![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
seriousficTitle: Duality
Fandom: Superman Returns and Batman Begins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,652
Acknowledgments: Thanks to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
damo_in_japan for betaing this.
Previous Part: Chapter 2
Next Part: Chapter 4
Summary: The girl who fell from Krypton.
The death of Jonathan Kent had taken away most of Martha’s will to live. And what was left was chipped away at by the absence of her son, dragging on year after year… not knowing if he was dead or alive, although what could hurt him she never knew, only had nightmares about. Sometimes she’d stay in bed all day, wondering what the point was of getting up. No little Clark, scampering about to wake her and bug her about a trip to the movie house or ferret some money out of her. No Jonathan, his unshaven cheeks bristling against her arm as he kissed her. Just her and the cows and the chickens.
Then he’d come and she, more than anyone else, had taken it as a bright shining beacon of hope. Superman, the papers called him. But she didn’t need to wait for Clark to come home, taking off his glasses as an afterthought to the way he’d been standing up straight, to know it was her boy. For the first time in years she stopped living on microwave food and fixed them both a proper meal. She’d started setting Jonathan’s place without thinking and she’d cried then too, all those tears she thought had worked their way out at the funeral. But they were still there, bitter, and Clark held her as she purged them. He was so big now, so tall and handsome. He’d met a girl.
Lois. Her name was Lois and to hear Clark tell it, she was the greatest girl that had ever lived. Brassy, bold, opinionated – beautiful, too, Clark got around to mentioning, as if it should be obvious. She breathed oxygen, had two lungs, and was beautiful.
It took him a few more weekends to stop the “What Lois Did Today” report. They weren’t working as co-writers anymore, which was a shame. “Lois Lane and Clark Kent” made for a good byline in her Super-scrapbook. Then he stopped mentioning her altogether. And then they stopped talking altogether.
Except to tell her she was leaving.
This time she didn’t let it hit her as hard. She went to town every day, to drink coffee at the Talon or watch a movie or pick up a book from the library or help out somewhere, anywhere. She tried to pretend it didn’t mean anything when her car broke down and Ben Hubbard drove her to town, or when he drank coffee with her or held her hand at the scarier movies or recommended a library book or gravitated to her charities like a big lovesick puppy. But Jonathan had been gone a long time and he would’ve wanted her to be happy. And so Martha wasn’t lonely anymore.
Then Clark returned. Clutching her shawl around her for warmth, feeling the paradoxical chill of the night air and the heat on her face from the melted, flaming slag of the crystal star, she drew closer. She had felt fear the first time, all those years ago, when she and Jonathan had been blessed with Clark. But not this time. This time, the heavens would hold no surprises.
And the heavens laughed and said Yeah, right.
“Ma, this is Kara,” Clark said, holding her hand as they hovered out of the wreckage. “She’s my cousin. She’s going to be living here from now on.”
***
“This world smells funny,” Kara said. She paused, then scraped at the earth with her foot. “Is that dirt?”
“Just give it a chance. There’s a lot to like. Starting with my mom’s cooking.”
“Your mother is Lara. These Earth clothes are insufficient to keep my warmth about me. This area’s atmosphere manufacturers must be malfunctioning.”
Clark put a hand on her shoulder. “Earth doesn’t have atmosphere manufacturers or synthi-skin clothes or anything you’re used to. You’re just going to have to… rough it. And part of that is speaking in English so Ma can understand you.”
Martha had stopped to look back at them. Kara looked at her. “How do you do, Mrs. Kent?” she asked, turning the language harsher and terser than necessary. It lacked the flowing eloquence of her home tongue.
“Very well, thank you,” Martha said, far more shaken than she should be, and went inside.
“It’s a start,” Clark reasoned.
***
Martha reheated some chicken and had an apple pie in the oven before Clark could blink. They sat at the kitchen table and talked about Krypton and five years gone. Martha had sent the five years’ worth of postcards to Lois and Jimmy and Bruce. Bruce knew Clark’s secret, so he wouldn’t have been fooled, but Clark had addressed five letters to him anyway. Birthday cards.
Kara looked like she was drowning in Clark’s clothes. She both held them tightly around her and seemed repulsed by the Earth fibers, like a cold vegetarian wearing a fur coat. Clark reached out his hand to her and she took it quickly, abashed at her speed.
“She’s all that’s left, besides me. The last daughter of Krypton.”
Kara’s hand went limp in his.
“I was hoping she could stay here until… she’s ready.”
Martha gave Kara her friendliest smile and poured her some coffee. “She can stay as long as she likes. She is family, after all.”
Kara shoved the coffee away. Clark caught it just as it cleared the table.
“You’re not my family!”
“Kara!” Clark shouted, rising to his feet so fast he pushed his chair back.
“I don’t want to stay here! They’re all human and they’re so primitive and I want to help you!”
Clark looked at her. She was breathing hard. Those deep, childish pre-sob breaths. Her face was screwed up with the effort of not crying. With that comforting Krypton calm, Clark turned to Martha.
“Mother, would you please excuse us a moment?”
“Of course, Clark.”
She left them alone. Kara’s hitched breathing calmed. Clark drew closer to her, heard her racing heart slow, then felt her throw her arms around him with strength she didn’t know she had, knocking him back. She sobbed into his chest, and for the second time in that kitchen Clark sat down on the ground with the tears of someone he cared for flowing, gathering her upper body onto his crossed legs and rocking her gently, cooing Kryptonese into her ear. Her legs were sprawled across tiles of the linoleum floor and Clark picked them up, pulling her closer against him. Blonde hair tickled at his gullet as he rested his chin on her head.
“I hate it here. Why do these people deserve you more than me? You’re all I have left and now you’re going to leave me too.”
“Only for a little while,” he replied, insisting on English. “I’ve been gone a long time. I don’t know how they’ll react. It might not be safe.”
“I can handle myself,” Kara said fiercely, still clinging to him.
“No, you can’t. Not yet. You don’t have all your powers. Ma can help you with that. She went through exactly the same thing when I was developing my abilities.”
“She doesn’t like me,” Kara said with teenager moroseness. “I can tell. She hates me because I took you away from her and she’s going to be awful to me.”
“She’s Ma. She doesn’t hate anyone.”
“You swear?”
“I promise.”
Kara sniffled and wiped her eyes on his sleeve. “And you’ll come back, right? You won’t just leave me here?”
“I come here every weekend. You’ll never be alone, I promise.”
“I don’t know if I can go a week with these weird smells. I like the way you smell.”
Clark gently detangled himself from Kara and brought them back to their feet. Kara was slow to break away from him. She’d stopped crying, aside from a few hitches in her breath. She wavered, not quite sure what to do, and he put an arm on either shoulder to steady her.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She grabbed hold of his hand as he walked out the backdoor. The screen door banged shut behind them. As soon as they were off the cold concrete porch, Kara floated. She hovered over the painful gravel trail, tethered to the earth by Clark. Clark made a mental note to buy her shoes. Hopefully, shoe-shopping cheering women up would prove a universal constant.
With his free hand, Clark threw open the barn doors. He tugged her down so she was once more touching the ground. Kara picked at stray straws with her toes as Clark opened up the storm cellar.
“This is the ship I came here in as a child,” Clark said, running a hand over it.
“It looks… different,” Kara said thoughtfully.
She reached out to touch its ovoid mass. As if the death of Krypton had caught up to it, even here, the ship was cold and dead. She drew her hand back. Clark had told her he’d always thought of Krypton as sterile, and it was, but it was also bright and warm and heavenly. Not like this.
“Jor-El showed me models of it. I never thought I’d actually see it built. He always was a bit of a dreamer…”
“Aren’t we all?” Clark grinned, but it wasn’t catching. He brought forth a neatly folded pile, blue and red and yellow. “Here. Take it.”
Kara did, unfurling the suit until she saw a familiar raised crest.
“The House of El…” she repeated, breathless.
“Maybe you think I’ve turned my back on my heritage. But I haven’t. I just choose to honor it in a different way than you would.” He held the top of the suit up so that it covered her chest, modeling it on her. “And I was hoping one day… you could too.”
***
Martha set the pie out on the windowsill and, as if attracted by the sweet scent, Clark returned. He propped up both arms on the windowsill and leaned his head in, taking a big whiff of the pie.
“Kara… needs to be alone for a little while. Please tell me that everything’s been fine with you,” he said, genuinely exasperated.
“Can’t complain. Had to hire a few farmhands to tend the fields… bank nearly foreclosed on us before a nice man bailed me out…”
“Nice man?” Clark repeated.
“Yes. He wrote a check, told me to keep the farm running… I think he was a friend of yours.”
Clark’s blood ran cold. “Did he leave a name?”
“No…” Martha opened up a drawer and dug around under some old bent spoons. “Just this letter.”
Clark opened it the moment she handed it to him and was relieved, but not wholly surprised, to see what was written inside.
Come see me now. Sincerely, Bruce Wayne.
“When did you get this?” Clark asked, turning it over in his hands to search for some ninja disappearing ink or another of Bruce’s little tricks, but there was none.
“Three years back.”
Clark shrugged. The bossily-written now was just Bruce’s trademarked control freak at the forefront. Clark was just glad he wasn’t in a relationship with him. Now that would be hell.
“It held this long. It’ll wait a while longer. Anything else?”
He said it casually, but Martha had been skirting around a subject all night. There was something important she hadn’t touched on. The Daily Planet and its staff were fine, Metropolis was more or less alright… what could be wrong?”
“Ma?”
Martha signed and dug into the drawer again, this time coming up with an old video tape. She blew the dust off it. “I knew you’d have to see it for yourself.”
Clark took it from her and, after a quick X-ray/superhearing check on Kara (fine, if mopey), he pushed it into the VCR and pressed play.
The TV went from blue to an old football game to static to what had been taped latest. It was a news conference broadcast on the six o’clock news. Taping had started halfway in, but it only took a moment for Clark to get the gist of it.
Behind the podium, armored in an Armani suit, long tailored sleeves that ended in black leather gloves, a man read a statement as precisely as any orator ever could. His head was bare, as hairless as stone, and his eyes were friendlily blunted by spectacles, but still as fiercely intelligent and malignant as ever. At his side was a muscular man in a dark suit, with blond hair and gray eyes. Clark looked down at the teletype, as if it would tell him that what he was seeing was some kind of cruel hoax.
SEC approves Yoyodyne buy-out… Lex Luthor new CEO… a Luthor at the head of former Luthorcorp for the first time in over a decade…
Memories of the horrors Lex had committed when he was in control of Luthorcorp, before his first conviction, flooded Clark’s mind. More than a few of them had been aimed at exposing Clark’s secret, before he’d left for Arctic. With Clark out of the picture, Lex’s scheming mind had gone into overdrive and he’d burned out in scandal, stripped of his company and packed off to jail. That should have been the end of it, but Lex had quickly escaped and begun hatching new plots and land grabs. Superman had come onto the scene in time to curb the worst of them.
Lex orated about how his family had been the one to build Metropolis up from a small town into the city of tomorrow. Clark remembered. Jor-El had used Lex Luthor and the Luthor family to demonstrate the fallacy of social Darwinism. If not for the Luthors, Lex said, Metropolis would still be a podunk little town.
“I like podunk little towns,” Clark said. He turned to Martha. “How’d he get out?”
“No one quite knows. He claimed to have a jailhouse Saul-to-Paul, but most folk with common sense thinks that’s hogwash. But he must’ve convinced the parole board, because they let him out at time served.”
“When was this?”
“A year after you left. The fact that you weren’t there to speak against him didn’t help.”
Clark ground the heel of his hand into his forehead. Luthor had been tried, sentenced, and convicted to a double life sentence. He’d thought the case was closed. Obviously, he was wrong.
“Then he started a venture capitalist fund… managed to come up with such wondrous technology… then two years ago he bought back Luthorcorp.”
“Yoyodyne.” Clark kept rubbing his temples. “They changed the name to Yoyodyne because they didn’t want to be associated with him anymore.”
“They were going through financial difficulties. He bailed them out… built an empire out of them. The first billionaire with a parole officer. He’s a philanthropist now, or so he claims.”
“Do you believe him?” Clark said, looking up at her.
Martha shut the VCR off. “I don’t rightly know. He’s helped a lot of people, but I always got the impression that he was trying to… one-up you. Like he wants to beat you at your own game. Now that you’re back…” She reached down and touched her shoulder. Clark was bent over almost double, staring at his shoes. “I know you were friends once. But as much as you like to believe in redemption, some things can’t be forgiven.”
“Like leaving for five years?” Clark asked, looking up. His blue eyes were as bare as she’d ever seen them. “Like that?”
***
Kara checked with her X-ray vision to make sure Clark wasn’t watching. No, he was being comforted by the crone. Hardly Kryptonian of him. She slipped her hand into the landing gear compartment and found the black crystal right where her father had left it. She stuffed it into her pocket for later. She would honor her heritage. But not in the way Kal-El had in mind.
Fandom: Superman Returns and Batman Begins
Rating: PG-13
Word Count: 2,652
Acknowledgments: Thanks to
damo_in_japan for betaing this.Previous Part: Chapter 2
Next Part: Chapter 4
Summary: The girl who fell from Krypton.
The death of Jonathan Kent had taken away most of Martha’s will to live. And what was left was chipped away at by the absence of her son, dragging on year after year… not knowing if he was dead or alive, although what could hurt him she never knew, only had nightmares about. Sometimes she’d stay in bed all day, wondering what the point was of getting up. No little Clark, scampering about to wake her and bug her about a trip to the movie house or ferret some money out of her. No Jonathan, his unshaven cheeks bristling against her arm as he kissed her. Just her and the cows and the chickens.
Then he’d come and she, more than anyone else, had taken it as a bright shining beacon of hope. Superman, the papers called him. But she didn’t need to wait for Clark to come home, taking off his glasses as an afterthought to the way he’d been standing up straight, to know it was her boy. For the first time in years she stopped living on microwave food and fixed them both a proper meal. She’d started setting Jonathan’s place without thinking and she’d cried then too, all those tears she thought had worked their way out at the funeral. But they were still there, bitter, and Clark held her as she purged them. He was so big now, so tall and handsome. He’d met a girl.
Lois. Her name was Lois and to hear Clark tell it, she was the greatest girl that had ever lived. Brassy, bold, opinionated – beautiful, too, Clark got around to mentioning, as if it should be obvious. She breathed oxygen, had two lungs, and was beautiful.
It took him a few more weekends to stop the “What Lois Did Today” report. They weren’t working as co-writers anymore, which was a shame. “Lois Lane and Clark Kent” made for a good byline in her Super-scrapbook. Then he stopped mentioning her altogether. And then they stopped talking altogether.
Except to tell her she was leaving.
This time she didn’t let it hit her as hard. She went to town every day, to drink coffee at the Talon or watch a movie or pick up a book from the library or help out somewhere, anywhere. She tried to pretend it didn’t mean anything when her car broke down and Ben Hubbard drove her to town, or when he drank coffee with her or held her hand at the scarier movies or recommended a library book or gravitated to her charities like a big lovesick puppy. But Jonathan had been gone a long time and he would’ve wanted her to be happy. And so Martha wasn’t lonely anymore.
Then Clark returned. Clutching her shawl around her for warmth, feeling the paradoxical chill of the night air and the heat on her face from the melted, flaming slag of the crystal star, she drew closer. She had felt fear the first time, all those years ago, when she and Jonathan had been blessed with Clark. But not this time. This time, the heavens would hold no surprises.
And the heavens laughed and said Yeah, right.
“Ma, this is Kara,” Clark said, holding her hand as they hovered out of the wreckage. “She’s my cousin. She’s going to be living here from now on.”
***
“This world smells funny,” Kara said. She paused, then scraped at the earth with her foot. “Is that dirt?”
“Just give it a chance. There’s a lot to like. Starting with my mom’s cooking.”
“Your mother is Lara. These Earth clothes are insufficient to keep my warmth about me. This area’s atmosphere manufacturers must be malfunctioning.”
Clark put a hand on her shoulder. “Earth doesn’t have atmosphere manufacturers or synthi-skin clothes or anything you’re used to. You’re just going to have to… rough it. And part of that is speaking in English so Ma can understand you.”
Martha had stopped to look back at them. Kara looked at her. “How do you do, Mrs. Kent?” she asked, turning the language harsher and terser than necessary. It lacked the flowing eloquence of her home tongue.
“Very well, thank you,” Martha said, far more shaken than she should be, and went inside.
“It’s a start,” Clark reasoned.
***
Martha reheated some chicken and had an apple pie in the oven before Clark could blink. They sat at the kitchen table and talked about Krypton and five years gone. Martha had sent the five years’ worth of postcards to Lois and Jimmy and Bruce. Bruce knew Clark’s secret, so he wouldn’t have been fooled, but Clark had addressed five letters to him anyway. Birthday cards.
Kara looked like she was drowning in Clark’s clothes. She both held them tightly around her and seemed repulsed by the Earth fibers, like a cold vegetarian wearing a fur coat. Clark reached out his hand to her and she took it quickly, abashed at her speed.
“She’s all that’s left, besides me. The last daughter of Krypton.”
Kara’s hand went limp in his.
“I was hoping she could stay here until… she’s ready.”
Martha gave Kara her friendliest smile and poured her some coffee. “She can stay as long as she likes. She is family, after all.”
Kara shoved the coffee away. Clark caught it just as it cleared the table.
“You’re not my family!”
“Kara!” Clark shouted, rising to his feet so fast he pushed his chair back.
“I don’t want to stay here! They’re all human and they’re so primitive and I want to help you!”
Clark looked at her. She was breathing hard. Those deep, childish pre-sob breaths. Her face was screwed up with the effort of not crying. With that comforting Krypton calm, Clark turned to Martha.
“Mother, would you please excuse us a moment?”
“Of course, Clark.”
She left them alone. Kara’s hitched breathing calmed. Clark drew closer to her, heard her racing heart slow, then felt her throw her arms around him with strength she didn’t know she had, knocking him back. She sobbed into his chest, and for the second time in that kitchen Clark sat down on the ground with the tears of someone he cared for flowing, gathering her upper body onto his crossed legs and rocking her gently, cooing Kryptonese into her ear. Her legs were sprawled across tiles of the linoleum floor and Clark picked them up, pulling her closer against him. Blonde hair tickled at his gullet as he rested his chin on her head.
“I hate it here. Why do these people deserve you more than me? You’re all I have left and now you’re going to leave me too.”
“Only for a little while,” he replied, insisting on English. “I’ve been gone a long time. I don’t know how they’ll react. It might not be safe.”
“I can handle myself,” Kara said fiercely, still clinging to him.
“No, you can’t. Not yet. You don’t have all your powers. Ma can help you with that. She went through exactly the same thing when I was developing my abilities.”
“She doesn’t like me,” Kara said with teenager moroseness. “I can tell. She hates me because I took you away from her and she’s going to be awful to me.”
“She’s Ma. She doesn’t hate anyone.”
“You swear?”
“I promise.”
Kara sniffled and wiped her eyes on his sleeve. “And you’ll come back, right? You won’t just leave me here?”
“I come here every weekend. You’ll never be alone, I promise.”
“I don’t know if I can go a week with these weird smells. I like the way you smell.”
Clark gently detangled himself from Kara and brought them back to their feet. Kara was slow to break away from him. She’d stopped crying, aside from a few hitches in her breath. She wavered, not quite sure what to do, and he put an arm on either shoulder to steady her.
“Come with me. I want to show you something.”
She grabbed hold of his hand as he walked out the backdoor. The screen door banged shut behind them. As soon as they were off the cold concrete porch, Kara floated. She hovered over the painful gravel trail, tethered to the earth by Clark. Clark made a mental note to buy her shoes. Hopefully, shoe-shopping cheering women up would prove a universal constant.
With his free hand, Clark threw open the barn doors. He tugged her down so she was once more touching the ground. Kara picked at stray straws with her toes as Clark opened up the storm cellar.
“This is the ship I came here in as a child,” Clark said, running a hand over it.
“It looks… different,” Kara said thoughtfully.
She reached out to touch its ovoid mass. As if the death of Krypton had caught up to it, even here, the ship was cold and dead. She drew her hand back. Clark had told her he’d always thought of Krypton as sterile, and it was, but it was also bright and warm and heavenly. Not like this.
“Jor-El showed me models of it. I never thought I’d actually see it built. He always was a bit of a dreamer…”
“Aren’t we all?” Clark grinned, but it wasn’t catching. He brought forth a neatly folded pile, blue and red and yellow. “Here. Take it.”
Kara did, unfurling the suit until she saw a familiar raised crest.
“The House of El…” she repeated, breathless.
“Maybe you think I’ve turned my back on my heritage. But I haven’t. I just choose to honor it in a different way than you would.” He held the top of the suit up so that it covered her chest, modeling it on her. “And I was hoping one day… you could too.”
***
Martha set the pie out on the windowsill and, as if attracted by the sweet scent, Clark returned. He propped up both arms on the windowsill and leaned his head in, taking a big whiff of the pie.
“Kara… needs to be alone for a little while. Please tell me that everything’s been fine with you,” he said, genuinely exasperated.
“Can’t complain. Had to hire a few farmhands to tend the fields… bank nearly foreclosed on us before a nice man bailed me out…”
“Nice man?” Clark repeated.
“Yes. He wrote a check, told me to keep the farm running… I think he was a friend of yours.”
Clark’s blood ran cold. “Did he leave a name?”
“No…” Martha opened up a drawer and dug around under some old bent spoons. “Just this letter.”
Clark opened it the moment she handed it to him and was relieved, but not wholly surprised, to see what was written inside.
Come see me now. Sincerely, Bruce Wayne.
“When did you get this?” Clark asked, turning it over in his hands to search for some ninja disappearing ink or another of Bruce’s little tricks, but there was none.
“Three years back.”
Clark shrugged. The bossily-written now was just Bruce’s trademarked control freak at the forefront. Clark was just glad he wasn’t in a relationship with him. Now that would be hell.
“It held this long. It’ll wait a while longer. Anything else?”
He said it casually, but Martha had been skirting around a subject all night. There was something important she hadn’t touched on. The Daily Planet and its staff were fine, Metropolis was more or less alright… what could be wrong?”
“Ma?”
Martha signed and dug into the drawer again, this time coming up with an old video tape. She blew the dust off it. “I knew you’d have to see it for yourself.”
Clark took it from her and, after a quick X-ray/superhearing check on Kara (fine, if mopey), he pushed it into the VCR and pressed play.
The TV went from blue to an old football game to static to what had been taped latest. It was a news conference broadcast on the six o’clock news. Taping had started halfway in, but it only took a moment for Clark to get the gist of it.
Behind the podium, armored in an Armani suit, long tailored sleeves that ended in black leather gloves, a man read a statement as precisely as any orator ever could. His head was bare, as hairless as stone, and his eyes were friendlily blunted by spectacles, but still as fiercely intelligent and malignant as ever. At his side was a muscular man in a dark suit, with blond hair and gray eyes. Clark looked down at the teletype, as if it would tell him that what he was seeing was some kind of cruel hoax.
SEC approves Yoyodyne buy-out… Lex Luthor new CEO… a Luthor at the head of former Luthorcorp for the first time in over a decade…
Memories of the horrors Lex had committed when he was in control of Luthorcorp, before his first conviction, flooded Clark’s mind. More than a few of them had been aimed at exposing Clark’s secret, before he’d left for Arctic. With Clark out of the picture, Lex’s scheming mind had gone into overdrive and he’d burned out in scandal, stripped of his company and packed off to jail. That should have been the end of it, but Lex had quickly escaped and begun hatching new plots and land grabs. Superman had come onto the scene in time to curb the worst of them.
Lex orated about how his family had been the one to build Metropolis up from a small town into the city of tomorrow. Clark remembered. Jor-El had used Lex Luthor and the Luthor family to demonstrate the fallacy of social Darwinism. If not for the Luthors, Lex said, Metropolis would still be a podunk little town.
“I like podunk little towns,” Clark said. He turned to Martha. “How’d he get out?”
“No one quite knows. He claimed to have a jailhouse Saul-to-Paul, but most folk with common sense thinks that’s hogwash. But he must’ve convinced the parole board, because they let him out at time served.”
“When was this?”
“A year after you left. The fact that you weren’t there to speak against him didn’t help.”
Clark ground the heel of his hand into his forehead. Luthor had been tried, sentenced, and convicted to a double life sentence. He’d thought the case was closed. Obviously, he was wrong.
“Then he started a venture capitalist fund… managed to come up with such wondrous technology… then two years ago he bought back Luthorcorp.”
“Yoyodyne.” Clark kept rubbing his temples. “They changed the name to Yoyodyne because they didn’t want to be associated with him anymore.”
“They were going through financial difficulties. He bailed them out… built an empire out of them. The first billionaire with a parole officer. He’s a philanthropist now, or so he claims.”
“Do you believe him?” Clark said, looking up at her.
Martha shut the VCR off. “I don’t rightly know. He’s helped a lot of people, but I always got the impression that he was trying to… one-up you. Like he wants to beat you at your own game. Now that you’re back…” She reached down and touched her shoulder. Clark was bent over almost double, staring at his shoes. “I know you were friends once. But as much as you like to believe in redemption, some things can’t be forgiven.”
“Like leaving for five years?” Clark asked, looking up. His blue eyes were as bare as she’d ever seen them. “Like that?”
***
Kara checked with her X-ray vision to make sure Clark wasn’t watching. No, he was being comforted by the crone. Hardly Kryptonian of him. She slipped her hand into the landing gear compartment and found the black crystal right where her father had left it. She stuffed it into her pocket for later. She would honor her heritage. But not in the way Kal-El had in mind.
