A/N: Pardon the speedy updates - I'm hoping to finish before the boards go down on the 25th![CHAPTER 22]---
As great scientists have said and as all children know, it is above all by the imagination that we achieve perception, and compassion, and hope. --Ursula K. LeGuin---
Tuesday, two weeks later…Lois hummed happily as she submitted her latest story to the Editing Department via the network. Lois Lane, star reporter, was back in action, and it was good to be on top of her game.
Consequently, and perhaps ironically, while she had taken a turn for the better, Clark seemed to recede into non-existence. He hadn’t been in the newsroom since the early days of the first week. Lois didn’t know the true story behind his dwindling appearances, but refused to question it or show too much interest. Even with his absence, a few stories had shown up here and there under his byline so she just assumed that he was flirting with a return to his previous life as a freelance reporter.
She didn’t have the time or energy to deal with Clark or think about him. She had been rock star busy once she had determined to throw herself into work. Work was her true love, and unlike other situations, she could love it enough to make up for the fact that it couldn’t love her back. She was a story-breaking machine, and they couldn’t come fast enough for her.
Life was once again good.
Clicking her teeth, she pushed her chair back and stood, intending on cornering Perry for another assignment when her phone started ringing.
“Lane,” she said offhandedly after grabbing the headset from the phone.
“Lois, it’s your father.”
“Hey, Daddy,” she greeted with a wide smile.
“I’m at the hospital.”
“Dad, you’re a doctor. You’re always at the hospital.” She chuckled at his serious ‘doctor’ tone.
“Honey, I’m at your mother’s hospital and I need you to come down here right away.”
That news caused her to come to attention. “Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine, it’s…”
Lois jumped in before he could finish. “Then why are you at *her* hospital? What’s going on?”
She heard her father sigh, as if being forced to reveal something he hadn’t wanted to say over the phone. “It’s Jory.”
“I’m on my way,” she muttered, barely getting the words out before dropping the phone back to its base.
Even given what she had just said to her father, Lois found herself dropping back into her chair as the weakness in her legs suddenly overpowered her.
~.~
After getting the room number from the information desk, Lois hurried down the hall of the pediatric intensive care unit. Sure that she looked as harried as she felt, she didn’t slow until she had nearly run over Martha Kent.
The older woman turned and intercepted her just in time. “Lois,” she gushed as they embraced. “I’m glad you’re here.”
Lois pulled back and looked at the woman with mixed hurt and confusion. “What happened?” Her attention flicked to the doorway of the room they were standing outside of when Clark appeared in the archway.
“I asked you not to call her,” he ground out to his mother.
“Clark Jerome Kent,” Martha responded tightly.
Lois blinked and looked from one to the other. She finally turned to Clark. “My father called me,” she explained, realizing with sudden pain that even with what she imagined was at stake, Clark still hadn’t planned on telling her.
“And I’m glad he did,” Martha added, giving her son a hard stare.
Lois glanced at Martha and somehow knew that her father had acted on his own. She looked down at the little stuffed bear she had found in the backseat of her car and steeled herself against Clark’s venom.
Lifting her head she met his gaze. “Move aside or I’ll go through you.”
His head titled in challenge and Lois prepared to push past him when Martha intervened. “Clark. Move.”
Narrowing his eyes, Clark shifted slightly. It wasn’t much, but it was enough for Lois, and she brushed past him and stepped into the room brashly.
When she saw the small figure dwarfed by the white sanitary sheets, the various tubes and the monitors, her bravado disappeared. Jory’s head was wrapped in a bandage and wires trailed from various places on his body where electrodes had been attached.
As if sensing her presence, the child turned his head toward the door. His eyes fixed on his forgotten teddy bear and he reached out for it.
Fighting tears, Lois clutched the bear to her chest and walked to the bed. When she was there, she forced a trembling smile and handed the bear to him.
She was surprised when Jory took it and tossed it carelessly to the side. Then he reached out and grabbed her hand instead.
<Pain my arm, Mommy> he awkwardly signed using his free hand.
Lois’s eyes grazed over his little body and all the various materials that were intruding upon his person. It amazed her that the band-aid on his arm was the only thing he could find to complain about. She gingerly touched the bandage that was wrapped around his head, tracing where it covered both of his ears, before pulling her hand from his.
Shrugging out of her blazer and dropping her things onto a nearby chair, she rounded the bed and kicked off her shoes – Jory’s eyes following her every move with desperation. Finally, she climbed onto the bed and carefully shifted the little boy around so that she was holding him in her arms without disturbing the machinery. Jory relaxed against her chest and contentedly began playing with her necklace.
Looking up, she saw that Clark was still standing in the doorway and met his angry gaze. She silently challenged him to say something. After a brief stare-off, he looked down; his expression unreadable.
Then he turned and disappeared through the doorway.
Martha had followed her into the room and had moved to take Lois’s suit jacket from the heap she’d left it in to hang it in the room’s little closet. She looked at Lois and Jory with a soft smile. “I’m glad you’re here,” she repeated.
Lois lowered her chin so she could kiss Jory’s brow. “Martha, what happened?”
Martha sighed and moved Lois’s bag to the floor so she could sit in the chair. “They went ahead with the cochlear surgery,” she explained.
Lois’s eyebrows arched. “They what? When?”
“Last week.”
“Last week?” Lois repeated incredulously.
Martha looked at her sadly. “I wondered if he’d told you, but he refused to talk about it and after the awards ceremony, I didn’t know…”
Lois shook her head. As much as it hurt, the whys behind her not knowing were not nearly as important as finding out what she hadn’t been told. “The implant… The surgery didn’t work?”
The older woman shook her head. “While they were in to check Jory’s response to the auditory stimulation, he had a seizure.”
The news was horrifying to Lois and she was sure that her expression revealed the sentiment.
“It was actually kind of what they were hoping for,” Martha continued. “They were able to see what caused it.”
“And if they could see the cause, they could fix it,” Lois deduced out loud. She looked down at Jory’s bandages again.
“What they found was that his cochlear itself was malformed, not just damaged cilia like in most cases. The seizure turned out to be a neural reaction to the bones trying to reform themselves.”
Lois looked up with a start. “What?”
“It was those super regenerative cells at work. They were constantly attempting to heal the deformed area, and when they succeeded, his brain would react to the new stimulus but was unable to naturalize it.” Martha sighed. “The doctors also found the reason the healing wasn’t able to sustain itself.”
Lois frowned. Martha was apparently having a hard time coming to terms with this latest bit of the story. “What was it?”
“Kryptonite.”
Lois suddenly straightened and Jory looked up at her in alarm. Realizing that she had jolted him, Lois smiled down at him and rubbed his back calmly. “I don’t understand,” she said to the other woman. “What do you mean Kryptonite?”
“Somehow those cell masses in the cochlear had acted as a repository for all of the Kryptonite in his body. The poor baby’s system was in a constant fight over control – life against death.”
“Why would there be Kryptonite in his system?” Lois asked, finding it all hard to believe and yet knowing without a doubt that it had to be true. “How would it have gotten there in the first pl…” Her voice trailed off as she figured it out.
Lana.
“Dr. Klein said that it had something to do with the cloning process. The radiation from the meteorite material caused the cells to divisionalize in the first place.”
Lois nodded. It somehow made sense. She remembered Dr. Klein’s lecture about the cloning process. When he’d drawn the picture of the over-easy egg, he’d also drawn a lightening bolt. For the cloned cells to start dividing and becoming organs, a catalyst had to be introduced.
Kryptonite had been that catalyst.
“The good part about the kryptonite having been isolated in one location was that the doctors were able to remove the deposits,” Martha added.
“And the bad part?” Lois asked, knowing from the wording that the other shoe had yet to fall.
Martha sighed again. “The deposits were actually the things that kept the regenerative cells under control. When they were present, the cells were focused on the foreign bodies. Once they were removed, they returned to their original mission: dividing cells.”
Lois blinked as she fought against comprehending the seriousness of what all of this meant.
That was the other part of Klein’s cloning lecture. Cells had a limited life span and could only divide so many times before they died. Jory’s cells were already aged beyond his years. If the cell division had begun again, it meant that he was dying.
“He’s been here the entire week?” Lois asked; her throat dry and scratchy.
Tears rose to Martha’s eyes. “No. After the cochlear surgery, he was sent home. We didn’t find out that the cells were dying at a faster rate until he was brought in yesterday morning.”
Lois met the woman’s gaze and waited.
“That was when Clark called for the ambulance to bring him in. He’d suffered heart failure.”
~.~
Clark had been walking the stark halls of the hospital for an hour and a half trying to blow off steam. He couldn’t explain why he always reacted completely opposite to Lois’s presence than he wanted to. It was as if she represented everything he feared and reviled in himself all at once.
She had been the one who was against the cochlear surgery, and she had been right. She had berated him for being a horrible father, and she had been right about that too.
He arrived at the doorway to Jory’s room and stopped short, feeling all at once that he was the one who was intruding upon a place he was not supposed to be. The room was darker now; someone had pulled the blinds and the two figures on the bed were sleeping peacefully; tucked against one another as if theirs were the only cares in the world.
He quietly stepped into the room and continued to watch the sleeping woman and child - his memories taking him back to another time when he had seem them in a similar position. That time, he’d returned from a Superman rescue and finally allowed himself to admit to his heart that he loved the little boy whose life he was responsible for.
Now, he was trying not to admit that his heart had expanded even more than that.
He didn’t know why he was determined to push her away, but he’d thought he had done an effective job of it. A part of his soul had died with every push, every kick... every shove.
And yet here she was.
The night of the barbeque at the Lane’s house, he had overheard her tell her mother exactly who he was to her. In that moment Clark had realized just to what extent he had come to rely on Lois in a way he had vowed never to rely on anyone. The overheard words had been just what he *needed* to hear to wake up and pull himself out of fantasy. In addition, the words declaring the platonic nature of their relationship had been just what he *wanted* to hear. As he’d said, he had no *intention* of falling in love with Lois Lane.
Then, on the night of the awards ceremony, Lois had thrown more words at him. That time, she had said she loved him. In some odd way, those had also been words that he had needed and wanted to hear. Even as he denied that they could be true… See, even then, he still had no intention of falling in love with Lois Lane. So he had retreated into the person that he knew the best – even if it wasn’t really the one he necessarily *liked* the best.
But now, with the lights off and the draperies drawn, the things inside the room were not so stark – not as black and white, so much as gray. He liked black and white – they were as simple to understand as yes and no, do and don’t. Here in the diluted world of inbetween, he wasn’t sure where he fit on the scheme between need and want.
He both dreaded and hoped that the woman on the bed would open her eyes and force him to choose a side.
“I think you owe me an explanation.”
The sound of his mother’s voice at the door behind him caused him to stiffen, but he didn’t turn around. “An explanation for what?”
“For the way you have been treating the one true friend you’ve got in this world.”
Clark turned and gestured with his head for his mother to follow him out of the room. When they were in the hall, he closed the door and took a few steps away, not wanting to chance being overheard by the woman inside the room.
Martha followed him and then looked at him expectantly. “Why didn’t you tell her about the surgery? Why didn’t you want her to know about his condition now?”
“Lois and I aren’t really on the best terms right now. You heard what she said at the awards ceremony. She crossed a line.”
“Crossed a line?” Martha’s head tilted and her eyes narrowed. “Was this line crossed before or after what she said on that stage?”
Clark didn’t respond but his mother nodded as if she’d gotten her answer anyway.
“Before,” she said succinctly. “This is the woman who investigated you, who secretly tracked your activities and who saved your life… What could she have possibly done to cross a line that hadn’t already been demolished?”
Clark’s gaze dropped. He couldn’t tell her what Lois had done that was so bad. That she’d fallen in love with him.
And to his detriment… he with her.
“It doesn’t matter,” he answered curtly.
“If it didn’t matter, we wouldn’t be standing here, now would we?”
Frustrated, Clark felt a slight crack in his composure. “I’m trying to do what is best for my son!”
“Your son?” Martha asked with mixed pleasure and incredulity. “Isn’t Lois the reason you are even able to call him that?”
He decided not to answer that. “Did you ever think that maybe she deserved her life back?”
Martha smiled wryly. “So you’re being noble, now? What pain were you sparing that child by closing him off from the people who love him? All this time… everything that you’ve accomplished… I thought you had grown.”
The wrenching in his heart at his mother’s disappointment almost made him physically wince. “What about the pain she’d feel – that we’d all feel – if he dies?” he asked tightly, angry at the slight catch in his voice.
He looked away when he saw his mother’s expression change. She had heard it.
“The doctors are working on a way to fix him right now, Clark,” she said, grabbing his right forearm with both hands. “They’re going to cure him.”
“But what if they don’t?” He looked into her eyes, searchingly; for once not attempting to hide what he was feeling – or perhaps just too raw to be able to. “What if they can’t?”
He pulled his arm away, knowing that he didn’t deserve her comfort. “Everyone who loves me dies.”
Martha’s expression took on yet another emotion as a number of her questions were answered in that one statement. She reached out for him again but he shifted away. “Clark…”
“Um, I’m sorry to interrupt…”
Both Martha and Clark turned to face the gray-haired doctor that had discretely approached them.
Clark inhaled a deep breath and forcibly regained his composure. “Dr. Klein,” he greeted. “Did you find something?”
“Maybe. I mean we may have,” the man stammered. “I would like to talk to you if you don’t mind. Ellen has made her office available… if that’s okay with you, that is.”
Clark ran a hand through his hair roughly; something he had been doing often over the last two days. Dr. Klein’s nervous demeanor wasn’t really helping his already faltering confidence. “Yeah. Of course. Mom, is Dad still in the cafeteria?”
Martha gave both men a worried glance. “Yes – I’ll get him and meet you upstairs.”
~.~
Lois looked up as the door to the hospital room opened. She had been awake for a while but hadn’t moved from the bed; relishing in the time she was able to spend alone with Jory after they had spent so much time apart. She had been silently watching his sleeping form for over thirty minutes.
“Hi Daddy,” she said, greeting the man who slipped into the room. “I was wondering when I would get a chance to see you.”
Sam grunted as he lowered into the visitor’s chair. “Yeah, well, things have been a little crazy. I’m sorry I wasn’t here when you arrived.”
Lois smirked. “Clark was quite angry when he saw me. He mentioned asking that I not be called.”
Sam’s brow creased slightly. “First of all, I thought you deserved to know. Second – I’m unabashedly biased.”
Lois chuckled. “I’m glad.” Taking a breath she glanced around the room. “I don’t understand why he’s here, though,” she said. “At Mom’s hospital… or why you’re here, even.”
Sam leaned forward so his elbows were sitting on his knees. “Bernie needed access to more resources and additional hands and Clark felt that he needed people around this situation that he could trust.”
Lois blinked. “This situation… So you know.” She swallowed. “And Mom?”
Her father nodded. “She’s making sure that everything we do is private.”
Lois nodded gratefully. “People he could trust.” She tried not to show how much that stung. “Clark couldn’t tell me, but he recruits my parents? Nice.”
Sighing, she carefully shifted in the bed and climbed out. Once she was standing she took her time straightening her clothes and sliding her shoes on, using the delay to keep the hurt feelings at bay. “So… now that all the greatest minds of Metropolis are together, what have you come up with?”
Sam pushed himself up from the chair. “You look like you could use some coffee.”
Lois’s brow creased as she looked toward the bed.
“The medication he’s on is going to keep him sleeping for a couple more hours – it’s really important that he rest.” He reached out a hand. “The nurses will keep an eye on him.”
Lois gazed at the child on the bed for a few more moments before sighing and reaching out to take her dad’s offered hand. She knew that he would answer her questions frankly, and had a feeling that those answers might take better over coffee.
She was too distracted by her anxieties to worry about the wrinkled state of her clothes as they made their way to the cafeteria.
“Martha told me what she’d already explained to you,” Sam said, once they had found a secluded corner table and sat down.
Lois released a short breath and wrapped her hands around her cup for warmth and reassurance. “Yeah, the cells that are supposed to heal him are attacking everything – including the things that are already healthy.”
“You remember when I first met Jory and mentioned that he appeared to be showing some mild signs of Progeria?” When Lois nodded, he continued, “Well, it’s not Progeria. Given his… unique genetic makeup, it’s probably not something we could even name, but one of the aspects that is similar to that disease is the fact that his cells are out of control. In most cases, the symptom is fatal because we don’t have a way to turn off the command that tells them to divisionalize.”
Lois looked at her father questioningly. “But you know of a way to turn it off in Jory?”
Sam sighed. “Not exactly. We know that it is the regenerative properties of his cells that have gone haywire. Since those are inherent in his DNA, it really becomes a matter of finding a way to eliminate those properties. That is most likely where Dr. Lang ran into problems.”
Lois flinched. Hearing Lana referred to as a doctor gave her a credibility she didn’t think that woman – regardless of how intelligent she had to have been to pull off what she had – was worth. “What are you saying, Daddy?” she asked warily, feeling something foreboding in the air.
“Jory’s problem is that his body is overly trying to heal itself. The hypothesis we arrived at was actually spurred by Clark’s…inability to do the same.”
Lois abruptly pushed her chair away from the table. “No.”
“Lois, hear me out…”
“No,” she said again. “It could kill him.”
Sam leaned across the table. “If we don’t do anything, it will *certainly* kill him.”
She shook her head. “You weren’t there. You don’t know what that stuff can do. You don’t even know how much of it to use… how much would be too much… He’s just a little boy.”
“He’s a little boy who’s been living with that poison inside of him for four years. We’ll use those amounts as a baseline. Those amounts didn’t kill him.”
“Didn’t kill him?!” Lois said with as much vehemence as she could manage without raising her voice. “What do you call what they caused him to do over the past four years – slowly *live*?”
“Actually, yes. That is what I would call it. You have to remember that in this case, the poison has been the thing keeping him alive, while the cure has made him sick.”
Her mind reeling, Lois couldn’t think of anything to say in response.
“We’re planning to hook him up to a radiation therapy machine to flush his system with Kryptonite so that all of the regenerative powers he has are eliminated. If everything goes as planned – his cells will stop aging at a super rate.”
“And if it doesn’t go as planned?” Lois asked, eyeing her father angrily. “Or did you even consider that possibility?”
“Of course we did, Honey. The consequences of this experi… procedure are that he’d probably never be super like his father was. If we strip his regenerative abilities, he might have a harder time healing from future ailments…” Sam paused. “…You already know the outcome of the worst case scenario.”
Lois licked her lips and considered everything he’d thrown at her. “No,” she said after a moment. “You keep looking. Find something else.”
She rose to her feet with her head tilted to the side as a thought struck her. She really didn’t have a say in any of this. “What did Clark say?”
Sam moved to push his chair back as well. “Lo, before you…”
Divining an answer from her father’s actions, she shook her head curtly again. “Hell no,” she growled. Then she spun on her heel and ran out of the dining area, garnering startled looks from other patrons as she dashed past.
~.~
Clark and his parents had just returned to Jory’s room when Lois appeared in the doorway. She smiled at the older couple before locking eyes with Clark.
“Can I talk to you outside for a minute, please?”
Clark immediately felt his heckles rise. Despite the politeness of the request, he could tell from the fierce look in her eyes that it was not a request after all. It was more like a warning bell announcing an oncoming storm. With narrowed eyes, he followed her into the hall, already feeling defensive.
He wished that they could slip back into that easy friendship that he had come to miss, but the moment feelings had entered into the equation, the possibility of easy friendship had gone out. Now with them there was no natural harmony. They either ran hot or cold… and never at the same time.
“How could you go along with this?” she demanded, suddenly rounding to face him.
“What?”
“The…” she glanced around and lowered her voice, “…radioactive material. That stuff almost *killed* you and you’re willing to put Jory in those same circumstances? What the hell is wrong with you?”
Clark felt the muscles in his jaw tense and realized that he was gritting his teeth with the effort to keep from shouting his rebuttal. “Why wouldn’t I consider something that had the chance of saving his life?”
“You want to talk about chances? Why not just play Russian Roulette? The odds are better.”
He gave a wry laugh. “Wow. Gallows humor. That’s good. Maybe you should be working for the comics section.”
Lois’s jaw set and she crossed her arms over her chest. “If I did, I would have a strip dedicated to a schizophrenic superhero who saved people by night but was really a coward in the light.”
“And she scores again,” Clark bit out. “Any more pot shots left in you?”
“Only one,” she said challengingly. “But I won’t let that distract me from the fact that you are once again making a bad decision.”
“How long have you been waiting to say, ‘I told you so’?” He was unable to help the elevation of his tone. “You think I don’t know that it made everything worse?”
Out of the corner of his eye, Clark noticed that a male nurse had risen from the nurses station and was approaching them. He knew they were being disruptive, but again… he couldn’t help it. “You think I like being the perpetual bad guy? You come in here with your bold assumptions and angry accusations, and *I’m* the one who looks like a heel.”
Lois’s eyebrow arched. “If the shoe fits…”
“Excuse me,” the nurse said, having finally reached them. “I’m afraid visiting hours are over. Only parents or guardians will be allowed to remain in the ward.”
Clark felt the surge of victory. “Not a problem,” he replied to the other man calmly. “I’ll just go back to *my son’s* room now.” He eyed Lois as he started to walk past her, making sure she caught his meaning.
From the fire he saw there, he was sure that she had.
“No you won’t,” another male voice countered.
Clark looked up in surprise to see his father standing outside Jory’s room looking at him angrily. “You’re not coming back in this room with that attitude.”
“Dad, you can’t kick me out of a hospital. I’m the only one who has the right to be here.” He heard Lois give a dry laugh behind him but refused to turn around.
“I think I get a say,” Ellen Lane entered, suddenly appearing from a nearby room where she had been checking on another patient. “And I’m not letting either of you,” she pointed to Lois and Clark with a level finger, “back in there tonight.”
“Mom,” Lois protested, “you can’t be…”
“Serious?” Ellen asked, finishing Lois’s statement. “I’m putting in the order right now. Ian?”
The male nurse nodded and walked back to the nurses station, no doubt to gather the relevant paperwork.
“Go home, Clark,” Martha advised, also stepping into the hallway and blocking the door with his father. “You haven’t slept in two days.”
“I don’t want to go home,” he ground out. “And if you ban me from the room, I’ll just stay in the waiting room.”
“Go home,” Martha said again. “I need you to go get Jory a new set of clothes for when he’s discharged. Can you do that?”
The words had the desired effect. In one fell swoop, his mother had brought everything back into perspective for him. Clothes for discharge… if he were to ever leave.
“Lois, I want you to drive him there,” Ellen added.
“Mother!”
“Don’t ‘mother’ me,” Ellen said, deftly taking the clipboard that Ian handed her and signing the top sheet. “The fact that you two can’t control your tempers is detrimental to the health of our patients. Until you can rectify that, I don’t want to see you on my floor.”
Clark sighed and exchanged an angry look with Lois. As Ellen had said, they had allowed their tempers to get the best of them and now had to pay the price.
~.~
tbc
