I wasn't going to post this last part so soon, but as I was trying to open the Word file with this document I couldn't access it, and I panicked! So, now that managed to retrieve it, there's no way I'm not posting. So here goes, last part....

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Lois Lane lay in her hospital bed at Star Labs, experimentally moving her toes. Her back had been broken and she had been paralysed, but with Superman’s assistance, Doctor Klein and her father had found each torn nerve ending and had managed to surgically stitch them together. Now sensation and movement were returning to her lower body, and she was full of elation and impatience to return to her former life. Not that there wouldn’t be one huge change in her life, she thought with a grin that refused to leave her face: Now Clark would be part of it.

As for Clark, he had confessed his Superman identity to both Doctor Klein and Sam Lane, asking them not to expose him, and confessing to them his love for Sam Lane’s daughter.

He had somehow managed to tell them about his fears of hurting Lois should he ever be intimate with her, and Doctor Klein had offered to conduct appropriate tests. Very nearly backing out because of his acute embarrassment, Superman had nevertheless subjected himself to the tests, and had been told, to his immense relief and joy, that the risks of him hurting Lois during lovemakeing were all but non-existent.

While they waited for Lois to be strong enough for any intimacy to take place between them, Clark and Lois revelled in the newfound, easy familiarity of their togetherness. Coming to Star Labs every day after putting in a few hours of work at the Daily Planet, Clark would sit at Lois’s bedside, smiling and touching her and trading gentle jokes.

When he first told her that Clark and Superman were the same person, she had merely grinned at him and informed him that she already knew. The first time he had been squirming because he needed to run out on her to be Superman, she had just rolled her eyes, swatted his behind to send him on his way, and muttered, ”What are you waiting for, Flyboy?”

They didn’t speak of why she’d been dying in the Arctic. There was no need. They both knew, with the certainty that comes from having shared a dream, that she had risked everything to challenge and banish his fear of himself, and his fear of her. She had laid everything on the line to make him believe in himself, and in her. And he had found it in himself to take her hand, and to believe. There were no words to express what had passed between them, or to define the gift she had given him. The overwhelming joy in their eyes as they looked at each other was the only acknowledgement they needed.

He kissed her and caressed her, his eyes shining with love for her. He often touched and tousled her hair, every time making her brown eyes glitter. But the only time he asked her when she had gotten herself a haircut and a dye job like that, she had looked troubled. She didn’t know. It was sobering to realize that something monumental had happened that each of them could only fleetingly remember; and that everyone else, it seemed, had forgotten altogether.

No. Not everyone else had forgotten. Those closest to Lois and Clark seemed to retain memories of their own. Almost as soon as Lois had woken up after surgery, Perry had come to see her. Finding her smiling happily, if tiredly, at him, he had sunk down onto a chair and buried his face in his hands. Finally, misty-eyed, he had gotten up, gently taken Lois’s hand in both of his and stood looking at her, wordlessly, for many long minutes. Then he had placed a fatherly hand heavily on Clark’s shoulder, and gruffly told him that he had come through better for Lois than Elvis ever did for Priscilla. Perry had come to see them several times after that, Jimmy in tow, smiling broadly and telling Elvis stories, and never once asking questions about Lois’s balloon accident in the Arctic.

Sam Lane had invited his former wife and younger daughter to come and see Lois. Lucy had been abroad during Superman’s outing and had not been severely affected by the repercussions of it, and Ellen, who had been admitted to a clinic for treatment of her alcoholism during the furor of it, had been blissfully unaware that media everywhere had been trying to hunt her down in her capacity of Superman’s probable future mother-in-law. For quite a long time now, Ellen had been incapable of taking any real interest in the outside world, or really in any other people than herself. But at seeing how genuinely happily her injured daughter had greeted her, Ellen had been strangely moved. Also, Sam had taken her hand and thanked her for giving him Lois. As an afterthought, he had thanked Ellen for Lucy, too, and he had embraced his younger daughter.

As for the Kents, they had woken up one morning in a slightly tacky motel in Nebraska, their heads full of unconvincing memories of a cheap and mostly unenjoyable vacation. Returning home, they had found their farm not that much worse for wear, except that a window pane had been broken, there were cigarette butts and wheel tracks everywhere and the grass was badly downtrodden. They had tried to call Clark, but had not been able to reach him at his apartment. But not long afterwards they had been contacted by Sam Lane, who had not only invited them to the clinic at Star Labs, but had insisted on paying for the air fare as well.

Lois had been deeply touched by the way the Kents had greeted her. She had met Clark’s parents before, but had not been altogether comfortable around them, not absolutely sure what they thought of their son’s interest in her. Now their gratitude made them almost shy of her, as if the gift she had given to them and their son was too great. But an overwhelmed Lois pulled Martha close and hugged her. Martha’s cheeks were wet with tears as she embraced her new daughter, and Jonathan bent down to them to enter into their embrace.

But Clark was filled with an overpowering sense of guilt. He had abandoned his parents and let them down in a way he couldn’t clearly remember, but which was clearly and damnably unforgivable. Once again he wanted to run away from the world. But he couldn’t run from Lois, and as he looked at her, into her eyes, he felt her love envelop him. Warm him and soothe him. She knew of his guilt, but offered him an cornucopia of love and understanding. An inexhaustible source of new hope, new happiness. And as she held out her hand to him, he allowed himself to be drawn into his parents’ embrace, where, wordlessly, he asked for and was given forgiveness.

Facing Lana was even harder. Nothing could change the fact that she had been shot, and she was haunted by unanswered questions as well as by traumatic memories of it. Visiting her, Clark could only offer her Sam Lane’s help in treating her arm. Lana had thanked him. Unexpectedly, she had asked Clark to give her love to Lois.

Returning to Lois, he proposed. She pulled him close and kissed him. Kissing the man who had saved her life in the Arctic, and now wanted to give himself to her, she felt a dam burst inside her. She was carried away by a firestorm of passion, and she carried him along with her on rainbow wings of liquid fire. The answer to his question was lost among their kisses, but the ring ended up on her finger.

They made love. Afterwards, Clark was filled with a joy almost too great for a mortal’s heart to hold. As he held her soft sweet body close to his, the stars of the heavens seemed to smile down at him, and the never-sleeping-city below somehow chimed in with its approval. Marvelling at the way their bodies fitted together like two pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, and savoring the intoxicating sweet scent of her, her breath against his shoulder, her heart beating in time with his own and her soft skin caressing his, he drifted into a blissful sleep.

A very odd-looking man visited his dreams, a man with wild hair, a paper-white face and strangely luminous eyes, with stardust and spiders falling off his robe. He was looking straight at Clark, and the ghost of a smile was playing at the corners of his mouth.

There would be no nightmares for Lois and Clark for a long, long time.

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Ann