Chapter 12

Lois frantically tore through what appeared to be a storage room in the military hospital wing. There was enough light from the flashing alarms further down the hallway that she could just about make out the shadowy outline of the objects she rifled through, somehow having faith that she would know what she was searching for when she saw it.

Her instinct to protect her family spurred her on, giving her a singular sense of purpose that kept her moving despite the thoughts of defeat that threatened to creep in. There was no way she was going to just stand around while her son and her husband suffered a painful death in front of her eyes. She was going to find something in this room to protect them and she was going to get them out of there.

She glanced over at Jonathan, who still hovered in the doorway, peeking anxiously at the progress of the kryptonite gas as it continued to spread. He looked lost, and she felt a pang of recognition at his powerless expression. She knew how hard it was for him having to stand on the side lines these days, ever since his brother developed powers. Where once he'd been a pillar of confidence, the change in their family dynamic had clearly shaken his identity.

It was part of why she refused to just sit back and let Clark take all the risks, despite knowing that would be his preference. She needed him to know she was more than just a bystander.

Besides, right now the people with powers were the ones in the most danger, and it was up to them to do the saving.

'Sweetie, can you check those shelves over there?' she asked, pulling her son out of his thoughts and away from the gas.

'What are we looking for exactly?' he asked, heading quickly over to where she was pointing and absently picking up a few mysterious items.

'I don't know, gas masks? Lead blankets? Anything that might protect your dad and brother from the effects of the kryptonite gas,' she said, feeling like she was asking for a miracle.

But she knew this wasn't just any hospital, it was the DOD. They were used to dealing with unusual medical situations down here, included those of alien origin. That knowledge gave her a little hope they might find something more useful than they would in a normal hospital's storage cupboard.

Lois gratefully stumbled across a torch in her search and Jonathan spun around as she clicked it on.

'It's okay sweetie, it's just me, I found this,' she said, waving the torch slightly. 'Any luck over there?'

'I don't think so mom, it's mostly medicines and towels and stuff,' he said in defeat, glancing back over the shelves before turning back to her. He took a deep breath and asked, 'Mom… are dad and Jordan going to die?'

His words chilled her to the bone.

She hesitated briefly, knowing she couldn't just pretend away the danger they were in but feeling a familiar wall of protection around acknowledging worse case scenarios. It was part of the coping mechanisms she had developed over the years, and it had gotten her through so much – both as an investigative journalist, and then later as Superman's wife. She simply never allowed herself to acknowledge the possibility of defeat. When it came to hope, she would always be stubborn and tenacious, right until the bitter end.

'I know it feels like there's no hope right now honey, but trust me – sometimes things turn up, just in the nick of time,' she assured him, handing him the torch and adding, 'So just keep searching. How about over there in that cabinet?'

She could see that her words had only partially allayed her son's fears, but she suddenly felt much more confident herself. So many times they had been right up to the edge of catastrophe, when somehow luck had turned their way. There was still hope.

Lois returned to examining more strange objects in the dark, bring them closer to her face to get a clearer look. She found what look like ear plugs and casually pocketed them – they might not do anything for the kryptonite gas, but maybe they would help lessen the impact of the alarms that seemed to have jolted her husband's nervous system into fight or flight.

She hadn't yet had a chance to process the news that her husband had experienced a panic attack. He was always so defiant about fear and so dismissive when she made suggestions about getting help to process some of the experiences they'd been through. She had to admit, she wasn't exactly great at talking about her feelings either. It felt very unnatural to sit there and admit her vulnerabilities to a stranger.

She'd been to therapy once herself after losing their third child, their daughter, Natalie. She did try and engage with the process… and it's not that the session wasn't helpful or the therapist a bad fit – but she just felt she couldn't afford to take the plunge and really open up her emotional world. She had no idea what might happen, and their lives were just too busy.

Now she wondered if they'd both been a optimistic in their dismissal of how much damage unprocessed traumas could do over time.

'Uh, mom…' she heard Jonathan say, excitement in his voice. 'I think I found something.'

Lois dashed over to his side to see what he had stumbled upon. He held the torch out, waving it up and down so she could see the full scope of his discovery. She thanked whatever higher power there might be for proving her right to have faith, and gave Jonathan a beaming smile that clearly said, 'I told you so.'

Hanging up beside the shelves at the back of the cabinet were two bright orange hazmat suits.

As soon as the eradication procedure was complete, John Henry was in a battle for control of his own mind. The pain was excruciating, and he could feel the force of the kryptonian's consciousness pushing in on him… whoever this General Zod was, he was clearly very strong minded.

Thankfully, so was he.

Still tied down by the restraints, John felt the metal underneath him sliding out of the machine.

'General Zod?' Edge asked curiously, peering down at John Henry's form.

'He's feeling a bit shy,' John responded definitely, before grunting and clenching his teeth together as he pushed back against the other man's efforts to come forward.

'You're only making this worse for yourself by fighting it, John,' Edge attempted to reason with him. 'All you have to do is submit, and your pain will cease.'

'Oh you know what they say. No pain, no gain,' John replied sarcastically, gritting his teeth as another wave of the man's mental force pushed in on him and his eyes briefly flashed red.

He shook his head to try and help himself stay focused. He needed to push it all out, Zod, Edge, his memories of Kal-El - he pushed out anything but the thought of his family. Lois. Natalie.

He may have lost them, but that didn't mean they couldn't still give him strength.

John Henry pictured the memory of his wife holding his baby girl at the hospital after she was born. He felt the joy that had coursed through him as she smiled up at him, so proud of the life they had created, so much love for the unbelievably tiny little life in her arms. The more he connected to that moment, the further away the other man's presence in his mind seemed to get.

'So be it,' Edge said with a petulant sigh. 'Delay the inevitable.'

Edge motioned towards two men that John hadn't noticed before and they undid his restrains, pulling him up into a standing position and shoving him towards a doorway leading god knows where.

'Fight as long as you can John… but eventually, you will fade as this new mind comes to light,' Edge called out, and John could hear the anticipation in his voice.

'Not even Superman is strong enough to resist the will of Zod.'

Earth-TUD22

1 year earlier

Natalie woke to the sound of blaring alarms and she immediately called out for her dad, looking around to see if he had returned. She cursed herself for having fallen asleep at the monitors. She had been scouring them for hours, waiting for any sign of success.

'Your father has not yet returned from his mission,' the AI she helped create and lovingly named 'Hettie' told her.

'What's happening Hettie?' she asked, her voice trembling.

'I'm detecting some sort of temporal anomaly moving through our galaxy,' Hettie advised, bringing up an image of the strange phenomena she'd discovered on her monitors.

Natalie frowned as she peered at the screens. What she was seeing didn't make any sense.

'It's compromising the integrity of our entire dimension,' Hettie added.

This was bad. Really bad. She had to let her dad know immediately.

'Establish a link to my dad,' she commanded Hetti.

'Your father has left orbit. Your escape pod may not reach him before…' Hetti pointed out, but Natalie had already started entering the code to the back room where the escape pod was stored.

'Just do it, please,' Natalie called out, now desperate with worry as she tried to imagine what might happen if her dad encountered this anomaly without any warning.

She knew he'd be furious with her for coming after him, but she couldn't just sit there when he could be walking into a universal death trap.

Within minutes, she was up in the air and out of the earth's orbit, hot on the trail of her dad's spaceship. The she saw it, her initial excitement quickly replaced by horror as she saw Kal-El punching the spaceships windows, trying violently to break in.

'Dad!' Natalie cried out, trying to figure out if there was a way to make this thing go any faster.

With no idea exactly what she going to be able to do to help, she propelled the pod forwards. Just as she closed in on her dad's ship, she saw some kind of explosion radiate out from it, and Kal-El tumbled away from them and back towards the earth.

Natalie didn't have time to celebrate the solar flares successful effect.

'Something's wrong,' Hetti spoke up. 'We are losing connection to your father's ship.'

Natalie lifted her hands to shield her eyes from the brightness of the red explosion whose shock wave now rocked her body back and forth in her seat. She tried to reach out for anything to hold onto to gain a bit of stability as she was thrown around in her seat. The pod had almost caught up to her dad's ship now. Surely his AI would have clocked on to her by now.

She was so close to being able to hold him once more, and this time she was never going to let him out of her sight.

Suddenly, Natalie looked up in stunned silence as a wave of energy began sweeping towards her dad's ship, engulfing it and leaving nothingness it its wake. Then the wave came over the pod and she was plunged into darkness and stillness.

Looking out at the emptiness surrounding her, she somehow knew wherever she was… she was on her own.

Clark barely registered the general's words as he spoke angrily into the radio, but he could see the fear they produced on his sons face. He wanted so badly to be able to stand up straight and reassure him, but there was something happening inside of him that he'd never felt before.

The sight of the impending Kryptonite gas was stirring up yet another panic response, but this time it came with a detached sensation, like he was losing his grip on reality.

Dimly aware of his son's concerned face mouthing something at him, he felt his body sink back against the wall and slide to the floor. He knew it was happening, but he couldn't say he felt it exactly. He barely felt like he was in his body at all.

His eyes were fixed straight ahead at the still incoming smoke, and he squinted as he thought he could make out a shadowy figure making it's way towards them. Was that Lois?

As the figure moved closer, his outline started to become familiar, and he knew it wasn't his wife's form he was seeing. It was his captor.

It couldn't be him, could it? Clark shook his head and tried to reason with himself, but he was struggling to remember where he was. When he was.

He could do nothing but watch as Lex Luthor approached through the smoke, moving purposefully slowly. A familiar horror crept over him… whatever doubt he'd been entertaining before, whatever they had done to him this time to confuse his mind, he knew this was really happening.

He felt it.

The terror, the pain, the unbearable hunger from weeks of starvation. His long adopted sense of utter hopelessness. He was in the hidden room at Lexcorps medical facility, and he'd been there for months.

He frowned as he felt something wet on his cheeks, his rational brain not even present enough to recognise they were his own tears.

He felt a phantom pressure on his shoulder, like maybe someone next to him had put their hand on his… but there was no one with him in the hidden room. He was alone. Always alone.

The smell of Luthor's cologne wafted towards him and the sound of his expensive shoes clacking against the metal floor echoed around the tiny room, getting closer by the second. He couldn't help himself – he pulled his knees up to his chest and tucked his head low, not wanting to see what was coming.

Lex knelt down in front of him, bending to one knee and reaching out to grab his captive's chin roughly. Clark was forced to meet his eyes and he did his best to stare blankly back at him. He'd learned by now that Lex would force him back if he tried to look away, and there was usually a punishment that went with it.

Oh how he wanted to look away though. Lex's eyes were a dark and soulless pit, a window into the darkest side of humanity. The only flicker of emotion he ever saw in them was the occasional spark of pleasure that ignited whenever he was causing his enemy pain.

He had perfected his public persona so well, learned how to act like a decent human being. To the public, Lex Luthor had been a charming philanthropist. Until they'd exposed him.

But here in this room, he'd let all of it fall away. He let Clark really see him. The real him.

And he was a monster.

Clark thought he heard a distant voice that almost sounded like a young man he knew from somewhere. He was pleading with somebody, and Clark felt something nagging at him, trying to pull his mind away from Lex's glare.

But then he leaned in impossibly close and spoke his alter ego's name in that low, hate filled way that always chilled him to the bone.

'It's over, Superman,' Lex said, his tone was calm, yet somehow still menacing. 'I finally found her.'

His eyes lit up with pleasure as Clark's face fell. Pleading words began tumbling out of his mouth.

'Please… don't…' he begged the man who seemed to desire nothing more than the opportunity to torture his enemy for the rest of his life.

'I told you, I'm going to make you both pay for what you did to me,' he said, almost matter-of-factly. 'Lois Lane is going to die, slowly and painfully. And I am going to make you watch every second of it.'

And with that, Clark was screaming in agony again, the man's murderous intentions tipping him over the edge of what he could psychologically tolerate. He'd known all along that kryptonite was just a means to an end. That wasn't the way he was really going to break him.

His knew his real weakness was Lois Lane.

Lois' whole body jumped out of its skin at the sound of her husband's blood curdling scream. Jonathan had already grabbed the hazmat suits and was running towards the door before she had even had time to react, and she briefly acknowledged just how fast acting he was starting to be in a crisis.

She sprinted after him, heading straight into the now thick green smoke that had caught up with them while they searched the room.

The two of them burst through the cloud of gas and tumbled into the last bit of clean air in the building, where the rest of her family was stranded.

Clark was still screaming, batting away her dad's attempts to shake him out of whatever was happening. He was on the floor, his body pushed right up to the corner of the metal doors and his knees bent up to his chest like he was trying to protect himself from some unknown danger.

'Mom!' Jordan cried out, his voice cracking as he reached his own breaking point emotionally, tensing in pain from the gases close proximity. 'We can't get through to him. I think he's having another flashback, but it's not like the other one. He's completely gone.'

'Jonathan, help your brother get one of these suits on,' she instructed, and her son held one of their successful finds up for Jordan to see in full.

She could hear him exclaiming, 'Oh my god, where did you find these,' as she moved quickly over to Clark's terrified form. She crouched down, getting herself as close as she could get without placing herself in the path of his flailing hands.

His screams turned to the occasional whimper, and he rested his head on his knees, rocking slightly back and forth to comfort himself.

'Lois,' her dad said, clearly shaken by his own powerlessness in the situation. 'I've seen stuff like this before, but never like this. It's like he doesn't even hear us.'

Lois heard a muffled voice coming from her dad's radio, and he quickly lifted it up to his ears. The line was crackly and the garbled voice was barely perceptible.

'Hardcastle, is that you?' her dad called out over the radio, his voice practically pleading.

He stood up and started to move, trying to to get a better signal, before looking back down at Lois in hesitation. She waved her hand at him, signalling she would handle this. He nodded gratefully and focused getting a good line of communication with General Hardcastle.

She knew it was up to her to pull her husband back from whatever memory had taken over his mind.

Lois gently moved a little closer to him, pausing to see how he would respond. He didn't look up or flinch, so she moved a little closer still.

'Clark,' she said softly, but loudly enough that she could be sure he would hear her.

He stopped rocking for a brief second, but then muttered something under his breath and continued his repetitive movements.

'Clark, it's me. It's Lois,' she said, daring to place a hand on his arm and give it a firm squeeze.

His head lifted up slowly, and she looked straight into his eyes. They were glazed over look, his pupils were dilated and his gaze unblinking. A look of horrified confusion covered his face.

His expression began to shift slightly as he seemed to actually see her. He squinted like he was trying to figure out if she was a mirage.

'Clark, where are you right now?' she asked.

'I… I don't know,' he said quietly. 'Lex… took me… Lois, is that really you?'

So that's what he was remembering. Lois' heart sank, knowing how deep those wounds were.

'You have to listen to me,' she said emphatically, moving even closer now that she felt confident he wasn't going to lash out.

He reached out a hand to touch her cheek, eyes filling with surprise when the feel of her skin provided proof she was more than just a figment of his imagination.

He started to cough then, the kryptonite gas catching up to them at the end of the hallway. They had nowhere else to go but back through the smoke now, and the only way that was going to happen was if she could get him to put that hazmat suit on.

'You're not Lex's prisoner anymore,' she tried to explain. 'That happened a long, long time ago, Clark. We are at the DOD hospital right now. Lex is in a coma. It's over. He didn't hurt me, I'm right here. The boys are here too. Do you remember your sons?'

'Sons?' he asked, confusion crossing his features for a second before his eyes seemed to become clearer and he looked around her to where Jonathan was frantically doing up the seals on his brother's suit.

Reality seemed to come back to him slowly and he looked at her tentatively, like he'd been woken up from a nightmare.

'What's going on?' he said anxiously, before breaking out in another coughing fit.

'I need you to stand up quickly, can you do that for me?' she demanded, not bothering to try and answer his question. There was no time.

'I… I think so,' he said, using the metal door for support as he pulled himself to his feet, holding his chest as he coughed and wheezed, the kryptonite gas burning as it travelled down his throat and lungs.

'Okay, let's get this on,' she said, holding up an orange hazmat suit for him to step into.

He barely even reacted to the suit, his mind foggy and still struggling to process reality. He simply complied with his wife's instructions and stepped into the legs of the garment, allowing her to pull the suit up over his body and place the breathing apparatus over his mouth.

He held it tightly against his mouth, grateful for the clean air that replaced the agony of the toxic gas. She watched him breathe deeply as she zipped him up. She quickly fumbled for the ear plugs he had found earlier and pushed them gently into his ears, softening the intensity of the attack on his senses, before pulling the hood of the suit up over his head. She placed her hands on the side of his helmet so she could meet his eyes briefly beneath the visor, making sure he was still with her.

'Boys!' she called out hoarsely, the thickening smoke beginning to irritate her own throat despite not being vulnerable to the kryptonite's effects.

'Lois! Up here,' she heard her dad's voice from further up the hallway, and she turned back to Clark, grabbing his arm and pulling him into the smoke.

She almost bumped into her sons as she did, but stopped herself from falling over, pushing them on ahead with her free hand.

'In here!' her dad called out, and she tried to follow the direction his voice had come from.

She reached the end of the corridor and was grabbed by rough hands, pulling her through a small doorway to her side. From the smell she would guess it was a bathroom. She found herself pushed deep in as Clark and the boys piled in behind her and her dad closed the bathroom door.

It was slightly less thick with gas in the room, but there were no windows and no obvious route to escape. She looked up at her dad in confusion, failing to understand why he would pull them in here when they desperately needed to find a way out.

She was about to start questioning him when the thunderous sound of a nearby explosion sent shockwaves towards them, the bathroom stalls shaking violently in response. Dust shook from the ceiling and a several pipes bust open, gushing water spilling out onto the floor.

'What was that?' Jonathan asked, looking up at his grandad who seemed much less surprised by the ominous sound than they were.

'General Hardcastle,' he said simply, pushing the bathroom door open and peering out to assess the damage.

He nodded back at them and motioned for them to come back out into the hallway.

Lois hesitated as she passed her dad, not wanting to leave him behind.

'Go!' he said, pushing her on and trotting behind her.

And with that they were running back down the hallway towards the place where the mangled metal doors had been only moments before.

Now there was nothing but a gaping hole surrounded by rubble.

The kryptonite gas was clearing quickly, spreading out and dispersing into the cool evening air. Shadowy figures of armed soldiers moved towards them slowly, guns raised and flashlights shining in their faces.

'Lower those weapons,' her dad barked from behind her, and the soldiers immediately relaxed their defensive approach at the General's commands.

A familiar woman dressed in full military garb stepped out from behind the soldiers and over a large chunk of the now decimated hallway wall.

'General Hardcastle,' her dad said gratefully as she came to a stop in front of them, glancing behind her at the damage caused by the controlled explosion. 'You always did know how to make an entrance.'