peace comes dropping slow

Every year, Martha makes sure to return to the farm for Christmas, no matter how many proposed bills she still needs to review or how many people she still needs to meet.

She likes the quiet familiarity of driving up that same dirt path. She feels like she’s returning to a more innocent time, no matter how fleeting that fleeting that feeling may be. She likes spending time with Clark, amazed at how much older he seems, how much more mature he’s become. She likes being home.

Clark picks her up from the Metropolis airport, a week before the Christmas. She spots hims easily, even amongst the press of people who are traveling home for the holidays. He stands out, her son, and she loves that about him even as it terrifies her at the same time.

“Mom!” he says, rushing over to her so he can pull her into a hug. He’s wearing his usual red jacket over a blue t-shirt, and it’s far too little for this sort of weather. Martha refuses to think like that too much, because Clark’s careful. They’ve taught him to be.

After they pull apart, Clark takes her bags and smiles at her brightly. He looks a little tired at the corners of his eyes, though she could write that off as the lack of sun during the winter. “You’ve been remembering to sleep properly, right?” she asks, just to make sure.

“Yes, Mom,” he says, with a slight roll of his eyes, like the insolent teenager he never really was. “I’ve also been eating right and taking care of the farm like I should. Though, um.” He stops short of finishing the sentence.

“Yes?” she says.

Clark winces. “The barn got a little destroyed, but it’s okay, I’ve been fixing it.”

It could have been nothing more than a bad storm, but this was Smallville, after all. “That’s good,” she says. “I hope no one got hurt.”

Clark winces again. “There were a few injuries, but it all worked out okay in the end.” He looks as relieved about that as she feels.

“Good,” she says, squeezing one of his hands in her own. “I’m glad it did.”

The drive back to Smallville is dark, with only a few passing motorists, their headlights shining bright for a moment before they pass by. Clark takes his time to fill her in on the things that have happened that he can’t say over the phone. She can hear the places where he carefully edits things out, but she doesn’t push.

“I invited Chloe and Jimmy over for the holidays,” he says as they pass the ‘Welcome to Smallville’ sign. “And Lois sort of invited herself over, too.”

That’s not the entire truth, either, but Martha’s just glad it won’t be only the two of them this year. “No Lana or Oliver?” she asks.

“They’re out of town,” Clark says, and she nods in acceptance.

It snowed the night before, and the farm is covered in a thin white blanket. The snow on the ground usually reminds her too much of Jonathan’s funeral, but the ache is worth it, a reminder that she has loved someone that much for that long, and that she doesn’t regret a single moment of it. She kissed him for the first time on a night like this, clear and cold. They held hands as they walked through Grant Park, and under a street lamp, he put a hand under her chin and kissed her, gently.

The lights in the house are on, and she can practically feel the warmth as she steps out of the truck. The front door swings open. Three figures spill out.

“Hey, Mrs. Kent!” one shouts, the one Martha is pretty sure is Lois.

“Hello, everyone,” Martha says back, laughing, because she’s finally home.

She greets each one with a hug, because she’s missed them, missed Smallville, even with its dangers and horrors.

Chloe looks happier than Martha’s ever seen her; married life has been good for her. Jimmy is a warm presence, bright and eager. Lois, who was always drifting from place to place, seems to have found her center. Martha’s never felt prouder or older. She’s known them for so long, and she’s seen what they’ve become.

Chloe’s cooked dinner (though “Jimmy and Lois helped!” she insists). Martha just takes the time to sit back and enjoy their company. They listen with rapt attention as she tells stories of what it’s like on the Senate floor, and she makes sure to listen to Lois’ adventures in journalism, Clark’s corrections to Lois’ stories, Chloe’s newfound passion for working at the Isis Foundation.

Clark’s quieter than Martha remembers. He was never the most talkative person in the world, but he keeps himself tucked away now, only speaking up sporadically. She catches him watching Lois a few times, his expression shuttered. She doesn’t catch Lois watching him back.

After dinner, they all gather together in front of the television to watch a movie, but Martha begs off. She’s worn out, tired. She wants to sleep.

Clark still sleeps in his old room, she knows, and the master bedroom is reserved for her when she’s in town. The bed still feels too big, even though she should be used to it by now.

She forgets, more frequently than she’d like to admit, that the farm is much quieter than her apartment in Alexandria. When Martha wakes up the next morning, she hears nothing, not even the sound of passing cars. She walks over to the window and rests her hands on the sill, admiring the pristine white that stretches out in front of her, untouched. She used to wake up to this every morning.

In the corner of her vision, she thinks she can see Clark, in a heavy blue jacket, being chased by Chloe and Jimmy, both of them with snowballs in each hand. It almost looks like they might have the upper hand, right up until the point when Lois ambushes them herself, firing off two quick shots before they come after her, too. They must be laughing, she thinks, but they’re too far away to hear.

She decides to do Clark’s laundry, because she knows he tends to put off doing it until the last moment, and sure enough there’s a pile of clothing stacked up in his hamper. She likes the simplicity of the task, a chance to clear her mind and focus on one thing. She likes remembering that she’s a mother as well as a Senator.

As she’s folding Clark’s shirts, she hears someone rummaging around in the kitchen, but when she finally gets a chance to see who it is, they’re gone, the front door slamming shut behind them. Her chest tightens, because this is still Smallville, and even the most innocent things are not what they appear to be.

She approaches the door carefully. When she twists the handle, she holds her breath, preparing for anything.

But it’s just Lois, sitting on the porch and holding a mug between her yellow and blue striped mittens.

“I heard a noise from the kitchen,” Martha says, as she breathes a sigh of relief. “I thought it might be…”

“Nope. Just me,” Lois says, and her expression says she understands. She glances down at her cup, watching the steam rise from it. “Hot cocoa,” Lois confesses. “Clark’s hidden all the coffee because he says I drink too much of it.”

There’s a warmth to her voice that Martha’s never quite heard her direct toward Clark before, a softness in her expression. And Clark would never be such an ungracious host unless he really was concerned about her health. She raised him better than that. He hadn’t mentioned Lois much when he was driving her home, and Martha wonders where Lois fits in those empty spaces, the things he left unsaid.

Martha pulls her coat tight around her shoulder, sits down next to Lois, and says, “It’s been so long since we’ve had a chance to talk. Tell me how you’ve been.”

Lois takes a sip from her mug and talks about The Daily Planet, how much she loves it there, how much it feels like her calling, how glad she is to have finally found it. She glows as she talks, a brightness to her cheeks and her eyes, and Martha’s so happy for her, so fiercely proud of her.

“Is Clark doing all right?” Martha asks, finally, because she knows Clark isn’t good at being completely up front about that, especially not to her.

“He’s doing pretty well at the Planet,” Lois says, “but there was that whole thing with Chloe getting kidnapped on her wedding day and Lana coming back, and also the five billion weird things we’ve been getting into. But he’s been Clark, you know.” She looks down at her cocoa, a grin plastered to her face, like she’s hiding something, like she can’t bear to let Martha see it.

“Yes,” Martha says, thinking about the boy she’s raised for so long. “I do.”

The next day, she finds Clark in the barn, slowly rebuilding his loft. Slowly for him, at any rate. Chloe and Jimmy are nowhere in sight, and Lois tends to sleep late, so it’s just the two of them, almost like old times.

“It’s looking good,” she says, placing a hand on one of the support beams. “It’ll be like new in no time.”

Clark frowns a bit as he nails another beam into place. “I keep thinking that maybe I should try something different with it, but I don’t know what.”

“Well, as long as you’re not putting a pool up there, you should be fine.” Martha can’t help but see Clark and remember what it was like, finding that little boy out in that field, how small he was, how vulnerable he seemed.

Clark laughs. “I’ll keep that in mind.”

“Lois mentioned that Lana came back,” she says. He’d told her everything about Chloe the other night, about how she became infected by Brainiac, about how he decided to take all her memories of his secret, about the monster that took her away, but he hadn’t mentioned Lana at all.

Clark shuts down completely after she says that. “I didn’t tell you about that because it wasn’t important,” he says, turning away. “She came back. We found Chloe. She left again. That’s it.”

Martha pulls him into a hug, and he lets her. “You’re allowed to care about her, Clark. You may not have worked out, but that doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to still have feelings about her.”

“I didn’t love her anymore,” he says, miserably, into her hair, “and I never thought that would happen.”

She just holds him until his breathing evens out again. Then he begins to fill in some of the blank spaces, like how it felt to lose Chloe, like what it was like to start working at The Daily Planet, like how the farm is too quiet these days. He finally tells her about all the other things that have been bothering him. He barely mentions Lois at all.

“Jor-El helped me, in the end,” Clark says. “And I called him ‘Father’ before I let Brainiac take him.” Martha’s always hated Jor-El just a little for all the things he’d done to Clark, but Clark’s pain is far more important to her. She rubs his back as he talks, the way she used to when he was five and just had a nightmare. “I keep losing the people I love,” he says. “I miss Dad so much.”

Martha thinks of her bed in Alexandria, the one that only fits one person. “So do I,” she says. “So do I.”

That afternoon, Chloe and Jimmy arrive with a tree, and the four of them spend the rest of the night decorating it. Martha doesn’t bother doing any of the work, content to simply sit back and watch them. Over the years, the Kents had managed to accumulate quite a few boxes of Christmas decorations, and it was always a bit of a struggle to figure out which ones they wanted to use.

Clark starts a fire in the fireplace as the others rummage through the boxes, pulling out the decorations of years gone by.

“This is actually kind of adorable, Smallville,” Lois says, as she pulls out the flat, clay ornament of a Brontosaurus. The front is painted gray, with a splotch of black for the eye. On the back, the words, ‘Clark, age 6’ are written in Martha’s careful handwriting. Martha remembers the day Clark handed it to her, his eyes big and hopeful. “I didn’t know you had a thing for dinosaurs,” Lois continues. “I would have thought it was all about corn and cows for you.”

“I have hidden depths,” Clark deadpans, but the corner of his lips twitches, like he can’t quite stop the smile from forming.

They all laugh, together, and then Chloe starts up with an, “There was this one time, in middle school, when I was trying to investigate the school principal, and Clark was helping me out--”

Martha drinks her hot cocoa and watches as they reminisce together. She thinks of years gone by, all that time she’s spent watching Clark and Chloe and Lois grow up, grow into themselves, and she smiles.

The days pass one by one, unhurried. Martha likes the pace of life on the farm, the way each thing happens one after the other. There’s no rush, no need to multi-task. Clark insists on doing most of the work, but she lets herself take care of him in small ways. She helps him clean the dishes every night, chats with Lois and Chloe as he fixes the barn and does his chores, does his laundry when he forgets. She likes doing these little things.

She lets herself enjoy each moment as it comes.

On Christmas Eve, Jimmy’s mistletoe hanging over the front door manages to catch Lois and Clark by surprise as they come back from a grocery trip.

“C’mon, CK,” Jimmy says from the couch in the living room, a broad grin on his face. “There’re rules about this sort of thing.”

Martha watches as the two of them look at each other awkwardly, neither willing to make the first move, before Lois sighs and stands on her tip-toes, giving Clark a quick peck on the lips. Then she turns and heads into the kitchen with her grocery bags without another word.

Clark watches her leave, and the expression on his face almost looks like regret.

Dawn on Christmas morning wakes Martha, the sun rising just above the trees. She dresses herself slowly. There’s no rush, especially not today. Clark always liked to barge into their room on Christmas mornings, shaking Jonathan awake and dragging them both towards the tree so that they could open their presents. He stopped doing that around the time he turned twelve, when he started considering himself too old for that sort of thing.

As she walks down the stairs, she overhears the tail end of an argument happening in the living room.

“It was nothing, okay? Just a wedding-induced lapse of sanity. I can promise that there won’t be a repeat performance.” That’s Lois, her voice high and tight, desperate to sound normal.

“It wasn’t nothing, Lois. At least, not for me,” Clark says. Martha has only ever heard Clark sound like that when he’s talking about Lana, his emotions completely exposed.

Martha catches a glimpse of them, Lois with her head turned away and Clark holding one of her hands in his. He’s rubbing his thumb over her knuckles, and his eyes are intent on her face.

It’s far too personal for Martha to interfere, so she climbs back up the stairs as softly as possible and curls up in bed, wrapping the covers over her body to keep warm.

When she wakes up again, the sky is a clear, bright blue, and a strange truce has formed between Lois and Clark. They don’t quite meet each other’s eyes, but their banter is still easy and familiar, affectionate and teasing. Whatever happened, they’re working through it. Martha almost wants to push a bit on the issue, but Clark has so deliberately kept her out of it. He’s a grown man, now, and she has to trust him to handle things. Even when she knows he’s not particularly good at that.

Chloe and Jimmy are lost in each other, the way newlyweds frequently are, and Martha feels every year of her age. Was she ever really that young?

The five of them gather around the tree and the presents that are stacked up underneath it. The lights wrapped around the tree are on, casting the room in a soft yellow glow. They open the presents one at a time, the sound of laughter and cheering filling the room as each one is opened. Lois even makes sure to punch Clark in the arm when he presents her with a tin of tea leaves from Chinatown (“Something to ween you off your coffee, Lane,” he says). Chloe throws her arms around Jimmy’s neck and plants a kiss on his lips after she unwraps her gift, a simple gold necklace.

Martha gets a book of fun Senate facts from Chloe (“A chance to learn about that fine institution you belong to.”), a gift certificate to the Talon from Jimmy (“Just in case you ever get nostalgic.”), an iPod Nano from Lois (“So you can space out whenever those meetings get too boring.”), and a digital photograph frame already filled with family pictures from Clark (“Chloe did most of the work. I just picked out which pictures to use.”). She holds the frame in her hands, watching as it flips from one picture to the next, and thinks about putting it on the desk in her office. She can look at it when she’s feeling homesick.

After all the presents have been opened, Martha shoos everyone else out of the house so she can make dinner, something she insisted she take care of herself, even though Clark offered to do it instead. They have another snowball fight outside. She can see them from kitchen window, running through the snow like the world hasn’t touched them. She knows how deeply untrue that illusion is, and it makes her all the more glad that they can have this, these moments when the weight of the world isn’t on them.

During dinner, Chloe calls a toast. “To friends and family,” she says, raising her glass in the air.

“To friends and family,” Clark repeats, a broad smile on his face.

Martha looks once more around the table, at the people who are with her right here right now, and thinks of Jonathan, of Lana, of Oliver, of Lionel even. “And to all those who couldn’t be here tonight,” she adds. She feels their absence keenly.

“Them too,” Lois says and takes a drink. They all follow her lead.

The mood lightens after that, as they start digging into the plates of food Martha has prepared. The conversation circles to office gossip at the Planet, something Martha can’t quite follow. But it doesn’t matter. She feels warm here, surrounded by these people she loves so much.

She doesn’t want to leave, but she knows that she will. They don’t need her anymore, not really, and that alone is enough to convince her to go.

A few days later, Clark drives her to the airport.

“I wish you could stay until New Year’s,” Clark says to her, his eyes focused on the road in front of him.

Martha sighs. “I would love to, honey, but I really do need to make an appearance at Senator Thompson’s New Year’s Eve Gala. You know that.” Politics are so draining, but she knows how to navigate her way through the social niceties required. She sometimes wishes she weren’t so good at it.

Clark frowns, and a silence settles between them again. Martha takes the time to study her son’s face. He will always be that chubby little baby boy she rescued from a cornfield in her eyes, but he has grown into a fine young man. His father would be so proud.

At the entrance to the airport, he helps her pull her bags out of the car, always the dutiful son she has raised, and she knows she will miss him while she’s gone, a constant ache while she’s in Washington.

“I hope things work out between you and Lois,” Martha finally says, filling in that one last empty space. She won’t pry -- she knows better than to do that -- but she wants him to know that she does care.

Clark tenses, his shoulders going stiff. “Lois and I,” he says,“we’re… we’re complicated.”

He’s making things more difficult for himself, she can tell. He’s letting his emotions tie him up in knots. “It might be simpler than you think,” she says, giving his arm a squeeze.

Clark says, “I hope you’re right, Mom.”

She pulls him into a hug. “I just want you to be happy,” she tells him after she steps back. She’s his mother, of course she means it from the bottom of her heart.

“I think I will be, Mom,” he says, and the look in his eyes says that he’s telling the truth. She just has to trust him to figure things out on his own time, in his own way.

“I’ll call you when I land in Washington,” Martha says. She makes sure to give him one last peck on his cheek before she picks up her things and heads through the automatic doors, leaving him and Kansas behind.

FIN.