for the remainder

part 3




It was around the count of eight that I became aware of...

Pupil shrinking brightness.

The light tore me awake from comforts of anesthesia. Awoken to a dream state, Clark's dream, or his mind, caught in the web of an intrusive, parasitic plant that was currently draining the life from him.

But in this world, there was none of that. The room where my body was, the panicking and desperation surrounding Clark's pale body was gone.

I looked around, trying to gain an idea of where I was, but all I could see were reflections of light, like the world had become a giant, rotating prism. It was beautiful, serene, and awfully quiet.

It was a type of silence you only heard when you were absolutely alone, and felt alone. The world caught in the static inbetween my ears, and I could not even hear my own breath.

But suddenly, in front of me, was a boy. I didn't know how he'd gotten there, nor did his expression say that he knew where I came from either.

But we were both there, looking at each other.

 And then I knew.

It was the same feeling you get when you look at a unfamiliar photo, but spotted the one face you knew. I knew Clark. I had known Clark for a long time. I had never known him as a small child, but I knew that this was him, and I felt his loneliness.

I didn't question too long where I ended up. I only wondered how often Clark dreamed of this place. How often every one of us dreamed of a place we never got the chance to experience.

This was his Kryptonian childhood.

I looked into his light blue eyes, wondering if he knew who I was? I tried to speak to him, but I wasn't sure I could even hear myself.

Clark looked eight or nine, although, I knew he must have been younger than that when Krypton was destroyed. This place looked similar to a version I had experienced before.  There was ice structures and crystal spires circling us much like the Fortress, but above us was a perfect red sphere. We weren't on Earth.

"Chloe," young Clark said, his dark hair neatly laid back from his face. My sense of hearing returned to me.

I sighed in relief, the younger version at least remembering who I was. The parasite hadn't removed his mind completely. I knelt down and held out my hand, "Clark, you have to come with me, okay?"

He looked at me the same as a child would a stranger offering help. "I can't, my parent's are waiting for me." His answer was more of a question, and his mind under a compulsion he couldn't control.

Clark sprinted past me and I found myself chasing after him without a thought of my own.

"Clark!" I yelled, the strange landscape overwhelming my voice. Everything was very empty, lonely, unpopulated. Just a vast landscape of white ice and rock. I wondered if this was what Krypton was really like, or was Clark's imagination limited to what he could only remember?

I panted and slowed my run once I saw there was no where to go. Clark's footprints were the only ones to follow here, and they led me to him. I found him standing outside a ginormous cave. A boy on the verge of escaping deeper into the unknown, but hesitant to take the first step. He looked back at me, and with the same eyes I had known most of my life, Clark asked me to follow him.

Boy Clark ducked into a ice cave, which I crawled after him. I didn't know where he was taking us, but Clark travelled down the path to where he believed he would be reunited with his parents. His young voice cried, echoing through the thick walls of ice and which then traveled back wards to me. He was desperate and anxious, and I questioned why Clark would choose this dream over all others.

I could feel his loss of control as the cave became deeper. The black parasite's tendrils digging deeper and darker into Clark's mind, draining him of his life and his last shred of comfort. He had become a shrinking, insecure child, trapped in a world that was destroyed long before he could remember.

When I reached the end of the cave, I found him huddled in the middle of a large cavern opening. Ice so sheer, and beautiful with the rose sunlight. It was difficult to imagine that Clark could have remembered anything quite like this. The sub-level room glowed in amber, giving the illusion of warmth to a world where it was absent.

"Clark," I said, sitting down on the ice with him, "you have to come with me."


"Why do you keep calling me that?" He said, his nose squinched up, "That's not my name."

Of course, I had forgotten. "Kal, do you remember how you got here?"

"What do you mean? I was born here." His blue eyes pierced into mine.

I sat with him for several moments, realizing I had no real plan to break the news.

"How did you get here?" Clark asked later on, and I realized he might have been wondering it since I materialized. "I don't think my parent's will like you here."

The second statement worried me, "Why do you say that?"

"We don't like visitors. Visitors are dangerous."

Boy Clark's voice shook within the fragile ice dome, and the ice shivered too. I knew then that the parasite had manifested as fear within the dream. Clark was deep in it. So tangled with fear that I wasn't sure how to rip him awake to reality without destroying this fabricated world. And perhaps destroying us in the process.

"Clark, this place is not real. You're asleep right now. You're dreaming."

He looked at me curiously, "Then why wake me? This is a good dream. I'm happy here."

I continued to look at him, processing what all his mind really wanted. This was Clark's good dream.

I looked at him still, trying to understand why he would want to go through this nightmare. Or was it? We both waited in long moments where nothing happened. Clark kneeling, facing the same entrance where we'd crawled from, waiting for, someone who would never be there. Or would they? There was a constant suspense of a dangling hope. I could feel it in the air, in Clark's young voice, in his loyal eyes...

I felt that this was the labyrinth the parasite had chosen for him. Perhaps Clark didn't have a choice where his mind wandered. Perhaps, this was the deepest trap it could find. Using a boy's memory against his longing desire to reunite with his family . Boy Clark would end up waiting here for an eternity or more while his real body rotted on the table where his lost friends celebrated both his day of birth, and death.

I waited with him for several hours, our skin glistening from fresh frost. I found that I felt no cold here. I felt hardly anything. I was a spectator in this world of Clark's. And in this spirit form, I felt almost helpless to help him. I couldn't force him to wake up from this place, he'd have to make that choice on his own.

Clark would turn to me every so often, his alert eyes darting to mine. "They're coming. They promised me."

"I know," I answered him each time, hoping his patience would wear. It didn't. His loyalty was heartbreaking, and his stubborn resistance to me was even harder to bear.

I stood up and walked to one of the ice pillars next to us, and kicked it.  I noticed I was still wearing Lois' bathrobe, and my toes looking up at me.

"What are you doing?"

I shrugged, "I wasn't' sure if that would hurt or not."

Boy Clark squinted at my response, but atleast I had broken the strange spell over him. He seemed to notice that I was not dressed like him. I did not have my white Kryptonian robes, or my winter gear. No, I'd arrived in Lois' hot pink bath robe and clashing blue nail polish.

"Clark," I sat back down next to him, "if this was real, how did I get here?"

He looked confused, but on the verge of answering, but didn't.

I pointed to the monogram on the bathrobe, "You see this? This is Lois' robe. Your wife? My cousin? Don't you remember her? Clark, she's waiting for you to wake up from all of this."

I watched as he closed his eyes, and then rubbed them like I had blown sand in his face.

"I have to stay here," he replied after his internal fit had withered away, and then returned to gaze motionless at the cave's mouth.

"What are you so afraid of?" I reacted a little differently than before. My hands grabbed his shoulders and forced him to face me. I was tired of his deflections, and I was tired of competing with a plant that was draining the remains of him. I couldn't let Clark choose this. I couldn't let him waste anymore time. There was no clock in la la land, and I had no idea how long we had been down there.

"Listen to me," I pressed my fingers into his robe, his small body strange to hold, "I can't let you sit here and rot, and die. Alone. Alone, Clark. There is no one else here, and there is no one else coming to save you..."

I choked up at the idea that I had his only chance. Surely that wasn't true? Was it? I remembered Oliver and Emil were working on something, but who knew... Clark's body was in less than poor shape when I left.

His skin was white.

I felt Boy Clark shiver in my grip, the coldness of his world catching up to him. His lips were blue, and I saw flash of Clark's body on that dinning room table in the apartment. His lips, also blue.

"You're cold," I said, touching his cheek, "the Clark I know never gets cold."

"I'm not Clark." He said, then shivered.

I smiled at him, and my tears fell against it, "Yes, you are. No matter who you think you are, you will always be Clark. I know you better than anyone, better than this parasite does and I'm not letting it take you from us."

I took him in my arms, and held him against me. It was something we had shared for years and years, except, not in recent years. There were days when I desperately longed to be held by someone, to be close to someone like I had been close to Clark, long ago. That type of intimacy had both eluded and scared me for years. Now, looking back, it haunted me.

I held onto him, not knowing what else I should do. Perhaps if I squeezed him hard enough he'd just snap out of it. I held onto Boy Clark until I felt him tremble against me. When I looked at him, his condition had gone south, quicker than I thought was normal. His skin was white. I was losing him.

"No," I shook him when I saw his eyes try to close, "Clark, wake up. Wake up!"

It wasn't working.

I looked above us to see the red sun chasing an invisible path in the sky. I begged for more time, but sensed that the parasite was becoming conscious of my prescence. Perhaps that was it. Maybe the plant was reaching deeper into Clark, its damage advancing even faster.

A wind picked up within the vacuum of the cave, and then I really knew.

It knew I was there.

I scooped Boy Clark into my arms and tried to escape the cave. I tried to run. Anywhere. No where. Somewhere.

As I predicted, the mouth of the cave vanished within seconds, newly developed crystalline structures burying any hope of exit.

I collapsed on top of the crumbled ice with Clark's hands still attached to my collar.

He was dying, and I didn't know how to save him. I cursed all of my intellect and suave skills I had not too long ago when I convinced everyone that this would be a good idea. Chloe always had the solutions, or at least something. I had nothing.

There was nothing here.

I told myself that all I needed was to keep him warm for a few minutes longer. I needed to keep talking to him. Reassuring him. I just needed to buy time until someone else stepped in and figured out a miracle.

The thought that 'this was it' didn't cross  my mind. Well, maybe it had, but I refused to acknowledge it. It just seemed so easy to fight this. All he had to do was wake up. That was it, just wake up. After everything Clark and I had gone through together, I refused to believe that this was the one thing that would defeat Superman.

Nothing would ever defeat Superman.

But Clark?

Was Clark letting it defeat him?

The coldness, I felt it now, creeping up from my toes and into my bones. I wasn't sure how much longer I could do it. I thought I felt a presence within my thoughts, bending my memories of  Clark like a entity tinkering with devils.

I held him for what seemed like an eternity, weighing the meanings of why it had come down to this? Why did this happen to Clark? Why today of all days? Why did I come to the birthday party after swearing to myself that I wouldn't?

After all the questions, I realized it. The part of me that I wanted to share with no one. The part of that both desired and feared, being alone.

 I bent down and pressed my lips to his ear, "Is this what you want? To die alone?"

His lips answered nothing in return.

I realized that I had been talking to myself, and that I was, alone.

I cried.

I cried like I had never let myself cry before. I thought I had wept before, but not like this. Not even at my husbands funeral. Not like this.

I cried over that little boy's body because I knew I would never let Clark die alone.

And as the wind gathered stronger, and more violent against our bodies, the snow buried our skin in white erasure. I didn't know what would come after a dream that you didn't wake up from.

I looked down at Clark, and touched my lips to his forehead. I closed my eyes, "I'm not leaving you."


tbc