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Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!
(This is probably the last post until after Christmas, so enjoy. And please review. This is my Christmas present to you, and a review can be your present to me
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Chapter 24: Back to the White Room
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Martha acquiesced to Clark's request hesitantly. She herself had hardly spent a few hours at a time away from Jonathan’s bedside, but with Clark here, things were different. She noticed how tired he looked, how his limp became more pronounced the longer he stayed on his feet, and how he was growing increasingly pale as he moved. But she could see it in his eyes. He needed this.
So they walked together down the stairs, Martha worrying the whole way about straining Clark’s leg (she hadn’t seen it, but the image of his arm was burned deeply into her mind, and that was enough). She ran out to hail a taxi.
Twenty minutes later, they were walking down the hall of the hospital.
Clark kept his mind firmly focused on the present. On his mother, walking next to him as if ready to catch him in the rare event that he might fall. Of the increasing pain in his leg—of concentrating on keeping the limp as small as possible, lest she worry even more, though he was tired already from the motion and activity of the day.
He tried not to hear the silence, to feel the thick air, to see the white walls that closed in around him. It was too white. Too quiet. And Lois wasn’t there.
A nurse walked across the hall with a tray of needles and Clark stopped stone-still in his tracks, his eyes widening and his breath stopping short as all intentions of calm and control flew out the window. He backed up automatically, stumbling slightly, but a wall was against his back and so he didn’t fall, but leaned against it, trembling and pale.
Martha had been noting the rising tension in her tall son’s frame, but hadn’t been prepared to see such stark terror.
She caught his arm to keep him from falling right then. The nurse passed, too intent on her task to notice their distress.
“Clark!” Clark was shaking under her hand, and didn’t seem to hear her. “Clark!”
Clark gave a soft whimper in the back of his throat.
Lois. He needed Lois.
“Lois…”
“Clark. It’s Mom. Look at me, honey.”
“M-mom?”
Clark inhaled suddenly, straightening and blinking as one jerked suddenly from sleep. He looked down at one of his hands and stared at it as if surprised to find it shaking.
“S-sorry.” He ducked his head and pushed up his glasses.
Martha had not let go of his arm. “Come on. I’m taking you back home. You’re not ready for this.”
“N-no,” Clark said, and his voice was firm despite the slight shake in the beginning. “I need to see him, Mom. I need to do this.”
He actually pulled away from her, straightening noticeably, and squaring his shoulders in a way that resembled his primary-colored counterpart.
He started down the hall again.
He didn’t think. He didn’t look at the beds around him. He didn’t see the white. He didn’t see the needles, the nurses, the doctors. He walked, unfeeling, unthinking. Just thinking about his Mom, and concentrating on the dull throb of his leg and arm.
It was enough.
Martha actually had to reach forward and stop him when they got to Jonathan’s door. He blinked, getting that startled and haunted look in his eye again as he turned to look at the closed door before them.
Room 537. A white door.
“Are you sure you’re okay?” Martha asked. “We can come back in the morning. You’re all tired out.”
Clark shook his head, brushing his hair slightly from his eyes with a shaking hand, but then realizing his reaction reached up and brushed it to the side rather than back, as he was prone to. His mother watched each slight movement, each dark flicker of his eyes, her heart heavy. But there was nothing she could do.
“I…I have to see him, Mom.”
She didn’t expect any other answer. In fact, if he had answered otherwise it would have scared her more than she could tell. That was Clark.
Martha nodded and pushed open the door.
The room was dark. Jonathan was sleeping limply on the hospital bed. Clark stopped on the threshold, a cold edge of fear creeping into his limbs and making them feel heavy.
It was a white room. The monitor marking his father’s heart beat beeped away, and it had the smell—the sick smell. The hospital smell. That awful scent of disinfectant.
He felt himself taking a step backwards involuntarily, his breath quickening as his fear began to rise in panic. He grabbed onto the doorframe, feeling it, trying to drag his mind away from the white rooms and terrible memories of darkness—and physically anchoring himself from backing out of the room without realizing it.
His mom touched his arm. He flinched at the contact, but it helped to further ground him. He took a sharp breath, his eyes jerking to the present.
“Are you okay, honey?” Martha queried gently.
Clark nodded, though a cold sweat had broken out on his palms and his forehead and his leg and arm were throbbing as if in warning to tell him to get out of there. He knew his mom could see right through him, but with gentle brush against his shoulders she moved forward and laid a hand on Jonathan’s brow.
“Jonathan?”
The man stirred. He looked old—like he had aged twenty years in the last week. He had lost weight and his formerly robust face looked wrinkled and pale. He drew a deep breath from the tube that fed him oxygen and opened his eyes slightly.
“Martha?” even his voice was reedy—not anything like the deep tone of the strong farmer of Smallville. “I…I told you to go and get some rest.”
“I did,” Martha said. “That was almost three hours ago.”
Jonathan frowned slightly, his brow puckering in confusion. “T-time just seems to…to blur together in here, you know?”
Clark knew. He knew very well.
Jonathan seemed to slowly come to the realization that Martha wasn’t the only one in the room with him. He looked up, squinting slightly against the light of the hallway which illuminated Clark’s tall, dark form. His eyes widened as he recognized him.
“Clark?”
Clark forced himself deeper into the room. His breath was tightening in his chest, but he reached over to turn on the light.
Immediately he saw what made this white room so much different than the one in his memory. Cards, flowers, and get-well gifts from neighbors and friends abounded around the windowsill, the shelves, the bedside. They weren’t expensive—indeed, more than one card was probably homemade and flower homegrown—but they gave a color and life to the room that was almost painfully different, especially against the pale visage of Jonathan’s face.
He fixed his eyes on his dad’s face and took another careful step forward. Jonathan’s eyes were just as firmly fixed on his son’s. He held out a hand, and Clark took it in his large grip as he sat down in the chair next to the bed.
“Dad.”
He felt the awkward teenager again—the kid with developing powers. Throughout those years that are difficult even for the most normal human kid, his mom had made him feel loved—and his dad made him feel normal. Sure, he had his own little changes and challenges to overcome, but so did every boy teenager, his dad had told him. It was his dad that had taken him camping, played football with him when he couldn’t risk playing with any kids his age for fear of accidentally doing something special. It was his dad that he had told his woes of teenage broken romance that he now realized was nothing more than an overgrown crush on his part. But that was normal.
“They did it, didn’t they?” Jonathan’s voice pulled him out of his thoughts. Yet the tone was surprising—not weak, not angry, not afraid, but just calm and deep—almost like the voice of the strong, healthy man he had visited not two weeks ago in Smallville. Clark looked deep into his father’s eyes and saw the sadness, but there was something deeper. “How bad?”
Clark swallowed. “I—I’m alive.”
“I see that. How bad was it?”
Clark hesitated. What did his dad want to hear?
“Bad.”
“You just got out?”
“Three days ago. Lois—Superman stayed at her house...recovering…” He trailed off.
“And you’re walking already? That’s good.”
Clark blinked at the almost casual comment.
“I almost died,” he said, his voice shaking slightly. “Lois—Lois said that I practically did, for a moment. They—they used a…an x-ray…with…with kryptonite.”
Martha gasped and grabbed onto the wall to support herself. He hadn’t told her about that in his brief explanation, and she wondered what other horrors he might have hid from her.
Jonathan closed his eyes. His fingers tightened on Clark’s as he took in his son’s thinner form and pale expression. He had seen the way that his son had walked into the room, favoring his leg carefully. He had seen the barely-reined terror on his strong son’s face.
Clark felt that his father’s eyes going over him carefully, and felt that he could see right through him, taking in every bruise, every cut, every scar and scrape. Every sore rib, every fearful beat of his heart. And then, he looked back into his eyes, more deadly serious than he had ever seen him.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
Clark stared at him. What kind of a question was that? He was going to forget it as best as he could—put it behind him, forget. Forget…
“The…the doctor responsible…he’s dead.” Perry had said that Logram was dead…poisoned in jail, mysteriously.
“So what are you going to do about it?”
The question again. His father’s eyes were unwavering on him.
Clark didn’t know what he wanted. “I’m going to forget about it,” he said. “I—Clark Kent…he wasn’t even supposed to have been there. Not really. So…” He trailed off.
Jonathan grunted slightly—a clear signal of disapproval. “Good luck with that.”
“Jonathan,” Martha said, surprised and dismayed, especially at the sudden uncertain look that came over Clark’s face.
Clark felt sick. After all they had gone through, did his father not even care? Had he decided that he was just too much to worry about—too much of an alien to be scarred after what he had been through?
Jonathan seemed to recognize the fear, and his expression softened. His hand gave another squeeze to Clark’s fingers.
“You can’t forget something like this, Clark.”
Suddenly, without warning, a flare of anger made Clark stand, wrenching his hand away from his father’s. He almost overbalanced at the sharp stab of pain from his injured leg, but he grabbed the chair beside him and faced his father angrily.
“Don’t you think I
know,” he hissed, his eyes flashing. Anger and fury, fed by days upon days of helplessness and despair, burned behind his dark eyes. “I
know that this will never leave me. It’s in my dreams, when I walk outside, when I walk inside. I see green grass across the way and think of pain. I see a man walking down the street in a red shirt and see him bathed in blood. I see black death, white walls, white eyes, white faces, and I see pain, death,
fear.” His voice had shrunk into a harsh whisper. “But I can try. I can hope. That’s
all that kept me alive, there—hope, and Lois. You
can't understand. But I can try to live, to forget, to pretend it was just a bad dream. Otherwise, it…it’s too much. It—it’s too much.”
“What about Superman?” Jonathan asked softly, his eyes not wavering.
“I don’t know,” Clark said tightly. “I don’t even know if he’ll ever be back.”
“So you’re going to let them beat you? You’re giving up?”
“I’m
surviving. What do you want me to do? Track them down? Kill them?” It would be so easy, once he had his strength back. Hardly a flick of his finger—and their lights would vanish. The metal of the chair began to bend beneath Clark’s fingers. He noticed and loosened his grip slightly—but just slightly. Dark memories assaulted him—anger raging with fear and white shadows.
Slowly they filtered away, fleeing behind Clark’s eyes.
He stopped, looking suddenly shaken at his own outburst and thoughts. “But I—I can’t do that. That…I can’t.” He couldn’t. Even after everything that had happened, the very thought of…
killing someone, made him as nauseous as the thought of green light—no, more.
He would never be able to live with himself.
He peeled his fingers from the metal of the chair he had been gripping—the indentations left behind were not deep, and it would doubtful to be recognized for the fingermarks that they were.
And his fingers hurt like he had punched a wall.
It was a weird realization. Clearly his strength was returning, but not very consistently at all.
He wasn’t ready to face this. He wasn’t ready to be the alien right now. He just wanted to be Clark. Just Clark.
His mother was perched, looking just short of horrified. He looked at his father and was surprised to find tears rising in Jonathan’s eyes.
“That’s my boy,” he whispered, sinking back into his pillows with a sigh. The conversation seemed to have sapped all the strength from him, and his voice was thin again.
Clark immediately was tired, and felt bad for letting his anger get the best of him. “I—I’m sorry, Dad. I—it’s just…”
“Don’t be sorry,” Jonathan gruffed softly. “You came in here like a shadow. Scared me to death. Hardly recognized you, all hunched and dark and pale like that. Th-thought I was seeing a ghost or something, or that they might have beat your spirit, which is even worse. But…you’re in there. You’re still the boy we raised, no matter what they do and say. That’s your true strength, Clark Kent. Not that you can lift rockets or bend metal with your bare hands—you’re Clark. My son. A good, strong boy with good raising. No matter what, you’re who you are. You’ll be all right.” He sighed again. “You’ll be all right.”
Clark wanted to cry.
“I…I wish I knew that, Dad.”
“It’s like what you said,” Jonathan replied, his voice slurring slightly. “You can hope, Clark. That…that’s really all of us have got. Don’t you ever stop hoping. And with that hope, you do what you know is right. You might be the man of steel but your mother and I know you have the most gentle heart as anyone beneath that. Keep that heart, son. You were sent here for a reason. You can’t let a little fear get in the way of the good you can do, or evil really does win, no matter how many times you’re able to escape with your life.” He smiled. “You’ll be all right.”
TBC...
