Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Newsworthy 12/25

*12*

“Come with us,” Martha had said, and the Lois who searched for James without knowing why, the Lois who docilely let the winds of fate bob her about in its whimsical current (the Lois who lied to herself so well and so thoroughly that she’d managed to almost pretend she didn’t miss Clark Kent) would have stared and blinked back tears and peppermint-tinted bile and searched in vain for her voice until maybe her chance passed her by. But the new Lois (the hybrid-stranger she now sees every time she glimpses her reflection, the mix of the redeemable qualities of the old Lois mixed and mingled with a new Lois refined by stress and grief and fire) is enough in place to make her smile instantly and agree to the startling invitation.

“We try not to go out too often,” Martha explains as they wait for the elevator to reach the ground floor (and Lois is so intent on not missing a cue and messing up this unexpected sign of reconciliation that she forgets to look at the signs in the lobby or find recognizable landmarks around the building).

“And it’s so rare that James takes the time to remember we like seeing him for more than a few moments at a time,” Martha says, teasingly, in the second of three taxis they take (and they’re not living in Coast City, after all, because it takes two hours to reach the city, but Lois tamps down her waking curiosity and does her best not to think on what she knows of Californian geography).

“We don’t do much, but it’s fun to do it together,” Martha explains, after James has finished laughingly reassuring her of his intentions to spend more time with her and Jonathan. They wander leisurely along downtown streets, past small shops filled with books or coffee or clothing or souvenirs stamped with an emerald sigil shaped like a lantern. It isn’t until then, hearing Martha’s staggered explanation, that Lois realizes the older woman is nervous, is talking so much--not to include Lois--but to fill up the awkward silence between them.

And that is not all right. Lois has become intimately familiar with awkwardness and with silence, and if there is one thing she knows above all others, it is that the Kents do not belong in that realm. They do not need to feel unsure in themselves, do not need to justify their decisions or their lives, certainly not to her.

So she offers Martha a tentative smile and tries to sound completely accepting (and as understanding as Martha has been for her) when she says, “I don’t need to do much.” The compassion that stirs inside her, struggling up through rusty disuse and dusty inexperience, is strange and new and so welcome that Lois feels like skipping and laughing and throwing her arms around first Martha, then Jonathan, then even James (if he would ever stand for such a thing). “Really,” she adds. “I think all that gardening has made me lazy. Soft.”

“Not lazy,” Jonathan corrects, throwing her a wink. “Just content. Able to take a breath and savor the small things.”

He’s teasing her, but he’s right. Of course, it’s not the gardening that’s the miracle cure, she knows; it’s Jonathan himself, and James’s promise, and Clark’s forgiving smile, and Martha’s nervous efforts.

“Content,” Lois repeats (and remembers Clark telling her that contentment is enough). “I guess that’s the right word. In fact, you’ve done such a good job of converting me into your amber-waves-of-grain society that I find myself thinking that a walk through that park over there would actually be fun.”

The shop with the fashionably dressed mannequins in the window and prominently displayed shoes actually looks much more tempting than slow, winding paths through grass and sparsely planted trees, but Jonathan has been looking bored and she saw his eyes light up when he caught sight of that park, and James has been fondling the camera he’s stashed away in a nondescript bag at his side--and Lois wants to see the park because she wants them to be happy. Because she wants to see this strange little family come alive with laughter and sunshine and a measure of freedom (even if there is a hole where Clark should be; a stain of guilt at the constant knowledge that she’s the reason he can never have this again). Because she wants to treasure her presence with them (for the first time by invitation, by choice, by mutual consent). Because she wants to take this day and freeze it in time and tuck it away in her heart as a healing balm she can use to soothe her soul on the darkest and bleakest of days.

“The park?” Jonathan makes a sincere but woefully inadequate attempt to hide his hope, and for the first time since inviting Lois to join them, Martha laughs.

“The park sounds good,” she says, threading her arm through Jonathan’s. “We can eat our sandwiches there.”

Jonathan laughs. “Even better!”

“I hope there’s a bit more than sandwiches in that basket,” James finally speaks up. He has been quiet, almost abnormally so, since leveling a steady gaze at Lois when she stepped into the elevator with them and saying, “Make sure you keep that cap pulled low so no one recognizes you.” A few weeks ago, his protectiveness would have stirred indignation, would have ignited anger. Now, it only warms her. (Now, it only reminds her of Clark’s quiet resignation and his absence from their side so that their disguises have a chance of working.)

Martha narrows her eyes at James and gives a slow shake of her head. “It’s been a while, but I haven’t quite forgotten what your favorite cookies are.”

The laughter that escapes James makes him look younger. More innocent. Unburdened by the task he has set himself. He slips an arm around Martha’s shoulders and lightly tugs on a lock of her brunette wig, his own fake blonde hair flopping over his brow. “All right, all right, Mrs. K, I get the hint! I’ll stay home more often if you make the cookies more often. Deal?”

“I don’t know.” Martha’s laugh is softer, shorter, but just as unabashedly happy. “If this is a negotiation, I may have to make sure I stipulate how many batches there will be to equal a day of your company--and who exactly will help me bake all these incentives.”

James slants a mischievous look to Jonathan. “Well, Mr. K is obviously the first candidate. He’s the one who promised to love and support, right?”

“Oh, I support.” Jonathan chuckles, his shoulders losing some of their tension now that they are surrounded by living plants rather than specialized boutique stores. “If Martha wants to corral you into the kitchen with her, I’ll help her block the door behind you.”

“Don’t even think about it!” Lois exclaims when James’s gaze slides to her. She holds up warding hands. “I help out by staying away from the kitchen.”

“Abandoned on every side!” James rolls his eyes and does his best to look aggrieved (a familiar expression, calling up long-ignored memories of Perry’s sly smirks and the underhanded protection he’d sent the young man’s way).

“Helping throw some eggs and sugar in a bowl is hardly going to hurt you,” Martha tells him dryly. “Jonathan sets the table, Lois does the dishes--that leaves you to show us some productivity.”

James says something else that makes a silver, joyous laugh shake Jonathan’s frame, and Martha replies and James darts ahead to walk backward while saying more, but it all fades away in Lois’s consciousness. All of it muted and frozen in a picture-perfect moment by the sparkling, gilt-edged realization exploding in Lois’s mind and heart and being.

She is included.

James pulled her into their teasing. Martha listed her contributions to their daily chores alongside Jonathan’s.

Her two detractors, and they are including her.

Accepting her.

Teasing her.

As if she’s part of the family. Part of their unit. One of them.

Not an outsider. Not a murderer. Not their worst nightmare.

An ally. A compatriot. Someone who will do anything for Clark up to and including giving up her life for him.

And she will. She knows it without thought, without hesitation, without doubt. She feels it in the lightness of the day outside their apartments, in the happiness to be outside the cloak of hiding, in the guilt to be experiencing all this without Clark, away from Clark (possible only because Clark is not there, reminding them of all the reasons they have to be grim and watchful and sober).

Those silken threads lining her bones, strengthening her muscles, pulse deeper, more vivid, so that Lois feels as if she is about to explode with urgent energy, with what feels almost like relief (like atonement; like absolution). The sunlight is amber and warm, sweet like honey as she pulls in an overly large breath to swell her ribcage, expand her chest, make herself large enough to contain the frothing, sparkling feelings boiling up within her.

She thinks the moment will pass quickly, glowing drops of condensation that evaporate into dispelled, invisible liquid under the glaring light of day. She thinks she will shrink and retract and grow up a protective shell to shield and camouflage that instilled, borrowed strength. (She thinks these noble, too-good-to-be-true people, these three brave but weary defenders, will remember who she is, what she did, and take back their forgiveness, their inclusion, and bring out their spiky shells of awkwardness cloaked in engrained kindness.)

But the moment doesn’t pass. The feeling doesn’t go away. Her body (her determined resoluteness) doesn’t abandon her. The clock ticks on, storing up the seconds and minutes, a reservoir of time filled with an ambling stroll along green pathways under dappled shadows shaped like the leaves of the passing trees, with a picnic alongside a fountain of topaz-colored stone pebbled like honeycomb, with a meal eaten to the accompaniment of tinkling water and relieved laughter. Moments that continue uninterrupted and give no indication of slipping away from her.

And gradually, so slowly she almost doesn’t notice it (so momentously she cannot understand how there is not a full orchestra and a media team there to commemorate and proclaim it), the knot of ever-present tension at the base of her spine loosens, spirals outward and allows air through, lets her shoulders slump, makes a smile easier to claim.

They’re different outside that tinted, cool suite, Lois realizes, studying Jonathan, Martha, and James in turn through eyes unbounded by tension and fear. They are survivors, in those rooms, witnesses in hiding, victims gone to ground, pretending (for Clark’s sake) to strength and sanguinity and contentment they don’t really have (not more than surface deep). In those rooms, they are constantly on edge, waiting (for the alarm, the siren, the flash of a camera) to leap into desperate flight once more.

But here, away from their small self-contained world, away from covered windows, away from the remnants that can only remind them of all they’ve lost (away from Clark? she wonders with a surge of discomfort), they change. Transform. Morph into strangers. Civilians. Anonymous citizens untouched by that infamous Pulitzer prize-winning article (by gaping loss and tiny slivers of hope). Regular, normal people who can relax in their average anonymity, their relative mediocrity…their alter egos.

Relax in everything that the separation of Clark Kent and Superman once gave that lost, uncomfortable stranger even now out saving lives. Relax in everything that has been taken (stolen, ripped, torn away from, by Lois herself, though she’s doing her best not to think on that, not to keep heaping guilt onto her shoulders to slow herself down) from the man who deserved his fate least of all.

Enjoying the very things that he no longer can.

The realization, the sense of truth clicking into place, threatens to send Lois back into the morass of guilt and regret she’s only just pulling herself from. It’s not new, but it’s just as painful this time around as every other time of remembering all he’s lost. Only…only she cannot allow herself to fall again. Cannot let herself second-guess her precious, hard-won success. (Cannot allow herself the luxury of numbing self-pity to take away her responsibility to act, to heal, to fix.)

“You okay?”

Lois smiles at Martha. At the concern in her voice. At the feel of her age-smoothed hand resting so gently atop Lois’s. “Getting there,” she murmurs beneath the flow of James’s voice and Jonathan’s chuckle.

Martha’s own smile is cracked and tremulous. “Me too. It’s a slow road sometimes, isn’t it?”

“Yeah.” Her voice breaks, but Lois doesn’t care. No need for false pride or defensive facades here. Not now. Not with this woman, with this family (with these few who see beyond her disguise and know her in all her forms). But she cannot help adding, in little more than a whisper, “I just wish Clark could be here.”

Instead of denouncing her for her hypocrisy (for wishing for the very thing she made impossible), Martha only tightens her grip over Lois’s. “So do I. He could sure use a day like this. Or even just an hour. Sometimes, I think he’s gotten so focused on what he still has left to him that he forgets he can have more.”

An idea sparks in Lois’s mind. It feels like creativity. It feels like purpose. It feels like adrenaline. It feels like an echo of what she lost when she pulled that metaphorical trigger. She’s afraid to look at it too closely, or examine it out in the cold light of day, but she cradles it close. Hugs it inside herself and lets it grow in warmth and seclusion and hope. Promises herself she will take it out and nurture it further when she is alone.

As if she knows that Lois doesn’t have words to give her (cannot compose herself quickly enough to scrabble for a reply), Martha blinks, trading tears for mischief. “And don’t worry about having to stay here all day. After we’re done with lunch, I’ll distract Jonathan long enough to let you slip into one of those shops you keep eyeing.”

Lois laughs. “Thanks. But what do I do about James?”

“Him? Well…” Martha sips her tea in a contemplative fashion. “Well, he’s much sneakier than Clark ever was. You’re on your own with him--though I have the feeling that if he sees you headed into a shop, he’ll find a way to distract himself.”

“Careful, James.” Jonathan’s voice breaks through their quiet conversation. “They’re whispering together--who knows what they’re conspiring for us.”

“Conspiring?” One of Martha’s thin eyebrows arches in an eloquent manner Lois can only hope to emulate. “Does a bit of quiet conversation not filled with silliness scare you that much?”

“It does when you get that cunning look in your eye.” Jonathan winks at James, who laughs with him but shoots a helpless glance to Martha when Jonathan looks away, adeptly playing to both sides. “You can always tell when to be scared, son, when a woman gets that look in her eye and starts sizing you up.”

“Suspicious, isn’t he?” Lois asks, and despite the warm feeling expanding her chest, still feels relieved when none of them freeze up or give her reproachful stares.

“Paranoid, more like,” Martha replies. “More cookies, James?”

“It’s not paranoia,” James says, but doesn’t hesitate to take two more cookies.

“They’re buttering us up.” Jonathan turns tender as he meets Martha’s gaze, their hands idly caressing each other when he takes a cookie from her. “Must mean we’re going to be stuck with an afternoon of shopping.”

He’s right, though just barely. First they follow James along a scenic bridge and give him helpful (increasingly silly) suggestions about what shots of the scenery he should snap (only scenery; no people; no family photos to betray them to the harsh, consuming world). They then stop at a small café to let Martha sample a new tea. Finally, Martha gives Lois a smile and tugs Jonathan over to a street-side vendor. Lois smiles back, pulls her cap low to shade her features, and ducks into the boutique they’ve passed three times now.

It’s comfortable and familiar to browse through stiff fabrics and sleek gowns and luxurious lingerie. She can’t remember the last time she went shopping. Can’t remember the last time she gave it a thought (and realizes anew just how much of Lois Lane was tied up with Clark Kent). Minutes trickle by unnoticed as she feasts her eyes on colors and cuts, lets herself try on a few things, and even taxes her limp savings account by buying a new dress (without letting herself think on why she suddenly wants a new dress Clark has never seen her in before).

She’s just tucking her wallet back into her purse and looping the handles of her plastic bag over her wrist when she feels it.

A tremble.

A shudder.

A ripple passing through the ground beneath her feet and spreading outward in every direction.

Lois freezes. Stares down at the floor with a perplexed wrinkle in her brow.

“Ma’am?” the salesclerk calls behind her, frantic panic and urgent fear evident in her voice. “Ma’am, you need to duck and cover!”

She’s turning toward the lady, opening her mouth to ask for clarification--and the world cracks and buckles beneath her.

The doors and windows shatter. Glass flies through the air, singing as it whirls toward her, and Lois falls into a crouch, arms covering her head and knocking aside her cap (mind cowering beneath incomprehension). When the melody of whistling danger is silenced, transmuted into the tap-tap-tap percussion of shards settling on the ground, when Lois peeks up, she sees the clerk huddling against an inner door frame, beckoning to her.

The ground is shivering, is sloping up and down (as if finally, so very belatedly, recognizing the extent, the enormity, of Lois’s crimes and is now trying to hurl her off into empty infinity, rid itself of her blemish), and Lois tries to find some balance, enough stability to crawl toward relative safety. Clothes rain down from hangers all around her, glass is murmuring beneath her, hushed by crimson blood that turns her hands and knees slick, and Lois cannot make any headway. Rocks are shattering, there is a crack running a chasm through the tiles beneath her, her entire body is shaken until every single molecule within her is rattled like dice in a cup, threatening to unravel her from the inside out, and every thought in her head is turned upside down, made weak and quivering.

There’s a scream shrieking against her ears, pounding against her eardrums. There’s a rumble carving furrows through her veins and grinding against her breastbone. There’s a cacophony of car horns and blaring alarms and shouts drifting in through the gaps where once there were windows--and Lois cannot take it anymore. Why try to make headway when there is nowhere to go? When the world itself has turned against her? When there is nothing in her worth saving?

She stops where she is, perched atop lines spider-webbing through the solid ground (no longer solid or unmoving or trustworthy), curls herself up in a ball, wraps her arms around her head, and waits for the end.

It’s loud and raucous and dangerous, but silence seems to enwrap her in a smothering cape, as if she cowers in the eye of the storm. And here, alone, cut off from everyone and everything, only one thought can shoulder its way through the mess of this earthquake to keep her company.

This must be what Clark felt like that day.

This is what he must have thought was happening when he walked into the Daily Planet, straight into the firing squad.

Like the world had vanished beneath his feet. Like every rule and law of nature had been broken, remolded and shaped to oh so perfectly and neatly destroy the life he’d oh so carefully built. Like Earth itself had risen up in revolt against him.

This must be what he feels like every day. Each moment facing a quaking world, all stability gone, unable to find any form of balance. Facing the unknown while reality shakes him like a mouse in the jaws of a cat, and the lives of everyone he loves teeter on a fragile precipice.

The insight quakes through Lois’s soul long after the ground has stopped shaking beneath her. It ripples across her psyche as if to echo the aftershocks that send her crashing back to the soiled clothes and sharp glass as soon as she tries to get to her feet. It stays with her, numbing her, while she checks to make certain the clerk is safe, both of them half-covered in plaster dust and bits of dirt and debris from the ceiling.

“Are you okay?” the clerk asks in reply, eyes locked on the various cuts and scrapes carving a scrawled map of guilt and realization over Lois’s exposed flesh (her sins finally shown on the outside, bleeding out into the open).

“I’m fine,” she says, brushing off the concern. (It’s another lie, but she doesn’t care.) “But why on earth do people choose to live in a state that tries to periodically throw them into the ocean?”

The clerk doesn’t seem to hear the question. Her gaze has moved past Lois to the world (large and alien and hostile) outside the gutted windows. Her eyes widen, her ebony skin bleached ashen. “Wow.” Her voice is small and washed out. “It’s a bad one, the worst I’ve ever seen. I’m glad you weren’t out in the open when that hit.”

Horror hits harder and longer and more devastating than the earthquake. Fear (as big as Nightfall, as vast as Superman’s silence, as debilitating as Clark’s death) assails Lois like a disease. Like a virus that attacks and drains and steals and wounds (and kills).

Because Jonathan and Martha were standing outside.

Because they promised to wait there for her until she was done shopping. Because James was there with them. Because they were in the open.

Unprotected.

In danger.

Because the only things left to Clark (the only people he loves and daily saves the world for; the only people he will talk to and for) were all in one place. And if they are gone (if they were taken from him while they waited for Lois, of all people), then Clark will not be the only one broken and crushed. Superman will be broken too. Superman will be devastated. Will be cut loose from the Earth, ripped from his only tether.

And there will be nothing at all left to save, no alter ego to keep him here.

And all because of Lois.

Again.

The shop’s door is hanging loose on its hinges, inviting her to see the entirety of the desolation awaiting her (awaiting Clark). Lois slips through the revealed gap, heedless of the remnants of glass, and walks into a scene that looks as if it’s been pulled straight from some end-of-the-world movie. The road has been chiseled into rocks, into canyons, into an obstacle course keeping her from finding Clark’s family. People are shouting and crying, their voices intermingled with sirens and alarms to make a symphony of fear and pain and loss and confusion.

Lois stumbles over debris she doesn’t bother to identify as her eyes dart from one empty space to another, looking for landmarks that are no longer there. Searching for the green awning of the vendor Jonathan and Martha had stopped at. Praying for a glimpse of pink blouse or worn plaid shirt or flashing camera.

She sees the camera first. It is sitting incongruously in the middle of the street, its cracked lens reflecting back rays of a sun that should be veiled but isn’t, as if heedless of the momentousness of this moment, this hour, this afternoon. The camera’s strap is empty, placed almost decorously beside a downed telephone pole, and Lois doesn’t know whether to be relieved it’s not laying atop a body or frustrated that it brings her no closer to finding James. She has no time to decide because it’s then that she spots a swatch of green beneath the crumbling remains of a storefront.

Lois doesn’t stop to think on what she might find there (on how little there might be left for her to find), just climbs and stumbles and crawls her way toward it (and if tears are swirling through the dust she walks through and that cakes her face, if sobs are shuddering their way through her, she cannot take the time to realize it). And when she climbs atop a stone (a bit of the road churned up and spit out to resemble a rock with yellow lines adorning its surface), she sees James.

He is digging through the rubble. His blonde wig is lost somewhere, but his dark hair looks gray with the dust that covers up the sheen of skin and blood (painted over his forehead and shoulder and leg) alike. His right arm hangs limp and lifeless at his side, but he digs anyway with his left hand, his watch incongruously black against smudged skin. He digs methodically. Desperately.

Alone.

Lois needs to join him. To help him. (To mourn with him). She means to, but she can’t. Her limbs won’t cooperate. Her voice won’t work. Her entire body rebels against her to leave her frozen and motionless for a long, eternal moment.

But they need her. And Clark needs them. And she needs to do something (something besides bring them into danger and have them wait in the most dangerous place and huddle frozen in a shop while they are hurt). So she forces herself downward. Forces gravity to help her move from her perilous perch. Forces herself to lift up a hand toward James.

Then everything stops.

The sun’s rays seem to halt in place.

The clouds cease moving forward.

The symphony goes silent.

Lois’s heart stutters to an uneven, slowing beat.

Because there is a rush of wind. There is a blur of red and blue high up in the sky. There is a thud that rivals the beginning of that earthquake as Superman hits the ground. There is a rush of held breath as he looks at the rubble before him (at the young man fallen utterly, hopelessly still in his digging). There is a single instant when the world itself stops its revolution to see what Superman will do.

Except that when he moves, he moves too quickly for anyone to see, for the world to comprehend. He is gone, a flash, a blur, a whisper of sound, and the street’s new geography shifts and changes again. Cleared and smoothed and tossed away from the bit of space where a shredded green awning hangs limp on the ground like a fallen standard.

Superman, when he comes once more into mortal sight, is on his knees. He is staring down at two bodies, uncovered by stone, drenched in blood, their angles unnatural enough to make Lois’s eyes skitter away from them. She looks, instead, back up to Superman.

But Superman is gone. Vanished. Dead. Transformed, in an instant, in the blinking of an eye, back to the haunted, dying remnants of Clark Kent. It is Clark who kneels there before his parents, beneath the eyes of James and Lois (and the onlookers and the other victims and the cameras sure to come), unveiled. Stripped naked and exposed once more to everyone.

“Clark,” Lois whispers with a half-step forward. But it’s too little too late (and there is no comfort to be found), and when he turns to look at her, she does not see the devastation she expected. She does not see heartbreak or anguish or pain.

Instead, all she sees is emptiness.

Bleak, hopeless emptiness.

And she did not realize how much she depended on his last slivers of hope until they are gone.

James is apologizing, explaining, crying as he says he is sorry, he should have been with them, he should have gotten to them sooner, he should have signaled or called immediately. Clark is a void, numb to all that’s been taken from him, sucking in all James’s words and giving nothing in return. And Lois can do nothing but stumble forward. Can do nothing but hate this world that can cause so much hurt to a truly good man who doesn’t deserve it at all.

Then, breaking the silent, fractured tableau, Clark bends. So slowly. So infinitely gently. He curls his arms under his mom’s tiny form and then straightens as if the entire world will shatter should he not do this exactly, precisely right. And then he is gone, a swirl of wind to batter at Lois’s ankles all that marks his passing. Lois doesn’t even have time to register the swiftness of his actions before he is back, passing Lois and not seeming to hear James’s apologies.

“Dad,” Clark croaks out (and the entire world shudders in astonishment, to remember that Superman can talk). He bends again and once more cradles his parent close, the bulky form of his father turned somehow fragile and child-like in Clark’s grip. Once he’s on his feet, he hesitates, then looks at James. “I’m taking them to Mercy Hospital,” he says, his voice so distant, so inflectionless, that it is as if a stranger is speaking. He narrows his eyes at James, sweeps a look from his head to his toes, then does the same to Lois (but he is not seeing her, is seeing only muscles and bones and tendons and organs). “You both might want to get checked out, too—your arm is broken, James.”

He turns, about to burst into invisible movement and action, but Lois reaches out a hand (that drops before reaching him, because who is she to offer comfort to him). “Clark,” she says, because the murmurs of the crowd are full of Supermans and because he seems more elusive than ever before (even when she hadn’t seen him in months and knew nothing about where he was).

As if he cannot help himself, he looks at her. Casts her a silent, screaming look (like a child left abandoned and desolate and searching for impossible answers). Then he once more shuts himself down, and he is gone, leaving Lois and James to follow in a more sedate fashion.

Or maybe just gone, period. Gone so far that no one and nothing can bring him back, and Lois should have come sooner, should have promised to help him earlier, should have done more instead of playing around in gardens, because now it’s too late.

Clark is gone, and even Superman cannot save him.

And without them, what is there left for Lois Lane?

*