Author's Note: I promise that future trips to the Kent farm won't span six chapters. Eventually we'll get back to Metropolis and some excitement there. Lois is just really enjoying herself with Clark on this trip. :) I hope you're enjoying it, too!

Instead of a tractor motor, birdsong and muted sunshine greeted Lois, and she smiled with satisfaction that the universe had gotten its act together. For a few minutes she basked in the indulgent glory that was a lazy Sunday morning. Wisps of her dreams came back to her, emotions and fleeting mental images more than anything, and she was more grateful than ever that mental telepathy wasn't one of Clark's superpowers. Some of the things she'd dreamed were enough to make her blush this morning.

Eventually she wondered what time it was and reached for her phone. After she'd skimmed her email, she finally noticed that the aroma of coffee was filling the room. It made her smile that Clark knew just the right lure to coax her out from her comfy makeshift bed.

As she descended the stairs, he was in the kitchen, a steaming mug in his hand that he offered to her. "Are you positive you're not a mind reader?" she asked, just to be doubly-sure.

"Nope, just very observant," he answered with a wink. "There's batter for waffles when you're ready for breakfast."

Lois blew on her coffee and headed toward the living room to be polite. A newspaper was spread across the coffee table and the TV was turned to CNN with the volume turned low, but Martha was nowhere to be seen. "Where's your mom?"

Clark had followed her into the room and casually brushed a strand of hair from her face. "She left for church a few minutes before you woke up."

"Church?" Lois sat down on the couch, a bit befuddled by that, and cautiously sipped at her coffee.

Clark shrugged as he joined her on the couch. "Everybody goes to church out here. Folks don't get too worked up about where, but it's what you do on a Sunday morning."

Lois shook her head at him in amusement and reached for the front page of the paper. "I thought this was Smallville, not Mayberry."

Following her lead, he turned his attention to the comics section. "Six days out of seven, it is."

She chuckled, liking the two of them just enjoying the morning paper together. It felt vaguely like something out of a Norman Rockwell painting – comfortable in unfamiliar ways. She'd finished all the major stories and was debating which section to move on to when his words and the caffeine finally collided in her brain. "Everybody goes to church out here?"

"Yeah?" Clark said, not looking up from the Sudoku puzzle he was working on.

"So who taught Superman's Sunday school class?"

That caught his attention and he looked up at her with a faint smile. "Helen Ross."

"Ross? Pete Ross' mother?"

"The same."

"Hm." She tried to wrap her mind around it, and Clark returned to the Sudoku puzzle. Religion was a slippery concept for her to begin with. She'd never found anything she had faith in until she'd crossed paths with a certain red-caped god. That Martha and Jonathan would bring Clark – a non-human with supernatural powers – to a church every Sunday was probably the most mind-blowing thing she'd learned about him in months. Did they go out of devotion or because it was another way to blend in? Did Clark ever believe in the Christian God? Did he ever stop? Did that upbringing have an impact on why he decided to become Superman?

She shook her head, trying to pull herself out of reporter mode. He didn't need to be badgered by her about it. While the world would love to know all that about him and more, it was too personal a part of his story to tell. For one thing, it might give away too much publicly about who he was.

Mentally shifting gears, she said, "You didn't have to skip Sunday services for me."

He shrugged, still engrossed in the puzzle. "I confessed to the current pastor that I'm an alien. I figured that might make it a bit awkward to go back."

Lois started giggling. "You did not."

Clark leaned back into the corner of the couch so he was facing her and smirked. "Now why would you doubt me?"

"I don't know, maybe because you try to hide that from everybody."

His expression sobered. "Until I couldn't anymore."

It took her a few seconds to realize what he meant. "Zod's transmission?"

He nodded. "I wasn't sure where else to turn, and I guess old habits die hard. I went to the chapel I attended as a kid and talked with the pastor there. Told him I was the one everyone was looking for."

Lois just couldn't even imagine the scene he was describing. "Did he chase you out with a crucifix or...?"

Clark's easy smile cut her off. "He was a little rattled but for the most part he took it in stride. I hadn't attended services for years, and he was a new pastor so he didn't recognize me, but he actually gave me some good advice."

"Huh." Granted, her line of work left her a bit jaded about humans in general, but she'd come to associate deceit, hypocrisy, abuse, embezzlement, and arrogance with religion. A pastor actually guiding and uplifting one of his flock wasn't as mind-blowing as the idea of a devout Superman, but it was still hard to wrap her head around.

"Ready for waffles?"

"Sure." It was a laid-back Sunday morning, after all.

Of course, Clark couldn't just serve her any old waffles. While the iron heated, he pulled a bowl of sliced and sweetened strawberries out of the fridge along with some actual whipping cream. "You spoil me rotten," she said as she watched him whisk the cream by hand.

"You can thank my mom for this, actually," he said, not looking up from the bowl. "She planned the menu for this weekend. Except for the soup yesterday. That was impromptu."

Lois chuckled, but she also made a mental note to thank Martha.

Clark being Clark, he had no problem with joining her for strawberry shortcake waffles, even though it was his second breakfast. As he cut into it with his fork, Clark said, "Did you see the story about Indonesia?"

She nodded. A volcano on one of the islands was sending up a massive plume of hot ash and poisonous gas. Local authorities had evacuated several villages on the slopes. Some people were refusing to leave, though, since there wasn't a place to evacuate their herds to.

Around his bite of waffle, he said, "If it erupts, I'll need to duck out for a little while."

"I guess I can't complain too loudly," Lois answered. "I had you to myself pretty much all day yesterday."

"Did you enjoy that?" he asked, tilting his head curiously and reaching out to take her hand.

She squeezed it tightly in answer. "Yes. I could definitely get used to more of that. But there are a few emails I should respond to. It's not a big deal if I'm alone for a few hours."

Clark cheerfully turned his attention back to his breakfast. "Mom will be home around eleven o'clock, depending on how long she and Aunt Emmie spend talking over coffee and donuts after the worship services. Worst case scenario, you'd only be on your own for about an hour."

Swallowing her own bite of waffle, Lois said, "I'll be fine either way. I haven't needed a babysitter for decades."

Before she was done eating, though, Clark pulled out his cell phone and turned up the volume on the streaming app. It was a language she didn't recognize, but his expression was all too familiar. "The volcano?" she asked.

He nodded and gave her a rueful smile. "I'll be back as quickly as I can."

"Go, and no rush. I'm not flying anywhere without you."

His smile warmed to something more genuine, and with a shock of air he was gone.

Lois finished her breakfast at a leisurely pace then washed the dishes. She wasn't lying to Clark earlier about needing to answer a few emails, so she kicked back on the couch and put her cell phone to good use. Her usual sources with connections to Metropolis's criminal elements had clammed up, but an idea had occurred to her. An animal rights activist – some would say extremist – had helped her in the past, and he just might be able to help her now.

She was so focused on her emails that she didn't realize she wasn't alone until Martha opened the front door. "Oh, hey," Lois mumbled in greeting, feeling a little under-dressed in her nightgown when the older woman was in her Sunday best.

"Good morning," Martha cheerfully answered, shedding her purse and heels. "Where's Clark?"

"Saving some people and their cows in Indonesia."

Martha half-laughed and sat down in the recliner opposite the couch. "I need a globe just to keep up with him."

"It feels the same for me sometimes," Lois agreed.

They lapsed into a moment of awkward silence, and Lois started to say something about getting dressed for the day when Martha also began speaking. "You first," Lois insisted.

"I just wanted to apologize. The last time you and I were alone here, I acted like a stubborn old goat."

Lois smiled, realizing Clark must have forgotten to relay her answer to that. "I was a stubborn younger goat and I got beaten fair and square. No hard feelings."

Martha's eyes sparkled in amusement. "I'm glad you see it that way. But I still...I wish there were some way we could start over."

Lois started to shrug, but inspiration struck. "So why don't we? Give me a few minutes to change clothes, and then let's start over. I'll knock at the front door, you can let me in, and we can talk about the man we both know is someone pretty amazing. Let's have that interview now, off the record, of course."

Martha laughed. "I won't make you knock on the front door, and I want to change out of this dress, too. But the rest sounds nice."

In her bedroom, Lois hurriedly pulled on her jeans and a t-shirt, anxious to hear whatever Martha was willing to tell her. The older woman was even quicker, though, and was sitting in the recliner again, fidgeting with the cross on her necklace, when Lois came back downstairs. "You'll understand if there are some things I can't tell you, I hope," Martha said when Lois entered the room. "I mean some things I can't and some things...I won't."

She nodded as she sat down. "Of course. Some things aren't yours to tell, and I understand that. Others might be too personal, and that's okay, too." She hesitated, choosing her words carefully. "Clark's told me a fair amount of his story, and I'm happy to get the rest when he's ready to tell it. But your story is a pretty amazing one, too. I don't know if you can appreciate just how much of you and Jonathan are in Clark. Some of who he is today is nature, but a lot of it is going to be nurture, too. I want to hear your story if you're willing."

Martha rocked back a little in surprise. "I'm just a farmer's wife..."

"Who taught a being with limitless power how to be kind and compassionate," Lois said. "Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Your son is one of the purest, brightest souls I know, and it's a complete contradiction."

Martha blushed and looked down. "You're right about Clark, but I think you're overestimating my part in all that. He's always been..." Martha lifted her gaze to Lois. "...special, from the moment I laid eyes on him. There's just something good about him. Wholesome. Beautiful. I don't know..."

Lois listened, enthralled, as Martha shared in detail everything she could remember about finding Clark. But that was just the beginning. "For the first week or so, I barely slept a wink. I'd hold him in the rocking chair until I was so tired I was afraid I'd drop him, but I couldn't leave him alone, either. He was so...fragile."

Lois' reporter composure slipped, and she jerked a little in surprise. 'Fragile' was the last word she'd use to describe Clark.

Martha noticed and smiled. "I know you'd never guess it now, but he was. Earth wasn't kind to him at first." Her smile faded. "Of course, we didn't figure all that out until later. We didn't realize he was an alien yet. He looked too human. We thought it was just the effects of being sent up into space as a baby. He spit up so much formula that I thought nothing was getting to his stomach. He struggled to breathe. Sometimes he'd startle at nothing, and I thought it might be a seizure. And he cried unless he was being held. It broke my heart."

"Did you bring him to a doctor?" Lois asked.

Martha shook her head. "We didn't dare. We thought he was part of a Soviet experiment. For the first time in ten years of marriage, I didn't sleep next to my husband. Jonathan slept with a shotgun, and I slept next to this tormented baby. Some of it seems kind of silly now, but my imagination ran wild. What if they figured out where he was? What if they stormed the house? Would my Jonathan kill another human being over this child? Would I be willing to die to protect him? I think it was the third night or so that I realized, yes, I would, and so would Jonathan."

Despite herself, Lois was moved by her words. It was the way every parent was supposed to feel about their child, but she seriously doubted that her own mother ever felt that way. And at the time, Clark wasn't an invulnerable superhero. He needed that kind of protection.

Martha shook herself a little, a hint of a smile returning to her face. "Fortunately, none of that was ever necessary. The first night we didn't even have formula and had to feed Clark cow's milk. When he reacted so badly to it, Jonathan went first thing the next morning to buy some formula and diapers and such from the grocery store. But Smallville's...well, small. Everybody knows everybody and their dog, especially back then. The cashier was one of the Irig girls, and she of course knew we didn't have any kids. She commented on the baby stuff, and Jonathan had to make up some story about it being for a charity drive. We were more careful after that. We drove all the way to Wichita and bought a crib and car seat and everything else we could think of for him. For about four months we managed to hide Clark from everyone. When the authorities never came for him, we decided to adopt him. To do that, we needed a story that would never make anyone suspicious. So we brought him into town and told Chief Parker that we'd found this baby, strapped into a car seat alongside the road in the middle of a field."

"And he believed it?"

Martha shrugged. "He had no reason not to. Jonathan...well, you never got a chance to meet him, but he was as plain-spoken as they come. Had a reputation for honesty. It was a wonder he could lie well enough for the Irig girl to believe him. And while our story was strange, for sure, and the search for his mom made all the papers in the state, there wasn't any reason to not let us just adopt him, when all was said and done."

"So when did Clark go from spitting up formula to having a super appetite?" Lois asked.

Martha chuckled. "Pretty quickly. That's part of why we thought it was safe to introduce Clark to the world. Within a few months he was breathing normally and eating as well as babies eat, but he still twitched unexpectedly sometimes. Chief Parker had a doctor come look at Clark, of course, but he didn't seem to think much of the twitch. He guessed Clark was about six months old at that point, so he was maybe two months old when we really found him."

"Clark mentioned his grandmother – I believe it was your mother – lived with you for a while?" Lois was curious how she'd fit in to the picture.

Martha nodded. "Yes, she came to live with us a few months after we introduced Clark to the world. She and Dad had been living in Topeka with his sister. He had lung cancer and had been treated in the hospital there, but he'd died almost a year before we found Clark. Mom was tired of grieving and wanted to feel useful, so she came and stayed until her own health wouldn't let her anymore."

Martha's words continued to weave the tapestry of Clark's early childhood, with so many names of those long gone. Jonathan, Martha's mother, Helen Ross... When Martha mentioned her mother's passing, Lois said, "I would have liked to have met her."

Martha smiled, her eyes a bit misty, and she went to the only bookshelf in the living room. Pulling a half-dozen photo albums and scrapbooks off the shelf, she sat on the couch next to Lois and spread them out on the coffee table. She opened a faded, brown-and-orange photo album and pointed to the first picture. It was an older woman who clearly resembled Martha, holding a chubby cherub of a baby.

"Is that...?"

"My mom and Clark," Martha proudly said, her finger touching the baby's face.

Lois' heart swelled in unexpected ways. Yes, he really was adorable, even then. Especially then.

Together, they went through all the albums in the living room, and then Martha got a whole banker's box of scrapbooks and albums from upstairs somewhere. She and Lois had flipped through about half of them before a puff of air announced Clark's return. He stood just inside the front door, still in his Suit, and sighed in consternation. "Really, Mom? The bathtub pictures?"

Lois broke out in laughter, and Martha hastily closed the book they'd been looking at.

"I leave you two alone for a few hours and what do you do?" A grudging smile spread over Clark's face and he stepped deeper into the room to give Lois' hand an affectionate squeeze.

Still amused, she said, "You smell like sulfur and stinky animals. I take it the rescue went well?"

"Well enough. There were a few head of cattle I couldn't save, but no human lives were lost."

"Go shower," Martha said with motherly authority, "and you can tell us all about it afterward."

He nodded and dashed upstairs.

Lois helped Martha put the books back into the box. "Thank you."

"For what?" Martha lightly asked.

"For opening up to me like that. You didn't have to, and so it means the world to me."

Martha paused and looked her square in the eye. "Thank you. I've never..." She glanced away, smiling faintly. "There hasn't been anyone I even could talk to about all this." She patted Lois' hand and went back to packing up the books.

Like seeing the picture of Clark as a baby, Martha's words make Lois' heart squeeze in unexpected ways. While she'd known she'd get along with Martha well, she hadn't anticipated an direct friendship with the mother of her boyfriend. It was an unforeseen fringe benefit, and it made her smile.

Clark returned, showered and changed, before they were done. He kissed Lois and hefted the box of books for Martha. "Pete was at church today," she said as she followed him up the stairs. "He says 'Hi.'"

"He knows we're in town?" Lois asked in surprise.

Martha shook her head. "No, he just wanted me to pass it along the next time I saw Clark. But he did invite me and Emmie and her husband and the Langs over for a barbecue on Monday night."

Clark turned into a storage room across the hall from Lois' library of a bedroom and added the box to a stack of them. "What did you tell him?" he asked his mother.

"I told him I'd have to get back to him."

Clark glanced at Lois. "He's one who's in the know. Or close enough, I guess."

She frowned thoughtfully. "What about the others?"

"They're family, by blood or friendship," Martha said with a shrug. "There's no danger in it. It's just a matter of what you prefer to do."

Lois glanced at Clark, trying to read his expression. These were his people, as much as any humans could be, and the reporter in her was curious to see him around them. He was so different here compared to Metropolis, and she wanted to observe him in his natural habitat. "I'd kind of like to go," she said.

He nodded. "Go ahead and call him, then. Tell him we flew in for the weekend and you'll be driving us over to Wichita to catch our flight home tomorrow night, but we could come for at least a little while."

Martha grinned and headed back downstairs to make the call.

Clark moved to follow her, but Lois caught his hand. Martha would be on the phone, so they had a few minutes alone together. What was it about him that reduced her to a twitterpated fangirl, anyway?

A smile flitted across his face, and he cupped her cheek with his free hand. "I love you, Lois."

Warmth rushed through her, and she stood on her tiptoes to kiss him. "Love you...too," she whispered. His arms encircled her and pulled her close as he returned her kiss – with interest. Her heart thundered, and she tried to remind herself to not overwhelm his supersenses.

Martha hollered up the stairs, "Pete wants to know if starting at five o' clock will be early enough to let you to catch your flight home."

Lois giggled against his lips and forced herself to take a step back. The longing in his eyes almost brought her back into his arms, but he stepped toward the door.

Tonight, she promised herself. She'd convince him to take her flying again tonight, and they'd pick up where they left off now.

"That should be fine, Mom," he called down to her. "We'll have to leave by about seven o' clock, but that will work."

Lois could hear Martha's voice, presumably relaying the information, and she called back up, "Can we start at four, then?"

"Sure."

Clark glanced back at Lois, but she knew the moment had passed. With a reluctant sigh, she took his hand and headed downstairs.

Martha was tying an apron on when they came down into the kitchen.

"How can I help?" Clark asked, grabbing another apron for himself.

Martha started him on prepping chicken for grilling while she made the salad. Lois was used to Clark taking over her kitchen, so she just took a seat at the table and kept them company. As Lois watched the two of them working together with familiar ease, she felt a little wistful. If only she and her own mother had a relationship that was half as close as this alien and the woman who raised him.

Even though Martha had denied it, there was something super about her, too. Lois was grateful for the time they were able to spend alone together that afternoon. The act of sharing her story drew Lois a little closer into the circle of Martha's love and Clark life. It was a precious gift, something that, as a wordsmith, she particularly appreciated. She'd have to find some way to repay that kindness some day.