Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic In time, somewhere 2

There was something about his smile. The more she stared at the picture, the more Lois saw something she couldn’t describe. It was almost as though he was looking directly at her, smiling just for her.

He was handsome, but that alone wouldn’t have caught her attention. She’d dated attractive men in the past. Yet even if she hadn’t seen him on and off throughout her life, Lois suspected that she’d have been drawn to this picture.

There was something intimate about his expression, as though he was sharing something private just between him and her.

This wasn’t the usual picture from her great grandfather’s era, with stiff, emotionless features. This was the kind of smile that Lois would have felt touched to have directed in her direction at least once in her life.

It was the kind of smile she’d have loved to have been able to direct in someone else’s direction.

She’d always been a closet romantic, but secretly she’d always felt that deep down she was damaged, that she’d never really be able to love anyone. True love was a Hollywood fantasy; sweet, but ultimately a lie.

Seeing the life her parents had shared had caused her youthful dreams of romance to fade; the life she’d lived since had only proven to her just how much a sweet lie these fantasies really were.

There was an emptiness inside her that she knew wouldn’t ever be filled. She had her work, and sometimes her family and that would have to be enough.

Her chest ached a little as she stared at this picture. This was a man she could almost believe really had a great kind of love; not an actor paid to pretend, but someone staring out at something he treasured with his life.

She had no idea how long she stood, transfixed as she stared at the picture, but eventually the ache in her joints forced her back to reality. She still wasn’t healed.

Still, forcing herself to look away was a chore. It was bittersweet.

“He’s a handsome devil, isn’t he?”

Lois started. The man who’d been talking to her before had left. In his place was a distinguished looking woman in her early sixties.

“It’s a striking picture,” she admitted, forcing herself to turn away and look at the woman.

“I sometimes like to pretend it’s me he’s looking at,” the woman said. “It takes a lot of women that way.”

“I suppose he was quite the ladies’ man, for his day,” Lois said, her cynicism returning a little.

The older woman shook her head. “He had a manager who was determined not to allow relationships to interfere with a promising career. It’s said that he lived chaste as a monk until the final days when a he met a mysterious woman.”

“How can anyone be sure that they didn’t just run off together?”

Lois had looked into enough missing person cases to know that most of them were eventually solved. Usually the simplest explanation was the right one.

Of course, the simplest explanation in her case was that this Clark Kent had run off with some woman, had children and grandchildren and one of them looked almost identical to him and had been stalking her throughout her life.

The fact that he hadn’t aged or seemingly changed clothes in that time was…troubling.

“It was the night of the great fire. If it hadn’t been for him, dozens of people would have died. He carried people out of the flames, but the woman he’d been seeing went missing. He ran back into the burning building just before it collapsed.”

“And they found his body?”

“No bodies were ever found.”

There was an awkward silence as they stared at each other.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I haven’t introduced myself. I’m Irene Matheson. I volunteer to help maintain this museum.”

“Lois Lane,” Lois replied. “I’m a reporter for the Daily Planet. I’ve heard there are some ghost stories about this place.”

The woman smiled. “There are a few, but Mr. Kent is the only one I’ve actually seen in person.”

“You’ve seen him yourself?”

“I saw him the first time when I stayed here as a little girl,” the woman said. “I’ve seen him twice since then. There’s always such a look of sadness on his face; it breaks my heart. He looks lost.”

The woman seemed sincere enough; Lois would have been more cynical if it hadn’t been for her own experiences.

Lois forced herself to smile.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

*************

Multiple ghost investigators had investigated the hotel, with varying degrees of success, at least as they defined success. No one had ever produced any photographic evidence, and as far as Lois could see, most of it was the usual nonsense these people peddled- flickering lights, cold spots. These things were the stock in trade of hokum artists as far as Lois was concerned.

What startled her was that a physics professor from the University of Michigan had investigated as well, claiming to be looking for gravitational anomalies.

Although Lois usually left the Internet work to the office intern Jimmy, she was more than capable herself, and a quick look through Dr. Erskin’s work didn’t show anything related to ghosts or the supernatural.

If anything, a transcription of one podcast seemed to indicate that the man was an avowed atheist, with an almost condescending attitude towards people who were willing to take anything on faith.

The abstracts of his work online seemed to be highly esoteric, but as far as Lois could tell seemed to be focused on the relationship between gravity and time.

Although she wasn’t exactly intrigued, Lois’s work ethic forced her to call his office and ask for an appointment. The thought that he might be able to come up with an alternative explanation for what she’d seen was encouraging. He didn’t seem like the kind of person who would buy into the ghost nonsense.

She managed to get an appointment for ten the next morning, penned in by the graduate student who answered his telephone.

In the meantime, she tried to look more into the life of Clark Kent.

There wasn’t a lot online; his career hadn’t lasted long enough to make much of an impact on the stage, and he’d lived too far in the past to still have any real fans.

There weren’t even any recordings of his voice and pictures were few and far between.

He was born in 1886 in Kansas in a cow town called Smallville. He’d been a farmer until 1908 when both his parents had died from a localized typhoid epidemic when he was twenty two years old.

Somehow he’d been discovered by a theatrical agent William Robinson and had spent the next four years touring the country with a celebrated acting troupe. He’d eventually become one of the leading men in the troupe before vanishing on the night of the great fire. His agent later died during the sinking of the Lusitania.

Other than a few notes about the plays he’d been in, there wasn’t much more about his life online.

Lois scowled. It had been years since she’d had to go to a library; having Jimmy was making her soft.

**************
Although she was tired from her early flight, Lois managed to take a cab to the library. Finding what she needed took longer than she’d anticipated; the library was in the process of computerizing its archives and things weren’t where they were easily accessible.

Finally, however she had what the librarian swore was all the books available on the subject in the library without getting an inter-library loan. Apparently there was more information available about the man in Kansas because Smallville had very few even quasi-celebrities in its history.

Lois wasn’t sure she was going to be around long enough for the books to come through; with any luck she’d finish this assignment and get back to Metropolis where she belonged.

The longer she was away from the picture at the hotel, the more doubts assailed her mind. She’d only thought she’d seen the man a half dozen times in the past twenty years, but eyewitness testimony was notoriously unreliable. Lois herself hadn’t been a trained observer until relatively late in her life. As a child she’d been precocious but hardly the keen observer she considered herself now.

If it hadn’t been for the anomalous gray suit, she’d have written it off as a series of similar looking men who’d just been fortunately in the right place in the right time. The suit though, was distinctive. She couldn’t really see it in the picture in the museum, which was focused on his face, assuming he was wearing the same clothes at all.

She flipped through the oversized books.

Maybe it had been a trick of the mind. She’d seen some other kind of suit and transposed it in her mind with something she’d seen in the past. The brain played all kinds of tricks.

There were pictures in this book. Apparently the acting troupe had celebrated with pictures with the locals.

Pictures of people having a picnic on grounds that didn’t look that much different than the grounds today, although the old photography gave the pictures a sepia tint that made everything look hazy, almost like a dream.

Clothes were beautiful back in those days; there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t dressed up. Even the hairstyles were intricate; they looked like they would take some work to…

She froze. There he was, in the exact suit she’d first seen all those years ago. He was wearing it differently; the buttons to the collar were buttoned, not loose, but it was unmistakable.

He was smiling and looking down at a woman. Lois couldn’t help but have a flash of jealousy. She was wearing a pale pink chiffon dress with ecru lace and beaded trim. She was turned away from the camera, looking up at him. They were standing close together, almost too close.

This had to be the mystery woman.

She wasn’t wearing a hat, like almost all the other women, and her hair wasn’t an ornate construction like most of the other women’s.

It was a short pageboy cut, not much different from the way Lois had recently had her own hair cut.