Clark lifted his hands from the ends of the opened cuff.

Lois stared down at the place they had left, at the bent-back curve of steel where her wrist lay. Slowly, she lifted her other hand and touched a finger to one of the pinched-off ends, as if it might perhaps bend like putty again.

Or as if it had opened of its own accord, and might close again as quickly.

He watched the comprehension of it seeping into her face. He felt her slow-spreading shock in his own body, like making groundfall. It would be with him the rest of his days.

Of course, with his recall, so would everything else.

Like the unholy voices that had come to him in his kryptonite madness. And every word they had said.

But primarily, this moment, dreaded and longed-for. When her brown eyes widened, and her mouth dropped open, and she lifted her face to look up at him. And said nothing at all.

I'm sorry. I didn't plan to do it this way. I know what it feels like, to have the world go mad around you.

Because now he saw, in her eyes, the same lostness he knew from the first touch of the kryptonite madness. From the pits and walls he'd seen in his path that hadn't really been there, as they led him through the factory for questioning. And he had known what was happening. He knew the touch of kryptonite, as she knew the touch of shock.

Though he had never before realized that the shield of his skull was protecting his brain from it, until the moment when the diaphragm bent space to transmit it inside. He had never known kryptonite had that potential, never felt that intimate and wordless violation.

And now there was something similar shadowed in her eyes. But you were so sure we were done for. I couldn't bear it.

Do you regret it already?

Lois looked back down, and up again. Her heart was starting to race in her ribcage. She was wide-eyed, pale, searching his face, as he had watched her search a hundred, hundred witnesses and suspects.

But what are you looking for in me?

He swallowed. "Lois?"

As he watched her, staring at him as if she hadn't heard, his recall of the kryptonite voices came back like a cold finger on his neck. And the fears that had known him from childhood, that they had brought across the years to that night, reached out for him again.

About the humans all round him being, below their skins and behind their eyes, unknowable. Endpoints of an alien evolution. That unanswered question, whether he could ever know for certain what fermented in their minds. Or was it all one long, mutual misunderstanding? Was he, after all, alone on a planet of alien intelligences, all moving to currents subterranean and secret, that would one day shift?

It's the kryptonite talking, Kent. You just haven't quite shaken it yet.

For the love of God, Lois, please say something.

"Oh," she said.

He snapped back into reality. Tell me you understand, and it's all right. Let me mope around the newsroom for a few days, while you bring me food and proofread my articles.

Instead, looking down at her other hand still cuffed, he reached one hand out halfway and said, "May I?"

She looked down. Then she lifted her wrist up to him, mutely, looking back up at him with unreadable eyes. His hands trembling – Kent, stop it, she'll think you'll slip and break her wrist – he took the metal between thumb and forefinger and peeled it away.

"Oh, God," Lois clarified, her voice shaking at the end.

Maybe she didn't know what to say. Maybe she wasn't saying more because, Loislike, she didn't want her voice to crack. But he couldn't take it anymore, this silence for his addled fears to run wild in.

"I'm so sorry," he said, and his voice sounded loud in his own ears. "I would have chosen somewhere else. But the cave-in…it…boxed me in a bit."

And then he heard the chopping of helicopter blades, rising from behind the skyline.

Jimmy must have made it.

Lois, we don't have long. So would you process this in the next fifteen seconds, and then maybe give me a game plan in the ten after that?

Lois took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Of all things, she got out a shaky little laugh.

She almost whispered, "This is what you called a 'project'?"

And then her eyes opened and her glance went to the ripped-open wall, and he knew she heard the helicopter as well. It would be in sight in a moment.

He looked at her helplessly, thinking of all the hundred things he could say. "I'm sorry."

She looked at him mutely, back at an unLoislike loss for words, staring as if he were somehow changing before her eyes. The black G.M.P.D chopper cleared the skyline and banked toward them, a black dragonfly silhouetted by the sunrise.

Lois glanced at it. Then she focused down at the ground and shook her head violently for a moment, as if trying to fling off confusion like water. She took another deep breath and swallowed hard. He was afraid she might be fighting back tears.

And then she looked up at him, and held out the cuffs, dangling clinking from her hand.

"I guess Superman must have opened these," she said, almost levelly. "And then gone off to look for other victims."

For a moment he stared at her in horror, wondering if she could possibly have misunderstood everything. Or if he really had pushed her off the edge. Or if this was going to be that moment, when the human race became utterly alien.

The moment the kryptonite hallucinations had promised him was coming.

Then he realized she was trying to get their stories straight for the police.

"With the ceiling collapsing," he said numbly, "that was damned irresponsible of him."

Don't tell me you're going to handle this better than I am.

"Only if we're still sitting under the cracks."

And she gave him a shaky smile, and got up and walked unsteadily to the edge. He followed behind her. By her profile, backlit by the dawn sun, it was far from over. She was keeping it together. But barely.

He got up and joined her at the edge.

"Lois, I…"

She swallowed. "And what about the kryptonite? Do you know if Marshall and his men took it?"

"Lois…I'm so sorry…"

As the chopper lowered itself by the wall, she turned and met his eyes. He saw there utter disorientation, incomprehension of the world they looked out on. And they looked at each other helplessly, as an officer leaned out of the chopper behind her, with his megaphone.

He stepped in close to her and whispered, over the chopper blades, "My parents' lives are in your hands."

She turned and looked at him, mutely. He saw the comprehension in her eyes.

"G.M.P.D. Is anybody in there injured?"

Could you please, please leave, and come back in a couple of minutes? We were in the middle of a conversation. I can give her a ride home. Unless she never wants to see me again...We haven't cleared that part up yet.

"Officer," he said aloud, over the chopper blades, "thank God you're here."

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First, on the ground, the paramedics checked them over. In light of his supposed half-hour unconscious from going up against the ravener, it was the closest Clark had ever come to being taken to the hospital. He shuddered to think what his head imaging would look like. He had to finally, politely, refuse, and then to convince them of his competence to refuse.

Lois was mostly silent, as they cleaned and bandaged her jaw, except when they brought out the recovered kryptonite. With typical presence of mind, if less than her typical flare, she insisted they transport it separately, that she wouldn't stand being around it any more.

And as they badgered Clark about why he didn't want a workup of a likely intracranial bleed, his recall cut in on him again.

About the questioning room in the factory, where it had taken the last remaining bit of his strength to keep silent, while the doorway slid around the walls and the floor rippled beneath him.

He had been clinging desperately to his cover, trying to hide the signs of the madness while they questioned him about what he knew and who else knew it, how badly they had failed to hide their tracks by taking Lois and Jimmy. If they realized who he was…Ma, Dad, all of Smallville, Perry, Lois, Jimmy…he had recited their names again and again there, as the seal on his silence.

When the paramedics finished, they were taken to the station. They gave their statements separately, per G.M.P.D. protocol.

Their witness rooms were side by side, and he couldn't concentrate on his interview for the life of him. Partially, because he was watching Lois' through the wall, to keep their stories straight. And partially, because the floodgates of his recall had opened. It was just getting started with him.

Fantasizing again, the kryptonite voices had whispered in the questioning room in the factory.

Not true! he had answered silently. I haven't let myself fantasize about Lois for over a year. It was a boy's crush back then. Selfish. I stopped!

Fantasizing, about a grateful world. About the love of humans. You study their muscles and their neurons firing as long as you like. You'll never know them.

I know mom and dad, he had answered, watching his questioner's faces swim before him. Had he said it aloud?

Like wasp maggots know the hosts they were laid in. The day's coming, Clark Kent, Kal-El, Superman, last son of Krypton, cuckoo chick in an alien nest. You'll find out you have no idea what happens behind their eyes, and that all the distance you traveled will not bridge it.

"Mr. Kent?"

He shook himself and looked up to meet the eyes of the weary forty-something officer across the table from him. The station coffee was getting cold in the styrofoam cup at his elbow. Under the single overhead light, there in the same bare room they used for both witnesses and suspects, she looked almost as worn-out as he was.

"I'm sorry."

"Not a problem. I said, did your human captors deliberately harm you in any way?"

He made up something halfway coherent. In her witness room next door, Lois was spinning out the bit about Superman breaking the chains and flying off, without a hitch.

But then her questioner added, "Ms. Lane, did he seem completely…recovered to you, by the end? Or was he still disabled?"

"In what way?"

"In any way. This was an unprecedented type of kryptonite attack, penetrating his brain in an unprecedented way. Anything you could remember might be important."

She hesitated. He heard his own heart pounding in his chest. What had she read there in his eyes in those moments? What did she know about him, that maybe he himself didn't?

She tilted her head and looked at her interviewer, the way she looked at people she interviewed. And then he heard the muscle units firing, as she tensed imperceptibly.

There's Lois, too, he had told the kryptonite voices in the factory. I know her. She went into newspaper so she could tell the truth, to protect the innocent.

Fantasizing again, they had said. Lois has always seen the alien in your eyes. She'll be the first to turn from you.

And it was at that moment, as he had reeled, his own mind slipping through his fingers, that the kryptonite dazzle had gone out like a light switch. In a faraway room in that same factory, unknown to him then, Lois had just set fire to the diaphragm.

There in the witness room next door to him, she took a breath. She said, "By the end of the battle he seemed to me to be entirely himself. Which means, if anything, he recovered faster from transmitted kryptonite than he has from the standard attacks in the past."

Clark breathed again.

"Mr. Kent?"

"Sorry." He jerked his head back to look at his officer again. "I'm so sorry," he said, feeling genuinely bad for her. He wondered if Perry always felt this way during staff meetings.

He saw just a flash of irritation in her eyes, quickly swallowed by pity. There had been an edge in her voice, but she sighed and rubbed her eyes and looked back up at him, and spoke more gently. "No. I'm sorry. You've been through…well…calling it traumatic doesn't do justice, does it? Don't you want to talk to a crisis counselor?"

I want to talk to Lois. I want to go home and sleep. I want to forget the desperate eyes of the ravener, and the filthy blank faces of the children, and the little police-girl – you would have liked her, ma'am – and the kryptonite voices.

I had better go home and sleep, before my thoughts start coming out aloud.

"No, ma'am. I apologize. I just don't remember everything too well. I keep trying to think of something to add, but I'm never sure if I'm remembering or imagining."

She nodded. "We could get the EMTs back within fifteen minutes. It's no trouble for them. Plenty of victims think they're fine till the adrenaline wears off. That's when things start to hurt."

"Thank you, ma'am. I just want to go home. I mean, I want to help, of course. I just…is Lois all right?"

His officer blinked. "Is that the hurry, then?" She looked at him with new sympathy. "We're almost done here. Two more questions. And then we'll be done for today." She smiled wryly. "Though you know we're going to be good friends for months to come."

"Yes, ma'am. Thank you. What else was there, then?"

She peered at him over her own glasses, meeting his eyes through the jagged cracks in his. "Mr. Kent, why on earth did you act on your own, without even contacting the G.M.P.D.?"

He blinked.

Because I didn't know they could target me without identifying me first. Because they said they'd kill her if they caught sight of you.

And because I have no idea how deep Luthorcorp's roots go here, ma'am, and I've been afraid for a year that they include your department.

Aloud he said, "Was that illegal?"

She looked at him in real exasperation this time. "It was reckless, Mr. Kent. I don't have the heart just now to take you to task for it the way you deserve. But it was a damnfool way to be macho, and you put them all in more danger by doing it. Vigilante justice only works in Gotham City."

Despite everything, he almost laughed at the macho part, but he held it in.

"No, ma'am. I know it was reckless. But I can honestly say I haven't been thinking my clearest tonight. Today. I kept seeing…imagining them…" He rubbed his eyes. Thankfully, his recall had fallen silent for the moment. "Was there another question?"

She looked down over her paperwork. There was nothing left on her sheet. "No," she said, unexpectedly loudly. "I think that's all. Why don't you get yourself together for a moment, and then I'll go see how Ms. Lane's coming?"

He nodded mutely.

His officer got up to the door and opened it. She looked both ways in the grey, silent hall. Then she closed the door softly and came back to him.

Clark looked up at her, puzzled. She put a finger over her lips. She took another sheet from her stack, a little post-it note with a handwritten question, and turned it around to face him. He looked down at it.

Was there any mention of Luthorcorp?

He looked up at her, astonished. She looked pointedly around the room.

He didn't have to follow her. The perfect clarity of his peripheral vision had noted speakers in the four ceiling corners the moment they entered. Exhausted he might be, but not blind.

And the next moment he knew, sickly, without a doubt, what had raised Lois' hackles a moment before.

Clark shook his head slowly. They looked at each other across the table in utter, wordless mutual comprehension. He took the pen from her hand. How many in this department? he wrote. His hands had stopped shaking.

She took it back. If we knew, it would be easy.

She hesitated a moment. Then she added, faster, almost scribbling, Keep writing your articles, Mr. Kent. But both of you, watch your backs. Someone knew Ms. Lane was still at the Planet that night. Maybe someone who saw her there, when he was leaving work.

Clark looked up at her in horror.

"Do you feel all right to go now?" she said aloud cheerfully, taking the note.

"Yes, ma'am," he said numbly. "I feel much better."

Lois was still being questioned when he got out to the station waiting room, but Perry and Jimmy were there. Jimmy had finished giving his shorter statement an hour before, and had been pacing the halls in the interval, while Perry sat reading the same page of a four-month-old magazine, over and over. The kids had been taken directly to Metropolis Children's Hospital.

Perry got up and studied him, his eyes shining in his grizzled face, almost overflowing. He had aged ten years in forty-eight hours.

"She's okay, Chief," Clark said simply. And Perry shook his hand, without speaking, his Adam's apple working.

"And you, son?"

Clark smiled wearily. "I will be."

He turned to Jimmy and they embraced, wordlessly, for a long moment. "You know they've got no leads on the men?" Jimmy said over his shoulder.

"I know," Clark said quietly. "And no Luthorcorp connection. What about the kids?"

"All okay," Jimmy said simply. "Filthy. Full of chocolate."

Clark held him out at arm's length, and held out his hand. Jimmy took it and they shook, solemnly. "Well done, soldier," Clark heard himself saying, his own voice hoarse in his ears.

Good man. These good-hearted, faithful men…it's not so mysterious what goes on behind their eyes, is it? Is it?

It occurred to him, the next moment, that the slips Jimmy accepted without question might raise an eyebrow with Perry. It was probably time to say something goofy. And then he decided he was too tired to care.

In fact, he wondered in passing if it would be too outrageous to relax a little more around the newsroom, to tone down the goofiness just a bit. Surely that was plausible, reasonable, after two years?

Now that's definitely the kryptonite talking.

And then he heard Lois' footsteps, rounding the corner with her officer, and they all looked up together.

Her jaw was covered with a clean bandage. Her steps were weary, with none of the crispness that greeted him every morning at the office. She was slumping, the way she never did in public. But she saw them and lifted her head, and smiled, and it was like the sunrise all over again.

Perry and Jimmy rushed her, and threw their arms around her, tangling themselves up together, while Clark watched silently. He had never thought she would do well in a group hug. But half-laughing, half-asleep, she didn't seem to mind.

And then, watching them, he finally, finally, allowed himself to think, They're safe. They're safe. Whatever she thinks about me, whatever she decides…even if the kryptonite voices were right about that…that smile, and that mind and spirit are still here.

And then there was a call for help, on Sixth and Kingsfield.

Weary as he was, he caught himself reaching for his shirt buttons there in the middle of the police station.

Mentally he smacked his forehead. His hand froze and dropped, just as Jimmy and Perry stepped aside, and his eyes and Lois' met across the room.

He swallowed. Into that silence he said, "Just remembered. Very important. Better go."

Perry and Jimmy blinked. Jimmy looked merely baffled; Perry looked almost disappointed in him for bungling the moment.

And Lois' eyes widened. And as he watched mutely across the room, for once he could read her like text, as her mind scrolled through all his history of strange disappearances, transformed in the altered light of that one new truth. And he stared at her, unable under Jimmy and Perry's gaze to even use his eyes to plead with her.

"Clark," she said into the silence, her voice a little shaky. "I can't believe I'm saying this, but could you maybe chase that last lead without me?" She looked back at him, exhausted but steady, unblinking.

It was an unbelievable moment. To Jimmy and Perry, most likely, because after two years of apprenticeship, Lois was turning him loose. And to Clark because, he realized, in a hundred hundred such awkward emergencies, he had never had anyone hand him his excuse.

Then he realized he hadn't breathed out for a full minute. He let his breath out, and breathed in again, and said, "Of course." After a moment, looking at her, he added, "After all, I got off easy."

"Be careful," she said softly. "He has enemies everywhere." Her eyes moved pointedly around the room.

And he looked at her, the strength of her small shoulders, the faithful unceasing rhythm of her heart, the cycling of her blood. The fluid in her jaw tissue was beginning already to drain back to its right place in the veins. He watched her wordlessly, grimly, but aware at the same time of the warmth of a little bright flame of hope.

Burning low but steady, like a lighter, like the lucidness looking back at him from her eyes.

He left.

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Clark woke with his throat dry, soaked in sweat, with an unaccustomed draft blowing over him.

He opened his eyes and looked down.

The covers were parted over the length of his body. He had ripped them clean in half. He sat up, and lifted them, and there were smaller tears near his elbows and toes. He had thought, stumbling into bed after stopping the mugging, with Lois already home asleep, that he was too weary to dream.

He rubbed his eyes and looked for the clock. It was after seven. By the waning winter light outside, that was seven in the evening. He had slept for twelve hours. He usually needed two.

Then, moved by a dark premonition, he checked the date on his watch. He had slept, in fact, for two days.

He looked around the room again, wondering if the walls would buckle and the doors would move.

He had dreamt of the policewoman, passing notes to him. And at first, they said the words she had really written. But then he had looked down and seen, looking back at him, the words fantasizing again.

He had looked up at her, and seen there instead the milky eyes of the ravener – no, of the police-child. She smiled at him wryly with her last gasping breath and said, "Best not to trust too easily, with a strange world." And then she died at his feet.

And then they had been back in the factory, with the police-child still there at his feet, with the ruined wall open to the sunrise. He looked around, and there was Lois, looking down at her peeled-apart handcuffs. She had looked up at him and said, wondering, "I should have guessed, from the kung pao chicken."

"Lois," he had said miserably, "I'm sorry. I stopped fantasizing a long time ago. Also, about being Superman." He didn't want to look in her eyes, but he had to, to see whether there was an alien, a stranger, staring back out.

But they were grave, and wide, and full of pity, like those of another of her kind in a Kansas farmhouse. She had cocked her head and looked at him, and shaken her head slowly. "Clark Kent, Kal-El, Superman, last son," she said gently, "you really need to lighten up."

Sitting on the edge of his bed, replaying it, Clark realized his heart was racing again. He went into the bathroom, splashed cold water on his face, and sat back down again, looking over the ripped wreckage of his sheets. He hadn't done that since puberty.

He shook his head and pulled his thoughts together.

Clark Kent, you really need to lighten up.

He sighed. He probably did. And the kryptonite voices and the dreams didn't change anything. All the human world, as unending aliens to him, and he to them - he hadn't been tormented this badly by those fears for years, but it wasn't a new wound. Just the reopening of an old one. And he had come to truces with it already before, time and again.

Admittedly, not as successfully as he'd thought. But tomorrow would be better, and the following day better still.

"But I'll have to get new sheets," he said aloud, his own voice sounding strange to him.

And I have to talk to Lois. Because kryptonite madness and eternal aliens or no, we still have a lot to talk about. These boy's fears of his were one thing. The real complexities he had just dropped in her lap were another.

She had defended his cover and his mysteries without dropping a beat. She didn't hate him. Probably. He knew without thinking, without questioning, that she would be his ally and guard his secret faithfully.

But that's not really the question, is it, Kent?

Because it would require no fury, no compulsion for exposure, for her to find it unbearable to keep the Man of Steel in her life. Deathbed good intentions in the factory were one thing. The innate, unforceable intricacies of relationships, which either worked or didn't, were another. She had never been comfortable with that side of him.

And he had already promised he would understand.

And if it does change everything, that's all right. Muggings and robberies and hate crimes aren't going anywhere. And I won't be a cuckoo chick. I won't make the world suffer for my own insecurities.

Lois, would you proofread that thought for me? I'm a little tired, and I'm not sure it made sense. I think I'm worn out from writing about that last Superman crisis.

"Clark," she said softly, "are you up?"

He jerked his head up, and looked around the room for her.

Then he felt like a fool. It had been years since he'd assumed things he heard must be nearby. No, she was calling him from her apartment. He could almost see her on her balcony, leaning over the railing, the wind just lifting her dark hair from her thin shoulders, her clear eyes peering out into the haze over the city.

Despite everything, Clark felt himself smiling in the half-dark of his room. She was, apparently, no slouch on the possibilities for convenience his abilities afforded.

He got up to shower.