Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Newsworthy 2/22

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Lois is uncomfortable. It’s hot--sweltering, actually--and the vinyl booth in the dingy diner with its cracked tabletops and ancient salt and pepper shakers is pretty much the last place she expected to find herself in when she asked Perry for time off. From the halls of the Daily Planet to the backwoods of the country, she muses, and it all seems so useless, so unnecessary. So pointless.

This diner is the twelfth place she’s been to in as many days, looking for Jimmy, hoping to meet him, thinking that any minute he’ll walk through the glass doors with their blistering metal handles and grin at her and slide in to sit across from her with all the boyish eagerness and young charm she’s missed. But he hasn’t been in any of the other places she’s gone, hasn’t answered any of the numbers she’s tried, hasn’t responded to any of the ads she’s placed, and she’s fairly certain this is going to end up being a dead end too.

Two weeks.

Superman has been missing two weeks. Clark’s been…well, Clark’s been missing for so much longer than that, but the numbers cut into her soul like blades so she usually avoids spelling it out for herself.

Two weeks and she’s not anywhere nearer finding him now than she was the night Perry told her what Superman had faced. Alone.

Terror chokes her, lumped up in her throat like bile, like bitterness, like guilt. Because he’s alone and because he can’t ask for help and because she should have been there for him and because this is all her fault.

Well, not all her fault. But partly (maybe even mostly; maybe so much more than she can bear to admit).

She needs to find Jimmy. Now. Before another two weeks can pass. Before Perry starts drinking salutes on a different day to another anniversary of a death (of the same man). Before she loses it completely and gives up on the Daily Planet and the mentor who sometimes looks at her like she’s just as dead as Clark Kent and the desk where once she ruled and glowed and conquered whole corporations and congressmen and crimes and now she only rusts and dims and dwindles away. Give up on it all because none of it is what it once was and she’s tired of realizing that anew every morning.

And Jimmy better hurry up if he’s coming, she thinks, because she’s getting more maudlin with every empty moment that passes.

The bell over the door tinkles, and Lois looks up hopefully (a stupid hope, because Jimmy hasn’t come in to the tinkling of a bell over any of the other doors in all those other anonymous, tiny towns she’s been to, but there it is, that hope, struggling gamely on against all the odds). But it’s just a businessman, white shirt, pressed slacks, neat hair, sunglasses that Lois wishes she had because the glass walls do a phenomenal job of filtering the sunlight through in a direct line over her corner booth.

Sighing, Lois looks away, back down to her hands, playing with her cool, sweating glass. Tea. She never drank iced tea, not before. In fact, it was coffee or cream soda or water, maybe something stronger if Superman--if he--well, if things weren’t quite as she wished they were. But never tea. Never, ever, and certainly not when he gave her that unaffected look and quirked an eyebrow in that gentle-cocky way of his and told her it was better for her.

Certainly not then.

She thinks, though (in some tiny, hidden, damped part of her mind), that she’d give almost anything for him to be here right now, sitting across from her, cocking his eyebrow at the half-empty glass in her hands, saying…

Saying nothing.

Because he doesn’t say anything. Not anymore. Not at all. He’s silent, expressionless. Swoops in and saves and rescues and fixes and catches and helps and then disappears again and never a single word spoken (certainly not the one word he spoke to her when she wasn’t listening, the last word Clark Kent ever spoke).

“Lois?”

The world tilts around her. Shakes and trembles and swirls so that the glass of iced tea falls to its side with a resounding clatter and dark tea mingles with ice cubes to draw a map of a world she’s never seen across the cracked tabletop. Her hands are as cold as those sticky cubes, pale and nerveless, and when she looks up, she thinks that maybe she will fall apart into just as many pieces (just as much of a mess) as her tea; maybe her own fragments will map out a truth she’s never admitted.

But it’s not him.

Not Clark. Not Superman. Not a silence broken and a name spoken (in a way no one else can duplicate) by a voice the exact nuances of which she’s beginning to forget.

It’s the businessman who came in a moment before. Clean and put together and obviously on top of things, so sure of the way the world is and the way everything should go and just how he will affect that all. Just like she used to be. Before it all went so very wrong.

“Lois,” he says again, and then this man (with his dark hair and his dark eyes and his narrow chin) gives half a smile, and suddenly Lois recognizes him.

“J-Jimmy?” she asks, and cannot even fault herself for stumbling, because this cannot be the young, earnest, eager-to-please kid she’s missed so much.

“I almost didn’t recognize you,” he says, warmly (and that, at least, is familiar), and slides into the booth across from her. His long fingers place his sunglasses down, very neatly, against the sun-warmed wall, reach out to the napkin dispenser and pull out several napkins, begin to mop up the mess she’s already forgotten.

“Same here,” she manages to say, but she cannot make her numb hands reach out to this man (this stranger) and help him clean up the spilled tea. “You look good, Jimmy.”

“James,” he corrects her, matter-of-factly. “No one calls me Jimmy anymore.”

“Oh,” is all she can say. But really, she thinks, she shouldn’t be surprised. Everything else has changed; why shouldn’t this be different too?

“So.” Jimmy (James) pushes the sodden napkin to the end of the table and folds his hands in front of him. His dark eyes turn fully to her, and Lois finds herself frozen. The diner’s air conditioner is old and outdated and over-worked, and the New Mexico sun is broiling her in this glass and metal cage, and still she is cold and still, some frozen heart of her, trapped in stasis, trembling on the brink of something new and frightening.

“So,” she echoes, when Jimmy says nothing else.

His smile is gone, and he is once more unrecognizable. He is grown up and competent and composed (and not smiling), and Lois looks at him and thinks that this secret identity, this alter ego, is just as good as Clark’s was.

“You’ve been looking for me,” he prompts, finally, giving her a small nod, as if to remind her of a cue. As if this entire conversation has already been scripted and she’s the one who forgot to learn her lines (and maybe she has; maybe she’s wandered into the wrong theater, and now she’s stuck in the middle of a play completely foreign to the one she knows, written in a strange language, set among alien props, populated by unknowable characters).

“Yes.” Inwardly, her mind reels. She has a speech, planned out and suffered over and readied for a meeting just like this (only different, because in all her plans, she’s only ever met with Jimmy, not James), but she cannot think of any of it. And somehow, she doesn’t think rote words will work, not now, not here, not facing a man who seems all too sure of himself and his place in this world and his part (his lines, his script, the ending to this scene she hasn’t rehearsed).

Jimmy only looks at her. Before…the boy of her memories would never have been able to take a sustained stare like this. He would have broken, would have shifted uncomfortably and sweated and babbled out whatever he thought she might want. But this man sits before her and his gaze remains steady and his hands don’t shake. The waitress comes over and takes his order for a coffee, but when she leaves, he simply turns back and regards Lois again.

It unsettles her. She feels, then, as if she is the young cub reporter, all nervous anxiety and hopeless awkwardness. As if their roles have been switched, leaving her scrambling behind him.

It’s been months since she’s written an article worth the money Perry pays her. Months since she’s felt like the reporter she’s always known she is. Months since she’s felt that lightning spark in her veins, that surge of gilded energy mixed with molten adrenaline. Months, and yet when it hits her, like a rush of cold water flung straight at her from point-blank range, it feels as familiar as ever.

So she straightens in her seat and wraps her hands around her righted glass. “Perry’s doing well,” she says, conversationally (she lies). “Still going strong.”

“I know.” Jimmy gives that almost-not-quite familiar smile again, a mere curving of his lips rather than the grin that used to light up his entire face. “I keep abreast of what’s going on at the old place. I’m glad he hasn’t given it up.”

She wonders if she only imagines the slight hint of reproof toward her she thinks is implied in his brief statement. (She wonders if she has given up.)

But she only nods and wishes she hadn’t spilled her tea so she could take a sedate sip of it and pretend to be as unaffected as he is. “Me, too. The Daily Planet wouldn’t be the same without Perry White as the chief.”

This time, Jimmy’s smile is a bit wider. “Don’t call him chief,” he teases her.

It’s not much, little more than the thinnest of lines leading back to the time when they were more than casual acquaintances, but Lois takes it. Reaches out and grasps hold of it and clings to it as if it is strong enough to hold up all her expectations and wants.

“I’m glad to see you,” she tells him bluntly. And it’s not a line. She really is. Jimmy was just the sometimes-endearing, sometimes-annoying office gofer--until he left. Then she realized she likes him, liked his help with her disguises and his streetwise savvy given out so freely and his youthful optimism. She liked him. And right now, looking at this man with the echo of his smiles and the hint of his resemblance, she still misses him. Maybe even more than ever before (because he is so tantalizingly close but just outside of reach).

Jimmy nods and studies her. “So I gather. You’ve been going to quite a bit of trouble to find me.”

“Haven’t seen you in a while,” she says evasively, but knows it is only for show. As many polite courtesies as they exchange, they both know why she is there.

“I’ve sent a postcard or two.”

“Have you?” She shakes her head, then waits for the waitress to set down Jimmy’s coffee and her iced tea refill. When they’re alone again (or as nearly as they can be in this decrepit diner), she takes a deep breath and forces herself to continue. “I remember a post-it note shoved in an envelope that said, ‘Doing fine, talk to you later,’ and then a couple weeks later, a card that said ‘Happy Birthday--found a job, like it a lot, look after yourself.’ And it wasn’t my birthday.”

He shrugs, easily. Smoothly. Unaffectedly. Takes a sip of his coffee, and for the first time (seeing and recognizing her own avoidance moves, reflected back at her) Lois realizes that he is not as calm as he wants her to think he is. She looks at him, and finally, belatedly, she sees him. Dark shadows under his eyes. Red veins showing at the corners of those eyes. Crimped lines around his mouth. A bit too much attention given to keeping his hands steady.

He is tired. He is worried.

He is afraid.

Pure terror sheers its way through Lois’s body, headed straight for her heart. An instinctive, immediate reaction, emotions she cannot control, so powerful they prompt a visceral response. Her breath catches in her throat. Her hands are shaking. The blood drains from her cheeks. Wind rushes in her ears, blocking out the clatter of silverware and the muted murmur of distant conversation.

“There was an asteroid. Seventeen miles long.” Perry’s words are like approaching thunder, far-distant, growing louder, rolling over open prairie, blasting everything in its path with a violent deluge and forking lightning. “Superman is missing.”

“It was the only card I could find,” Jimmy says, and for a long, uncomfortable moment, Lois can only stare at him in complete confusion until she remembers their conversation, remembers her own comment, remembers that he cannot read the thoughts in her head (only one person could do that, but even then, he didn’t do a good job of it, did he, not in the end).

“Jimmy,” she says, “I--”

“James,” he corrects her.

“James,” she amends without missing a beat. “I know about the asteroid. I know the military asked Superman to stop it. And I know that it’s been two weeks since anyone’s seen him.”

He betrays no surprise. He’s not gullible or naïve (not anymore), and he knows why she is here. Knows why she has chased him across eleven states and a territory, knows why they are sitting in this stupid diner she hopes never to see again, drinking tea and coffee and pretending they’re just here to catch up on old times.

“Please,” Lois says, and her voice cracks, and she doesn’t even care.

For the first time, Jimmy breaks eye contact. He looks down at his coffee, and she thinks she sees the hint of a tremble in his hands when he opens and pours in a packet of sugar (and she remembers that he hated the artificial sugar, was always making fun of their little colored packets). “There’s nothing to worry about,” he says.

She does not believe him.

“Then where is he?” she demands. Quietly. Intently. She doesn’t want to make a scene. Doesn’t want to scare him away. She just wants him to know that she needs to know this.

A flash of something shoots through Jimmy’s eyes, turning him once more into a stranger (dangerous and unknown). When he looks up to glare at her, she realizes it is anger, glimmering there in his eyes like cosmic storms raging in the far-off skies over the heads of oblivious Earthlings. He is angry with her. No--he is furious.

“He’s resting!” he hisses. “If you know about Nightfall, then you know exactly how much it was asking of him to expect that he could go up there and stop it single-handedly! He may be special, Lois, but he’s still a man, and heading out into space to stop a rock bigger than Smallville is just a little bit daunting. So, no, he’s not flying around saving people, and he’s not out there being Superman for a world that treats him like some kind of a cross between their savior and a ghost. He’s recovering, and when he’s ready, he’ll come back, all right? Now is that enough for your article?”

“I don’t believe you,” Lois says, coldly. Numbly (because his words hurt, and they are unjust and unfair, and they paint a picture she does not want in her mind for all the dark nights when she can’t sleep and terrible thoughts come creeping out from under their mental rocks). “If all that’s true, then why are you afraid?”

He swallows. Hard. Then sets his cup down with force enough to make her blink and glance down at it, expecting to see shards of white ceramic littering the table. But the cup is not broken and when she looks back up at him, she sees a dispassionate mask staring back at her, reflecting her back on herself in the image on his sun-bright eyes.

“I’m afraid of you, Lois,” Jimmy finally says.

It hurts more than anything because, much as she wishes otherwise, she can tell he is not lying.

“He’s okay, Lois. Really. He is. It was hard and there’ve been some scary moments, but he’s better. He’s okay. So, just go. Just…just tell me some more about Perry and funny office stories and then drive or fly back to Metropolis and write your articles and just let him go. Okay? Just let him go.”

Lois stares at him. She cannot read him, cannot comprehend the truth behind the almost desperate plea staining his words. “Wh-what?” she stammers.

Jimmy leans over the table, intensity crackling from him, dispassion falling away to reveal that fear and defensiveness and desperation. “It’s taken him a while, but he’s moved on. He’s…adjusted. Don’t mess this up for him. Don’t take away everything he’s worked to build back up. You ruined his life once, Lois, isn’t that enough?”

Her refill of iced tea slops over onto the table, dribbling down the rim, jarred by the force of her grip on it, almost strong enough to shatter the glass. “I don’t want to ruin anything,” she hears herself say, as if from a distance. “I just want to see him.”

And it is not until then, hearing herself say the words, that she realizes why she has left the Daily Planet and sits in grungy diners and spends her savings on hundreds of classifieds and begs this stranger before her. She wants to see him. Nothing more, nothing less, and it is like a weight has fallen from her, to have the sum of her wants, the extent of her life’s desires, distilled down into one, simple statement.

Jimmy’s eyes slide closed, as if she has just hammered the last nail in his coffin. “No,” he says.

“So this is what you do now?” she asks, and now she feels anger to match his rising up within her. “You screen his calls? Stand guard at his door? What do you do, interview everyone before they can meet him? Did you appoint yourself his bodyguard--or is the correct term ‘warden’--or did he ask you to fill in?”

His jaw firms, his eyes narrow, and Lois almost chokes because that expression (that determined resoluteness he never exhibited before) is Clark’s. It’s Clark’s expression, sitting there on his face like it belongs, and if she ever doubted that Jimmy does know where Clark is and sees him and talks to him regularly (talks to him, when no one talks to him anymore), then all her doubts are shot and buried and laid to rest right then.

“You don’t get to pass judgment over this,” he says with finality.

“But you get to pass judgment over me?” she retorts. “I’m not asking for you to help me ambush him. I don’t want it for an interview or an article--I’m on my own time here, on a leave of absence. And I don’t need you to ‘approve’ of me, all right? Just ask him. Tell him I want to see him. If he says no, then I’ll leave. I’ll go back to Metropolis and never bother you again. But just, first, ask him if he’ll let me see him.”

“No,” Jimmy says, but it is more a hopeless denial than an answer to her plea (the murmur of a man over the body of his child, hoping it isn’t so even though the blood staining the cloaking sheet is incontrovertible).

Lois finds it hard to breathe, every breath saturated with hot sunlight. “Why not?”

“Because,” he murmurs, almost inaudibly, “if I tell him that Lois Lane wants to see him…there’s no way he won’t say yes.”

For the first time since Perry told her about this asteroid, Lois thinks she feels a glimmer of hope limn her heart, like the half-glimpsed, half-doubted flash of lightning behind thick clouds at the corner of her eye.

“This isn’t fair,” Jimmy says. And now, finally, he sounds like the young boy she knew. “He’s just starting to move on.”

“I’m not here to ruin anything,” she says again. “But the way things ended wasn’t…it…don’t you think it’d be better to clear some things up?”

“How?” he shoots back, all bristling anger and righteous indignation. As if he is restraining himself, he wraps the fingers of his right hand around the band of his watch on his left wrist, holds on so tight she can see his knuckles turn white as bone, sharp as pain. “Slapped across every front page in the world like last time?”

Lois flinches away from him, and cannot meet his gaze. “No. No, not like that.” When she does look up, Jimmy looks caught between fury and grief. “But if he’s really moved on, if he’s really okay…then doesn’t he deserve the right to make that choice himself?”

She sees it, the moment he admits defeat. The moment he drops his weapons to the ground and slumps to his knees on the battlefield and bows his head in abject surrender. The moment he looks at her, and there is only resignation, dull and weary and oh so very jaded, there in his eyes. (And she wonders what she has become, to slay superheroes and disillusion young men and leave their innocent bodies in her wake.)

“You think I’m wrong to try to protect him,” Jimmy observes slowly, lifelessly. His hand clenches his watch even tighter. “But don’t you see? Someone needs to save him.”

Impulsively, Lois reaches out and places her hand over Jimmy’s, fever-hot next to the warmth of the coffee, beneath the blistering glare of the sun (feels the bones tense even tighter, whiter, harsher). “I’m not going to hurt him, Jimmy.”

“Oh, Lois,” Jimmy breathes, “how can you do anything but?”

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