FIC: "Reunion", Part 13 of ?? (SV)
This part is rated PG-13 for "coarse language" in the heat of an argument. You've been warned.
Previous Parts
Part Thirteen
Chloe’s car had barely left when Lois turned around and went back in the house. Okay, Lois, she told herself, Mrs. Kent put you in charge. Don’t screw it up.
The aliens - Clark’s family, if you could believe it - were sitting on the couch again, speaking softly to one another. Jor-El’s bruise was looking ghastly, but Lois knew that that just meant it was healing.
Provided that humans and - Kryptonians? was that the right word? - healed the same way. She shook her head. Who would have thought that Clark Kent was an alien?
She realized that the farm boy in question hadn’t followed her inside but she shrugged it off. Leave him alone for now, she told herself. It’s been a weird, long day. Evening. Whatever. Especially for him.
During her moment of introspection, Jor-El had discovered the TV remote and was examining it with curiosity. As calmly as she could, she walked over to them and took the remote and turned on the television for him. Given that the first image that appeared on the screen was of an autopsy on what was probably one of the CSI shows, she quickly changed the channel - there weren’t many to choose from; the Kents couldn’t afford to spend money on something as frivolous as cable - and finally left it on PBS, something with lots of underwater footage of very colorful fish. “Ah,” said Jor-El, taking it all in. “Thank you, Lois-Lane.”
Leaving the aliens engrossed in the fauna of the Great Barrier Reef, she went upstairs and began to contemplate the orders she’d received from Mrs. Kent. As missions go, surely this wouldn’t be too difficult, would it?
She froze; where was she going to put everyone? She took a quick inventory: there were only the two bedrooms, and of course the couch downstairs, to which Clark was always banished when she stayed with the Kents. What was she going to do with three more aliens and Chloe?
She walked into Clark’s room and opened up the window. She could see that he was still standing where she’d left him. Oh, yay. Brooding. As if he doesn’t do enough of that already. “Hey, Smallville!” she called. He turned and looked up at her. So much for leaving him alone. “Come up here and help me out!”
Instantly, he was gone - and half a heartbeat before she heard the kitchen door slam shut on its own, he was standing beside her. “What the -” she started. “Wait a sec. That one of your mutant powers?” she asked, thinking of what Chloe had said earlier, and all the meteor freaks she’d told her about - and everything she’d seen during her visits to Smallville over the last year. If Chloe had thought that Clark was one of these meteor mutants or whatever, then she must have seen something that led her to believe he had some kind of special powers.
Grinning a little - damn that wholesome farm boy smile! - he shook his head. “I’m not a mutant,” he said firmly.
Ah. Struck a nerve there. Secret alien power, then.
Moving on to the mission at hand, she crossed her arms and said, “We’re a few beds short of a hotel, Smallville.”
“Oh, you’re only now figuring that out?” he replied. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was miffed. “And here I thought I was sleeping on the couch because it’s comfortable.”
Not miffed, but maybe a little pissed.
“That’s not all my fault,” she told him. “I tried to refuse the first time - Uncle Gabe has a couch of his own, you know, but your mom doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she went through officer training with the General.” He opened his mouth - she wondered if the slightly crooked teeth and almost-fangs were an alien thing or a dirt-poor-farmer thing - but she cut him off before a single sound escaped: “And this is a farmhouse. Aren’t farmers supposed to have, like, a dozen kids? Where are all the extra bedrooms -”
She knew from experience that he was usually too polite to interrupt, so it surprised her when he did just that just then. “Never say anything like that to my parents,” he said icily. “Ever.”
Startled, she actually found herself stammering as she acknowledged his order. “O-okay,” she said. “I swear I won’t say anything to them.”
His body recovered some of its mild-mannered façade, relaxing slightly. “For your information,” he allowed, “there were originally three bedrooms, but one was sacrificed to allow indoor plumbing in the ‘fifties.”
The infamous only bathroom in the house. She supposed that if you broke down the wall between it and the bizarre closet space next to it you could get a reasonable bedroom out of it. “Well, then,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I guess we’ll leave your folks’ room alone, in case they send them back home from the hospital tonight.” She’d been surprised at how good Mr. Kent had looked after Clark’s uncle had given him that injection. “Chloe and I could go to her place - Uncle Gabe will wonder what’s going on but between the two of us, I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
Clark nodded. “Just don’t say that we have relatives over. Mr. Sullivan knows us well enough that saying anyone from the Kent or the Clark side was visiting would sound suspicious.”
“Clark side?” Something in the way he said it told her that he wasn’t referring to himself.
He shrugged. “Mom’s maiden name is Clark. It’s how they came up with my name.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to sound disinterested. In actuality, she thought it was awesome that they’d given him such an important name, like he was their own flesh-and-blood. The only way they could have gotten any more territorial would’ve been by calling him Jonathan, Jr., which, quite frankly, would’ve been disastrous, in her honest opinion. “Jonnie” was ten time worse than “Clarkie” - especially coming from her.
“Anyways,” Lois said, shaking off such deep and Clark-friendly thoughts, “all that’s left is figuring out where we’re putting Jor-El and Lara and Zor-El, then. Oh, and you, of course.”
Clark pressed his lips together. It seemed that his biological parents were a sore topic with him, thought she couldn’t really imagine why. Granted, she probably hadn’t heard the whole story yet, and at times it still didn’t feel like it had really sunk in yet, that Clark ‘farmboy-from-Nowheresville’ Kent was really an alien from the planet Krypton, so maybe she just hadn’t processed it all yet. She waited for him to say something - anything, really. He knew she wasn’t comfortable with uncomfortable silences. “I guess Jor-El and Lara,” he finally said, a little stiffly, “can have my bed, and I’m on the couch. Again.”
It was a little weird, realizing she was curious about it, but it bothered her a bit, how unwelcoming he was of his birth parents. If it was her mom that she suddenly got to see after so many years - Chloe had told her that Clark had been with the Kents since he was really little - she’d be really happy. Shouldn’t he be glad to see his real parents? Another part of the so-called mystery that was Clark Kent, then, she told herself. Not bad for someone who was naked and had a serious case of amnesia the first time I met him. “And Zor-El?” she finally asked.
She half-expected to hear him say something about sleeping in the barn, but when he didn’t, she had to admit that he was more decent than that. And Zor-El had saved Mr. Kent’s life, which definitely counted for something. “He’s too tall for the other couch-”
Ha. Lana Lang’s too tall for that loveseat, she snarked in her head. Mr. Kent laying on it during his heart attack had been an emergency thing. He was just about as tall as Clark himself.
“-but we might have a cot or something in the attic. Or he can have the couch and I’ll sleep on the floor. Or something. We have sleeping bags.”
She nodded in agreement; what else could se do? “Be glad this isn’t the middle of downtown Metropolis,” she told him, only half in jest, “or you’d be rethinking the sleeping-on-the-floor idea.”
“Why?” he asked innocently. It was an almost-endearing look on him.
“Cockroaches, Smallville,” she said wisely. “Cockroaches.”
Looking back on it, it was hard to imagine that something as innocent as putting fresh sheets on Clark’s bed could have been so volatile.
By the time Clark had come back from the attic with the cot and a sleeping bag, Lois had gotten the fitted sheet onto the mattress, but the flat top sheet was proving to be a problem. “I swear to god, this thing is possessed,” she complained, seeing the blur of him setting up the cot at super-speed come to a standstill. He didn’t say anything, just cocked one dark eyebrow as she lifted up the sheet yet again and watched it fall clumped to one side again. “Well?” she finally said. “Are you going to help me?”
He stared at her with a bemused grin for a moment before coming to her aid. Together they finally got the sheet to lay straight and square on the bed and began to tuck the edges under the mattress. Though he wasn’t using super-speed - the only secret alien power she’d seen so far, to her disappointment - he finished ahead of her, to her embarrassment.
The General would have her hide if he knew. The possibility of super-powered cheating would mean nothing if she was bested by a civilian.
“Lois,” Clark said in a frustrated tone. “What are you doing?” Having finished her side, she’d moved to his and started re-doing his work.
“Military corners,” she said, grunting a little as he lifted the mattress to tuck the sheet under. “I’m surprised your mom lets you get away with such crappy bed-making skills. Don’t you think your birth parents deserve a properly-made bed to sleep on?”
She looked up just in time to see his more-or-less neutral expression turn hot in anger. “They don’t deserve anything from me, Lois. Nothing.”
Crap. “Clark -” she started, but again he cut her off. Way to go, Lois. Let’s piss him off some more.
“And speaking of deserving things, let’s talk about how I don’t deserve you stealing my room every time you come to town. I don’t deserve you stealing my parents either. God knows Mom’s always wanted a daughter, but why she decided to adopt you of all people, I’ll never know. Chloe I could understand, and I’ve know her for ages - or even Lana, and Mom’s known her since even before I freaking fell out of the sky - but no. It had to be you. You breeze into town and you’re here for five minutes and she wants to adopt you. I don’t get it.”
For a moment, she thought he was done, but within a moment she was proved wrong: he was just pausing for air.
“It’s not like I asked for all of this, to have someone like you invade my life. Or them. I didn’t ask for any of this. I mean, who would ask to be a freak? To be able to lift pick-up trucks or run from county to county in minutes and seconds before kindergarten - which you don’t even go to because your parents are worried you might hurt the other kids. That the only reason you even find out you’re an alien from another planet is because Lex Luthor accidentally hits you with his car when you’re fourteen and it doesn’t even leave a bruise. Just how long were they going to keep it a secret? I didn’t deserve to be kept in the dark my whole damn life - did they think I’d go around telling everybody I met? Hadn’t they scared me enough to keep quiet by then? Did they think I wasn’t scared of being captured and experimented on? Do you have any idea the kinds of nightmares that always gave me?
“I didn’t deserve not knowing anything about where I came from - about why I sometimes wake up floating six feet over my bed, or why I can see through things like an x-ray, or shoot heat-beams from my eyes. Hell, I didn’t ask to be able to hear a pin drop three counties over when I really try. I didn’t ask not to know what other ‘special abilities’ I might develop, or if one day I might wake up and not look human anymore. I mean, I could walk into the bathroom one morning and look in the mirrow and suddenly see antennae or a third eye or horns or wings or a tail or who knows what!
“I didn’t ask for my parents to have hidden my spaceship in the storm cellar for more than a decade. Sure, I wondered where I was from and why I was sent to Earth, but I didn’t expect to hear that my home planet was destroyed and I was probably the last survivor of my entire fucking species. I didn’t ask to find out that the meteors that crashed to Earth the same day I did were really the last remnants of Krypton, and I certainly didn’t ask for some of them to turn into Kryptonite and mutate half of Smallville. I didn’t ask to discover what claimed to be the voice of Jor-El in my spaceship and in the caves and I sure as hell didn’t ask for that voice to say it’s my destiny to conquer Earth and fucking rule it!”
It had been so long since he had paused, even for a split-second, that she didn’t recognize it when it came. Who was he to yell all this crap at her? Did she give a care about his little pity part? Did he really think people asked to have crap happen to them? “Get over yourself, Clark Kent,” she said, realizing suddenly that his rant actually seemed to have paused. “No one asks for bad things to happen to them. It’s just life. It’s part of being human - or Kryptonian or whatever the hell you are. Some people would give anything to have what you have. You have this awesome, idyllic, small-town life. You have two awesome parents who absolutely adore you and would do anything to keep your secrets. They took in a baby alien - don’t you think that scared them sometimes? You are so damn lucky and you don’t even see it. Guess what - you’re not the last survivor of your planet. Your birth parents are here - that is so awesome I can barely stand it. I though you were lucky when it was just Jonathan and Martha - but now you have Jor-El and Lara too, and so far they’re great. You know who I have? I have the General, who thinks I’m a disappointment to the Lane family name because I’m not the boy he wanted and I’ll never join the military like the last five or six generations of Lane first-borns. I have my sister, who only visits or contacts me if she needs something or she’s in trouble. And I have Chloe and Uncle Gabe, who I barely ever got to see before this year because the General was always too fucking busy to take a vacation. My mom is dead and I know she’s never coming back because I can remember the day we put her in the ground like it was yesterday. And here you are, whining about floating and running fast and growing wings instead of being unbelievably thankful that your parents, and your uncle, and who knows who else, managed to survive, even though they obviously thought they wouldn’t and love you enough to send you to this backwards little planet so you might live. I don’t know what bug crawled up your ass and pissed you off but get the hell over it and deal.”
Any other day she was sure he would calm down after a lecture like that and getting hit over the head of a Lois-shaped clue-by-four, but not today. Something was different this time, but she didn’t know what, and looking back all she could suppose was that this whole mess was finally the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had stepped towards him as she had delivered her own rant but he hadn’t budged an inch, refusing to give in. Now they stood close together, invading each other’s space, and she had to look up a little at him. His eyes seemed to blaze with anger, and she thought she could seen an unnatural red in his eyes. He had said something about shooting fire-beams or something from his eyes, and it would be just her luck that she pissed him off enough that he accidentally set fire to the bed and they’d have to find somewhere else for Jor-El and Lara to spend the night.
“Don’t you ever shut up?” he said, sarcasm and anger practically dripping from every syllable. I sure as hell didn’t ask for a lecture from you.”
“From where I’m standing, I’m the only one who’s forcing you to deal with the shit you’ve been shoveling. Poor alien orphan - who the hell cares? You’ve got special abilities? Then use them.”
“What do you think I do? Twiddle my thumbs every time a meteor mutant decides to destroy Smallville? I saved people so many times I’ve lost count. Is it asking too much that someone notice and say thank you once in a while?”
“Someone, notice you? Heroes in uniforms get thank-yous. Plaid doesn’t get you noticed, except to tell the world what lousy taste in clothes you have. Throw on some spandex and a cape like in the comics and maybe you’ll get lucky!”
“And I suppose that’s the solution to everything, is it? Be a comic-book hero and everything’s fine? Have you ever read one of those comics? They don’t get thanked most the time and they’re so busy keeping their identity a secret so they can have a normal life that they don’t have time for a normal life!”
No power in the universe could have told her which one of them was ultimately responsible for what happened next because in all honesty, she didn’t know herself. They were standing so closely together to begin with; she could feel the heat of his body across the brief gap between them. She was already standing on her tiptoes as if her height - already impressively tall for a woman - was all it would take to slap some sense into him; he was leaning down to meet her eyes, probably for roughly the same reason. But the next moment, the very next thing she knew, they were kissing.
It was brief, but it was long enough to realize that Chloe hadn’t been lying those years ago when she’d confided that Clark Kent had potential as a kisser. She’d never tell him, of course, but it was easily one of the best kisses she’d ever experiences. A contender for the best if it weren’t for who the other half of the kiss had been.
For a moment she considered slapping him, like in the old movies her mom had always watched, but she quickly decided that that was too old-fashioned for her. “What the hell was that?” she demanded before he had to the opportunity to open his mouth and screwed everything up.
“How am I supposed to know? You’re the one who kissed me,” he insisted, and then tacked on fiercely: “It never happened.”
“As if!” she replied and immediately cringed. “You kissed me, you lunkhead. And of course it never happened. You think I would admit to having suffered this travesty?”
“Why would you think that I would kiss you? I don’t even really like you most of the time! You’re rude, you’re bossy, yous teal my bed at every opportunity, you’re rude -”
“Shut up, Smallville,” she told him. “Don’t you dare try to foist this disaster off on me.” She suddenly realized that his hands - paws, really, and what girl this side of the Milky Way would find that sexy? - were still on her waist, and she pulled away. “I don’t have the energy to deal with this garbage, farmboy,” she told him. Before he could say anything else, she had turned around and left the room. A moment later she was down the stairs and in the kitchen.
She took stock of the downstairs situation: Jor-El and Zor-El still sat in front of the TV - typical men - which was now tuned into the ten o’clock news out of Metropolis, and Lara was in the kitchen, trying to make sense of the appliances.
“Eh, Lo-ees,” said the alien woman, turning to look at her. “More tea?”
Lois sighed and jumped into action, filling a bowl with water and putting it in the microwave to boil. She might not cook worth a damn, but she was the queen of microwaves. Thank goodness that the Kents had come far enough into the future to have one.
After a moment, Lara spoke again, this time a little concerned, if she read the tone of her voice right. “You, Clark, talk very loud,” Lara said carefully. “All is good?”
Snarkily, Lois wondered to herself how long it had taken her to string those two non-sentences together. With a sigh, she told Lara, “Yes, all is good.”
Lara nodded, looking pensive, and then said, “El men, very stubborn,” and glanced over at Jor-El and Zor-El with a shrug and a frustrated look on her face.
Lois laughed. That was an understatement when it came to Clark. “Kent men, very stubborn,” she corrected.
Lara gave a little snort of amusement and said something in her own language and then, in English, she said, “Earth men, Krypton men, very stubborn.”
“Ah,” said Lois, pointing at herself and giving Lara a sly look, “but woman very stubborn, too.”
Lara laughed freely and loudly this time and nodded with a wide smile - a smile Lois recognized from Clark, crooked, pointy alien teeth and all. “Good,” Lara said firmly. Then Lara smoothed away her bangs and kissed her on the forehead. “Very good,” she added conspiratorially when she stepped away, and then left the kitchen to rejoin her husband an brother-in-law.
Lois smiled. How about that, Smallville? she thought to herself - not sure if she hoped he was telepathic as well, or not. Both your moms like me, so ha!
TBC
Previous Parts
Part Thirteen
Chloe’s car had barely left when Lois turned around and went back in the house. Okay, Lois, she told herself, Mrs. Kent put you in charge. Don’t screw it up.
The aliens - Clark’s family, if you could believe it - were sitting on the couch again, speaking softly to one another. Jor-El’s bruise was looking ghastly, but Lois knew that that just meant it was healing.
Provided that humans and - Kryptonians? was that the right word? - healed the same way. She shook her head. Who would have thought that Clark Kent was an alien?
She realized that the farm boy in question hadn’t followed her inside but she shrugged it off. Leave him alone for now, she told herself. It’s been a weird, long day. Evening. Whatever. Especially for him.
During her moment of introspection, Jor-El had discovered the TV remote and was examining it with curiosity. As calmly as she could, she walked over to them and took the remote and turned on the television for him. Given that the first image that appeared on the screen was of an autopsy on what was probably one of the CSI shows, she quickly changed the channel - there weren’t many to choose from; the Kents couldn’t afford to spend money on something as frivolous as cable - and finally left it on PBS, something with lots of underwater footage of very colorful fish. “Ah,” said Jor-El, taking it all in. “Thank you, Lois-Lane.”
Leaving the aliens engrossed in the fauna of the Great Barrier Reef, she went upstairs and began to contemplate the orders she’d received from Mrs. Kent. As missions go, surely this wouldn’t be too difficult, would it?
She froze; where was she going to put everyone? She took a quick inventory: there were only the two bedrooms, and of course the couch downstairs, to which Clark was always banished when she stayed with the Kents. What was she going to do with three more aliens and Chloe?
She walked into Clark’s room and opened up the window. She could see that he was still standing where she’d left him. Oh, yay. Brooding. As if he doesn’t do enough of that already. “Hey, Smallville!” she called. He turned and looked up at her. So much for leaving him alone. “Come up here and help me out!”
Instantly, he was gone - and half a heartbeat before she heard the kitchen door slam shut on its own, he was standing beside her. “What the -” she started. “Wait a sec. That one of your mutant powers?” she asked, thinking of what Chloe had said earlier, and all the meteor freaks she’d told her about - and everything she’d seen during her visits to Smallville over the last year. If Chloe had thought that Clark was one of these meteor mutants or whatever, then she must have seen something that led her to believe he had some kind of special powers.
Grinning a little - damn that wholesome farm boy smile! - he shook his head. “I’m not a mutant,” he said firmly.
Ah. Struck a nerve there. Secret alien power, then.
Moving on to the mission at hand, she crossed her arms and said, “We’re a few beds short of a hotel, Smallville.”
“Oh, you’re only now figuring that out?” he replied. If she didn’t know better, she’d say he was miffed. “And here I thought I was sleeping on the couch because it’s comfortable.”
Not miffed, but maybe a little pissed.
“That’s not all my fault,” she told him. “I tried to refuse the first time - Uncle Gabe has a couch of his own, you know, but your mom doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer. If I didn’t know better, I’d think she went through officer training with the General.” He opened his mouth - she wondered if the slightly crooked teeth and almost-fangs were an alien thing or a dirt-poor-farmer thing - but she cut him off before a single sound escaped: “And this is a farmhouse. Aren’t farmers supposed to have, like, a dozen kids? Where are all the extra bedrooms -”
She knew from experience that he was usually too polite to interrupt, so it surprised her when he did just that just then. “Never say anything like that to my parents,” he said icily. “Ever.”
Startled, she actually found herself stammering as she acknowledged his order. “O-okay,” she said. “I swear I won’t say anything to them.”
His body recovered some of its mild-mannered façade, relaxing slightly. “For your information,” he allowed, “there were originally three bedrooms, but one was sacrificed to allow indoor plumbing in the ‘fifties.”
The infamous only bathroom in the house. She supposed that if you broke down the wall between it and the bizarre closet space next to it you could get a reasonable bedroom out of it. “Well, then,” she said. She took a deep breath. “I guess we’ll leave your folks’ room alone, in case they send them back home from the hospital tonight.” She’d been surprised at how good Mr. Kent had looked after Clark’s uncle had given him that injection. “Chloe and I could go to her place - Uncle Gabe will wonder what’s going on but between the two of us, I’m sure we’ll come up with something.”
Clark nodded. “Just don’t say that we have relatives over. Mr. Sullivan knows us well enough that saying anyone from the Kent or the Clark side was visiting would sound suspicious.”
“Clark side?” Something in the way he said it told her that he wasn’t referring to himself.
He shrugged. “Mom’s maiden name is Clark. It’s how they came up with my name.”
“Oh,” she said, trying to sound disinterested. In actuality, she thought it was awesome that they’d given him such an important name, like he was their own flesh-and-blood. The only way they could have gotten any more territorial would’ve been by calling him Jonathan, Jr., which, quite frankly, would’ve been disastrous, in her honest opinion. “Jonnie” was ten time worse than “Clarkie” - especially coming from her.
“Anyways,” Lois said, shaking off such deep and Clark-friendly thoughts, “all that’s left is figuring out where we’re putting Jor-El and Lara and Zor-El, then. Oh, and you, of course.”
Clark pressed his lips together. It seemed that his biological parents were a sore topic with him, thought she couldn’t really imagine why. Granted, she probably hadn’t heard the whole story yet, and at times it still didn’t feel like it had really sunk in yet, that Clark ‘farmboy-from-Nowheresville’ Kent was really an alien from the planet Krypton, so maybe she just hadn’t processed it all yet. She waited for him to say something - anything, really. He knew she wasn’t comfortable with uncomfortable silences. “I guess Jor-El and Lara,” he finally said, a little stiffly, “can have my bed, and I’m on the couch. Again.”
It was a little weird, realizing she was curious about it, but it bothered her a bit, how unwelcoming he was of his birth parents. If it was her mom that she suddenly got to see after so many years - Chloe had told her that Clark had been with the Kents since he was really little - she’d be really happy. Shouldn’t he be glad to see his real parents? Another part of the so-called mystery that was Clark Kent, then, she told herself. Not bad for someone who was naked and had a serious case of amnesia the first time I met him. “And Zor-El?” she finally asked.
She half-expected to hear him say something about sleeping in the barn, but when he didn’t, she had to admit that he was more decent than that. And Zor-El had saved Mr. Kent’s life, which definitely counted for something. “He’s too tall for the other couch-”
Ha. Lana Lang’s too tall for that loveseat, she snarked in her head. Mr. Kent laying on it during his heart attack had been an emergency thing. He was just about as tall as Clark himself.
“-but we might have a cot or something in the attic. Or he can have the couch and I’ll sleep on the floor. Or something. We have sleeping bags.”
She nodded in agreement; what else could se do? “Be glad this isn’t the middle of downtown Metropolis,” she told him, only half in jest, “or you’d be rethinking the sleeping-on-the-floor idea.”
“Why?” he asked innocently. It was an almost-endearing look on him.
“Cockroaches, Smallville,” she said wisely. “Cockroaches.”
Looking back on it, it was hard to imagine that something as innocent as putting fresh sheets on Clark’s bed could have been so volatile.
By the time Clark had come back from the attic with the cot and a sleeping bag, Lois had gotten the fitted sheet onto the mattress, but the flat top sheet was proving to be a problem. “I swear to god, this thing is possessed,” she complained, seeing the blur of him setting up the cot at super-speed come to a standstill. He didn’t say anything, just cocked one dark eyebrow as she lifted up the sheet yet again and watched it fall clumped to one side again. “Well?” she finally said. “Are you going to help me?”
He stared at her with a bemused grin for a moment before coming to her aid. Together they finally got the sheet to lay straight and square on the bed and began to tuck the edges under the mattress. Though he wasn’t using super-speed - the only secret alien power she’d seen so far, to her disappointment - he finished ahead of her, to her embarrassment.
The General would have her hide if he knew. The possibility of super-powered cheating would mean nothing if she was bested by a civilian.
“Lois,” Clark said in a frustrated tone. “What are you doing?” Having finished her side, she’d moved to his and started re-doing his work.
“Military corners,” she said, grunting a little as he lifted the mattress to tuck the sheet under. “I’m surprised your mom lets you get away with such crappy bed-making skills. Don’t you think your birth parents deserve a properly-made bed to sleep on?”
She looked up just in time to see his more-or-less neutral expression turn hot in anger. “They don’t deserve anything from me, Lois. Nothing.”
Crap. “Clark -” she started, but again he cut her off. Way to go, Lois. Let’s piss him off some more.
“And speaking of deserving things, let’s talk about how I don’t deserve you stealing my room every time you come to town. I don’t deserve you stealing my parents either. God knows Mom’s always wanted a daughter, but why she decided to adopt you of all people, I’ll never know. Chloe I could understand, and I’ve know her for ages - or even Lana, and Mom’s known her since even before I freaking fell out of the sky - but no. It had to be you. You breeze into town and you’re here for five minutes and she wants to adopt you. I don’t get it.”
For a moment, she thought he was done, but within a moment she was proved wrong: he was just pausing for air.
“It’s not like I asked for all of this, to have someone like you invade my life. Or them. I didn’t ask for any of this. I mean, who would ask to be a freak? To be able to lift pick-up trucks or run from county to county in minutes and seconds before kindergarten - which you don’t even go to because your parents are worried you might hurt the other kids. That the only reason you even find out you’re an alien from another planet is because Lex Luthor accidentally hits you with his car when you’re fourteen and it doesn’t even leave a bruise. Just how long were they going to keep it a secret? I didn’t deserve to be kept in the dark my whole damn life - did they think I’d go around telling everybody I met? Hadn’t they scared me enough to keep quiet by then? Did they think I wasn’t scared of being captured and experimented on? Do you have any idea the kinds of nightmares that always gave me?
“I didn’t deserve not knowing anything about where I came from - about why I sometimes wake up floating six feet over my bed, or why I can see through things like an x-ray, or shoot heat-beams from my eyes. Hell, I didn’t ask to be able to hear a pin drop three counties over when I really try. I didn’t ask not to know what other ‘special abilities’ I might develop, or if one day I might wake up and not look human anymore. I mean, I could walk into the bathroom one morning and look in the mirrow and suddenly see antennae or a third eye or horns or wings or a tail or who knows what!
“I didn’t ask for my parents to have hidden my spaceship in the storm cellar for more than a decade. Sure, I wondered where I was from and why I was sent to Earth, but I didn’t expect to hear that my home planet was destroyed and I was probably the last survivor of my entire fucking species. I didn’t ask to find out that the meteors that crashed to Earth the same day I did were really the last remnants of Krypton, and I certainly didn’t ask for some of them to turn into Kryptonite and mutate half of Smallville. I didn’t ask to discover what claimed to be the voice of Jor-El in my spaceship and in the caves and I sure as hell didn’t ask for that voice to say it’s my destiny to conquer Earth and fucking rule it!”
It had been so long since he had paused, even for a split-second, that she didn’t recognize it when it came. Who was he to yell all this crap at her? Did she give a care about his little pity part? Did he really think people asked to have crap happen to them? “Get over yourself, Clark Kent,” she said, realizing suddenly that his rant actually seemed to have paused. “No one asks for bad things to happen to them. It’s just life. It’s part of being human - or Kryptonian or whatever the hell you are. Some people would give anything to have what you have. You have this awesome, idyllic, small-town life. You have two awesome parents who absolutely adore you and would do anything to keep your secrets. They took in a baby alien - don’t you think that scared them sometimes? You are so damn lucky and you don’t even see it. Guess what - you’re not the last survivor of your planet. Your birth parents are here - that is so awesome I can barely stand it. I though you were lucky when it was just Jonathan and Martha - but now you have Jor-El and Lara too, and so far they’re great. You know who I have? I have the General, who thinks I’m a disappointment to the Lane family name because I’m not the boy he wanted and I’ll never join the military like the last five or six generations of Lane first-borns. I have my sister, who only visits or contacts me if she needs something or she’s in trouble. And I have Chloe and Uncle Gabe, who I barely ever got to see before this year because the General was always too fucking busy to take a vacation. My mom is dead and I know she’s never coming back because I can remember the day we put her in the ground like it was yesterday. And here you are, whining about floating and running fast and growing wings instead of being unbelievably thankful that your parents, and your uncle, and who knows who else, managed to survive, even though they obviously thought they wouldn’t and love you enough to send you to this backwards little planet so you might live. I don’t know what bug crawled up your ass and pissed you off but get the hell over it and deal.”
Any other day she was sure he would calm down after a lecture like that and getting hit over the head of a Lois-shaped clue-by-four, but not today. Something was different this time, but she didn’t know what, and looking back all she could suppose was that this whole mess was finally the straw that broke the camel’s back. She had stepped towards him as she had delivered her own rant but he hadn’t budged an inch, refusing to give in. Now they stood close together, invading each other’s space, and she had to look up a little at him. His eyes seemed to blaze with anger, and she thought she could seen an unnatural red in his eyes. He had said something about shooting fire-beams or something from his eyes, and it would be just her luck that she pissed him off enough that he accidentally set fire to the bed and they’d have to find somewhere else for Jor-El and Lara to spend the night.
“Don’t you ever shut up?” he said, sarcasm and anger practically dripping from every syllable. I sure as hell didn’t ask for a lecture from you.”
“From where I’m standing, I’m the only one who’s forcing you to deal with the shit you’ve been shoveling. Poor alien orphan - who the hell cares? You’ve got special abilities? Then use them.”
“What do you think I do? Twiddle my thumbs every time a meteor mutant decides to destroy Smallville? I saved people so many times I’ve lost count. Is it asking too much that someone notice and say thank you once in a while?”
“Someone, notice you? Heroes in uniforms get thank-yous. Plaid doesn’t get you noticed, except to tell the world what lousy taste in clothes you have. Throw on some spandex and a cape like in the comics and maybe you’ll get lucky!”
“And I suppose that’s the solution to everything, is it? Be a comic-book hero and everything’s fine? Have you ever read one of those comics? They don’t get thanked most the time and they’re so busy keeping their identity a secret so they can have a normal life that they don’t have time for a normal life!”
No power in the universe could have told her which one of them was ultimately responsible for what happened next because in all honesty, she didn’t know herself. They were standing so closely together to begin with; she could feel the heat of his body across the brief gap between them. She was already standing on her tiptoes as if her height - already impressively tall for a woman - was all it would take to slap some sense into him; he was leaning down to meet her eyes, probably for roughly the same reason. But the next moment, the very next thing she knew, they were kissing.
It was brief, but it was long enough to realize that Chloe hadn’t been lying those years ago when she’d confided that Clark Kent had potential as a kisser. She’d never tell him, of course, but it was easily one of the best kisses she’d ever experiences. A contender for the best if it weren’t for who the other half of the kiss had been.
For a moment she considered slapping him, like in the old movies her mom had always watched, but she quickly decided that that was too old-fashioned for her. “What the hell was that?” she demanded before he had to the opportunity to open his mouth and screwed everything up.
“How am I supposed to know? You’re the one who kissed me,” he insisted, and then tacked on fiercely: “It never happened.”
“As if!” she replied and immediately cringed. “You kissed me, you lunkhead. And of course it never happened. You think I would admit to having suffered this travesty?”
“Why would you think that I would kiss you? I don’t even really like you most of the time! You’re rude, you’re bossy, yous teal my bed at every opportunity, you’re rude -”
“Shut up, Smallville,” she told him. “Don’t you dare try to foist this disaster off on me.” She suddenly realized that his hands - paws, really, and what girl this side of the Milky Way would find that sexy? - were still on her waist, and she pulled away. “I don’t have the energy to deal with this garbage, farmboy,” she told him. Before he could say anything else, she had turned around and left the room. A moment later she was down the stairs and in the kitchen.
She took stock of the downstairs situation: Jor-El and Zor-El still sat in front of the TV - typical men - which was now tuned into the ten o’clock news out of Metropolis, and Lara was in the kitchen, trying to make sense of the appliances.
“Eh, Lo-ees,” said the alien woman, turning to look at her. “More tea?”
Lois sighed and jumped into action, filling a bowl with water and putting it in the microwave to boil. She might not cook worth a damn, but she was the queen of microwaves. Thank goodness that the Kents had come far enough into the future to have one.
After a moment, Lara spoke again, this time a little concerned, if she read the tone of her voice right. “You, Clark, talk very loud,” Lara said carefully. “All is good?”
Snarkily, Lois wondered to herself how long it had taken her to string those two non-sentences together. With a sigh, she told Lara, “Yes, all is good.”
Lara nodded, looking pensive, and then said, “El men, very stubborn,” and glanced over at Jor-El and Zor-El with a shrug and a frustrated look on her face.
Lois laughed. That was an understatement when it came to Clark. “Kent men, very stubborn,” she corrected.
Lara gave a little snort of amusement and said something in her own language and then, in English, she said, “Earth men, Krypton men, very stubborn.”
“Ah,” said Lois, pointing at herself and giving Lara a sly look, “but woman very stubborn, too.”
Lara laughed freely and loudly this time and nodded with a wide smile - a smile Lois recognized from Clark, crooked, pointy alien teeth and all. “Good,” Lara said firmly. Then Lara smoothed away her bangs and kissed her on the forehead. “Very good,” she added conspiratorially when she stepped away, and then left the kitchen to rejoin her husband an brother-in-law.
Lois smiled. How about that, Smallville? she thought to herself - not sure if she hoped he was telepathic as well, or not. Both your moms like me, so ha!
TBC