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Mr. Beeto
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Long Live the Movieverse

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Location: Warren, Michigan, USA
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Family Reunion - 17/?
Sep 18th, 2008 at 1:03am
 
Title: Family Reunion
Author: Mr. Beeto
Rating: PG-13
Beta: htbthomas and Shado Librarian
Summary: AU Twist on Donner/Singer Movieverse: Tie the three films together into a cohesive whole, and provide a more credible and interesting reason for Superman to have returned to Krypton.

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Author’s Notes:
Looks like I'm a day early with the post this time...  Well, we got a little more pseudo-science here, and a lotta explaining to do.  Hope you enjoy.

Thanks to htbthomas and Shado Librarian for the beta.

Chapter 17 – The Horrible Truth

Thursday, September 28, 2006 5:20PM EDT
The blood drained from Clark’s face and his eyes grew impossibly large as he weakly answered, “I thought… I thought Jason was Richard’s.”

“I was almost convinced of that myself, even though the math never quite worked there,” Lois declared.  “But the striking resemblance between Jason and Kara is kind of hard to overlook.”

My God, they do look alike! Clark realized.  How did I miss that?  Aloud, he nervously asked, “You, um… you think they look alike?” He awkwardly looked away, and covertly focused his vision through the floors and walls to the children in the descending elevator where he found Kara staring back at him, wide-eyed.  Oh, boy, I really didn’t want to have to explain things like this to her, he thought.  He shook the concern from his mind, and shifted his focus to Jason for a closer look at the boy’s cellular structure.

“Clark, if they were the same age and gender, those two would pass for twins!” Lois angrily replied in a loud whisper.  “Sure looks like those two are brother and sister, which would mean that Jason is your son.  Now, how the hell could that even be possible?  Did you decide to get yourself laid after I fell asleep?”

Clark’s eyes, already impossibly wide, grew even wider as his head snapped back to Lois.  She was glaring at him, angrier than he’d ever seen her, and he couldn’t really blame her – the circumstantial evidence suggested date rape.  He’d been shocked mute by both the accusation and her stated conclusion that Jason was his son!  It only took Clark a moment to find his voice.  “H-How can you even suggest…” he stammered.  “I would never – it wasn’t like that at all.”

“Then what was it like, Clark, because I certainly don’t remember going to bed with you.”

“I… I’m still trying to figure this out,” he admitted.  “It shouldn’t be possible.”  How can this be? Clark wondered.  Jor-El said that the genomes weren’t compatible.  Clark was forced to acknowledge that his father had been wrong.  Not only did Jason bear a striking resemblance to Kara, a super-close look at him a moment earlier revealed uniquely Kryptonian attributes in his cellular structure.  Somehow, Jason had been conceived while he and Lois were together during the alternate timeline and had miraculously survived the space-time fold.

“What part of this isn’t possible, Clark?” Lois demanded.  “That you got into my panties?  That you knocked me up?  Or that I figured out who it was that knocked me up?”

Clark suddenly became aware of the chatter from the bullpen.  Though the office had thinned out considerably, the bullpen was still lightly staffed for the swing shift.  They’d noticed Lois dragging him into the conference room by the tie, which was something she something reserved for people who had seriously pissed her off.  Fortunately, the glass barrier between them still offered their conversation some privacy, but Clark became suddenly uncomfortable at the attention.  “We’re… We’re attracting a bit of a crowd,” he pointed out.  “How about a change of venue?   The roof, maybe?”

“You’re not getting out of here until I get an explanation,” Lois insisted.

Clark sighed tiredly, lowered his head, and pinched the bridge of his nose.  I have to tell her, he concluded.  She’s earned that right…   But, not here.  Not like this.   He raised his head with a determined expression on his face and firmly told her, “Lois, I think I know what happened and I promise, it’s not what you think–”

“Frankly, your promises don’t mean a lot right now, and you really don’t want to know what I think right now.”

“In order to explain what happened with us, I have to tell you about something that affected the entire globe,” Clark informed her, reaching around her for the doorknob.  “It’s a horrible truth that the rest of humanity has been blissfully ignorant of, but you’ll need to know the full truth of it – you deserve nothing less.  But we’re not having that conversation here.  Give me ten minutes to check my facts, I’ll meet you on the roof and explain everything.”

  “Get away from that door!” she commanded.   “You’re not running from this.”  She tried to push him back, and was surprised when he didn’t budge.  It was like pushing against a wall.

“I’ll never run from you, Lois,” he told her sincerely.  “But I do have to go right now.”  He easily opened the door against her resistance, again surprising her.  “Ten minutes, and you’ll have my undivided attention and the explanation you’re looking for.”  Clark then turned from her, and walked briskly through the door, heading towards the elevator lobby.

Lois was only a few steps behind him.  “Stop right there, Smallville,” she called after him.  “We’re not even close to being done here.”

“Ten minutes,” Clark repeated over his shoulder as he quickened his pace and ducked through the door to the stairs.

When Lois opened the door to the stairs five seconds later, she was astonished to discover the space deserted.  “Get back here, damn you!” she hollered, her voice shrilly echoing through the empty and silent stairwell.  She waited a moment, and then sighed irritably before shouting up the stairs, “Fine.  You’ve got ten minutes!  And you had damn well better not be late!” She finally abandoned her quarry, marched to her desk, retrieved her purse from the bottom drawer, and returned to the elevator lobby.  She angrily pressed the up button while a handful of her colleagues in the bullpen looked on in amusement.

-o-o-o-


Lois set her purse on the half-wall at the edge of the roof, fished out her cigarettes and lighter and attempted to light a cigarette.  The lighter’s flame went out just as she was about to touch it to the end of her cigarette.  Lois grumbled and repeated the attempt, and again the flame extinguished itself almost immediately.  To her left, a deep baritone greeted her, “You know, you really shouldn’t be smoking, Miss Lane.”

Lois yelped in surprise at the voice.  Oh, my God, he’s here, she thought.  Does his timing ever suck… 

“I’m sorry,” he told her sincerely as he floated down to the roof and stepped forward.  “I didn’t mean to–”

“I’m fine,” Lois protested.  “Really.  I just wasn’t expecting… you.”  She practically spat the last word, and Superman winced.

“I’m–” Superman began.

  “So, where–” Lois said at the same time.  After a short awkward silence, she decided, “You first. I can wait.”  Okay, Lane, take a minute and figure out what you’re going to say, she instructed herself.  Try to be articulate this time.

“I’m sorry,” he began.  “For leaving like that.  And with all the press on the plane, it really wasn’t a good time to talk.”

Press? Lois wondered, her brow momentarily wrinkling in confusion.  “Oh, right.  The plane.  We’ll there’s no press around now.  Except me.”

“Well, um, I know that people are asking a lot of questions, um, now that I’m back, and I think it’s only fair that I answer those people.”

Those people? Lois thought.  “So you’re here for an interview?”  Lois turned and searched her purse for her tape recorder.  “Where did I put that thing?” she mumbled.

“Your right pocket, Lois,” Superman informed her and she fished it out of her pocket. “But you won’t need it.  This visit is strictly off the record.”

“Off the record?” Lois asked incredulously.  “Do you have any idea the kind of pressure my editor is putting on me to get this interview?  I can’t do the real stories until I get this damn thing done.”

Superman frowned and said, “The explanation that I owe you, and the horrible truth I must share with you, is not for public consumption.  It’s for your ears only.”

Horrible Truth?  Lois thought.  Those are the same words that Clark used.  She turned off the recorder and threw it back in her purse.  “Were you eavesdropping on us earlier?” she demanded to know.

“You know I hear everything, but we’ll come back to that later,” he evaded.

“Fine,” she snapped.  “You say you owe me an explanation, so explain, starting with where the hell you were these past six years.”

“I went back to Krypton.”

Lois’ brow again wrinkled in confusion.  “But you told me it was destroyed,” she recalled quietly.

“It was,” he confirmed sadly.  “And quite thoroughly so.  Big chunks of the planet were blown away, and almost nothing is recognizable from the days when I lived there.  The little that is still standing has been transformed into kryptonite by the supernova – something I hadn’t noticed until it was almost too late.  But I had to go back.”

“Why?”

“Six years ago, a distress call from my father’s brother reached Earth,” Superman explained.  “He’d been trying to escape with his family, and while they launched from Krypton in time to escape the supernova, they got caught in the shockwave.  Their ship was disabled, and power nearly depleted…  Lois, this was a call for help from my family.  I had to respond to the call.”

“So you’ve brought them back with you?” Lois asked in amazement.  “How come nobody’s seen them?”

Superman offered her a sad look before lowering his gaze to the tile beneath his feet.  “They didn’t all survive,” he said quietly.  “There was only enough power to sustain one of them, frozen in stasis.  My aunt and uncle chose life for their daughter – I brought her back with me and I’m taking care of her now.”  He lifted his head with a serious expression on his face and stressed, “Lois, nobody can know about this…  Maybe that will change someday, when she’s grown up and out of school – if she chooses to join me in this mission.  But until that day, I want her to enjoy what remains of her childhood and to at least have the option of a normal life.”

Jesus, the poor kid, Lois thought.  “How old is she?”

“I’d rather not go into details,” Superman told her firmly.  “Not yet.”

“You should have told me about this before you left,” Lois scolded him.

“Lois, I…  I meant to.  But when I went looking for you, you were on a plane heading to L.A.,” he explained.  “I couldn’t pull you off the plane without validating everything that the tabloids were suggesting.”

“Who cares about the tabloids?” she shouted.

“Lois, not everyone realizes that they’re fiction, and that includes some of my most vicious enemies,” he reminded her.  “There was no way that I was going to unnecessarily endanger your life, especially when I wasn’t going to be around in case something happened.”

“Then you could have found me that night in L.A.,” she argued.

“There wasn’t time,” he insisted.  “As it was, I barely got to my uncle’s ship before power ran out.  I’m sorry.”

“What about during those two weeks before you left when you were flying around like the end of the world was coming?” Lois argued.  “You couldn’t take a few minutes to drop down to the roof at the Planet, where I was waiting for you, and explain what was going on?”

“Lois, I left thirty hours after my uncle’s distress call reached Earth,” Superman informed her.

“Then what was up with your hyperactivity?” Lois pressed.  “It sure seemed to me that like you were putting in the extra effort because you knew you wouldn’t be here.  And you were avoiding me like the plague.”

“I’m sorry about that, Lois,” he told her sincerely.  “It’s just… Well, you know me well enough that if I’d dropped by, you’d have known something was wrong, and I didn’t want to burden you with that.”

“Does this have something to do with that ‘horrible truth’ that you were mentioning?”

Superman nodded.  “On August twenty-sixth, two thousand, I folded space-time back on itself eight days to mitigate the effects of a global nuclear holocaust.”

“Whoa, slow down a minute,” Lois asked in disbelief.  “Did you say, ‘nuclear holocaust’?”

Superman sadly informed her, “Three vicious Kryptonian criminals escaped their prison and discovered Earth.”

“Kryptonian?”

“Yes,” he confirmed.  “They were terrorists, for lack of a better word, led by an egomaniacal sociopath named General Zod, who had once been in charge of Krypton’s security.  They were the only three criminals that the Kryptonian justice system had been unable to rehabilitate, and had been banished to a space-borne prison called the ‘Phantom Zone’.  Ironically, their punishment gave them a chance for survival that wasn’t available to Krypton’s law-abiding citizens...  I hadn’t realized it at the time, but apparently the Zone got caught in my ship’s wake and dragged to Earth with me when I first came here, and they had been orbiting out near the Kuiper belt.  I had no idea they were there…”

“Jesus…”

“Anyway, in the original timeline, when that runaway nuke got loose the morning of August eighteenth, I intercepted it and threw it into space towards the outer planets.  Its trajectory took it close enough to the Phantom Zone that the shockwave from the detonation breeched the seal and they escaped.  When they arrived on Earth a short time later, I was distracted with some personal matters and didn’t realize what was happening.  By the time I learned that they were here, they’d already taken over the Earth and nuked twenty-eight major cities around the world…  I did manage to defeat them – just barely – but the damage was done.  There was nowhere on Earth to escape the fallout…

“But you were able to undo it…”

Superman shrugged, and continued, “Afterwards, when I pieced together what had happened, I realized that my carelessness had freed them.  I had to share responsibility for the hundred million people who perished in those nukes, and the hundreds of millions more who’d die from the radiation.  However, it occurred to me that I could mitigate the damage by folding space-time back on itself eight days – prior to Zod’s escape from the phantom zone.  The second time around I made sure that they stayed sealed in their cage.  I got to that runaway nuke sooner, and the detonation was contained deep in the atmosphere of the planet Venus, and safely isolated from the Phantom Zone.”

“Where is this ‘Phantom Zone’ now?” Lois asked anxiously.  Oh, Dear God. The damage they could do if they got free again…

“They’re in a distant orbit around a red giant twenty thousand light years from Earth,” he said simply.  “I left a probe to monitor it, just in case, but they won’t be going anywhere anytime soon.”

“That’s a relief,” Lois commented.  “Now, about that other thing you mentioned…  You rolled back time?  You never told me that you could do that.”

“That not quite how it works, but your description is close enough,” he replied.  “It’s not an easy thing to do, and not something to be taken lightly.”

“Okay, fine,” Lois replied sharply.  “You rolled back time and stopped Armageddon from happening…  So what exactly does this ‘horrible truth’ have to do with the leper treatment I got from you before you left?”  Clark’s not the only one who has some explaining to do, she thought.

“Lois, I hadn’t intended that as a rebuke,” he told her sincerely.  “I had a lot going through my mind, mostly a combination of guilt over the acute harm that my carelessness and dereliction of duty had caused, and some personal disappointments.”

“What harm?” Lois asked incredulously.  “You rolled back time!  You stopped it from happening!”

  “Those eight days still happened, Lois – you can’t rewind time like a video,” Superman explained.  “There’s no separate time stream – its space-time.  H.G. Wells got it wrong.  It’s impossible to completely undo events by folding space-time.”

Lois shook her head.  “Okay, now you’re making my head hurt,” she complained.  “You know I’m not a science geek.”

“Okay, try to think of like this,” Superman offered.  “Imagine that you can fit the entire universe on a single sheet of paper – all the planets, all the stars, all the galaxies.  Okay?”

“Okay.”

“But that sheet of paper is just a snapshot of the universe at that particular moment.  For every second that passes, there’s another sheet of paper that gets glued on top of the previous page.  As time passes, you end up with a stack of paper, rather than a single sheet.  That’s space-time.  Understand?”

“Sure, but what’s it have to do with rolling back time?”

“Well, you can’t just pull the pages off of the top of the stack and start over to retroactively prevent a horrible event,” he explained.  “The pages are glued together.  But…”  Superman poked his index finger down on top of his open palm and continued, “…if you exert enough force at a particular point, you can compress the top pages down into the lower layers.  You’ll end up with something the thickness of a single page, but with the mass of all the upper pages merged into it, at that one point.  That’s kind of what happens when folding space-time – there’s a localized effect contained within the local sun’s gravity well, and the future folds into the past.  In this case, I folded space-time back on itself eight days.  Everyone here repeated the eighteenth through the twenty-sixth of August, two thousand, though no human being remembers the first time around.  Those memories are out-of-phase and lost forever.”

“So how’s that different that rolling back time, if it’s like those eight days never happened.”

“The future merges with the past, and that leaves residual traces of the original timeline – the top pages on our stack of paper.  When I folded space-time after the nuclear holocaust, the nuked cities were whole again, but the poisonous radiation wasn’t completely dissipated.  There’s still much higher background radiation in those cities even now, which some of your sources have noticed.  That’s resulted in an elevated cancer rate in those cities, according to a CDC report I read recently.  Also, the construction in those cities is much weaker and has a greater potential for structural failure than before the nukes.  That probably accounts for multiple bridge and building collapses over the past six years.  Lois, people have died from these things.”

“Okay, I get the point,” she told him.

Superman nodded, and after a moment’s pause, he told her apologetically, “There’s another affect of the fold that you need to know about – how certain people were directly affected by it.  People whose actions and experiences were starkly different in those lost eight days than they were the second time around.”

“Why would that be a big deal?” Lois asked.  “Seems like it would be a good thing, if the first time around was as bad as you say.”

“For some people, it was a good thing,” Superman conceded.  “They’d been killed or seriously hurt the first time around, and after the fold, they were alive again with little evidence of their original ordeal.  However, there could be some symptoms of the original injuries, which I suspect were sometimes fatal.”

“So it’s basically a what-if scenario?” Lois asked skeptically.  “What if so-and-so’s unexplained death was from the nukes that nobody remembers.”

“It’s statistically unlikely that none of the deaths in the last six years could be traced back to injuries from those original eight days,” Superman insisted.  “However, that wasn’t why I brought it up.  There’s a different scenario I want to discuss – one that affects you directly.”

Lois’ eyes went wide. “How bad is it?” she asked anxiously.

“That depends on your perspective,” Superman answered.  “I’ll get right to the point.  I’m absolutely certain that Jason was conceived during the original timeline - nothing happened in Niagara Falls the second time around.  The circumstances were different.”

“You’re saying that Clark and I…  That we…,” she began nervously.  Suddenly, her nervousness morphed into irritation, and her eyes narrowed into a glare.  “Wait a minute,” she said irritably.  “Were you spying on us?”

“What? No!” he protested.  “It’s not like that.  It’s just… well, the circumstances were different the first time through those eight days, and you saw your partner in a different light.  Your situation was somewhat different than that of the other affected women–”

“What ‘other affected women’?” Lois demanded.

“There was a report of an unusually high spike in the birth rate in the spring of two thousand one, with a remarkably high percentage of single women giving birth,” Superman explained.  “At first, I didn’t think anything of it, but after taking a closer look at the data earlier tonight, I couldn’t help but notice that the birthrates were flat in the nuked cities that were included in the study.  That suggests that something happened in those original eight days, in the cities that weren’t nuked.”

“What does this time fold have to do with that?”

“Think about it for a minute, Lois,” Superman suggested.  “Three vicious aliens take over the world and promptly ‘punish’ twenty-eight cities by nuking them.  There’s nowhere to escape the fallout, and no sign of Superman.  It really looked like the end of civilization as we knew it.”

“So you’re saying the survivors decided to get laid while they still had the chance?”

“I… I wouldn’t have put it that way,” Superman protested as a slight blush rose up his cheeks.  “But it shouldn’t come as a surprise that some people sought comfort in each others’ arms.  Perhaps with partners that they wouldn’t otherwise consider or without the precautions that they might otherwise have exercised.  Those pairings wouldn’t necessarily have been repeated in the revised timeline.”

“Okay, I’ll buy that,” Lois agreed.  “But you said my situation was different,” Lois pressed.  “How so?”

“You weren’t aware of Zod’s invasion when… you know…”

“You were spying on us,” Lois accused irritably.  “So you’re some kind of super-stalker now?”  Is that why you ignored me after rescuing that kid in Niagara Falls?  Couldn’t face me after what you saw me doing with Clark?

“Lois, that’s not how it was,” Superman stated sternly.  “I’ll explain it all to you in a little while…  I think that there are some things about Clark Kent that may surprise you.”

“What about him?” Lois asked.  “And how is it that he seemed to know about this ‘horrible truth’?”

The Man of Steel looked away, walked to the edge of the roof and stared out at the cityscape as he let out a frustrated sigh.  After a moment, he quietly said, “I get the feeling that I’m not doing a very good job explaining things.  Every question I answer seems to spawn two more, and we’ve seriously digressed from the original topic…”

“Occupational hazard.”

“You asked why I seemed to be avoiding you before I left,” he reminded her.  “Part of the answer was guilt over what happened in that alternate timeline, the affects of which are still being felt.  But there was also some personal baggage that I was preoccupied with.  You remember the disappointment I mentioned?  The truth is that while Zod and his cohorts were invading Earth, I was daring to hope that I could have a normal life.  In fact, I was trying to live that normal life, rather than attending to my duty, which was why I hadn’t noticed their invasion until it was almost too late.  Afterwards, I was forced to face the fact that a normal life might not be part of my future, and that was not an easy truth to accept...  I could hide my sorrow over that from the rest of the world, but I knew that if you saw me, I wouldn’t be able to hide it from you.  I didn’t want to burden you with my problems.”

  “You still should have explained things to me,” Lois insisted.

“I know,” he conceded.  “And I’m sorry.”  The two settled into an uncomfortable silence, both seeming to study the patterns in the roof tile at their feet. It had only lasted a couple minutes when Superman declared, “It’s good to be back.”

“Yeah, well everyone seems to be happy about it.”

“Not everyone,” he said quietly.  They both raised their heads, and he looked her intently in the eyes.  “I read the article, Lois.  ‘Why the World Doesn’t Need Superman’.”

Way to ruin the moment, you jerk, Lois thought.  Aloud, she sternly told him, “So did a lot of people.  Next week, they’ll give me a Pulitzer for it.”

“Why did you write it?”

“How can you ask that after leaving me like that?” she hissed.  “Was it that hard to say ‘goodbye’?”

“I’m sorry if I hurt you.”

“No.  The time to say sorry was six years ago,” Lois snapped.   She turned her back to him and stared into space, fighting the tears that were glistening in her eyes.  She blinked away the tears, and spoke slowly as she kept her back to him, “I moved on.  I had to.  So did the rest of us.  That’s why I wrote it.  The world doesn’t need a savior.”

“I never wanted to be a savior.  I just wanted to help.”

“Well, I guess you sure screwed that up, didn’t you.”

The two stood silently for a few minutes in an awkward silence.  Finally, Superman looked tenderly at her and asked, “Lois, will you come with me?”

“What? Why?”

“There’s something I want to show you…  Please.”

Lois turned back to him and looked at the hopeful expression on his face.   This is a really bad idea, she thought.  I should refuse.  She hesitated a moment, but then stepped towards him.  “I can’t be long,” she said.  “Clark should be here any minute.”  She toed off her shoes and stepped up on his feet.

Superman smiled sweetly at her and assured her, “That won’t be a problem.”

-o-o-o-


It had been a long time since Lois had seen the city from this vantage point.  Though she’d flown often enough in Richard’s seaplane, it wasn’t the same with the droning engine noise and the speed required to maintain lift.  Nothing compared to standing on Superman’s feet, in the protective circle of his arm and basking in his unusual warmth as they looked down on the city from a stationary point high above.  It felt like they were standing on top of the world.  I don’t think that I’ll ever get tired of this, she thought.  Though, he doesn’t need to know that. She was enjoying the flight despite her best efforts to cling to her anger.

As they slowed to a stop, Lois turned her head back to face him and asked, “What was that you were saying earlier about Clark, about needing to explain a few things?”

“It’s a long story.  I’ll tell you all about it later,” he promised.  He paused a moment, and then asked her, “Lois, what do you hear?”

“Nothing.  It’s quiet.”

Superman smiled.  “Do you know what I hear?  I hear everything.”  His smile faded as he continued, “You wrote that the world doesn’t need a savior, but every day I hear people crying for one, and I can’t ignore their call.”  He paused a moment, and told her tenderly, “I’m sorry I left you like that, Lois.  Please believe that I never meant to hurt you.”

Before Lois had a chance to respond, a small voice to her left unhappily informed them, “I’m sorry, too.  It was my fault.”

Lois’ head spun to her left at the child’s voice and her eyes flew wide open in shock when she recognized the small blonde girl floating ten feet away.  Lois heard herself quietly voice the girl’s name:  “Kara.”


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« Last Edit: Nov 21st, 2008 at 12:33pm by Mr. Beeto »  
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