Whew! Well, folks, here we are. I am taking a much-needed break amidst my frenzied cramming to release both some tension from myself and chapter 18 to you.
But before we begin, I have a random side note: Boggle. For any of you who may not be familiar with the game, Boggle involves 16 dice with letters on the 6 sides of the dice. You shake the dice, then settle them in a 4 x 4 tray, and you have a set amount of time to find words within the Boggled up letters. The words have to be at least 3 letters long, and you can go diagonal, horizontal, or vertical to create words, but the letters must be connected in order of the proper spelling to create a word.
After the time runs out, the players go around and read the words they’ve found, and cross out any words that they have that others found as well. 3 and 4 letter words are 1 point, 5 letter words are 2 points, 6 letter words are 3 points, and so on and so forth. No onomatopoeias, proper nouns, or other stuff like that.
There. That’s semi-confusing, but the point is that it’s a great game. And the rounds can become very competitive. My family has torn more than one dictionary fighting over the correct spellings of words, etc.
Goodness, I’m such a hopeless geek. If you want to experience Boggle firsthand, here’s a free sample download you can get off Yahoo!
Anyway…after that rant—enjoy the chapter.
And please review!
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Chapter 18: You Boggle My Mind
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At the coming of night Lois helped Superman back into her bed—there was no need for him to sleep on the couch if the sun wasn’t out. She didn’t want him waking up with a sore neck. The man had enough on his plate already.
She was gladdened to notice that he was leaning on her considerably less, and seemed to be limping more carefully, as if aware of certain pains and trying to avoid aggravating them—rather than before, when his whole body had been limp as a rag and probably just one mass of pain.
At this rate, one more day and he should be able to walk on his own. So she settled down to sleep, glad that Superman, Kal-El…that he was getting better.
But while Clark had found peaceful sleep in the light of the sun’s rays, during the night he woke up more than once, sweating and shaking, but managing to bite his tongue to stop the screams. He managed to sit up despite the protests of his muscles, and he looked around the room. His eyes settled on Lois where she slept on top of the covers beside him and the tightening in his chest would loosen. Even so, he had trouble going back to sleep; whenever he closed his eyes he found himself back in the white room.
Morning came and Lois slept on. Clark had awoken from his latest nightmare and had finally determined that he had no desire to go back to sleep again, for now. He wiped sweat from his brow and took a deep breath, turning on his side to look over at Lois beside him.
She was so beautiful.
Slightly curled up, her hair in slight disarray. The fire of her eyes hidden as she looked the picture of perfect innocence. Like a little angel.
But if he called her that to her face she’d likely turn into an angel of doom, he thought with a slight smile.
He was in Lois’s bed. With Lois, even if she was still on top of the covers.
It was surreal.
No one would believe it. Of course, he would make all effort to make sure no one ever knew that Clark Kent had spent a night—two nights, now—with Lois Lane.
He breathed deeply again, dispelling as best as he could the morning aches and stiffness, as well as the shadowed thoughts that hung over his mind. He focused on Lois.
She still looked tired, despite the fact that since they got back they’d done nothing I]but[/I] rest. He wondered, now that he was awake and aware, how much Lois had slept while he was going in and out of consciousness during their imprisonment. It had seemed like she never slept at all—that she was always awake at his side, ready to help him. That she was always there for him.
Her brow furrowed in sleep and she whimpered softly. Clark reached forward and brushed her hair from her brow gently.
“It’s all right, Lois,” he murmured. “It’s just a dream.”
She leaned unconsciously into his touch, then settled back down into her pillow and slept peacefully away.
Clark watched her for a few more minutes, then decided that he was tired of laying around. The first bit of sunlight was beginning to come in through the window, and he carefully sat up, and while it was accompanied by a good many complaints and twangs of complaining muscles, as well as a sharp dart from his leg, he could do it. He his legs over the bed’s edge, struggling to keep his breathing quiet despite the strain. He carefully set one foot on the ground, then the other.
His injured leg gave a sharp stab of pain as he stood, and he took all the weight off it with a small gasp. He balanced fully on his good leg and leaned against the wall shakily to support himself.
He could do this. He was Superman.
He limped forward, using the wall like another leg. His breathing grew heavy. Sweat beaded on his brow, but he continued straining forward. He needed to do this.
He didn’t think he had ever done anything so hard in his life.
He reached the bedroom door. Three full steps from the bed.
A small step for mankind, a giant leap for Superman.
This from the man for whom it was said, “Can leap tall buildings in a single bound.”
Clark wanted to smile at that thought, but he couldn’t.
Superman. Was he ever coming back?
He, Clark Kent, was an alien. Could he ever go back to being a man?
He made it to the bathroom and lowered himself down to sit against the wall for a minute, shaking and pale from the pain and exertion, but victorious. It was a bitter victory, though. He was still so weak, and he hated it. He hated that he was so helpless--that he was putting Lois through more, even after everything else she had done.
After recovering for a few minutes he climbed to his feet. He turned towards the sink and froze still.
He hadn’t looked in the mirror yesterday, even during his brief time in the bathroom. His mind had been too fogged up, and if he had seen he hadn’t recognized what he was seeing.
He didn’t recognize himself.
He was pale as a ghost, his eyes slightly sunken. His hair looked like a shock of black against his white complexion, his eyes darker than ever—haunted, frightened.
He looked like a terrified kid. He looked like an old man. He looked like a surreal creature from a cheap Hollywood horror movie.
Shaking anew, he finished his business in the bathroom—even awkwardly using the razor that Lois had showed him yesterday. He managed to cut himself twice, and at the sight of the blood welling up around the small nicks he had gone even more pale and had to clutch the counter to keep from falling as he saw more red—deeper, thicker red, which was so far away, but right before him. He didn’t know how long he stood there, his eyes closed, his fingers white on the sink, until he was able to calm his breathing and remember.
He was all right. He was here. No green, no terrible white. He was safe.
He needed to see Lois.
It was a much more hurried, painful journey back to the room.
Lois was still sleeping.
Clark let out a breath of relief.
He hung onto the doorframe, quivering like a fallen leaf in the wind.
He wanted to lie back down next to her and forget everything again. To bask in the sunlight of her face—to hold her hand and forget everything but her—his single light in the darkness.
He forced himself to turn away. He limped over to the couch in front of the television and sat down awkwardly in front of the screen, and turned on the TV.
It was on mute already. Clark turned the volume on low.
The morning news was on, and shot after shot was filled with crime. A bank was robbed last night. A woman found mugged and murdered in an alleyway in Suicide Slum. A drive-by shooting that injured three innocents. One of them was in critical condition.
Elsewhere, an earthquake in China was still being cleaned up. The quake had happened three days ago, and the death count was in the thousands.
And then, a short comment.
“Still no sign of Superman.”
Clark couldn’t agree more with that.
There was a sudden curse from the bedroom, the sound of frantic shuffling, and Lois staggered into the room, sleep-disheveled, stopping only when she saw Superman laying there, his eyes pained as the flickering of the television danced across his pale face.
“Kal-El! What are you doing?”
Clark looked at her slowly. Her heart wrenched at the guilt in his expression. She walked forward, catching sight of the ruin from the earthquake in China.
She swore and stepped forward to turn it off.
“What’s the matter with you?” she grumbled, her voice rough from sleep and she rubbed her eyes. “You crawl in here, eager to soak up guilt? Sunlight not enough for you?”
“I had to see what’s going on,” Clark said softly. “And…I walked.”
“Walked?” Lois said, blinking hazily. “Well, that was fast. Knowing you, though, you’re not even ready to walk, but you did anyway. Or maybe it’s some manly instinct.”
Clark knew Lois’s comment was certainly not meant to strike him, but the ‘manly instinct’ cut him to the quick. He looked away from her and began to rise.
Despite her morning grumpiness, Lois was at his side in a moment to help him up.
“That’s what I thought,” she said as she helped him take a couple steps towards the bedroom. She noticed his faint quivering from the strain of standing erect. “Walking nothing. Hobbling is more like it. Don’t you want to get better? Now come here, sit in the sunlight like a good super hero while I go make some coffee. You’ve had coffee, right? How do you like it?”
Clark hesitated a moment. “Three sugars, and cream if you have it.”
Lois grimaced. “Well, you can tell that it was Clark Kent that introduced you to Earth’s coffee. Let me tell you something, flyboy. Just toss everything he’s taught you out the window, because it’s not worth anything next to what I know.” She helped him sit at the couch and pulled up the plaid blanket from the gas station and handed it to him.
Clark couldn’t help it. “You don’t really think that, do you?” he asked, his voice serious.
Lois paused, looking back at him from the doorway through sleep-blurred eyes. “Why? Does it matter?” she grumped.
Clark just looked out the window. “I just thought you two were friends, that’s all. He…he speaks very highly of you.”
“Friends?” Lois frowned, rubbing her eyes. She was grumpy, she needed her morning coffee, and Superman had just near scared her out of her mind when she noticed he was gone. She didn’t feel like talking about Clark Kent right now. “He’s not a bad guy. Too naïve for his own good, and he’s got a crush on me, you know? I think he thinks he’s discrete about it, but it’s just…awkward. He’s too soft, and I’m way out of his league. You can’t get more old-fashioned, tight-buttoned, or farmer-boy than Clark Kent.” She peered at him, stifling a yawn. “But you know him. You should know that for yourself. I’m going to go get that coffee.”
Clark let her go, feeling miserable.
They drank their coffee in silence. Lois was still in her morning mood, and Clark just didn’t feel like saying anything. Lois wouldn’t let him leave the sunlight even for breakfast, though he argued that he could make it into the kitchen well enough. They ate breakfast of fruit and toast, and then Clark told Lois he was tired and wanted to take a nap.
It wasn’t entirely true. Sure, he was tired, but didn’t feel like sleeping. So he lay on the couch, his eyes looking up through Lois’s dusty window to the blue sky.
How he wanted to fly, right now. He took a deep breath, and the yearning filled every part of his body. He wanted to take off, forget it all. Just drift.
The world looked so nice, floating above it all. So nice, so long as he covered his ears.
He shuddered. He could hear them now--hear everyone that needed his help. Feel their cries, even without his ‘super’ hearing. He saw them through the television. He saw them in the desperate eyes of a woman that had fallen weeping over the body of a dead child in the ruins of her home.
He could feel Lois’s wariness—the shadow of her soul, even as he saw it in her eyes. He could feel it in the whimpers of her sleep, in the pale, fearful look she got on her face whenever she thought he wasn’t watching.
His fault.
And Superman was gone, for now. Maybe for good. But Lois still didn’t care for him—Clark Kent. And that was all that was left. That was all he was, except for an increasingly flimsy façade.
He actually did fall asleep, eventually, and was surprised when he didn’t wake until the sun was disappearing over the building adjacent to Lois’s apartment. He woke up in a start, not remembering his dream but feeling a shadow of doom and terror clinging to his soul. Lois was not in the room.
Clark forced himself to keep calm. To breathe. To stand up slowly and limp out of the room at an unpanicked pace.
Calm. Just calm.
“Lois?” Why did his voice crack? He was all right. Lois was just right there. No need to shiver…
“Good morning, sleepy-head,” Lois called from the counter. She was dressed in casual jeans and a blouse, but to Clark she had never looked better. He felt his body relax, even down to his toes. “You really are walking, aren’t you?”
“Trying,” Clark said, limping forward. Lois came forward to help him pull out a chair so he could sit at the table.
“I’m glad you’re awake,” she said. “I was just about to get out the ice water. You’ve been sleeping all day.” Her eyes reflected that always-present concern despite her calm words. “Are you okay?”
“Y-yeah.” At her unconvinced look, he admitted hesitantly. “Bad dream.”
Lois nodded. “Well, if you’re good enough to walk around already, I mean, your with leg…” She trailed off, feeling ill as she remembered why exactly his leg was injured in the first place. She swallowed, forcing down memories. “That’s good. That’s very good.”
Clark’s own face was pale as he was caught in the same nightmare as she. “Y-yeah.”
She walked back to the counter with purpose, determined to brush away that shadow from her mind, and brandished a paper with phone numbers written on it.
“Okay. We’ve got Chinese take-out, Italian take-out, or we can order pizza. What’s your choice?”
Clark lifted his injured arm onto the table and ran his hand over the cast. There was a faint tint of darkness to the underside where dark blood had long since dried. “Whatever you want, Lois.”
Lois glared at him. “I told you what I wanted. I want Chinese take-out, Italian take-out, or pizza. Goodness, Superman, if you weren’t the man of steel I’d tell you to grow a backbone!”
Clark blinked at her tone. But it did serve to bring him out of his dark thoughts, somewhat. “Uh…Italian is good, then.”
“I should have guessed,” Lois muttered, even as she lifted the phone to call. At Clark’s confused look, she clarified: “Pasta, remember?”
Clark nodded slowly, his eyes darkening a shade. He didn’t want to, but he did certainly remember.
They both did.
So Lois called in an order, giving the person on the other end of the line a fake name and ordering enough, it seemed, to feed a small army.
Which might have been a good idea, Clark mused. He was actually hungry. It was a feeling he had almost forgotten, between time and nausea that made any food seem quite unappetizing.
Lois hung up the phone, looked at him for a moment, and then turned and began digging through one of her cupboards. After some cursings and general grumblings, she straightened, an old, falling-apart box in her hand.
“There!” she said. “Boggle. The game of the mind. I would have brought out scrabble, but I think Lucy stole it, and I don’t understand why because she hates that game and isn’t even that good at it. She just plays it to show off to her brainless arm-ornaments, not that they really can appreciate it anyway.”
Clark almost smiled at Lois’s babbling. At least, the corners of his lips turned up the slightest bit, and a small light appeared in his eyes.
“There we are!” Lois said, setting the game down with a slight flourish. “Involves no movement save with your pen. So no handicaps, and no excuses for you. Here.” She handed him a small notepad and a pen. Clark took them with his uninjured arm.
“What about handicaps for everyone writing left-handed?”
“Nonsense,” Lois said. “Knowing you, you are left-handed. Or worse—ambidextrous!” She gave him a sideways look. “You know how to play?”
“Clark liked it,” Clark said. “We played a couple of times. It wasn’t too…interesting.”
Which was true, he argued to himself. Boggle was one of his favorite games—he had used to play it late into the night with his parents, and had been the official founder of the Boggle Society of Smallville High. But that had started small and ended smaller. By the end it he had gone to the meeting place to find that he was alone in the empty classroom. He had played a few rounds alone for the fun of it. But, of course, he soon realized that there was no point and little fun in playing Boggle alone—he always ended up crossing off his own words, and no matter how much he cheated, he always lost.
Lois lifted an eyebrow. “ Kent? Well, no wonder. Probably the only words he knew were things like ‘farm’ and ‘corn.’” She shook the dice furiously. “This time you’re playing with the master, flyboy.”
She made sure all the cubes were lying flat, then set the game on the table between them, one hand on the cover as she looked at him, her eyes sharp with the no-lose spirit of Lois Lane.
“Don’t you need a timer?” Clark asked.
“I’ve got my watch. Three minutes. I broke that cheap hourglass thing years ago. Ready? Set, go!” The shaded cover was cast aside, and Lois immediately hunched over her paper, shielding it protectively with one hand as she scribbled away furiously with the other.
Clark just watched her for a good thirty seconds of the time, then shook himself and began looking for words of his own. Lois slaughtered him—beating him twenty to a mere three points.
Lois looked satisfied, but she still made the effort to reach forward and pat his arm. “You’ll get better, Superman. It just takes practice.”
Clark looked back, holding his pen over his paper this time, his own dark eyes focused an intent—the perfect, serious Superman stare that made most criminals quake in their shoes.
“No onomatopoeias, acronyms, or abbreviations,” Lois reminded him, her voice all business. “No foreign languages, either—that includes Krypontese, or whatever.”
Clark gave her a closed look at that.
Lois beat him again—but barely, this time. They went into a third round facing off like gunmen across the table. Two pairs of dark eyes narrowed, pens held at ready, shoulders hunched over papers as if to shield their words from any possible intrusion.
Clark finished off the next round triumphantly, tossing his pen on the table as he leaned back with a smirk. Lois had had more words in the round, but Clark had barely pulled ahead with two words: “chance” and “chances.” Lois positively fumed at that, especially since she was put behind only because “fiery” dared not be spelled with as “firey.”
Clark reached up without thinking to adjust his glasses, then felt a shock as he realized they weren’t there. He quickly changed the action to pushing a non-existent stray hair from his forehead, hoping that Lois hadn’t noticed.
They played for a full hour and a half—pausing only briefly when there was a knock on the door. The two of them had frozen still, despite the fact that they were expecting take-out, and then Lois had risen, grabbed a pair of sunglasses and opened the door slowly. Of course, it was only their dinner arriving, but Clark hadn't been able to breath until the pale, skinny little kid that had brought the food had left. After that, they had eaten, then resumed their play.
They won and lost about the same, and rising to loud contests for and against words before diving for the dictionary that Lois had brought out in indignant righteousness to prove that weird was spelled “wierd”—only to be proven wrong. On the other hand, Lois refused to admit that “gat” was a real word, even though Clark argued that it was a word (despite not being in the dictionary), though archaic in form. Clark decided it would be wise not to argue that one. Much. In the end he allowed her to scratch it from his list, even though he ended up winning that round anyway.
Lois beat Clark soundly for the first time since the very first round and paused to look at him. Even as he reached for the game to shake it up for a new match, his eyelids were drooping slightly and the hunch of his shoulders had gone beyond intense competition and into a world of weariness. She reached over and gently pried the game from his hand.
“That’s enough, Kal-El,” she said. “Time for you to go to bed.”
As if on cue, Clark felt a yawn cracking at his jaw. He covered it with a large hand, embarrassed.
“You’re just afraid to lose again,” he teased, even while Lois came over to help him stand.
“Dream on, flyboy. You’re heading downhill towards a brick wall, and I just swooped down to save you from crashing, at my own loss of trouncing you soundly once again.”
Clark winced as his broken arm gave a slight twang, but managed to cover it up enough that Lois didn’t seem to notice. He swallowed.
“Once again?” he said, glancing down at the papers now littering the tabletop. “By my count, I actually won more rounds than you.”
Lois took a quick count and swore mentally. The man was right. Superman had won no more than one single round more than she had.
She stopped, torn between temptation, and Superman’s eyes glimmered with humor as he saw the fight behind her eyes. She saw it and glared at him.
“Enjoy it, flyboy,” she said. “It won’t happen again.”
TBC...
