I'm bored, I have to run to the store, and I just realized that I have more of Darkest Dreams that I have written and not posted then that which I *have* written *and* posted. So this is to fix that.
Wow, that sounds confusing.
Either way, I feel like getting this plot on the road, so here's another chapter. It's another shortie, though, so I feel somewhat excused.
Thanks for those who reviewed. Please continue to do so. For those that didn't review...<gets down on knees and begs>
Enjoy,
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Chapter 12: A Leaking Battery
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Superman must have been too exhausted to have nightmares, or at least Lois slept too deeply through the night to be woken by his weakened mumbles and cries. She herself woke up in a cold sweat, shivering with memories of desperate screams and that terrible, desperate helplessness that she had had to place upon herself. She couldn’t get back to sleep.
The morning passed uneventfully. Superman ate little despite Lois’s urgings, and was so weak that he barely managed to rise into a sitting position with Lois’s help, and even then his head spun and he was soon forced to lie back down. He dozed off to sleep shortly after his meager breakfast of creamy cereal laced with a couple raspberries that Lois had slipped into his bowl, and Lois had followed into a restless sleep.
Logram came in just after breakfast, waking them unpleasantly. He drew three more vials of blood in the same quick manner before leaving. Clark wasn’t sick this time, but instead just lay there, still and pale as a rag doll. The guards hadn’t given Lois a chance to stay by him—both of them had grabbed her before she had even had a chance to think about fighting them. They had come in, taken the blood samples, and left them just like that.
Superman didn’t get better.
They still spoke, but not like before. Not so constantly or light-heartedly. Mostly they just sat there—there was more between them than words could convey. Minutes stretched into hours of silence, though much of that time Superman slept, exhausted from the ordeal and loss of blood. Lois urged food on him whenever he woke, and he ate enough that Lois was satisfied, but his appearance didn’t improve. In fact, he seemed to be weakening. His hand was growing colder and colder, his body more still, and it terrified Lois to death.
That evening Logram came in again, and Lois was frazzled enough from Superman’s despondent appearance that she spoke up to Logram, forcing herself away from the rising panic—forcing her eyes away from Superman’s shaking body.
“What are you doing?” Lois demanded. “You’re bleeding him dry. He’s lost enough already, and soon he’s not going to have any more to give, at this rate. Don’t you have enough already?”
“Quite the contrary, Miss Lane,” Logram replied, and his voice was troubled. “The blood tests are for his own good.”
Lois openly scoffed at that. “’For his own good’,” she repeated with a half-crazed laugh. “Right. Keep telling yourself that.”
Logram actually looked irritated at that. “It’s really quite simple,” he said shortly. “From the blood tests and from his further weakening strength. Your alien friend is slowly yet surely starving to death—at the molecular level, his cells are beginning to fail from lack of energy.”
“That’s impossible,” Lois snapped, though it softened as she looked at Superman lying there…so pale. “I’ve been making sure he eats…he may be sick now and again, and he’s weak from what you’re doing to him, but he still eats enough…” Surely, out of all things, starving to death was one of the least of his problems. But…there was too much uncertainty there. Who knew how much Superman usually ate?
“It may be a number of factors,” murmured Logram distractedly, tapping his pen on his clipboard as he scanned over the data. “It could be that Earthly food does not have all of the nutrients necessary to sustain his metabolism, but as he has not been able to be damaged since arriving here he has not required any further nutrients other than that which he already had. Or it could be that it’s just making itself manifest now, after a number of months, or a combination of these effects. However, we haven’t found any elements in the samples we’ve taken that are not also necessary for the human metabolism. It must be something else.”
He turned to Superman. “What does your diet usually consist of?”
Clark tensed involuntarily. It was the first time the doctor had actually addressed him directly, and his stomach clenched so tight that he was afraid that if he opened his mouth he would be sick. His face paled as he stared at the doctor, seemingly petrified.
The doctor didn’t look patient, even with the terrified expression that appeared on Superman’s face. He looked ready to turn to more drastic means to get his answer, but Lois stepped forward.
“I’ll ask him,” she said. She sat down beside Superman, clasping his hand in hers. “Look at me,” she said firmly. Clark was still frozen, so she reached forward and forcibly turned his face towards her. His eyes slowly focused on her face, turning away from his inner nightmares, and he blinked, coming to himself as if from a great distance. He inhaled sharply, having not realized that he was holding his breath.
“Lois.”
“Superman,” she said, her voice still somewhat firm—meant to catch the attention of his mind and not let the fear overcome him again. “What did you eat before you came here? You know, when you were hungry.”
Clark furrowed his brow. “I—I didn’t get hungry,” he said.
Lois blinked. “I thought you said you ate.”
Clark stared at her, his mind gibbering in near panic. He wasn’t from Krypton, he wanted to explain—not in the way that it mattered. He didn’t know any more about it than they did, and in his mind he was as human as anyone. He thought like a human, acted like a human, felt like a human…
The doctor shifted slightly, and panic rose to a new height, but Lois’s eyes had caught his like flies on flypaper, and it anchored him. He was brought out of the rising clamor of increasingly terrified thoughts as she tightened her hand over his. He took a shuddering breath.
“Yes,” he decided to say. After all, he had used to get hungry, when he was younger. “But I didn’t r-really need to.”
Logram stared at him. “But with the energy expenditure we have estimated...” He scribbled something on his charts furiously. “Energy cannot be created or destroyed. So where was it coming from?” He looked at Lois, and then Superman. “Right now he’s like a leaking battery, Miss Lane, and we don’t know how to recharge him. If he’s hiding anything from us, it would be for his own interest that we know. Is that understood?”
He thought they were hiding something. Or, at least, he thought Superman was hiding something. But considering his mental state, Lois could see right through him, and she knew that Kal-El was just as confused by his body’s deterioration as the rest of them.
TBC...
