"Dad, unless that kick is from a grandé cup of something caffeinated, I could really use another ten minutes," Chloe grumbled sleepily when something nudged her foot.

"You can take ten or twenty for all I care, but not in my field!"

Chloe's eyes flew open and she bolted upright. "You're not my dad!"

"'Course not, no daughter of mine would be spending the night in a cornfield." The landowner looked down at Chloe and Clark, who was still asleep, with obvious disdain.

Chloe ignored him. "Daylight!" she cried in a panic. "Clark, wake up - wake up, we fell asleep and the sun is up!" She shook his shoulder.

Clark opened his eyes groggily and sat up, looking around in confusion. "Where…?" Then realization dawned on him. "Daylight! We fell asleep! How could we fall asleep? What time is it?" He'd been drained by the events of the previous night, and when he finally knew that his family was safe and he could still do nothing but wait, he and Chloe had laid down and evidently succumbed to their exhaustion.

It wasn't until he stood and began assessing his strength to see if he could fly again that he even noticed the man standing before them. "Who are you?"

"Considering this is my field, I think I'm the one who gets to ask the questions. Now who are you?"

Clark took Chloe by the hand and began to back away. "We're uh… we're leaving," he answered.

The man chuckled and dropped his gaze to his feet, intending to deliver a pompous retort when he looked up again - only to find himself face to face with empty morning air.

"Should you have done that right in front of him?" Chloe asked with concern after they'd found cover behind a stand of maple trees.

Clark shrugged. "It's not the first time. He won't know what he saw or didn't see, he'll just figure his eyes are playing tricks on him or something. We don't have time to waste standing around trying to explain ourselves. What time is it?"

Chloe checked her phone. "It's eight o'clock - we only lost an hour."

"Only an hour?"

"Well, it could have been worse! Everybody's safe - "

"For now," Clark huffed. "We have to get back now." Clark ran a hand over his face and looked up at the sky.

Chloe looked up with him. "Do you think you can do it?"

Clark stood, hands on his hips and face turned upward. "Won't know until I try." He took a deep breath and scratched his head, then held his arm out to Chloe. "Come here, and - "

"I know, hold on," Chloe smiled. This time, without being surrounded by commandos and knowing what it was that Clark was trying to do, she couldn't quell her excitement.

Clark closed his eyes, and was surprised to find that he almost effortlessly drifted through the veil in his mind that partitioned him from Kal-El. He felt light again, suspended gently in emptiness.

"Clark?" Chloe's voice sounded distant, but it echoed through his mind and became louder until he opened his eyes.

"Hmm?" He felt an odd sort of peacefulness.

"You did it," Chloe whispered.

Clark looked down to see that they had indeed risen over the trees. He smiled down at Chloe and held her tightly. "Are you scared?"

Chloe shook her head. "No, this is… this is incredible." Clark realized that the distance in Chloe's voice wasn't due to his retreat into his mind, it was because she herself had retreated into wonderment. "Are you?"

Clark smiled and breathed in the stratosphere. "Not anymore. Let's go home."

"I am so sorry!" Lana cried as she already had at least a dozen times, bustling past Marin with a tray of steaming lattes. "Five more minutes, tops!" An unexpected rush of customers had flooded the Talon, requiring Lana to remain at her post for another ninety minutes.

"Don't worry, take your time," Marin replied sincerely, hoping the delay would leave enough time for the situation at the Kent farm to be remedied before Lana Lang arrived to witness it. Her news was going to be wrenching enough to deliver without adding Clark's undoubted anger if she were to get Lana involved, however inadvertently. She'd tried to go on alone, but Lana insisted on playing chauffer and kept placating her with pastries. Exhausted as she was, she let herself go blank and accept the momentary respite.

The crowd was finally thinning and two more members of the late-morning crew had arrived, so Lana quickly untied her apron and grabbed her jacket. "Come on, let's make a break for it."

Marin followed Lana to her SUV, and once settled into the passenger seat she realized that, despite her fatigue, she felt strong, healthy - indeed, better than she could ever remember feeling. She couldn't imagine why, given that she'd spent half the night crouched on the floor, three hours on the torn vinyl seat of a bus, and then walked to downtown Smallville. She should at least be sore.

They flew at the same tremendous speed as the night before - making the trip from Roseville, Minnesota to Smallville, Kansas in mere moments - but this time Clark eased up on his pace before attempting to land, bringing himself and Chloe gently back to the earth without missing a step.

Chloe found her second plane-free flight just as speech-robbing as her first, and couldn't tear her eyes away from the hole in the roof of the Kent barn as she and Clark glided over it. There were moments in the last twelve hours in which she'd been able to just be Chloe, exchanging witty banter and the occasional meaningful gaze with her "once-almost-more-than-a-friend." Now she marveled at how she'd been able to speak at all, because there wasn't a thing about what she'd learned since the night before that didn't leave her breathless.

"Are you okay, Chloe?" Clark was beginning to question the wisdom of letting anyone fly with him, if it was affecting enough to leave even Chloe Sullivan without words - twice, at that.

Chloe nodded emphatically, though her eyes still looked far away. "Yeah, I'm great, really." She smiled reassuringly.

"Clark?" Martha emerged from the front door, her voice all at once relieved, anxious, questioning and protective. "Clark! Oh, thank God!" She ran to him and flung her arms around his neck. Tears that she hadn't intended to shed fell onto his collar. "Even though I'm usually sure you're going to be okay, I can never believe it until you're actually here."

Clark's knee-jerk reaction to his mother was unexpectedly emotional. She had such strength that even when it was tested to its furthest limits - and being Clark's mother had its share of tests - she usually maintained her relatively calm, if tearful inner fortitude. She had to hold herself up through so many trials, and when they were over she continued to stand tall, because whether or not they always knew it, she was a pillar on which the Kent men relied.

Admissions of deep fear were rare from Martha Kent, as were tears from her son, and few things apart from his mother's vulnerability could elicit them from Clark. Overnight, Clark had bridged his heart with his destiny, and now he knew that there was nothing he wouldn't do, nowhere he wouldn't go, nobody he wouldn't face, if it meant he could save anyone the anguish he saw in his own mother's eyes.

Jonathan was overwhelmed when he saw his son, standing strong and tall as he always did, in defiance of Jonathan's mortal expectations. Despite all he knew about Clark, the anxious father in him always half believed that his son would return mangled, bruised, bloody - or in his worst nightmares, not at all. Though an interval of two hours had passed since he'd learned that Clark was unharmed, each of the one-hundred twenty minutes that ticked by was an arrow that pierced him, reminding him that he had not yet seen, and could not yet be certain. He believed in Clark without reservation, but when his son was out of sight and danger lurked nearby, Jonathan didn't have the power to keep himself from fearing.

Conquered as he was by the veracity of his emotions, Jonathan could only wordlessly join his family, enclosing his wife and son in his embrace as they all gave themselves over to bittersweet reunion.

Chloe stood nearby and watched without an inkling of discomfort. Less than a day earlier she'd have uttered one of her famously snarky excuses to slink away, leaving the family to regroup. But now she understood, she'd seen the other side, she'd seen the things that Jonathan and Martha Kent had always known about their son, and as awestruck as she was by all that she'd learned, she marveled with almost even incredulity at these two people - people gravely underestimated. People with superhuman abilities to manage a secret - and to unquestioningly choose to love what must have been the most unusual child on Earth. An astounding feat demanding greater valor than most mere humans possessed. The Kents were superheroes.

None of the four knew how long they'd been standing motionless in the drive, but when Martha turned her head slightly to wipe a tear from her cheek, she caught sight of Chloe for the first time. "Chloe!" she exclaimed, and Jonathan snapped to attention as well.

"Hi, Chloe," Jonathan began, trying to adopt a normal, casual demeanor. "How long have you been there?"

Clark walked over to Chloe and led her closer to his parents. "She came with me, Dad. Remember? I told you she was with me."

Perplexed and somewhat panicked, Jonathan and Martha exchanged a look of alarm that had become a familiar ritual over the years. "Yes…" Jonathan said slowly. "I remember."

"It's okay, Dad. She knows - she knows everything."

Jonathan rubbed his chin and looked deeply considerate. "Do you think that was necessary, Son?"

"I really couldn't avoid it, Dad."

"How's that?"

Clark turned toward the barn, looking up at the jagged edges of the boards surrounding the hole left by their escape. "We were surrounded."

In his angst, Jonathan hadn't even noticed that his barn was yawning openly to the sky. His jaw dropped and he ran inside to look up through the rafters, and the others followed suit. Mystified, he turned to Clark. "What happened?"

"I, uh… flew through the roof?" Clark toed the floor, listlessly nudging a piece of straw from side to side; an old habit from the days when he would break lamps, furniture, farm equipment - and then endure another lecture on how vital it was that he learn to curb his strength.

Both Jonathan and Martha were struck silent, trying to reconstruct the event in their minds as they regarded the shards of the formerly intact roof. "You flew through the roof…" Jonathan repeated in astonishment.

Chloe, having gone a record-breaking interlude without uttering a word, finally spoke. "You know, I always thought this place could use a skylight."

Martha released her bundled nerves in an airy laugh. "Oh, Chloe!" She crossed the debris in the middle of the barn to hug the girl. "I'm so sorry - how are you handling this?"

Chloe gratefully accepted and returned the hug, but looked at Martha in shock. "You're sorry? What on Earth for? You were tied up in the kitchen all night, I went joyriding in mid-air."

"Joyriding?" Jonathan raised an eyebrow along with his parental radar.

Clark looked up innocently. "No, Dad - she just means that we were okay, and - well, we were flying, but we were okay."

Jonathan looked up at the gaping hole again until it almost made him dizzy. He stumbled back a step and Clark held out an arm to steady him.

"You okay Dad?"

Jonathan put a hand on Clark's shoulder. "This just might take me a while to get my head around," he said with a warm smile. "We'd better get this covered until we can fix it - I don't know how we'd explain this to people."

Clark jumped at the thought. "Lex! Lex saw this, didn't he?"

"He might have," Martha speculated.

"He was here, right?"

Jonathan nodded, wishing it weren't true. "Yes, he was here, and about that, Son - "

"Later, Dad - we'll talk inside. First, like you said, we should get the roof covered. I'll do that, won't take a minute. Did you get all the Kryptonite out?"

Martha nodded. "At least we think so. There was a lot of it - the refined bars, the ones Lionel had in his office."

Clark winced. "Did Lex see that too?"

Jonathan nodded. "He couldn't have missed it, it was everywhere."

"Great." Clark closed his eyes and shook his head. "There's no way to explain that."

"We'll figure something out, Clark." Chloe assured.

"I don't know how that's possible," he said, shaking his head again. Resolving to think about it after he'd taken care of the business at hand, he turned to focus through the barn and into the house. "There are a few bars left."

"Where?" Martha cried, alarmed.

"Two under the front steps, one under my bed, one under your dresser, and one in the refrigerator."

"The fridge? That's creative," Chloe smirked.

"Okay, well, we'll take care of that, and you cover the roof, and then you two can get cleaned up and we'll talk about Lex."

"Jonathan, they're probably starving."

"Okay, you can eat, and then we'll talk about Lex."

"Sounds like a plan," Chloe agreed, and followed Jonathan and Martha back to the house.

Clark had covered the roof with an old tarp and lashed it to the eaves before the front door had even closed behind the others, so he walked the perimeter of the yard to survey the trampled landscape of his home as he waited for the all-clear. He'd just rounded the corner behind the barn when he thought he faintly heard the crunch of tires down the road. He tuned his hearing and heard voices - female, talking about recipes, Metropolis, waiting tables, coffee, Paris… Lana! And Marin? Flustered, knowing there was no way to hide the damage inflicted by last night's visitors, Clark sped down the lane and pretended to be crossing the road, just before the car and its occupants were close enough to see that anything was amiss.

The car slowed to a stop and Lana rolled her window down. "Out jogging?"

Clark drew a deep breath and nodded, trying to look at least a little winded. "Oh, yeah - miles. Hi Lana." He nodded and peered through the driver's side window at the passenger. "Marin?"

Marin smiled sheepishly. "Hi, Clark," she squeaked.

"This is… a surprise." To Marin's relief, he didn't look entirely unhappy - albeit confused, and rightly so.

"Yeah, I know, I'm sorry to just drop in, but - I…"

Clark didn't know why she was there, but he was certain that her reason couldn't be shared in front of Lana. "No need to explain. Want to walk from here?"

"Sure," Marin nodded and unbuckled her seatbelt. She surmised that Clark must have heard them coming, and that her suspicions were correct - he didn't want Lana or anybody else anywhere near the Kent farm.

"I can drive you both the rest of the way, if you want," Lana offered.

"Nah, it's not far, and it's a nice morning for a walk."

"Well, actually, giving Marin a ride is only half the reason I'm here. Is your mom okay?"

Clark blinked uncertainly. "My mom?"

"Yeah, she was supposed to open the Talon this morning, and - "

"Oh yeah! Yeah of course." Clark nodded a little too affirmatively.

"So, she's okay?"

"Yeah, she's - well no, she's sick, but she'll be fine. Just a bug." Clark threw an anxious glance toward Marin.

"She, um… she didn't call in."

Clark slapped his forehead. "Ah, that's my fault - the phone's not working and my dad asked me to stop by and tell you she couldn't come, and I just - I completely forgot."

Lana gave Clark the slow, subtle nod she'd become all too accustomed to, after a litany of "I forgot's" and "I have to go's." It didn't surprise her anymore. "Well, just tell her I hope she feels better soon. It was nice to meet you, Marin. Stop by again before you leave. Bye Clark." She rolled her window up and turned around, driving back the way she came.

Clark watched her go, still and silent.

"I'm sorry, Clark, she insisted on driving me, I couldn't talk her out of it."

Clark inhaled deeply. "It's okay, it doesn't matter. She's gone, and we have bigger things to worry about."

You have no idea.

"Do you know what happened here last night?"

"Look, Clark, there's something I have to tell you - "

Clark was looking skyward, almost trancelike. "I flew last night. And this morning." He hadn't heard her.

"See, something happened at the lab, and… what?" Marin's eyes widened and she couldn't suppress a grin. "You flew? Really? You didn't just float?"

"No, I - it was amazing, I just… okay. Lionel Luthor had all these men here last night, you know - and they had Chloe and I cornered in the barn, and we had no other way out so I just - I kind of pushed through something, and then I did it." Clark's eyes were alight like a little boy who'd received the train set he'd begged for on Christmas morning.

Oh, he's so young to be so old. "That's fantastic, Clark! I had no idea you'd be able to do it that soon, that's - that's incredible!"

"Well, I was really motivated."

"And this morning? Did it work the same way?"

Clark shook his and smiled. "No, I hardly had to think about it at all, it was like I just told myself to fly, and I did. I don't know - I think that whatever happened last night broke something loose. I feel… different. Once the sun came up this morning and I was recharged I felt… well, I felt different. It's hard to describe."

"I'm really happy for you, Clark, that's fantastic." Marin was sincere, but she couldn't keep the traces of sadness out of her voice.

Clark realized that the reason for her visit must have serious repercussions, or she wouldn't risk it at a time like this. "So, why did you come all the way out here?"

Marin caught her breath and closed her eyes. They were walking up the drive now. Soon they'd be at the house. This might be the only chance she'd have to talk to him alone, and she couldn't bear to tell him why she was there in front of his family. She had just mustered the courage and very nearly the words to go with it when Martha walked outside.

"Clark, it's not quite - oh, hello?" Martha looked quizzically from Clark to Marin.

"It's okay Mom, this is Marin Blake - she's part of Dr. Swann's team."

"Oh! Yes, of course, to what do we owe the honor?" Even when surprised, Martha Kent was quick with courtesy, and she didn't yet know that what had befallen her family the night before was partially due to Dr. Swann's team

Marin hesitated. "Maybe we should go inside first."

"Oh, certainly - I just have to get these last two bars from under the steps." Martha knelt to reach between the slats.

"Bars?" Marin queried.

"Kryptonite," Clark explained. "The house was full of refined Kryptonite bars."

"Ah - Luthor."

"Clark, where exactly are they under here? I can't feel anything." Martha had one arm under the steps up to her shoulder, feeling in the mud for something smooth and lethal.

Clark focused his vision. "You've almost got one, just a little to your left there," he called.

"Here, let me give you a hand," Marin offered, approaching the steps. She was still several feet away when her insides suddenly twisted and she reeled back, struggling for breath as she clutched at her abdomen.

Martha had just gotten a hand around one of the bars when she heard Marin hit the ground, and wheeled to help the girl. "Marin, what happened? What's wrong?"

"Mom! What's going on?" Clark shouted from the minimal safe distance.

"I don't know! She - " Then Martha saw it. She had moved her hand closer to Marin - the hand holding the Kryptonite - and the girl's veins bulged through her skin, green and thickly pulsing. She cried out and threw the green block as far as she could and tried to drag Marin away from the stairs.

As soon as they were close enough, Clark took over and pulled Marin out of range of the Kryptonite's effects.

"I'll get the other piece," Martha announced and ran back to the stairs.

"Marin?" Clark looked down at her, bewildered and concerned. "Marin, what was that? How could you possibly react like that?"