Chapter 55
"Hmm… the flight I can take care of right now if you like, but the meeting…I don't know. How do I know you can behave yourself around her?"
"Oh, you can be sure I won't, not to your satisfaction anyway. I need to tell the—" she bit her bottom lip, smiled, and continued, "…the nice lady a thing or two."
He smiled down at her and said, "I'll think about it, but for now…" He scooped her up into his arms and slowly rose up into the air.
Dusk had descended around them and stars were beginning to litter the sky above them. The lights of neighboring farms seemed to be just twinkling dots in the distance. Lois noticed it all as she clung with her arms tightly encircling Clark's neck and watched the ground disappear into the growing darkness beneath them.
"Smallville, how…just how are you doing this?" she asked with a note of wonder.
"I really don't know. I couldn't for the longest time."
"And you just thought 'what the heck, I think I'll fly?' And you did?"
"Not exactly. This took me a long time to conquer. I grew up with a fear of heights."
"Why did you even try it then?"
"I knew it was the last step to…"
This was something that he wasn't comfortable talking about at all. She knew that. But somehow, she needed to get him to admit whatever it was he was so hesitant to share with her. "To what? She probed, momentarily forgetting they were hundreds of feet in the air, with Clark defying gravity as if it was an optional law to abide. "The last step to being more than just the Red/Blue Blur? To being Superman?"
"Yeah. To being Superman." She saw him shake his head. "I'm still grateful you didn't go with Stupendous Man, by the way."
"Yeah, well, it was taken anyway. Some comic strip character had first dibs on it. Superman is a fantastic fit though, Smallville, if I do say so myself." She smiled up at him proudly, looking up slightly to stare into his eyes. Glittering points of light framed his head and the sight of this super being from the stars against a background of them caused her to draw in her breath sharply.
At that same moment, Clark looked down at her. It caused him to lose focus for just the briefest second, and his flying speed increased greatly, causing Lois's head to slam into his chest. Almost immediately, he was in control again. She tightened her hold around his neck, and he could hear her breathing and heart rate quicken.
"Are you all right?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you sure? You're not hurt? That was some impact."
"I'm fine," she said again, gulped, and then asked calmly, "What…was that?"
"I think we'd better get back down on the ground." Clark flew lower, touching down within minutes back in front of the barn. As he put Lois down, he could feel her shaking.
When he put his hand up to the side of her head to check for any lumps, she batted his hand away and said, "I told you I'm all right."
"I'm sorry, Lois. That kind of sucked any romance out of the flight, didn't it?"
"Clark, what happened?"
He looked for all the world like it was the last thing he wanted to tell her, but he knew he had to, so he said, "My powers…they… sort of… surged."
"Surged?"
"Yeah. It's been happening a lot lately," he admitted, grimacing, as though he were embarrassed by the whole idea. "I told you I've been breaking the machines at the lab… well, that's why. My powers are growing. Really growing." He lowered his head as if he were a little boy that had been caught doing something bad. "And you wonder why I don't…why we can't…"
"But you got control back in just a couple of seconds."
"Yeah, my body is learning to deal with it, but, Lois, it would only take me a second to hurt you. Can you not see that?"
"Still concerned with that, are you?"
At that, he let out an audible groan, letting his frustration with her cavalier attitude for her own safety show itself. "I have to be conscious of it with anyone I interact with physically."
She gave him a look that spoke of surprise, suspicion, and jealousy all at once. He could see that the specter of Wonder Woman had sprung up between them in her mind again.
"No, not that way. I didn't mean that. I mean things like rolling with the force when someone slaps me on the back, remembering to allow enough give, and to exhale through my nostrils to provide a cushion of air along my arms when I catch someone who's falling, or when I—"
"Okay, okay, I get the picture." She turned and walked away from him a few steps to gather her own thoughts. "So if the ability to fly came last, maybe it's that one you're just having the most trouble compensating for? Yeah. That makes sense."
"It's certainly the trickiest of them all."
"And you don't know how you're doing it?" She turned, tilted her head to the side, and placed her hands on her hips. "Clark, you must have some clue if you went from no flying to-"
"—to catching a plane while flying?" he supplied.
"Oh, my god! Just how long had you been able to fly when you did that? How did you know you could do it?"
"I'd been trying for a few weeks before that. I'd managed to float a bit…but I didn't know. When I saw that plain falling out of the sky, I just knew I had to." She saw him look down again and scuff at the gravel with one foot. "Lois, I was on my way to meet you at the airport that day. I knew you were on that plane."
Her heart did a little jump at the idea that he'd taken that giant leap into flight to save her. No, that really wasn't true. She couldn't let herself believe that even if she wanted it to be true. There had been a lot of people on that plane that day. He'd saved them all. No, she had a feeling he'd have caught that plane anyway if she hadn't been on it.
"You said you were strong as a child and pretty much invulnerable. Your vision powers came along when you were a teenager. So why has it taken so long to learn to fly?"
"Honestly? I don't know. I don't know how I'm doing it or why I can, and neither do the doctors. They think it has something to do with my personal bioelectric field, either that, or some control my body's cells have in dealing with gravitons."
"Gravitons? What the heck are those?"
"They're…you know, some kind of sub-atomic particles. It's all theoretical. The problem is I'm not supposed to be able to fly. Not without wings or thrust and lift, and I think the only thing they're sure of is I don't have any wings. But then, you probably figured that out the first time you saw me."
"Yeah." It was all she could say in her surprise at the scientific jargon he was suddenly spouting as if he'd used it all his life.
"They're working on it though."
"And how are they doing that?"
"I'm not sure. They hook me up to a lot of strange devices and have me float. I'm not sure what it's telling them about me. Sometimes I wonder…"
"Wonder what?" There was something that worried her in his tone.
"Well, I caught Dr. Hamilton lying to me. At least, his heart rate shot way up, and, outside of some external cause for it doing that, it usually means someone is—"
"About what?" she asked sharply.
"That's just it. It was crazy. Probably nothing. Maybe I'm just getting a little sensitive again about being their personal lab rat."
"People like Dr. Hamilton don't lie about 'nothing,' Clark. They lie for gain or to protect themselves. What did he say?"
"He said he 'probably' didn't have a Kryptonian gene in his body. I mean, it's obvious that he doesn't, right?"
"Well," she began to pace as she thought about it, "I can only see two possibilities. Either he's been experimenting with your DNA, giving himself some injections of it or something like that, which would be really stupid, or…" She paused, trying to work out her thoughts.
"Or?"
"Or he thinks Kryptonians have been intermarrying with Earth people for a long time…which is equally crazy, because no one else is running, or flying around with powers like yours, and you said you only came here in the first meteor shower. It's not as if there was some kind of air corridor between here and Krypton with regular spaceships traveling back and forth—"
"It's not that crazy. There were portals to Krypton…and the stones were scattered all over the world…" Clark also had begun thinking out loud. "They were hidden a long time ago."
"What portals? What stones?" Lois drew back her head to stare at him. "Just how much have you left out telling me about yourself, Smallville?"
