Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Homecoming 20

“We’ve got to get to my car,” Lois said.

They were in the back of the house and her car was still parked in the front. She had the keys, and once they were on the road, their chances would be much better.

“It’s the first thing they’ll be looking for,” Clark said. He glanced back at her house and stared for a long moment, then said, “I wouldn’t be surprised if they had someone out there watching your car right now.”

“So what do we do?” Lois asked. “You didn’t leave your bike in the front, did you?”

Clark shook his head. “I dropped it when I heard you scream.”

Lois frowned. Wouldn’t it have been faster to ride his bicycle than to run?

“I’ll get it when we get to the end of the block,” Clark said. He looked carefully in both directions, and they headed up the dark alley.

“Wouldn’t it make sense for them to be looking for us right here?” Lois asked. “It’s not like there’s a lot of places we could go.”

The alley was a bad place to be. Lois was pretty sure that her neighbors kept their postage stamp size yards and garages locked tight, and there weren’t many hiding places.

Clark glanced upward at the streetlights above. They were sparse here, a fact that her father had complained about numerous times as he took this route to park his car.

One of the lights burst above them, followed by another, and then another.

Lois clutched Clark’s arm in the sudden darkness, stumbling a little. Her heart began to race again. Was someone shooting out the lights?

Clark pulled her to the side, through a gate as lights appeared at the end of the alley. He pulled her down, shutting the gate only moments before the light from the car played over the gate they’d just come through.

Lois crouched down as the car on the other side moved slowly down the alleyway. Lois peered through the fence and she could see some sort of dark vehicle with floodlights playing up and down the alley.

Dogs were barking sporadically up and down the alley, sensing that something was wrong.

Lois froze as she heard the doors to the vehicle open and men got out. They had flashlights and they were trying gates to see if any were unlocked. This caused some of the dogs to go into even more of a frenzy.

They were approaching the gate Lois and Clark were hiding behind.

The gate was secured by the same kind of gate latch Lois had in her own back yard, the kind that had a latch which gripped a metal bar unless pushed up, or unless something was inserted into it, like the bar from a metal lock.

Lois didn’t think she had anything that would work; a pen wouldn’t feel the same, and it wasn’t as though Clark could hold the latch closed without it giving enough to warn the man on the other side. Nobody had that kind of gripping strength.

Tensing, Lois readied herself to fight as well as she could, although she suspected the men all had guns.

The man rattled the gate for a moment and moved on.

Lois stared at Clark; the questions about him kept mounting.

***********

“I didn’t know the bus even ran in my neighborhood!” Lois said. Clark had gone to retrieve his bike and his bag, and somehow he’d managed to come up with a coat and a hat from his bag, even though it didn’t make any sense for him to have them. The night was only cool.

There’s been a whooshing sound when he went to retrieve his bike and bag, a sound Lois was coming to associate with Clark’s oddness. His bike had even been unnaturally warm for some reason. He’d stuffed her purse in his bag and had put both in a plastic bag, the kind he used to collect cans.

“Before I got my bicycle, I learned the routes pretty well,” Clark said. “Bus and subway. You’d be surprised how easy it is to get around that way in Metropolis.”

What had surprised Lois was how thoroughly invisible she’d become once she’d put the coat and cap on. Clark had smudged her face and he’d taught her the basics of looking homeless. Somehow he’d come up with his own outfit.

Both smelled clean but looked smudged and dirty.

Clark admitted that he sometimes used them to out among homeless men who hadn’t met him before; he said he kept a second coat to give out if someone needed it.

None of that explained how he’d had both coats on a night that was only a little cool.

The men in the dark truck had driven right by them and hadn’t taken a second look at them. When they’d gotten on the bus, the few other passengers had purposefully made a point of looking away from them. It was like they were ghosts.

It was horrible in a way, although Lois had been glad to be overlooked.

He’d taken her to a public restroom and encouraged her to use the facilities. Trying to wash her face had been a mistake; whatever he’d used smudged even worse and Lois now looked like a refugee from a Dickens novel.

Now Lois stared at the expanse of chain link fence in front of her.

Clark led her until they came to a gap in the fence, and he slipped his bicycle through it with what looked like a lot of experience. He held the links of the fence open for her.

“What are we doing here?” Lois asked.

They were in a self-storage facility not too far from the bar Clark had helped her extract Ellen Lane from.

Lois had been forced to help her mother move her furniture into a place like this after she moved out; her father, of course had used a moving company.

Clark held his hand up in a gesture that obviously meant she needed to be quiet.

He led her to a building on the edge of the property, near the gap in the fence. The storage units all had roll up doors, a little like garage doors.

Clark quickly unlocked a combination lock and pulled it off. He carefully lifted the door until it was high enough to admit his bicycle, and then he gestured Lois inside.

The lights here were dim, and Lois could only see blackness inside the unit. She looked at him for a moment, and he gestured again, glancing down the path toward what presumably was the manager’s office.

They’d seen a murder together, and Clark had risked his life for her. If that wasn’t a good basis for trust, Lois didn’t know what was.

She stepped inside, and Clark followed her. He gently lowered the door, slowly enough that it didn’t make much of a sound.

She stood in the darkness for a long moment, before she whispered, “Clark?”

He switched the light on, and she gasped.

It was a unit that was ten feet wide by fifteen foot long. A battered futon covered in a black quilt was on her right against the wall, with a nightstand made of a milk crate having an old lamp on it. Next to the milk crate night stand was a mini-fridge set up on concrete blocks.

He’d made bookshelves out of boards and concrete blocks and they were covered with old used paperbacks.

Instead of posters, the walls were covered with tools; rakes and hoes, even a small hand mower, the kind that didn’t use gasoline.

He had several chests which were battered; they were in all sorts of different styles. Nothing matched; it was as though he’d gone shopping at a flea market for everything he owned.

Notably, there was no television, no toilet and no sink.

It took Lois a moment to understand what she was seeing, even as Clark turned on the lamp and turned off the glaring overhead light.

“You live here?” she asked, stunned.

Clark hung his bicycle up on pegs on the wall. He took a deep breath before he turned back to face her. He nodded. “Does it matter?”

Suddenly a lot of things began to make sense. He showered at school because he didn’t have any other place to shower. He was friends with the homeless because he essentially was homeless.

He didn’t watch television because he didn’t have one.

Clark grabbed an iron bar leaning against the wall and he stuck it in the track that let the garage door move up and down. He wedged it so that if anyone outside tried to life the door, it wouldn’t open.

“Won’t someone notice the lock isn’t on the door outside?” Lois asked.

“I mostly don’t come here until it’s pretty late, and I leave early,” Clark said.

“Why?” Lois asked.

He didn’t have the usual girlie posters on his wall that most teenage boys seemed to have; there was no Heather Locklear or Farrah Faucett. All she saw was equipment to work.

“I got in trouble when I was fifteen,” Clark said. “I ran away. I lived on the streets here in Metropolis for about a year before Charlie helped me rent this place.”

“Why not get an apartment?” Lois asked. If Clark was on his own, he was essentially emancipated. She’d seen a movie about it once.

“You know how much it is for even a roach infested apartment in the worst part of town?” Clark asked. “About nine hundred dollars a month. I get this place for sixty five.”

With no water, heating or cooling, Lois could believe it.

“So Charlie knows you’re here?”

Clark shook his head. “Charlie thinks I keep my tools here. I had to have his help because I couldn’t rent the place underage. The good part is that there’s no paper trail leading here, and the owner has never even seen me.”

“This can’t be legal,” Lois muttered.

“It’s a civil matter,” Clark said. “Not criminal. The owner would have to go to small claims court to get me out, although I don’t plan on ever making him have that choice.”

It still seemed to stretch an ethical line to Lois, although she could see how it would be better than being stuck outside.

“It’s important to have some place to keep things,” Clark said. “When I didn’t have a roof over my head, it was hard to work. Now I do yard work in the summers and dig snow in the winter.”

Along with being a bicycle messenger, having a paper route and being a can and glass recycler.

“You stay here in the winter?” Lois asked. It seemed like it would get pretty cold even with the heat from the lights.

“I’m pretty tough,” Clark said. “It doesn’t bother me much.”

“Why are you doing all this?”

“I’ve got enough money collected for my first year of college if I live like this,” Clark said. “If I have to stay in the dorms it’s enough for half a semester.”

It made Lois’s struggles to win a scholarship so she wouldn’t have to owe her father seem petty.

Clark began stripping the futon, putting the heavy blankets on the floor. He went to one of the chests and pulled out a fresh set of sheets.

For someone who lived in squalor, Clark was remarkably neat and tidy.

Lois frowned. It occurred to her that Clark had never smelled bad, even when he’d just gotten off work. She’d assumed that he showered again, but he showered at school for a reason. Most of the bicycle messengers who had delivered things for her father had smelled bad.

“How do you keep everything from stinking?” Lois asked. She flushed as she realized what she’d just asked, but it was a valid question. She hadn’t been in many teenage boys’ rooms, but the ones she’d been in had smelled a lot like the boy’s locker rooms at school.

This place smelled fresh and clean.

“There’s a Laundromat nearby,” Clark said.

“No, I mean…you. Everything should smell like sweat.”

“I don’t sweat much,” Clark said.

“Everybody sweats,” Lois said skeptically.

He shrugged. “Not me.”

Although some of her questions had been answered, many more remained.
**************

Lois tossed and turned. The futon didn’t smell bad, but it wasn’t comfortable either, and worse, she was having to sleep in her clothes.

“Are you all right?” Clark asked.

“I’m hot,” Lois admitted. She knew it was silly, but the air felt stuffy, and knowing they couldn’t open a window or turn on an air conditioner made her feel as though she were suffocating.

The darkness was oppressive, darker than anything Lois had ever experienced in her life. She felt as though she was trapped in a grave.

What she’d seen happen to Joe kept playing over and over in her head, making sleep elusive at best. It was as though her mind was a record player skipping, stuck in one position and repeating the same part of the song over and over.

Clark was silent for a moment, and then the now familiar whooshing sound occurred again. Lois felt cool air passing over her skin.

Lois sat up straight and fumbled for the lamp by the bed. She switched the light on.

“What did you just do?” Lois demanded. “How do you keep doing these things?”

Clark stared up at her from the floor with a startled expression, like a deer in the headlights.

“You keep doing things nobody can do, impossible things, and you can’t expect me not to notice,” Lois said. “You owe me an explanation!”

Lois knew she was taking it too far; he’d saved her life more than once and he didn’t owe her anything more than what he was willing to share. Yet he couldn’t think she’d be so stupid as not to notice.

He’d been a lot less careful since Joe had died. It was almost as though he was begging her to notice.

Staring at her for a moment, Clark finally looked down at his covers and sighed.

“I could have saved Joe tonight,” Clark said. “If I’d understood what was happening.”

Lois shook her head. “I told you once already, there was nothing you could have done. It wasn’t humanly possible.”

“Whoever said I was human?”