OMG this story is absolutely amazing!!! PPMS!!!
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Story Time
“Your proposal, our engagement, and my…death?” Lana asked slowly, almost cautiously.
“Yeah.” Clark stuffed his hands in his pockets. “You obviously remember the day I had you meet me in the loft, since you’re dressed exactly the same way today.”
“Yeah, I wore this on purpose,” Lana said, as she gestured at her outfit. “The last time I dressed this way, you were supposed to tell me something, maybe even give me answers to some long-held questions. Instead, you chickened out…again. I was hoping that in this case, the second time would be the charm.”
Clark saw that she had given him a perfect opening, and he took it.
“Actually, this is the third time and I guarantee you that it will be ‘the charm.’” Before Lana could muster a protest, Clark pushed on. “The second time, I did as you said. I was scared, scared for your life I might add, and took the easy way out. The first time you dressed for me that way…was magical. I told you everything.” Clark got a dreamy look in his eyes as he remembered back to his last truly happy day. “You don’t remember it, however, because for you, it never happened.”
“What happened? Did you erase my memories somehow?”
“No,” Clark replied glumly. “I erased everyone’s memories.” He relived that day in his mind and winced at the memories, both sweet and bitter, unsure of which set were more painful. “Only I remember that day now.”
“But how…”
“…is unimportant right now. My alter-ego promised that you’d learn about what I sacrificed for you to bring you back to life and to keep you safe once you were back. That’s one promise I intend to keep.”
“Oh…so now you start keeping your promises to me. You’re a little bit late, don’tcha think?”
Lana had tried to make her comment come out sounding droll, but Clark knew her well enough to hear the remnants of old pain in her voice, an unnecessary reminder of his many failures as a boyfriend.
“Yeah, I’m more than a little bit late when it comes to treating you the way you deserve. I realize that and I apologize.” Clark chuckled softly and Lana wanted to know what he had to laugh about. “My father, Jor-El, did say it was time for me to start growing up.”
“Really?" Lana asked in surprise. "I have to say I agree with him, Clark. I’ve been waiting for you to grow up for years.”
“Yeah, I know you have, but you don’t know the whole story. You don’t know why things happened the way they did. I hope what I have to tell you will help you connect the dots so you can see the big picture. Maybe then I won’t look quite so bad.” Clark started to pace back and forth just a bit. “Anyway, the first time you came out to meet me in the loft dressed like this, I was scared out of my mind. It was so bad, that my heart was beating like a drum machine and you noticed it. Before we left the loft that day, I showed you everything I can do, all of my special abilities.”
“How many are there?”
“A lot,” Clark said as he shrugged his shoulders. “Super-strength, super-speed, super-hearing, physical invulnerability to anything except meteor rocks, heat vision, and two kinds of x-ray vision.”
Unlike when Chloe learned about the x-ray vision, Lana didn’t reflexively cover her chest. In the first place, Lana thought, this Clark’s too much of a gentleman to take advantage of me like that, and besides, he’s already seen everything anyway.
“I’d turn this into the biggest show-and-tell in the world and give you a proper demonstration, but we need to save that for later, right now I need to tell you this story quickly so we can get back to Smallville…besides, you’ve already seen examples of most of my abilities already today.”
“Why?” Lana asked. “I’ve got all of the time in the world for this.”
“Yeah, but by now, Lex has woken up in the loft. He’s probably got all of his security men scouring Lowell County to find where I’ve taken you…then there’s the likelihood that he’s also filed kidnapping charges with the Sheriff. So we need to go back long enough for you to make an appearance and calm everyone down. Hopefully, you’ll be forgiving enough to not send me to jail.”
“You’d just break out…” A random memory surfaced, and Lana continued, “…like you did that one time to save Lex from Desiree Atkins…and the fires…heat vision…forget any demonstration of that ability, Clark. I believe I watched you incinerate the Talon’s original cappuccino machine.”
Clark smiled genuinely for the first time in a while as he said, “Well, it was your fault.”
“Mine?”
“Yeah, there we were, all alone in the Talon just having come from Lex’s wedding and you were standing next to me looking more like some college-aged goddess than a high school sophomore.” Clark swallowed hard when he remembered the way she had looked that night with her hair in big, loose curls tumbling down over her shoulders and onto the top of her sea-foam green dress. She had looked so far out of his league that night, and yet there they had been, side-by-side. “We exchanged thoughts on the weirdness of Lex getting married that quickly and then you said something about how Lex was able to act on his passion and you wondered if we would ever be able to do that.”
“I seem to vaguely remember something like that,” Lana said.
“Well, I took what you said to mean me and you acting on our shared passion instead of us each acting on separate, individual passions. That got my hormones boiling and I started to heat up. Before you could get me out of the Talon, beams of tightly focused heat shot out of my eyes and set the Talon on fire.”
“So your heat vision has a hormonal trigger?” Lana asked, as she tried mightily to keep from snickering at Clark.
“Yeah, it does.” Clark was righteously embarrassed and turned away from Lana to recover. When he turned back to her, he said, “I have complete control over it now after burning down a number of scarecrows and other farm items. But from that day on, there’s only been one word that I’ve used to trigger that ability, one word that contains all that I think passion should be.” Clark turned back to face Lana. “That word is ‘Lana.’”
Now it was Lana’s turn to blush, but she kept her eyes locked on his. Wordlessly, they drank in the lines and curves of each other’s face. What they were thinking helped Lana keep her blush and returned a full, rosy blush to Clark’s cheeks.
Clark finally shook himself out of it, and said, “Well, I got sidetracked there for a moment. I’d better get back to the story I’m supposed to be telling. Where were we, anyway?”
“Abilities, Clark. You were telling me about how, you supposedly showed me all of your abilities in the loft.”
“Supposedly?”
“You gotta admit, Clark, this is going to be a pretty tough story for me to swallow.”
“Just wait. Sometime soon, I’ll have someone we both trust tell you a corroborating story.” Still seeing a bit of skepticism in Lana’s eyes, Clark plowed ahead with his story. “Next, I took you to the caves and brought you here. This is where I told you about being an alien, about being from a planet called Krypton.”
“How did I react?”
“Much the same way you did now…but then, I did something else. I scooped you into my arms and carried you to a small outcropping of crystal up near the top of the Fortress. That’s where I proposed marriage to you. I knew instantly that I should have given you enough time to process my revelations about my abilities and origin before hitting you with a marriage proposal, so I asked you to wait to tell me your answer.
“You were quiet the whole way home, seemingly lost in your thoughts.” A warm smile, the kind that always melted Lana’s heart, slowly made its way across Clark’s face as he thought about what came next. “The next time I saw you, I was getting ready to go to the Talon for my Dad’s election party. We were supposed to meet there, but you decided to come out to the farm where we would be alone. You had made your decision.
“I was scared out of my mind that you’d reject me. That was my oldest reason for not telling you my secrets. I asked you if I looked any different to you and you replied that I looked like the same handsome guy you’d always known. Unsure of what that meant, I wanted things to be made more clear and asked if that meant you were saying yes or if you were letting me down easy.
“You said, and I quote, ‘As in, yes, Clark, I will marry you.’” Clark stopped for a moment, both to take a deep breath and to savor the memory. “That was, without a single doubt, the happiest moment of my life. You pulled the engagement ring out of your pocket and I slipped it on. Soon after, we were at the election party.”
Lana watched as the mere mention of the election party made all of the color drain from Clark’s face. Why does this not feel like a happy story all of a sudden? Lana wondered.
“What happened at the election rally?” Lana asked.
“You and I were arm-in-arm, showing off your ring and collecting congratulations from everyone, including my parents once they showed up. They were both thrilled to have you joining our family. That moment with my folks was the realization of almost every dream I had ever had.”
“It sounds wonderful, Clark. I wish I could remember it.”
“You could, except Jor-El insists I tell this to you myself. He seems to think it’s part of the maturation process or something…or maybe he just wants to punish me, I don’t know. Anyway, once Dad was announced as the election winner, Lois dragged the three of us off to have a photo op.”
“I’m sure I looked on closely,” Lana said warmly, “watching the family I was about to join.”
“Actually, no. Somewhere in there, you got a call from Lex and you went to see him at the mansion. Something happened there and you left the mansion with Lex in hot pursuit. You called me on your cell phone while driving and said that Lex had figured out that I had to have told you my secrets. I could hear the roar of Lex’s car as it pulled up beside you and then I heard you scream, followed by the crunch of metal and the shattering of glass.
“I don’t mind telling you I flat-out panicked. I super-sped to the scene of the accident, desperate to save you, but even with all of my abilities, I was too late. Your broken body was sprawled in the middle of the road, blood everywhere, and you were dead. The best day of my life had just become the worst. I was hysterical, absolutely inconsolable, but Dad tried. He pulled me off of you and held me as I cried and then raged.
“If Lex had said anything to me at that moment, I would have killed him without a second thought. But I wasn’t thinking about him at the time. All I could think about was you and how desperately I wanted to bring you back from the dead. I already knew, that to reach that goal, I’d willingly sacrifice anything. I just wish I had known how much ‘anything’ was gonna cost.”
Lana finally believed what Clark was saying. More than anything, it was the panic, the desperation, the unalloyed pain in his voice as he told his story that did the trick. She didn’t know how, but Clark had lived the events he had just described. For the first time since Clark had pulled her away from her engagement dinner, Lana willingly went to Clark’s side, wanting to console him, but unsure of how to do it.
In the end, she did the only thing necessary, she wrapped her slender arms as far around his chest as possible and held on tight as she repeated softly, “I believe you, Clark.”
All she wanted was to let him know she was there for him, but her close presence and emotional support did more: it helped blunt the edge of his remembered anguish, making it somewhat tolerable and allowing him to go on.
“You know most of what happened next,” Clark said. “You had to suffer for my mistakes…but at least you lived.”
Not sure she really wanted the answer, Lana asked, “What does that mean?”
“The first day, the day you died, my dad lived. He stopped on his way home to wrestle me away from your body. He didn’t have a heart attack that night, he survived.
“But when I saved you the second time around by stopping that God-forsaken school bus…”
“That was you?”
“Yeah, who’d you think it was…the School Bus Fairy?”
“I thought that bus stopped miraculously quickly.”
Clark was okay now, but for some reason Lana couldn’t place, she was loathe to let him go. Instead, she rested the side of her face against the broad expanse of Clark’s chest and relaxed her hold on him. Clark responded by enfolding her in his arms. He’d been aching to do it since she first hugged him, but her relaxing into him was the first sign he’d been given that allowed him to proceed.
In a slower, softer voice, Clark continued, “…when I stopped that bus, Dad didn’t stop since there was no wreck. He drove home and had his fatal heart attack in the barn. He must have been meeting someone since he left his own election party early, and without Mom, but I’m not sure who it was, though I do have my suspicions.” Clark didn’t know exactly how to finish telling Lana that her life had been bought with the coin of Jonathan’s life, but he felt he had to. If she really wanted to know everything, she had to know the bad stuff as well as the good. “I ended up saving your life at the cost of my father’s, all to keep you safe from Lex. A sacrifice you nullified by entering a relationship with Lex.”
Lana could hear the loathing in Clark’s voice, a tone of voice she had hoped to never hear him direct at her. If what he said about losing his dad to save her was true, she could understand his feelings, but she didn’t see how his dad’s death was caused by him saving her life miles away.
When she said as much, Clark’s only reply was to say, “It did happen that way, Lana, and it all dates back to the day of the second meteor shower, when I saved you from the two aliens that were looking for Kal-El…but that’s a story for later. Right now, we need to go back to Smallville, let the authorities know you’re okay, and get you fed. I imagine you also need some sleep.”
“I’ll admit to being hungry, but sleep can wait, I’ve been waiting six years for this conversation.”
“Okay, Lana, have it your way…your slightest wish is my command.”Last edited by Cardinal; 02-22-2007, 11:02 AM.Comment
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