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It began in a world of blues and whites, and the rattle of tires crunching like loose change over the gravel. It began in one stride too long across a dusty floor, and Clark grabbing for something solid as the world was ripped out from under his feet.
He had a sensation of someone lashing a lasso around his waist and jerking him, violently, backward; and his fingers found purchase, and held on.
The next thing he knew he was dumping on his hind end in the kitchen of the farmhouse and there was a weight crushing his chest, suffocating, and Lois’ cry of “Thank God.” turned to “What the hell?” and then there were hands throttling Clark’s chest as someone rolled off him and Emil was the only calm presence in a midst of “Oh my God, Mister Kent?!” and Clark staring at the very bewildered face of his Earth-2 adopted father.
Jonathan was every kind of rumpled and unsure, in a world he squinted at with shy eyes and it took Clark a long second to realize they were sitting on their haunches in the kitchen and Jonathan was grabbing his sleeve like Clark was the only thing Jonathan trusted to be substantial.
When he looked at Clark, he was just a few days sober and a few weeks unshaven and out of place and after five years, he didn’t look as much like a fixture of the kitchen as Clark remembered. It wasn’t his world.
“Clark. What the hell?” Lois repeated, breathlessly. She hadn’t moved any closer.
And Clark said, “I’ll deal with Clark Luthor.”
—
That night, after the Fortress, after the portal to the other world was sealed and after Lois had gone to stay at Watchtower for the night, they sat in the living room, Clark and Jonathan. On the floor, with the Mirror Box between them, and they looked at it very long and hard and said nothing. Jonathan drank from a black coffee mug and Clark from a white, and a certain yellow ceramic sat forgotten on a shelf somewhere, gathering dust with the rest of everything.
Clark was memorizing him, and Jonathan was memorizing the box, and the world beyond, and what he’d left behind.
“I can still send you back,” Clark offered, wistful in spite of himself. “I know this is a lot to take in. Believe me, I know. When my birth father sent his doppelganger here and he found out he had a son, he…well, he gave up everything for me. I’m not expecting you to do the same.”
“Give up a wrecked dream of a prosperous life. Give up imposing myself on a woman who told me she never wanted to see my face again?” Jonathan sounded bitter, a kind of world-weariness Clark wasn’t used to hearing from him. “It’s not exactly a sacrifice, on my part.”
“It wouldn’t be the first time it’s happened. In this world, you died trying to protect my secret.”
“Secret,” Jonathan scoffed. “Still find it hard to believe not everyone knows exactly what you are and how to kill you.” His eyes raked over Clark, limpid and familiar and so achingly, penetratingly deep Clark thought he would get lost somewhere in there. “Still find it hard to believe a headcase like me could raise a man like you.”
Clark decided to accept that for a compliment. “You didn’t do it alone.”
They sat a while longer, and finally Jonathan sniffed, and looked away. “Have that doctor destroy the stupid box. I’m not going anywhere. Whole world went to hell in a handbasket anyway.”
Clark took the Mirror Box to Emil, and by the time he returned Jonathan was sitting on the couch, and looking all around at the walls.
“It’s strange, seeing this place so full of life.”
“There’s one thing missing,” Clark said, his hands shoved deep in his pockets. “You know. In this world, Mom never stopped missing you. She hasn’t been around much since she became senator—”
“Senator!” Jonathan snorted. “Now, why doesn’t that surprise me?”
“But she misses you,” Clark pressed on. “Maybe more than she knows.”
Jonathan looked up, his eyes hard like blue flint. “Not yet, Clark. Not yet.”
—
The farmhouse family grew from two, to three.
It took some convincing on Lois’ part, more from a state of shock than anything. The conversation was long and fraught and took place somewhere between stripped gutters and skylights in Metropolis, on the edge of a nondescript rooftop in the middle of the night. Lois argued against Jonathan’s sanity; and with Earth-2 Lionel as a point of reference, Clark understood the risk.
But what was done, was done. And somewhere on the far side Martha Kent would have Clark Luthor to nurture, along with Jor-El’s guidance which spanned gaps of time and space and all the rifts a slit of mirror glass could open. Their worlds would never intersect again.
In the end, with her head on Clark’s shoulder Lois told him they’d faced time rips and evil army invasions and the darkness before, so why not this?
Jonathan watched over the world, mostly, from barn lofts and crevices and side railings, like a specter detached from the land of the living. Where Lionel’s echo from another plane of existence had plunged up to his elbows in the world he’d inherited by chance, Jonathan seemed afraid to touch it. Afraid, as he’d gripped Clark’s jacket that first day, that everything around him was made of smoke and mirrors and if he looked too closely, touched too nearly, it would disappear. Or he would. Either case, it would all go away.
Clark hunted Darkseid, to no avail, and checked in on Connor and Dinah and Oliver and Chloe, and rotated back to the Daily Planet and Lois and then they orbited back to the farm, where Jonathan could generally be found nursing a bottle of scotch. Amber rings thrown on a polished floor, dark stains of a past everyone remembered, except for him; Jonathan drank with both eyes on the pictures on the mantle, on the desks, on the table.
“It’s funny,” he said one night. They were sitting in the living room, Lois asleep half-sprawled across Clark’s lap with a dozen pieces for her promotion scattered over her knees. Clark stroked her hair down her back and watched as Jonathan fingered and squinted at a picture of him and Martha and Clark, squinted and frowned and rubbed his jaw and squinted some more.
“What’s funny?” Clark took the bait, finally. It was a rare night of sobriety for Jonathan. Clark had realized within the first few weeks that hiding the booze never solved the problem.
“You have all these memories. You, your mother and me. This whole life I was never a part of. I mean. I know it’s my face in those pictures, but that’s not…that’s not me, Clark. I’m not the man who raised you.”
“Maybe not. But you’re still the man I looked up to my whole life. And you are him, you have the same wisdom, and everything.”
There was an abundance of sadness in Jonathan’s eyes when he looked at Clark, then. “Son, I am about as wise as the dirt I came from and I’ve got nothing to offer you except the first stages of cirrhosis and the kind of hope that went sour decades ago. Hope you can live with that.”
“I can live with it. But can you live with being nothing more than the man you are right now?”
“Wouldn’t know where else to start.”
“You could start by helping Lois and me with chores. I know you and Mom managed before I came along, but with full-time jobs at the Planet Lois and I can barely make ends meet on the homestead.”
The light that pooled across Jonathan’s features was a rich red-gold. “Why do you do that? Talk about me like I’m him.”
“Like I said,” Clark’s arm curved around Lois, drawing her close against the beat of his heart. “You’re the person I look up to the most.”
__
Jonathan traded, in time, the constant companionship of whiskey and scotch by the bottleful for the pleasurable company of cows. His hands, callused from years of labor and clubbed from a subsequent span of languor, began to bear again the rough hardiness Clark had known all his life. Nevertheless, the planes, of Jonathan’s face retained their bitterness, and a flare of true hatred stole across his expression every time Oliver Queen or the Luthors were mentioned. Lois cottoned on quickly to the fact but seemed to struggle with curbing her tongue on the matters.
“Seriously, Clark? I know your dad was as stubborn as the next guy. Believe me, I was his campaign manger. Nothing says bullheaded like the answer you get for trying to convince a salt-of-the-earth politician to skip his anniversary for a state dinner.” Lois tossed Clark a wrench while he fiddled with the tractor’s loose seat. “But this cold shoulder he’s giving the world is about to go arctic. I think it’s time for an intervention.”
“Lois, he did just get uprooted from his world and forced into ours,” Clark pointed out. “And so far we’ve kept it a secret from everyone. Not even Chloe knows. What am I supposed to do, take him out and show him Metropolis’ finest?”
Lois crouched, hands on her thighs, behind him. “Start small. Start Smallville.”
__
Though Clark had never happened upon the depths of Smallville in the parallel world where Luthors reigned supreme, he gathered from Jonathan’s reaction that it wasn’t anything like as friendly and bright as what their world had to offer. Jonathan took to it with that typical mistrust, but with an encroaching wonder of a child beginning to hope that something he desperately wanted might be real.
There were people in town who recognized Jonathan, some who didn’t; to those who did Clark recited the story Lois had labored over creating, something about a leave abroad to escape assassination attempts after his induction as senator, and of course Martha and Clark had known the whole time. They toured the town for hours, passing the restored Talon more than once, and for Clark it was a small piece of coming home.
Jonathan was quiet that night, and remote all through dinner. He excused himself shortly after and didn’t emerge for two days.
When he did, he was all bloodshot eyes, shaking hands, a full swing of detox with moodiness to match. He told them he’d given up the drinking for good. Clark and Lois cleared out to their Metropolis flat for the rest of the week, giving him a wide berth.
Jonathan called Clark in the middle of the night. His voice a husk of its old strength, wrung out to the bone from his body purging itself of the poisons he’d long been feeding it.
“Tell me everything,” he said. “I want to know every detail of your life. Your mother’s life. I’m tired of living on the outskirts like this.”
It was Lois who found Clark asleep the next morning, lying on the couch with the phone still pressed to his ear. She picked it up and frowned at it and spoke into it, “Hello, who’s this?”
“I don’t have a single memory of Clark Luthor that’s good,” Jonathan said, quietly. “I don’t have any memory at all of this Clark who has the same last name as me. Yet somehow I feel like I’ve known him a long, long time, and for the most part it’s a good memory. It’s good.”
“He really missed you. I mean. You have no idea how much Clark missed the other you, Mister Kent. He looks at you and he still sees the man who raised him.”
There was a pregnant pause, then, “In the world I come from, you just became Oliver Queen’s widow. Looks like your taste in this world is better, if you’re with Clark.”
He hung up on her.
—
They came home the next day. Jonathan was up before dawn, standing by the kitchen sink, watching the sunrise while he drank generously from a glazed, bright yellow coffee mug. He toasted them when they came in, and the red rims of his eyes, and the dark bruises under them, didn’t matter. His smile did.
“Hope you have the day off, Clark. The cows won’t feed themselves.”
Lois thought Clark’s smile looked like sunrise. “Yes, sir.”
__
While they drank lemonade and watched the sunset, Jonathan asked Clark if he was sure about marrying Lois. Clark watched her walking from car to house, on the phone with Chloe about some maid-of-honor duty Chloe was currently fulfilling, and with a grin Clark drank deeply. “Never been surer of anything in my life, Dad.”
Then he caught himself, because it was the first time he’d really called Jonathan that since he’d decided to stay.
Jonathan was thoughtful, regarding him over the glass. “If Oliver Queen is going to be your best man, maybe it’s time I gave him a chance to prove he’s not the man he was in my world.”
__
Jonathan used the same aftershave in both worlds.
It lingered in the communal bathroom and Clark drank it in.
__
Godfrey brought the Kryptonite.
Clark should’ve expected it. Despite sleeplessness, and work, and a hundred other things he was finally, finally drawing close to Darkseid. And one night Lois was at Watchtower with Tess and Emil and Clark was poring over things at the farmhouse and that was when it happened. One second, in his chair; the next, flat on his back, blood erupting from his side in a fountain spray. Clark lashed and scrambled and cried out as the Kryptonite bullet plowed into bone and stopped, pulsing poison through his bloodstream.
Clark only caught a glimpse of Godfrey, a satisfied white flash of leering teeth outside the black lidless eye of the kitchen window, before Darkseid took him away in a flurry. Clark rolled on the floor, trying and failing to reach for his phone, his last desperate thought call Lois, call Lois, Lois, Lois —
And then hands were pulling him up, sitting him up against the table’s leg and Jonathan’s disheveled hair and dark eyes were inches from his. “Clark, look at me—Clark!” Jonathan steadied the side of Clark’s head. “I heard the shot, what happened?”
Clark’s feet skidded on the floor, trying to propel himself up, and the angry rancor of Earth-2 Jonathan seemed to melt away. “All right, hold still.” He tugged Clark’s shirt up to expose a mess of veins liming over with Kryptonite sludge. “Oh, Clark…”
“Get it out of me,” Clark rasped feebly. “Get it out.”
Jonathan looked at him, with all the terror of a man who’d had no one relying on him but himself for a very long time. He was frozen helpless, and Clark could feel himself dying, his life slipping away to the tips of his fingers with every traitorous beat of his sluggish heart.
And then Jonathan’s face set. “Stay here.”
Clark didn’t know, later, who called Lois and Emil and which one of them got the bullet out, but when he woke up the sunlight was strong through the window and he was asleep on the couch with his head on Lois’ lap. She was stroking the bangs from his forehead when he came around.
She thumped her fist on his shoulder. “Tess found Godfrey. Let’s just say those bullets are no longer in his possession.”
Clark smiled, tiredly. “At least some good came out of that.”
“I thought you were a goner for sure, Smallville. Lucky your not-actually-really-him father manned up and did some battlefield triage.”
Clark turned his head to look; in the cushy armchair in the corner, Jonathan was sound asleep, head tipped back and breathing open-mouthed. Clark couldn’t count the number of times he’d seen such a sight, growing up.
“You know, he may not be one-hundred-percent USDA certifiable Jonathan Kent, but something tells me he’s really made from the same stuff,” Lois commented. “The only person I’ve ever seen try this hard to fit into a world he didn’t belong was the man himself, when he was running for office. Same piss-and-vinegar attitude.”
“He saved my life,” Clark commented, drowsily. “If he hadn’t been here…”
“Don’t start.”
Clark didn’t start. “I think it’s time.”
When he levered himself off the couch, Jonathan woke with a snort, his head rolling up. “Hey, son. How’re you feeling?”
“Sore.” Clark’s hand guarded his side. “But, okay. I’m okay. Thanks to you.”
Jonathan flushed slightly. “First time I’ve helped someone in as long as I can remember. I can’t begin to thank you for everything you’ve given me, Clark.”
“Saving him from potentially lethal alien poisoning is probably a start,” Lois chipped in. “Clark, where are you going?”
He made long, determined strides toward the telephone. “There’s someone I need to call.”
—
Lois went to pick up Martha from the airport the next day, clueless as to what was happening aside from Clark’s enthusiasm. Clark stayed home, watching as Jonathan fidgeted in his coat, more nervous by far than Clark had ever seen him.
“She’ll know it’s not me,” he fretted. “And I know it’s not her. This….version of Martha, she’s not the woman I married.”
“That’s not true,” Clark protested. “I think your lives are pretty similar, up until the meteor shower, anyway. Trust me, though, she knows all about your world…she’ll have an open mind.” Gravel spat under tires outside the front door, and Clark got to his feet. “You ready, Dad?”
“Ready as I’ll ever be.”
They came around the back porch, shoes clomping on the steps, and Clark and Jonathan were standing in the living room looking out toward the kitchen when the door opened and Martha came in first, looking down ruefully as she kicked mud off her shoes.
“Clark, what’s this about? And when did you have time to till the whole—”
Martha’s suitcase hit the floor with a fwump, and Clark saw the disbelief that turned her eyes to half-moons. Over Martha’s shoulder, Lois shrugged expansively. Here it comes.
Martha’s mouth popped open. She said nothing.
“Clark Luthor sent me back to his world again,” Cark explained, rapidly. “Except this time, it wasn’t the Luthors I found—it was Dad. When Doctor Hamilton and Lois brought me back, I guess I pulled Dad through the same way I pulled Lionel.”
Martha took a single hesitant step forward. “Jonathan?”
Jonathan seemed at a loss for words, so he said, simply, “Hello, Martha.”
And that, like it had been permission, spurred Martha forward. She all but tackled Jonathan, knocking him back a few steps, and her hands stroked his hair with her arms around him. After a long, uncertain moment, Jonathan returned the embrace just as fiercely.
Some part of this, Clark thought, should have been a wonder to him. But he was looking at Lois then, and thinking about love that abided beyond the stretches of universe and time, and place, and reason. If Earth-2 Lois could know by looking at him that there was enough love between them to wipe away a Luthor’s legacy, then it wasn’t beyond reason to Clark that his parents could be destined for each other in the same way.
When Jonathan finally pulled away, it was only enough to take Martha’s face in his hands. “I know I’m not the man you married, I’m not half the man that raised Clark. But if you give me a chance, I promise, I will do everything in my power to make you happy. I’ll make you proud, sweetheart.”
Martha’s eyes were on the wedding ring on Jonathan’s finger. “In your world, we were still—?”
“Always.”
Lois joined them, and took Clark’s hand as Jonathan pulled Martha closer and tucked his chin over the top of her head. “It’s a long road from here, Clark.”
“It’s always been a long one.” He said. “But we’ll make it work.”
__
That night, for the first time in a very long time, Martha Kent did not sleep alone.