*6*
The Kents bring out sandwiches for lunch and Jimmy emerges from his room with a crease in his brow to eat one and have his unnamed worry cajoled away by Jonathan and Martha’s easy conversation. Lois nibbles at a sandwich while she watches the three of them together, and absently examines the unfamiliar envy creeping along the edges of her being. She offers to help with the dishes, but Martha says there’s hardly enough to bother with and Jonathan assures her she’s a guest while Jimmy disappears with the muttered excuse of having a call to make.
Lois thinks about retreating to her own room, but some last gasp of her old stubbornness breathes life into her determination, and instead, she plants herself on a couch in the living room. She will not give them excuse to forget about her. Will not give Clark a way to squirm out of seeing her. She will sit here and make sure they see her, and even if they have to trip over her as they each do their thing--Martha working on some art project that involves a lot of magnets, paint, and glue at the counter; Jonathan disappearing for a few hours before coming back in and fiddling with some kind of odd mechanism, a small case of tools on the coffee table between him and Lois--she at least knows that she is here. Waiting.
The windows let in plenty of light, and Lois watches it change, from afternoon to evening, gold and yellow to orange and purple and russet red, all diffused and altered by the tint to the glass. Jonathan eventually sets aside his tools and brings out a magazine with a picture of a green tractor and a red barn on its cover. Martha cleans up her art project and heads into the kitchen, presumably to work on dinner judging by the smells that start wafting into the living room a few moments later. Lois thinks about offering her help, but she has the feeling Martha would prefer she didn’t, and anyway, Lois wouldn’t even know where to begin.
So she waits. As silent as Superman. As stubborn as Jimmy. As solid as Jonathan. As strong (she fancies herself, a delusion that helps her get up in the morning) as Martha.
When twilight hits, when Martha brings out plates of roast beef and potatoes and corn and salad, Lois tenses. She forces herself to sit quietly, to stay still and patient. Her eyes are locked on the windows, on the closed door, on the elevator.
“He won’t come.”
At Jonathan’s quiet statement, Lois gasps and looks over. Meets his soft gaze.
“His hands shake,” Jonathan explains. “He hasn’t eaten with us since Nightfall. Martha always hopes, always sets out a place for him, but…he uses the time to chase the sun a ways across the ocean and store up some extra sunlight for the night.”
“Oh,” she says, in a shaky, raspy voice, dry from disuse. “When will he be back?”
Jonathan shrugs, tidies the corners of his magazine and places it in a drawer in the coffee table. “Depends. He’s so close to being back to normal that he’s getting impatient. Has the idea that if he just gets a couple extra minutes of sunshine, he’ll finally snap back. But don’t worry, he always comes home.”
“Is this home?” Lois asks, wistfully. She glances around the suite--it’s nice, luxurious almost (and she wonders how he’s paying for it, who’s paying for it), but it is not a farmhouse in Kansas, and it is not a newsroom or homey apartment in Metropolis, and she cannot imagine Clark Kent being comfortable here (but then, she couldn’t imagine Jonathan and Martha Kent anywhere but their quaint little farm either).
Jonathan’s small, warm smile takes her breath away. It transforms him, turns him from a squat man past the prime of his life into something nobler, almost handsome in a silver and steadfast way. “Home’s not a place, Lois,” he tells her, like a benediction, like he’s unfolding the secrets of the universe just for her. “It’s people and family and love. So don’t worry--no matter how far away he flies, Clark always comes back to the people he loves.”
She is speechless, frozen, and almost does not even notice as Jonathan gets up at a quiet call from Martha and leaves her alone in the living room.
But they call to her, and Martha asks her, kindly, if she isn’t going to eat, and so Lois shakes herself back into action (stirs herself to life even when it seems there’s so little left to live for) and joins them around the counter.
For a while, she can pretend she is not an outcast. Pretend she is as welcome there as Jimmy, as if the conversation doesn’t include her for longer than a question or statement at a time simply because she is quiet today and does not feel like joining in. Pretend that she has not forced herself into their life in multiple, unwelcome ways.
She notices the extra plate set between Martha and Jonathan’s, notices that there’s plenty of food left over, notices that sometimes Martha looks toward the windows with a tight look around her eyes until Jonathan clasps her hand and gives her a steadying nod. The conversation is light and easy, Martha commenting about how hard it is to find good corn out here, Jimmy talking about the pictures he’s been taking of people out in the parks, Jonathan chiming in with his plans to maybe go out and visit one of the museums if Martha wants to come with him in a few days.
They have a life here, Lois realizes for the first time. This isn’t just a hide-out, a place to stay for a few weeks until they once more pick up and leave (and it could so easily be that, too, but they all take great pains to pretend that it is not); it is a home, a place where they are doing their best to put down roots. And maybe Martha grumbles about the price of food and maybe Jonathan shakes his head over the lack of things to do if one doesn’t like to sightsee, and maybe Jimmy only practices photography as a hobby now, but they have settled in nonetheless.
It both eases some quiet tension inside of Lois and makes her feel even worse (that they have to settle for so little in comparison to what they once had).
“Thank you, Mrs. Kent,” Lois says, when the edge of her vague hunger is gone, when her plate is near enough empty that she can set her fork aside and stop pretending. “It was delicious.”
Martha sets her own fork down and gives Lois a look. It’s a ‘mom’ look, Lois thinks, an expression that needs no words to let her know she has seen through what Lois is doing and will not allow for it. “Thank you,” she replies, then adds tartly (forgivingly), “but I believe I’ve told you before to call me Martha.”
Lois smiles. A real smile. A small, tremulous smile that seems a bit too close to tears for comfort but that she doesn’t mind anyway because, for the first time, she feels like perhaps she is not the enemy. “All right, but only if you let me help with the dishes. I may not know what to do with a roast, but I certainly know how to wield a washcloth.”
Jonathan chuckles. “Might as well let her, Martha,” he says, and winks at Lois.
In short order, Lois finds herself with an armful of dishes, and she finally gets to enter another door besides her own. The kitchen is warm and golden and everything Lois thought it would be (bigger than she expected, as everything in this suite is). The countertops are clean, though riddled with bits of whatever Martha used to ready the meal. There are homey dishtowels hanging from the stove; there are a few pictures affixed to the refrigerator with magnets (Jonathan and Martha in front of their house in Smallville; the Kents with Jimmy at a park, a mountain visible in the background; but none of Clark, none that will betray that Superman lives here, none that give a hint where they have stayed between Smallville and here); a few of Martha’s in-progress art projects are spread out across the small table pushed to the side of the room. Over all, Lois thinks, it looks like a kitchen Martha has appropriated as her own space, and she thinks of the living room with Jonathan’s little tools and his magazines and the kitchen with Martha’s work and Jimmy’s room with his framed photographs, and she wonders what Clark’s room looks like (wonders if it is as bare as the places on the fridge where his pictures should be, or if he lets himself have that one, locked space).
“I’ll wash,” Lois says quickly. “Seems easier since I don’t know where any of the dishes go after they’re clean.”
“Sounds good,” Martha agrees easily. She has made peace with Lois’s presence (has resigned herself to it, or maybe, Lois thinks, has decided on a course of action and can now be patient in the meantime), sometime throughout the day, and she bustles around Lois as if there is nothing unusual about her being there at all.
Jimmy and Jonathan bring in the last of the dishes, but Martha chases them away after that. “Too many people in the kitchen and I just start feeling crowded,” she admits before picking up a cloth and beginning to dry the growing stack of now-clean dishes.
Lois nods, and focuses on the bowl in her hands, on the flecks of mashed potato marring its surface, on the swirls in the color of the bowl itself--anything to distract herself from the thought that she is crowding Martha. Crowding them all. They have moved on and settled in and adapted to each other. They have survived…and here she is, as if on cue, ready to come in and destroy their lives all over again, and Lois cannot understand why they allow her to be here at all. She knows that if she were Jimmy, she would have packed them all up after his meeting with her in that dingy diner, packed them up and moved them on with nothing but a bare fridge and an empty living room and too-high chairs at the counter to mark they’d ever been there.
They’ve invited the enemy into their midst, and it doesn’t matter that Lois has no intention of ruining what they’ve built or taking anything away from them. Her presence is enough to do that all on its own, reminder of all they once had and no longer do thanks to her.
She’s gone through several dark periods in the past three and a half months. Days when she couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t rouse herself enough to even call Perry and tell him she wouldn’t be in (he never mentioned those days later, never talked about them; he was too busy drinking his anniversary salutes). Weeks when she merely went through the motions, whole days blurring in her memory so that she couldn’t remember what she’d done, where she’d been, if she’d written anything, or how she’d gotten to work.
Dark periods. Bleak moments. But she does not think she’s ever felt so bad as she does now, her hands wrist-deep in soapy, dirty water, holding a ceramic bowl and a washrag. Teardrops fall into that water (further dirtying it, sullying it with guilt she shouldn’t even have the luxury to feel, to indulge in), tiny ripples pushing aside soap bubbles, plink-plink-plinking alongside the rim of the bowl.
“I think that one’s done now, honey,” Martha says gently, and she reaches out, infinitely slowly, and unwraps Lois’s fingers from around it. Before Lois can do more than take in a shuddering breath, Martha has placed another bowl in her hands. “Start on this one, okay?”
Lois gives the impression of a nod. She doesn’t say anything and Martha lets her hold on to her impossible hope that neither of them know she is crying.
It takes a while to finish up. There are a lot of dishes (but not so many that Lois doesn’t notice Martha taking the empty plate set aside earlier and filling it to overflowing with leftovers, wrapping it in plastic and placing it in the fridge), but Lois wishes there were more. She wouldn’t mind if she never ran out of dishes, if Martha just kept handing them to her one by one (giving her an excuse to stay; giving her the illusion that she can possibly do something to help them, to give back to them, to make up for what she’s stolen).
She’s just draining the water (as slowly as possible, not wanting this to be over, not wanting to go back to just sitting in their way and waiting for a man she’s starting to think is never going to appear) when Martha suddenly stills. She covers it quickly, finishing drying the plate in her hands with a few decisive swipes, but it is the first time Martha’s shown any hesitation since breakfast and it catches Lois’s attention. And as if the movement was a switch thrown, Lois suddenly becomes aware of the sound of voices, a murmur coming from the living room, background noise that’s been there since Jimmy and Jonathan exited the kitchen.
Jimmy’s voice. Jonathan’s voice.
And a third voice.
A hum. A dim, distant swirling of noise. A gentle sound more soothing (more disturbing) than any other noise Lois has ever experienced.
And she knows.
(He’s talking. He’s broken his silence. He is alive and just outside the door.)
“He’s here, isn’t he?” she asks. Watches the last of the water flee down the drain, a whirlpool of purposeful chaos, of motion, hypnotizing because it gives her excuse not to look up.
Martha glances at her, picks up another plate to dry. “Yes, he is.” She pauses, then sets aside the plate and cloth, takes hold of Lois’s shoulder, hands her a dishtowel from the stove. “Dry your hands and then go on out there. I’ll finish up in here.”
A bolt of sheer terror sparks a revolution in Lois’s system, deadening her nerves system, shooting adrenaline through her veins. Freezing her in place. “Wh-what…what do I say?”
Something like compassion, like sympathy (or maybe just pity) moves through Martha’s eyes, turns them almost silver, highlighted with sapphire, reflecting gold sparks from the warm tones of the kitchen. “Oh, honey--whatever it is you came all this way to say.”
And with that, Lois finds herself propelled to the door (the dishtowel whisked out of her wrinkled hands), and she cannot make her mouth cooperate long enough to inform Martha that she didn’t come to say anything, has come only to see him and make sure he has survived (Nightfall, the past hellish four months; what she did to him), and that he is all right.
The door into the main suite, already half-ajar, swings open traitorously easy, stripping her of the last obstacle between herself and the man she murdered. She steps through it, fully expecting the scenery to change to something grim and bleak, or for another door to appear, and another and another and another (it’s what always happens in her dreams, when she thinks she’s finally going to get to see him).
But he’s there. It’s him, standing by the coffee table. Dark hair, shorter than she remembers. Tall. Broad shoulders (he’s dressed like Clark, and she can’t stop the room rushing in circles around her long enough to decide if that makes it better or worse). Hands with long fingers that gesture as he talks.
Talks.
He’s talking.
His back is to her and yet…and yet he knows she is there. The line of his shoulders becomes just a bit more rigid. His voice, in the middle of a sentence (and how long has it been since she’s heard him speak a sentence that is not just comprised of her name?) wavers before finishing (“…the ringing went away last night,” she thinks he says, but she cannot focus on anything past frantically re-memorizing every nuance of the sound of his voice to decipher the comment), and then…he falls silent.
Mute.
Dumb.
It’s a cruel, cutting coincidence: she walks into the room and he is instantly cut off, separated so fully that he does not even attempt to breach the distance with speech (and she suddenly thinks Jimmy was right, this was a bad idea, this is so wrong, she’s going to ruin everything for him again).
She wants to say his name (wants to make him turn toward her because there’s still plenty of time for him to fade away if this is a dream, to be someone else, some featureless mask, when she grabs his shoulder and yanks him toward her), but she doesn’t. Doesn’t because she knows, instantly and startlingly, that she doesn’t want to speak first. Doesn’t want to talk, to state her case, to so blatantly exercise the right she’s taken away from him.
She does not want to talk to him if he will not speak to her in turn (if he will give her only silence, as she gave him coming back from their trip to Smallville).
So she, too, is mute. Motionless. Hovering on the threshold to the room (to him; to more; to anything other than the torturous limbo she hasn’t been able to escape).
Jonathan and Jimmy, seated on the couches, watch her, and they do not speak either. Behind her, Lois can feel Martha’s eyes, locked on her back, willing her to do something (but she cannot imagine what that is, unless it is to walk out their door and never come back).
And then, as she knew it would be, it is Clark who breaks the tableau. Who reaches up a trembling hand and removes something (something that glitters and shines) from his face, and turns toward her.
She finds herself face to face with a stranger.
Neither Clark, nor Superman, he is some strange hybrid, a facet of him she has never seen before (the facet she didn’t take the time to get to know before splashing it across every newspaper and television screen in the world). An amalgamation of both the parts that she knew (Superman, the son of Krypton, and Clark Kent, farmboy and investigative journalist). It is Superman’s eyes and Clark’s mouth, Superman’s brow and Clark’s nose, Superman’s stance and Clark’s hair. But his expression is not Superman’s polite, bemusement. It is not Clark’s open wonder with the world and everything in it.
It is…different. It’s soft and guarded and kind and arrested and a hundred more things she cannot interpret (because she does not know the man standing in front of her). He tucks something in his pocket (the something he took from his face) without looking away from her, and then he crosses his arms over his chest, hides his hands away. That’s familiar, Lois thinks, remembers the superhero’s customary stance (or at least, it was customary before; he does not stick around anywhere long enough for her to know if he still uses it or not), but without the Suit, it looks strange and new and unfamiliar too.
He’s unfamiliar (but it’s him, it is, she knows it; she could not make this up, could not dream this), and she doesn’t know what he will do. When she imagined seeing Clark again (after Jimmy told her that Clark would not turn her away), she imagined him with his forgiving, accepting, fond smile. When she imagined seeing Superman (in those days when she still thought there was a chance she could track him down at the scene of a crisis, before every reporter in the world learned how impossible that was), she always imagined a stern, disappointed look and a blur of colors as he put the globe between them as quickly as only he could.
But she does not know what this stranger will do. She doesn’t know what to expect of him. She doesn’t know what he wants of her or expects of her. So she only stands there and stares and matches his silence.
Out of everything she could imagine him doing, though, out of all the possible scenarios, he chooses the unlikeliest of all.
He smiles at her.
And as Clark Kent exited this world with a single word, so this stranger enters her world with the same one.
“Lois,” he says. A breath. A murmur. A sound (when for so long there has been only silence).
If she had not spent almost four months layering herself up with fake resolve, with false determination, with forced control, she would have crumpled right then. Would have bent in on herself and folded to her knees and bowed before him and covered her face with her hands and wept.
But she has been building herself up in a steel mold, has poured all that is left of herself into an invisible body-cast that keeps her upright, keeps her looking as people expect her to look, saying the things the Lois Lane of old would say. And so her only reaction is the breath escaping her lungs in a shuddering, involuntary rush.
“Lois,” he says again, and he smiles. Again. (And this stranger, this unfamiliar hybrid before her, is even more unbelievable than the man who befriended the woman no one else could, than the superhero who flies and bends steel in his bare hands and shoots fire from the skies.) “It’s good to see you.”
He is insane. He has cracked and broken and doesn’t remember what happened. Or worse, he never read the article, never realized it was her who wrote it and so he has spent all this time blaming the wrong person (poor, poor pitiable person) for what has happened to him. He is delusional or misinformed or deceived, or maybe he has grown clever and sly and vindictive in retaliation and is planning something slow and cruel and terrible to avenge his own death and this is only a game of cat-and-mouse. Or…or something, because there is no way he is actually smiling at Lois Lane (at his murderer, his enemy, the woman who unmasked him to the world without even asking for a quote) and telling her it is good to see her. As if he is glad she has come back into his life. As if she is not the specter that haunts his nightmares, the face put to his childhood fears.
“You came.” She hears the words, recognizes her own voice, and yet, she doesn’t know where those words came from. Doesn’t know why they are the first words she chooses to say to him. But nonetheless, it is her voice and she is the one who said them, and everyone can hear the tears surging up behind them, can hear the disbelief and the relief tainting those two words with a weight they aren’t strong enough to bear up under.
His smile (another one, and this is a Clark smile, teasing and slight, curling up higher at one end of his mouth than the other) makes the room steady around her. Makes the light dim a bit so that it isn’t stabbing into her eyes, into her brain. “Shouldn’t I be the one saying that?” he asks wryly.
As if he can still laugh. As if he was not destroyed by what she did. As if…as if he has survived (and that is what she came to see, isn’t it, to reassure herself of?).
She blinks, realizes he is waiting for her reply (though she doesn’t know why, doesn’t know why any of them care to let her talk at all when they could just be sitting there and letting him talk and luxuriating in the fact that she did not entirely steal his voice from him). “Oh, right.” She blinks again, gives herself a small shake, and takes a tentative (brave) step into the room, rests her cold, wrinkled hands on one of the slats of the tall chairs. “Thank you for that. For letting me come.”
He gives a short nod, this stranger, not a real nod, just confirmation that she spoke. He waits (she holds her breath, afraid she has scared him away, has lost him again), then, as if he cannot help himself, says, “I missed you.”
Lois swallows. Hard. Curls her hands into fists so tight that she feels a couple of her nails puncture the flesh to release tiny pinpricks of blood. As if in response, the stranger (Clark, her heart stubbornly says; Superman, her mind reminds her; neither, she thinks) flinches. His eyes dart toward her hands, and for the blink of an eye, she thinks he will drop his arms from their crossed position and stride across the distance separating them and then, with hands as gentle as his mother’s, will uncurl her fists and tsk over the puncture wounds and chide her about being more careful. (She thinks he will turn into the Clark she killed; thinks she can resurrect him from the dead with less effort than it took to kill him.)
But then his own hands form into fists, and he tightens his position, resettles his arms across his chest, and does not move (does not rise from his grave to comfort her).
Behind them, Jonathan pointedly asks Jimmy a question in a low voice, drawing the young man into conversation, as if they can all pretend that Lois and this stranger are alone and not being attended by family all too ready to leap between them (like a mother before her child, leaping into the path of bullets, and Lois wonders if bullets always feel so used up and reluctant and agonized over their task).
“How’s Perry doing?” the stranger asks, and Lois almost flinches, to hear this man she almost-but-not-quite knows ask after the editor who was a mentor to Clark, to her, to them both.
“Good,” she says automatically, but that’s a lie. He’s talking to her (talking, breaking the silence with words that mean things and say more than she’s ever said before in her life), and she’s lied to him. Without even thinking. Without even meaning to. So she winces and says, “I mean…he’s still the chief. But he’s…he’s tired. And he says he feels old. He’s muttering about retiring, but I think that’s an annual thing he goes through.”
He nods, but there’s a flicker in her eyes, and Lois realizes, with a pang, that Clark Kent didn’t work at the Daily Planet long enough to know what was annual and what wasn’t. She forgets, most of the time, that he wasn’t there very long (only two months; only eight weeks and four days); he slipped in so easily, fit in so well, that it seems he was always there.
“And Cat?” he asks after another tiny slice of silence tries to sneak in.
“Umm…she left. Transferred to Los Angeles.”
“Well.” He smiles, but this is not a Clark smile. It’s almost (but not quite) a Superman smile, reserved and more perfunctory than real. “Lots of gossip there for her to find.”
“Yeah.” He hasn’t stopped looking at her yet, hasn’t looked away, and it would make Lois uncomfortable except that she hasn’t looked away either. This is her one chance to make sure he is all right and doing well and that he is recovering, and she might not ever get to see him again (might never hear his smooth, silky voice again), and if this is all she will get, then she will not waste a second. So she gathers her courage and she steps around the counter, closer to him. Watches him, notices that he tenses at her motion before obviously forcing himself to stay in place.
She takes another step nearer, toward the couch, and this time, he does not stop himself. He backs up until he is only a foot away from the windows, until he is not touching anything at all. But he does not look away from her.
“And you?” not-Clark asks. “How are you, Lois?”
A tremor ghosts across her at the sound of her name from his mouth (the death-cry of Clark Kent, the birth-cry of this amalgamation before her). “Fine,” she says, but that is another lie, and she would take it back, but she can’t. She can’t because she is not fine, but that is her fault, not his, and even if he is a stranger, there is enough of both Superman and Clark Kent in him that she knows he would feel guilty. He would feel duty-bound to help her in any way he can. He would set aside his own needs (his anger and his resentment; his fears or his hopes) to make sure she has what she needs. So this is one lie that will stand. This is one lie that cannot be bad.
Except, even though he is not Clark, he gives her a Clark look, one that tells her he sees right through her and he is disappointed that she is lying but he understands and he is trying to decide if he should call her on it or let it go until later when she is most unsuspecting and vulnerable (Clark could always say so much with a single look).
“Fine,” she says again, firmly (that is always what she did with Clark, and then he would decide to drop it temporarily and give her space and time). “But that’s not important. How are you?” She has to bite the end of the question off, has to tuck her bottom lip in her mouth, to keep herself from finishing it the way it was about to slip out (to avoid saying Clark, because she lost the right to call him that, and she does not want to see his eyes go blank at the sound of it; does not want to hear this stranger tell her that Clark is dead and he is Superman now).
“Fine.” Clark was a bad liar (most of the time) and she never knew Superman to lie (until later), and this stranger is no better at it. For the first time, he looks away, and she is free to look at more than just his eyes, free to study him from top to bottom, and it has been weeks since she’s acted like a reporter, but she has not lost the knack entirely, and she can see behind the brittle veneer spread too thinly across his surface.
He is exhausted. He’s been out soaking in sunlight (apparently a good thing), but he looks tired and pale and withdrawn. He moves stiffly, with none of the grace both Clark and Superman displayed. And still his hands are drawn into fists against his own chest (His hands shake, Jonathan had said, and Lois hadn’t understood why that stopped him from coming to eat with others, but she looks at this man who is Superman and thinks she understands why he touches nothing).
Recovering, Jimmy said. Recovering, Jonathan and Martha told her. Recovering, she thinks, and aches for him, that even this has been denied him (though this was sacrificed freely rather than stolen blindly), that even his own body has turned on him.
“You’re okay?” Lois asks again, skeptically.
He cannot meet her gaze. “I’m here,” he says in a small voice. “And I’m getting better.”
It’s the same thing the others said. The party line, she thinks, and they’re all sticking to it without backing down.
But he is not okay. He is not well. He is not surviving.
He is lost. And he is alone (even with his family around him). And he is adrift. And he is sick.
And she suddenly knows that she wants more than to just see him this once. She wants more than she ever knew she did.
Because now, seeing him, hearing him, this stranger who is so familiar, this man who is so alien, she knows that she will never be satisfied with this brief conversation (with the sound of his voice once more falling away into endless silence). She will never be able to pack up her things and walk away and not look back.
She came to see that he was all right, and now she has her answer.
He isn’t.
And so, Lois decides, she has a new wish (a new desire; a new goal), and she will not leave until it is accomplished.
She is going to take this stranger, and she is going to make him better.
*
