Mwhahahaha! Finals are done! Finals are done!
< does a crazy-mad dance then collapses and sits at her computer like a deflated balloon >
Well, I survived. Barely. Thanks for the reviews, everyone. I think they saved my life today.
Anyway, enjoy.
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Chapter 21: Are You My Mother?
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Clark looked around for a paper and pen. Usually he didn’t keep one by the phone: he never had a need to, since his memory served him well enough that he usually didn’t need to write things down. Finally finding a pen, and a scrap of paper from the corner of a notebook, he wrote down the number with a shaking hand, thanked Perry, and then hung up.
He moved over to the couch again, leaning against it and closing his eyes. His broad, strong shoulders hunched and his dark hair hung down as if to emphasize his too-pale face. His father was in the hospital. From the sound of Perry’s voice, it wasn’t looking good. Nothing was looking good.
“Clark?”
A soft voice spoke behind him, and a gentle arm brushed his back. He couldn’t help his automatic reaction. He flinched back so violently that he lost his balance as he spun to face his presumed attacker. His bare foot caught the corner of the couch and he stumbled, catching himself as best as he could as he fell to the floor in a heap.
“No…” It was pleading, desperate…of endless whiteness and pain and fear. It bled through the single word and sank into the bookshelves, the floor, the walls, and into the small woman that stood before him now, one hand still outstretched from touching him.
“Clark!”
Martha fell down beside him, pushing the coffee table out of the way so she could better get to her son. She hugged him, and in his terror he wasn’t even able to pull away as his body screamed him to do. To get away. This wasn’t Lois. He needed Lois.
His mother held him tight, feeling the trembling through the thin cotton shirt. She had seen the defeated slump of his shoulders from behind, but now the haunted look into his pale and thin face shocked her into silence.
Slow recognition seeped through Clark’s being, and with that, terror began to fade into relief. “M-mom?”
“Clark. Clark. I thought I’d lost you, my baby. Oh, Clark.”
“I—I’m here, Mom.” His voice choked. It was different—even more comforting than one of Lois’s embrace, at the moment. Because this was his mother. The woman who had loved him from his first moments on this earth. The woman who had taught him, accepted him, loved him. His mother…she knew him. She knew him better than he knew himself. He carefully lifted his arms around her, feeling tears fall from his own eyes as she cried into his shoulder, her fingers clutching his shirt as if she might never let go.
He was distantly aware of the phone ringing insistently from where he had left it next to the note on the counter, but that didn’t matter. Martha straightened after a moment, looking deep into his eyes as her fingers went up to hold his slightly scruffy face. Tears still drying on her cheeks, her expression changed from one of joy and relief to horror, underfed by a mother’s fury at the sight of the fear in his eyes.
“Clark. What have they done to you?”
Clark pulled both his eyes and his face away. “I’m doing better,” he said. He lifted himself up slowly—gingerly with his leg and arm, which were both complaining from the sudden movement and not-so-gentle fall.
Martha stood up with him, her mother’s eyes seeing the careful way he was moving—and seeing beyond that, deeper. Tears leaked from her eyes again, but this one at his pain.
She moved forward—slowly, cautiously, as if she was afraid to make any sudden movements that would frighten him again. She reached her hand out, carefully taking hold of his right arm. Clark did nothing to stop her, but didn’t meet her eyes as she lifted it, taking a full look at the angry coloration and uneven skin there. He hadn’t yet washed off the blood from his cast, and it made dark smears across his skin.
Martha couldn’t even swear—the only breath she had was let out in a faint gasp.
“Clark…”
Clark pulled away, putting a hand over the scar tissue as if covering it might erase the ugly picture from his mother’s mind.
“S-sorry.”
“No, no, no. What did they do to my baby?” She pulled him around so she looked right up into his dark eyes. “Who did this to you?”
“B-bureau 39,” Clark said. “I…I don’t really want to talk about it.”
And he didn’t. This world around him was already flickering with the memories of that darkest dream; it was too real already without telling about it now.
“Clark…”
“Please, Mom.” It was not firm. If it had been—that firm, yet gentle voice that Martha knew her son could speak in…his Superman voice—her mind might have been soothed…at least a little. But this was a plea. And it raised flares in her mind.
She wrapped her arms around him. “They did that to you?” her voice trembled. His arm looked like some sort of war-wound—something horrible you heard about and saw in inhuman pictures, but never with your own eyes. And they had done that to her son.
Clark shuddered. “Yes.”
“W-what else?” It would be a lie if Martha said that she wasn’t afraid to ask. She was terrified—shaking as bad as the boy in her arms.
Clark choked, the feel of his mother grounding him, holding him away from the darkness. “M-my leg,” he murmured, closing his eyes. He spoke the words, but didn’t feel them. Because as long as it was someone else he was talking about, he would be fine. “And my head—but that’s feeling better, now.”
“Oh, Clark.”
“T-they hurt me, Mom. I—I just wanted to save Lois, but they had…they had kryptonite.” It wasn’t working. His breath was tightening and tears began to sting at his eyes as his mother held him. “Mom…” He choked. His legs weakened beneath him and he would have fallen, but Martha held him and helped him down to his knees, and she pulled him towards her, rocking him like she had when he was a child.
“ Clark, baby. Clark…”
“I’m s-scared, Mom.” He was crying in earnest now, shaking as the world seemed to tumble off his shoulders. He was safe, here. Safe with the only woman he had known as a mother. The woman who had created him—had made him, in every way that mattered…a human.
“Oh, honey.”
“I-I’m an a-alien, Mom. A…an alien.” Clark cried through his staggered breath. “Th-they d-dissected m-me like a f-frog. Th-they said I wasn’t human. Mom….” He shivered, holding her tight so that even had he even only had normal strength he would have hurt her…but he was weakened. And weakened even further by the sudden onslaught of memories.
Martha’s heart felt as if it might crack in two. From the moment she had heard that Clark was missing her life had turned into a nightmare, but she had hoped that she might wake up to see all was well. That Clark was fine—perhaps he had gotten lost on a quick trip to Mars, or something, and taken his time coming back. That she would wake up in the morning and find Jonathan his usual, robust self—not the pale shadow of the man that now laid in the hospital.
This is what Jonathan had feared, or worse, from the first phone call from the Daily Planet that told him that Clark was missing. They had started out for Metropolis at once, even despite the fact that there was some chance that Clark was off dealing with some natural disaster—although there were none so big on the news right then. They just hoped that there was something they could do.
The Daily Planet seemed more of the headquarters for the search than the police station. Though Clark was yet relatively new there, his open and friendly manner had already won him a number of allies among his associates. Perry had Jimmy, the young copyboy, searching through every file he could for some clue, and the young man had gone forth on the job with extreme intent. He didn’t even sleep the first couple nights, it seemed, for early in the morning when the Kents would drop by he would be hard at work at his computer—a cup of coffee at his side to aid him in his search.
And then, he had found it. Some significantly large financial movements in some accounts that Jimmy had been able to link to Bureau 39 during his research for Lois and Clark’s last article. Money that had been donated by an anonymous source that Jimmy, for all his tries, hadn’t been able to track. Jimmy held up the find with a cry of success. Superman also hadn’t been seen since the two reporters’ disappearance, and so the connection, it seemed, could be there. They had a lead at last.
They had phoned the Kents, who had been at Clark’s apartment catching a few hours of sleep. Jonathan’s expression had gone pasty. He had finished up the call and hung the phone up carefully. Then, he’d just said one thing:
“They’re going to dissect my boy like a frog.”
And then, he’d collapsed.
Martha had tried to keep up her flagging spirits, to keep on hoping that her little, perfect star from the heavens would be all right… but no. Jonathan had been right all along.
She held her boy, her precious, innocent son—her baby. How she wished it was those days when she could kiss a scraped knee (when he was quite young and still had to worry about such a thing), and he would be fine. No—this was out of her experience. She didn’t know what to do, didn’t know what she could do. Worse, she had a feeling that there was nothing really that she could do at all.
So she just rocked him and let Superman—the greatest American hero and the strongest known man on Earth—cry in the arms of his mother.
TBC...
