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apocalypsosTitle: Wave If You See Me From Afar
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Superman Returns
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,583 words
Pairing: Lois/Superman, Lois/Richard
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Dude, if I owned these characters, I think I'd have a nicer car.
Summary: After you stop being worried and start being angry, which takes about another two weeks of searching empty skies, you get absurdly hateful of his hair.
Author's note: I just had this overwhelming need to write fic about what happened to Lois while Superman was gone. Forgive me if the timeline's a bit wonky.
*****
Wave If You See Me From Afar
*****
After a week goes by, you bite off every single one of your fingernails except the one on your right pointer finger, because you need something to drum on your desktop or else you'll go insane.
It's not like Superman hasn't disappeared for a week before. You know this. Ever since he suddenly showed up in Metropolis, Superman has been missing for a seven-day period or longer exactly eight times. Lex, Lex, that thing with the cave and the kryptonite, Lex, the comet thing, Lex ... okay, most of them were Lex. But Lex is in prison and will be there forever and a day at this point, so ... yeah.
Maybe he's taking a vacation.
See, as pissed as you'd be if he were taking a vacation (because, you know, a forwarding number would have been nice), you'd get it. He's sure as hell earned it. You can even picture the scene. Superman on a beach somewhere with a silly drink with an umbrella in it. Lose the tights, keep the Speedo, spit curl coming apart in the humidity.
After you stop being worried and start being angry, which takes about another two weeks of searching empty skies, you get absurdly hateful of his hair.
Stupid spit curl. You hope he has an accident shaving and cuts the damn thing right off.
One day you take one of Jimmy's better shots of Superman and white out the dark curl against his forehead. It's ridiculously moronic revenge and yet you spend the rest of the day beaming like an idiot.
And the worst part of the whole situation is that you can't even complain to Clark about it, because Clark packed up and left town right about the same time Superman did. You only consider slipping the gossip columnist the rumor they ran off together for an hour before you toss the idea right out.
Okay, mostly because you can't see anybody running off with Clark, but still.
*****
Five weeks and three days after the last sighting of Superman, Jimmy catches you staring him over the top of your cubicle and frowns.
"Something wrong, Lois?"
Jimmy is loyal and dependable like a golden retriever. He's always just there in the office like a light fixture. Today, he's gotten doughnuts for Mr. White, gone through his photos of Superman looking for something that works with the headline "Has Superman Forsaken Us?", and sharpened every pencil in his desk until they're the size of the ones you get at a mini-golf course.
You've been watching him for twenty minutes waiting for him to get up out of his chair, go outside for some fresh air, and never come back.
"No, Jimmy," you say. "I'm fine, really. Scout's honor."
You smile. It's probably not as scary-looking as you think it is.
*****
The reason you don't notice is because Mr. White throws story ideas at you like hot potatoes he expects you to catch and juggle.
You know he's doing it because if anything relieves your stress, it's juggling hot potatoes. Or something. It doesn't really matter.
You're tired because you keep thinking that you should keep checking the places Superman frequents just in case he comes back and you've gone up to the roof so many times you caught yourself drawing the skyline from memory on the border of a press packet last week. You're nauseated because every so often you have this mental image that makes you gag of Superman lying somewhere in a pool of his own blood and surrounded by kryptonite. You can't sleep at night because the FBI's started investigating his damn disappearance like he's just another missing person.
The lead agent's name is Tom. He has a wife, two daughters, plays a lot of golf, has met the president and doesn't like him much. He thinks you should repaint your living room. The two of you have spoken a lot in the last two months.
You're not eating much because every time you take a deep breath you smell the familiar scent of Superman in the air instead of hamburgers or Chinese food and nothing you taste could possibly be as wonderful as that one patch of skin at the base of his throat.
You're just making yourself sick, is all.
You find a receipt going through your junk drawer from right around when Superman disappeared. That's why you notice, because you bought a box of tampons that day and it's still sitting unopened under your bathroom sink.
The stick turns blue. Hell, all four sticks turn blue.
You're more surprised that it doesn't turn green instead, which gives you a case of hysterical giggles for the rest of the day.
*****
You make a list of people you can tell.
It's not like you really are going to tell anyone. It's just because if you thought Superman vanishing was going to drive you nuts, this will take you right over the edge. Making a list isn't hurting anyone. It's mostly keeping you from really calling someone, is what it's doing.
You could tell Mr. White. No, that's a brilliant idea. He'd be polite about it, or at least as polite as he can manage, and then he'd offer you the front page if you could come up with a less tacky headline than "I'm Carrying Superman's Baby!" Which says it all, don't you think?
Or you could always go on Oprah. You could tell people exactly what it's like making love to an alien. "Exactly the same as making love to a human, with less gravity."
You could tell Jimmy. It'd probably be worth it just to see how red you can make his ears turn.
That's about it, really. You never said it was a long list.
*****
What you're hoping is that the kid doesn't kick through your stomach.
It's not a real fear, you figure, except it is a real fear regardless of what Superman's told you about his childhood. You're perfectly within your rights to wake from nightmares where the baby wriggles a little in there and pokes a hole right through your belly. The kid's not even much bigger than a peanut, so you probably shouldn't worry.
Except there was that one time Superman kept a skyscraper from collapsing and now you can't stop trying to figure out if the ratio between Superman and a skyscraper is close to that of an unborn child and your internal organs.
You've become exceedingly morbid about your own personal health, but you think that's fair.
*****
So yes, you made that stupid list and threw it out as soon as you made it, but the fact is that you're going to have to tell someone.
Superman's been gone almost three months now and everyone is pretty sure he's not coming back. They're hopeful, but they just keep looking at you. Okay, more like through you, like you've got some secret pocket or something in you that you've got Superman stashed away in. It's ludicrous on the face of it, but then it isn't anymore and you just want people to look somewhere else.
You're keeping it. That's not negotiable.
You tell Mr. White -- the pregnant part, not the by-Superman part -- because he should know you're going to be out of commission in another six months. He gives you this look like he wants to ask and doesn't want to and isn't sure he wants to hear the answer and wants to hear the answer more than anything. Funny how good he is at that.
And instead of going down the road you're afraid he's going to approach, Mr. White just asks, "You going to be all right, Lois?"
You pick at your cuticles as you speak. "It was ..."
Thinking about what you were going to say gives you an immediate monster of a migraine. You contemplate blaming Clark, but he was probably gone too early to be a scapegoat. Maybe you can make somebody up. I got drunk one night when I realized Superman wasn't coming back and went home from the bar with this guy who looked just like him.
"I made a mistake," you finally say, "but a good one in the end, I guess."
Then Mr. White smiles, and you smile, and nothing about your job really changes for the next six months except for how close to your desk you can pull your chair.
*****
You can't tell an obstetrician that you're carrying Superman's baby, because that's just crazy. True, sure, but if you want to turn your life into even more of a circus than it already is, that's one way to make sure of it.
You spend weeks waiting for the doctor to tell you something's wrong with the baby, that he's got two heads or three arms or a tail. He's taken to lasering graffiti on your insides with his eyes, he's been bench-pressing your kidneys ... something. It doesn't even matter if you've seen every inch of Superman and know for a fact he looked just like any other human man.
And then the doctor says one day, "Well, would you look at that?"
He chuckles at it, and maybe you stop moving. Maybe it's just because some of that goop is sliding right down your side off the gentle slope of your belly. Your stomach is always so warm these days, like there's a solar battery in there. "What? What is it?"
Dr. Harris chuckles as he moves the sonogram over your stomach again. "That kid of yours is going to be in pictures one day, the way he always turns toward the probe like he does."
After that, you wave down at your stomach sometimes. Who knows? Maybe the little bugger can see you.
*****
When Richard comes to work for the paper, you've got about five thousand schematics from the bank robbery on Essex Street spread across your desk, a phone tucked between your ear and shoulder, a pen in your one hand for taking notes and an apple in the other hand you take bites from every chance you get. It's no wonder he doesn't notice the belly until two hours after he introduces himself.
When you finally get a chance to do more than wave a distracted hello at him between quickly fired questions at the company that supplies Metropolis Bank and Trust with their security guards, Richard's coming back from lunch on the same elevator you're about to board.
His eyes are this gorgeous shade of blue that makes you think of what the sky looks like when you're standing in mid-air with someone far above the city just after sunrise.
His gaze drops and lifts back up again almost too quick to notice. "Oh, so you're ..."
Pregnant. With someone. Not fitting back into a size two anytime soon. There's a dozen different ways he could be going with that, and you have this weird feeling he's pleading to you with his eyes to shut him up.
Probably because he is.
"Going to be late for my interview about the bank heist?" you say, breezing past him into the elevator. "Oh, yeah."
As the doors close, Richard smiles at you and the baby gives you a good thump in the kidney.
You can't help but wonder later on if that was his version of an elbow in the side.
*****
You don't know when it is that you start eating lunch with Richard, but the day your water breaks he's sitting next to your desk and raiding your bag of chips as the two of you talk out that new treaty in the Middle East. You hate this stuff because the politics confuse the hell out of you and you have a bad habit of misspelling "Israeli," but Richard gets it. That's mostly why you let him steal so many of your Doritos when anybody else would have lost a hand by now.
And then your water breaks and all hell breaks loose.
Mr. White's shouting things about how you should have stopped working weeks ago. Jimmy races from here to there asking if you want juice or water or anything to drink for the ride to the hospital. One of the guys from the leisure section asks if you want to know how to spell "epidural" as Richard tries to help you to the elevator and the entire newsroom cracks up. It's almost comforting.
Twelve hours later, you have sore muscles you didn't even know existed before and a new son with the right number of fingers and toes who has a father who doesn't even know he exists.
*****
Jason.
Jason, son of Superman.
Of all of the questions you never asked Superman, it suddenly occurs to you that his last name was way at the bottom of the list.
Not that it would have made it onto the birth certificate or anything, but it'd be nice to know.
Mr. White gives you three months off for maternity leave and you take one. It's either that or explode from nervous energy, you figure, because as much as you love Jason more than anyone else (maybe even more than Superman, but the betrayal still smarts), you can't stop staring at him.
You take out your five million notes on Superman and go over them again and again like you don't know them back to front. Maybe you were imagining it when he said he didn't fly until he was a teenager. And did he say anything about when he started running fast enough to beat bullets? It would probably help to save that worry until after Jason can walk, or at least stand, but still.
Jimmy can't stop talking about how much Jason looks like you. You smile and nod and take it as a bad sign. Jason does look like you, almost eerily so, but you know damn well who his father is and every time he grabs at Richard's finger with his own tiny hands you expect Richard to pull it back broken.
You lock the window in the nursery after the third time you have a nightmare about him floating out of the house. Hey, it can't hurt.
*****
The first time Richard takes you out to dinner, it's a little Italian place where the greeter doesn't wince when you walk in with a baby and the waitress offers to take a bottle into the kitchen to heat it up for you if you want. The waitress asks after Richard's mom and he asks her if that boyfriend of hers has sold that novel yet, and it's nice.
It doesn't even matter that the only prep you did for the date was to sit down with the baby and order, "All right, kiddo, do Mommy a favor and try not to shoot laser beams out of your eyes or anything, okay?"
Jason looks up at you like you're insane. Which, let's be honest, you just might be.
*****
The dates continue at a steady pace for a good six months before you even notice how serious they are, until all of a sudden it hits you as you're standing in a grocery store with Richard having the world's stupidest discussion about how disgusting shrimp is.
And it's not even the shrimp talk that gets you, really, because if it did that would just be embarrassing. No, it's Jason cooing in your arms and Richard smiling wide and handsome as he waves a plastic bag of shrimp at you and you sticking out your tongue and flinching away, because that's what makes the little old lady walk up to the three of you and say, "You three make such a lovely family."
You freeze and blurt out a thank you as Jason pats your cheek with a small damp palm. Richard puts down the bag of shrimp and his grin changes.
"A family, huh?"
You rub your hand in gentle circles on Jason's back, and he snuggles up against you, so warm, so much warmer than any other baby you've ever held. "How about that?" you say, and you laugh with this nervous edge you didn't expect to be there.
*****
Richard proposes to you over a candlelight dinner by the waterfront, with a clear cloudless night sky overhead and Jason in a high chair next to the table squishing a fistful of peas in his hand.
If you keep expecting Superman to swoop down and break this whole thing up, for this to be the thing that brings him back from wherever he went to, you think it's understandable, even if it's only to you.
*****
Jason has asthma.
Or at least you think it's asthma. Maybe it's some weird Kryptonian wheezing thing you get when your mom is human and your dad is a deadbeat. The pediatrician says it's asthma, but the pediatrician also says a lot of things without knowing how many white lies are all over Jason's medical history.
Trying to come up with something to put down for the medical history on his father's side of the family had been fun. You were sorely tempted to put down, "Well, there was that one time their planet blew up, I think."
So, yeah, Jason's got asthma. And the list of things he's allergic to is longer than your arm.
You once saw Superman stuff a bomb into his mouth and swallow it right before it exploded. Seeing Jason cough and gag at something with peanuts in it seems grossly unfair.
It's just a hybrid thing, though, you figure. There's a difference between being human and being an alien, and being both at once can't be good for anyone's health. Maybe Jason will get better. Or maybe he'll just keep getting allergic to stuff for the rest of his life until you have to put him in a bubble and feed him only Jell-O or something.
Maybe you're just being paranoid, but with Superman's son, there's probably no such thing as not paranoid enough.
Especially with Superman still missing.
*****
When Jason starts speaking, he calls Richard "Daddy" so fast you're pretty sure he planned it for all those months during which all he did was babble.
Richard's thrilled to pieces and bounces Jason around the room, but one of these days you'll have to tell him. And when you say "have to," it's not because he's going to be your husband, you're going to spend the rest of your lives together, and you have an obligation to tell him whose son he's raising.
It's because one day Jason may start juggling the furniture or seeing through walls, and ... well, you have to.
When Jason calls Richard "Daddy," you duck into the bedroom and cry for a half an hour.
*****
When Lex Luthor gets out of prison, you get hopeful.
Well, Superman has to come home, right? For this, he has to come back.
But he doesn't. Lex gets out, and Jason has his one facial expression that looks so much like Superman you have to keep from flinching every time you see it, and the big jerk doesn't come back and you really want to slap him for it.
After Lex gets out, you sleep in Jason's bedroom for a week and come dangerously close to nailing his window shut. You keep expecting to wake up to a bald head in your line of sight, to Lex Luthor bending over your son's bed with a wicked smile saying, "Well, looks like someone got lucky."
The last day, you wake up to Richard asleep beside you, watching over Jason with you even though he doesn't know why you're doing it.
After breakfast you sit down at your laptop. You've got a cup of coffee and a doughnut and a permanent dent in your bottom lip from chewing it as you work up the courage to type up the words floating through your head since Lex Luthor stepped out of prison and into a limo. Your fingertips settle on the keyboard, relaxing at the steady familiar hum of it, and the words "Why The World Doesn't Need Superman" flow across the screen like an exhaled breath you've been holding for years.
It's not as hard to put into words as you think it will be.
Author: Troll Princess
Fandom: Superman Returns
Rating: PG
Word Count: 3,583 words
Pairing: Lois/Superman, Lois/Richard
Warnings: None
Disclaimer: Dude, if I owned these characters, I think I'd have a nicer car.
Summary: After you stop being worried and start being angry, which takes about another two weeks of searching empty skies, you get absurdly hateful of his hair.
Author's note: I just had this overwhelming need to write fic about what happened to Lois while Superman was gone. Forgive me if the timeline's a bit wonky.
Wave If You See Me From Afar
*****
After a week goes by, you bite off every single one of your fingernails except the one on your right pointer finger, because you need something to drum on your desktop or else you'll go insane.
It's not like Superman hasn't disappeared for a week before. You know this. Ever since he suddenly showed up in Metropolis, Superman has been missing for a seven-day period or longer exactly eight times. Lex, Lex, that thing with the cave and the kryptonite, Lex, the comet thing, Lex ... okay, most of them were Lex. But Lex is in prison and will be there forever and a day at this point, so ... yeah.
Maybe he's taking a vacation.
See, as pissed as you'd be if he were taking a vacation (because, you know, a forwarding number would have been nice), you'd get it. He's sure as hell earned it. You can even picture the scene. Superman on a beach somewhere with a silly drink with an umbrella in it. Lose the tights, keep the Speedo, spit curl coming apart in the humidity.
After you stop being worried and start being angry, which takes about another two weeks of searching empty skies, you get absurdly hateful of his hair.
Stupid spit curl. You hope he has an accident shaving and cuts the damn thing right off.
One day you take one of Jimmy's better shots of Superman and white out the dark curl against his forehead. It's ridiculously moronic revenge and yet you spend the rest of the day beaming like an idiot.
And the worst part of the whole situation is that you can't even complain to Clark about it, because Clark packed up and left town right about the same time Superman did. You only consider slipping the gossip columnist the rumor they ran off together for an hour before you toss the idea right out.
Okay, mostly because you can't see anybody running off with Clark, but still.
Five weeks and three days after the last sighting of Superman, Jimmy catches you staring him over the top of your cubicle and frowns.
"Something wrong, Lois?"
Jimmy is loyal and dependable like a golden retriever. He's always just there in the office like a light fixture. Today, he's gotten doughnuts for Mr. White, gone through his photos of Superman looking for something that works with the headline "Has Superman Forsaken Us?", and sharpened every pencil in his desk until they're the size of the ones you get at a mini-golf course.
You've been watching him for twenty minutes waiting for him to get up out of his chair, go outside for some fresh air, and never come back.
"No, Jimmy," you say. "I'm fine, really. Scout's honor."
You smile. It's probably not as scary-looking as you think it is.
The reason you don't notice is because Mr. White throws story ideas at you like hot potatoes he expects you to catch and juggle.
You know he's doing it because if anything relieves your stress, it's juggling hot potatoes. Or something. It doesn't really matter.
You're tired because you keep thinking that you should keep checking the places Superman frequents just in case he comes back and you've gone up to the roof so many times you caught yourself drawing the skyline from memory on the border of a press packet last week. You're nauseated because every so often you have this mental image that makes you gag of Superman lying somewhere in a pool of his own blood and surrounded by kryptonite. You can't sleep at night because the FBI's started investigating his damn disappearance like he's just another missing person.
The lead agent's name is Tom. He has a wife, two daughters, plays a lot of golf, has met the president and doesn't like him much. He thinks you should repaint your living room. The two of you have spoken a lot in the last two months.
You're not eating much because every time you take a deep breath you smell the familiar scent of Superman in the air instead of hamburgers or Chinese food and nothing you taste could possibly be as wonderful as that one patch of skin at the base of his throat.
You're just making yourself sick, is all.
You find a receipt going through your junk drawer from right around when Superman disappeared. That's why you notice, because you bought a box of tampons that day and it's still sitting unopened under your bathroom sink.
The stick turns blue. Hell, all four sticks turn blue.
You're more surprised that it doesn't turn green instead, which gives you a case of hysterical giggles for the rest of the day.
You make a list of people you can tell.
It's not like you really are going to tell anyone. It's just because if you thought Superman vanishing was going to drive you nuts, this will take you right over the edge. Making a list isn't hurting anyone. It's mostly keeping you from really calling someone, is what it's doing.
You could tell Mr. White. No, that's a brilliant idea. He'd be polite about it, or at least as polite as he can manage, and then he'd offer you the front page if you could come up with a less tacky headline than "I'm Carrying Superman's Baby!" Which says it all, don't you think?
Or you could always go on Oprah. You could tell people exactly what it's like making love to an alien. "Exactly the same as making love to a human, with less gravity."
You could tell Jimmy. It'd probably be worth it just to see how red you can make his ears turn.
That's about it, really. You never said it was a long list.
What you're hoping is that the kid doesn't kick through your stomach.
It's not a real fear, you figure, except it is a real fear regardless of what Superman's told you about his childhood. You're perfectly within your rights to wake from nightmares where the baby wriggles a little in there and pokes a hole right through your belly. The kid's not even much bigger than a peanut, so you probably shouldn't worry.
Except there was that one time Superman kept a skyscraper from collapsing and now you can't stop trying to figure out if the ratio between Superman and a skyscraper is close to that of an unborn child and your internal organs.
You've become exceedingly morbid about your own personal health, but you think that's fair.
So yes, you made that stupid list and threw it out as soon as you made it, but the fact is that you're going to have to tell someone.
Superman's been gone almost three months now and everyone is pretty sure he's not coming back. They're hopeful, but they just keep looking at you. Okay, more like through you, like you've got some secret pocket or something in you that you've got Superman stashed away in. It's ludicrous on the face of it, but then it isn't anymore and you just want people to look somewhere else.
You're keeping it. That's not negotiable.
You tell Mr. White -- the pregnant part, not the by-Superman part -- because he should know you're going to be out of commission in another six months. He gives you this look like he wants to ask and doesn't want to and isn't sure he wants to hear the answer and wants to hear the answer more than anything. Funny how good he is at that.
And instead of going down the road you're afraid he's going to approach, Mr. White just asks, "You going to be all right, Lois?"
You pick at your cuticles as you speak. "It was ..."
Thinking about what you were going to say gives you an immediate monster of a migraine. You contemplate blaming Clark, but he was probably gone too early to be a scapegoat. Maybe you can make somebody up. I got drunk one night when I realized Superman wasn't coming back and went home from the bar with this guy who looked just like him.
"I made a mistake," you finally say, "but a good one in the end, I guess."
Then Mr. White smiles, and you smile, and nothing about your job really changes for the next six months except for how close to your desk you can pull your chair.
You can't tell an obstetrician that you're carrying Superman's baby, because that's just crazy. True, sure, but if you want to turn your life into even more of a circus than it already is, that's one way to make sure of it.
You spend weeks waiting for the doctor to tell you something's wrong with the baby, that he's got two heads or three arms or a tail. He's taken to lasering graffiti on your insides with his eyes, he's been bench-pressing your kidneys ... something. It doesn't even matter if you've seen every inch of Superman and know for a fact he looked just like any other human man.
And then the doctor says one day, "Well, would you look at that?"
He chuckles at it, and maybe you stop moving. Maybe it's just because some of that goop is sliding right down your side off the gentle slope of your belly. Your stomach is always so warm these days, like there's a solar battery in there. "What? What is it?"
Dr. Harris chuckles as he moves the sonogram over your stomach again. "That kid of yours is going to be in pictures one day, the way he always turns toward the probe like he does."
After that, you wave down at your stomach sometimes. Who knows? Maybe the little bugger can see you.
When Richard comes to work for the paper, you've got about five thousand schematics from the bank robbery on Essex Street spread across your desk, a phone tucked between your ear and shoulder, a pen in your one hand for taking notes and an apple in the other hand you take bites from every chance you get. It's no wonder he doesn't notice the belly until two hours after he introduces himself.
When you finally get a chance to do more than wave a distracted hello at him between quickly fired questions at the company that supplies Metropolis Bank and Trust with their security guards, Richard's coming back from lunch on the same elevator you're about to board.
His eyes are this gorgeous shade of blue that makes you think of what the sky looks like when you're standing in mid-air with someone far above the city just after sunrise.
His gaze drops and lifts back up again almost too quick to notice. "Oh, so you're ..."
Pregnant. With someone. Not fitting back into a size two anytime soon. There's a dozen different ways he could be going with that, and you have this weird feeling he's pleading to you with his eyes to shut him up.
Probably because he is.
"Going to be late for my interview about the bank heist?" you say, breezing past him into the elevator. "Oh, yeah."
As the doors close, Richard smiles at you and the baby gives you a good thump in the kidney.
You can't help but wonder later on if that was his version of an elbow in the side.
You don't know when it is that you start eating lunch with Richard, but the day your water breaks he's sitting next to your desk and raiding your bag of chips as the two of you talk out that new treaty in the Middle East. You hate this stuff because the politics confuse the hell out of you and you have a bad habit of misspelling "Israeli," but Richard gets it. That's mostly why you let him steal so many of your Doritos when anybody else would have lost a hand by now.
And then your water breaks and all hell breaks loose.
Mr. White's shouting things about how you should have stopped working weeks ago. Jimmy races from here to there asking if you want juice or water or anything to drink for the ride to the hospital. One of the guys from the leisure section asks if you want to know how to spell "epidural" as Richard tries to help you to the elevator and the entire newsroom cracks up. It's almost comforting.
Twelve hours later, you have sore muscles you didn't even know existed before and a new son with the right number of fingers and toes who has a father who doesn't even know he exists.
Jason.
Jason, son of Superman.
Of all of the questions you never asked Superman, it suddenly occurs to you that his last name was way at the bottom of the list.
Not that it would have made it onto the birth certificate or anything, but it'd be nice to know.
Mr. White gives you three months off for maternity leave and you take one. It's either that or explode from nervous energy, you figure, because as much as you love Jason more than anyone else (maybe even more than Superman, but the betrayal still smarts), you can't stop staring at him.
You take out your five million notes on Superman and go over them again and again like you don't know them back to front. Maybe you were imagining it when he said he didn't fly until he was a teenager. And did he say anything about when he started running fast enough to beat bullets? It would probably help to save that worry until after Jason can walk, or at least stand, but still.
Jimmy can't stop talking about how much Jason looks like you. You smile and nod and take it as a bad sign. Jason does look like you, almost eerily so, but you know damn well who his father is and every time he grabs at Richard's finger with his own tiny hands you expect Richard to pull it back broken.
You lock the window in the nursery after the third time you have a nightmare about him floating out of the house. Hey, it can't hurt.
The first time Richard takes you out to dinner, it's a little Italian place where the greeter doesn't wince when you walk in with a baby and the waitress offers to take a bottle into the kitchen to heat it up for you if you want. The waitress asks after Richard's mom and he asks her if that boyfriend of hers has sold that novel yet, and it's nice.
It doesn't even matter that the only prep you did for the date was to sit down with the baby and order, "All right, kiddo, do Mommy a favor and try not to shoot laser beams out of your eyes or anything, okay?"
Jason looks up at you like you're insane. Which, let's be honest, you just might be.
The dates continue at a steady pace for a good six months before you even notice how serious they are, until all of a sudden it hits you as you're standing in a grocery store with Richard having the world's stupidest discussion about how disgusting shrimp is.
And it's not even the shrimp talk that gets you, really, because if it did that would just be embarrassing. No, it's Jason cooing in your arms and Richard smiling wide and handsome as he waves a plastic bag of shrimp at you and you sticking out your tongue and flinching away, because that's what makes the little old lady walk up to the three of you and say, "You three make such a lovely family."
You freeze and blurt out a thank you as Jason pats your cheek with a small damp palm. Richard puts down the bag of shrimp and his grin changes.
"A family, huh?"
You rub your hand in gentle circles on Jason's back, and he snuggles up against you, so warm, so much warmer than any other baby you've ever held. "How about that?" you say, and you laugh with this nervous edge you didn't expect to be there.
Richard proposes to you over a candlelight dinner by the waterfront, with a clear cloudless night sky overhead and Jason in a high chair next to the table squishing a fistful of peas in his hand.
If you keep expecting Superman to swoop down and break this whole thing up, for this to be the thing that brings him back from wherever he went to, you think it's understandable, even if it's only to you.
Jason has asthma.
Or at least you think it's asthma. Maybe it's some weird Kryptonian wheezing thing you get when your mom is human and your dad is a deadbeat. The pediatrician says it's asthma, but the pediatrician also says a lot of things without knowing how many white lies are all over Jason's medical history.
Trying to come up with something to put down for the medical history on his father's side of the family had been fun. You were sorely tempted to put down, "Well, there was that one time their planet blew up, I think."
So, yeah, Jason's got asthma. And the list of things he's allergic to is longer than your arm.
You once saw Superman stuff a bomb into his mouth and swallow it right before it exploded. Seeing Jason cough and gag at something with peanuts in it seems grossly unfair.
It's just a hybrid thing, though, you figure. There's a difference between being human and being an alien, and being both at once can't be good for anyone's health. Maybe Jason will get better. Or maybe he'll just keep getting allergic to stuff for the rest of his life until you have to put him in a bubble and feed him only Jell-O or something.
Maybe you're just being paranoid, but with Superman's son, there's probably no such thing as not paranoid enough.
Especially with Superman still missing.
When Jason starts speaking, he calls Richard "Daddy" so fast you're pretty sure he planned it for all those months during which all he did was babble.
Richard's thrilled to pieces and bounces Jason around the room, but one of these days you'll have to tell him. And when you say "have to," it's not because he's going to be your husband, you're going to spend the rest of your lives together, and you have an obligation to tell him whose son he's raising.
It's because one day Jason may start juggling the furniture or seeing through walls, and ... well, you have to.
When Jason calls Richard "Daddy," you duck into the bedroom and cry for a half an hour.
When Lex Luthor gets out of prison, you get hopeful.
Well, Superman has to come home, right? For this, he has to come back.
But he doesn't. Lex gets out, and Jason has his one facial expression that looks so much like Superman you have to keep from flinching every time you see it, and the big jerk doesn't come back and you really want to slap him for it.
After Lex gets out, you sleep in Jason's bedroom for a week and come dangerously close to nailing his window shut. You keep expecting to wake up to a bald head in your line of sight, to Lex Luthor bending over your son's bed with a wicked smile saying, "Well, looks like someone got lucky."
The last day, you wake up to Richard asleep beside you, watching over Jason with you even though he doesn't know why you're doing it.
After breakfast you sit down at your laptop. You've got a cup of coffee and a doughnut and a permanent dent in your bottom lip from chewing it as you work up the courage to type up the words floating through your head since Lex Luthor stepped out of prison and into a limo. Your fingertips settle on the keyboard, relaxing at the steady familiar hum of it, and the words "Why The World Doesn't Need Superman" flow across the screen like an exhaled breath you've been holding for years.
It's not as hard to put into words as you think it will be.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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Date: 2006-06-30 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 01:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 04:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-06-30 07:43 pm (UTC)Hee.
I loved all of Lois' worring about a Krytonian/human baby.
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Date: 2006-06-30 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 12:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-01 03:51 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-03 12:22 am (UTC)Read this today, loved it.
*THUNDEROUS APPLAUSE*
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Date: 2006-07-04 05:05 am (UTC)So good.
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Date: 2006-07-04 11:32 pm (UTC)It was more than brilliant, and I hope you'll try your hand at more stories.
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Date: 2006-07-05 04:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-05 11:48 pm (UTC)I loved it!
no subject
Date: 2006-07-06 12:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-06 02:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-10 01:06 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-11 05:41 am (UTC)"All right, kiddo, do Mommy a favor and try not to shoot laser beams out of your eyes or anything, okay?"
Just wonderful. Thank you.
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Date: 2006-07-11 11:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 04:05 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-07-14 06:24 pm (UTC)"Maybe it's some weird Kryptonian wheezing thing you get when your mom is human and your dad is a deadbeat.
I LOLed at this.
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Date: 2006-07-23 12:19 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-17 03:41 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-08-20 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-09-04 02:57 pm (UTC)Thank you so very much! :)
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Date: 2006-11-23 11:45 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-14 09:10 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2006-12-14 09:15 pm (UTC)*hugs*
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Date: 2006-12-14 10:54 pm (UTC)Great story. Marvelous voice. Funny, funny, funny. All, as always.
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Date: 2006-12-15 04:52 am (UTC)This was amazing - the first time I've enjoyed a fic written in second person. I love the distance it gave Lois' perspective - she's distant even from herself.
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Date: 2007-02-09 05:19 am (UTC)Organizational note: I checked through your tags to find other SR fic, and noticed that this one wasn't tagged for some reason.