- Chapter 36

Trudging into the apartment, Vicki dropped her purse onto the couch as she got to it before lowering herself down slowly. Frowning at her stomach as the baby kicked her a couple times, she shook her head before letting it fall back and rest against the couch. Everybody had told her that she had been carrying the baby low her whole pregnancy but in the last week it had gotten ridiculous. The baby was firmly ensconced deep in her pelvis, and while this was nice in that it had made it easier to breathe, it was causing her to feel constant pressure. It had also given her the gift of a near constant need to pee, to the point where sometimes she thought it would save time to get a glass of water and drink it while sitting on the toilet. Add in swollen feet that made walking annoying, sore joints, leaky breasts and a forced waddle, and she was done. She was ready for her son or daughter to be born so that bodily discomfort could be replaced by sheer physical exhaustion. That was something she had at least experienced before, though she doubted previous experience with exhaustion was any indicator of how well she would cope in the near future. At least then she would be in control of her own body, insomuch as anybody was.

Looking over at the door as she heard it open, she saw Jeff walking in, shooting a small smile at him in response to him smiling at her. "Hey," he said, walking over to plop down onto the couch next to her. "How does it feel to officially be on maternity leave?"

Vicki grumbled for a moment before Jeff started spinning her around so she was laying down, her legs resting on his lap. He started kneading the swollen mess that was her right leg, relieving a bit of the discomfort. "I'm torn about Ryan asking me to start my maternity leave now. On the one hand it will be nice to have some time to spend here to make sure that everything is ready. Would really like to take another pass at the nursery to make sure it's clean."

"We've both cleaned the nursery half a dozen times. If it isn't clean now it never will be. I would chalk this up to nesting, but since I don't want to get punched, I'll just say that you're trying to be thorough, and you've been plenty thorough."

"Be that as it may," Vicki said, tempted to swat him for even bringing up nesting, "better that we've cleaned one time too many rather than one time too few." He was probably right. She hadn't ever been one to obsess over extreme cleanliness, but lately the idea that her baby might come home to an apartment that wasn't spotless made her want to clean the whole place inch by inch, which was made much, much more difficult when carrying thirty-seven pounds of baby weight that stressed out her back. "Now, on the other hand, I don't think my current physical and emotional states are affecting my writing. Admittedly, after finding out why I was having dreams about Chloe I was not writing very well, but I worked through that and was producing some outstanding columns! No need to bench your best player when she's still two weeks from her due date."

"Two weeks from your due date, yes, but you are technically full term now so it could be any day." Jeff switched from her right leg to her left, giving it the same relief he had given her other leg before it. "Could it still be two weeks? Yes. At risk of being done bodily harm, it could still be three weeks, or even four. I've read and have been told that first time moms have a tendency to go beyond their due dates, though I'm not sure if that applies to first time moms that celebrate twenty-ninth birthday anniversaries rather than over thirty-five birthdays."

"If I could sit up, and if you weren't doing such amazing things... oh, hell, I don't care. I'm thirty-eight. It's not like I go around lying about that fact. And I wouldn't do bodily harm to you for telling the truth about it possibly being more than two weeks until I deliver, since that's just the truth of the situation." Stupid truth. If she was forced to spend three or four more weeks with a baby wedged in her pelvis, peeing three or more times an hour and in as much discomfort as she was able to imagine outside of severe injury and rehabilitation, she was going to end up letting loose on Jeff, and she really didn't want to do that. Again. She hated making him the brunt of a tirade that had nothing to do with him. "Let's just hope that our baby decides to come a little before the due date, in the least painful way that can be managed."

"You still intent on having a natural birth?" Jeff asked, and Vicki nodded.

"I would like to do everything in my power to have as little medical intervention as possible, yeah. Not that I have a problem with drugs, epidurals or women using them to make their birth a more manageable affair." Spreading out her hands a little bit and shrugging, Vicki continued. "There's every chance in the world that I may end up using drugs or getting an epidural if it's a prolonged labor. I would be stupid to rule those things out. Just want to do it the old fashioned way if at all possible."

She could see Jeff glancing at her out of the corner of her eye as he continued working on her legs, now doing both at the same time. "You still want to give birth in the tub, don't you?"

"It looked so relaxing!" Vicki exclaimed, thinking back to the video they had watched of a water birth, plus the other videos she had watched online by herself. It hadn't really looked relaxing unless in comparison to some of the other births they had been forced to watch as part of the classes Jeff had signed them up for. She had liked the idea so much that she had gone ahead and registered at a birthing center after her last OBGYN visit the week before, though she hadn't dropped that bomb on Jeff yet. Now was as good a time as any, though. "I went and registered at the Gotham Area Birthing Center earlier this week. Now I know what you're going to say, that you think I would be better off in a hospital should something happen, but my OBGYN has privileges there, and if she can't make it they have two doctors on hand and on call twenty-four hours a day, two operating rooms for emergency c-sections and a NICU. It's just as safe as a hospital would be!"

Waiting for him to start trying to lawyer her with logic and sentences that tried to twist her reasoning into pretzels, she was extremely surprised when all he said was, "All right."

"That's it? You're not going to try and lawyer me out of this?"

"Of course not." Jeff smiled at her before looking back down at her legs. "First off, you're the one giving birth, so unless you want to deliver our baby in the middle of a drum circle out in some field onto a pile of hemp, I'm going to support your decision. Even then I would at least attempt being supportive before I tried to convince you that you had lost your mind. Secondly, that place is roughly fifteen minutes from here and only five from Beth and Chuck's house. Since you are now on maternity leave the majority of your time will probably be spent here or there, which means that either way we're close. I like that. So if that's what you want, I support your decision. You obviously want to do the birth there strongly enough that you did the research, and if I've learned one thing in our near two year relationship, it's that your research is always very, very reliable." Jeff was quiet for a second as he continued his work, now concentrating on her feet more than her calves and ankles. "Plus, once I saw that you were enamored with that water birth video, I assumed that you would want to try a water birth, and found that the birthing center offered that option while none of the area hospitals did."

"How did you know that I was going to want to try a water birth?" Vicki asked, surprised that he had done some of the same research she had.

"One of the other things that I have learned in life is that one should always pay attention to the little things, and especially to the little things that make women sit up and take notice. What made you sit up, or at least take notice since I had to help you up, was the water birth." He smiled again, though this time he didn't turn his head to face her. "It also helped that you left a water birth website up a few weeks ago, and that the birthing center called to confirm your registration last week."

"Oh, you are so damn sneaky!" Swinging her legs off Jeff's lap and slowly sitting up, she started pushing him lightly. "Why didn't you tell me that you knew I was registered and was going to try to do a water birth?"

"I knew you would tell me when you wanted to tell me. I figured you were leaning that way after I found the website you had left up, but when the birthing center called and confirmed your registration I figured it was a done deal. I even bought a few pairs of swimming trunks so that I can sit in the tub with you if you want me to. Some of the videos I watched as research weren't real clear if that's standard or personal preference."

"Assuming the tub is large enough, I will most certainly have you in there with me." Pulling his face over gently, she kissed him lightly. "Why would I do something so important like giving birth without my amazing husband there to hold me and help me get through it?"

"A very good question," he murmured before kissing her again. That continued for a moment until there was a knock at the door, leaving them to rest their heads against each other as they attempted to catch their breath. "You expecting anybody?" Jeff asked her, and Vicki shook her head. He popped up off the couch, Vicki sitting back and craning her neck to see if she could see who was at the door as he opened it.

Shoving her hands into the back pockets of her jeans, Lois looked around for a second as she waited to see if anybody was home. She should have called first, should have told Vicki and Jeff that she was coming, but she wasn't sure that she would have been told that she could come by. It was a lot easier to turn somebody away over the phone, though since she hadn't spoken to Vicki in over a month, despite attempting various forms of long distance communication, she wasn't entirely sure the door wasn't going to be shut in her face. If she was lucky Jeff would answer the door and let her in before talking to Vicki. It wasn't like she blamed her for being mad about the situation and possibly dropping the lion's share of the blame on her head. She was shooting the messenger, a messenger who had used false pretenses to insert herself into her life and befriend her. In this case shooting the messenger was an entirely understandable and justified action. She just hoped that Vicki could remember from her dreams how much she had loved Chloe. If she didn't understand now, maybe she would one day. The door came open slowly, and Lois almost breathed a sigh of relief when it was, in fact, Jeff that was answering the door. He was smiling, but that melted into a look of surprise.

"Lois, hey," he said, stepping aside after a second. "Please, come in."

"Thanks," she said, stepping far enough inside so that Jeff could close the door. Noticing Vicki on the couch, she held up a hand as she moved like she was going to get up. "Please, don't force yourself up on my account. I have a sneaking suspicion that it often feels like more trouble than it's worth." Walking around the couch, Lois took a seat in an adjacent chair, observing as Vicki readjusted her position, settling back into her seat as Jeff sat down next to her. "I'm sorry for dropping in like this but I decided to take a chance since I haven't been able to get a hold of you otherwise."

"Yeah, about that," Vicki said but Lois held up her hand again.

"I don't need you to explain. Processing big information takes time, and the bomb I dropped on you was atomic, not to mention that the timing was awful. You're about to start your family and to find that kind of thing out..." Trailing off, Lois shrugged, unable to find more words beyond that. "I would have left you alone, let you get in contact with me if you chose to do so, but I'm one of those people that would rather have too much information rather than too little." Reaching into her pocket, Lois pulled out a flash drive she had gotten from Bruce before driving to Vicki's apartment from Wayne Manor. She held it up, smiling a little. "I know that this isn't the modern way of transferring information anymore, that it would have been easier had I just uploaded it somewhere and given you a password, but this isn't the kind of thing I want to put out in the ether, just in case."

"What is it?" Jeff asked after a moment of silence, appearing surprised that Vicki hadn't beaten him to the punch.

"This is everything I could collect on Chloe." Setting the flash drive down on the coffee table in front of her, Lois continued. "Every page of every document related to Chloe that was in my possession, every picture from our childhood to not long before the first bombings. In addition, I asked everybody that had known or worked with Chloe in journalism or the nascent Justice League to write what they could remember about her. There are documents in there from Green Arrow, Aquaman, Flash, Cyborg and others, talking about their time with Chloe. Her baby book is in there, somehow having ended up at the farm so it wasn't destroyed when my house burned down. That might be good information to have right about now. Stuff from my dad, my sister, Perry, Ron Troupe and Clark's mom, who over time became a surrogate mother for both her and myself. And then there's something from Clark, who remembers everything about his time with Chloe, and something from me. I may not remember everything, but I remember enough that if there's anything in your dreams that seems confusing, maybe that can help explain it."

"Why are you giving me this? Vicki asked as soon as Lois had finished explaining. "Why couldn't you wait until I came to you? Too much information is preferable, but I wanted to be prepared for it. I finally started putting the Chloe information behind me and now you're dropping this in my lap so I can obsess over it!"

Lois sighed, unsurprised by the outburst. She had readied herself to take a verbal onslaught from Vicki over the situation. "Pretty soon you're going to have somebody in your life that demands your undivided attention, no matter what day it is or what time it is. Your baby will be your whole focus, and should be. I didn't want to wait until you had your baby to give you this and distract you from what should be your priority. This way you have some time if there's information about her that you want. Again, I suggest going through the baby book. Chloe's mom wrote a pretty detailed account of her pregnancy, labor and delivery, which might at least give you a hint at how things might go for you. The pregnancy part probably isn't all that useful anymore, but you can at least see if there were similarities." Standing up, Lois shoved her hands into her pockets. "Like I said, I would rather have too much information than too little, and I'm fairly certain you're the same way. You look great, by the way," she said as she started moving towards the door, "and you're going to be a great mom. If there's anything more you want to know, or if you need a friend, just call. My phone is always on." Walking to the door, Lois wanted to say more, but knew that there was nothing left to be said unless Vicki wanted to hear it.

Closing the car door, Beth was only a few steps away from her car when the door to Jeff and Vicki's apartment opened and Lois, of all people, walked out. "Lois, hey," she said, smiling at her as she closed the apartment door. "This is the second time this month that I've run into a Kent in Gotham. You guys make Metropolis and Gotham seem a lot closer together than they are."

Lois half smiled but looked away, rubbing at the corner of her eye with a thumb. "Yeah, we're funny like that."

"Are you okay?" Beth asked, surprised to see that Lois looked like she was about to cry.

"Yeah, it's just... Vicki's not too thrilled with me these days." Lois shrugged, exhaling slowly before starting to look more like the Lois that Beth was used to seeing. "Just the way things go, I guess. Hopefully someday she'll decide that I'm not so bad as I sometimes seem. Anyway, I should go. Nice seeing you again, Beth."

"I can try to help, if you'd like." Putting a hand on Lois's arm, she smiled at her, hoping that she could at least offer her some comfort. "I don't know what happened between the two of you, but we all need friends that are our own friends, not friends we inherit by marriage. I don't mind raising that point."

"Thank you, but I wouldn't want what's straining Vicki and I to have any effect on the relationship you two have. You're going to be an even more important part of her life once her baby is born, and I don't want my actions to impact her son or daughter negatively."

"I know I'm prying, but what happened? Something was off with her for a few weeks after she came back from covering the bombings in Metropolis, but I just assumed that she was hitting a wall in her pregnancy. If it's something between the two of you that's at least something that's potentially fixable rather than a waiting game."

Lois glanced at her for a second before looking away, staring off across the parking lot for a moment before speaking. "Vicki had a question that I knew the answer to, and when I told her what the answer was she didn't like what she heard."

"But if you were just answering a question, why would that make her mad at you?"

"Sometimes shooting the messenger is justified," Lois said quietly. "If you want to know more than that, tell Vicki that you have mine and Clark's blessing. Jeff and Sam all ready know, so what's one more?" Lois started chuckling all of a sudden, though it didn't sound like there was any mirth behind it. "Used to be the best kept secret in the world, but the way things are going pretty soon everybody is going to be in on it. It was good seeing you again, Beth."

Lois walked away, leaving Beth alone standing in front of Jeff and Vicki's apartment, confused as to what exactly was going on. What could be the best kept secret in the world, except now Jeff, Sam and Vicki all know? Turning, she knocked on the door, and it didn't take long for Jeff to answer the door. "I just had a very strange conversation with Lois," Beth said as Jeff stepped aside and she walked in. Looking around the living room and seeing that Vicki wasn't there, Beth continued. "She said that she and Vicki had some sort of falling out because she answered a question and Vicki didn't like the answer, and something about shooting the messenger being justified and the best kept secret in the world now being known by you, Vicki and Sam for some reason. She said that you guys have her's and Clark's blessing to tell me what that secret is, but at this point I'm not entirely sure that I want to know. Hello, by the way," she said, trying to smile but not doing so very well because of her confusion.

"Hi," Jeff said, glancing back towards their bedroom before looking back to her. "Lois really said that we have their blessing to tell you about what's going on?"

"Yeah, but if it's going to be some world shaking secret that makes me not like Lois and Clark anymore then I think I'd rather just stay on the outside looking in." Crossing her arms, she was going to let Jeff say something but she spotted Vicki emerging from the bedroom, walking slowly and looking like she was as unhappy as Lois had been when they had talked. "Hey," she said, walking away from Jeff and approaching her sister-in-law. "Is there anything I can do to try to help you feel better? Whether or not you tell me what's going on between you and Lois, I don't like seeing you be anything less than your vibrant self."

"It's not my secret to tell, Beth. I'd love to let you in, see if you have a take on this that I haven't heard but I can't..."

"Lois passed a message to us through Beth," Jeff said from over Beth's shoulder, though she didn't look back at him. She wanted to stay focused on Vicki, though her attention was on her husband at the moment. "She said we have their blessing to let her know what's going on and why it has been bothering you."

"Seriously?" Vicki asked, but didn't hear anything before Vicki nodded and walked over to the couch to sit down. Beth followed her, taking a seat in a nearby chair. "This is something that you can't tell anybody, Beth. Not Chuck, not Jenny and Liv, not anybody in the group of friends. I'm leading with that because if you don't want to hear what we have to say then we should just forget about it now."

That gave her pause. This was going to be something that she couldn't even tell Chuck? What could possibly be such a huge secret that she wouldn't be able to share it with her husband? "Is this something that could come between Chuck and I, because if it is I don't want to know."

Vicki looked back at Jeff, who was still standing behind the couch. They both shrugged before Vicki turned back to her. "I don't see how it would be the kind of information that could come between the two of you. It's world view altering, but not marriage threatening."

"Well that's not ominous at all," Beth said, frowning at herself afterwards.

"I'm going to call Sam while you get her caught up." Jeff leaned down next to Vicki, resting his head against hers. "I think it'll be best if she comes over and we start going through some of the information that Lois dropped off. I know you said that you weren't sure about going through it right now, but I think we need to. If nothing else, we should go through the baby book stuff, see if we can get some insight into what's to come. It may not help, but it can't hurt."

Jeff walked into their bedroom, leaving her alone with Vicki. "There's no easy way to get into this, so it's best I start at the beginning. Lois had a cousin named Chloe Sullivan that I assume you've heard her mention before. Chloe was thought to have been killed in the first bombing of Metropolis. Turns out she wasn't. Here's why that is important."

I spent my whole life worrying about Chloe, sometimes so much so that it became a point of contention between us. I bugged her about getting married after I got married, about having kids after I had my son. Out moms were sisters, and in the limited time that we each had with our moms they imparted to us both how important family is. We had spats, and there were times that we didn't talk very much, either because of those spats or because we were both busy with things in our lives, but we always came back to each other. We could always relate because we saw the world the same way. I'm a journalist because of Chloe, and I'm a great journalist because Chloe and I always competed to be the best. Simply put, there is no Lois Lane, not the one the world knows, without Chloe Sullivan.

Looking up from the screen of her tablet, Sam scanned the room, watching Beth, Jeff and Vicki all reading the same information that she was, though she doubted they had all skipped straight to Lois's memories of Chloe. There was a ton of information to go through, and they had decided to go through it together, but everybody seemed to be focused on something different. Jeff had said that he wanted to read the detailed account that Chloe's mother had written, and that was understandable since they were about to have a baby. Vicki was going through it with him, her body curled up with his as they read together. Beth had confessed to wanting to go through Clark's memories of Chloe, which made sense that in the last hour she had learned that Clark Kent was Superman, Vicki Vale had been Chloe Sullivan and Chloe Sullivan had been an integral part of the Justice League before it was actually the Justice League, amongst numerous other things. Sam herself had only known about Chloe for about a month now and she was still surprised that she hadn't been a more famous journalist akin to her cousin, despite Lex Luthor trashing her name and black listing her.

My earliest memory of Chloe is of a happy little blonde blur, running around with me and causing mischief, mostly at my behest. Rule breaking is a genetic trait we both get from our moms, who had rebellious streaks that they had inherited from their mother. Must be an X chromosome thing. Anyway, after Chloe's mom split and my mom died, we didn't see each other very much for almost a decade because of my dad dragging me from military base to military base and Chloe moving to Smallville when she was in seventh or eighth grade. We kept in contact, though, talking to each other about our problems on the phone and sending emails back and forth when the phone wasn't a great option. We knew everything about each other, despite barely seeing each other. But Smallville... that's the town that brought us together and changed both our lives beyond anything we could have imagined, and that's where the story really begins.

An hour later Sam finally had to put down her tablet, the strain of staring at the screen forcing her to take a moment to rest her eyes. She was engrossed in what Lois and Clark had written about Chloe, flipping back and forth between what they had written to get both sides of the story. She had initially flipped over to Clark's memories of Chloe to fill in some background from before Lois had gotten to Smallville, but she had gotten engrossed in his detailed accounts of what had happened with the meta humans in Smallville. She couldn't believe some of the things that Chloe had survived. After an hour of reading the accounts, she was only up to Lois making it through the second meteor shower to hit Smallville while Clark and Chloe had been transported to the arctic. If she hadn't known that there was, in fact, a super powered man from another planet that protected Metropolis and Earth she would have assumed she was reading a work of fiction. A really gripping work of fiction. Opening her eyes and blinking a few times, Sam noticed that Vicki, too, wasn't looking at her screen, instead holding her glasses in one hand while rubbing at her eyes with the other. "Any useful information?" she asked, Vicki looking up as she did so.

"Well, that depends on if my labor is anything like Moira Sullivan's, which considering she's my mother, no matter what my memories tell me, I guess there's a decent chance of that happening." Vicki closed her eyes and shook her head a couple times, apparently still getting used to the idea of Vicki Vale and Chloe Sullivan sharing a body the same as she was. "Lois was right about Moira giving a detailed account of her pregnancy and labor. She had the same two week bout of horrible morning sickness that I did, though now that I think about it, Lois told me about that once, obviously leaving the part about her aunt being my mom. Anyway, there's that, and her boobs apparently got crazy big, too. As far as the labor, she went natural, too, and despite me being her only baby gave birth in seven hours, so at least I might have that to my advantage." Vicki turned to Jeff. "What was the over/under on the length of my labor?"

"14 hours. You took the under while Beth, Chuck and I all took the over because Powers babies are stubborn." Despite saying all that, he hadn't looked away from the screen of his laptop, where he was obviously engrossed in something.

"Anyway," Vicki said, looking back to her, "she goes into a lot of details that I won't go on about, mostly because you've had a baby and have a pretty good idea of what she went through. She said that doing it naturally made her feel empowered, though with the amount of detail she describes her labor, I'm not surprised that Chloe was... that I am an only child. She seemed to remember every single contraction." Vicki shuddered, and Sam was tempted to offer some comforting words about how the rush of oxytocin once the baby is born helps a woman forget some of the pain from labor, but considering her mother remembered in detail, Sam didn't want to give false hope. Some women were just unlucky like that. "Mostly it's just minutiae, and while I'm usually a fan of minutiae, it's nothing I hadn't heard about before. I just... I wish I could ignore all this. I wish that I was just Vicki Vale, that there wasn't somebody else asleep in my head. It's absurd to even think about, let alone live it! Yet here I am. Lois was right that having too much information is better than having too little, but I wish that there was no information at all."

"Are you still mad at her?" Beth asked.

"I'm mad at the situation more than her, but she's an easy target because I am disappointed that the whole reason she struck up a friendship with me is because she initially thought I was Chloe. What I am angry about is that I have to deal with this shit when I'm about to have a baby."

"You should probably tell her that, then. She looked pretty down when I ran into her after getting here earlier." Beth frowned after a second, looking down. "You know, with all the information I've been bombarded with tonight, I can't even remember why I came over. Wait," she said, holding up a finger as she did so. "I was running errands in the area and was going to invite you guys over for dinner. Speaking of which, despite having made sure that Chuck was going to be available to feed the girls, I have not eaten in about eight hours."

"I could eat," Sam heard Vicki mutter, her glasses back on and back on the screen in front of her.

"Pizza okay for everybody?" Sam asked, and when they all nodded pulled her phone out, knowing what everybody liked. What she also knew was that it was going to be a long night of reading through the information Lois had collected for Vicki, but she was glad that they were all there to help support her, even if none of them knew how to do that. If only they had covered hibernating personalities and how to deal with discovering that you had once been somebody else in her masters psychology program.