back where nobody, except my mother and Chloe, knows that I'm a Kryptonian. Back where – " he stopped.

"What?" I asked sharply.

"Back where everyone doesn't hate me," Clark said softly. He sat up straighter and spoke a little louder. "That sounds like….that's whining. But you have to admit, the Kryptonians have done some serious damage here. And I'm tarred by the same brush."

Perry and I exchanged a glance. It was true. Why else was I still carrying kryptonite?

"But I wouldn't want to leave without doing something more, um something to fix what's been broken here. Martha, I know you must feel the same way." He turned back to me, extended his hand across the table. "We can't restore the lives that were lost, or repair everything that was destroyed or damaged….but we must be able to do something."

Slowly, I nodded. "I haven't thought about it a lot yet, but I agree with you, Clark. I want to fix things, or improve them, somehow."

"OK."

"OK."

I reached across the table and shook his hand. It was more than comrades making a deal; it somehow had turned into a quest. I remembered our first mission, and how I'd been afraid even to put my hand over his so he could demonstrate his aura. Things were different now.

"We have to talk to Jor-El," Clark said. He sounded like he dreaded it.

"I know." Too bad the thought had me shaking in my boots. Before, when everything was so raw, anger and excitement had carried me through. Now, after rest and food, I could view things with more balance. And it scared me.

Here I was, in control (or at least fifty percent in control) of a….structure that pretty much had the power to do anything. The choices I'd have to make, even thinking of the possibilities….I suddenly wondered if this was how Clark felt every day. He had almost unlimited physical power. And every day, at least every day that I'd known him so far, he'd chosen to use it a certain way. He helped people. He rescued them. He pulled capsized boats out of rivers and saved dams from bursting. He cleared roads. He got oil rigs back on-line. He took messages, and people, back and forth. Heck, he even delivered the Daily Planet to people all over the country.

And we took him for granted and reviled him when we thought he wasn't listening. We used him, we didn't trust him, and we let him know it.

I know he got discouraged at times. Did he ever get angry? Did he want to respond to the insults? I knew for a fact that several people had attacked him with kryptonite and tried to kill him. In some cases, only luck, and fortitude, and courage I didn't know if I would have had, had saved him.

For example, the time he had taken me to Colorado and been ambushed. The bad guys had hurt him. And what had he done? He had removed himself from any contact with them, foregone any possibility of revenge. Had Clark gone back and retaliated? No. I'd followed the rumors and news very closely for months afterward, expecting him to kill our attackers in some ingenious Kryptonian way. But, to my surprise, he never had. It was Lex who'd arranged the mysterious deaths of our captors. Lex never admitted it, but I recognized his style.

It hit me. Clark had to keep control of himself twenty-four / seven. If he slipped, if he made a move in anger, he could hurt or even kill someone. He wasn't allowed to be tired or angry or have bad days. Unlike me. I could snap and have a temper and yell and even strike out at people if I wanted to.

Except now I couldn't. What power did I wield, what spirit of the Fortress might flow through me? What if I harmed others? It was like boxing. Before, I'd been a bantamweight or a flyweight or something like that. Something light. And suddenly, I'd moved up with Clark to the heavyweight division. My blows could kill. I shuddered. I wasn't sure if I was ready for this responsibility.