Table of Contents


From Part 21:



"Don't hurt her!" Clark almost reared up off the table, but Trask's upraised hand, prepared to give the signal to shoot, stopped him. "Please, don’t hurt her..."

"Clark? Clark!"

"Please stop. Please don't hurt her!"

Hands gripped him, shaking him.

"Please! Yes, I'm an alien! But I'm not a threat!"

"Clark!" The hands shook him some more. "Clark!"

He seized his captor, gripping the man's upper arms and pushing back. "Leave me alone!"

"You’re having a bad dream, Clark." Suddenly, the voice was soothing, and he recognised it as female. "It's okay. No-one's trying to hurt you. Come on, wake up."

He was dreaming. Again. But it was only a dream. Trask was dead, and his parents were safe.

Sobbing with relief, he collapsed into the waiting, welcoming arms.


**********

Now read on...


Something had awoken Lois from a deep sleep minutes earlier. Disoriented, she'd lain in bed for a few moments before hearing the sound of voices. Someone was shouting, but she hadn't immediately recognised the voice.

Then she'd realised. It was Clark.

Was he being attacked? she'd wondered. That was what it had sounded like. Had Luthor actually sent someone to come after Clark in his own apartment?

But he'd been yelling "Don't hurt them!" - which hadn't made any sense at all.

Grabbing her robe and throwing it on, she'd hurried down the spiral staircase, almost losing her footing once or twice. Once she'd reached Clark's bedroom, it had become clear that there was no-one else in the apartment. He was dreaming - having a nightmare.

It had clearly been a pretty bad one, because she'd been shaking him and calling to him for a few minutes before he'd finally woken. She'd heard him yelling some stuff in among the whimpers - whimpers so full of anguish they'd torn her apart inside. But none of it had made any sense to her: stuff about aliens and an invasion, while Clark insisted that he knew nothing about anything and yelling for someone to stop hurting someone else.

He'd even tried to push her away while she'd been holding him; he'd grabbed hold of her arms as if he was trying to fight her off. When he'd finally come out of the nightmare, he hadn't even opened his eyes. He'd just slumped against her, allowing her to hold him, his head pressed into the crook of her shoulder.

And, as she cradled him in her arms, loving the freedom she had to hold Clark at last even at the same time as she ached for the pain he so clearly was feeling, his arms came around her, enfolding her tightly against him.

She stroked his back, murmuring his name and hoping that somehow she was getting through to him. And she realised that the collar of her robe was damp - with his tears.


***********

Warmth, comfort and the assurance of being loved that always came from being held in his mom's arms surrounded Clark. It had only been a nightmare, after all. Another one.

They were hellish. Every time he had one, he was back in that living nightmare, when Trask had tortured him and his parents for ten days, locked up in that windowless fortress with his strength draining away day by day due to the lack of sunlight. Not that all of his powers had been any use to him or his parents before then. All of the incredible powers that he possessed - and he hadn't been able to lift a finger to save his parents.

Because they'd have shot Mom before you'd have got to them, he reminded himself. He sometimes tortured himself with the thought that he should have just grabbed Trask, threatened to break the man's neck if his minions didn't let his parents go. But in his more sensible moments he knew that hadn't been an option anyway. Trask had made that clear early on: his men were well trained. If he was taken out, they would kill the hostages before saving their own skins - or letting themselves be killed in return.

And yet, when Lois had arrived, he hadn't hesitated. He'd broken the bonds tying him down and had launched himself at Trask.

But his captor had been distracted. Lois had had a gun, he remembered, and she'd been pointing it at Trask. That had evened the odds considerably. Perhaps Trask's threat to have Lois raped had been the final straw, too.

His nightmare over for another night, and wrapped in a warm, comforting embrace, Clark tried to reassure himself once more that there had been nothing he could have done sooner to get his parents out of there.

That soft hand stroked his back again. The gentle voice spoke his name. "Clark? Want to talk about it?"

He stilled.

Arms around him? His arms around someone?

Lois. He was in her arms. He was holding her - holding her so tightly that she must be -

"Let go of me!" he yelled.

Abruptly, almost rigid with fear, he pushed her away. He didn't dare to look, to see what he'd done to her. And yet he knew he'd have to.

He'd look, and she'd be lying there bruised, in pain, and with shattered bones. And her eyes would look at him with fear.

"Clark?" Now she sounded hurt, confused. But not in pain.

Not in pain?

He opened his eyes at last, sitting up in the same motion. She was sitting on his bed, beside him, dressed in that pale robe he'd glimpsed a few times. She didn't look injured in any way. But she did look hurt - as if her feelings had been hurt.

"Lois?" he said carefully.

She dropped her gaze. "Clark, I know you don't like to be touched. I'd kind of worked that out. But you didn't need to... to just push me away as if I'm some sort of leper. I was only trying to help - "

She thought that he didn't like her touching him?

Aghast, he interrupted her. "Lois, it's not that! I swear, if I wasn't terrified that I'd hurt you... Are you hurt?" he demanded quickly. "I was holding you pretty tightly - you must be bruised all over! I'd be surprised if you didn't have a couple of broken bones - do you mind if I X-ray you?"

"What are you talking about, Clark?" She stared at him.

"Me. My strength - god, Lois, you must have noticed! Aren't you in pain?"

She shook her head. "I don't know what you're talking about, Clark. Sure, you were holding me, like I was holding you. But you didn't hurt me. Why would you?"

"Lois, I'm Superman!" he reminded her. "I'm the strongest being in the world. I can snap steel with my bare hands. Are you telling me that I was holding you the way I was and I didn't hurt you? At all?"

"Not one bit!" she insisted. "Look, you can X-ray me if you want. You won't see a single bruise, I'll bet."

He hesitated, but then said, "Turn around."

She did, her expression apparently perfectly calm. Fearless, he thought, marvelling at her courage. Surely she of all people had to be aware of what he was capable of doing to her? Slowly, he skimmed her back with his X-ray vision, trying not to focus too much on the fact that he was seeing Lois's bare skin. She was right. No broken or even cracked bones. And not so much as a bruise in sight. No reddening of her skin. Nothing whatsoever except unsullied, creamy flesh.

Lois's flesh.

Feeling himself grow warm, he blinked, shutting off his vision powers. He hadn't hurt her. She was safe. This time. But he'd been lucky. Next time...

There wouldn't be a next time.

"Okay, you can turn around again," he told her abruptly.

She did. "Clark, are you going to tell me what all this is about? Why were you so convinced that you'd hurt me?"

Wasn't it obvious? He shook his head, unable to understand why she wasn't seeing it. "It's my strength, Lois! Doesn't it frighten you? Don't you know that I could crush you with my little finger?"

"You can, of course," she said, her voice as slow as if she were explaining to a child. "But you wouldn't. Of course I know that. Why would I be worried?"

"What makes you think I wouldn't?" he asked immediately. "Of course I wouldn't want to hurt you. Or anyone. But what if I can't help it?"

Lois shook her head, as if to deny his words. "Of course you can help it! Clark, every day of the week you control your powers. You control your strength! You pick things up - a coffee-mug, your mouse, the keys to my car, all sorts of things - if you weren't able to control your strength you'd crush every one of them! And I'm sure that it's instinctive, unless you're telling me that every time you touch any inanimate object you're exerting huge control over your reactions."

He stilled. She had a good point. On the other hand, the last time he'd had a nightmare he'd shredded his blanket. And he'd hurt Lana all those years ago.

He had to tell her, even if it made her afraid of him as a result. It was only fair to Lois. She was living with him - she had a right to know what sort of danger she could really be in. "But I did hurt someone, Lois," he began to explain. "It was years ago - when I was about seventeen. I was kissing someone. A good friend - well, a girlfriend. And she was struggling for breath before I even noticed what I was doing - and I think she was bruised too where I was holding her."

Watching Lois, Clark mentally prepared himself for her reaction. The way that she would, of course, flinch from him. Move away from him. And from now on she'd keep her distance. Of course she would. He wasn't human, and he was dangerous.

But, although she was frowning, she wasn't moving away. Instead, she widened her eyes and shook her head slightly. "When you were seventeen, Clark? When you were little more than a kid, bursting with hormones like any normal teenage boy? When did you start getting your powers?"

"Depends which power you're talking about. They arrived bit by bit from the time I was about 10. Flying was the last - I was eighteen."

"And when did you realise how strong you were?" she asked.

He shrugged. "I was bench-pressing cars when I was thirteen."

"But were you able to control your powers then? All of them, I mean. Didn't you ever - oh, I don't know. Accidentally set something on fire?"

He almost choked at the memory. "Mom's vegetable patch!" he exclaimed. "I didn't even know how it had happened - I wasn't trying to do anything weird. I was just picking some green onions for dinner. And the next thing it all went up in smoke. That's why I started wearing glasses, you know - so my vision powers can't kick in accidentally."

"You don't wear glasses as Superman," Lois pointed out. "And I've never seen Superman set anything on fire accidentally."

Okay... he thought he could see where she was going with this, but he still had to ask. "Lois... what are you saying?"

"Only what you should be saying to yourself, Clark," she said wryly. "If you hurt someone back then, you were only a teenager. You were still learning to control your powers. Of course you made some mistakes then. Everyone does at that age - it's part of growing up. It would've just been a bit tougher for you - you had to cope with superpowers on top of puberty and raging hormones."

When he'd been a kid... when he'd only been learning to control his abilities... Clark leaned back against the pillows, wondering if she was right. Had his fears been based on something so... well, teen angsty?

But...

Don't you know that he could snap you in two between his little fingers?

"Trask!" he blurted out suddenly.

Lois blinked. "What has that monster got to do with anything?"

"Lois, even Trask knew that I was a danger to humans!"

"Clark!" Lois exclaimed, and, before he could stop her, she'd moved closer to him and shaken him.

"Wha -?" he protested.

"First off, how can you possibly take anything that madman said as even close to the truth? Clark, he was a xenophobe! He hated you because you were different. Because he had this crazy, skewed view of the world in which anyone different was automatically bad. You know, we call the Ku Klux Klan racists, and rightly so. Would you believe a word that comes out of their twisted lips? So why do you believe anything Jason Trask had to say?"

"Just because he was a xenophobe doesn’t mean that he was wrong, Lois," Clark felt obliged to point out.

"I'll get to that," she said, waving his point away with her hand. "Second, why do you talk about 'humans' like that - as if you're not one?"

Well, that was obvious, wasn't it? "Because I'm not, Lois," he said flatly.

She shrugged. "Sure. If you want to be literal about it, you're Kryptonian. By birth anyway. But you were brought up on Earth. Do you think of yourself as an American?" she shot at him suddenly.

He blinked. "Well... yeah. I mean, I pay my taxes, I vote, I hold a US passport..."

"You weren't born in the US," Lois pointed out. "And you never obtained naturalisation papers. Does that make you feel any less American? Any less like you belong here?"

"You mean I'm a fraud," he said bluntly.

"No, I'm talking about assimilation," she said with exaggerated patience. "Clark, you're human in every way that matters. You sure look like a human. You have human emotions - very human, in fact. You're about the most compassionate, caring person I have ever met. And if that's not human, I don't know what is. When you talk about humans as if they're other people, not you - it sounds like you're thinking of yourself as an outsider. As if you don't think you belong."

"Maybe I don't," he said softly.

She just rolled her eyes. "I won't even ask what your mom would say if she heard you say that. Anyway, my *point* here is that Trask was talking through his... well, you know what. What did he say to you?"

He shrugged. "I'd forgotten about it until now, but I guess it was in my subconscious all along. I remembered it in my dream. He said to my parents, 'Don't you know that he could snap you in two between his little fingers?'"

Lois rolled her eyes again. "I'm sure you could, Clark. But you wouldn't. That's the difference between someone like you and someone like him. If Trask had your powers, he'd have used them for evil. You use them for good - and you always control them."

"But how can you know that?" Clark objected. "I've always been so careful around you..."

"Simple." She smiled triumphantly at him. "How much do you remember about when you came out of that nightmare just now?"

He frowned. He'd been yelling at someone to let him go... and then he'd woken up and realised that Lois had been holding him. Alarm bells started ringing - he'd known that he'd been touching her, but just how much of what he remembered was dream and how much reality?

"Tell me, Lois," he demanded urgently.

"You'd grabbed my arms. And you were shaking me, trying to push me away," she said. "Clark, if controlling your powers didn't come instinctively to you, I'd be on the floor with multiple broken bones, assuming I was still alive." She grinned at him. "See? You're not a danger - to me or to anyone."

He'd done all that to her - and he hadn't hurt her? And her description was familiar. He did remember shaking someone, trying to push them away, Was she just saying she was okay to make him feel better?

But he'd X-rayed her. She was fine. Not hurt at all. There was no way that he could disbelieve the evidence of his own eyes.

"You told me about the way Trask was using your parents against you and vice versa," Lois continued. "If I had to guess, I'd say that he was just trying to scare your parents - trying to drive a wedge between you by talking up how different you supposedly are. He was fixated on this notion that you're an alien. But he didn't know you at all. How could he? He was judging you by what he would have been if he had your abilities."

Dare he believe her? He wanted to, so badly. So much of what she said made sense. He'd let Trask's ranting xenophobia get to him. He'd allowed himself to become increasingly paranoid about his strength - to the point where even the thought of touching another person made him terrified. To the point where he denied himself physical contact with other people wherever possible. To the point where he would avoid hugging his parents in case he might hurt them - and he avoided touching Lois at all.

To the point where he'd crippled himself because of his own fear. And where his ability to help other people could have become seriously compromised.

But what if he could control himself? What if it was all in his mind after all?

If that was the case, he should feel shame that he'd allowed himself to become so paranoid. And he did - but more importantly, at last he was finding out the truth. At last he was doing something about it.

"Lois," he began hesitantly. "I want to know... I want to find out if I really can touch someone without hurting them."

Before he could continue, to ask her if she'd be willing to help, she interrupted again. "Clark, you touch people all the time! You're Superman. You rescue people!"

"Yes, but I only touch them when absolutely necessary. And if I have to pick someone up I'm really careful and I put them down as soon as I possibly can. But," he added with a grimace, uncomfortable about confessing all of this to anyone, even Lois - especially Lois, "I know this fear has been getting worse. When I first became Superman I just did what I had to do. If I needed to catch someone, or pick them up, I just did it. I didn't think about it."

"You've picked me up a few times. You took me flying - to San Francisco, remember?"

Clark nodded. "I was being careful, though. You probably didn't notice, but I was very cautious about the way I held you."

He glanced down, feeling embarrassed at everything he'd told her - and yet at the same time feeling overwhelmed with relief at having voiced his fears for the first time. The conventional wisdom about internalising things, bottling them up, being worse than talking about them was very true, he admitted. Even if it made him feel somehow inadequate to have confessed all this to Lois, the woman he loved, the woman he'd prefer to see him as a capable, confident man rather than a gibbering fool, he did feel better.

Lois scrambled up the bed, moving closer to him. "You want to know if you can touch someone without hurting them, right?"

He nodded.

"Okay then. Touch me." She moved closer still, then slid her arm around his waist. "Hold me. Only if you want to, of course."

Only if he wanted to? If she had any idea how much he wanted to, she'd probably run screaming out of the apartment!

He still hesitated, though, the automatic response to avoid contact still present. Yet she was right: he had to touch her if he was going to find out if Trask was wrong. He didn't have to hold her for long - all he had to do was put his arms around her and hug her, just for a few seconds. That would be enough to show him whether he was capable of controlling his strength.

He took a deep breath and leaned towards her. She gave him an encouraging smile. "It's fine. Don't even think about it. Pretend I'm your mom or your old girlfriend, if it makes it easier."

He blinked in surprise at her words, and what they implied. She thought it would be difficult for him to hug her? It was, but not for the reason she clearly imagined. No, he couldn't allow her to think that he found the thought of touching her repulsive. He'd already given her reason to believe that a few minutes earlier, when he'd pushed her away.

"I don't need to pretend, Lois," he said quietly. "I would love to hug you. You know, I wanted to last night - remember, when I gave you back your Kerths?"

Her eyes widened and she dipped her head. "I wished you had."

A lump began to form in his throat; regret flooded him. For the missed opportunity; for his failure to give her the comfort she'd obviously wanted from him. Needed, even.

"Let me make up for it now," he said huskily, moving closer still and, with a deep breath and a silent prayer that everything would be okay, that he could do this without harming her, wrapping his arms around her.

She felt soft and warm and utterly appealing. Clark closed his eyes, letting his head rest lightly on top of Lois's, and drew her against his chest, pressing her gently against him. Not too much pressure, he told himself. Keep his hold on her easy, so that she could break it if at any time she felt he was hurting her.

She pressed her body against his. He could feel her curves through the thin fabric of her robe and whatever she was wearing beneath it. She felt so warm and soft against his chest, which he only now realised was bare. He hadn't worn a T-shirt to bed. Lois held next to his skin.

Without conscious thought, his arms around her tightened. He wanted - needed - to hold her close. To feel her next to him. To show her every ounce of affection - of love - that he'd wanted to give her right from the moment that she'd let her barriers down with him and told him about her childhood.

"Oh, Lois," he murmured against her hair.

"It's okay, Clark. Everything's okay," she whispered in return. "You're not hurting me. I promise you."

Her words reminded him of what he was supposed to be doing, and he checked himself. He *was* holding her more tightly than he'd intended. And yet... she was assuring him that he wasn't causing her pain...

"How about now?" he asked tentatively, tightening his grip a little more.

"Nope. You're going to have to try a lot harder if you want to cause me any pain at all," she teased.

Daring, he squeezed just a little more. She laughed. "Not a chance, buster!"

He began to increase the pressure - and then halted, knowing without any doubt that if he did so now he would hurt her. And suddenly he realised exactly what he'd been doing - now and at any other time he'd been in contact with human beings, just as he did when he was in contact with inanimate objects.

Controlling his strength. Moderating himself. Understanding instinctively just how much pressure to apply in order to grasp something without causing damage. How to hold his coffee-cup. How to shake hands with someone. How to grip a door-handle in order to open it. And, also, how to increase the strength of his hold if he did actually want to break something.

Instinct. He'd been using it all along - he'd just somehow forgotten that. Or been brainwashed, or intimidated, into forgetting it.

He knew how to control his powers. He did it every single day, every moment of every day. It came as naturally to him as breathing.

"Oh, Lois!" he said again; an exclamation. He rocked her in his arms, never wanting to let her go, jubilant in the knowledge that now he could hug her any time he wanted. He was free to touch her, hold her, do all the things with her that he'd dreamed of - well, always assuming that she wanted to, too, which was by no means a foregone conclusion.

But he wasn't going to let even that worry him right now. A huge weight had been lifted from him. At last, the terror he'd lived with for so long had gone.

Clark lifted his head from her shoulder and, still holding her, held her gaze with his own. He was surprised to find her eyes shining with the faint shimmer of tears. So she found this as emotional a moment as he did? It surprised and touched him.

"Thank you," he murmured, then leaned forward and touched his lips to hers. A kiss of friendship, deep affection and a gratitude he could never express, he told himself.

Her lips felt soft and inviting. She tasted of mint toothpaste and very faintly of coffee. He struggled to resist deepening the kiss - he had no right to, after all, but even a kiss as light as this was sending his senses into overload.

And then her lips parted, and she kissed him back.


*********

...tbc


Just a fly-by! *waves*