Wood grain is terribly engrossing. At least it can be, when one is sitting at a virtual stranger's kitchen table with three pairs of eyes focused in narrow scrutiny, and four sets of ears waiting to hear how a research assistant from Metropolis came to be carrying the child of an as-yet-unspoiled Kansas farm boy.
It had been six minutes since anyone had made a sound.
Clark was sitting opposite Marin, with Jonathan and Martha to his left and Chloe to his right. While Marin's eyes almost literally bore a hole in the worn table top, Clark's gaze darted from face to face, sometimes landing on a random knickknack, often resting on the clock.
Seven minutes of silence.
Chloe sat with her hands pressed between her knees, feeling uncomfortable and conspicuously out of place. She tried to conjure viable reasons to leave just then, though she wasn't certain she wanted to. She needed the truth, but she feared it.
Eight minutes.
Martha's heart was racing. She'd always hoped that Clark would adhere to what might appear to be an old-fashioned ideal. The idea that he hadn't disappointed her, and it stung her, as yet another reminder that he was no longer a child, No longer the little locomotive who would literally tear through the house on a Saturday morning, leaving broken table legs and the occasional splintered cupboard door in his wake. She'd give anything to be replacing a cupboard door just then.
Nine.
After calling them all around the table, Jonathan had leaned on his elbows and folded his hands together, issuing an order with pointed glances that they would give Marin a few moments to collect herself. He'd been intently focused on Clark's and Marin's faces, trying to discern what truth they held. Clark looked guilty, nervous, and confused. All things he'd expect to see as a result of such circumstances. Marin, however, held far greater angst than their current understanding of the situation - which was miniscule - seemed to merit. She looked haunted, drained, hollow - her eyes, though downcast, betrayed the depth of her fear. Now, as Jonathan straightened his back and drew his chair closer to the table, he appeared ready to call the meeting to order.
Ten.
"Who wants to start?" Jonathan prompted.
Both Clark and Marin looked up sharply, each toward the other. It was the first time they'd looked at each other directly since Marin had uttered those four fateful words. Marin gave her head a vaguely negative shake.
"Can you start, please?" she whispered pleadingly, speaking more with her eyes than her voice.
"Me?" Clark stammered. "Start where? I don't have any idea what happened!" He was trying so hard to speak gently, but internally he was seething with questions unanswered. He was torn between Marin's obvious need for time and solace, and his own need to understand what had happened. He briefly considered throwing the table aside and forcing the truth from her, just as he had back at the lab when she'd injected Lois with EF-19. But he hadn't known her then.
Now he knew her. Rather, he knew at least enough to know that she was lonely and misunderstood, to which he could relate. So, he fought to suppress his sense of urgency.
Marin bit her lip and pulled the cuffs of her shirt over her hands. She realized they were chapped, and one knuckle was bleeding. She felt embarrassed by that. It was a strange time to feel embarrassment at all, and from so small a thing. "The experiment," she muttered plainly.
Clark slumped in his chair, crestfallen. He couldn't fathom an even moderately satisfactory way to rationalize what he and Marin had almost done. The arguments for it felt much thinner now, and parents had a way of making such reasoning look even more ludicrous. Everything had seemed so clear to him those few weeks ago in his moment of almost-weakness - everything had been justified in its own convoluted way. Now however, he could make sense of none of it. Man among wolves, ideals, conventions, reasons of the heart - none of it held any substance when balanced against the weight of a parent's judgment.
"The experiment?" Jonathan prodded. He didn't like the idea of an "experiment" that could precipitate his son becoming a teenage father. His heroically patient veneer was beginning to crack.
Clark straightened and cleared his throat. "Yeah… well… it was one of the… um… questions, that came up while I was there. In Metropolis. At the lab."
Chloe's impatient inquisitiveness kicked in, though somewhat against her will. "Okay, setting established. What's the question in question?"
Clark shifted uneasily, absently scratching his head behind his left ear before crossing his arms over his chest. "The question was… well, we were - that is I - I was wondering if I could safely - um… be… with somebody."
"Be with somebody?" Martha squeaked, and Clark felt the sting of cold consequences begin to pool around his ankles as the tissue-thin ice he was skating on melted away.
"It made sense at the time," Clark murmured meekly.
Jonathan flexed his fingers and gave Clark a measured authoritative glare. "A lot of things make sense at the time, Clark! Did you even think about the consequences?"
Clark stood abruptly, knocking his chair backward. "Of course I did, I - "
"Pick up the chair and sit down," Jonathan interrupted forcefully.
"Dad, listen to me, I -"
"First, you listen to me! Pick up the chair and sit down, now." Jonathan's reserves of restraint were running low.
"I'm not a kid," Clark whined sullenly, but nonetheless complied and righted the chair, taking his seat as directed.
"Good to hear," Jonathan replied with a stark nod and a raised eyebrow. "Because I expect you to behave like an adult now, since you think you're ready to go ahead and make adult decisions."
Clark let those words fester in an angry silence before he spoke. "Are you finished now?"
"Am I finished now?" Jonathan repeated. "You want to say that again, Son?"
"Are you going to let me explain, or are you just going to keep jumping to conclusions?"
"Great! If you have an explanation, go ahead - let's hear it!" Jonathan challenged, expecting a stream of excuses to follow.
"Okay, just - no interruptions, just let me get this all out."
Jonathan and Martha exchanged glances, then nodded their agreement in begrudged unison.
"Okay," Clark nodded, exhaling heavily. "So… uh… Dr. Ripley brought up this experiment, and…" suddenly Clark's face fell. "Oh no…"
"What?" Martha, though she wasn't anxious to hear any sordid details, was growing anxious over the drawn out explanation.
"You don't even know about Ripley yet!" Clark exclaimed. "He's the whole reason everything happened last night, he took everything and - "
"We'll get back to that, Clark," Jonathan interposed. "Don't change the subject."
Clark looked agitated. "But Dad, it's really - "
"I said we'll get back to it! Right now, I'm waiting for this explanation you said we couldn't interrupt."
"Fine!" Clark huffed and slouched. "Dr. Ripley came up with this idea that - for the sake of science - I should sort of - do a trial run, I guess."
"A trial run? For the sake of science!" Chloe exclaimed. "Are you sure that's not from a Penthouse letter?"
"Hey, I said no interruptions! This is hard enough!" Clark visually pleaded with Marin. "Can you help me out here?"
Marin met Clark's eyes and nodded solemnly. "Okay," she said, barely above a whisper. Clark had broken the ice, at least, and he was coming to the end of the part of the story he knew. It was her turn - but then she looked up at the anxious faces all waiting on her, and her resolve retreated a bit. She swallowed past the aching lump in her throat and took in the expressions she saw; Chloe's was pained, perhaps tinged with jealousy, Martha's was saddened and distressed, and Jonathan's was wrought with anger and disappointment, but laced with a thread of rational reason.
Clark's face was angst-ridden. Marin could imagine the thousand questions that must have overrun his mind the moment she told him she was pregnant. She'd expected him to spit the words back at her, calling her a liar or worse, and she'd told herself that he would have been justified in doing so. There was no way he could have imagined how grave a travesty had been committed against them both. He could have railed against her or thrown her out. He could have screamed at her, fired all of his questions in rapid succession, leaving Chloe and his family to look on in an astonished stupor. He should have yelled, instead of coming to her with a glass of water and concern - that would have been easier. It would have lit a fire under her, heated her enough to make the truth boil over instead of simmering inside her as it was, wearing through her like acid.
"There was a trial set up," Marin began feebly, "to determine whether or not Clark could safely copulate with a human female." Good, keep it clinical, you can get through this. She noted the round of grimaces at the word "copulate" as she paused for another breath. "A series of post-procedural questions and lab tests was developed to follow the actual trial. I completed the report and the subsequent tests on my own."
"What exactly does that mean?" Martha asked, her distress showing despite her determination to hide it.
"It means I faked the report, because there was nothing to report." She glanced up at Clark, who nodded to prod her along. "Clark and I never completed the trial. We let the others think we did, so that he wouldn't be pressured with it again." She was surprised at how collected she was beginning to sound, and prayed that she could maintain her composure during the rest of her revelation.
The faces on both sides of the table bounced their glances from Marin to Clark and back again, like they were a confessional tennis match.
It was Martha who spoke first. "So… you two didn't…?"
"No," Clark and Marin answered simultaneously.
There was silence for half a second before Jonathan emitted a low whistle, Martha smiled and silently mouthed, Oh, thank God, and Chloe released her tension in a wild peal of nervous laughter.
But Clark didn't move. He seemed to become darker in the space of a second, more troubled now that Marin had given her account of events truthfully. She wasn't crazy then, she knew nothing had happened between them. That could only mean that if the reason for her visit was true, it had occurred by unthinkably sinister means.
After a moment's relief, the others in the room fell victim to Clark's darkness as well, realizing that there was still one very big question left with no answer.
Then came the eleventh minute of silence.
And the twelfth.
This time, Clark's eyes didn't wander. The answer had begun to form in his mind, an inky black cloud that consumed any possible ray of light in the situation. He stared at Marin, and he could see the truth in her eyes. The assumption he was forming was already there in all its terrible reality. There was nothing left to do now, but to ask the question.
He couldn't ask it. He already knew. But still, it had to be done. Feeling suddenly ill, as if a Kryptonite mist had descended over him, Clark leaned his elbows on the table and let his face fall into his hands.
Thirteen minutes.
Clark forced himself to look up again, and when his eyes met Marin's he could see that she knew he understood. But still the question demanded the force of words and a voice behind it. At least one word.
"How?"
Marin's face dissolved with tears and defeat as her shoulders fell, leaving her hunched over the table. "Dr. Ripley did it." The words dripped onto the table top like poison.
Clark relinquished his breath with a guttural sob and let his forehead meet the warm wood grain.
"He drugged me, he harvested my eggs, he used your samples and made embryos and then he implanted me and then he - he made me forget, and he - " Marin interrupted herself with tears, unable to continue, but the profusion of words that had flowed from her stream of consciousness was more than enough to send the occupants of the Kent house into a tailspin.
Jonathan had finally reached his limit, and the house was far too small to contain the onslaught of revulsion and rage that surged through him in that moment. After everything that he'd done and tried to do to protect his son, especially in the last few years, he had never imagined anything like this, and there was nothing he felt he could do about it. The slam of the kitchen door and an animalistic cry resounding through the walls from outside were the only sounds to testify to Jonathan's fury until the rumble of the truck's motor was heard as it flew down the drive.
Clark leapt up from the table hastily, again knocking his chair over. In a fit of rampant hysteria he picked up the offending chair and heaved it through a nearby window, sending dozens of shards glittering down on to the floor. He screamed in rage and picked up handfuls of the broken glass, hurling them against the ground beyond the gaping hole he'd left. When the largest of the fragments had all been tossed out onto the lawn, Clark let himself fall to his knees, crunching against the glass that remained. He bitterly wished he could feel it.
At last he raised his eyes to the three women at the table, those who had remained at least outwardly steady and stalwart while the Kent men let loose their demons. Three pairs of eyes were on him, Chloe's bewildered, Martha's beside herself with worry, and Marin's bereaved.
"I'm sorry," he said to all of them, his voice uneven. It was a simple but weighty apology, harboring all the guilt and turmoil over everything he'd ever done or had caused to happen to people he cared about. Even on journeys of self-discovery, he brought wounds to those who helped him, but never to himself. He gripped a knife-like shard of glass that should have sliced his flesh to ribbons, but instead he ground it into dust.
Chloe saw her friend, her dearest friend, the one whom she felt she'd only just begun to know, and was now just beginning to become somebody else. Her heart ached for him and all the things she fervently wished she could understand and empathize with, but never really would. In some ways he was marked by an isolation as impenetrable as his skin.
Marin saw the man she'd wronged, the one she and her colleagues had caused to suffer, the one they'd endangered and exposed. She saw his pain, for which she took the blame, and swore to herself that she'd do everything she could to abate it. She'd cost him too much.
Martha saw her son. Her only son, strong, determined, but shattered. Sitting there by the broken window, like he must have done a dozen times a year when he was a child, looking up at her with sodden eyes and apologizing ambiguously, not knowing exactly what he'd done wrong, but certain that everything was his fault.