He stood and approached her, "Lois –"

"Get out," she repeated.

"Please, lis-"

"Get out!" she shouted.

He responded quietly, "There's more."

Her eyebrows went up, "There's more? There's more than you stealing thoughts out of my mind and disappearing with them for five years? There's more than you standing there before you left and watching as I got together with Richard out of pain and loss? There's more," she was roaring at him now, in a high rage, "than you with all your Kryptonian knowledge, not realizing you could knock me up? God damn you, Clark, Kal-el – Jesus, you're the father of my child and I don't even know what to call you! What were you thinking? How could you possibly believe the right thing to do was to remove my memory of all that happened between us? That was the most important thing that ever happened in my life! All we are are our memories. You changed who I was! You changed what kind of mother I was, what kind of reporter, what kind of woman! Without my permission! Are you out of your mind?"

"Lois, it was – you could barely function. You were sick with it –"

"I was pregnant, you moron," she said flatly. "Do you honestly think I couldn't handle it? I was in mourning and it had been all of a month! You couldn't have given me some time to recover?"

His earnest face was racked with pain, "You were falling apart –"

He had seen her mad before, even livid, but right then he could swear the temperature in the room actually went up as her face colored and she spat, "Bullshit! You were falling apart. You didn't do that to spare me, but to spare yourself. You thought it was somehow noble to keep your secrets and tell yourself you were bearing the pain and the guilt for me, when what you were really doing was hiding! Deciding your duty meant we couldn't be together cut me down to the quick – you did that and by God, you should have stood the pain it caused me. Instead you stole my right to make my own decisions based on the truth! Life is messy, Clark! It hurts! The pain changes us and that's the way it is! You can't hide it away to try and keep everything nice and neat and perfect. When something terrible happens to Jason, and it will eventually – he'll fall in love and lose someone, a friend will die, he'll try something ambitious and fail – and you're not going to be able to stop it. Are you going to take his memories too just so he won't hurt? Would you want the memory of your parents taken from you? I can't –" her anger was breaking now, her face twisting, "You have to go!"

"You need to know the rest, Lois," he said.

Her hard stare was like a knife, "You give me back everything that is mine, right now, and then get out!"

"I have given you everything that was yours. It's not your memory I need to show you. It's one of mine."

She backed up a step, "I don't want inside your head. I don't even want to look at you!"

He nodded, his brow creased with sadness, "I understand. And you're right. You're right about everything. I want you to understand where it all started. What I did that brought all of this down on our heads." She didn't budge, still staring at him malevolently. "It's something that happened between us – don't you want to know it all?"

Her eyes flashed threateningly that he would dare to tempt her that way. "If I have all my memories back then why wouldn't I know about this thing that happened between us?"

"I –" he stopped. "There is no way to describe it. You have to see."

Lois was exhausted suddenly. She felt like a pane of glass with weights being stacked at her center, certain she would shatter at any second, disintegrate into tiny little pieces to be swept up, swept away. How could he? How could he even bear to see her with the knowledge of their time erased? This betrayal was so huge, so total and cruel.

"Please, Lois," he begged. "I will never ask anything from you for me, ever again."

He looked near to broken, and some small part of her was moved by it, but her mind rebelled at the thought of any closeness with him now. In the end though, she could not stand not knowing the truth, no matter how horrible it might be. She could not imagine what was worse than what he had already revealed, what he might deem the cause of all this grief. Grudgingly, she took one step closer. He still held the crystal, and he reached for her hand, lifting it to touch the crystal as he laid it on his own forehead.

The scene that played in her mind made no sense. She saw a dirt road far below her, in a desolate brown wasteland. A massive fissure had split the road and a car, a long red car had been swallowed. Only its back right fender showed above the crack. She felt terror, horror as the view descended toward the road, saw hands, his hands, lifting the car free, ripping the door off. There, in her apartment, Lois' legs nearly gave out, but his free arm caught her and held her up as she saw her own body spill from the car along with mounds of dirt.

She saw through his eyes as he lifted her corpse, heard his swirling thoughts, saw his memories of Jonathon's funeral laid over what was happening, felt the kiss he laid on her dead lips, the denial welling up out of him, and heard his terrible resounding cry of despair.

She barely understood what happened next, the speed, the tearing of time's fabric, feeling his body like an artillery shell driving into the ground beneath the road the car would travel a few seconds from then (from now, from when?), shoring up the road from below, shooting back out, ripping through time again to return to the same moment he had left, but now the road was firm, the car merely out of gas – and his memory dovetailed with what existed in her mind, as she got out of the rented car and berated him, as they leaned toward each other –

He drew her hand away from his forehead, the crystal lay, warm and pulsing, in her palm. She looked at it, unable to find words.

"It was wrong," he whispered hoarsely. "It was a crime against nature. I have paid the price for it – and I would do it again, Lois. I would do it a thousand times if I had to."

She looked up at him numbly, looked into his eyes as he stepped back, out the doors and, following her demand, took flight.