----Chapter 7
Watching Clark take a deep breath, Lois could only wonder what he was going to say. Had he become somebody like the Green Arrow? Was he some vigilante running the rooftops looking for crime? She wondered if Bruce being Batman had led him towards that, if that's what he was talking about.
"Lois, you know all those times that I've disappeared without a word and turned up places where I shouldn't and couldn't possibly be? All those times I've miraculously saved people who, for all intents and purposes, shouldn't have survived?"
She nodded to his question, remembering the hero complex very well since she'd just mentioned it.
"Well, I've been able to do those things because I have some gifts. As in, I have super powers I use to save people."
Lois worked her jaw a second before drawing upon her knowledge of words to say something. "Ok..."
"And not only that, but I am not so much from Earth as I am from a planet called Krypton that was destroyed right after my biological parents launched me towards Earth in a small spaceship as a baby. Oh, and my birth name is Kal-El."
Lois watched as the confidence Clark had been oozing became a little less prevalent. He was still leaps and bounds better than he'd ever been so far as she remembered, but she liked the way he was. Suddenly the weight of the world on his shoulders look made a lot more sense, though she still wasn't going to excuse the brooding.
She figured being alright with all of this would help. It certainly couldn't hurt things. The news was... shocking, for lack of a better word, but in the grand scheme of things only like the third weirdest situation of the day. She was still way more nervous about possibly having a daughter. And memory problems on the scale she had them... ok, no, she was moving the fact that she apparently had an extraterrestrial husband above her memory loss on the crazy scale.
That's when it hit her: she had a daughter that was only half human. Freakin' weird. "I guess Jordan being half... what is it again?"
"Kryptonian. K-R-Y, not C-R-I, just in case you were wondering."
"Right. Jordan being half kryptonian explains why she seems older than three, at least in speech."
Clark only nodded an answer. Lois scrambled for something else, hoping to fill the awkward silence. He said he had powers, so that seemed a topic that could be broached.
"Abilities! So, um, show me your powers. Well, tell me what they are first and then show them to me." None of that sounded natural, so she went for sarcastic. "Wow me, Smallville." She smirked and watched his face brighten a little. Can't go wrong with sarcastic and smirking.
"Powers. Well, I run extremely fast. Smallville to Metropolis and back faster than you'd probably believe. I've got super breath, which means I can produce very strong winds if I blow hard enough. Freeze breath, heat vision..."
"Heat vision? What does that mean?"
"Basically, I can shoot lasers out of my eyes. I can control the intensity of the heat produced and use it for anything from warming you up after being dunked into freezing water to melting metal or welding two things together."
"Certainly a useful power."
"They all are. I also have X-ray vision, telescopic and microscopic vision, super strength, and am more or less invulnerable."
"Well, that's not a lot to take in all at once." The man was a walking list of abilities little boys dreamed of having! "Anything else in there, farm boy?"
"I can, uh, fly."
Well that one caught her unawares. "You can fly?"
"Yeah. It's even faster than the running, as you can imagine, and how I get around not only Metropolis but the world to help people."
She watched him hover off the ground and lift her seat with her still in it with one hand like it weighed nothing. He then exhibited his heat vision and freeze breath on a trashy romance novel he found before she slumped back in her chair.
A concerned look passed over his face as she looked to him instead of where he'd been demonstrating. "I hope I'm not piling on too much with all this."
"No, it's not that. What I can't wrap my head around is a super hero from another planet that is more human than anybody, ever, married a very brash, brain damaged army brat. I mean, I know I'm sexy, but I don't think it offsets," she paused and waved a hand at her head, "this whole thing."
"Also, why in the world would I marry you of all people when I forget things. Seriously, aside from having a smoking body, you were not high, or really even on my radar because of your brooding tendencies."
Clark shrugged as Lois noted a small smile playing at his lips. "Things change, Lo. I had my head so twisted with the negative I figured I had a destiny of loneliness ahead of me. A woman out there for me? With my track record and destiny, a life together would be way too dangerous for her. Not only that, but I wouldn't want to burden anybody with my secret that doesn't need that kind of pressure. I've learned that it's more than it would seem to be.
"But, I got things figured out. Got my thinking straight, not without help from a certain spunky blonde, and found in myself, and more so in you, how to be happy. I just needed the love of the right woman."
"I'm happy for you, Clark. I really am. But even with your apparent 180 degree turn from Clarkie, brooder extraordinaire, I wouldn't be able to get that out of my head. I'd be waiting for the mope to return. Like I said, before this memory jazz you were a good friend with a hot body I would never fall for."
"I think you underestimate my power to get you to fall in love with me."
"I don't fall in love quickly, Smallville. Actually, that's pretty much an understatement. It takes a good long while for anything resembling love to take hold of me. You should know that as well as anybody, better now I suspect."
"Forgetting doesn't happen that often, Lo. It's not a yearly thing so much as every two to four years. The time it happened after just a couple years was not long after we, well I, found out you were pregnant with Jordan. This time, pregnant again but it's been over three and a half years, so maybe it's a coincidence. It's doubtful, but you never know.
"Anyway," he said as he grinned at her widely, " this being the third time you've forgotten since we got together, I know all of your defenses, as well as some things you haven't thought of yet. Please trust me when I say I can break your walls down."
She scoffed at him. "Not likely, farm boy."
He scoffed right back. "I dare you to resist me, city girl. Two months, you'll be cracking. In fact, if you weren't so ridiculously stubborn, I'd say a month. However, I know you'll last an extra month out of stubborn pride. Which, if I may add, is a trait you passed to our daughter."
"Every Lane is stubborn, Smallville, so you're damn right Jordan is." Wait, had she just called Jordan a Lane? She shook her head and rolled her eyes at him and herself, walking over to stand right in front of him. "I thought that if I had gotten anything through that thick skull of yours, it was that you never make a bet you can't win. You just did that, and you're going to pay."
"We'll see. Currently, though, I'm going to go get our food. You know how I said it's very authentic?" She nodded. "Doesn't get any more authentic than being straight from China, does it?" He winked at her and disappeared from sight with a gust of wind.
She shook her head and muttered to herself as she pulled hair out of her eyes. "Unbelievable."
Thirty minutes and a severely grumbling stomach later he was back in front of her holding a few bags of food. He handed her a large carton of white rice and another with assorted dumplings, which she immediately dug into when she found a fork and sat down at the table. Clark and Jordan joined her after a moment, but she didn't bother to acknowledge either of them beyond grunts in response to questions. When she heard Clark jokingly warn Jordan to watch her hands around mommy or else they might get eaten, she glared at him but continued to eat anyway.
When she finally felt full, she noticed Jordan was gone and Clark was just staring at her, smirking. The cartons were now empty and she knew there had been at least three egg rolls and a number of wontons somewhere in that feeding frenzy. Groaning, she let her head fall back and began mumbling to herself. "I have to be pregnant to eat that much."
"Hey now, you've always had a healthy appetite, Lo. Don't go blaming it all on Tiny in there." He pointed at her stomach to make sure she got his point. "I'd say it's thirty percent Tiny, currently."
She laughed at him a second. "You call our embryo Tiny?"
"Fetus." She looked at him funny. "You're far enough along now that he or she is a fetus, not an embryo. And why not Tiny? I could always use the nickname Peanut, or to be less of a cliché and stick to the nut theme, Cashew or Almond."
She saw his eyes light up and the rest of his face quickly followed suit. "That's it! Until we have a name, and probably well beyond that, our currently internal baby shall be called Almond Joy!"
Lois rolled her eyes but couldn't help grinning at his pure joy at having come up with the name. "Are you serious? If we start using that with any frequency and we may as well just have a therapist deliver him or her and cut out the middle man."
"So long as the name is said with love it doesn't matter if you call the baby Almond Joy, Snickers or Twix. I could probably call our unborn baby doofus until it's born, not that I would, and so long as the love is felt, that's what's important."
Lois looked at Clark and realized that the strong Kent beliefs and values still held strong with Clark, even with all the bad he'd probably seen in the world. She couldn't decide if it was endearing or unbelievably ridiculous. She settled on the latter, but kept the former in mind.
She was glad he hadn't become jaded, though. She couldn't even really imagine what a jaded Clark would be like, but doubted it would be far off from broody Clark.
She looked away from him and rubbed her stomach a few times, thinking an apology to it for stuffing it so full when she was entirely likely to lose it all sometime not far in the future. Morning sickness... it's like she got the negative effects of being pregnant without getting to enjoy the sex that brought it about.
As soon as the thought entered her mind, she pushed it away. She didn't need to be having stray thoughts about sex with Clark. That was inviting all sorts of bad ideas into a day filled with far too much crazy for any one person.
Lois looked at him again and caught him staring. His eyes bored right into hers, making her a little uncomfortable. She turned away and waited for him to look away for a moment but his eyes never wavered. It was like he was taking a nap with his eyes open. She wondered if sleeping with his eyes open was part of his interesting heritage. Finally, though, she just got sick of it and decided enough was too much.
"Is not blinking for hours on end another one of your powers, Smallville?"
Her noisy intrusion caused him to blink a few times and grin sheepishly as he snapped out of his stare. "Sorry, I tend to have some deep thought sessions when you lose your memory. And before you say anything, it's not brooding, just thinking. I think I'd get kicked by four or five different people if I were to start brooding."
"Well, at least there's that. Nobody wants a mopey super hero, especially not me. Now, on to other topics that are more useful to me at the moment. I tried this once before, but let's give it another go." She motioned with a hand at herself and then him.
"When did we become a we?"
