Clark rose slowly from the side of the body, a young boy maybe a year younger than Jason. For a moment, he couldn't keep the emotions off his face, the anger he felt towards the boy's murderer and the people who had let it happen, the sadness for the young life cut short, the sympathy for his parents standing just behind the police line. He looked across at the parents and wearily shook his head, making eye contact only for a moment before he pulled up the façade again. He wanted more than anything to just fly home and spend the afternoon with his kids. Of course, that would mean going to their schools first and pulling them out for the rest of the day.
"You okay, Superman?" Jim Harris asked. Clark snapped out of it, looking around himself and realizing he had been zoning out next to the ambulance Jim drove. Jim had been driving the ambulance that had taken him to the hospital after the New Krypton fiasco, but Clark had spoken to the EMT on many occasions before and after Luthor's bid for beachfront property. He was probably the oldest EMT in the city, and he had a knack for getting to the scenes Clark called in before anybody else. That reliability was only part of what made Clark like him so much.
"I'm fine," Clark said, his voice as deep and full of confidence as ever. Jim just gave him a look as though he were seeing the Man of Steel for the first time—not the amazed look people got when they first saw the cape, but the look anybody gives anybody else when they see something in them that had gone unnoticed before. It made Clark nervous.
"You got kids, Superman?" It sounded like a casual comment, but the look of pure curiosity on Jim's face said otherwise.
Clark's throat closed up for a brief second in surprise and he nodded once before he could stop himself. He actually had three kids and a pregnant wife. Jason was nine and the spitting image of Clark at that age. Molly was three and followed her brother around everywhere he went that she could follow; she liked to just sit and watch him while he did his homework, even. Little Joanna had just had her first birthday and had recently mastered the art of navigating the apartment by holding onto tables or chairs or the wall and taking a few steps before crawling to the next table or chair. Lois was due with their fourth—he'd peeked; it was another girl, but Lois refused to let him tell her—in three months or so.
Jim's face flashed with surprise before he covered it with a relaxed smile. Clark just shot up into the air, hearing another cry for help a few blocks over. With any luck, Jim would let it go, or at least respect his privacy.
"What do you mean 'he figured it out'?" Lois asked three days later, watching her husband pace and stare through the outer wall down at the street.
"I mean he figured it out. He figured me out," Clark said, sitting down across the table from Lois. He tried not to look at her, pulling a box of sesame chicken his way and grabbing a pair of chopsticks instead.
"Who, again?" Lois asked, realizing Clark had been going on about 'him' for the past twenty minutes.
"Jim Harris, an EMT. He was the driver of the ambulance that brought me to Met. General after New Krypton." He stood again, chewing.
"Would you sit down?" she asked, rolling her eyes at him. "You're making me nervous."
"I'm just worried about what he's going to do now that he's figured it out… He's sitting down there in his car. Just staring at our balcony."
"How did he figure it out anyway?"
"I might've given a little more information than I meant to."
"What sort of information?" Her tone was carefully level.
"There've been a lot of kids turning up dead lately, Lois." She nodded, her eyes cold; they'd been trying to crack that case in the journalistic sense since it had begun, and Clark had been having little luck stopping them as Superman, only getting there in time to lift the little bodies out of the horrible places he found them. "Jim asked if I had kids—I told him I did."
"Why?"
"I didn't mean to! It just kind of came out, I mean—I do have kids…"
"We have kids, Clark," she reminded him with a smile, and he just gave her a tired look which made her smile all the more. She opened her mouth to say more but Clark's head snapped around and he glared through the wall again. "What is it?"
"He's going away…" he said in confused surprise.
"Good."
"What's for dinner?" Jason asked, sitting heavily at the dinner table and staring across the table at his father, who was reviewing story notes.
"Pizza," Clark replied without looking up.
"Really?"
"Yeah—we'll order in about ten minutes, if you've got anything you want?" He finally looked up, smiling at the expression on his son's face.
"Hawaiian!"
"Yech," Molly said from the chair beside him.
"I like it," Jason said, hopping off his chair and bolting, probably with a bit of super-speed, into his bedroom and shutting the door—his signal that Molly wasn't allowed to follow.
"When Mommy come home?" Molly asked, looking across the table at her Dad with innocent eyes.
"In a little bit," Clark said, then gave her a suspicious look. "Why?"
"Just won'drin."
Molly wandered off into the house, leaving Clark sitting at the table by himself, contemplating the mysteries of his children.
A knock interrupted his thoughts, and a glance through the door took him by surprise.
Jim Harris was standing on the other side, looking extremely nervous. Clark glanced around—they hadn't cleaned in a while. The bookshelves were littered with not only books of every shape and size, from big name biographies to Curious George, but also toys Molly or Jason had left in the living room that had been shelved to get off the floor. The coffee table was covered in Lois's story notes, old issues of the Planet, and colored pages from Molly's Pixar coloring book. Joanna had investigated the boot bench by the door before her nap and Clark hadn't picked up any of the shoes yet. Jason had left green army men in the hall between the dining room and kitchen, a few of them now 'wounded' after having been stepped on.
Clark looked down at himself as he made his way to the door, cursing himself again. He'd been listening for the man all day and the moment he let it slip, Jim showed up. His glasses were on the table with his notes, his hair the usual messy mop of Clark Kent, and he wore jeans and an old white long-sleeved shirt and stocking feet. At least his socks matched. Jim was dressed casually on the other side of the door, jeans and a t-shirt, fidgeting nervously with a stray thread on his sleeve. Clark couldn't help but smile; Jim was always very calm in a crisis.
For a moment, Clark considered putting his glasses on and slouching, exaggerating the stutter. He would dive into his Daily Planet façade. He would mumble and trip his way out of the identification.
Steeling himself, Clark opened the door.
"Superman," Jim said in a low, surprised whisper.
"Jim," Clark replied, holding the door open wider for the EMT to enter.
"I—uh—I—well," Jim tried. Clark smiled a relaxed smile he certainly didn't feel, closing the door and looking out at the apartment as Jim would be seeing it. It was a large place, the top floor of their building. The apartment was a mess—they all spent their time at work and school, or daycare, and when they came home they relaxed. There were no cobwebs or disgusting smells, but it had a very lived-in feel that Clark's mother would tell him to trim back a bit.
"Lookit, Daddy! I'm pretty!" Molly said, coming out of her parents' bedroom with a huge smile on her face. Clark couldn't help it; he smiled back, momentarily forgetting the awkward guest. Molly was big on dress-up, especially when Lois wasn't around to keep her out of her shoes. Molly had a huge chest of dress-up clothes, including the floppy purple hat with a huge feather, the neon pink feather boa, and the lime green flapper-style dress that was about five sizes too big, but not the five inch heels that Molly had pulled out of her mother's closet. She'd hung herself with beads and bracelets and struck a pose upon sight of her father, framed in the doorway to the hall leading to the bedrooms. Molly already took after her mother—she had wavy dark hair and her mother's chin, but her father's eyes. Then there was the mischievous personality and an already developing wit.
"You're always pretty, honey," Clark assured his daughter, getting a large, bright smile. Molly tossed the feather boa over her shoulder and Clark couldn't help but chuckle as it fluttered down over her back. He took a step forward and scooped his daughter off the floor in a bear hug. "But you'd better put those shoes back before Mommy gets home and worries about you falling and breaking your ankle."
"Can't break my ankle," Molly protested. "I'm invulna—inverala—I'm like you."
"Yes, but Mommy still worries," Clark said, setting the three-year-old on her feet and giving a light push in the direction of the bedrooms. Molly gave a soft humph before doing as she was told.
"Cute kid," Jim said, shifting awkwardly when Clark turned to him.
"Molly. She just turned three," Clark said with a fatherly smile and a glance through the wall at his daughter, who was putting the shoes carefully back in their place.
They stood in the living room for awhile, Clark trying not to look to nervous while he tried to put a few words together unsuccessfully. Jim seemed to be in awe of the whole situation.
"I won't tell anybody," Jim said, his voice quiet
"Thank you," Clark replied with a very slight smile.
Neither of them seemed to know what to say. Clark continued to watch Molly changing outfits again—she was in a phase—while he tried to think of some topic that didn't involve handing Jim more information or bringing up the first thing they had in common that came to mind (that being the recent murder of children).
"You know," Jim said almost a full minute later, "I never even suspected you of having some sort of—secret identity—until..."
"That's kind of the point of the exercise." Clark raised an eyebrow and smiled ever so slightly again. He wasn't sure where his personality was in at the moment. He wasn't being detached or emotionless like Superman, nor was he being clumsy like his office persona. But he wasn't being himself, really, either.
They stood in silence again for a minute until Jason came and stood in the doorway. He looked at the pair of them before opening his mouth.
"You're Jim, right?" Jim nodded and Jason nodded back. "I thought so…" He turned to his father. "Did you order the pizza yet? I'm hungry."
"When are you not hungry?" Clark asked, taking his phone out of his pocket.
"When I'm asleep," Jason replied, drifting back down the hallway.
Clark ordered the pizza, motioning for Jim to take a seat at the dining room table, hoping to put the man a little more at ease. Instead, Jim was looking at him with that look, the one that everybody he'd ever told the Secret gave him when they began trying to mash up the fact that he was from a different planet with the fact that he was a fairly normal guy too. He didn't seem to register the offer of a chair.
"So," Clark said, shifting through his papers on the table and packing them away for later, folding his glasses and putting them safely on a shelf. "How did you figure this out, anyway?"
"Well, um—sorry," Jim said, looking truly apologetic. Clark just shook his head, again with a small smile. "Well, it was, y'know, the thing with the kids."
"I thought that might've been it," Clark said, sitting in his usual chair and motioning for Jim to take a seat and end his perpetual nervous shifting.
"I'm a curious person, I've always… wondered." Jim glanced around again, hearing Molly giggling from her bedroom. Clark glanced away from the EMT's face briefly to look through the wall and make sure Molly was leaving Jason alone. "When you said you had kids, I did a little research… Actually, it took a lot of research. My wife thinks I'm insane… I started with people I knew you had contact with, and I didn't have to go much farther. Lois Lane was the obvious starting point. When I was looking for it…" He shrugged, pointing at the glasses on the shelf. "Those didn't work so well when I was trying to see past them."
"That's the way it tends to go," Clark said, smiling easily now. He mentally added Jim Harris to the short list of people who knew the Secret—Lucy Troupe, Jimmy Olson, Bruce Wayne, Chief Henderson, and, of course, Martha Kent.
It was a testament to how thoroughly Jim had surprised him that Clark hadn't heard Lois approaching the moment she'd parked her car. She came through the front door, letting it slam behind her, and sighed loudly as she dropped her keys in the dish by the door. From her vantage she could only see Clark at the dining table.
"Clark," Lois said, tossing her jacket over the back of the couch and folding her arms over her pregnant belly, "I hate my mother. Can I borrow yours?"
"Again?"
"My mother wants to throw a surprise baby shower," she said sharply, kicking off her shoes and looking around the entryway at all the other shoes strewn about. Her heels looked lonely, sitting tidily beneath the boot bench.
"How do you know about it if it's a surprise?"
"Your mother is a saint. My mother called to let her in on it, and your mother called me because she knows I don't like that sort of thing and we've already got all the stuff—we happen to have three other children." She sighed and started walking toward the kitchen. "How about we just go down to Smallville next weekend so—so sad—we just happen to be out of town when the whole thing goes down?"
Clark leaned back in his chair, an amused smile on his face, contemplating his wife. "Why do you hate parties so much, Lois?"
"Why do you hate publicity so much, Clark?"
Clark just shook his head, smiling. "You remember Jim Harris?" he said when she made it the rest of the way into the dining room and froze at the sight of the EMT.
"Um—oh, yeah." She gave her husband a look before smiling warmly at the guest. "Good to see you again, Mr. Harris."
"I'm sorry for, um, intruding," Jim said, shifting uncomfortable again. He'd frozen in his seat when Lois had mentioned Clark's mother and hadn't moved until she'd addressed him.
"No, it's… well…" She looked helplessly at Clark for a moment. He was a bit ill at ease, she could see, but playing it cool for Jim's sake.
The awkward silence was interrupted by a loud bang on the front door.
"Pizza's here," Clark said. He grabbed his glasses off the shelf and paid the pizza guy with the ease that Lois and his mother only ever got to see.
"Pizza!" Jason and Molly cheered in unison, streaming out of their bedrooms towards the boxes.