Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic In time, somewhere 17- revelations

Although they did their best, Lois didn’t always respect the police in Metropolis. Many of them seemed willing to simply punch a time clock and they weren’t willing to take the kinds of risks she did, although she suspected that was true of most people.

Even those who honestly tried couldn’t seem to keep up with her mentally. She sometimes found the police to be frustratingly slow to reach conclusions that she herself had reached long before.

Yet compared to the police of this time, the Metropolis police were a group of genius crack investigators.

They took her statement, but kept looking at Clark when he hadn’t even been there when she’d hit the man with a frying pan. She had to keep prompting them to ask questions they should have asked on their own.

In their defense, they hadn’t heard of fingerprinting or even many of the most basic forensic techniques. Policing a city with less than five hundred people was probably a little less demanding than making peace in the Suicide Slums.

Still, they took the statements of several witnesses and accompanied the thug to the hospital. Considering that antibiotics had yet to be invented and surgical techniques had to be rudimentary, Lois suspected it would be a long time before the thug was able to be a bother.

“So that’s it?” she asked.

“I suppose so,” Clark said absently, staring after the ambulance.

Lois fidgeted. Deep in her gut she knew that something was wrong. Everything else- the dress, the picture, her name in the ledger…all of it had led her to believe that what she had done had already happened before she’d ever done it.

Yet she’d seen no mention of the thug being arrested, and there was no sign that the fire was even going to happen.

“I must have changed something,” she said. “Maybe stopped him from starting the fire.”

Clark was silent for a long moment before he said, “Would that be so bad?”

“If I wink out of existence and we have to go through all of this again without remembering any of it, it would be,” Lois said.

“Maybe the woman who did all those things was another Lois, from another time,” Clark said.

“You mean that we’ve created some sort of alternate timeline?” Lois asked.

It impressed her that he was able to work it out without any exposure to a hundred years of science fiction speculating about the nature of time.

“If that were true,” he began, “And your choices were your own, would you stay with me?”

Now it was Lois’s turn to be silent. Was she willing to stay behind in a time where women had even fewer opportunities than in her own?

If this was really a new timeline, maybe that meant she could actually make a real difference, change things for the better.

“I’ll stay,” she said. “It’s not like we have much choice anyway. Finding the portal is going to be almost impossible without you being where you had to be to save people.”

“That’s the only reason?”

She looked up at him. “Stop begging for compliments. You’re the only interesting thing in this whole era, as far as I’m concerned.”

She shivered.

Clark pulled his jacket off and slipped it around her shoulders. It was warm again.

“Those lights in the sky are unusual,” he said.

“The sun is doing…something,” Lois said. “Solar storms…it’s hard to explain. It’s one of the things the scientist I spoke to suggested might help activate the tunnels through time.”

“So once the sky returns to normal we know we are in a whole new world.”

Lois nodded soberly. Once the borealis was gone, she was trapped here, probably forever.

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

As it was getting colder, Clark led her back through the kitchen. The interrogation had taken long enough that the evening rush was over and most of the people in the kitchen were involved in cleaning up after the evening meal.

The door with the bullet hole was open. Lois glanced inside, where the water heater sat. The cook was arguing with another man, holding up a small piece and gesturing inside.

As far as Lois could tell from his heavily accented English, all the bullet had done was hit something at the top of the heater and knocked it off before lodging itself in a wall.

The police in her time would have already looked into this, taken innumerable pictures and figured out the angles of the shot.

These police had been willing to take her at her word. She could have been lying! How could they possibly be that trusting?

Barney Fife would have done a better forensic job than the local yokels.

As they left the kitchen into the now largely deserted dining room, Clark said, “We need to talk.”

Lois said, “In my time, guys hate it when girls say that to them. It’s usually about something unpleasant.”

The expression on Clark’s face was neutral. “I’m hoping you won’t think so.”

From his body language, and the fact that he wasn’t looking her in the eyes, Lois could see that he wasn’t sure she’d be accepting of whatever it was.

“If it was important, we had plenty of time to talk about it today, after…”

Clark stopped and said, “Today I thought it was likely that we were going to be separated forever. Telling you wouldn’t have been a kindness and might even have tainted your memories of our time together.”

“And now?”

“If we are to move forward, you have to know everything,” he said. He looked pointedly at the servers cleaning dishes in the distance, along with a few remaining diners. “Not here, though.”

Her mind raced. What sort of secret could he possibly have that would change the way she thought about him? Although he hadn’t said it directly that was what he was implying.

Did he have a wife and children somewhere, stashed away out of the reach of history?

He didn’t seem like the kind of man who would let himself get involved with her if that was the case. In any case, he wouldn’t have had to wonder about her opinion on the matter.

A sexually transmitted disease didn’t seem likely; while they existed in this time period, Lois didn’t see Clark as the kind of person who would burden anyone else without informing them before they’d had sex. In any case, he hadn’t seemed all that experienced, in the beginning at least, although he was a fast learner.

“Where, then?” she asked.

“Follow me,” he said.

The one thing she was sure of was that she wasn’t going to let herself get separated from him again. Although staying in this time period would be difficult, it might be worth it if she could be with Clark. Going forward in time with him would also be acceptable.

The one thing that would be a disaster would be if he went forward and she was left behind. She didn’t think she’d be able to bear that.

She followed him through the front lobby and out the entrance. They made their way through to the gazebo.

After everything they’d been through, he could have easily taken her back to his room. The fact that he hadn’t suggested that he wasn’t certain how she would receive what he was about to tell her.

“All right,” Lois said. “What could possibly be so important?”

Clark led her to a bench and gestured for her to be seated. As she did so, he sat down beside her and took her hand.

“My parents warned me to only share the secrets of my birth with the woman I was going to spend the rest of my life with,” Clark said.

Lois forced herself to remain silent, although she found herself relaxing. If it was about something that happened when he was born, then it couldn’t be that serious. Probably his parents hadn’t been married when he was born or something similar, something that would have been a scandal in his time, but almost inconsequential in hers.

“My parents were not my biological parents,” Clark said. “They found me, abandoned.”

“So you were adopted,” Lois said. “That happens to a lot of people. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”

“That’s not the secret that I wasn’t to share,” Clark said. “The secret was where they found me.”

“Ok,” Lois said. She forced herself not to smile. For some reason he was taking this very seriously, and it obviously meant a great deal to him.

“I told you my mother told me I’d come on a shooting star,” Clark said. “What I didn’t tell you was that she wasn’t speaking figuratively.”

Lois frowned. “I don’t understand.”

“My parents kept a few cows,” Clark said. “And they had to check the fences regularly or cows would get out. Old man Schuster hated that, and he’d complain.”

He went from stars to cows? How did he go from the eloquent man she’d come to know to someone who had forgotten how to tell a story?

“They were on the edge of their land fixing a fence when they saw a ball of fire in the sky. It landed, not too far from them, and they went to investigate.”

His hand tightened on hers.

“When I first heard the story as a child, I always imagined the machine they found to be some sort of train. My parent’s tried to explain it to me, but trains were the only large machines I’d other been around, other than horse drawn reapers.”

Machine? What?

“The first motion picture I ever saw was Melies’ ‘A trip to the moon,’” Clark said. “I was sixteen at the time, and the minute I saw the craft they used to get the moon I realized that what my parents had found wasn’t a train.”

He released her hand and stood up, stepping away from her.

“I read Jules Verne’s stories about reaching the moon, and Mr. Well’s story about going to the moon as well. It wasn’t until I read War of the Worlds that I truly understood what it all meant.”

“Are you saying you think you’re some kind of alien?” Lois asked.

“I know I am,” Clark said.

“Did you ever see the machine your parents were talking about?” Lois asked.

Clark shook his head. “Mr. Schuster sold it to a travelling circus.”

“What seems more likely,” Lois said. “That your parents were just telling you a fanciful story, or that you are some kind of space alien who just happens to look exactly like a human being?”

Clark leaned against a post and stared up at the colors in the sky.

“My parents assumed I was human, at first. I never got sick, and I never got any of the scrapes or bruises that other children did, but they just assumed it was because I was lucky.”

He took a deep breath. “When a bull ran over me at six, and I wasn’t hurt at all, they assumed it was a miracle. But when I was as strong as three grown men by the age of ten, they began to wonder.”

“So you’re telling me you’re some sort of superman?”

“You asked me to believe that you are a time traveler,” Clark said. “If I wasn’t…different myself, I’d have had a hard time believing that.”

“I showed you proof,” Lois said. “You’ve got to understand. I’m a reporter and it’s my job to be skeptical. Asking me to simply…”

Raising his hand, Clark turned to the post he was leaning against.

Smoke began to rise from the surface, and a moment later she saw initials appear, hers linked with his.

“You could have painted some kind of chemical,” Lois said. “Triggered it…”

Before she could continue, Lois heard the deeply guttural sound of an explosion coming from the direction of the hotel. She saw something white flying upward, through the roof.

Too late she remembered what she’d struggled to remember before.

Water heaters had a safety valve, often on the top of the machine. Without it, the water inside the heater continued to heat, pressure growing and growing until it became a bomb.

Clark stared into the direction of the explosion, looked back at her and then sighed.

A moment later he wasn’t there. It was as though he’d vanished into thin air.