That's What Friends Are For
Clark decided that he'd avoided home long enough. Avoiding had become far too easy a habit, and had far too high a price in the end.
And there was still Chloe to talk to. Oddly, the thought of making his apologies to Lana didn't bother him nearly as much as how he was going to try to regain Chloe's trust or acceptance, or even if he was worth her trust again.
He'd once thought he loved Lana more than anything, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. In a very real sense, it had been a kind of lifetime ago. He had been terrified of her finding out about his differences -- she'd never exactly kept her opinion of "freaks" a secret. He had been certain that she would push him away if she thought he was to blame for the meteors that killed her parents. She was obsessive to the point of psychosis on the subject of the meteors and the loss of her parents, as if her whole life would have been some magical fairy tale otherwise.
Clark had never thought of that as a weakness before. He'd figured it to be his duty to cater to her feelings of abandonment. He wanted to pretend that it made a bond between them, both of them inexplicably orphaned, neither of them ever quite fitting in.
Then he'd learned about Cyrus, and a great many others who had gone through far worse hells than Lana was even capable of imagining. Cyrus had nearly died himself, and had been sent to a series of foster homes totally unable to cope with an unusual child at all, much less someone who couldn't explain why other people made him so crazy. Cyrus had had no stability in his life, no help, and very little in the way of love. That he had finally managed to come back from ranting lunacy and catatonic shock was a tribute to his strength of character.
Yet Cyrus didn't blame Clark for also being Kal-El, didn't think of the meteor storm as any worse than a thousand other purely Earthly disasters, didn't obsess on anything at all. (Well, except maybe for that really weird request for a purple shirt. Ew. Lex was right, that would be a terrible color on him.) Cyrus had spent most of his life haunted by Kal-El's memories, not even certain of who and what he was himself. And still he accepted Clark, all and everything about him, as a friend.
Clark decided he needed a better yardstick to judge people's pain by than Lana.
He slowed to a normal human jog, then to a walk, then to a dead stop as he reached the porch leading into his once-upon-a-time home. Deep breath. It didn't hurt quite as much as it had yesterday, but he was pretty sure it would never feel anywhere near normal again. "Mom? Dad?"
Martha turned from her search of the refrigerator, and the sparkle in her eyes was just short of tears. "Hi, honey. Have you had breakfast?"
Mom would be a good yardstick. "Um, well, yeah, I actually cleaned out most of Lex's leftovers. We had, kind of a long discussion. And Cyrus showed up. And Lionel." And I am not going to tell her about the rum. Some secrets are meant to stay buried. "And we, well, came to an understanding. Of sorts. Mom, is dad around? This might be easier to tell you both at once."
"He's washing up. We were just waiting on you. We figured we had some ... things to discuss, too." She motioned into the next room. "You have company."
He flicked to x-ray before he could stop himself. Chloe. And Lana. Sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Oh, no.
Once, that would have been an invitation for him to sit companiably between them. Now, it looked more like undisguised hostility. He closed his eyes, grateful that he couldn't see through his own eyelids.
"I guess I asked for it. May as well get it all over with at once."
"Clark. Son. Don't be that way. It isn't the end of the world." Martha left the snack tray she was putting together to hug him. "I know it's hard for you. But you're old enough now to understand that nothing stays the same. You can handle this, too."
Clark tried to hold himself still so that she wouldn't feel the tightness in him. End of the world. Bad choice of phrases, mom. I've already been through too many ends of the world to keep track. "I know, mom." Softly.
The hard hand on his shoulder was reassurance made solid. "Come on, son." Jonathan's blue eyes were as warm as the summer sky. "I'll do all the talking, if you want."
Clark straightened. Damn if his dad didn't always know exactly the right thing to say to get his attention. Jonathan could push his buttons almost as well as Cyrus. "Thanks, dad. But it's mine to tell, and to take responsibility for."
Jonathan held his gaze. "Responsibility, yes. Blame, never. Remember that."
Martha gave them both a light shove. "Shoo, you two, and let me finish this."
Clark and Jonathan exchanged glances, and both managed a small smile. "They probably shouldn't be eating anything when I say "spaceship."
Clark and Jonathan found seats across from the girls. That would leave Martha to sit between them and play diplomat. Clark wondered how he could ever have not realized how special his parents were, to put such subtle shields around him. "Well. Where do we start?"
"You can start by telling us why you lied to us all these years, Clark. Why didn't you trust us? Why didn't you trust ME, when you claimed to love me?"
Clark steeled himself and met Lana's eyes. "Would you even have wanted to be friends with a freak, Lana? I wanted you to get to know me, Clark, the boy next door, before you found out I was different. I hoped maybe then you could accept me for what I am. But once you started wearing that necklace, I couldn't even get close enough to you to carry on a conversation, much less develop any kind of relationship. So I had to lie to you. Pretend to be normal. Because I couldn't stand for you to look at me, think of me, talk about me, the way you did about all the other meteor freaks."
Martha came in with the snacks and set them down on the table between them, but rather than take the remaining seat, she came to stand behind Clark and rest her hands on his shoulders. Clark had never thought that he would appreciate such physically fragile support before. He could toss a tractor, but his mother's love could move mountains.
"Why do those meteorites hurt you so badly, Clark?" Chloe's voice was quiet anger, barely masking long-controlled pain. "I know the green ones make you sick as a dog. I suspect the red ones do the same thing to your head. But why you, and none of the other meteor freaks? They get stronger from the radiation, not weaker."
"Is that what you told Lionel?" he challenged levelly. Hopefully. "That I'm a meteor freak?" He hated hurting Chloe any more, but maybe, once they had it out, it would lance the festering wound.
"I told the bastard that you were bizarrely strong and fast and good at math, and unreliable and a jerk and would sell out your best friends. Seems he got some confirmation of that from independent reports of several of your own stunts. I told him you were a sneak and a liar. I didn't tell him about the school rings or what a real prick you turned into when you put one on, though you didn't exactly keep that a secret yourself. I told him it probably wouldn't be a good idea to piss you off. He laughed and said "don't worry about that." I told him you'd been a total a-hole the day you blew up your storm cellar, and that obviously you'd been planning to do it." Her voice broke. "I didn't tell him why."
Clark absorbed that in silence, trying not to give anything away as his eyes flickered from her face to his feet, though Martha and Jonathan were hard put to keep their expressions neutral. "And you knew why?"
"Clark. Or whatever your real name is. I may be a latecomer to farmville, but I've been in storm cellars before. They don't usually come equipped with what looks like a miniature version of an experimental fighter jet." The flashing emotions that chased through her face despite her set jaw hurt him just to watch, until she fought them back to steadiness. "Answer the question, Clark. Why do the meteorites drop you in your tracks the way they don't anyone else?"
Clark glanced up at his mother, over at his father, a silent plea. Both nodded. Jonathan opened his mouth to speak, and Clark held up his hand and nodded back. He could do this.
"The miniature experimental fighter jet," he spared a moment of amusement for Chloe's description, "is a spaceship. I came here, to this solar system, to Earth, to Smallville, in it, when I was about two. The meteors that came with me are pieces of the planet I was born on. The planet exploded. Some kind of giant nuclear bomb. The explosion turned what was left of the planet radioactive. The radiation is dangerous to humans, mutagenic, but it's lethal to me. Hurts just to be anywhere near it. Like it's ripping my guts out." Deep breath.
"I don't know why. Matches my chemistry or something." He fought an insane urge to giggle hysterically. "Is that ironic enough for you, Chloe? The only thing left of my home world, the only souvenir I have of the planet I come from, will kill me just to be around it."
Lana was so white that Martha thought about going for the smelling salts. No, Clark needed her more right now. Jonathan met Chloe's eyes, daring her to think about what she was going to say next, and what the consequences might be.
Clark waited through an awful minute of dead silence, even everyone's breathing barely audible, even to his acute hearing. Finally the tension got to be too much for him, and he stood, offering his hand to Chloe as if in introduction. "And the name I was born with," he shifted accent and pronunciation automatically, "is Kal-El."
Chloe stared at him for another nerve-wrenching minute. Then she fell back on cushions and slid to the floor, hooting with laughter. "Pleased to meet you, Kal-El," she gasped, in between snorts. "You know what?" More laughter. "You look an awful lot like this boy I know." She tried to lift her hand to take his, and failed, hands falling back to hold onto her sides. "Name's Clark Kent. You could be brothers. Twins even."
Lana frowned, and Martha was relieved to note that her color was returning. She was dealing with it. "Chloe, what's so funny?"
"Oh." Chloe leaned back against the bottom of the couch, exhausted from laughing. "What's not funny? This guy is claiming to be from another galaxy. Clark has pulled some fast ones on us, but this takes the cake."
"Solar system, not galaxy," Clark said grumpily. "You made a deal with me, Chloe. I promised not to lie to you. It kind of ruins everything if you don't believe me."
Chloe calmed down. "I believe you, Clark Kal-El Kent. It fits too many of the pieces. And there's hardly any reason for you to make up something so crazy when you could have just claimed to be a run-of-the-mill Smallville freak. It's just that, aren't aliens from other galaxies -- sorry, solar systems -- supposed to look like giant bug-eyed monsters? With tentacles and insect heads and all? Why don't you look like an alien, Kal-El? Why do you look like the boy next door? Or is that a disguise?"
Clark raised his hands in supplication. "How should I know? I was a little kid when I was sent -- away. Here. Maybe I was altered. Maybe humanoid beings are common. Maybe Terrans settled Krypton. Or vice versa, though that's not likely, or you'd be more like me. I mean, like what makes me different. As far as I know, though, this is how I look."
"He looked like a little boy when we found him," Martha added softly, rubbing her thumbs in gentle circles on his neck. "When he found us. A lost little boy who needed a home." Clark fought back the burning in his eyes and put a hand up to cover hers.
It surprised all of them when Lana spoke. "Are there any others like you?" There was fear plain in her voice, but also something unexpectedly like concern. "Any ... survivors, of -- what did you call it? Krypton?"
Clark took his hand away from his mother's to keep from accidentally breaking anything. The hard knot inside him that had grown since he first realized his differences, that had solidified for all time when Dr. Swann told him there was only one message, kept him from answering for a long few seconds. It took all his strength to force a breath. "No."
Jonathan rose to come stand beside Martha, adding the grip of his strong hands to hers, knowing his adopted son could barely feel it, but knowing he couldn't do anything else. "I know it won't ever be enough, son. But this is your home. Jor-El and Lara loved you enough to give you up, give you a life, give you to us. Don't ever think less of them for that. Don't ever think you were abandoned. They wouldn't want you to feel ... alone."
Chloe and Lana spoke simultaneously. "No." They looked at each other, and the hostility between them changed, a nearly chemical reaction, to something more like -- a dawning agreement? Jonathan and Martha watched them warily, cautiously optimistic.
Chloe took the initiative. "No," she said again firmly as she stood. "You have friends, Clark. Kal-El. Whatever you want to call yourself. You're not alone." She moved around the table to stand in front of Clark and took her hand in his. "Those damn rocks aren't your home. We are."
Lana followed her lead, taking his other hand. "We would always have been here for you, Clark. All you had to do was let us know you were hurting, and what we could do. You were always here for us -- why did you think it would only be one way?"
Clark looked from one to the other, confused, relieved, frightened that he might be misunderstanding. His hands were frozen with the fear of hurting them. But when he tried to pull back, they both tightened their grips, refusing to let go. "You're not -- too mad at me? You don't think I'm a, a freak?"
"Mad at you? Clark Kal-El Kent, I am mad enough to beat the living tar out of you, as soon as I figure out how to do it without breaking my fists. But you're my FRIEND. You've been my friend for YEARS. What, you didn't think friends ever had fights and made each other mad? That must be one cold unhealthy planet you come from."
"Clark, I don't dislike freaks because they're different. I don't like them because they stalk me and try to KILL me! Ask any of the cheerleaders. Crazies follow some people around like we have a weirdo magnet, and most of the crazies aren't meteor mutants or anything, they're just I-want-to-feel-you-up-and-own-you sickos. I thought you were more of a freak when you were spying on me through your telescope but not talking to me in person than I do right now. If I had known why you didn't want to come near me...."
"I'd call that telescope-peering pretty strange behavior myself," Chloe added. "Clark, you could have saved yourself and all the rest of us a lot of trouble if you had just told us." Her eyes darkened. "Trusted us."
Deep breath. "Chloe, I do trust you. Always have. Though I did have nightmares sometimes about ending up on the front page. Can you blame me? I just ... wanted to be ... normal. Accepted. One of -- " his throat tightened. "You."
The two girls looked at each other again. Clark couldn't read their expressions. He'd bet that even Cyrus couldn't. Female communication seemed to be a lot more complicated than Kryptonian.
"Any reason why you still can't be?" Chloe asked, forced-casually.
"Chloe -- " Suddenly impatient with their seeming inability to understand, Clark stood, vanished, and came back with the refrigerator balanced on one hand. "Sorry, mom, I'll plug it back in before anything spoils. Though I should probably clean out from under it first. Chloe, does this answer your question?"
Chloe began giggling. Lana thought about for a second, and followed suit. "Yes, Clark, it does. You're carrying around a refrigerator on your fingertips and worrying about the food spoiling. That pretty much answers the question of whether you're an alien or one of us."
"And thinking about cleaning out from under it," Lana snickered. "You sound like your mom. Could you come over and lift up our beds so we can find our missing socks?"
Martha let out the breath she'd been holding and chuckled. "He's been doing that since he was six."
"And using those muscles to change tractor tires," Jonathan added genially. "Not something he got from the spaceship's computer, I bet."
Clark looked helplessly from one to the other. "You don't GET it."
"Honey, of course we do. Now go put the fridge back. We can clean under it later. You're confused enough right now, and it would be a mess if you dropped it."
Clark sighed in defeat. It didn't help that everyone started chuckling again behind his back when he absently shifted the refrigerator from one hand to the other reaching for the plug.
One of them. Not at all like them, physically. But mentally? Thinking the same things they did, having the same emotions? Was that enough to be accepted as "one of them"? To be Normal?
Would they let it be enough?
Clark stood up from checking the plug, and it took a good proportion of his speed to keep from cracking the skulls of the two girls who had snuck up behind him. Both of them just laughed and put their arms around him, holding him close in hug of sympathy and friendship that demanded nothing of him.
"We came to see if maybe there was some ice cream that needed eating before it melted," Chloe declared.
"Looks like Clark has saved the ice cream from us," Lana pouted at the humming refrigerator.
"Nah, I bet some of it melted while he was trying to find the plug. What about it, Mister Alien, got any candy for the little girls?"
"Chloe! That's obscene."
"Et tu, Lana? Takes a dirty mind to know one. Come on, Clark, I want to hear all about the growing-up-green thing, and if I don't have some caffeine, I need sugar."
Clark bowed his head, his arms gently, ever-so-carefully around his very special friends. Friends who had accepted him, after everything that had gone so terribly wrong. His shoulders were trembling with the effort. Chloe and Lana looked up at him, worried. But when he finally managed to raise his eyes to meet theirs, the tears were balanced by the trademark Kent smile.
"Mom? Do we have any coffee ice cream, or do I need to go get some, like, real fast, before Chloe beats up on me?"
Martha and Jonathan were holding each other tightly, sharing silent thanks that their son was back, that his friends had accepted him, that he would no longer be so terribly alone. Martha turned from the desperate embrace long enough to call, "There's butterscotch and mint chocolate chip. If Chloe insists on coffee flavored, just don't break the sound barrier getting to Mr. Johnson's."
Chloe's eyes widened. "Break the sound barrier?"
"Butterscotch is fine with me," Lana put in hastily.
"I'll, I'll settle for chocolate chip. For now. Sound barrier? Seven hundred fifty miles an hour? Clark...."
Clark was quiet for a long time. They had not rejected him. He had promised not to lie. It was hard. But not anywhere near as hard as living a lie, as being alone. "I have to kind of watch that. It's...." He traced his fingertips up their shoulders, then locked his hands behind his back. "Being different ... sometimes it's not easy to remember ... what the limits are."
The two girls considered him, working through the terrible secrets he had tried to come to grips with for most of a lifetime, and still wasn't certain of. Maybe girls were just faster on the uptake than he was. Because Chloe nodded, slowly, and Lana smiled.
"You mean, like trying to figure out who to take to a dance?"
"Or how to explain why you have to go run off and try to rescue everyone when you're supposed to be at a party?"
"Or why people get mad at you when they know you're lying, but don't know why?"
"Or why Clark Kal-El Kent can be the most infuriating person in the world one minute, and make you want to apologize for whatever you've said half an hour later?"
"And that I -- we -- have made stupid decisions too, but we tried to learn from them, and do better next time? Those kinds of limits?"
"Did it ever occur to you that whatever planet you came from, you're still a teenager? Maybe we should get you a subscription to some of the "what teenage girls want in teenage boys" magazines."
"Mom would kill me!" And I REALLY hope dad didn't hear that comment.
"Fine. Go ask Pete what kind of magazines HE keeps under his bed. Bearing in mind how many older brothers he has." Chloe hesitated. "Does Pete ... know?"
Ulp. Clark turned away for a second, then forced his mostly-invulnerable body to look back at them. "Yeah. I ... had to tell him. He found the," a generic gesture, "spaceship."
Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't broad smiles. "Fantastic! Now we really do have something to share. Oh, wait. Let's play a snark on the little sneak and not let on that we know. And see how much payback we can give him for going around behind our backs."
"Pete was just trying to protect me. He didn't mean to do anything wrong by you. Don't blame him for keeping secrets. I'm the one who asked him to."
"Clark," Lana said seriously, "We understand that you meant well. But not only did you lie to us, now we find out that Pete did too. How do you think that makes us feel? How would you feel if, oh, I had run off to Paris with Lex, and had told Chloe, and told her not to tell anyone else? Wouldn't that make you wonder if you could trust either of us with anything?"
Clark blinked at her. "Coming from another planet isn't exactly the same as visiting another country."
Chloe said two words that he would have sworn he would never hear. "Lana's right." An aside, under her breath: "Run off to Paris with Lex? Lana, that's sick." Deep breath. "Clark, Kal-El, whatever, it's not about whether you're a little gray man or whether Lana secretly speaks French. It's about whether we're friends, and if friends care about each other's lives."
Clark looked back and forth between them, desperately wanting to believe, terrified of trying, wondering if he dared. "I want you as friends, Chloe. Lana. I need you as friends. Without you, I may as well just head off d be a stranger to the whole human race for the rest of my life. But that's not a burden I can put on you, or even ask of you. That's the weight I had to put on Pete, and wish I hadn't had to. That's what I mean by ... limits. I never wanted to lie. But I had to. I couldn't ... risk you."
The two girls regarded him for a long minute, and then huddled closer to him, putting warm firm arms around him. If it hadn't been so absurd, he could have sworn that they were trying to protect him. "It's a burden, if you want to call it that," Lana said quietly, "that we're allowed to choose to accept."
"The only thing you're allowed to try to hide from me, Clark Kal-El Kent, is your locker combination. Besides, I already know it."
Clark choked back a laugh. "Would you stop that? You're likely to call me Kal-El in school some day. I'm still Clark. The same guy you've known since you tried to flirt with me in eighth grade."
Chloe did laugh, remembering clearly how mad she'd been that day the cute boy in her new school that she had decided to get to know had thrown up on her during a field trip. She started to tease him in response about that inauspicious meeting, and then remembered something else. The meteor rocks, their odd veins of pretty, jewel-like, slightly glowing green, scattered throughout a trench nearby. She had been out to impress the boys with her athletic prowess by sliding down to retrieve a particularly large rock, and proudly presented it to her puppy love.
She had skipped up and tapped Clark on the shoulder with a giggle and handed him five pounds of deadly poison.
Chloe shivered. The wonder was that he'd ever forgiven her, not vice versa. "Yeah," she said softly, "You'll always be Clark. I'm ... sorry."
"Don't do that either," Clark smiled. "You can't be sorry for things you aren't responsible for. I've had that beaten into my head a few times lately."
"Beaten into YOUR head?" Chloe snorted.
"Yeah. Ask Bill. It's a good thing he can heal the bones in his own hands."
"Right, I remember," Lana chimed in. "He did that trick with Tyson. He can ... do things, too? Is he...?"
"He's human. From Earth. But he's a freak, too. Does that bother you, Lana?"
The girls looked at each other again, that incomprehensible female communication.
"He doesn't strike me as the stalker type," Lana admitted.
"He's an empath. It hurts him to even be around someone who's hurting. So if you think of him as weird, he'll be uncomfortable. Can you deal?"
"So long as he likes ice cream," Chloe declared after two seconds' thought.
"Bring some for us too, son!" Jonathan called.
Martha smacked her husband. Clark wasn't supposed to know they'd been listening.
Clark decided that he'd avoided home long enough. Avoiding had become far too easy a habit, and had far too high a price in the end.
And there was still Chloe to talk to. Oddly, the thought of making his apologies to Lana didn't bother him nearly as much as how he was going to try to regain Chloe's trust or acceptance, or even if he was worth her trust again.
He'd once thought he loved Lana more than anything, but that seemed like a lifetime ago. In a very real sense, it had been a kind of lifetime ago. He had been terrified of her finding out about his differences -- she'd never exactly kept her opinion of "freaks" a secret. He had been certain that she would push him away if she thought he was to blame for the meteors that killed her parents. She was obsessive to the point of psychosis on the subject of the meteors and the loss of her parents, as if her whole life would have been some magical fairy tale otherwise.
Clark had never thought of that as a weakness before. He'd figured it to be his duty to cater to her feelings of abandonment. He wanted to pretend that it made a bond between them, both of them inexplicably orphaned, neither of them ever quite fitting in.
Then he'd learned about Cyrus, and a great many others who had gone through far worse hells than Lana was even capable of imagining. Cyrus had nearly died himself, and had been sent to a series of foster homes totally unable to cope with an unusual child at all, much less someone who couldn't explain why other people made him so crazy. Cyrus had had no stability in his life, no help, and very little in the way of love. That he had finally managed to come back from ranting lunacy and catatonic shock was a tribute to his strength of character.
Yet Cyrus didn't blame Clark for also being Kal-El, didn't think of the meteor storm as any worse than a thousand other purely Earthly disasters, didn't obsess on anything at all. (Well, except maybe for that really weird request for a purple shirt. Ew. Lex was right, that would be a terrible color on him.) Cyrus had spent most of his life haunted by Kal-El's memories, not even certain of who and what he was himself. And still he accepted Clark, all and everything about him, as a friend.
Clark decided he needed a better yardstick to judge people's pain by than Lana.
He slowed to a normal human jog, then to a walk, then to a dead stop as he reached the porch leading into his once-upon-a-time home. Deep breath. It didn't hurt quite as much as it had yesterday, but he was pretty sure it would never feel anywhere near normal again. "Mom? Dad?"
Martha turned from her search of the refrigerator, and the sparkle in her eyes was just short of tears. "Hi, honey. Have you had breakfast?"
Mom would be a good yardstick. "Um, well, yeah, I actually cleaned out most of Lex's leftovers. We had, kind of a long discussion. And Cyrus showed up. And Lionel." And I am not going to tell her about the rum. Some secrets are meant to stay buried. "And we, well, came to an understanding. Of sorts. Mom, is dad around? This might be easier to tell you both at once."
"He's washing up. We were just waiting on you. We figured we had some ... things to discuss, too." She motioned into the next room. "You have company."
He flicked to x-ray before he could stop himself. Chloe. And Lana. Sitting on opposite ends of the couch. Oh, no.
Once, that would have been an invitation for him to sit companiably between them. Now, it looked more like undisguised hostility. He closed his eyes, grateful that he couldn't see through his own eyelids.
"I guess I asked for it. May as well get it all over with at once."
"Clark. Son. Don't be that way. It isn't the end of the world." Martha left the snack tray she was putting together to hug him. "I know it's hard for you. But you're old enough now to understand that nothing stays the same. You can handle this, too."
Clark tried to hold himself still so that she wouldn't feel the tightness in him. End of the world. Bad choice of phrases, mom. I've already been through too many ends of the world to keep track. "I know, mom." Softly.
The hard hand on his shoulder was reassurance made solid. "Come on, son." Jonathan's blue eyes were as warm as the summer sky. "I'll do all the talking, if you want."
Clark straightened. Damn if his dad didn't always know exactly the right thing to say to get his attention. Jonathan could push his buttons almost as well as Cyrus. "Thanks, dad. But it's mine to tell, and to take responsibility for."
Jonathan held his gaze. "Responsibility, yes. Blame, never. Remember that."
Martha gave them both a light shove. "Shoo, you two, and let me finish this."
Clark and Jonathan exchanged glances, and both managed a small smile. "They probably shouldn't be eating anything when I say "spaceship."
Clark and Jonathan found seats across from the girls. That would leave Martha to sit between them and play diplomat. Clark wondered how he could ever have not realized how special his parents were, to put such subtle shields around him. "Well. Where do we start?"
"You can start by telling us why you lied to us all these years, Clark. Why didn't you trust us? Why didn't you trust ME, when you claimed to love me?"
Clark steeled himself and met Lana's eyes. "Would you even have wanted to be friends with a freak, Lana? I wanted you to get to know me, Clark, the boy next door, before you found out I was different. I hoped maybe then you could accept me for what I am. But once you started wearing that necklace, I couldn't even get close enough to you to carry on a conversation, much less develop any kind of relationship. So I had to lie to you. Pretend to be normal. Because I couldn't stand for you to look at me, think of me, talk about me, the way you did about all the other meteor freaks."
Martha came in with the snacks and set them down on the table between them, but rather than take the remaining seat, she came to stand behind Clark and rest her hands on his shoulders. Clark had never thought that he would appreciate such physically fragile support before. He could toss a tractor, but his mother's love could move mountains.
"Why do those meteorites hurt you so badly, Clark?" Chloe's voice was quiet anger, barely masking long-controlled pain. "I know the green ones make you sick as a dog. I suspect the red ones do the same thing to your head. But why you, and none of the other meteor freaks? They get stronger from the radiation, not weaker."
"Is that what you told Lionel?" he challenged levelly. Hopefully. "That I'm a meteor freak?" He hated hurting Chloe any more, but maybe, once they had it out, it would lance the festering wound.
"I told the bastard that you were bizarrely strong and fast and good at math, and unreliable and a jerk and would sell out your best friends. Seems he got some confirmation of that from independent reports of several of your own stunts. I told him you were a sneak and a liar. I didn't tell him about the school rings or what a real prick you turned into when you put one on, though you didn't exactly keep that a secret yourself. I told him it probably wouldn't be a good idea to piss you off. He laughed and said "don't worry about that." I told him you'd been a total a-hole the day you blew up your storm cellar, and that obviously you'd been planning to do it." Her voice broke. "I didn't tell him why."
Clark absorbed that in silence, trying not to give anything away as his eyes flickered from her face to his feet, though Martha and Jonathan were hard put to keep their expressions neutral. "And you knew why?"
"Clark. Or whatever your real name is. I may be a latecomer to farmville, but I've been in storm cellars before. They don't usually come equipped with what looks like a miniature version of an experimental fighter jet." The flashing emotions that chased through her face despite her set jaw hurt him just to watch, until she fought them back to steadiness. "Answer the question, Clark. Why do the meteorites drop you in your tracks the way they don't anyone else?"
Clark glanced up at his mother, over at his father, a silent plea. Both nodded. Jonathan opened his mouth to speak, and Clark held up his hand and nodded back. He could do this.
"The miniature experimental fighter jet," he spared a moment of amusement for Chloe's description, "is a spaceship. I came here, to this solar system, to Earth, to Smallville, in it, when I was about two. The meteors that came with me are pieces of the planet I was born on. The planet exploded. Some kind of giant nuclear bomb. The explosion turned what was left of the planet radioactive. The radiation is dangerous to humans, mutagenic, but it's lethal to me. Hurts just to be anywhere near it. Like it's ripping my guts out." Deep breath.
"I don't know why. Matches my chemistry or something." He fought an insane urge to giggle hysterically. "Is that ironic enough for you, Chloe? The only thing left of my home world, the only souvenir I have of the planet I come from, will kill me just to be around it."
Lana was so white that Martha thought about going for the smelling salts. No, Clark needed her more right now. Jonathan met Chloe's eyes, daring her to think about what she was going to say next, and what the consequences might be.
Clark waited through an awful minute of dead silence, even everyone's breathing barely audible, even to his acute hearing. Finally the tension got to be too much for him, and he stood, offering his hand to Chloe as if in introduction. "And the name I was born with," he shifted accent and pronunciation automatically, "is Kal-El."
Chloe stared at him for another nerve-wrenching minute. Then she fell back on cushions and slid to the floor, hooting with laughter. "Pleased to meet you, Kal-El," she gasped, in between snorts. "You know what?" More laughter. "You look an awful lot like this boy I know." She tried to lift her hand to take his, and failed, hands falling back to hold onto her sides. "Name's Clark Kent. You could be brothers. Twins even."
Lana frowned, and Martha was relieved to note that her color was returning. She was dealing with it. "Chloe, what's so funny?"
"Oh." Chloe leaned back against the bottom of the couch, exhausted from laughing. "What's not funny? This guy is claiming to be from another galaxy. Clark has pulled some fast ones on us, but this takes the cake."
"Solar system, not galaxy," Clark said grumpily. "You made a deal with me, Chloe. I promised not to lie to you. It kind of ruins everything if you don't believe me."
Chloe calmed down. "I believe you, Clark Kal-El Kent. It fits too many of the pieces. And there's hardly any reason for you to make up something so crazy when you could have just claimed to be a run-of-the-mill Smallville freak. It's just that, aren't aliens from other galaxies -- sorry, solar systems -- supposed to look like giant bug-eyed monsters? With tentacles and insect heads and all? Why don't you look like an alien, Kal-El? Why do you look like the boy next door? Or is that a disguise?"
Clark raised his hands in supplication. "How should I know? I was a little kid when I was sent -- away. Here. Maybe I was altered. Maybe humanoid beings are common. Maybe Terrans settled Krypton. Or vice versa, though that's not likely, or you'd be more like me. I mean, like what makes me different. As far as I know, though, this is how I look."
"He looked like a little boy when we found him," Martha added softly, rubbing her thumbs in gentle circles on his neck. "When he found us. A lost little boy who needed a home." Clark fought back the burning in his eyes and put a hand up to cover hers.
It surprised all of them when Lana spoke. "Are there any others like you?" There was fear plain in her voice, but also something unexpectedly like concern. "Any ... survivors, of -- what did you call it? Krypton?"
Clark took his hand away from his mother's to keep from accidentally breaking anything. The hard knot inside him that had grown since he first realized his differences, that had solidified for all time when Dr. Swann told him there was only one message, kept him from answering for a long few seconds. It took all his strength to force a breath. "No."
Jonathan rose to come stand beside Martha, adding the grip of his strong hands to hers, knowing his adopted son could barely feel it, but knowing he couldn't do anything else. "I know it won't ever be enough, son. But this is your home. Jor-El and Lara loved you enough to give you up, give you a life, give you to us. Don't ever think less of them for that. Don't ever think you were abandoned. They wouldn't want you to feel ... alone."
Chloe and Lana spoke simultaneously. "No." They looked at each other, and the hostility between them changed, a nearly chemical reaction, to something more like -- a dawning agreement? Jonathan and Martha watched them warily, cautiously optimistic.
Chloe took the initiative. "No," she said again firmly as she stood. "You have friends, Clark. Kal-El. Whatever you want to call yourself. You're not alone." She moved around the table to stand in front of Clark and took her hand in his. "Those damn rocks aren't your home. We are."
Lana followed her lead, taking his other hand. "We would always have been here for you, Clark. All you had to do was let us know you were hurting, and what we could do. You were always here for us -- why did you think it would only be one way?"
Clark looked from one to the other, confused, relieved, frightened that he might be misunderstanding. His hands were frozen with the fear of hurting them. But when he tried to pull back, they both tightened their grips, refusing to let go. "You're not -- too mad at me? You don't think I'm a, a freak?"
"Mad at you? Clark Kal-El Kent, I am mad enough to beat the living tar out of you, as soon as I figure out how to do it without breaking my fists. But you're my FRIEND. You've been my friend for YEARS. What, you didn't think friends ever had fights and made each other mad? That must be one cold unhealthy planet you come from."
"Clark, I don't dislike freaks because they're different. I don't like them because they stalk me and try to KILL me! Ask any of the cheerleaders. Crazies follow some people around like we have a weirdo magnet, and most of the crazies aren't meteor mutants or anything, they're just I-want-to-feel-you-up-and-own-you sickos. I thought you were more of a freak when you were spying on me through your telescope but not talking to me in person than I do right now. If I had known why you didn't want to come near me...."
"I'd call that telescope-peering pretty strange behavior myself," Chloe added. "Clark, you could have saved yourself and all the rest of us a lot of trouble if you had just told us." Her eyes darkened. "Trusted us."
Deep breath. "Chloe, I do trust you. Always have. Though I did have nightmares sometimes about ending up on the front page. Can you blame me? I just ... wanted to be ... normal. Accepted. One of -- " his throat tightened. "You."
The two girls looked at each other again. Clark couldn't read their expressions. He'd bet that even Cyrus couldn't. Female communication seemed to be a lot more complicated than Kryptonian.
"Any reason why you still can't be?" Chloe asked, forced-casually.
"Chloe -- " Suddenly impatient with their seeming inability to understand, Clark stood, vanished, and came back with the refrigerator balanced on one hand. "Sorry, mom, I'll plug it back in before anything spoils. Though I should probably clean out from under it first. Chloe, does this answer your question?"
Chloe began giggling. Lana thought about for a second, and followed suit. "Yes, Clark, it does. You're carrying around a refrigerator on your fingertips and worrying about the food spoiling. That pretty much answers the question of whether you're an alien or one of us."
"And thinking about cleaning out from under it," Lana snickered. "You sound like your mom. Could you come over and lift up our beds so we can find our missing socks?"
Martha let out the breath she'd been holding and chuckled. "He's been doing that since he was six."
"And using those muscles to change tractor tires," Jonathan added genially. "Not something he got from the spaceship's computer, I bet."
Clark looked helplessly from one to the other. "You don't GET it."
"Honey, of course we do. Now go put the fridge back. We can clean under it later. You're confused enough right now, and it would be a mess if you dropped it."
Clark sighed in defeat. It didn't help that everyone started chuckling again behind his back when he absently shifted the refrigerator from one hand to the other reaching for the plug.
One of them. Not at all like them, physically. But mentally? Thinking the same things they did, having the same emotions? Was that enough to be accepted as "one of them"? To be Normal?
Would they let it be enough?
Clark stood up from checking the plug, and it took a good proportion of his speed to keep from cracking the skulls of the two girls who had snuck up behind him. Both of them just laughed and put their arms around him, holding him close in hug of sympathy and friendship that demanded nothing of him.
"We came to see if maybe there was some ice cream that needed eating before it melted," Chloe declared.
"Looks like Clark has saved the ice cream from us," Lana pouted at the humming refrigerator.
"Nah, I bet some of it melted while he was trying to find the plug. What about it, Mister Alien, got any candy for the little girls?"
"Chloe! That's obscene."
"Et tu, Lana? Takes a dirty mind to know one. Come on, Clark, I want to hear all about the growing-up-green thing, and if I don't have some caffeine, I need sugar."
Clark bowed his head, his arms gently, ever-so-carefully around his very special friends. Friends who had accepted him, after everything that had gone so terribly wrong. His shoulders were trembling with the effort. Chloe and Lana looked up at him, worried. But when he finally managed to raise his eyes to meet theirs, the tears were balanced by the trademark Kent smile.
"Mom? Do we have any coffee ice cream, or do I need to go get some, like, real fast, before Chloe beats up on me?"
Martha and Jonathan were holding each other tightly, sharing silent thanks that their son was back, that his friends had accepted him, that he would no longer be so terribly alone. Martha turned from the desperate embrace long enough to call, "There's butterscotch and mint chocolate chip. If Chloe insists on coffee flavored, just don't break the sound barrier getting to Mr. Johnson's."
Chloe's eyes widened. "Break the sound barrier?"
"Butterscotch is fine with me," Lana put in hastily.
"I'll, I'll settle for chocolate chip. For now. Sound barrier? Seven hundred fifty miles an hour? Clark...."
Clark was quiet for a long time. They had not rejected him. He had promised not to lie. It was hard. But not anywhere near as hard as living a lie, as being alone. "I have to kind of watch that. It's...." He traced his fingertips up their shoulders, then locked his hands behind his back. "Being different ... sometimes it's not easy to remember ... what the limits are."
The two girls considered him, working through the terrible secrets he had tried to come to grips with for most of a lifetime, and still wasn't certain of. Maybe girls were just faster on the uptake than he was. Because Chloe nodded, slowly, and Lana smiled.
"You mean, like trying to figure out who to take to a dance?"
"Or how to explain why you have to go run off and try to rescue everyone when you're supposed to be at a party?"
"Or why people get mad at you when they know you're lying, but don't know why?"
"Or why Clark Kal-El Kent can be the most infuriating person in the world one minute, and make you want to apologize for whatever you've said half an hour later?"
"And that I -- we -- have made stupid decisions too, but we tried to learn from them, and do better next time? Those kinds of limits?"
"Did it ever occur to you that whatever planet you came from, you're still a teenager? Maybe we should get you a subscription to some of the "what teenage girls want in teenage boys" magazines."
"Mom would kill me!" And I REALLY hope dad didn't hear that comment.
"Fine. Go ask Pete what kind of magazines HE keeps under his bed. Bearing in mind how many older brothers he has." Chloe hesitated. "Does Pete ... know?"
Ulp. Clark turned away for a second, then forced his mostly-invulnerable body to look back at them. "Yeah. I ... had to tell him. He found the," a generic gesture, "spaceship."
Whatever he had been expecting, it wasn't broad smiles. "Fantastic! Now we really do have something to share. Oh, wait. Let's play a snark on the little sneak and not let on that we know. And see how much payback we can give him for going around behind our backs."
"Pete was just trying to protect me. He didn't mean to do anything wrong by you. Don't blame him for keeping secrets. I'm the one who asked him to."
"Clark," Lana said seriously, "We understand that you meant well. But not only did you lie to us, now we find out that Pete did too. How do you think that makes us feel? How would you feel if, oh, I had run off to Paris with Lex, and had told Chloe, and told her not to tell anyone else? Wouldn't that make you wonder if you could trust either of us with anything?"
Clark blinked at her. "Coming from another planet isn't exactly the same as visiting another country."
Chloe said two words that he would have sworn he would never hear. "Lana's right." An aside, under her breath: "Run off to Paris with Lex? Lana, that's sick." Deep breath. "Clark, Kal-El, whatever, it's not about whether you're a little gray man or whether Lana secretly speaks French. It's about whether we're friends, and if friends care about each other's lives."
Clark looked back and forth between them, desperately wanting to believe, terrified of trying, wondering if he dared. "I want you as friends, Chloe. Lana. I need you as friends. Without you, I may as well just head off d be a stranger to the whole human race for the rest of my life. But that's not a burden I can put on you, or even ask of you. That's the weight I had to put on Pete, and wish I hadn't had to. That's what I mean by ... limits. I never wanted to lie. But I had to. I couldn't ... risk you."
The two girls regarded him for a long minute, and then huddled closer to him, putting warm firm arms around him. If it hadn't been so absurd, he could have sworn that they were trying to protect him. "It's a burden, if you want to call it that," Lana said quietly, "that we're allowed to choose to accept."
"The only thing you're allowed to try to hide from me, Clark Kal-El Kent, is your locker combination. Besides, I already know it."
Clark choked back a laugh. "Would you stop that? You're likely to call me Kal-El in school some day. I'm still Clark. The same guy you've known since you tried to flirt with me in eighth grade."
Chloe did laugh, remembering clearly how mad she'd been that day the cute boy in her new school that she had decided to get to know had thrown up on her during a field trip. She started to tease him in response about that inauspicious meeting, and then remembered something else. The meteor rocks, their odd veins of pretty, jewel-like, slightly glowing green, scattered throughout a trench nearby. She had been out to impress the boys with her athletic prowess by sliding down to retrieve a particularly large rock, and proudly presented it to her puppy love.
She had skipped up and tapped Clark on the shoulder with a giggle and handed him five pounds of deadly poison.
Chloe shivered. The wonder was that he'd ever forgiven her, not vice versa. "Yeah," she said softly, "You'll always be Clark. I'm ... sorry."
"Don't do that either," Clark smiled. "You can't be sorry for things you aren't responsible for. I've had that beaten into my head a few times lately."
"Beaten into YOUR head?" Chloe snorted.
"Yeah. Ask Bill. It's a good thing he can heal the bones in his own hands."
"Right, I remember," Lana chimed in. "He did that trick with Tyson. He can ... do things, too? Is he...?"
"He's human. From Earth. But he's a freak, too. Does that bother you, Lana?"
The girls looked at each other again, that incomprehensible female communication.
"He doesn't strike me as the stalker type," Lana admitted.
"He's an empath. It hurts him to even be around someone who's hurting. So if you think of him as weird, he'll be uncomfortable. Can you deal?"
"So long as he likes ice cream," Chloe declared after two seconds' thought.
"Bring some for us too, son!" Jonathan called.
Martha smacked her husband. Clark wasn't supposed to know they'd been listening.