Fic: Redshift Blueshifted
Title: Redshift Blueshifted
Word Count: 3300
Prompt: season 9 or 10, any rating, Ella Lane
Additional Notes: Written for Jade, as part of DI's Christmas fic exchange.
Redshift Blueshifted
for Jade
i.
the painting
when i was a little girl
before Lucy was born and i
fell running through great echoing halls of museums
and my mother rocked me close to her i wish
that i had clung on tight
rather than squirmed, and tried to get away
- - -
Clark ran his fingertips lightly over Lois's skin in the night just to watch the slight frown, the wrinkling of the nose, and then to have her bury her face in his neck again. He gathered the blankets up around her, conscious of the cold - in fact, it was snowing (he could hear the minute crunch as every flake settled on the roof, or the ground outside, or on the great creaking, rotating globe on the top of the Daily Planet, a hundred miles away).
She was still wound tight around herself; Clark knew there was more inside of her that he had never seen, hidden inside Matryoshka dolls of 'self'. It had been a little over a year now: the Earth had swung around the Sun and tilted on its axis, and Clark had glimpsed a thousand little lights in Lois's eyes, and smirked, and fought, and felt a soft wave break inside of him - a sensation he had never felt before. But there were dolls left to be opened, and inside himself too.
She was so quiet in the night. Her mouth hung part-open and her hair fell unkempt around her shoulders and knotted all over their pillow and she relaxed. He could say whatever he wanted to her when she was like this and there would be no comeback, nothing: no deflection, no batting-away or pulling-back and defensiveness.
He pressed his palm into the small of her back and said quietly, "Lois, I love you."
Against his neck, he felt the corner of her mouth tighten, and then relax.
- - -
Clark had to wake an hour earlier when Lois stayed over. It meant brewing coffee while she showered and then driving her a hundred miles through the snow while she grappled with her notes and insisted that he let her take the wheel - but he didn't mind.
He would never admit this to anybody, but part of the reason he had put off telling her about his 'secret' was the knowledge that this would all change. It would be exciting, and interesting, and of course he wanted to gather her up in his arms and take one long stride across the face of the Earth with her - but then, when she knew that he could, it would be unnecessary for them to do this: they could still do it, but it would be a choice; it would be quaint; it would be rustic. He wanted it to be necessary, just a little longer.
"You won't find it, you know," he said with a grin in her direction.
The previous year he had buried her Christmas present in a cornfield just outside of Smallville and found the earth disturbed when he went to retrieve it (and the present meticulously rewrapped, of course). This year he had buried it beneath the Earth's magnetic north pole.
"I'm pretty sure," she said, with a tight smile, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"OK, Lois," he said. "If you want to play it that way. Just remember that some things are worth waiting for."
"What, like you you mean?" she said, rolling her eyes sweetly in his direction. "Is that what we're talking about now?" Clark just smiled and turned his attention back to the road.
Lois watched him for several moments: she watched the way small currents in the air disturbed the hair over the nape of his neck; she watched the way he pressed his lips together, and measured the separation between eyelashes. Then she breathed in, closing her eyes, and turned back to her work.
- - -
There was a parcel for Lois to sign for when they reached the office. She took it, and then just stood for a moment looking down at it. Clark touched her shoulder.
"Lois?"
She licked her lips. "It's from the General," she said after a moment, without looking up. Then, "He never sends Christmas presents."
Clark half-smiled. "Then you can open it now," he said. "You don't even have to rewrap it."
"Clark -" Lois broke off. It was too much now, too soon. It was too early. Lois had a complex system of coping mechanisms where her family was concerned, old and fragile - and the cogs and the gears of it stalled and began to break down if anybody did something unexpected; if there was any whisper of an emotional shift the framework might collapse, and she might collapse, and it was too soon for Clark to know that.
But then he reached over and brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, and when he looked at her like that - wide-eyed and mouth gently set - it was as if he knew. "He's not trying to hurt you," he said.
"Some people don't need to try," she said. Then with a sigh, she ripped open the package. It was a painting. Lois pressed her lips together and set it on the desk.
It was small, painted with acrylic on card. Two girls stood, one smaller than the other, arms around each other. The younger girl was pulling away, looking at something out-of-frame to the left; the elder held her wrists and looked out towards him, through him.
"It's you and Lucy," he said.
Lois was quiet for several moments. Then she said, "I think my mother painted it while she was sick."
When Clark looked over at her, she was pressing the corners of her mouth together like so - and inside he knew that she was unravelling. Then she ran her finger along and just under her left lower eyelid, breathed in and said, "Time for work."
- - -
When Clark returned with her coffee the painting was gone, and he didn't see it again, and Lois said nothing about it.
- - -
ii.
he who walks in the permanent illumination of the sun
He who sees, understands and thinks the light, he who hears the light with its sounds of ceaseless rain. He whose life is attached to the sun, whose soul is a slave of the heavenly body.
- J. M. G Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
While Lois slept alone, Clark took one great step across the face of the Earth (and the stars wheeled and blurred over his head) to see her father. He wondered what Lois would think of him for this; he wondered what, if anything, Lois had said to her father in the five intervening years since they had seen each other face-to-face.
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps her silence itself was a communication.
Clark didn't understand her family dynamic. But since she had seen that painting, a melancholy and a distance had unfolded within her and then she had closed herself tight around it - and Clark had to know why: why send the painting? Why now?
"Why?" General Lane stared Clark down from behind his desk.
"I know what you think of me," Clark said gently. "But I'm concerned about Lois. I'm concerned that you are hurting her - and I don't know whether you know it. But after all this time, why open those old wounds for her? - and at Christmas."
The General was silent for several minutes (Clark heard clocks tick down the seconds for miles around). "I'll - tell you why," he said eventually, getting up and standing by the window with his back to Clark. "I sent it because he mother would have wanted her to have it. Maybe -" he paused, and then added, "maybe I should have sent it a long time ago."
Clark had wanted something less vague; but -
He wondered whether the General had reached some kind of realisation - and why? - or had he always known?
He wondered whether the General understood that it was not a positive thing to shut down your emotions; he wondered whether he had watched himself teach that lesson to his daughters, powerless to stop himself, powerless to show affection.
"But why now?" he asked.
"That's personal." The General said. Then, as Clark turned to leave, he added, "She will be getting something else - for Christmas."
- - -
iii.
the videotape
Lois sat cross-legged in front of the fire at the farmhouse. Clark had made some too-familiar excuse (she noticed that he had started recycling them) about having forgotten something and left - but he would be back. There was some secret in him to unravel, she knew; but there were more secrets in her, and things she would never unravel herself.
Everything in me is a contradiction.
Her mother. Everything was displaced after she died. That was the end of Christmas. Lois was an adult in that moment and thought that she would never know how an adult was to behave, was to feel. Even now she felt like she was play-acting at it, but there was no authenticity to her at all - and she was so afraid that people would realise that in her, that Clark would realise that in her.
He had covered the tree in red tinsel and blue lights and Lois was supposed to notice nothing.
It didn't feel like Christmas at all.
When she was small, Ella had put tinsel all over the house; it was silver and gold and when Lois focused on a strand just right she could see rainbows - there was so much wonder in that for her then where now there was indifference. There had been pine needles all over the floor and Lois always ran around barefoot - and her childlike inability to make sense of anything had a sense to it which nothing had anymore. It had fallen together; then her mother had died and it had fallen apart.
It was the painting.
Lois had never thought - never wanted to think - about how her mother saw her. But there she was in the painting, tall and tired-looking - and Lois could see nothing of love about the way she had been painted, had searched for something in her stance or her face or the stroke of the brush and found nothing but representation. There was Lucy, and Lucy was so Lucy - and there was Lois, and she was almost a non-person (and Lois thought she was a non-person).
It was too much. It was too overwhelming. There were too many feelings, too many ideas to unpick and she just - she couldn't.
She looked for the first time at the brown-papered package beside her.
- - -
Everything is a contradiction, Clark thought.
Because in this, somehow the most glimmering time of year there is death and destruction. There are a thousand suicides, fires and drunk drivers all drawing me away from my home, and my family - and Lois.
The sky had burst red for an hour in the corner of Metropolis, then as you drew in there was smoke and black scorch marks and blistering snow - and a mother beating the pavement, bloodying her hands because Clark had been far too late.
Everything in life is a contradiction.
He understood in that instant why Lois's father was too weak to cope with emotion; he understood why he had tried to eliminate even happiness in his world - because with elation always came sorrow. But even in the face of this despair Clark knew that it wasn't better to shut down his ability to feel love and warmth even if it came with this soul-breaking sense of guilt and this pain. It had taken him ten years to realise it.
Because feelings are all there are.
Feelings are what I fight to protect - because without feelings what are people? What is anything?
Feelings are the only thing. (And nothing in the world made him feel more intensely than Lois).
- - -
Lois,
if you're watching this then I guess -
well, I guess this was the last Christmas we had together
I know you're not crying
but Lucy is
I just want to say that - I just want to say that -
you're so beautiful, Lois
I don't need to say that you will do amazing things because
you already have
I want you to know that
that day when you ran away from me?
I wasn't upset
I wasn't angry
I love you
and I don't love you because you're my daughter
but because you run away from me; because you have to know
you have to touch and experience and understand everything
the world - Lois, just because you're here in it
the world is a better place
you won't understand most of this until you're older
I wish - I wish there were words to
to explain
language is so -
I wish I could watch you grow up, Lois
sorry I'm crying now, I'm not like you in that way
this is just so -
I want you to have something of me
so I made that painting of you and your sister
because I know things will be difficult for you now
but Lois
they won't always be difficult
and just - I guess - Merry Christmas
I know you know we got you rollerskates
and I love you
- - -
Lois stood quite still in front of the television; she could feel herself crumbling.
Then she turned, and caught a glimpse of Clark at the door - hair wet and coat snowed on - and she thought she might fall but he caught her, and held her, and rocked her tight. His hand was on the side of her face, pulling her hair back, and his mouth was pressed into the top of her head and she could feel his warm breath in her hair - and she was shaking.
When he felt her heart rate slow, and when her hands were still, Clark let her go and stepped back.
She swallowed, and stood up straight, turning back to the television. Her face was illuminated by the unnatural light from the static signal. But then Clark thought - that light is the most natural thing; some fraction of that light, of that signal, has existed since the egg-hatching of time itself, has travelled time and vast distances to be here, now, in this moment, to light up up Lois's face in the darkness.
Lois standing here like this, finally grieving her mother's death: this is a moment which will survive for another age. It will linger until next Christmas in light alone, and a thousand Christmases from now - half-faded and red-shifted. In a thousand years if the light from this moment could be perceived, someone might perceive Lois - and, seeing in her elongated and red-shifted appearance a hint of everything she has thought or felt and everything that has happened to her, might understand some small part of her, might understand to love her.
"She loved you so much," he said gently.
He saw Lois's jaw tremble, and she swallowed. Then she said, "She loved who I was when I was a little girl."
"You haven't changed so much," he said.
Lois closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. "You know," she said, "this is stupid - I still don't understand - why do people die?" She looked at Clark, and he shook his head. "People tell you that you will understand when you're older but you don't. Nobody understands it. They just stop asking themselves."
"They don't stop asking," Clark said. "Not everybody."
Lois made a quick gesture to wipe at her eyes and said, "I'm sorry. This is a crappy Christmas Eve."
It's the most perfect Christmas Eve, Clark wanted to say. The most perfect.
"You know, that first Christmas after my mom died?" she said. "That was the hardest period of my whole life. Because the General - retreated. But I wanted to do something for Lucy, because I had to look after Lucy - I just had to push all of my feelings about my mom deep down inside myself so that Lucy - so things would be better for her, I guess. But I did a lousy job of everything. It didn't work out."
Clark reached his hand out to her, and stroked her hair back from her face and behind her ear. "She doesn't take it for granted," he said quietly, brushing his fingers down her neck and her arm, and pulling her back into him. "Lucy understands what you did." He felt Lois dig her fingers into the material of his shirt at the back and just rocked her.
"I didn't do anything," she said.
"You did the best you could," he said. "That's everything."
- - -
They slept together on the sofa that night, all tangled up underneath the Christmas tree (which cast red and blue light over them). Clark stroked the hair back from Lois's face as she slept, and lightly kissed the corner of her eyelid and then the corner of her mouth. There was no tenseness now when he whispered "I love you," but her fingers wound themselves around his and he smiled.
- - -
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, As Once the Winged Energy of Delight
- - -
Lois dreamed later that her mother was rocking her in her arms;
and instead of squirming
she wrapped her stubby fingers up in Ella's hair
and felt the once hollow-sounding chambers of her heart filled
When she woke up, clear-eyed and, like a child, at the break of dawn, it was Christmas.
- - -
Clark was cooking breakfast in the kitchen.
"What time is your mom coming?" she asked him, wrapping her arms around his waist from behind and putting her chin on his shoulder.
"I take it," he said, and she knew that he was smiling, "you didn't find my present for you this year."
"I have no idea," she said, digging her fingers into his ribs, "what you're talking about."
He laughed. "OK, Lois. That's good." - and she ran her hands under his shirt to lie them flat against his skin, and rocked him from side to side.
"Merry Christmas," she said, and kissed the horizon of his shoulders.
- - -
They opened their presents together under the tree at noon. Lois noticed that Clark's was cool to the touch and quirked an eyebrow but said nothing (Clark and Martha shared a 'look', and Martha excused herself to make a drink). She ripped the wrapping paper off it.
"It's - a scrapbook," she said, in confusion. "Thanks."
Clark grinned. "No, look," he said, opening it. "I put in all the photographs I have of you, and clippings of your articles, and also -" he pressed his lips together, "all the things that remind me of you." He turned the pages and Lois saw - aerial photographs of Metropolis, and prints of paintings, and poetry, and other things - and on the last page, a copy of the painting her mother had made for her.
"You know," Clark said. "You gave me that journal for my birthday that year - and told me to put all my secret thoughts in it but - all I really think about lately is you."
Lois had to look away, and swallowed. "Thank you," she said, and felt Clark reach out to twist his fingers into hers.
When she opened her eyes she found herself looking at Martha, as Martha came back in from the kitchen.
Martha was smiling.
- - -
children running in galleries and museums
children playing on Christmas morning wrapping paper everywhere
mothers smiling mothers stroking hair
an infinite loop
redshifted
an imprint
an electromagnetic emotional recording
Word Count: 3300
Prompt: season 9 or 10, any rating, Ella Lane
Additional Notes: Written for Jade, as part of DI's Christmas fic exchange.
Redshift Blueshifted
for Jade
i.
the painting
when i was a little girl
before Lucy was born and i
fell running through great echoing halls of museums
and my mother rocked me close to her i wish
that i had clung on tight
rather than squirmed, and tried to get away
- - -
Clark ran his fingertips lightly over Lois's skin in the night just to watch the slight frown, the wrinkling of the nose, and then to have her bury her face in his neck again. He gathered the blankets up around her, conscious of the cold - in fact, it was snowing (he could hear the minute crunch as every flake settled on the roof, or the ground outside, or on the great creaking, rotating globe on the top of the Daily Planet, a hundred miles away).
She was still wound tight around herself; Clark knew there was more inside of her that he had never seen, hidden inside Matryoshka dolls of 'self'. It had been a little over a year now: the Earth had swung around the Sun and tilted on its axis, and Clark had glimpsed a thousand little lights in Lois's eyes, and smirked, and fought, and felt a soft wave break inside of him - a sensation he had never felt before. But there were dolls left to be opened, and inside himself too.
She was so quiet in the night. Her mouth hung part-open and her hair fell unkempt around her shoulders and knotted all over their pillow and she relaxed. He could say whatever he wanted to her when she was like this and there would be no comeback, nothing: no deflection, no batting-away or pulling-back and defensiveness.
He pressed his palm into the small of her back and said quietly, "Lois, I love you."
Against his neck, he felt the corner of her mouth tighten, and then relax.
- - -
Clark had to wake an hour earlier when Lois stayed over. It meant brewing coffee while she showered and then driving her a hundred miles through the snow while she grappled with her notes and insisted that he let her take the wheel - but he didn't mind.
He would never admit this to anybody, but part of the reason he had put off telling her about his 'secret' was the knowledge that this would all change. It would be exciting, and interesting, and of course he wanted to gather her up in his arms and take one long stride across the face of the Earth with her - but then, when she knew that he could, it would be unnecessary for them to do this: they could still do it, but it would be a choice; it would be quaint; it would be rustic. He wanted it to be necessary, just a little longer.
"You won't find it, you know," he said with a grin in her direction.
The previous year he had buried her Christmas present in a cornfield just outside of Smallville and found the earth disturbed when he went to retrieve it (and the present meticulously rewrapped, of course). This year he had buried it beneath the Earth's magnetic north pole.
"I'm pretty sure," she said, with a tight smile, "I have no idea what you're talking about."
"OK, Lois," he said. "If you want to play it that way. Just remember that some things are worth waiting for."
"What, like you you mean?" she said, rolling her eyes sweetly in his direction. "Is that what we're talking about now?" Clark just smiled and turned his attention back to the road.
Lois watched him for several moments: she watched the way small currents in the air disturbed the hair over the nape of his neck; she watched the way he pressed his lips together, and measured the separation between eyelashes. Then she breathed in, closing her eyes, and turned back to her work.
- - -
There was a parcel for Lois to sign for when they reached the office. She took it, and then just stood for a moment looking down at it. Clark touched her shoulder.
"Lois?"
She licked her lips. "It's from the General," she said after a moment, without looking up. Then, "He never sends Christmas presents."
Clark half-smiled. "Then you can open it now," he said. "You don't even have to rewrap it."
"Clark -" Lois broke off. It was too much now, too soon. It was too early. Lois had a complex system of coping mechanisms where her family was concerned, old and fragile - and the cogs and the gears of it stalled and began to break down if anybody did something unexpected; if there was any whisper of an emotional shift the framework might collapse, and she might collapse, and it was too soon for Clark to know that.
But then he reached over and brushed a piece of hair behind her ear, and when he looked at her like that - wide-eyed and mouth gently set - it was as if he knew. "He's not trying to hurt you," he said.
"Some people don't need to try," she said. Then with a sigh, she ripped open the package. It was a painting. Lois pressed her lips together and set it on the desk.
It was small, painted with acrylic on card. Two girls stood, one smaller than the other, arms around each other. The younger girl was pulling away, looking at something out-of-frame to the left; the elder held her wrists and looked out towards him, through him.
"It's you and Lucy," he said.
Lois was quiet for several moments. Then she said, "I think my mother painted it while she was sick."
When Clark looked over at her, she was pressing the corners of her mouth together like so - and inside he knew that she was unravelling. Then she ran her finger along and just under her left lower eyelid, breathed in and said, "Time for work."
- - -
When Clark returned with her coffee the painting was gone, and he didn't see it again, and Lois said nothing about it.
- - -
ii.
he who walks in the permanent illumination of the sun
He who sees, understands and thinks the light, he who hears the light with its sounds of ceaseless rain. He whose life is attached to the sun, whose soul is a slave of the heavenly body.
- J. M. G Le Clézio, The Book of Flights
While Lois slept alone, Clark took one great step across the face of the Earth (and the stars wheeled and blurred over his head) to see her father. He wondered what Lois would think of him for this; he wondered what, if anything, Lois had said to her father in the five intervening years since they had seen each other face-to-face.
Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps her silence itself was a communication.
Clark didn't understand her family dynamic. But since she had seen that painting, a melancholy and a distance had unfolded within her and then she had closed herself tight around it - and Clark had to know why: why send the painting? Why now?
"Why?" General Lane stared Clark down from behind his desk.
"I know what you think of me," Clark said gently. "But I'm concerned about Lois. I'm concerned that you are hurting her - and I don't know whether you know it. But after all this time, why open those old wounds for her? - and at Christmas."
The General was silent for several minutes (Clark heard clocks tick down the seconds for miles around). "I'll - tell you why," he said eventually, getting up and standing by the window with his back to Clark. "I sent it because he mother would have wanted her to have it. Maybe -" he paused, and then added, "maybe I should have sent it a long time ago."
Clark had wanted something less vague; but -
He wondered whether the General had reached some kind of realisation - and why? - or had he always known?
He wondered whether the General understood that it was not a positive thing to shut down your emotions; he wondered whether he had watched himself teach that lesson to his daughters, powerless to stop himself, powerless to show affection.
"But why now?" he asked.
"That's personal." The General said. Then, as Clark turned to leave, he added, "She will be getting something else - for Christmas."
- - -
iii.
the videotape
Lois sat cross-legged in front of the fire at the farmhouse. Clark had made some too-familiar excuse (she noticed that he had started recycling them) about having forgotten something and left - but he would be back. There was some secret in him to unravel, she knew; but there were more secrets in her, and things she would never unravel herself.
Everything in me is a contradiction.
Her mother. Everything was displaced after she died. That was the end of Christmas. Lois was an adult in that moment and thought that she would never know how an adult was to behave, was to feel. Even now she felt like she was play-acting at it, but there was no authenticity to her at all - and she was so afraid that people would realise that in her, that Clark would realise that in her.
He had covered the tree in red tinsel and blue lights and Lois was supposed to notice nothing.
It didn't feel like Christmas at all.
When she was small, Ella had put tinsel all over the house; it was silver and gold and when Lois focused on a strand just right she could see rainbows - there was so much wonder in that for her then where now there was indifference. There had been pine needles all over the floor and Lois always ran around barefoot - and her childlike inability to make sense of anything had a sense to it which nothing had anymore. It had fallen together; then her mother had died and it had fallen apart.
It was the painting.
Lois had never thought - never wanted to think - about how her mother saw her. But there she was in the painting, tall and tired-looking - and Lois could see nothing of love about the way she had been painted, had searched for something in her stance or her face or the stroke of the brush and found nothing but representation. There was Lucy, and Lucy was so Lucy - and there was Lois, and she was almost a non-person (and Lois thought she was a non-person).
It was too much. It was too overwhelming. There were too many feelings, too many ideas to unpick and she just - she couldn't.
She looked for the first time at the brown-papered package beside her.
- - -
Everything is a contradiction, Clark thought.
Because in this, somehow the most glimmering time of year there is death and destruction. There are a thousand suicides, fires and drunk drivers all drawing me away from my home, and my family - and Lois.
The sky had burst red for an hour in the corner of Metropolis, then as you drew in there was smoke and black scorch marks and blistering snow - and a mother beating the pavement, bloodying her hands because Clark had been far too late.
Everything in life is a contradiction.
He understood in that instant why Lois's father was too weak to cope with emotion; he understood why he had tried to eliminate even happiness in his world - because with elation always came sorrow. But even in the face of this despair Clark knew that it wasn't better to shut down his ability to feel love and warmth even if it came with this soul-breaking sense of guilt and this pain. It had taken him ten years to realise it.
Because feelings are all there are.
Feelings are what I fight to protect - because without feelings what are people? What is anything?
Feelings are the only thing. (And nothing in the world made him feel more intensely than Lois).
- - -
Lois,
if you're watching this then I guess -
well, I guess this was the last Christmas we had together
I know you're not crying
but Lucy is
I just want to say that - I just want to say that -
you're so beautiful, Lois
I don't need to say that you will do amazing things because
you already have
I want you to know that
that day when you ran away from me?
I wasn't upset
I wasn't angry
I love you
and I don't love you because you're my daughter
but because you run away from me; because you have to know
you have to touch and experience and understand everything
the world - Lois, just because you're here in it
the world is a better place
you won't understand most of this until you're older
I wish - I wish there were words to
to explain
language is so -
I wish I could watch you grow up, Lois
sorry I'm crying now, I'm not like you in that way
this is just so -
I want you to have something of me
so I made that painting of you and your sister
because I know things will be difficult for you now
but Lois
they won't always be difficult
and just - I guess - Merry Christmas
I know you know we got you rollerskates
and I love you
- - -
Lois stood quite still in front of the television; she could feel herself crumbling.
Then she turned, and caught a glimpse of Clark at the door - hair wet and coat snowed on - and she thought she might fall but he caught her, and held her, and rocked her tight. His hand was on the side of her face, pulling her hair back, and his mouth was pressed into the top of her head and she could feel his warm breath in her hair - and she was shaking.
When he felt her heart rate slow, and when her hands were still, Clark let her go and stepped back.
She swallowed, and stood up straight, turning back to the television. Her face was illuminated by the unnatural light from the static signal. But then Clark thought - that light is the most natural thing; some fraction of that light, of that signal, has existed since the egg-hatching of time itself, has travelled time and vast distances to be here, now, in this moment, to light up up Lois's face in the darkness.
Lois standing here like this, finally grieving her mother's death: this is a moment which will survive for another age. It will linger until next Christmas in light alone, and a thousand Christmases from now - half-faded and red-shifted. In a thousand years if the light from this moment could be perceived, someone might perceive Lois - and, seeing in her elongated and red-shifted appearance a hint of everything she has thought or felt and everything that has happened to her, might understand some small part of her, might understand to love her.
"She loved you so much," he said gently.
He saw Lois's jaw tremble, and she swallowed. Then she said, "She loved who I was when I was a little girl."
"You haven't changed so much," he said.
Lois closed her eyes and pressed her lips together. "You know," she said, "this is stupid - I still don't understand - why do people die?" She looked at Clark, and he shook his head. "People tell you that you will understand when you're older but you don't. Nobody understands it. They just stop asking themselves."
"They don't stop asking," Clark said. "Not everybody."
Lois made a quick gesture to wipe at her eyes and said, "I'm sorry. This is a crappy Christmas Eve."
It's the most perfect Christmas Eve, Clark wanted to say. The most perfect.
"You know, that first Christmas after my mom died?" she said. "That was the hardest period of my whole life. Because the General - retreated. But I wanted to do something for Lucy, because I had to look after Lucy - I just had to push all of my feelings about my mom deep down inside myself so that Lucy - so things would be better for her, I guess. But I did a lousy job of everything. It didn't work out."
Clark reached his hand out to her, and stroked her hair back from her face and behind her ear. "She doesn't take it for granted," he said quietly, brushing his fingers down her neck and her arm, and pulling her back into him. "Lucy understands what you did." He felt Lois dig her fingers into the material of his shirt at the back and just rocked her.
"I didn't do anything," she said.
"You did the best you could," he said. "That's everything."
- - -
They slept together on the sofa that night, all tangled up underneath the Christmas tree (which cast red and blue light over them). Clark stroked the hair back from Lois's face as she slept, and lightly kissed the corner of her eyelid and then the corner of her mouth. There was no tenseness now when he whispered "I love you," but her fingers wound themselves around his and he smiled.
- - -
As once the winged energy of delight
carried you over childhood's dark abysses,
now beyond your own life build the great
arch of unimagined bridges.
- Rainer Maria Rilke, As Once the Winged Energy of Delight
- - -
Lois dreamed later that her mother was rocking her in her arms;
and instead of squirming
she wrapped her stubby fingers up in Ella's hair
and felt the once hollow-sounding chambers of her heart filled
When she woke up, clear-eyed and, like a child, at the break of dawn, it was Christmas.
- - -
Clark was cooking breakfast in the kitchen.
"What time is your mom coming?" she asked him, wrapping her arms around his waist from behind and putting her chin on his shoulder.
"I take it," he said, and she knew that he was smiling, "you didn't find my present for you this year."
"I have no idea," she said, digging her fingers into his ribs, "what you're talking about."
He laughed. "OK, Lois. That's good." - and she ran her hands under his shirt to lie them flat against his skin, and rocked him from side to side.
"Merry Christmas," she said, and kissed the horizon of his shoulders.
- - -
They opened their presents together under the tree at noon. Lois noticed that Clark's was cool to the touch and quirked an eyebrow but said nothing (Clark and Martha shared a 'look', and Martha excused herself to make a drink). She ripped the wrapping paper off it.
"It's - a scrapbook," she said, in confusion. "Thanks."
Clark grinned. "No, look," he said, opening it. "I put in all the photographs I have of you, and clippings of your articles, and also -" he pressed his lips together, "all the things that remind me of you." He turned the pages and Lois saw - aerial photographs of Metropolis, and prints of paintings, and poetry, and other things - and on the last page, a copy of the painting her mother had made for her.
"You know," Clark said. "You gave me that journal for my birthday that year - and told me to put all my secret thoughts in it but - all I really think about lately is you."
Lois had to look away, and swallowed. "Thank you," she said, and felt Clark reach out to twist his fingers into hers.
When she opened her eyes she found herself looking at Martha, as Martha came back in from the kitchen.
Martha was smiling.
- - -
children running in galleries and museums
children playing on Christmas morning wrapping paper everywhere
mothers smiling mothers stroking hair
an infinite loop
redshifted
an imprint
an electromagnetic emotional recording