*3*
She waits, in a run-down motel that stands as the perfect complement to the decaying diner. One day passes, and that’s okay, because she’s asking a lot and if Superman was hurt by this Nightfall, then he needs time. Another day passes, and that’s okay too, because Jimmy isn’t sure about this and he will try to talk himself out of it before succumbing to what he surely knows is best. A third day passes, and now Lois begins to pace and bite her nails and leave a mess of chaos in her room just to give herself something to tidy up later on. A fourth day passes, and for the first time, she wonders if he will not see her. Regardless of what Jimmy said, regardless of all she has gone through to get to this point, she thinks that in the end, he will hear her name and he will fall into that guarded (trapped) silence, and when Jimmy asks him, he will say one more word.
“No.”
Even when he left that first time, when she began to wonder if she had gone too far and she went to his apartment and picked the lock and walked in, she didn’t truly believe that he was gone. Yes, his belongings were cleared out and his apartment looked like the desiccated husk of something that had always before been alive and vital and entrancing, but he could not be gone. He was Clark, and he was always there when she calmed down. He always let her be angry and nodded and smiled and rolled his eyes and comforted her, and then, when her anger burnt itself out and she could start to look at things more clearly, he was always there to laugh at her and tease her and make her smile.
He was always there.
So maybe what she’d done was worse than a tirade, and maybe she was still reeling from the look in his eyes when he’d said her name in the newsroom, but of course he wasn’t gone.
And then she saw it on the news, that his parents were missing, that everything in their house was packed away (all the pictures of that young, dark-haired boy with smiles that turned into pensive looks as he grew older that faded into a more reserved smile on a teenager that transitioned into a single photo of an adult Clark, glasses and all, at the top of that staircase of memories; all the awful, whimsical art Martha Kent delighted in showing her while her husband staunchly supported her even as he scratched his head in puzzlement over each one; all the farm equipment Jonathan Kent knew everything about, from the least screw to how many times he’d had to fix each one; all of it gone like it’d never been). She’d stared up at the television screen with its unwelcome news, and that was when she’d begun to suspect that Clark Kent wasn’t going to be there when she looked for him.
Not at his desk across from hers, where he could watch her with that small, secret smile of his he thought she didn’t know about.
Not at his apartment, where he kept a mind-boggling array of teas just to irritate her.
Not at the street vendors, where he’d buy her coffee and snow cones and pretzels, and then pretend he didn’t notice when she offered to pay this time.
Not at the park, where they’d walk, sometimes, while discussing a case that had fizzled out or what newest idiosyncrasy of Metropolis’s irritated her or Perry’s latest attempt to make Jimmy stand up to him again.
Not anywhere.
He was gone.
But she’s here now, Lois thinks. She’s here, and she’s come all this way, and Jimmy said he’d tell him--said Clark would let her come to him, would want to see her--but it has been five days and she has heard no word, and maybe he is gone again. Maybe this strange, grown-up version of Jimmy is better at lying than even she guessed, and he told her to wait here only so he would have time to go to Clark (to Superman) and get him to move again. Make him uproot his new life and pack up all his new and old things and once more disappear where even a hundred classified ads and an army of private detectives won’t be able to find him.
Maybe she will never see him again (except on the news, in flashes of red and blue and expressionless mask, distant and vague because reporters and photographers and cameramen are not allowed to get too close lest they spook him and send him once more blurring into hiding).
When the phone rings, she slips in her haste to reach it and slides to the floor and bangs her elbow on the nightstand, but she answers it on the third ring. “Hello?” Her voice is breathless, panicked, tremulous.
“Hello,” Jimmy replies (no, not Jimmy, James, because he does not notice, or care, that she sounds so anxious, and there is no smile in his own voice). “You’re still set on this?”
“Yes,” she says firmly, and the truth has never tasted so certain on her tongue.
“Then get on a plane headed to Coast City,” he tells her. “There’s one leaving this afternoon; I’ve checked and there are still seats available on it.”
“Coast City,” she says, and no matter how many times she has wondered where he is now, has imagined what his new place looks like, she does not think she ever gave a thought to the Californian city of test pilots and air force bases and strange myths about glowing green men.
“Yes,” Jimmy replies obliquely. “Unless you want to go back to Met--”
“No!” She swallows and tries to sound moderately more in control of herself. “No, I’ll go.”
The dial tone is her only reply, and she can see him, expensive sunglasses hanging from one hand, slamming the receiver down with a thunk and then looking around guiltily to make sure Perry didn’t see the abuse of Planet property. Except James, she reminds herself, probably has his own phone, and he would not look guilty at all.
It’s a good thing she hasn’t been fired like her current writing deserves, because her savings is dwindling fast. The last-minute plane ticket doesn’t help matters, and she hopes she can find a cheap motel in Coast City; otherwise, she might find herself staying at their local soup kitchen. But that is a passing concern, one forgotten as soon as she puts in the last of her credit card information and finds herself in possession of the ticket that will lead her to a recovering Superman.
Recovering.
She’s done her best not to think of it, these past five days (past nineteen days), but sitting in a plane and watching the sky and the obscured land pass her by out the tiny window, she has little else to think about.
Recovering. A meteor the size of Smallville, Jimmy said, and he sounded as if Superman had had trouble with it. As if Clark had been afraid.
It makes her breath short, makes her vision cloud and her thoughts haze, to imagine Clark afraid and unsure, but still firming his jaw into Superman’s and launching himself into the blackness of space. She cannot quite imagine why no one knew about this. Shouldn’t this be something that would be reported in every country in the world for months beforehand? Shouldn’t they all have been there to send Superman off and wish him well and pray for him and think of him and then welcome him back and thank him for his latest sacrifice in saving a world and a people not his own? Why have they kept it so quiet?
Because, she answers herself (ash heavy in her mouth and cloying in her throat), this is only another example of Superman’s silence.
He does not need gratitude. He does not need recognition. He does not need acclamation.
He is a ghost. An angel. A spirit protecting Earth, haunting it. A specter that wards off evil and tirelessly defends its charge--but invisibly. Incorporeally. Clark Kent is dead, and Superman is an alien, and so he does not belong, does not live. Only fulfills his self-ordained purpose and fades back into the woodwork.
She excuses herself from her seat and stumbles into the lavatory and is sick. It’s not an uncommon reaction to her thoughts these days. She carries mints in her pockets everywhere nowadays, and so after rinsing her mouth with flat airplane water, she slips two of the mints behind her lips. The taste of peppermint is now inextricably linked to the feelings of remorse and the image of nightmares, sitting heavy and bitter on her tongue.
When she drags herself and her single bag off the plane into Coast City’s bustling, organized airport, she looks all around. Jimmy’s instructions were as sparse as they were brief, and she’s not quite sure if this is a test or just a testament to his displeasure with her. But there, against the doors leading out into the warm Californian air, she sees a man holding a sign with the Daily Planet logo.
Without a second thought, without hesitation, she strides toward him. It is like James, this man who is not Jimmy any longer, to make her identify herself by the paper that assured her fame (her infamy) rather than by her name. She told him she is here for herself, but he does not believe her, and this sign is a pointed, poisoned reminder of that.
“Lois Lane?” the man asks her.
“Yes,” she replies. “What am I supposed to do now?”
“Follow me.” He’s big and broad, bulky and brisk, and Lois has to work hard to keep up with him (just another sign of how far she’s fallen, how out of practice she is; once, when she was the reporter she should still be, she could keep up with the best of them).
He leads her to a black car with windows tinted to obscurity. Lois hesitates (she’s been in situations like this before and they seldom turn out well), but she has come so far and if there is even the slightest possibility that climbing into this unmarked car with a stranger will lead her to Superman, then she will take it.
The man drives her through a winding, circuitous route she’s pretty sure is mostly to confuse her (not that it matters; she knows nothing about Coast City geography), out past an abandoned looking base with only a few planes on its tarmac (‘Ferris Air,’ the sign reads), back into town, to the sprawling downtown where skyscrapers rise into the air (blunt and oblong and so very different from Metropolis’s sleek and rounded skyline), through a residential area with identical houses, and back into a busier part of the city. When he finally stops in front of a towering hotel, Lois glances in the direction of the airport and thinks they could have halved the trip entirely if he weren’t trying to mislead her.
“Thanks for the scenic route,” she observes when he pulls the door open for her.
“I have a feeling it’s only just starting,” he replies, and does not give her time to react to that before he directs her to a taxi waiting on the curb.
Lois is caught between the urge to roll her eyes and the desire to stomp on the man’s foot and lecture him on just how ridiculous this is. Instead, she only sighs and climbs into the taxi. “I sure hope you know where we’re going,” she mutters.
The driver winks at her in the rear view mirror (she gets the sudden feeling he’s one of those people who enjoys surprises and scavenger hunts and secrets he’s in on). “Not to worry, Miss. I know a general direction.”
And once more, she’s off. After thirty minutes of scenery she could do without, Lois leans her head against the warm glass of the window and lets the swaying of the car lull her to sleep.
When she wakes to the cabdriver shutting off his engine, it’s dark. She looks around and can make out only that they’re on a city street, quiet for all the moderately high skyscrapers on either side of the road, lights shining in maybe half of the windows around her.
“You all right, Miss?” the driver asks her.
“Sure,” she says before she even realizes what he’s saying (before she can realize she’s lying). “Um…where are we?”
“Don’t exactly know,” the driver says with another delighted smile. “All I know is, once we’re here, I’m supposed to give you this.” He hands an envelope (grainy and not quite pure white) back to her.
Lois raises an eyebrow and tears it open. A piece of paper (whiter than the envelope; whiter than her hands) is revealed. Building 229, floor 19, room 38.
Obscure, she thinks, all very cloak-and-dagger, and if she wasn’t so desperate, she might even be able to work herself up to a full-blown rant. But things being what they are, she lets her frustration go and clasps the paper tight.
“Am I supposed to pay you?” she asks the cabdriver.
He pretends he hasn’t been watching her curiously, and shakes his head. “It’s all taken care of.”
She glances to the meter and feels her eyebrows rise almost to her hairline. Her savings account breathes out a sigh of relief that this is one tab she’s not picking up, because shelling out four-hundred bucks for a drive she didn’t even want to take would have been a bit much. (Except she knows she would pay it if she had to, knows she will pay out the entirety of her material possessions if it means that Clark Kent will speak to her.)
Pulling her bag behind her, Lois pretends she doesn’t notice the driver watching her avidly, and she takes a deep breath, strides to the door of the building across the street (229 marked along its side with ornate copper figures), and buzzes for entrance.
The door blinks open immediately.
She is halfway through the lobby, is pushing the button to the elevator, is stepping inside and selecting the button labeled ‘19’ before she lets herself realize that this is it.
All this time, all these obstacles, all the delays and the days when she talked herself out of even trying to go after him…and here she is.
There is a void in her stomach, sucking all her internal organs into its dubious gravity. She thinks her hands should be shaking, her knees should be giving out on her, her eyes should be misting.
But none of that happens.
Instead, she feels…numb. Detached. As if this is only a dream. She will walk through door after door after door. She will shout his name and reach for his cape and see a gleam reflected from his glasses--and then she will wake. Alone.
The elevator dings, the doors slide open, and Lois enters…a suite. She expected a hallway full of doors to apartments or hotel rooms (only belatedly does she realize she failed to notice what this building is or what kind of lobby she breezed through). Instead she is in what looks to be a living room, almost circular, fronted on one side by glass windows revealing a cityscape she doesn’t immediately recognize, lit by lights and the paltry effect of struggling stars. There are couches ringing a center coffee table to her left, plants (real ones, not fake ones) set out at decorous intervals and above the counter/bar to her right. Behind that counter is a door, open so that she can see a kitchen through it. Two more doors in front of her, against the far wall, one straight ahead, the other nearer the wall leading to the kitchen, are numbered--37 and 38. Another door pushed into the corner behind the couches, almost against the windows, is numbered 39 and is the only door with an obvious lock on it.
It’s cozy and clean and nice, but look as she might in the dim lighting (light from the kitchen and from the outside city, but not in the living room itself), she cannot spot any personal details (pictures of a small, dark-haired boy; African masks or eclectic books or football trophies).
Her breath shudders when she releases it, and it doesn’t feel quite as dreamlike anymore.
Lois tightens her grip on her bag, pretends that she cannot hear her swallow as an audible gulp, and crosses the room to the door marked 38. Her hand, though (she notices with a sort of vague appreciation) is steady as she reaches out and twists the knob.
It opens to an expansive bedroom.
A dark, empty bedroom.
Her breath whooshes out of her, and she almost does go boneless (with relief; with disappointment).
“It’s your room.”
Lois whirls around, her bag thrown in the direction of the voice so fast that her wrist twinges in protest. “Oh!” she exclaims when she sees Jimmy staring down at his chest where the bag hit, and then down at the floor where it now rests. Luckily, it’s pretty durable, and nothing spills out of it.
“Sorry,” she offers after a moment.
“No.” When he looks back up at her, there is a hint of his boyish grin curving his lips. “I should have known better than to sneak up on Lois Lane.”
“I didn’t know anyone was here!” she protests defensively, moving forward to bend and pick up the bag.
“Yeah, I just came in.” He gestures over his shoulder at a door she hadn’t noticed, on the same wall as the elevator. It’s ajar, she notices, and through the crack, she can see a bedroom almost identical to the one behind door 38, except there’s a camera on the nightstand and black and white photos framed on the walls and the covers on the bed are rumpled. “I heard the elevator,” he adds. “Figured you must have finally shown.”
“Finally!” She straightens, feels some of her bone-deep exhaustion recede before her indignation. “Listen, it wasn’t my idea to go for a ride through the scenery of Coast City and then another ride that took me who-knows-where. I was ready to be done after the long plane ride, but you’re the one all into this cloak-and-dagger routine--”
“I know,” he says, so calmly she is cut off mid-word. (It’s what Clark always did to her, and she hates it; hates that Jimmy keeps doing Clark things as if he doesn’t even notice.) “I know it’s been a long day, Lois, but it’s necessary. Trust me, if you knew how many times we’ve had to move because we got careless…well, believe me, it’s worth it to take a bit of extra time.”
“Oh,” she says in a small voice. Because she should know. She does know. He’s Superman, the most famous figure in the world, the biggest news to ever happen, and unlike the President or other heads of state, he doesn’t have Secret Service and bodyguards and multi-million dollar protection plans. He has only Jimmy, and his own natural abilities (unless he doesn’t; unless those are still recovering too).
“Anyway,” Jimmy says, stepping forward to gesture at door 38. “That one’s yours. I mean,” he corrects himself hurriedly. “It’s the guest bedroom. There’s a bathroom connected, and it’s fully stocked, so hopefully, you’re all set. If you’re hungry, there’s food in the kitchen. If you don’t need anything else, though, I need to get some sleep. I have an early start in the morning.”
“Wait.” Lois looks from him to the bedroom behind her to the kitchen, then back to the stranger standing so comfortably before her. “I don’t understand. I thought…I thought he was going to be here.”
His expression turns oblique so fast it’s as if she flipped a switch. “I told you. He’s still recovering. And you’ve had a long day. If you really want closure, then don’t you think it might be better to approach it after a good night’s sleep?”
To that, she really has nothing to say. Because, if she were really here for closure, then she’d have to agree with him. But she’s here just to see him (can’t think of anything past that, can’t wonder about more, can’t imagine what will happen after that), and so this only seems one more in a long line of useless delays.
But Jimmy doesn’t want her here, and he is still trying anyway, in his strained, disapproving way, so the least she can do is meet him halfway.
“All right,” she says. “Thanks.”
“Yeah.” For an instant, she thinks she sees sadness ghost across his face like a cloud across the surface of the moon. But it is gone in an eye-blink, and maybe she only imagined it. “Good night,” he offers, in a voice she cannot read, and then he turns and enters his room and shuts the door behind him.
Lois stands in the living room a long moment more, looking all about her. Jimmy’s door is numbered 36; it makes her wonder who lives behind doors 37 and 39. Makes her look at the door with the lock on it, the bedroom against the wall made of windows. Makes her wonder if maybe Clark is closer than he’s been for so much longer than she wants to acknowledge. Makes her heart stutter and quake in her chest at the thought that the only thing between them is a door.
But there is a lock on the door, and the last time she went where she shouldn’t, she ended up destroying a life (her own, and his, and Jimmy’s, and the Kents’, and Perry’s, and who knows how many others), and she doesn’t want to ruin this before it even begins.
So she turns back to her own door and enters the guest bedroom and shuts it behind her. She sets her bag down at the foot of the bed and turns in a circle to assess the room.
There’s a closet, and a narrow door open to a small bathroom with the light on, and a queen-sized bed with a burgundy comforter, and though there is no window, there is a framed picture of a city skyline. Metropolis’s skyline. Recognizable and as familiar to her as her own face in the mirror. When she steps into the bathroom to look around and set out her toiletries, she finds shampoo and conditioner--aloe and jasmine, just like hers at home, even if they are a different brand. There’s a notepad and pens on the nightstand by the bed. There’s a current copy of the Daily Planet tucked into the shelf. There’s a black and white teddy bear in the closet, as if left behind by some other guest (but it wasn’t, because she remembers it, remembers dust and heat and crowds and Clark smiling at her with that odd mix of shyness and confidence).
Lois backs up to the center of the room and wraps her arms around herself.
It’s as if this room was made for her. As if someone who knows her, who remembers everything about her (who knows more about her than most ever learn) wants to make her comfortable.
And this, finally, is just too much. After everything, after four months, after weeks of searching and days of hoping (fearing), it is this that breaks her.
Inside her chest, the shards of her broken heart shift and scratch at her ribcage before settling once more into their ash and dust.
Lois crumples to the floor, buries her head in her hands, and she weeps.
*
