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From Part 8:


“Okay. So there’s nothing more we can do on this for today?”

Clark shook his head. “I’ll talk to the fire investigators again tomorrow - or Superman will,” he amended. “Given I’ve told them what to look for, they shouldn’t have any problem finding evidence of sabotage. So then it’ll be a question of whether there are any clues I didn’t see, or whether the saboteur left fingerprints.”

“Right.” This was good, Lois told herself. She was seeing Clark as her partner again, instead of as a good-looking man whose bones she wanted to jump. “So if there’s nothing more we can do on that now, why don’t we get back to what we were working on before we were interrupted? I got my father to do some digging on the bionic research...”


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Now read on...


The pain was excruciating.

He was in agony. But however much he tried, he couldn’t get away from the source. He tried to roll over, to turn away, to curl up in a ball - but something was pinning his body down.

He couldn’t move.

He couldn’t see.

And all the time, the voice pierced the darkness. “Tell me. Where are they?”

“W-who?” he managed to croak out through dry, cracked lips, though he knew what the answer would be.

“The rest of you! The alien invasion!”

He tried to shake his head. He’d told the voice over and over again that he knew nothing about any invasion.

The knife gouged him again. This time it was his thigh; the pain was red-hot. It hurt. It shouldn’t hurt, but it did.

There was something very wrong...

Why was it hurting? Why was there so much pain? Pain like he had never before experienced. Pain like he wasn’t supposed to experience.

He was invulnerable. So why was it hurting?

“No! Please, don’t hurt him!”

The voice. A different voice. A voice he knew, but racked by pain. She shouldn’t be here. His mother. His father was here too, he knew. And he - the voice in the darkness - was hurting them as well. He’d seen them beaten, whipped, taunted - he’d heard threats to rape his mother.

All unless he gave the voice what it wanted: the alien invasion.

What aliens? What invasion?

But he was an alien. A dirty, sub-human, inhuman alien. An alien who had somehow subverted the minds of honest humans, making them complicit in his criminal, conquering intentions. The humans who had aided him, whose minds had been taken over by him, no longer deserved to be called by the name of human. Not any more.

So the voice claimed.

His parents were complicit, willing accomplices in the destruction of their own race. They deserved to die.

He had to get them out of here. Had to protect them...

But he couldn’t move. No matter how hard he tried, how much he struggled against the restraints, he couldn’t move.

And he knew that if he didn’t answer those questions, those questions to which there were no answers, they would be hurt. Again.

“Shut up!” The harsh voice was there again, and it was followed by the sound of flesh on flesh, brutal, violent. Then there was stillness, punctuated only by a sob.

“No!” he screamed, and was silenced by a brutal slap to his mouth. But that didn’t - couldn’t - silence the cry in his head. The memory of the agonised sob he’d heard through the darkness.

His mother’s voice. His mother’s sob.

And he was helpless to protect her. He, who had believed himself invulnerable, invincible, was unable to help his own mother.

“I...” he began, but his voice gave up before he could finish the half-formed thought. “Please...” He tried again, not knowing what he could say; only knowing that he had to say something. Anything, to stop those men hurting his mom...

He tried to move, but still he was pinned down, trapped in a supine position. The pain was back again, and he cried out...

...and awoke, sweating, breathing heavily, and realised that he was lying on the sofa in his own apartment, blanket tangled around him.

It had been a dream. Just a dream.

He was on the couch... oh yeah, Lois was in the bedroom. Quickly, he glanced through the bedroom wall to check on her, and sighed in relief to see that she was still fast asleep. He hadn’t woken her.

He didn’t want her to know about the nightmares.

That, he supposed, was the disadvantage of having Lois as an overnight guest - but since she already knew that he was Superman, at least he didn’t have to worry about giving his secret away. Still, having her in close proximity meant that she could have heard him tossing and turning - and even crying out, if his cries and moans had been real and not just a part of his dream.

Lately he’d actually thought the nightmares had gone, that he’d finally got over those horrifying days - eleven in all - that he’d spent in captivity, under Jason Trask’s control, being tortured and seeing his parents tortured. And all for the sake of that man’s paranoid xenophobia. So there really hadn’t been any risk in inviting her to stay - and how could he have let her go to an impersonal hotel when it was no trouble to let her stay at his place?

Clearly, though, the nightmares weren’t a thing of the past after all. And he was still shaking, still sweating. And the blanket on top of him, tangled with his body, was partly ripped to shreds.

Tossing the remains of the blanket aside, Clark stood and spun into his Spandex. It was probably time that he went out to make another circuit of Carter Avenue anyway.

Scanning the bedroom again, he confirmed that Lois was deeply asleep; there was no chance that he’d wake her if he floated through the room to get to the balcony door.

He’d won the battle of the bedroom, as he’d jokingly called it earlier. He’d insisted that Lois, as his guest, should have his bed, while she’d insisted that, since she was only a guest, she couldn’t possibly take over his bedroom and that she’d be perfectly fine on the couch. He had pointed out that, first, he could sleep comfortably anywhere because of his ability to float, and second, he expected to be out patrolling and keeping watch for at least some of the night, so he wouldn’t be using the couch for very long in any case.

At her question, he’d explained that he intended to keep an eye on her apartment building during the night. Sure, he’d acknowledged, there would be a security guard on duty, and they’d also surmised that construction workers would be at the site most of the night, but even all of that wasn’t necessarily sufficient protection. Someone had caused that explosion for a reason. The building was currently empty, and therefore he had every intention of trying to find out what the saboteur was up to.

He opened the door leading to the balcony very cautiously, watching Lois and listening all the time for any sign that she might stir. Okay, she'd known that he would probably leave the apartment as Superman, had even known that he’d have to come through the bedroom to do it, but he didn’t want her to see him now. He wasn’t sure how much would be revealed in his face, and he couldn’t let her find out about the nightmares.

Oh, she would be sympathetic. But he didn’t want her sympathy. He just wanted the whole horrible experience to be gone, forgotten completely. He wanted no reminders, ever - and if Lois knew that he was still dreaming about it, he’d be even less able to forget it.

He padded out onto the balcony, relieved to have got there without disturbing her, and took off immediately, becoming a mere shadow against the black night sky within a second.

That nightmare had been worse than the last couple he’d had. He couldn’t understand why, this time, in his dream, he’d been in so much pain. He was invulnerable. He’d hardly ever felt pain in his life; at least, not after his early teens, when he’d begun to develop invulnerability. True, over the days he’d been a prisoner, the sunlight deprivation had begun to wear away at his body’s natural resistance, and then he’d begun to bruise and his skin had broken under Trask’s attacks. But even then Trask hadn’t managed to inflict excruciating pain on him.

No, not on him. But on his parents.

And he’d had to watch every instance of that torture, see his parents’ faces as they were hurt - or as they had to watch each other being hurt.

Clark shivered as the memories of reality joined with those of his dream. The whole experience had been terrifying - it was no wonder that he was still suffering the aftermath. Were his parents still having nightmares? He’d never asked them - mainly because he hadn’t wanted them to ask him the same question.

Deliberately making himself do it, he confronted the memories - better awake than dreaming, he thought.

It hadn’t seemed so bad at first. But then, he hadn’t known that he was being confronted by a madman. At first, his principal concern had been for his identity: the fact that Clark Kent was Superman had been revealed to people at the Daily Planet as well as to these shady FBI-types. How much more widely had the information spread? That was the question which had been foremost in his mind while he’d been answering Trask’s endless questions. Foolishly, he’d even thought that he would surely be able to convince Trask of his bona fides.

As time had gone by and Trask wasn’t being convinced, Clark had just decided that, when he was ready, he would inform Trask that the meeting was over, and walk out. After all, he was Superman. Who could stop him?

And then he’d found out exactly how he could be stopped, when four men dressed in fatigues had entered the room, leading his parents, in handcuffs, between them.

From then on, he’d been forced to watch just how cruel human beings could be to one another. He himself had been stripped naked, his parents held hostage for his good behaviour. He’d seen his parents abused, beaten, tormented, threatened with more and more horrific forms of attack. The actual violence had never gone so far as to be life-threatening - after all, of what use was a dead hostage? - but the taunts, threats and dark hints had been enough to make it clear that the next attack might be worse than the last. And, of course, torture was most effective when it was psychological as well as physical - as this had been.

He had felt, inside, each one of the blows his parents had received. Something inside him had died every time he’d seen his mother cry. And he had been helpless to stop it, for any time he moved an inch in their direction Trask would give the order for another blow.

The man had been diabolically clever. At first, while he still had all of his powers, his parents had been kept in a separate room, visible from his own torture-chamber through reinforced glass. Of course, he could have shattered it in seconds, but his parents would have been cut, badly injured, by flying glass. If, of course, they wouldn’t already have been dead, shot as soon as his intentions had become clear. After all, one of Trask’s minions had held a gun to his mother’s head the whole time, as a method of ensuring his own ‘co-operation’.

Torture was not merely physical.

Although he’d learned the meaning of physical torture too, later, as sunlight deprivation had robbed him of his invulnerability and, slowly, most of his powers. And Trask had taken advantage of his prisoner’s state of vulnerability; his parents had then been brought into the same room, where they were so close that he longed to reach out and touch them. Where their bruises were much more apparent. Where his mom’s sobs and his father’s grunts of pain and quickly-stifled protests cut through him like lashes of a whip.

He hadn’t realised just how badly his abilities had been harmed until Lois had burst into the room - he hadn’t known she was in the building, hadn’t heard the scuffles in the corridor as she’d dealt with another of Trask’s minions. He hadn’t detected her heart-beat.

But her arrival had given him the distraction that he’d needed, and he’d drawn on every reserve of strength he had left in order to break his bonds. And they’d escaped.

The realisation struck him suddenly. Lois had burst in... he’d been naked... yes, he remembered her bringing him scrubs to wear, to cover himself up. She’d seen him naked.

He wanted to cringe. As if the torture hadn’t been bad enough, he also had the humiliation of knowing that his partner - his friend, true, but still, the woman he worked with, held down a professional job beside - had seen him completely naked.

How was he going to face her in the morning?

But he was going to have to. And, after all, Lois had never referred to that since, although they’d talked about other aspects of his kidnap. So maybe she’d forgotten all about it? He could hope, he supposed.

Physically, at least, his parents hadn’t been too badly hurt. But, until now, he’d given little thought to their psychological scars. That had been very wrong of him, and it was something he’d have to remedy at the earliest opportunity. Especially since they would never have been hurt if not for him.

He was the one Trask had been after.

He was the one being questioned, the one being accused of being the advance guard for some alien invasion.

They’d just been convenient hostages, taken because they were his parents.

Some reward for having taken him in as a baby and brought him up as their own son!

He’d often thought that he could never repay his parents for all they’d done for him. And now, thanks to what he was, they’d suffered pain and torment and indignity and terror - all because of him.

He’d avoided the subject with his parents for long enough. It was time he found out just how much they were still suffering from what had happened, and how he could help.

And, of course, he would have to find a way to deal with his own psychological scars. This latest nightmare was definitely considerably worse than the others had been. So much for thinking that he was almost over the experience. So much for thinking that he could handle it alone.

Not so Super after all, huh, Superman?

And, as his mind flashed back briefly to the memory of Lois sleeping soundly in his bed, one more thought occurred to him. If he needed another reminder of why he couldn’t possibly consider anything closer than friendship with Lois, this was it: if they became intimate, always supposing that she survived that experience, then if he happened to have a nightmare when she was sleeping beside him, he could easily thrash around in the bed and end up killing her.

He grimaced, shuddering once again at the thought of what he could do to Lois if he were ever foolish enough... But that wasn’t even worth a second’s thought. Quite simply, he wasn’t that foolish. And nor would he ever be.

A thought taunted him suddenly. Even if he were that foolish - well, why would any woman ever want him? After all, he was a “dirty, sub-human alien,” as Trask had told him.

“No!” he yelled, startling a passing bird. He couldn’t let himself believe Trask’s venom. If he allowed himself to think for one second that Jason Trask was in any way representative of other people’s perceptions of him... No, that way lay madness.

It was time to stop obsessing over things he couldn’t change, he told himself firmly, taking a deep breath and deliberately, calmly, forcefully pushing unwelcome images out of his head. He had to deal with what had happened, one way or another - and that included talking to his parents about it as soon as he got an opportunity.

But for now, he needed to get on with what he’d come out for. Clark took another deep breath, then flew in the direction of Carter Avenue.


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...tbc