Gardens of Wayne Manor: Hothouse Flowers (19/37)
Title: Chapter Nineteen: Hothouse Flowers
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Martha Kent
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None needed
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2800Summary: While Bruce investigates Fries's possible ties to the Chechen mafia, Clark confronts his mother about his fears.
Broken and boarded-up windows gaped at Bruce Wayne as he hunched his shoulders against the cold and went deeper into the East Side of Gotham. He passed people in cardboard boxes, people huddled around a burning barrel who cast him sidelong looks.
Bruce went further into the area of Gotham controlled by the Chechen Mafia.
It wasn't the worst area in town--that was the crumbling remnants of the North End, where the police rarely ventured at all. But it wasn't an area he wanted to bring Clark to, so he was here alone.
Clark.
Bruce felt a frisson crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He'd studied the art of seduction in Europe, back when he still harbored the delusion that he was going to become some kind of suave international spy. He'd kissed a lot of men and women, but it had always been an art to be studied and practiced: a pleasurable art, to be sure, but a craft. Part of him had always remained untouched, watching the scene with a detached, wry curiosity, analyzing his next move.
Kissing Clark had been nothing like that.
He hadn't thought of strategy when he felt Clark's mouth open to him; he hadn't thought of technique when Clark had bitten his lip so gently and coaxingly. He hadn't thought of anything at all except the feel of Clark's mouth, the touch of his hands, the sound of his hoarse breathing...
Bruce caught himself before he walked into a lamp-post. Damn it, he was doing it again. This was hardly the time or place to think about kissing Clark Kent. It wasn't fair! He'd only done it to help Clark out with his date, there hadn't been any--
Well, no, that wasn't quite honest. But Clark had been so amusingly flustered and Bruce just couldn't help pushing it to see how rattled he could make his friend and--
No, that wasn't quite honest either.
He remembered the sound of his own voice, delirious and low: God, Clark. There hadn't been anything objective or amused or academic about how he had felt at that moment.
This time he did walk right into a fire hydrant, barking his shins. Stop it. Bruce shook his head violently. Clark was straight and Bruce didn't have the luxury of dwelling on such things. With a Herculean effort, he shoved all profane thoughts of his friend into a small mental box, to be examined later if necessary.
If absolutely necessary.
He was deep in Kadyrov's territory now, he knew. The buildings were in slightly better repair, but with an ill-defined sleek sense of defensiveness and danger about them. Two teens about his age were playing cards on a stoop with an air of nonchalance, but their eyes were flicking about the area with a meticulous caution that spoke of training. Lookouts. Their eyes rested on him and skittered away; they kept playing cards. “You lose, Patsy,” said one of the kids.
“It’s Patrick,” growled the taller lookout, with the tone of someone who’d said it many times. He was wearing sunglasses and his dark hair was slicked back; his torn and patched clothes hung on his wiry frame. He looked rather like a vicious whippet: high-strung and ready to show his teeth.
“I’m Tony,” said Bruce. Patrick and his partner ignored him. “I heard word on the street that a kid with some skills could find work around here, if he had the nerve for it.”
Now Patrick did look at him. His lip curled as he looked Bruce over from head to toe. “Go back to your mommy and daddy,” he sneered. Bruce set his teeth against reaction as he continued. “Runaway rich kids like you are trouble we don’t need around here. Oh, I know your type. Your parents wouldn’t buy you a Ferrari and so you ran away from home.” His voice dripped contempt. “If you need some money, sell those shoes," he said, pointing his chin at them. "They'll feed you for a month down here. Or better yet...” He lowered his sunglasses and leered at Bruce over the tops: “With that mouth, you could probably make yourself a few quick bucks over in Paradise Park...” He added a string of increasingly inventive and obscene possibilities and the other kid joined in, sniggering.
At some point, Bruce turned around and stalked off, stiff-legged, followed by jeers from the ragged kids. He was fuming--more at himself than at them, he had to admit after a block or two. He had thought his clothing was non-descript enough to escape notice, but he had clearly underestimated how well-constructed even his most casual clothes were. He had haunted some of the worst areas of Paris, London, and Rome in his travels, but he’d always gone back to a decent hotel room or dormitory at the end of the night, always known where his next meal was coming from--and it probably showed in the very way he walked and talked and held himself. He’d carefully constructed a worldly-wise, cosmopolitan “international jet-setting spy” persona for himself...and clearly that was exactly what he was going to have to get beyond now.
He kicked angrily at a chunk of ice on the sidewalk, watched it skitter. He didn’t even know what he was going to do with his life, but it always seemed like he was one step behind what he needed.
Gotham brooded around him in the misty dusk, waiting for him to figure it out, whatever the hell it was. She suffered and waited and someday, someday he would put all the pieces together, for her and all her people.
: : :
The greenhouse was hot as Clark helped his mother replant some pot-bound roses. There was heat somewhere behind Clark’s eyes, a buzzing, sweltering pain that made it hard to think and had kept him from sleeping well for the last two nights. When he tried, he felt Bruce’s mouth under his, and that made him feel hot and anguished in a very different way. He tried to focus on easing the roses out of their painted china pots, on loosening the tight masses of pale roots that were keeping them from growing.
“Are you okay, Clark?”
“I’m--” He wanted to say he was fine, but the greenhouse was swimming around him. He was tired, so tired of lying to his mother about what was happening. He gripped the trowel in shaking hands. “I don’t know, Ma, I feel so strange lately. My...my head hurts and I...hear strange things.”
Martha’s eyes flashed to him, almost alarmed for a moment before becoming cheerful again. “Well, dear, it must be growing pains. I mean, you’re...you’re...”
Her voice trailed off and Clark realized she was staring at his hands. He looked down to see he had crumpled the trowel blade like paper in his bare hands. The miasma of pain behind his eyes sharpened until he felt almost sick. “Ma...”
Martha Kent’s lower lip was trembling, but she smiled: a horrible, fake smile that made her look tense and agonized. “Let’s just get you home and to bed,” she said as cheerfully as if her son hadn’t mangled steel between his fingers. “I’m sure that headache will go away in no time--”
“--It won’t, Ma!” Clark heard pain and anger in his voice, staining his words scarlet. The sunlight through the greenhouse glass edged everything in hallucinogenic brightness, eerie auras dancing around the roses and lilac bushes. His mother wavered in a jagged welter of pain and guilt and fear. “Every night it’s worse, every day there’s something new and horrible, like I’m--I’m not even human, and--”
“--Don’t say such things!” Martha’s voice was sharp, edged with grief. “You mustn’t, you mustn’t say such things, Clark, you’re my son, our son, and there is nothing wrong with you, nothing!”
Her voice was shaking, and Clark could hear tears under it. Her anguish seemed to be the final spark that ignited behind his eyes, all the terror and shame of the last few months blazing into fiery torment that blotted out his vision in a red wave. He heard china shattering, heard his mother scream, started to turn to look at her--
And saw the red light scything across the room, saw it clip a rosebush neatly in two.
It was coming from his eyes.
He clapped his hands over his eyes, clamped his eyes shut, held the pain inside for an eternity of horror until he heard his mother’s voice nearby. “Clark,” she whispered in the looming silence. “What happened?”
She was safe. She was safe, at least. He wanted to cry, felt sobs shaking his body, but didn’t dare let tears fall. Death from his eyes. He’d almost killed his own mother. Death. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice shaking so hard he could barely understand himself. “But I’m strong. Too strong. I can see things miles away. Hear things no one can hear. I’m fast. Faster than anything. And I can--” Kill with my eyes. “I can--”
He flinched violently when he felt his mother’s arms go around him, hugging him from behind. “Don’t touch me,” he cried. “Don’t--it’s dangerous--I could--”
“You could never hurt me,” Martha Kent whispered. “Not my dear boy, my little star.” He felt her sigh stir his hair. “My little star,” she said again. She held him, rocking him gently until he stopped trembling. “Open your eyes,” she said. “You can’t go around with your eyes closed forever,” she went on when he shook his head violently. “I’m here, not in front of you. The worst that will happen is you’ll prune some of our roses.” Amazingly, unbelievably, there was a glint of humor in her voice.
“I can feel it,” he whispered. “It’s still there.”
“Then we wait until it’s gone,” Martha said, as calmly as if she were telling Clark that the monsters under his bed weren’t real. She rested her head on his back and rocked him some more. After a while she said, very softly. “We were driving home one night, Jonathan and I. Driving in the dark, on a long, deserted stretch of highway. And a star came out of the skies, a falling star, bright and beautiful. It landed in the field nearby, and the impact shook the ground. We went to check it.”
She was quiet a long time. Clark waited. The agony behind his eyes was receding into a dull throb.
“We could see that there was something in the crater, a little shining thing, maybe the size of a bed. A crystal sphere, covered with glowing spikes. Jonathan was so brave. So brave. He went to it and it opened before him and inside there was a little baby, the most beautiful little boy, sleeping. He woke up and saw us and laughed, and held his arms out to us to pick him up. Our gift from the stars.” She swallowed. “We took him home. We made him ours. Ours.”
“Ma...”
“You’re not human, Clark.” The words were everything Clark had ever been terrified to hear, but his mother’s voice held no fear, no rejection. “But you are my son, and you are the kindest, most gentle person I know.”
“You should have told me.” The quiet accusation caused a fresh jolt of pain behind his eyes; Clark squeezed them more tightly shut.
“Yes.” Martha’s voice was a mere breath behind him. “We should have. Jonathan always said we should, but I...couldn’t bear it. I wanted you to be all ours so much. I just kept hoping it would never matter. I was so afraid I’d lose you. And then--” Her voice broke and wavered, “--and then I lost Jonathan, and I just couldn’t...I couldn’t...” She was weeping against his back. “Forgive me, forgive me.”
The red tangle in his brain dissolved into concern; eyes still closed, he turned in her arms and held her as she cried. “I miss him too,” he murmured. “I wish he were here.”
“Promise me,” she whispered. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone else. I’ve never told another soul, it’s too dangerous.” Clark hesitated and she said ”Please,” in such an anguished tone that he nodded.
“I promise, Ma. Just you and me.”
Some of the tension went out of her. “It’s almost a relief,” she said eventually. “To finally tell you.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Are you feeling...better?” she asked. “You’re going to have to open your eyes sometime,” she added as he tensed in her arms.
“Okay,” he said, hearing the fear in his own voice. “I’ll try.” He cracked open his eyelids just a bit. There was no red glare, nothing melted or exploded in front of him. “I...I think it’s okay,” he said shakily.
Martha shifted to look at him; he flinched away from looking at her directly. She reached out and touched his eyelids gently. “Can you...do that whenever you want?”
”No,” he said vehemently, but it was rejection rather than negation. Like his ability to shift into a different speed, he could feel the place in his mind now, the nudge he would need to spew scarlet death from his eyes. Never. Never again.
Martha took a long, deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out again, straightening her shoulders as though relinquishing a long-endured burden. “Well,” she said briskly. “I’ll need your help cleaning up the broken flower pots.”
Clark helped sweep up shattered china and clipped rose branches. There were petals scattered on the floor like drops of blood; he shuddered and looked away for a moment. “The spaceship,” he said when they were mostly done, and Martha paused suddenly, a shard of china in her hand. She turned it over a few times: a small, broken thing. “What did you do with the spaceship I came in?”
“We hid it in the barn,” Martha said. “When we touched it, there were...images. Like a hologram. A man and woman, a city.” She rubbed her eyes with a dirt-smudged hand. “They looked sad. The man and woman did. We couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
A memory like a dream rose in Clark’s mind: their last night in Smallville, his mother leaving in the middle of the night, towing a tarp-covered trailer. Dirt and tears on her face when she came back. “You hid it before we came here.”
She nodded. “I buried it out in the fields.” Her grip tightened on the jagged fragment of china and Clark reached out and took it away from her fragile, human hands. She looked up at him. “I’ll show you where it is someday. We’ll find it together.”
“Thank you,” said Clark, looking down at the bit of china. “For everything.”
“I think...those people in the hologram looked like you. I think they were your mother and father.”
Clark shook his head and smiled at her. It was a little weak, but it was the first real smile he’d managed in days. “You’re my mother. And Pa was my father. Nothing can change that.”
She flung her arms around him again and they held each other for a long time in the brilliant, dazzling sunlight of the greenhouse.
A light tap on the door and Bruce’s voice calling out, “Anyone there?” made Martha turn away and go back to sweeping, rubbing at her eyes.
Bruce came around the corner, saw Clark and grinned; his expression reminded Clark of what Bruce’s mouth had felt like, what his tongue had felt like inside his mouth. He felt a heat that nothing to do with the hothouse and also was most certainly not behind his eyes stab through him, and he brushed dirt off his hands with intense concentration for a moment.
“We were just repotting some of the roses,” his mother said. There was both laughter and sadness in her voice. “They grow so fast, and I guess...you can’t keep them in the same pots forever. Not if you want to give them a chance to fulfill their potential.”
“Um, right,” said Bruce, looking from Martha to Clark and back with a slightly bemused expression. “Can I help? We’ve got a couple of hours before the lecture tonight.”
As the late-afternoon sunlight turned the greenhouse into a glass of liquid gold, the three of them repotted most of the roses. Clark watched Bruce gently ease the tangled roots from their pots, watched his mother put new soil around them in larger containers.
Room to grow.
( Chapter 20)
Pairing/Characters: Clark/Bruce, Martha Kent
Rating: PG-13
Warnings: None needed
Continuity: The Gardens of Wayne Manor is an AU series in which Clark Kent and Bruce Wayne's lives intertwine at an early age. Click here for the complete series and series notes.
Word Count: 2800Summary: While Bruce investigates Fries's possible ties to the Chechen mafia, Clark confronts his mother about his fears.
Broken and boarded-up windows gaped at Bruce Wayne as he hunched his shoulders against the cold and went deeper into the East Side of Gotham. He passed people in cardboard boxes, people huddled around a burning barrel who cast him sidelong looks.
Bruce went further into the area of Gotham controlled by the Chechen Mafia.
It wasn't the worst area in town--that was the crumbling remnants of the North End, where the police rarely ventured at all. But it wasn't an area he wanted to bring Clark to, so he was here alone.
Clark.
Bruce felt a frisson crawl up his spine that had nothing to do with the cold. He'd studied the art of seduction in Europe, back when he still harbored the delusion that he was going to become some kind of suave international spy. He'd kissed a lot of men and women, but it had always been an art to be studied and practiced: a pleasurable art, to be sure, but a craft. Part of him had always remained untouched, watching the scene with a detached, wry curiosity, analyzing his next move.
Kissing Clark had been nothing like that.
He hadn't thought of strategy when he felt Clark's mouth open to him; he hadn't thought of technique when Clark had bitten his lip so gently and coaxingly. He hadn't thought of anything at all except the feel of Clark's mouth, the touch of his hands, the sound of his hoarse breathing...
Bruce caught himself before he walked into a lamp-post. Damn it, he was doing it again. This was hardly the time or place to think about kissing Clark Kent. It wasn't fair! He'd only done it to help Clark out with his date, there hadn't been any--
Well, no, that wasn't quite honest. But Clark had been so amusingly flustered and Bruce just couldn't help pushing it to see how rattled he could make his friend and--
No, that wasn't quite honest either.
He remembered the sound of his own voice, delirious and low: God, Clark. There hadn't been anything objective or amused or academic about how he had felt at that moment.
This time he did walk right into a fire hydrant, barking his shins. Stop it. Bruce shook his head violently. Clark was straight and Bruce didn't have the luxury of dwelling on such things. With a Herculean effort, he shoved all profane thoughts of his friend into a small mental box, to be examined later if necessary.
If absolutely necessary.
He was deep in Kadyrov's territory now, he knew. The buildings were in slightly better repair, but with an ill-defined sleek sense of defensiveness and danger about them. Two teens about his age were playing cards on a stoop with an air of nonchalance, but their eyes were flicking about the area with a meticulous caution that spoke of training. Lookouts. Their eyes rested on him and skittered away; they kept playing cards. “You lose, Patsy,” said one of the kids.
“It’s Patrick,” growled the taller lookout, with the tone of someone who’d said it many times. He was wearing sunglasses and his dark hair was slicked back; his torn and patched clothes hung on his wiry frame. He looked rather like a vicious whippet: high-strung and ready to show his teeth.
“I’m Tony,” said Bruce. Patrick and his partner ignored him. “I heard word on the street that a kid with some skills could find work around here, if he had the nerve for it.”
Now Patrick did look at him. His lip curled as he looked Bruce over from head to toe. “Go back to your mommy and daddy,” he sneered. Bruce set his teeth against reaction as he continued. “Runaway rich kids like you are trouble we don’t need around here. Oh, I know your type. Your parents wouldn’t buy you a Ferrari and so you ran away from home.” His voice dripped contempt. “If you need some money, sell those shoes," he said, pointing his chin at them. "They'll feed you for a month down here. Or better yet...” He lowered his sunglasses and leered at Bruce over the tops: “With that mouth, you could probably make yourself a few quick bucks over in Paradise Park...” He added a string of increasingly inventive and obscene possibilities and the other kid joined in, sniggering.
At some point, Bruce turned around and stalked off, stiff-legged, followed by jeers from the ragged kids. He was fuming--more at himself than at them, he had to admit after a block or two. He had thought his clothing was non-descript enough to escape notice, but he had clearly underestimated how well-constructed even his most casual clothes were. He had haunted some of the worst areas of Paris, London, and Rome in his travels, but he’d always gone back to a decent hotel room or dormitory at the end of the night, always known where his next meal was coming from--and it probably showed in the very way he walked and talked and held himself. He’d carefully constructed a worldly-wise, cosmopolitan “international jet-setting spy” persona for himself...and clearly that was exactly what he was going to have to get beyond now.
He kicked angrily at a chunk of ice on the sidewalk, watched it skitter. He didn’t even know what he was going to do with his life, but it always seemed like he was one step behind what he needed.
Gotham brooded around him in the misty dusk, waiting for him to figure it out, whatever the hell it was. She suffered and waited and someday, someday he would put all the pieces together, for her and all her people.
: : :
The greenhouse was hot as Clark helped his mother replant some pot-bound roses. There was heat somewhere behind Clark’s eyes, a buzzing, sweltering pain that made it hard to think and had kept him from sleeping well for the last two nights. When he tried, he felt Bruce’s mouth under his, and that made him feel hot and anguished in a very different way. He tried to focus on easing the roses out of their painted china pots, on loosening the tight masses of pale roots that were keeping them from growing.
“Are you okay, Clark?”
“I’m--” He wanted to say he was fine, but the greenhouse was swimming around him. He was tired, so tired of lying to his mother about what was happening. He gripped the trowel in shaking hands. “I don’t know, Ma, I feel so strange lately. My...my head hurts and I...hear strange things.”
Martha’s eyes flashed to him, almost alarmed for a moment before becoming cheerful again. “Well, dear, it must be growing pains. I mean, you’re...you’re...”
Her voice trailed off and Clark realized she was staring at his hands. He looked down to see he had crumpled the trowel blade like paper in his bare hands. The miasma of pain behind his eyes sharpened until he felt almost sick. “Ma...”
Martha Kent’s lower lip was trembling, but she smiled: a horrible, fake smile that made her look tense and agonized. “Let’s just get you home and to bed,” she said as cheerfully as if her son hadn’t mangled steel between his fingers. “I’m sure that headache will go away in no time--”
“--It won’t, Ma!” Clark heard pain and anger in his voice, staining his words scarlet. The sunlight through the greenhouse glass edged everything in hallucinogenic brightness, eerie auras dancing around the roses and lilac bushes. His mother wavered in a jagged welter of pain and guilt and fear. “Every night it’s worse, every day there’s something new and horrible, like I’m--I’m not even human, and--”
“--Don’t say such things!” Martha’s voice was sharp, edged with grief. “You mustn’t, you mustn’t say such things, Clark, you’re my son, our son, and there is nothing wrong with you, nothing!”
Her voice was shaking, and Clark could hear tears under it. Her anguish seemed to be the final spark that ignited behind his eyes, all the terror and shame of the last few months blazing into fiery torment that blotted out his vision in a red wave. He heard china shattering, heard his mother scream, started to turn to look at her--
And saw the red light scything across the room, saw it clip a rosebush neatly in two.
It was coming from his eyes.
He clapped his hands over his eyes, clamped his eyes shut, held the pain inside for an eternity of horror until he heard his mother’s voice nearby. “Clark,” she whispered in the looming silence. “What happened?”
She was safe. She was safe, at least. He wanted to cry, felt sobs shaking his body, but didn’t dare let tears fall. Death from his eyes. He’d almost killed his own mother. Death. “I don’t know,” he said, his voice shaking so hard he could barely understand himself. “But I’m strong. Too strong. I can see things miles away. Hear things no one can hear. I’m fast. Faster than anything. And I can--” Kill with my eyes. “I can--”
He flinched violently when he felt his mother’s arms go around him, hugging him from behind. “Don’t touch me,” he cried. “Don’t--it’s dangerous--I could--”
“You could never hurt me,” Martha Kent whispered. “Not my dear boy, my little star.” He felt her sigh stir his hair. “My little star,” she said again. She held him, rocking him gently until he stopped trembling. “Open your eyes,” she said. “You can’t go around with your eyes closed forever,” she went on when he shook his head violently. “I’m here, not in front of you. The worst that will happen is you’ll prune some of our roses.” Amazingly, unbelievably, there was a glint of humor in her voice.
“I can feel it,” he whispered. “It’s still there.”
“Then we wait until it’s gone,” Martha said, as calmly as if she were telling Clark that the monsters under his bed weren’t real. She rested her head on his back and rocked him some more. After a while she said, very softly. “We were driving home one night, Jonathan and I. Driving in the dark, on a long, deserted stretch of highway. And a star came out of the skies, a falling star, bright and beautiful. It landed in the field nearby, and the impact shook the ground. We went to check it.”
She was quiet a long time. Clark waited. The agony behind his eyes was receding into a dull throb.
“We could see that there was something in the crater, a little shining thing, maybe the size of a bed. A crystal sphere, covered with glowing spikes. Jonathan was so brave. So brave. He went to it and it opened before him and inside there was a little baby, the most beautiful little boy, sleeping. He woke up and saw us and laughed, and held his arms out to us to pick him up. Our gift from the stars.” She swallowed. “We took him home. We made him ours. Ours.”
“Ma...”
“You’re not human, Clark.” The words were everything Clark had ever been terrified to hear, but his mother’s voice held no fear, no rejection. “But you are my son, and you are the kindest, most gentle person I know.”
“You should have told me.” The quiet accusation caused a fresh jolt of pain behind his eyes; Clark squeezed them more tightly shut.
“Yes.” Martha’s voice was a mere breath behind him. “We should have. Jonathan always said we should, but I...couldn’t bear it. I wanted you to be all ours so much. I just kept hoping it would never matter. I was so afraid I’d lose you. And then--” Her voice broke and wavered, “--and then I lost Jonathan, and I just couldn’t...I couldn’t...” She was weeping against his back. “Forgive me, forgive me.”
The red tangle in his brain dissolved into concern; eyes still closed, he turned in her arms and held her as she cried. “I miss him too,” he murmured. “I wish he were here.”
“Promise me,” she whispered. “Promise me you won’t tell anyone else. I’ve never told another soul, it’s too dangerous.” Clark hesitated and she said ”Please,” in such an anguished tone that he nodded.
“I promise, Ma. Just you and me.”
Some of the tension went out of her. “It’s almost a relief,” she said eventually. “To finally tell you.” She took a deep breath and let it out. “Are you feeling...better?” she asked. “You’re going to have to open your eyes sometime,” she added as he tensed in her arms.
“Okay,” he said, hearing the fear in his own voice. “I’ll try.” He cracked open his eyelids just a bit. There was no red glare, nothing melted or exploded in front of him. “I...I think it’s okay,” he said shakily.
Martha shifted to look at him; he flinched away from looking at her directly. She reached out and touched his eyelids gently. “Can you...do that whenever you want?”
”No,” he said vehemently, but it was rejection rather than negation. Like his ability to shift into a different speed, he could feel the place in his mind now, the nudge he would need to spew scarlet death from his eyes. Never. Never again.
Martha took a long, deep breath, held it for a moment, then let it out again, straightening her shoulders as though relinquishing a long-endured burden. “Well,” she said briskly. “I’ll need your help cleaning up the broken flower pots.”
Clark helped sweep up shattered china and clipped rose branches. There were petals scattered on the floor like drops of blood; he shuddered and looked away for a moment. “The spaceship,” he said when they were mostly done, and Martha paused suddenly, a shard of china in her hand. She turned it over a few times: a small, broken thing. “What did you do with the spaceship I came in?”
“We hid it in the barn,” Martha said. “When we touched it, there were...images. Like a hologram. A man and woman, a city.” She rubbed her eyes with a dirt-smudged hand. “They looked sad. The man and woman did. We couldn’t understand what they were saying.”
A memory like a dream rose in Clark’s mind: their last night in Smallville, his mother leaving in the middle of the night, towing a tarp-covered trailer. Dirt and tears on her face when she came back. “You hid it before we came here.”
She nodded. “I buried it out in the fields.” Her grip tightened on the jagged fragment of china and Clark reached out and took it away from her fragile, human hands. She looked up at him. “I’ll show you where it is someday. We’ll find it together.”
“Thank you,” said Clark, looking down at the bit of china. “For everything.”
“I think...those people in the hologram looked like you. I think they were your mother and father.”
Clark shook his head and smiled at her. It was a little weak, but it was the first real smile he’d managed in days. “You’re my mother. And Pa was my father. Nothing can change that.”
She flung her arms around him again and they held each other for a long time in the brilliant, dazzling sunlight of the greenhouse.
A light tap on the door and Bruce’s voice calling out, “Anyone there?” made Martha turn away and go back to sweeping, rubbing at her eyes.
Bruce came around the corner, saw Clark and grinned; his expression reminded Clark of what Bruce’s mouth had felt like, what his tongue had felt like inside his mouth. He felt a heat that nothing to do with the hothouse and also was most certainly not behind his eyes stab through him, and he brushed dirt off his hands with intense concentration for a moment.
“We were just repotting some of the roses,” his mother said. There was both laughter and sadness in her voice. “They grow so fast, and I guess...you can’t keep them in the same pots forever. Not if you want to give them a chance to fulfill their potential.”
“Um, right,” said Bruce, looking from Martha to Clark and back with a slightly bemused expression. “Can I help? We’ve got a couple of hours before the lecture tonight.”
As the late-afternoon sunlight turned the greenhouse into a glass of liquid gold, the three of them repotted most of the roses. Clark watched Bruce gently ease the tangled roots from their pots, watched his mother put new soil around them in larger containers.
Room to grow.
( Chapter 20)