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the things the heart keeps - clark kent

request clark kent x forget-me-not!reader content clark kent x forget-me-not! reader, gn!reader, meta!reader, reader likes oranges in this sorry, suicidal ideation, passive death wish, reckless self-endangerment, repeated near-death situations, depression-coded thoughts, severe loneliness, social isolation, emotional neglect, memory loss, magical/psychic curse mechanics, panic/distress, crying/breakdowns, mentions of childhood abandonmeng, hospitals/paramedics, fire, explosions, collapsing buildings, heights, non-graphic injury, angst-heavy, emotional themes, hurt/comfort, heartbeat recognition

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Metropolis forgot you in pieces. Not all at once. That might have been kinder. A clean vanishing. A magician’s trick. A curtain dropping. Something with drama enough to feel like fate.

Instead, it happened in the smallest, cruellest ways. A cashier smiled at you while handing over your receipt, turned to tuck a bill into the register, then looked back with the bland politeness reserved for strangers who had stepped too close. A woman on the bus asked if the seat beside you was taken, listened to your answer, looked down at her phone, then startled when she glanced up and found you still there. A doctor once held your chart in one hand and your wrist in the other. You watched her eyes slip toward the blood pressure monitor for half a second. When she looked back, her mouth tightened with alarm.

“Who are you?” she asked. You had still been young enough then to cry.

You were not young enough anymore. That was what the world did to a person, eventually. It carved away the soft things first. Hope. Trust. The instinct to introduce yourself. The reflex to say, Remember me. After a while, you learned not to beg a locked door to become a home.

Your power had no name that you knew of. No origin story either. You had not fallen into a glowing pit or been struck by cosmic lightning. There had been no strange meteor, no laboratory, no curse spoken by an old woman in the woods. You had simply been a child, once, and then one day people began losing you whenever their eyes moved away.

At first, it had been seconds. Then consistently. Then forever. Your mother forgot you while making toast. She had been humming. That was what you remembered most clearly. Not the fear after, not the neighbours called, not the police officer crouching in front of you with his radio crackling at his hip. You remembered your mother humming, yellow morning light pooling across the kitchen floor, the smell of butter and bread and ordinary life.

“Ma,” you had said. She turned from the counter. Her face emptied. You had not known yet that there were expressions worse than hatred. Hatred meant you had left a mark. Confusion meant you had not.

Your father tried harder. For a while. He wrote notes. He took pictures. He set alarms on his phone that said, Your child is in the house. Do not look away. He forced himself to stare at you until his eyes watered, until his hands shook, until you begged him to blink because love should not look like torture.

Once, he tied a red string around your wrist and his.

“I won’t lose you,” he said.

He did. By dinner, he had forgotten why the string was there and cut himself free with kitchen scissors. You still dreamed of the sound sometimes. Snip. Like fate was not a thunderclap but a pair of dull blades.

After your parents, there were foster homes. Shelters. Street corners. Government buildings where case workers promised to help if you could just sit tight, just give them a moment, just wait right here. People told you to wait all your life. No one ever came back.

So you stopped waiting. You learned the city instead. The places where nobody asked questions. Twenty-four-hour laundromats with fluorescent lights buzzing like angry insects. Diners where waitresses forgot you between coffee refills but still left the pot on the counter. Libraries, if you moved carefully. Churches, if you didn’t mind saints looking down from stained glass with all that permanent sorrow.

Metropolis became a map of where a forgotten person could survive. You slept in rooms rented under names landlords did not remember approving. You stole food, sometimes, and hated yourself less than you expected. You got jobs that lasted exactly as long as you could hold someone’s eye. You learned not to need references, not to collect keepsakes, not to put your faith in paper trails. Documents disappeared not because they were erased, but because the people responsible for filing them forgot there had been a person behind the form.

You existed in loopholes. You lived in the margins of everyone else’s certainty. And eventually, the loneliness grew teeth. Not dramatic teeth. Not movie-monster teeth. Quiet ones. Patient ones. Teeth that worried at you in the dark, bite by bite, until you woke each morning with less of yourself than you had gone to sleep with.

It wasn’t that you wanted to die. At least, not at first. It was that you wanted to know whether your absence could be heavier than your presence. You wanted proof that the world would notice the shape left behind.

That was how you ended up on the bridge the first time Superman saved you. The bridge had been half-collapsed before you arrived. A tanker truck had jackknifed during rush hour, smashing through the barrier and taking three cars with it. Smoke climbed into the evening sky. Horns wailed. Sirens answered. The road buckled near the centre span, concrete splitting open in jagged mouths beneath twisted steel. Everyone was running away. You walked forward. No one stopped you. Someone might have seen you, briefly. A firefighter’s eyes brushed across your face. His hand lifted as if to shout, to gesture, to pull you back.

Then someone screamed behind him. He turned, and you kept walking. There was a terrible peace in danger. That was the secret no one told you. Danger did not forget. Fire burned whether it knew your name or not. Gravity did not need to remember your face to make room for you. A collapsing bridge would hold you as honestly as it held anyone else.

Your foot met the cracked edge of the road. Below, the river moved dark and cold. You wondered if hitting water from this height would feel like impact or arrival. Then the bridge groaned. The sound was enormous, ancient. Metal bending. Concrete surrendering. The world beneath you dropped. For one suspended heartbeat, there was only air.

Then arms closed around you. Warm. Strong. Impossible. The fall reversed itself so fast your stomach turned. Smoke and sky whipped around you. Your hands clutched instinctively at a chest harder than stone and warmer than any human body should have been. A cape snapped against your legs like a banner in a storm.

When your feet touched solid ground, your knees nearly folded. Superman held you upright.

“Careful,” he said. His voice was lower than it sounded on television. Less polished. More human. The kind of voice that had learned gentleness by choice and not by weakness.

You stared at him. Everyone stared at him, eventually. It was what he was made for. Hope in primary colours. A god with a farm boy’s face. Metropolis looked at Superman and saw rescue. You looked at him and saw another person who would forget.

“Are you hurt?” he asked.

You almost laughed. It came out wrong. “Give it a second.”

His brow furrowed. “What?”

“You’ll see.” You looked past his shoulder. “Actually, you won’t.”

A car exploded behind him. His head turned. Only for a moment. Less than a second. When he looked back, the concern remained, but it had lost its target. It hovered around him uselessly, a bird with nowhere to land.

He blinked. “Were you in one of the vehicles?”

There it was.

You stepped back. “No.”

His eyes narrowed faintly, not suspicious, exactly. Troubled. “Then how did you get past the emergency line?”

You smiled. You had gotten good at smiling like it did not cost anything. “People don’t notice me much.”

Something in his face shifted. Then someone called his name from the wreckage. Superman looked away again. When his gaze returned, he seemed even more lost. You turned before he could ask another question.

“Thanks for the save,” you said.

He did not answer immediately. You felt his attention on your back like sunlight.

“Wait,” he called.

You did not. Waiting was for people who could be returned to.

The second time, it was a fire. You saw the smoke from six blocks away, a black plume rising between glass towers, ugly against the clean Metropolis sky. People gathered on sidewalks with phones held high, filming the disaster the way people filmed fireworks. Somewhere inside the building, someone was screaming.

You moved toward it. That was the thing about being unremembered. You could pass through panic like a needle through cloth. Security guards shouted at each other, firefighters ran hoses, police pushed back crowds. No one had room in their mind for one extra body slipping through the seam.

Inside, heat swallowed you. The apartment building had been mid-renovation, all exposed beams and unfinished walls, plastic sheeting melting in long transparent tears. Smoke thickened the hallway until every breath became work. You pulled your sleeve over your mouth and kept going. There were people in the stairwell. A man with blood on his forehead. A little girl coughing into a stuffed rabbit. You helped them toward the exit because survival was stupidly stubborn in you, even now. Even when you walked into danger, you still opened doors for strangers. The man looked at you with wet, terrified gratitude.

“Thank you,” he choked. Then he glanced down to lift the child over a fallen pipe. When he looked up again, he flinched.

“Come on,” you said tiredly, pointing. “Exit’s that way.”

He ran. You went up. The higher floors were worse. Heat pressed around you like hands. The building screamed in its bones. Your skin prickled. Every instinct told you to leave, which made you laugh because your instincts had always been terrible at reading the room. You reached the fifth floor before the ceiling came down.

It happened in stages. A crack. A groan. A raining scatter of plaster. Then a burning beam tore free overhead. You looked up. It fell.

Red and blue cut through the smoke. Superman caught the beam before it crushed you, arms locked, boots planted in flame. Sparks showered over his shoulders. His cape smoked at the edges. He threw the beam aside hard enough that it burst through a wall.

Then he turned to you. His eyes widened.

“You,” he said.

The word hit harder than the falling wood ever could have.

Your lungs forgot how to breathe. “You remember?”

His face changed. Not enough. Never enough.

“I—” He shook his head once, like he was trying to clear smoke from inside his skull. “I don’t know.” You stared. He stared back. The fire roared around you, greedy and bright. “I don’t remember your name,” he said slowly. “I don’t remember where I saw you. But I know your heartbeat.”

The hallway tilted.

“That’s not possible.”

“I hear a lot of impossible things.”

Your laugh cracked into a cough. Superman took a step closer and stopped when you tensed.

“Why are you here?” he asked.

“Same reason anyone walks into a burning building.”

“To help?”

You glanced toward the stairwell where the man and child had escaped. “Sometimes.”

His jaw tightened. “And the other times?”

Smoke burned your eyes.

You could have lied. You had lied before. Lies were lighter than truth, easier to carry. But Superman was looking at you as if he might be able to hold the truth without dropping it. So you said, “To see if disappearing feels different when there’s fire involved.”

The flames snapped. His expression went very still. Horrified.

“You want to die.”

“No,” you said, because it was important, because language had edges and you were tired of people cutting you with the wrong ones. “I want to stop being the only proof I was ever alive.”

Something inside him flinched. You saw it. That was the dangerous part. Being seen always felt like being handed a weapon blade-first.

The building shuddered. Superman looked up at the ceiling, then back at you with visible effort. He was trying not to look away. You understood that suddenly, and hated that understanding could make a cage feel warmer.

“I have to get you out,” he said.

“You have to get everyone out.”

“I can do both.”

“Of course you can.” You wiped soot from your cheek with the back of your hand. “You’re Superman.”

For some reason, that hurt him. He crossed the space between you in one smooth movement and lifted you into his arms. You should have resisted. You didn’t. Your body was tired. Your heart was worse.

He flew you through smoke and heat, out a shattered window and into clean air. The city opened beneath you. It was beautiful from above. That was another cruelty. Metropolis, glittering and alive, all its windows catching the sunset, all its streets filling with people who would never know you had once moved among them.

Superman landed on the roof of a neighbouring building. He set you down carefully but did not step back. Rain from fire hoses misted upward, catching in his hair.

“Look at me,” he said. You did. His eyes held yours with almost painful concentration. “I’m going to turn away,” he said. “There are people still trapped. When I look back, I may not know you.”

“May not?”

His mouth tightened. “I’m hoping.”

“Cute.”

“I’m serious.”

“I know. That’s the problem.”

He inhaled slowly. “If I forget, it doesn’t mean this didn’t matter.”

You looked at him. It was such a stupid, impossible thing to say. It landed in you anyway.

“Easy for you,” you whispered. “You get to be the one who forgets.”

His face broke a little.

Then someone screamed below. His head turned. The connection snapped. You watched it go. Watched the shape of you fall out of him.

When he looked back, Superman’s gaze caught on you like fabric snagging on a nail.

“Are you safe up here?” he asked.

There was no recognition in his voice. But there was grief. He did not know why. You wondered if that was worse.

“Yeah,” you said. “I’m safe.”

He looked like he wanted to say something else. His hand lifted slightly, then dropped.

“I’ll come back,” he said.

“You won’t know who to come back to.”

The words passed through him like a ghost.

Then, softly, with confusion written all over his face, he said, “Maybe I’ll hear you.”

He vanished into the smoke.

You sat on that roof until your clothes stopped smelling like fire.

He did not come back. Of course, he didn’t.

But two days later, in a small apartment above a closed bakery, Clark Kent woke from a dream with his heart hammering and the taste of smoke in his mouth.

He sat up too quickly, knocking his glasses off the bedside table. His room was dark except for the thin gold line of streetlight beneath the curtains. Traffic murmured below. Somewhere three floors down, a couple argued about dishes. In the apartment next door, Mrs Alvarez’s cat knocked something ceramic off a shelf and looked smug about it.

Clark heard all of it. He also heard, impossibly, nothing.

No fire. No falling beam. No stranger with soot on their cheek telling him they wanted to stop being the only proof they were alive.

Except he could feel the sentence. It sat in his chest like a bruise.

He turned on the lamp and found a note on his own nightstand.

His handwriting. Uneven. Hurried.

Heartbeat: 72 resting, irregular under stress, slight catch before speaking. Familiar. Person in danger repeatedly. Do not dismiss. Do not look away.

Below that, written harder: They said disappearing. Fire. Bridge? Find them again.

Clark stared at the note for a long time.

Then he pressed both hands over his face and tried to remember.

Nothing came. Not a face. Not a name. Only a heartbeat. A rhythm tucked somewhere deep in his listening, distinct from the billions of human sounds he had learned to filter. He knew the mayor’s heartbeat. Lois’. Jimmy’s. Perry’s. Bruce’s, though Bruce would probably deny having one if pressed. He knew the panicked flutter of children, the laboured thump of the elderly, the terrible silence after a body gave up.

This heartbeat was different, not because it was extraordinary, but because something in him had already turned toward it.

Clark pulled the note closer. His hand shook. He did not sleep again.

The third time he saved you, it was raining underground. Not real rain. Pipes had burst in the subway tunnel after an explosion rocked the line between Midtown and Bakerline. Water poured through cracks in the ceiling, hissing against exposed electrical wires. Commuters staggered along the tracks in the dark, their phone flashlights bobbing like lost stars.

You had been on the platform when the blast happened.

You could have left with the others. Instead, you walked deeper into the tunnel.

There had been a boy trapped beneath a fallen section of maintenance stairs. You found him crying for his mother and managed to pry enough debris away to pull him loose. He wrapped both arms around your neck and sobbed into your shoulder.

“Don’t leave,” he begged.

“I won’t,” you said.

Then he looked away to cough. When he looked back, he screamed.

You closed your eyes. Of all the little deaths, that kind still hurt most.

You pointed him toward the light.

“Go that way,” you said. “Follow the others.”

He ran. You stayed.

The tunnel groaned around you. Water rose around your ankles. Sparks spat blue-white in the distance. The air smelled like metal, smoke, and panic. You leaned against the tiled wall, suddenly exhausted down to the marrow.

You had saved the boy. That should have meant something.

It did mean something. It just did not mean enough to save you from the hollow place opening wider inside your ribs.

A second blast hit.

The wall beside you shattered inward. You hit the ground hard. Pain flashed along your side. Dust filled your mouth. Somewhere nearby, the tunnel began collapsing.

You laughed, once. It was not funny.

But neither was anything else.

Then strong hands found you in the dark.

“Hey,” Superman said, voice strained. “Stay with me.”

You opened your eyes.

His face was inches from yours, lit by sparks and emergency lights. There was dust in his hair. His cape was torn. He looked frightened in the way people looked frightened when something had become personal.

“You again,” you breathed.

His eyes sharpened.

“I knew it,” he said.

You frowned.

He slipped one arm behind your back, careful of your ribs. “I knew I wasn’t making you up.”

The ceiling cracked overhead.

He shielded your body with his own as debris came down.

“You can’t make up someone you forget,” you said.

“I can leave notes.”

“You leave notes?”

“All over my apartment, apparently.”

Despite everything, you laughed. The sound turned into a wince.

His gaze dropped to your side. “You’re hurt.”

“Occupational hazard of bad life choices.”

His eyes came back to yours. “You make jokes when you’re scared.”

“I make jokes when I’m awake.”

“That too.”

Something in your chest tightened.

The tunnel screamed.

Superman lifted you.

“Don’t look away,” you whispered before you could stop yourself.

He froze. Only for a fraction of a second.

Then his arms tightened. “I won’t unless I have to.”

“That’s not comforting.”

“It’s honest.”

You hated honesty. It got under the skin.

He flew you through the wreckage, one arm holding you, the other clearing debris as he moved. Several times, people called for him. Several times, he had to turn his head.

Each time, you felt him forget.

It was strange, being carried by someone whose body still protected you after his mind lost the reason. His grip never loosened. His flight never faltered. But every time his eyes returned to you, there was that flicker. Confusion. Alarm. A grief with no address.

By the time he reached the surface, he had forgotten you four times.

He landed behind the police line with you in his arms, looked down, and visibly startled. “Are you—”

“Don’t,” you said.

He stopped.

You were not angry.

That was worse. Anger gave you somewhere to put the pain. Without it, the pain simply sat between you, breathing.

Superman swallowed. “I’m sorry.”

“You don’t know what for.”

“No,” he said. “But I think I am.”

The paramedics rushed over. One reached for you, then looked away to call for a stretcher. By the time she looked back, she hesitated.

Superman noticed. His expression changed.

“What just happened?” he asked quietly.

You closed your eyes. The rain fell cold on your face.

“Me,” you said. “I happened.”

At Clark’s apartment, the notes multiplied.

They appeared first in obvious places. On the bathroom mirror: Do not ignore the heartbeat. On the fridge: They are real. Beside the front door: Ask Bruce about memory alteration. Magic? Psychic? Fifth-dimensional?

Then they became more specific.

Their pulse spikes when thanked. Probably unused to it. Be gentle.

They deflect with humour. Do not laugh unless they want you to.

They are not reckless because they do not care. They care and cannot bear the cost.

Clark did not remember writing most of them. That was the terrible part.

He would wake up and find evidence of a grief he had lived and lost. He would come home from patrol and discover a voice recording on his phone, his own voice rough with urgency.

“Clark, listen. You found them again tonight in the subway. Injured but alive. They said people forget them when they look away. It happens instantly. It happened to a paramedic. It happened to you. Do not treat this like an abstract problem. They are suffering. Find a way to remember without staring like a creep.”

A pause. Then, quieter: “They asked me not to look away.”

The recording ended there.

Clark listened to it seven times. After the eighth, he called Bruce.

Batman answered on the second ring.

“It’s three in the morning,” Bruce said.

“You’re awake.”

“That isn’t the point.”

“I need your help.”

There was a silence. Then the faint sound of a chair shifting in the Cave.

“Tell me.”

Clark told him everything he could. Which meant he told him about notes, recordings, heartbeats, the bridge he barely remembered, the fire he did not remember, the subway he knew only from his own voice. He told him about a person the world forgot and his growing terror that he was failing them in a way more intimate than any physical wound.

Bruce did not interrupt.

When Clark finished, the line was quiet except for distant machinery.

Then Bruce said, “Could be a psychic field.”

“Can we stop it?”

“Maybe.”

“Could be magic?”

“Yes.”

“Can we stop that?”

“Maybe.”

“Bruce.”

“I’m not going to lie to you.”

Clark’s fingers tightened around the phone. “I can lift a plane out of the sky,” he said softly. “I can hear a heart attack before the person falls. I can cross the city in seconds. And every time I find them, I lose them because I blink.”

Bruce’s voice changed. Not softened, exactly. Batman did not soften. He became less sharp by degrees. “Then build systems stronger than memory.”

Clark closed his eyes. “I’ve tried.”

“Try harder.”

“I am.”

“Good. Then try differently.”

That was Bruce’s comfort. A locked door and a crowbar.

They spent the next two hours making a plan.

Voice memos. Written logs. Kryptonian data scans if Clark could safely gather them. Magical consultation, though Bruce said this in the grim tone of someone preparing to call John Constantine and already regretting it. A visual anchor system. A phrase Clark could record that would tell his future self not just facts, but emotional context.

“Facts won’t be enough,” Bruce said. “If the effect removes episodic memory, you’ll need to persuade yourself every time.”

Clark looked at the notes covering his table. “They shouldn’t have to persuade me they matter.”

“No,” Bruce said. “But the curse is making them.”

Clark hated that word. Curse. It made your suffering sound old, storybook, inevitable.

He wrote anyway. For when I forget: believe them first.

The fourth time, you met Clark Kent. He found you in a diner at 2:17 in the morning, though you did not know he had been looking. You sat in the corner booth beneath a flickering light, a plate of fries going cold in front of you. The waitress had forgotten you three times and charged you twice. You did not correct her. It felt petty to argue with someone who could not hold the shape of the argument.

The bell over the door chimed.

You looked up. Clark Kent walked in wearing a brown jacket, glasses, and an expression like a man who had rehearsed courage in the mirror and still did not trust it.

You knew him immediately. Of course you did. Superman’s face could be hidden by glasses only from people who needed the world to be less strange than it was.

He scanned the diner. His eyes found yours.

He stopped breathing. Not for long. Not enough for anyone human to notice.

You noticed.

He crossed the diner slowly, never looking away.

“Hi,” he said.

You leaned back against the cracked vinyl seat. “This is new.”

His mouth twitched. “Is it?”

“You usually do the cape thing.”

He looked relieved and devastated at once. “So I have found you before.”

“Several times.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You apologise a lot for things you don’t remember.”

“I remember enough to know I owe you more apologies than I can count.”

The waitress approached with a coffee pot. “More coffee, hon?”

You looked at her. “Sure.”

She refilled your mug, turned to ask Clark if he wanted anything, then glanced back at you and nearly dropped the pot.

“Oh,” she said. “I didn’t realise someone was sitting there.”

Clark’s face went pale.

Not with fear. With confirmation.

You took a fry and pointed it at him. “There. Scientific method.”

The waitress blinked at Clark. “Booth for one?”

Clark did not look at her.

“Two,” he said, eyes fixed on you. “It’s a booth for two.”

The waitress muttered something under her breath and left.

Clark sat down across from you very carefully, as if sudden movement might break the air.

He placed a small recorder on the table between you.

“Is that for me or for you?” you asked.

“For both of us.”

“Romantic.”

His ears turned pink. That surprised you into silence.

He pressed record.

“This is Clark Kent,” he said, still looking at you. “I’m in a diner on Ninth with…” He paused.

You smiled without humour. “Smooth.”

His blush deepened.

“I don’t know your name yet,” he said into the recorder. “Not because they don’t have one. Because I haven’t earned it.”

You looked down.

Something inside you hurt.

Not in the usual way. The usual hurt was old and grey, like weathered stone. This was sharper. Newer. A green shoot splitting concrete.

“You don’t have to earn a name,” you said.

“I think maybe I do.”

You should have left. Instead, you told him.

Your name felt strange in the diner air. Too delicate. Too exposed. Like a candle carried through traffic.

Clark repeated it. Quietly. Carefully.

The recorder caught it. So did you.

“You’re Clark,” you said.

“Yes.”

“Not Superman.”

“I’m both.”

“I know.”

His gaze warmed. Then, softly, “Do you?”

You looked at the fries.

“No,” you admitted. “I know the shape of that answer. Not the weight.”

Clark sat with that. He was good at silence. You had not expected that. Superman seemed like he should fill silence with speeches. But Clark Kent sat across from you in a flickering diner and let quiet settle without trying to rescue either of you from it.

Eventually, he said, “I have notes about you.”

“Creepy.”

“Yes.”

You looked up.

He grimaced. “Sorry. I mean, it could be. I’m trying very hard to make it not creepy.”

A laugh escaped you. His face changed when he heard it. As if the sound mattered. As if he wanted to write it down too.

“Don’t look like that,” you said.

“Like what?”

“Like I just handed you a moon rock.”

His smile was small. “Maybe you did.”

“That is such a Kansas line.”

His eyebrows lifted. “I told you I was from Kansas?”

“No. You just look like someone who has opinions about corn.”

“I do have opinions about corn.”

“Of course you do.”

The laugh came easier that time.

Clark’s shoulders loosened slightly, though his eyes stayed locked on yours. He had not looked away once. Not when the kitchen bell rang. Not when the waitress dropped a spoon. Not when a drunk man at the counter started singing half of “Sweet Caroline” with terrifying confidence.

It should have made you uncomfortable. It did, a little. But beneath that was something worse.

You wanted him to keep looking. That was how hope started to ruin you.

“You said I’ve saved you several times,” Clark said eventually.

“Yeah.”

“Were all of them accidents?”

There it was.

You pushed the fries away. “Some of them.”

“And the others?”

“You read the notes, Clark.”

His jaw tightened. “I want to hear it from you.”

“Why?”

“Because notes aren’t you.”

You closed your eyes. The diner hummed around you. Refrigerator buzz. Rain at the windows. Coffee dripping in the machine. Life, stupidly ongoing.

“You ever feel like the world has a door and everyone else got a key?” you asked.

Clark did not answer quickly.

“No,” he said. “Not like that.”

The honesty nearly made you smile.

“But sometimes,” he continued, “I feel like I’m standing outside the world holding it up. Like if I step inside for too long, something falls.”

You opened your eyes.

He looked embarrassed by the confession, but he did not take it back.

“That sounds lonely,” you said.

“It is.”

“You have people.”

“Yes.”

You waited. Clark’s mouth pressed into a line.

“Yes,” he said again, softer. “And it is still lonely sometimes.”

That was the first thing he said that made you believe he might understand anything at all.

So you told him.

Not everything. Not the beginning. Not your mother humming in the kitchen. Not the scissors cutting red string.

But enough.

You told him how people forgot. How quickly. How completely. How the world did not mean to be cruel, which somehow made the cruelty harder to survive. You told him about trying to leave notes. About names dissolving from systems. About the impossibility of being loved by someone who could not remember loving you.

Clark listened.

At one point, his eyes shone.

You stopped.

“Don’t,” you said.

He swallowed. “Don’t what?”

“Cry about me. You’ll forget why, and I’ll have to remember both sides of it.”

He breathed in as if the words had gone through him. “I’m sorry.”

“See? Again.”

“I’m going to keep being sorry.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“So does being forgotten.”

You looked away first.

It was an accident. Or maybe it wasn’t.

Your eyes flicked toward the window where rain blurred the streetlights into halos. Just for a second.

When you looked back, Clark’s face had gone blank.

He stared at you. Then at the recorder. Then at the cold fries.

His panic was quiet and immediate.

He pressed play.

His own voice filled the booth.

“This is Clark Kent. I’m in a diner on Ninth with…”

Your name played back.

Clark listened to himself say it.

You watched memory fail and choice step forward in its place.

When the recording ended, he looked at you again.

“Hi,” he said, voice rough.

You hated the tears that sprang to your eyes. “Hi.”

“I’m Clark.”

“I know.”

His fingers curled on the table, not reaching for you. Asking without asking.

“Can I stay?” he said.

It should not have been enough. It was not enough. It was only a booth in a diner. Only a man with a recorder. Only another beginning doomed to begin again and again.

But you nodded.

Clark stayed until sunrise. He forgot you seventeen times. He introduced himself seventeen times. On the eighteenth, he asked if you liked oranges because the recording told him to, and you laughed so hard the waitress forgot you mid-refill and poured coffee directly onto the table.

For one bright, absurd second, the loneliness loosened its teeth.

After that, Clark became a haunting in your life. A kind haunting, but still.

You found evidence of him in places no one else thought to leave proof. A folded note tucked into the sleeve of your coat after a rescue, written in careful block letters: You are real. I forgot. I came back anyway. A prepaid phone slipped into your bag with one number saved. CLARK — CALL EVEN IF I DON’T REMEMBER. A small orange left outside the laundromat where you sometimes slept, bright as a tiny sun.

That one made you cry so hard you had to sit on the curb with the fruit in both hands until morning.

You did not call him.

Not at first. Hope was a blade. You had learned that young. Despair was heavy, but at least it was blunt. Hope cut fresh every time.

Clark did not push. Superman still found you when danger did.

The fifth rescue was a LexCorp gala. Not because you belonged there. You had walked in through a service entrance while caterers shouted around you and security forgot what they were supposed to be guarding. The ballroom glittered with chandeliers and wealth. People laughed under gold light, all sharp suits and red mouths and diamonds bright enough to look like captured teeth.

Lex Luthor stood on a stage, smiling like a knife pretending to be a man.

You had no particular interest in him. You had only wanted to stand somewhere beautiful and dangerous. Maybe that was the shape your self-destruction had taken by then. You did not go looking for death with open arms. You wandered near it like a shoreline, letting it lap at your shoes.

Then the bombs went off.

Not large enough to bring down the tower. Precise. Surgical. Meant to terrify, to herd, to expose the important people’s exits. The ballroom erupted into screams. Glass rained from the ceiling. Smoke curled between silk-draped tables.

You stood very still beneath the chandeliers.

People ran around you. One man bumped into your shoulder, turned to curse, forgot the target of his anger, and kept running.

The ceiling cracked. A chandelier came loose overhead. You looked up as ten thousand crystals began to fall.

Then Superman was there.

He caught the chandelier in one hand and you in the other, spinning you out from beneath it. His cape swept around you like a red wing. Crystal fragments chimed as they hit the floor.

For a second, you were pressed against him, surrounded by smoke and wealth and panic.

His eyes met yours. Recognition struck his face before memory did.

“You,” he breathed.

You smiled weakly. “Me.”

His gaze flicked—almost—to the chaos.

He caught himself. Pain crossed his expression. “I have to—”

“I know.”

“I don’t want to forget.”

“I know.”

“There are people—”

“I know, Clark.”

His name hurt him.

You saw it. The superhero, the alien, the symbol, struck nearly speechless because a forgotten person knew the human part of him.

He leaned closer, voice low enough that even in the screaming ballroom it felt private. “Will you stay somewhere safe?”

You looked around at the shattered glass, the fleeing guests, the smoke. “Define safe.”

“Not here.”

“Bossy.”

“Please.”

That word undid more of you than any command could have.

You nodded.

Clark’s relief was visible.

Then another explosion rocked the far end of the ballroom.

His head turned. Gone.

When he looked back, Superman held you at arm’s length with careful confusion. “Are you injured?”

You almost said yes. Not because of the explosion.

Instead, you stepped back. “No.”

He searched your face, or tried to. You watched his mind fail to find the path.

“Please evacuate,” he said.

“So formal.”

His brow pinched faintly.

You left before he could hurt himself trying to understand.

That night, Clark found three new recordings on his phone.

In the first, his own voice said, “They were at the LexCorp gala. They knew my name.” In the second, recorded eight minutes later, “They looked at me like they were forgiving me for hurting them while I was still doing it.” In the third, barely audible beneath the sound of flight, “I think I am breaking their heart by trying. I think not trying would be worse.”

He sent the files to Bruce.

Bruce called back.

“You’re compromised,” he said.

Clark was standing on his balcony, looking out over a city that held you somewhere in its glittering dark. “Yes.”

“That wasn’t a criticism.”

“It sounded like one.”

“It was a fact.”

Clark pinched the bridge of his nose. “I’m not stepping away.”

“I didn’t ask you to.”

“You were about to.”

“No,” Bruce said. “I was about to tell you to stop doing this alone.”

Clark went still.

Bruce exhaled. It sounded like it physically pained him. “Send me everything. Notes, recordings, timeline. I’ll contact Zatanna.”

“And Constantine?”

“Only if we’re desperate.”

Clark almost smiled. Then he looked down at the orange sitting on his table, untouched, bought for someone who might never call.

“I think we are.”

The sixth time Clark saved you, you were not in danger. That was what made it worse. You were sitting in Centennial Park under a winter-bare tree, watching pigeons bully a tourist out of half a bagel. Your hands were cold. Your coat was too thin. The phone Clark had given you sat in your pocket like a heartbeat that was not yours.

You had not eaten that day. Not because you couldn’t. Because wanting food required imagining a future body that would need it.

A shadow crossed the grass.

You looked up. Clark Kent stood a few feet away, breathing hard as if he had run there, which was ridiculous for several reasons. His hair was windblown. His tie was crooked. His glasses sat slightly askew. He looked not like Superman, not like a god, but like a man who had left work in the middle of something because the world had shifted half an inch and only he could feel it.

“I heard your heartbeat,” he said.

You blinked. “That’s a weird greeting.”

His shoulders dropped.

“Sorry.” He swallowed. “Hi.”

“Hi, Clark.”

His eyes warmed with brief, fragile joy. Then fear returned.

“You weren’t in danger,” he said.

“No.”

“But it sounded…” He stopped, searching your face. “Slow.”

You looked away toward the pigeons.

His breath caught.

You realised your mistake and turned back.

His expression had reset. For a moment, he only stared.

Then his gaze dropped to the notebook already open in his hand.

He read silently. You waited. A pigeon strutted between you like it owned the narrative.

Clark looked up.

“Hi,” he said carefully. “I’m Clark.”

You were so tired that the laugh almost became a sob. “I know.”

“My notes say I’m worried about you.”

“Your notes are nosey.”

“They usually are.”

“You write that down too?”

“Apparently.”

He sat beside you on the bench, leaving a careful distance.

The park moved around you. Joggers. Dogs. Children in bright coats. A city performing normality with all its usual confidence.

Clark kept his eyes on you.

“You heard my heart sound sad?” you asked.

His mouth tightened. “I heard it sound like giving up.”

The words entered you cleanly.

No drama. No poetry.

Just truth.

You looked down at your hands. “I’m not standing on a bridge.”

“I know.”

“I’m not in a fire.”

“I know.”

“I’m sitting on a bench.”

“I know.”

“So what are you saving me from?”

Clark’s voice was very gentle. “Maybe the bench.”

You hated him then. For being right. For being kind. For finding you even when disaster was invisible.

The tears came without warning. Hot, humiliating, immediate. You turned your face away, but of course that only made him forget, and the thought of having to explain your own crying to him was so unbearable that you covered your face with both hands.

Clark went still beside you. You could feel his confusion.

Then paper rustled. His voice, when it came, was uncertain but determined.

“My notes say not to panic if you cry.” A pause. “They say not to ask too many questions. They say tissues are in my left pocket.”

Despite yourself, you laughed wetly.

Clark immediately pulled out the tissues. You took one without looking at him.

“I hate this,” you whispered.

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

“No,” he said. “I don’t. But every version of me who writes these notes seems furious about that.”

You pressed the tissue to your eyes. “I don’t know how to keep doing this.”

Clark did not answer with something easy.

That mattered. He did not say, Of course you do. He did not say, Be strong. He did not say, Everything happens for a reason, because he was not an idiot and you were not a greeting card.

Instead, he said, “Then don’t do all of it. Do the next minute.”

You laughed bitterly. “That’s your advice?”

“It’s advice I’ve used.”

“You?”

“Yes.”

You looked at him. He looked back, and there, beneath the glasses and the careful softness, was the weight of impossible things. A planet gone. A childhood split between species. A world always calling for him. A man trying to be gentle with hands that could break mountains.

“I thought heroes had better coping mechanisms,” you said.

“Absolutely not.”

The laugh that came out of you was fragile, but real.

Clark smiled.

For several minutes, you sat together in the park while pigeons committed organised crime around your feet.

Then he reached slowly into his coat and pulled out an orange.

You stared. “You carry fruit now?”

“Only when I’m hoping to see you.”

“That is absurd.”

“Yes.”

“You’re absurd.”

“Sometimes.”

You took the orange. It was cold from the weather, textured and bright against your palm. Clark watched you hold it as if the act mattered.

“It smells like someone peeled the sun,” he said.

Your throat closed. “You remember that?”

His eyes widened. “I said the right thing?”

“You remembered?”

“I don’t know.” He looked almost afraid to breathe. “Did I?”

You held the orange too tightly. “You weren’t supposed to.”

Clark’s face shifted. Hope, terrified of itself. “Maybe some things get through.”

“Don’t,” you said. His smile faded. “Don’t make it sound possible if it isn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You keep giving me almosts.” Your voice shook. “Almost remembered. Almost stayed. Almost knew me. I can’t live on almost, Clark. It’s starving me.”

He absorbed that like a blow. “I don’t want to starve you.”

“I know.”

“I want…” He stopped.

“What?”

He looked at you like the answer scared him. “I want to be someone you don’t have to convince.”

The park blurred. You wanted to tell him he could not want that. Wanting did not make reality negotiable. Wanting did not undo whatever cosmic joke had made you into a person-shaped blank space.

But the words would not come.

Clark’s phone rang. He did not look at it.

You heard the faint vibration.

He ignored it.

“Clark,” you said.

“It can wait.”

“What if it can’t?”

His jaw worked. The phone kept buzzing.

You both knew what he was. What the world needed from him.

Your voice softened despite yourself. “Go.”

His eyes remained fixed on yours. “If I do—”

“You’ll forget.”

“I’ll come back.”

“You always say that.”

“Do I?”

“Yeah.”

“Then maybe I always mean it.”

You looked at him for one long moment. Then you deliberately held out the orange. “Take this.”

He frowned, but took it. “Why?”

“So when you forget, you’ll wonder why you’re holding an orange in a park.”

His mouth curved despite the fear. “That’s a good plan.”

“I have my moments.”

He stood. His phone buzzed again. Somewhere downtown, someone screamed loudly enough for his head to twitch. He did not look away yet.

“Your name,” he said. “Please.”

You told him. He repeated it. The world held.

Then he turned. You watched him become Superman in the space between one breath and the next. Shoulders squaring. Body rising. Attention snapping toward disaster. When he looked back, hovering three feet above the path with an orange in one hand, confusion crossed his face.

Then he looked at the fruit. Then at you. Then, without knowing why, Superman tucked the orange carefully against his chest like it was something precious.

“I’ll be back,” he said.

This time, you almost believed him.

Weeks passed. Clark tried everything. He tried notes written before, during, and after every encounter. He tried recording your conversations with your permission. He tried a small earpiece programmed to play a reminder whenever his gaze shifted away from your face. He tried focusing on your heartbeat so intensely that Bruce told him he was going to give himself a psychological fracture, which was rich coming from Batman.

Zatanna met you once. Technically, she met you fourteen times. She was kind every time, though by the ninth introduction she looked like she wanted to set the universe on fire and bill someone for damages.

“This is old,” she said, chalk circle glowing faintly around her feet.

You sat on Clark’s couch with your knees drawn up, trying not to feel like an exhibit. His apartment smelled like coffee, paper, and oranges now. Notes covered one wall in neat rows. Some were written by Clark. Some by Bruce. Some by Zatanna. One by Lois Lane, though you had never met her long enough to survive the experience.

Lois’ note said: Clark, if you are reading this and there is a stranger in your apartment looking exhausted by your nonsense, be normal. Offer tea. Do not do the intense cow-eyes thing.

You liked Lois immediately. Even after she forgot you while making tea and almost hit Clark with the kettle.

Clark sat beside you, angled so he could see your face and Zatanna’s reflection in the dark window. He had become good at cheating the rules.

“What do you mean old?” he asked.

Zatanna’s earrings swayed as she tilted her head, studying the air around you. “Not a spell cast recently. Not a hex from a living practitioner. This is woven into them. Maybe born with them, maybe placed so early there’s no difference now.”

You looked at your hands.

Clark’s voice tightened. “Can you remove it?”

Zatanna was silent too long. You already knew the answer.

“Maybe,” she said.

Clark heard the lie because he could hear hearts. You heard it because hope had made you fluent in disappointment.

“Don’t,” you said.

Both of them looked at you.

You smiled, small and tired. “Don’t maybe me.”

Zatanna’s face softened.

“I don’t know yet,” she said carefully. “I can try to understand it. I can look for threads. I can maybe teach Clark ways to hold more through the forgetting. But ripping out something tied this deeply to your existence could hurt you.”

“Kill me?”

Clark went rigid.

Zatanna did not look away. “I don’t know.”

There were worse answers than no.

You looked at Clark. He looked devastated.

Of course he did. He had thought this would become a rescue. A problem solved by finding the right expert, the right spell, the right door hidden in the wall. He had believed there was a version of the story where he brought you to someone powerful and they gave you back to the world.

Instead, the world remained itself.

Broken. Unfair. Yours.

Clark reached for your hand, then stopped. Always asking. Always giving you the unbearable dignity of choice.

You placed your hand in his because choosing hurt less than being spared.

His fingers closed around yours. Warm. Careful.

Zatanna looked at your joined hands with an expression that made your chest ache.

“Physical contact helps?” she asked.

Clark blinked. “Does it?”

You looked at him. “Do you forget when you look away if you’re touching me?”

“I don’t know.”

His hand tightened slightly.

You turned your face toward the window.

For one second. Two. Three.

Clark inhaled sharply.

You looked back.

His eyes were wide.

Still there. Still him.

“Hi,” you said, afraid to hope.

Clark looked like someone witnessing dawn for the first time.

“Hi,” he whispered.

Zatanna leaned forward. “Interesting.”

You laughed, half sob, half disbelief. “Please do not say interesting like Batman.”

Clark did not look away. Not even to smile at Zatanna.

His thumb moved once across your knuckles.

“Again?” he asked.

You nodded.

This time, he looked away. At Zatanna. At the window. At the wall of notes.

Your hand stayed in his.

When he looked back, he knew you. Not perfectly. You could see the memory tremble under strain. But it held.

Clark laughed. Just once. A broken, disbelieving sound. then he pressed your hand to his forehead and closed his eyes.

You stared at him, stunned. “Clark?”

“I’m here,” he said.

The words wrecked you. Not I remember. Not It’s fixed.

Just I’m here.

For the first time in your life, someone looked away and came back with you still inside them.

It did not fix everything. Of course it didn’t. The universe was not that kind.

Contact worked only while it lasted. The second Clark let go and looked away, the forgetting rushed back in. Sometimes it took longer now, as if the curse had to wade through resistance. Sometimes his eyes would go blank but his hand would reach for yours anyway, instinct searching for the bridge memory could not cross.

It became another system. Another almost. But this almost had warmth. This almost held your hand.

You began seeing Clark intentionally. That was new. Not being found in disasters. Not being rescued from the edge of something. Seeing him.

The first time, you met him at the diner on Ninth. He arrived with a notebook, two pens, a recorder, and a paper bag full of oranges.

“You brought six,” you said.

“I panicked.”

“That is such a weird sentence without context.”

“I know.”

You ate fries and peeled oranges with your thumbnail while Clark asked questions and wrote the answers down in a notebook labelled, in his careful handwriting: Things I Want to Know Because They Told Me

You made fun of the title for ten full minutes. He refused to change it.

“What’s your favourite colour?” he asked.

“Depends.”

“On?”

“Whether I’m being honest or interesting.”

His pen hovered over the page. “Both.”

You rolled your eyes. “Honest?” You told him your favourite colour. “Interesting? The colour of the sky right before a storm.”

“That’s also honest.”

“Shut up.”

He smiled and wrote it down.

You leaned over the notebook. Storm sky; pretends one is a lie.

“Clark.”

“What?”

“That is editorialising.”

“I’m a journalist.”

“You’re a menace.”

“I’ve been told.”

“By who?”

“You. Probably.”

You hated how much you liked that.

Another time, you met him on the roof of the Daily Planet. He brought blankets because it was cold and tea because Lois had bullied him into owning a thermos.

“Lois knows about me?” you asked.

Clark adjusted his glasses. “Sort of.”

“That sounds ominous.”

“She knows I keep forgetting someone important. She knows the forgetting isn’t voluntary. She knows I’ve been leaving myself notes and once walked into a staff meeting holding an orange with no explanation.”

You grinned. “Please tell me Perry saw.”

“He asked if it was a prop for an exposé on citrus corruption.”

You laughed into your tea. Clark watched you with an expression so open it hurt.

You sobered. “What?”

He hesitated.

“I wish I could keep this,” he said.

“You are keeping it.” You tapped the notebook beside him. “You’re turning me into homework.”

“I mean this.” His voice softened. “The way you laugh before you’re ready to. The way you pretend you don’t like the tea but drink it anyway. The way you look at the city like it’s betrayed you and raised you at the same time.”

The wind moved between you. You looked away first because being perceived that deeply felt like standing under lightning.

Clark’s hand found yours.

You looked back. He had not forgotten. His thumb rested against your pulse.

“I hate that you notice things,” you whispered.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t. I hate it because I want you to keep noticing, and that makes me feel stupid.”

“You’re not stupid.”

“I am if I let myself want this.”

Clark was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I want it too.”

The city moved beneath you in gold and red and white.

“Clark.”

“I know wanting doesn’t solve it.”

“Then why say it?”

“Because not saying it won’t solve it either.”

Your laugh was small and wounded. “That’s annoyingly logical.”

“I have moments.”

“You have Batman.”

“That too.”

You sat together until the tea went cold.

Clark forgot you six times that night.

Each time, his hand remained around yours. Each time, he came back faster. Each time, it hurt. Each time, you stayed anyway.

That was the cruellest thing about healing. It was not clean. It did not arrive like a miracle and sweep the broken glass from the floor. It asked you to kneel down and pick up one shard at a time, knowing you would bleed, knowing there might still be more beneath the furniture.

You were not suddenly well because Clark Kent cared about you.

You still woke some mornings with the old emptiness crouched on your chest. You still walked too close to traffic when your thoughts got bad. You still looked at the phone he had given you and believed, with bone-deep certainty, that calling would only make him suffer.

Sometimes you hated him for giving you someone to disappoint. Sometimes you hated yourself more for answering when he called.

The worst night came in March.

Rain again. It was always rain with you, as if the sky had a flair for narrative symmetry.

You had been doing better. That was part of the problem. Better was unstable ground. Better meant you had farther to fall.

The day started badly and sharpened from there. A woman at the grocery store forgot you while you were helping her reach pasta from the top shelf. A child cried because you smiled at them and then seemed to appear from nowhere when their parent looked back. Your landlord forgot your lease and tried to call the police. The officer forgot why he had come mid-conversation and asked if you needed help with directions.

By sunset, you were shaking. By midnight, you were on the unfinished skeleton of a skyscraper forty-two stories above Metropolis, rain turning the beams slick beneath your shoes.

There was no emergency. No fire. No bomb. No villain.

Just height. Just wind. Just the city below, bright and indifferent.

You stood with one hand on a steel support and thought, with terrible calm, that gravity would remember you perfectly.

You did not step forward. Not yet. That distinction mattered to some exhausted legalistic part of your brain.

You were standing. Only standing. Only thinking. Only tired down to the oldest part of yourself.

Then the air changed behind you. You did not turn.

“Don’t,” you said.

Clark hovered several feet away in the rain, cape snapping around him. He was Superman now. Not glasses, not reporter, not diner booths and notebooks. The symbol on his chest shone dark with water.

“I heard you,” he said.

“I wasn’t calling.”

“I know.”

“Then stop answering.” His silence was worse than argument. You laughed without humour. “Sorry. That was mean.”

“You’re allowed to be mean.”

“That’s a dangerous precedent.”

“I’ll survive.”

“Of course you will.”

The wind shoved at your back.

Clark drifted closer. You tightened your hand on the beam. He stopped immediately.

“Okay,” he said. “I’m stopping.”

You closed your eyes. Rain slid down your face, cold as fingers.

“You can’t do this every time,” you said.

“Yes, I can.”

“No, Clark. You can’t.” Your voice broke on his name. “You can’t spend forever listening for me to fall apart.”

“I’m not spending forever. I’m spending tonight.”

“That’s very poetic.”

“It’s very true.”

You turned then.

He was closer than you expected. Or maybe hope always felt too close.

His face was pale with fear.

Not fear of heights. Not fear of danger.

Fear of you becoming something he could not catch.

“I’m tired,” you said.

“I know.”

“You don’t.”

“I know some of it.”

“No,” you snapped. “You know recordings. You know notes. You know heartbeats and clever little systems and all your heroic workarounds. You know the version of me you can rescue.”

Clark flinched.

Good, some bitter part of you thought. Then shame followed immediately, hot and brutal.

You kept going because stopping meant feeling it. “You don’t know what it is to be unmade by a glance. You don’t know what it is to watch kindness die in someone’s eyes because they looked at a clock. You don’t know what it is to explain yourself over and over until your own name feels like a sales pitch.”

Rain struck the metal around you in a thousand tiny impacts.

Clark landed on the beam. Carefully. Far enough away.

“I don’t,” he said.

You hated that too. You wanted him to defend himself. To argue. To give you something to push against. Instead, he gave you truth again.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But I know I don’t want you to be alone with it.”

“Want,” you echoed. “Everyone wants things.”

“Yes.”

“Want doesn’t matter.”

“It matters to me.”

“You’ll forget me.”

“Probably.”

The word tore through you. Clark’s eyes filled with pain.

“I’m not going to lie,” he said.

“You should. People love lying in situations like this.”

“I’m bad at it.”

“No, you’re not. You’re a reporter.”

“That’s not how journalism works.”

“I’m having a crisis, Clark. Don’t fact-check me.”

Despite the terror, a tiny smile moved across his mouth. Then it vanished.

He held out one hand. “Come away from the edge.”

You looked at his hand. “You’ll forget why you’re holding it.”

“Then I’ll read the notes.”

“What if there are no notes?”

“I’ll make more.”

“What if you get tired?”

“I will get tired,” he said.

That stopped you.

He took a breath. “I will get tired. I’ll get scared. I’ll get frustrated. I’ll hate that I can’t fix this. I’ll probably make mistakes I don’t know how to apologise for yet.” His voice shook. “But tired isn’t the same as gone.”

Your fingers trembled on the beam. “You don’t know what you’re promising.”

“I’m not promising forever perfectly.” He stepped one inch closer. “I’m promising this moment honestly.”

The city blurred below.

“You keep doing that,” you whispered.

“What?”

“Making now sound like enough.”

Clark looked at you with all the sadness in the world. “Is it?”

No one had ever asked you that. They told you to think of the future. They told you it would get better. They told you permanent things because temporary things frightened them.

Clark asked whether the breath in your lungs right now could be allowed to count.

You looked down. The street was impossibly far.

Your body swayed.

Clark did not move. Every muscle in him wanted to. You could see it. The effort it took for someone that powerful to stay still because your choice mattered more than his fear. That, more than anything, cracked you.

“I don’t want to die,” you said.

It came out small. Child-small.

Clark’s face crumpled. “I know.”

“I just don’t know how to live like this.”

His hand remained extended between you. “Then we learn smaller.”

Your vision blurred. “What does that mean?”

“It means tonight you don’t have to know how to live an entire life.” His voice was trembling now. “You only have to take my hand.”

You sobbed once.

It hurt. Everything hurt.

But your hand lifted.

Clark did not snatch. Did not grab. Did not rescue before you consented to being reached. He waited until your fingers touched his. Then he closed his hand around yours.

The world changed.

Not magically. Not all the way. But enough.

You turned your face away and sobbed into the rain.

Clark did not forget. His hand anchored you in him. You felt it in the way his fingers tightened, in the way his breath broke, in the way he whispered your name like he was afraid the sky might steal it.

“I’m here,” he said.

You stepped toward him.

Your foot slipped.

For one sick second, gravity took you.

Then Clark did. He pulled you into his arms and lifted you from the beam, holding you so tightly you felt the shudder move through his chest.

You clung to him.

Not because you were falling. Because you had stopped.

“I’m sorry,” you cried.

“No.”

“I’m sorry.”

“No,” Clark said again, voice fierce in your ear. “You don’t apologise for surviving the thing that hurt you.”

The sob that broke from you did not feel human.

He carried you down through the rain, past glass towers and empty offices, past the golden globe of the Daily Planet, past the city that had forgotten you and kept shining anyway.

He did not take you to a hospital immediately.

He asked. You said no. He listened.

Instead, he brought you to his apartment.

That mattered more than you could say.

Not a rooftop. Not a battlefield. Not the edge of a disaster.

A home. Small, warm, cluttered. Books stacked on the table. A mug in the sink. A ridiculous number of oranges in a bowl because Clark Kent apparently handled emotional distress by panic-buying citrus. Notes covered the wall by the kitchen, but there were fewer now, organised into careful sections.

Emergency reminders. Things they like. Things not to say. Things to ask.

You stood in the doorway soaked and shaking, holding his hand.

Clark did not let go.

“Can I get you a towel?” he asked.

“You’d have to look away.”

“I can use one hand.”

“That sounds inefficient.”

“I’m very fast.”

“Show-off.”

His smile flickered. He retrieved a towel from a hallway closet without releasing your hand, which involved enough awkward manoeuvring that you laughed despite the tears.

The sound made him freeze.

“What?” you asked.

He looked back at you. Still remembering. Still there.

“I like that sound,” he said.

You looked down. “Don’t make it a thing.”

“It’s already a thing.”

“Clark.”

“Okay.”

He wrapped the towel around your shoulders, then guided you to the couch. He made tea one-handed. It was, frankly, a disaster. He spilled water, dropped a spoon, nearly crushed a mug when the kettle whistled and startled him because his eyes were locked on you instead of the stove.

“You’re supposed to have super coordination,” you said.

“I’m under pressure.”

“I’m sitting on your couch.”

“Exactly.”

It was not fine. Nothing was fine. But somehow, between the shaking and the wet clothes and the bruise-coloured night pressed against the windows, there was warmth.

Clark sat beside you with his hand still in yours. Neither of you spoke for a long time.

Eventually, you said, “You should call Bruce.”

Clark glanced at the phone on the table and immediately looked back, grip tightening as the memory wavered but held. “Later.”

“He’ll be mad.”

“He usually is.”

“Zatanna?”

“Later.”

“Lois?”

“She’ll be madder than Bruce.”

“Terrifying.”

“Extremely.”

You looked at the wall of notes. Your name appeared there several times.

Not large. Not obsessive.

Careful. Real.

There were facts, too.

Likes oranges. Storm-sky. Hates being called brave when they had no choice. Ask before touching. Don’t say “at least.” Don’t make promises memory cannot keep. Their jokes are not consent to ignore pain.

Your throat closed.

“You wrote me down,” you said.

Clark followed your gaze. “Yes.”

“Not like a case.”

“No.”

“Not like a problem.”

“No.”

“Then like what?”

He took so long to answer that you looked at him. His eyes were steady. “Like someone I’m trying to love responsibly.”

The room went silent. Even the city outside seemed to hush.

Your hand went slack in his. His expression changed immediately.

“I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “That was too much. I shouldn’t have—”

“Do you mean it?”

Clark’s mouth closed. He looked frightened.

Not of loving you. Of mishandling the word.

“Yes,” he said.

You could barely breathe. “You’ll forget.”

“I’ll remember that I chose it.”

“That’s not the same.”

“No,” he whispered. “It’s not.”

The honesty cut again. But this time, you did not bleed alone.

Clark turned your hand gently in his, palm up, giving you time to pull away. When you didn’t, he rested his fingers over your pulse.

“I don’t expect that to make it easy,” he said. “Or enough. I don’t expect you to trust it because I said it beautifully in bad lighting.”

A laugh broke through your tears. His smile trembled.

“I know this is unfair,” he continued. “I know caring about me might hurt you. I know being cared for by me might hurt worse because sometimes I’ll look at you and lose everything. I hate that. I hate it so much I don’t know where to put the feeling.”

His fingers were warm against your wrist.

“But when I forget you,” he said, “something in me still reaches. Maybe that isn’t memory. Maybe it’s not enough to call love. But it’s real. You are real. And I want to keep choosing what’s real, even when something is trying to take it from me.”

You cried quietly. Clark let you.

He did not ask you to answer. He did not ask you to be okay. He sat beside you until dawn diluted the windows from black to grey.

At some point, your head tipped onto his shoulder. At some point, he rested his cheek against your hair. At some point, both of you slept.

When you woke, Clark’s hand was still in yours. His eyes were open. He had been staring at the ceiling.

You shifted. He looked down immediately. Recognition sparked. Held.

“Hi,” he whispered.

You swallowed. “Hi.”

His smile was soft and wrecked. “I didn’t forget.”

Your hand tightened around his. “You didn’t let go.”

“No.”

“You stayed awake?”

He hesitated. “Mostly.”

“Clark.”

“I blinked a lot.”

“That is not sleep.”

“I’ve had worse nights.”

You wanted to scold him. Instead, you pressed your face into his shoulder.

He went very still. Then, slowly, his free arm came around you.

You stayed there until the sun rose properly.

Later, Lois arrived with breakfast, fury, concern, and three coffees.

Clark opened the door while still holding your hand, which meant Lois got the full visual of Superman in sweatpants attached to a blanket-wrapped stranger by interlaced fingers.

She stared.

Clark said, “Lois, this is—”

He told her your name. Lois’ expression softened.

“Hi,” she said.

You braced. “Hi.”

She looked away to hand Clark the coffee tray.

Then she looked back.

Blank. Only for a second. Then her eyes dropped to your joined hands, to Clark’s face, to the wall of notes behind him. Understanding returned without memory.

“Oh,” Lois said quietly.

She did not ask who you were. She did not make you explain.

She set the coffee down, looked you directly in the eyes, and said, “Hi. I’m Lois. I’m probably going to forget you in about five seconds because apparently the universe has decided to be tacky and derivative, but Clark cares about you, which means you’re under my jurisdiction now.”

You stared.

Clark sighed. “Lois.”

“What? It’s true.”

“I’m not a jurisdiction.”

Lois pointed at you. “See? They get it.”

You laughed. Lois smiled.

Then she glanced toward the kitchen. When she looked back, confusion crossed her face again.

Clark played a recording. Lois listened, jaw tightening. Then she looked at you again.

“Hi,” she said, gentler this time. “I’m Lois. Sorry about the universe. Very poor taste.”

You laughed harder. It hurt and helped.

That became part of your life, too.

Not normal. Never normal.

But something.

Clark’s apartment became a place where you could exist for stretches longer than stolen minutes. Bruce developed a wristband that played reminders when someone nearby forgot you, though he pretended it was only a prototype and not an act of love by another name. Zatanna kept searching for the root of the curse. Lois made a shared document titled Operation Remember The Coolest Ghost We Know, which Clark said was insensitive and you said was hilarious.

Jimmy met you six times in one afternoon and eventually started wearing a sticky note on his camera strap that said, IF CLARK INTRODUCES YOU TO SOMEONE, BE CHILL.

Perry forgot you mid-sentence and continued yelling at the empty space where his complaint had been headed. You liked him immediately.

There were bad days. Many.

There were days Clark forgot and the sight of blankness in his eyes made you physically step back. Days he reached for your hand too quickly and you flinched. Days you did not answer the phone. Days you walked through Metropolis feeling the old hunger of the edge calling your name in a voice no one else remembered.

But there were other days too. Days Clark found you at the diner and slid into the booth with a recorder already on.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi.”

“I’m Clark.”

“I know.”

“Can I sit?”

“You already are.”

“Good point.”

Days he took you flying and held your hand the entire time, even when you teased him for being nervous.

“You are not allowed to drop me,” you said.

“I would never drop you.”

“You say that now, but what if there’s a bird?”

“A bird?”

“A dramatic pigeon.”

“I can handle a pigeon.”

“You say that, but Metropolis pigeons have organised-crime energy.”

Clark laughed so hard he nearly forgot to watch where he was going.

Days you stood in his kitchen peeling oranges while he wrote articles at the table. He would glance away by accident, lose you, read the note taped to his laptop, and look back with sorrow.

“Hi,” he’d say. And sometimes you would have the strength to answer kindly. Sometimes you wouldn’t. Clark learned not to punish you for either.

Months after the skyscraper, Zatanna called. Clark put her on speaker because his hand was occupied with yours. You were both sitting on his fire escape in the blue hour before evening, knees pressed together, the city cooling around you.

“I found something,” Zatanna said.

Clark straightened. You went cold.

“Not a cure,” she added quickly.

The hope that had lunged forward in Clark’s face stumbled.

You squeezed his hand. He squeezed back.

“What is it?” you asked.

“A theory. Your power doesn’t erase you exactly. It interrupts continuity. People can perceive you, but the moment visual attention breaks, the mind fails to connect the perception to identity. Clark’s hearing bypasses part of that because he recognises your heartbeat as a pattern rather than a visual memory.”

“So my face is doomed, but my heart has branding.”

Clark huffed a laugh despite himself.

Zatanna sounded amused. “Something like that.”

“What about touch?” Clark asked.

“Touch seems to create a stronger continuity loop. Especially with emotional attachment. It gives the mind another path back.”

Clark looked at your joined hands. You looked at the city.

“There may be ways to strengthen that,” Zatanna said. “Anchors. Repetition. Objects with emotional charge. Shared rituals. The more paths a person has to you, the harder the forgetting has to work.”

You swallowed. “Does that mean someday he could remember without touching me?”

“Maybe.”

The word landed softly this time.

Not as a promise. As a door not yet opened.

You had learned to distrust maybe. But maybe had changed shape in Clark’s hands. It no longer meant a doctor refusing to say no. A case worker avoiding your eyes. A parent trying to make hope sound responsible.

Now, maybe meant work. Messy. Slow. Human.

Clark looked at you. His eyes asked the question he would never force aloud.

Do you want to try?

You looked down at your hands, at his thumb resting over your knuckles, at the city beneath you that had not become kinder but had become less empty.

“Okay,” you said.

Clark’s breath caught. “Okay?”

“One path at a time.”

His smile rose slowly. Like sunrise. Like oranges. Like something bright insisting on itself after a long winter.

“One path at a time,” he repeated.

You leaned your head against his shoulder.

Below, Metropolis roared and forgot and lived. Above, the first star appeared in the bruised blue sky.

Clark looked at it.

For one second, his gaze left you. You felt the old fear rise, automatic and sharp.

Then his hand tightened around yours. He looked back.

Still there. Still Clark. Still knowing.

“Hi,” he said softly.

You smiled.

Not because everything was fixed. It wasn’t. Not because the loneliness had vanished. It hadn’t. But because the world had spent your whole life teaching you that love was impossible without permanence, and Clark Kent, stubborn farm boy, impossible alien, disaster of a journalist, had begun proving something else.

That sometimes love was not never forgetting. Sometimes love was building a thousand ways back.

“Hi, Clark,” you said.

His eyes warmed. “Tell me something.”

You looked out over the city. Traffic moved like blood through streets of light. Somewhere far away, someone called for help and Clark’s head tilted slightly, listening. His hand stayed in yours.

You thought about your mother humming. Your father’s red string. The bridge. The fire. The bench. The rain. All the versions of you that had stood at the edge of the world, waiting for absence to become proof.

You were still afraid. Maybe you always would be.

But your hand was held. Your heart was heard. For tonight, that was a kind of miracle.

“I used to think gravity was the only thing that remembered me,” you said.

Clark went very still. You felt his grief move through him.

Then his thumb brushed your knuckles. “And now?”

You turned your face toward him. This time, when he looked at you, you did not feel like a ghost. You felt like a person standing in the fragile, unfinished architecture of being loved.

“Now,” you said, “I think maybe the heart does too.”

Clark’s smile trembled. “Yes,” he whispered. “It does.”

Somewhere below, the city forgot your name.

Clark held your hand. And stayed.

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