Okay, I miscalculated what I'd already written (because I'm actually up to Chapter Thirteen in my writing-great progress!). There are actually two more Kansas chapters, this one and the next one-and then comes mystery and intrigue and a whole new phase of the Clark/Lois relationship (*squeal!*). And I'm probably going to start watching Man of Steel again for the fifth time tonight, so yeah, I'm a total goner for these lovely characters ;)

". . . pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, and in our own despite, against our will, comes wisdom to us by the awful grace of God."

-Aeschylus, "Agamemnon"

The next day Martha Kent appeared in church with her son and a very pretty young woman with keen blue eyes and a headful of hair the color of a newly-minted penny. If some of the most faithful parishioners found it difficult to pay attention to the sermon, they couldn't be blamed much. The sight of the newcomer was just too interesting.

Clark made a point to ignore the increased scrutiny. He could sense Lois doing the same, but she wasn't nearly as comfortable about it. Of course she wasn't. She hadn't spent thirty-three years, like he had, avoiding the curious looks of anybody who wondered at his strength or build.

She sat ramrod-straight in the pew with her eyes bolted on the minister and her hands tightly clasped in her lap. Clark discreetly touched her fists with his fingertips. Lois glanced at him and he gave his head the slightest of shakes. She didn't lose her dignified posture, but her fingers did loosen a little and she leaned back against the pew.

After church, she was soon surrounded by the kindhearted but intrigued citizens of Smallville. This time, however, Lois' confidence seemed to be on the rise. Clark watched her out of the corner of his eye while he stood with some of the other men in front of the church, and was glad to hear her laughing and talking with Pete Ross' mother, Gloria.

"Once the hurricane hits, we'll send the relief bus down to the Gulf Coast," Clark heard the minister saying. "Those poor people down there . . ."

"As if they hadn't had enough, after last year," another man grumbled. "It's been a bad couple of years for them. Say, Clark, I hear you're a reporter now. You gonna cut your vacation short to report on the disaster area?"

Clark shook his head. "No, I'm just a freelancer, I don't answer to an editor's beck and call unless he specifically asks for me. When is the hurricane supposed to hit?"

"They're predicting the fifth," the minister replied. "It'll be a grim Independence Day for the Southern states."

Clark nodded casually, as if he hadn't already owned this information. He hadn't taken his eye

off the weather forecast ever since the hurricane came close enough to North America to pose a threat. It was the first hurricane season where he was free to do something about it . . . but he had to admit, he was glad it wouldn't come until after the Fourth.

Martha had to go to work the next morning. The warm mugginess of the air promised a fair but hot day. Clark walked with his mother to the pickup, leaving Lois in the kitchen at her own insistence.

"I'll take care of the dishes," she'd said, tying one of Martha's aprons around her own waist. "I'll have it done in no time."

"I hate to leave you with it . . ." Martha said worriedly.

"Don't worry about it," Lois said with a smile and a toss of her head as she plunged her arms into the sudsy sink. "Have a good day, Martha. I'll try to keep Clark out of trouble."

Now, approaching the pickup, Clark heard the concerned note in his mother's voice as she spoke: "What are you going to do with her today?"

"I'm going to take her around the whole farm this morning, before it gets too hot," he said quietly. "She told me she needs some time this afternoon to write, though . . . so I'll clean out your gutters then."

Martha frowned up at him. "And tomorrow?"

"Tomorrow I'll take her into Smallville. Gloria Ross told us yesterday at church to drop by if we could. I think she took a liking to Lois."

Martha opened the pickup's door. He offered his hand; she took it and hoisted herself into the truck with surprising agility for her age. "All right . . . so long as you two stay busy and don't get into any trouble . . ."

Clark suddenly understood, and he grinned wryly at her. "Mom, don't worry. I've spent hours at her apartment in Metropolis and we haven't done anything you'd disapprove of yet. We aren't going to start now."

"Promise?" Martha asked, quirking a skeptical eyebrow.

He met her gaze steadily. "I'm not taking that step unless she's mine for keeps. I swear."

Martha slammed the pickup door shut; the window was rolled down, however, so she could keep talking. "All right, then. I'm just checking on you . . ."

"Do you like her?" he asked eagerly.

Martha's smile deepened. "She has just the right combination of trying to impress me and being herself." Her eyebrows suddenly furrowed. "You didn't tell her to impress me, did you?"

"Well, not exactly," he said, sheepishly rubbing the back of his neck. "I did tell her that if she came, it would show you that she took our relationship seriously enough to meet you. She was pretty scared of you at first."

Martha looked nonplussed and turned the key in the ignition. "A girl who all but faced off General Zod should not be scared of a cantankerous old woman."

"The woman who told General Zod to go to hell shouldn't be afraid of an inquisitive young reporter," Clark retorted.

Martha let out a shocked, laughing exclamation and reached through the open window to swat at his head. Clark ducked with a laugh. He held Dusty back by the collar while Martha turned the truck down the long, dirt road to the highway, then released the dog and went into the house.

When he pulled open the screen door Lois still stood at the sink, scrubbing a skillet. She gave him a rueful look. "I might not be able to cook worth a flip, but at least I can clean up my mess."

"Oh, your eggs weren't too bad," he said, grinning.

"I scorched them."

"And I still ate them."

Lois blew a loose strand of hair from her forehead. "Oh, Clark, you'd eat anything."

He watched her a moment, liking the sight of her biceps flexing beneath her short sleeves and that long, wavy strand of ginger hair drifting in front of her eyes. Handing her the last dirty plate from the table, he gently tucked the troublesome hair behind her ear.

"Thank you," Lois said, slipping the plate into the dishwasher. "I'm almost done here . . ."

"We can dry the dishes later. Come on, I want to take you for a walk. It's about time you saw where I grew up without Kryptonian invaders to interrupt us, like last time."

Intrigued, Lois hastily put away his mother's apron. Dusty trotted alongside as they left the front porch and entered the open yard. She'd already seen the barn, of course, and the now-empty cellar where Jonathan Kent had kept the round baby shuttle. Clark grabbed her hand and drew her to the south field.

"This isn't grass, is it?" Lois asked, running her hand over the top of the high green stalks.

"No, it's hay," he answered. "Mom rents out this field to old Mr. Tom Ross, Pete's dad. In October they'll harvest the hay and sell it, and Mom will get part of the money."

"What did you want to show me in here?"

Clark allowed his vision to zoom through the green curtain to the ground beneath. He found what he was looking for and led her towards it: a bowl-shaped dip in the ground where the hay wasn't nearly as high or healthy-looking, as if the soil there wasn't as nutrient-dense. Tiny spots of purple, however-violets-grew in the shorter grass.

"Remember the baby shuttle?" he asked quietly. "This is where it landed."

Lois stared at it, amazed. She released his hand and stepped into the dip, measuring it with her eyes, then sat down in it. She squinted up at him in the bright morning sun.

"Did they find you in the day, or the night?" she asked.

"Night," Clark said, remembering the day his parents sat him down and told him the whole story in the living room. "They thought at first the little ship was a meteorite-and then when they found me they thought I was some kind of Soviet experiment. The Cold War was still going on at the time."

Lois nodded thoughtfully. "And what happened after that? Did they take you to the doctor, to the police-what?"

He shook his head. "No, they said they just took me in and waited for someone to come for me. By the time they realized no one was ever going to come, they'd already decided they wanted to keep me."

He sat down on the edge of the dip, but not in it. Even as a boy, he hadn't been able to bring himself to get into the very spot where he first landed on Earth. An unconscious need to keep himself firmly in this world always kept him on the edge.

"Do you ever wish you still had the little ship?" Lois asked. "It was the only thing you had left from your planet."

Clark ran a blade of grass through his fingers. "We had to use it. You told me my father said so. The only thing I still wish I had was the command key."

"Well, you had to give that to me, too," Lois said briskly, obviously not wanting to think too long about the harrowing moment when he slipped it into her hand behind Faora's back.

"It took me weeks to remember it was gone," he said. "After all, I wore it around my neck for twenty-one years."

"Because you wanted something of your real parents close to you?"

"Yes . . . without knowing who or what they were."

Lois nodded towards the house. "You know . . . there's a chest in my room. My curiosity got the better of me last night, after you and your mother went to bed . . . and I peeked in it. It wasn't locked."

Clark stared at her, surprised. "What was inside?"

"Photo albums on top, and some old quilts." Lois shot him a sly smile. "I stayed up far too late looking at one of the albums. You were a very cute little boy."

Clark chuckled. "Thanks. What else did you find?"

Now Lois' eyebrows drew together a little. "At the very bottom of a chest, underneath all this other stuff, there was a cardboard box. I opened it up and found a blanket and a baby dress."

"That's all?"

"That's all. The baby dress is so cute-yellowed from age, but still pretty. The blanket, though . . ." Lois looked hard at him. "I don't think it was made by anybody on this planet, Clark. It looks like your cape-but it's silvery, not red."

His curiosity piqued, Clark glanced at the nearby house and the window of the upstairs room. He stood up. Lois followed him back into the house and up the stairs without a word.

Clark got down on his knees beside the chest and pulled out the photo albums and old quilts. He laid the cardboard box on the floor and opened it; Lois lifted out, with care, the yellowing baby dress with the pink skirt and lace hem, while he took up the blanket.

Unlike the dress, it showed no signs of age. Lois was right; it had the same texture as the red cape and was just slightly thicker. He stared at it, rubbing it between his fingers . . . imagining his real mother touching it long ago, wrapping him in it, tucking it around him before she sent him away. Lara, Jor-El had called her. Lois watched him keenly.

"Did you not know about this?" she asked.

"No," Clark murmured. "My dad gave me the key. I didn't know anything about the blanket."

Lois looked worried. "If Martha didn't want you to know about it-"

"She wouldn't have left this chest in here if she didn't trust you with it. She had to know you might not leave it alone." He clenched the blanket in his hands. "Did you look at all of the photo albums?"

"No . . ."

"Well, look now," Clark said, taking up one of the larger ones. He went to the back of it and pulled an envelope from the pocket. "These are the results of the chemical tests my dad asked Kansas State to run on the key. They told him it wasn't made of any known rock on this planet.

And look at this."

He pulled another folded paper from the pocket. "The results of the only blood test I ever had, done when I was six months old. They couldn't determine my blood type. At all. My parents never took me back to the doctor after that."

Lois stared at the papers, then at the blanket, then at Clark. She blinked hard, shook her head. "I've known all this long time I was in the presence of an alien. Sometimes it just hits me right between the eyes all over again."

Clark winced. "It's uncomfortable for me, too. I don't feel like an alien-most of the time I don't, anyway. But then, I don't know what it feels like to be a human, either."

"Yes, you do know," Lois said softly. "If you didn't, you wouldn't have saved us all."

He wasn't sure how to respond to that. Lois laid the baby dress back in the box but he held onto the blanket. "I want to ask her about this tonight."

"No, Clark, don't," she begged. "She'll be furious with me."

"If she is, then she's being unreasonable-and my mom isn't unreasonable," Clark said firmly. "Besides . . . I want to know about that baby dress. I wonder where it came from."

He didn't wait for Lois to go to bed to confront his mother. The two women were in the living room chatting that evening when he came in from his own bedroom with the blanket in his hands. Immediately Martha stopped mid-sentence and stared, shocked, at him.

"Is this what I think it is?" Clark asked quietly, gently. He didn't want her to think he was angry at her from withholding it.

Martha glanced sidelong at Lois. "So . . . which of you went digging in that trunk?"

"I did," Lois answered meekly.

"But I went up with her and looked for myself this morning," Clark added. "If you didn't want her to look in the chest, Mom, you should've locked-"

"Who says I didn't want her to look?" Martha cut him off, her voice slow and quiet. "Maybe I was hoping she would."

Clark and Lois stared at her. Martha held out her hands towards him, and he laid the blanket in her palms. Her strong fingers closed over it and she gazed wistfully at the thin golden threads racing through the silver cloth.

"You were on top of this blanket when we found you. You didn't have a diaper on, though, so I had a time trying to get a few stains out of it." Martha rubbed the edge of the blanket, her grey eyes thoughtful. "But as soon as I had it clean, I hid it away. We were so frightened you'd be taken away from us . . . we didn't want anything lying around the house that might be recognized as . . . as . . ."

"Alien?" Clark offered.

Martha shrugged, as if to say, Good enough. "When Jonathan gave you the key or talisman or whatever you want to call it, I thought about showing you the blanket. But you were so overwhelmed by what you'd just learned, I thought it would be better not to. And then . . ." She gulped. "I was afraid the blanket might make you think of your real mother, the way the key made you want to know your real father. I was selfish . . . I didn't want you to leave me."

Clark knelt in front of her and laid a hand on her knee. Martha put her own hand over his and patted it gently.

"I'm sorry, Clark," she murmured. "Do you want to keep it for yourself?"

He forced a smile. "What would I do with it in Metropolis? You keep it. I'm just glad I still have something from my parents, even if it's just a little blanket."

"Blankets don't carry the same sentimental value for a young man like a fierce-looking key, do they?" Martha asked dryly. She looked at Lois again. "If you found the blanket you must've found the dress."

Lois nodded slowly. "I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pried-"

"Don't be ridiculous," Martha said with an amused smile. "You're the most inquisitive young woman I've ever known. Someone as smart as you wouldn't be the kind to ignore a possible mystery, right?"

Lois blushed and laughed. Martha sat back, still stroking her son's hand. "My mother made that dress. Actually, she made a pink dress and a little blue suit."

"For me?" Clark asked, confused. He barely remembered his adoptive grandmother; she'd died before he was six years old.

"No-for my baby."

Clark jerked back in surprise. Martha drew herself up and met his startled gaze.

"A couple of years before Jonathan and I bought this farm, we had a little one of our own. A girl. She was premature, and that was back in the late 70's. They didn't have the technology then to save her, not like they do now."

Martha closed her eyes and took a deep, bracing breath. "She was too tiny to bury in that little dress, so I just kept it. The blue suit ended up being the only baby outfit I had in the house when we found you. Thank God I had something on hand."

"Why didn't you tell me that?" Clark asked, stunned by her secrecy.

"Maybe because it was too hard to talk about," Martha said quietly. "But the good Lord gives and he takes away. He took away my little Claire Elizabeth but he gave me you, so . . . who am I to complain?"

I embrace the purpose of God and the doom assigned . . . the words from the book Lois gave him weeks ago suddenly came back like a flash of lightning. That calm, humble acceptance of whatever life threw at you-his mother had it, just as Lois did.

He wondered what else he would learn about her-and himself-as the years progressed.