Author's Note: this is a two part fic, it's post reconing clois and clana never happened if only tptb would agree with me. this was supposed to be a one shot but it got a little too long, this is my first fic so don't be too brutal, but please read and leave a review ,they're what gets me writting.

He was gone. Not the 'oh I'll be back in a few days' kind of gone, but gone like never coming back. He was dead. The body was dressed, the coffin was closed and it was all lowered down. The sound of the dirt hitting the coffin trapping his body forever echoed hollowly against his ears breaking the deafening silence. His father's life marked with a slab of stone, that's all it ever amounts to, that's where everyone ends up, six feet below.

"It's my fault" Clark whispered into the empty, motionless air that surrounded him in his loft, the one his father built for him.

His hearing picked up on the light footsteps against the gravel driveway and the deep breaths that could only belong to one person, the one he considered his best friend.

"Did I just think that?" he asked the air forgetting about the soon to be presence.

"Think what Smallville?"

Yup it was her,the one person that made him smile more than anyone else could. She broke through the fifty-foot cement wall he had so recently built around his feelings and secrets and that was just plain scary. She knew him too well and that's why he was afraid.

"Nothing I was just talking to myself." Or at least that's what he wanted her to think.

"You know, in my book talking to yourself constitutes as crazy." She delivered with sarcasm, her tone changing from a questioning one to the lighthearted tone he heard so often. Her patented I'm-going-to-talk-you're-going-to-listen tone.

"Oh yeah he asked?" questioning her for once.

"Yeah along with people who mumble under their breaths, twitching along with mashing up your peas before you mix them with your potatoes."

"Hey! I do the last one and I'm not weird." he shot back, hoping to get in a word edge-wise with the fast-paced, quick-witted person he has given up his room to.

"Wanna bet, I have a whole list that says otherwise," Lois declared soaking up the victory she had just recently gathered.

"I set myself up for that one didn't I?" Clark moaned, realizing that she had won this round.

"You bet you did farmboy, getting slow in your old age."

"Hey you're almost two years older than I am so you can quit talking." he declared not wanting to loose twice to Lois in a five minute period.

"Actually it's one year, three months and fourteen days, but whose really counting." She replied mater-o-factly, not wanting to be older than she already felt at twenty-seven.

"Sure whatever helps you sleep at night." he shot back proud of himself for coming up with a comeback Lois Lane would deem worthy of being thrown at her.

"Ok Smallville, all of this talking made me forget what I was going to say." She declared noticing the irony of what she just said.

"Oh and what was that?"

Knowing that this was a difficult and that she was walking on glass here she reluctantly pressed on wanting to get through the entire conversation. But when dealing with Clark an entire conversation of substance would be compressed and compacted into a total of three sentences.

She said the dreaded words that no matter how you hard you try to change or reshape them into something different or better they always end up as unoriginal, clichéd

Words that then to have little meaning and here they came.

"How are you feeling?" she asked, already knowing the answer to that question before she even asked it.

"I ..I … uhhhh"