Epilogue

Lois Lane looked over at the tall dark-haired man sitting across from her in the hotel coffee shop. He hadn't aged much in the past twenty years since his wedding. He was fifty-seven and looked closer to forty, except for the gray at his temples. She suspected that was combed in to keep his two identities separate. Superman wasn't gray. Clark Kent was. Lois knew she hadn't fared quite so well. There was more than a little gray in her hair, but she figured she'd earned every bit of it.

"I'm sorry I couldn't make Esther's funeral," she told him, taking a sip of her coffee. They hadn't simply sat down and talked in – how many years? Much too long. They'd hardly said more than two words to one another since Jason's high school graduation, and that was ten years ago. Tonight, after their son's wedding rehearsal dinner seemed as good a time as any to catch up. "It must have been awful for you, not being able..."

He shook his head, hair falling over his forehead. He still kept his hair unfashionably long, bangs hanging over his glasses. "She... it was her choice. A quick passing due to an accident, or a slow painful one from inoperable cancer. She died instantly. It was no one's fault. Jason and Amanda offered to delay the wedding but she wouldn't have wanted that."

"How are the rest of the kids handling it?"

"Well, you've talked to Jason, I'm sure. Matthew is gifted the same way his mother was. He knows she'll be back. Laura and Jon take more after me, but they're doing okay. They don't see her quite the same way Matt and I do, but they know she's around, watching, smiling." He smiled at her gently. "Death is not the end, only another door."

"Do you really believe that?" Lois asked.

He nodded. "I know that's what she believed. I've no reason to doubt her," he said quietly.

"Will your in-laws be at the wedding?" she asked.

"Maybe," he told her. "The general and I don't see eye to eye on a lot of things, and you know he wasn't well pleased when Esther and I took Jason to raise. He was definitely not happy when he discovered that just because I married his daughter, it didn't give him some hold over me. I think he was thinking that just because I don't approve of violence, that I was a pushover."

"More the fool him. He obviously never read your Nobel essay," Lois commented. "You were never a pushover."

"Except for you…" He smiled again, but there was a wistful sadness in it. "How's Richard doing?"

She gave him a crooked smile at the change of topic. "His new trophy wife is keeping him hopping. I could have told him that, but he was taking his late mid-life crisis so seriously. New car, new job, new wife. Sam isn't speaking to him at the moment. She thinks he made an incredibly stupid mistake leaving us for a bimbo only a few years older than she is."

"Hmm… self-expression is not one of Samantha White's problems," Clark said with a laugh. "How old is she now?"

"Nineteen and a half going on forty," Lois told him. "But you know that. She's interning at the Planet this summer."

He chuckled. "I'm trying not to interfere. Wouldn't look right," Clark admitted. "But she does take after you. Thank God for spell check."

She peered into his face. He still looked too young to be managing editor of the Daily Planet. He'd accepted that position five years earlier, after Perry White had died of a heart attack in the middle of the bullpen. She knew that was the only reason he'd returned to Metropolis, to take the reins of the Daily Planet after spending two years as editor of the Chicago Star. He was now the last of the old guard, the last of those who rose to management after starting in print-on-paper. They were both dinosaurs.

"What are you going to do when you can't hide that fact that you're not aging as fast as you should be?"

"Oh, I figure in a few years, ten at the outside, Clark Kent will have a fatal accident, plane crash in the deep ocean, I think. And I'll relocate somewhere, maybe Canada. I'm already starting to outlive my peers."

"How lonely for you," she said, meaning it.

"Better than the alternative, I guess," he said. "How's L.A. treating you?"

"Not bad," she admitted. "The Times isn't the Planet, of course."

"Of course," he repeated with a gentle smile. "There's always room at the Planet for you, if you want to come back," he said.

"You'd do that for a washed up old bitch?" she asked.

"I would do that for Lois Lane, the best of the best," he told her. "Even if she is a bitch."

"I think that was always my problem. I was so wrapped up in being the best, being a woman in a man's field, that being a bitch just came too easily," she said. She laid a small hand on his larger one. "Clark, I want you to know how sorry I am about everything that happened back then."

"I think we both made more than our share of mistakes back then," he said.

"But have we learned anything?"

"I hope so," he said, sipping his own coffee. He still fixed it the way she remembered, three sugars, two creams. "It would be very boring to have to keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again." He gave her a solemn look. "You know, even when you hated me openly, I couldn't hate you back. I just couldn't."

"You took Jason away from me," she reminded him.

"I did what I had to, for his sake," he told her. "You know that. And it's worked out. He's a good man, and it's nice to have a little help at the other job."

There was a long silence as the waitress came by and refilled their coffees. "Clark, it's taken me a long time to figure out what happened, to come to terms with what I did to you," she said. "I think the part of the problem was, I did love you, but I couldn't have you. I wanted it all and couldn't have any of it. I was furious. At me, you, the universe."

"You did love me? Past tense?"

"I don't think I ever stopped. I simply gave up trying for the fairy tale ending," she said softly. "I thought you didn't want me. At the time, I thought that if you wouldn't fight for me, wouldn't fight with me, you couldn't possibly love me. And then Richard was there for me, and you had Esther."

"And now?"

She gave him a cheeky grin. "They say there's only one way to console a widow. I wonder if that holds true for a widower?"

"My dear Ms. Lane," he grinned back at her. "Are propositioning me? The woman arrogant enough to tell Superman to bugger off?"

"We're both free agents now. Clark Kent's not a bad looking fellow. And he has a better track record for sticking around than Superman has."

"But what will the children say?" His tone was facetious.

"Well, the eldest thinks it's about time his parents got their heads screwed on straight," Jason Samuel Kent announced, walking up to them. "Go get a room. Just make sure you're back at the church in time for my wedding ceremony, okay?"