*18*
Lois feels inordinately nervous to have James up here on the roof with her, amidst the maze-like planters filled with crops she’s nurtured and protected and helped along as well as she knows how. If he were still Jimmy, she wouldn’t be so anxious about what he might be thinking as he looks around at the fruit of her clumsy labors; she would be impatient and careless, heedless of how the younger man judges her and her efforts.
But he is not Jimmy. He is James, and he has earned her respect on top of her dormant affection for him. He is James, and he is like a brother to Clark and a son to Jonathan and Martha, and that makes him important. He is James, and his opinion, his judgement, matters (because out of all the employees of the Daily Planet, he is the only one who chose right on that fateful, infamous day).
Her knot of tension barely has time to grow, to send out tendrils of roots (and oh man, she has become a farmer if that’s the simile she picks), before James ends his perusal, turns to her, and smiles his young, wide smile. “Looks great,” he proclaims, and Lois feels twenty pounds lighter. The grin turns mischievous almost instantly, as fast as the twinkle in his eye appears. “Looks like that black thumb you had in the newsroom was just a disguise, huh?”
A disguise. A mask. A lie.
She’s not sure if he means the backhanded reference to what she stole from Clark. She thinks he does. She thinks he wants her to remember where they started (in that old, dying diner with salt and pepper shakers as cracked as the trust between them) and realize how far they’ve come (to a rooftop covered in green, staring at the skies for a glimpse of Superman oh so carefully flying his injured parents to an undisclosed location). She thinks he’s using a reference to the worst time in their relationship, turning it into a joke, to remind her that things are different now. She is an ally (not an enemy), a friend (not an uninvited guest), and the genuineness of his grin makes it impossible for her to take offense or fall back into debilitating guilt.
“My greatest secret,” Lois replies casually, and she is not talking about green thumbs.
James’s smile turns soft and slow and relieved all over again (as if he worries always, constantly, ceaselessly, and has lost hope that there will ever be a time when he does not need to; as if he is not used to allies to his cause and help in these lonely moments and a worry falling away).
A glimpse of red and blue in the sky distracts them. It is Clark, impossibly distant (but visible expressly because he knew Lois wanted to see Jonathan and Martha in whatever way is open to her), on his way to a new, secret location with his parents. He and James haven’t told her where the Kents are going, and truthfully, Lois doesn’t want to know (doesn’t want another secret to protect, or give away, or to be used as a test of her loyalty). She wants them to be safe, and if ignoring her curiosity on this subject is the only way to see that done, then she will practice a bit of the self-control she’s had to take a crash-course in since arriving at this private suite.
“The cameras and helicopters can’t track him?” she asks, even though she already knows the answer. James spent over an hour the night before reassuring her they had all the kinks in the plan worked out.
“No,” he tells her anyway, patience as dark and heavy in his voice as the sunglasses over his eyes. “And Clark made sure all the satellites that could be tracking him are temporarily…unaligned, shall we say. Besides, once he’s out of sight of the immediate spectators, he’s going to accelerate to a speed the human eye can’t discern. Don’t worry--his aura will protect the Kents while he’s carrying them.”
“It doesn’t protect his cape,” she points out (for the tenth time).
The glasses give him a cover, but she’s relatively sure James is rolling his eyes anyway. “He’s holding his parents a lot closer than the cape, trust me.”
“I just want them to be okay,” she whispers.
“They’re okay.” His voice is calm, his expression steady, his hand on her shoulder warm and comforting. “They’re fine. Clark made a lot of friends in his journeys around the world--friends who are more than willing to help him without tipping off the press. The Kents will be well taken care of.”
“Something that cannot be said for you.” A shadow falls across them both, blotting out the sun, distracting from that glimpse of red and blue, startling both Lois and James as they turn away from the skies.
The careless, drawling voice is one that Lois has heard in her nightmares for months (since the suffocating heat of tents and the feel of fingers around her throat and the sound of a gunshot cloaked in green), and for a long, frozen moment, she thinks she has imagined it. Here. In her sanctuary. In the pseudo-fields where she has found some measure of peace with herself (has achieved contentment, which she found lacking all the way up until the instant she hears this voice and now realizes there are oh so much worse things) and learned of the Clark she lost in Smallville.
From behind the planter near the stairwell emergency exit (the same planter that had been infested with bugs, Lois thinks numbly), from behind the cloaking lushness Lois herself has helped cultivate, he steps. A figure of terror and regret and choking guilt and blame. A man embodying so many of Clark’s childhood fears. (So many of her own recent terrors.)
Trask.
Here. In this moment. Not a dream. Not a nightmare. Real.
He is standing four feet in front of her and he is holding a gun leveled at them and James is moving, darting in front of her, his hand raising up from near his ankle, and there is something dark in that hand, something black, something shaped very like a gun--
The gunshot deafens Lois and sends her reeling backward. Silence envelops her like an atmosphere of private confinement, numbing her to the world, to this reality that is so much like the nightmares she hasn’t experienced in weeks.
For an instant, she is back in Smallville, beside a lake near the Kents’ barn. Clark is bruised and dirty and covered in the dirt but standing upright and defiant while a green rock glows inches away from him, and Trask is looming over him until the second gunshot sounds and then he is clutching his arm and running and leaping into the van that wheeled away and out of sight, pursued by (but ultimately evading, a fact she has conveniently forgotten or ignored all these months) the Smallville police.
For an instant, Lois is back in that moment, choking on anger and hurt and terror. For an instant, she is overwhelmed with the enormity of her emotions and the depth of her reaction. For an instant, she cannot think, can only scream a silent shriek that scrapes along the insides of her skull. Because Clark had been in danger, he’d been hurt, and she hadn’t known, hadn’t realized, had only seen the lies and the masks and the false conclusions. He’d been hurt, and she had not cared because other things had seemed so much more important and real and imperative.
But then James falls with a grunt to the ground, his shoes (smart and practical shoes, not the sneakers he used to wear) skidding through the gravel, and his gun (the gun Jimmy would never have owned) falls uselessly aside, and the scent of blood is overpowering, drowning out the smells of the plants on either side of them and the water misting from the sprinklers a few rows down.
“James!” Lois cries, and this time she knows what is important (knows the difference between false pride and practical possibilities), so she does not throw herself uselessly at the standing, smirking Trask with his (metaphorically) smoking gun, but drops to her knees at James’s side.
He is bleeding from his left shoulder, the gravel beneath him swimming in his life-blood. His face is pale, almost ashen, his sunglasses gone and his eyes dark and hollow. He tries to reach up with his hand, tries to lift his right hand toward his left side, but he forgets the splint still there, forgets his weakness, and he cries out in pain and curls in around himself.
“Shh, shh,” Lois murmurs, over and over again, trying to think past her own panic. She sets her own hands over his shoulder, tries to staunch the bleeding (so much of it, wet and sticky and startlingly hot against her palms, filling up every crevice, every pore, staining her fingernails, a pool of it that she kneels in, her flesh forever marked by her sins and mistakes). He yelps again, flinches, and his entire body spasms. She presses harder (focuses on him so that the memories cannot drown her and Trask cannot cow her), shrugs off her jacket and uses it as an inept, bulky bandage.
Behind her, Trask comes nearer, his footsteps heavy. Ponderous. Implacable.
“I knew you’d lead me to the alien eventually,” he says, all cocky surety and brash insanity. “I knew all I had to do was follow you long enough, and he couldn’t help but show himself.”
Before, she would have tried to bluff him (would have stared him in the face and dared him to take his best shot at her, Lois Lane, the great investigative journalist, so sure and confident and immortal). But this is now, and the world is changed (so utterly different that it seems alien), and she cannot look away from James (so young and so important and so loved and so vulnerable), cannot think of anything past the blood pooling around her hands and staining her dove-grey jacket (cannot let herself think of Clark, right now bearing his precious cargo to a safe place, so scared for their safety that it had taken him and James and a team of people at the Superman Foundation weeks to come up with a plan he would accept; so relieved that after this morning he would not have quite so much to worry about with everyone he loved somewhere safe).
She is old and frightened and has lost too much already. It’s no longer in her to be quite so blasé about her life (about Clark’s life). So she does not try to pretend she doesn’t know what Trask is talking about, does not try to make him think there is help coming. She does nothing (because all she does brings ruin) but try to keep at least a few liters of blood in James’s veins (because she cannot help but keep trying and doing and hoping even with all the proof against her).
James’s lashes flutter a few times before a sliver of his dark eyes are revealed. They latch onto her, desperate, intent, as if he is trying to tell her something. He lifts up his splinted hand again, but the pain of the movement ripples in spasms across his face and he falls back, limp and beaten.
“Shh, shh,” she keeps saying, stuck on repeat (doomed to the endless cycle of being invited into Clark’s home and learning a bit more about him and then watching, causing, it all to turn on him, to transmogrify from hope and comfort and love to pain and fear and weakness).
“Don’t worry about him.” Trask’s shadow falls over her, heavy across her shoulders, blotting out the sun. “He’s not going to die. Yet. First, you’re both going to help me destroy the alien invader. I’m doing you a favor here, Lane, you and the kid--I’m giving you the chance to turn from traitors to your own race…into heroes for your world.”
“Never.” Her throat is dry, her mouth parched, her lips cracked, but her voice (her choice to break her own silence) is loud and defiant. Finally, she can look up at him, can crane her neck and skip past the view of the bullet (slick with James’s blood) embedded in the elevator doors, and look Jason Trask full in the face.
He smirks at her (laughs at her scraps of courage). “You forget, Lane--I turned you into a hero after my own heart once already. I can do it again.”
Then he brings his hand down, the gun dark and bold and stark, and Lois’s vision explodes in a shattering of light and sparks and the silhouette of brightness against darkness.
The rooftop vanishes. Lois falls.
*
She hadn’t wanted to go to Smallville. It was a waste of time, blatant favoritism on Perry’s part to give Clark a trip home on the Planet’s dime. There wasn’t, she was so sure (so determined), going to be anything there worth her time or effort. Clark spent the entire plane ride and car trip trying to chivvy her out of her dark mood, his indomitable smile and innocuous attempts at humor almost enough to pierce her resentment if she hadn’t been so flatly intent on remaining unimpressed.
But then they’d arrived at the Irig farm, and Clark had motioned to her to keep Sherman talking, and he’d faded to the side, back, back, back until even Lois’s careful sidelong glances couldn’t show her where he was. Later, she’d realize that when he fiddled with his glasses he must have seen Wayne Irig (inextricably linked in his mind with memories of happier times and an idyllic childhood and caramel apples) tied up inside. Later, when she is alone and there are no stories fizzing at the ends of her fingertips anymore, she’ll piece it together and realize Clark had used her distraction to superspeed through the camp and snatch the bloodied, bruised farmer right out from under Trask’s nose.
A noble gesture. A heroic act.
A foolish miscalculation.
Because then Trask had known, and he’d realized Superman was here, even if not in the Suit, and he’d connected the arrival of reporters Lois Lane and Clark Kent to the Kent farm down the road, and then…well, then that had been the beginning of the end.
But at the time, all Lois had known was that she didn’t even want to be here but she was doing her best anyway, for crying out loud, and yet when Clark returned, he claimed he hadn’t found anything and all her efforts were in vain.
“Nothing suspicious,” he said, and Lois had looked at him and known he was lying (he’s never been a good liar, even then when he had so much more need for it).
It made her angry. No. It made her furious. All this way, side by side with him, doing her best even on such a stupid excuse for a story, and he was finally doing what she’d been certain this whole time he would.
He was lying to her. Hiding something from her.
He was trying to steal this story and make it his own.
He was leaving her behind.
And suddenly she’d known there was a story, and it must be big, big enough to worry about, and she could not let this small-time reporter from a town that worshipped corn deities come out on top.
So she’d smiled and pretended to believe him, and she’d gone with him to the Corn Festival. And her own plan had begun to take shape.
If Clark wouldn’t tell her what he’d found beyond the line Sherman hadn’t allowed them to cross, well, she’d just have to pay her own visit.
Later, she’ll realize how foolish that was, but later…later, it is already far, far too late.
*
When she opens her eyes, the lights are still there, floating in the center of her vision and swirling about all but psychedelically at the edges. She groans and brings one hand up to her brow--or tries to, but both hands come together, bound tightly with thick, scratchy rope.
“Lois?”
She squeezes her eyes shut again, does her best to will herself better, and then opens them. The sparks fade back, not gone but at least dulled, and Lois is able to take in her surroundings. A small closet-like space in a damp, cold office building abandoned what looks to be decades ago. There’s water dripping somewhere, she has the damp feeling at her back to inform her she’s lying in a puddle, and only marred, vague daylight issuing from painted-over windows illuminates the makeshift cell. It’s been a while since she’s last been kidnapped (the last time was Smallville, with Trask and his paranoid whispers and insane schemes and effective manipulations), but she finds the entire situation all too depressingly familiar.
Except…except this time she has a lot more than a story or a source or her life to protect.
This time, Clark is depending on her.
Clark Kent, and everything that entails. The last vestiges of the man she came thousands of miles to find. The remnants that she and James have been working so hard to resurrect. The fledgling hope and confidence he has only just begun to reclaim.
With a sudden sick feeling of urgency and panic, Lois sits upright. Her head protests with a truly nauseating array of sensory upheaval, but she narrowly manages to avoid vomiting in the puddle seeping through her clothes, and looks up to see James. He’s propped up near the door, his shirt gone, blood staining his pale skin (almost gray in the sparse light), and the bullet wound is stitched closed with jagged lines of inky shadow. His cast is missing; he holds his left arm close to his body, his wrist cradled in his right hand.
“L-Lois,” he says again. “Are you okay?”
“Am I okay?” she repeats, not sure she wants to know the answer. Then, belatedly, she shifts to her knees and crawls toward him, awkwardly due to her bound hands. Her feet are bound too, a fact that seems trivial in comparison to the rest of their situation. “You’re the one who was shot, James.”
“Trask doesn’t want me dead,” James says with the suggestion of a shrug that makes his face go even more ashen. “They patched me up--a bit of a q-quick, messy job, but hey, I guess I can’t complain.”
“You…” Her throat is hoarse, her mouth parched, her heart shriveled up within the confines of her ribcage, and she almost cannot get the words out. Almost forgets that she has been learning how to be strong again (a better strong, a more selfless strong) and that she has vowed to do whatever she can, whatever she must, to save Clark even if that includes facing up to truths she’d so much rather avoid.
Again, she squeezes her eyes shut (as if that will make it any better), and clears her throat, and forces herself to say, “You know why he doesn’t want us dead.”
“Of course.” James’s tone, in direct contrast to hers, is almost cavalier. As if it doesn’t matter. As if there is nothing to be afraid of. As if (in a delayed echo to her own actions) he is simply reflecting her own careless thoughts of months previous back on her. “Trask isn’t exactly shy about admitting his plans. He expects Superman to arrive v-very shortly.”
Lois gapes at him, stares with all the astonishment she can muster in the hopes that he will snap out of his shock or his drug-induced stupor or something, and realize how bad this situation is.
James only shifts a bit against the wall, adjusts his arm in his lap, tightens his grip over the watch adorning his wrist.
“James,” she says slowly, calmly, rationally (because one of them needs to be thinking clearly), “you know we can’t let that happen. We can’t let Cl--Superman come here. Trask is dangerous.”
She’s afraid to spell it out, just in case her late-night musings, her regretful ponderings, have led her to the wrong conclusion. Just in case Trask is listening for any sign of weakness. Just in case the universe is trying to set her up to destroy Clark Kent again.
“He is,” James agrees amiably. “Very dangerous. Of course, you’d know that better than anyone.”
Flashes of long-repressed memory spark in front of her, specters crowding the room, looming over her, trapping her between their pain and regret and guilt. Trask coming in behind her after she’d snuck into his camp, jerking the tent-flap closed before she could even start to think about making a run for it, staring at her with that infuriating smirk twisting his lips. Her anger at being trapped. Her foolish (stupid, stupid) defiance as she’d informed him Superman could never be harmed by Trask, that he was a hero, invulnerable and powerful and good. Her fear when Trask’s hand had closed around her throat and mouth, the feel of him hard and dangerous behind her as he pushed her to the edge of the tent. Her shock at hearing Clark’s voice, and irritation thinking he’d come after her and walked into the same trap as she did. And her complete and utter astonishment when that earnest, sarcastic voice had morphed into a deeper, more confident voice that she’d heard dozens of times in her dreams and her fantasies and her infrequent interviews.
The sense of betrayal.
The rage.
The humiliation.
When she’d written her article, she’d thought those feelings, that upsurge of terrible, broiling, mixed emotions, were the worst part. But later, when there was no one to call her, no one to buy her snow cones or pretzels, no one to touch her simply to let her know she was not alone during the hardest moments of her life--later, she’d realized the worst part came after those emotions. After she’d escaped Trask, after she’d joined Jimmy in rushing with the police to the Kent farm (but only so she could catch Clark in the act, not so she could save him; not then, and maybe that is the most shameful part of the entire debacle), after she’d seen the Kents stumbling from a burning barn out into the open only moments after their son had stood upright before a madman through sheer force of will while all the while a green rock burned and glowed and writhed with poisoned potency at his feet.
After, when there was no Clark left and Superman died a little bit more every day.
Yes. She knows how dangerous Trask is. She knows just what kind of damage he can do. And she knows exactly what he thinks of Clark (she still dreams of it, sometimes, his blunt voice in her ear, threading its way through her bloodstream like poison, coating her in a filth no amount of showers can ever cleanse her of).
“We can’t let this happen,” is all she says, though, because she cannot let James know just how weak she is. She cannot fail him, cannot let him down after he has trusted her and allowed her into their elite pact. She must be strong for him, must be calm and firm and clear-headed so that they can get out of here (and she can leave Clark Kent behind forever, then, before she ruins what little is left of his life yet again, because this cannot happen again).
James studies her, curiously. Bemusedly. “What do you suggest we do?” he asks.
“Well…” She’s clumsy with bound hands, with the coarseness of the ropes rubbing her skin raw with every move she makes, but she finally manages to untie the bindings around her ankles. She stands and moves to the door. “First things first…”
“Locked?” James asks. He still sounds insanely calm, still watches her as if he is not trapped here at all.
Lois throws her shoulder against the door, ignoring the complaints from what must surely be a concussion, and then kicks it with panic she’s only barely controlling. “Yes,” she finally says regretfully. “But maybe I can twist those pipes over there free and use them as a lever to pry the door off by the hinges.”
James follows her gaze to the rusted water pipes against the edge of the far wall, the source of the dripping water. “Maybe,” he says noncommittally. The pipes are heavy and corroded and spattered with rust and mold, but they are wedged solidly into the floor and the wall, and Lois doesn’t have much more hope than James, but she can’t just sit here. Not again. Not ever again.
(It’s like a mantra, pounding in her head along with her rapid, uneven heartbeat: Never again. Never again. I won’t. I won’t. Never again.)
She has to do something. For once, for the first time, she needs to help Clark instead of hurt him.
So she pries at the casings around the pipes, scratches at them with her fingers, refuses to take notice when her nails tear and rip and blood begins to drip down the pipes along with the dank water. In the corner, tossed aside as if it were in the way, she sees the remains of James’s splint, soaked and dirty just like her clothes and her hair and skin and everything around her. Her current surroundings are so different from the lush rooftop garden, her situation as a prisoner so far removed from her time as a guest in that suite of rooms she’d almost begun to fool herself into thinking she belonged in, that she wonders if maybe she isn’t just imagining all this.
Except that James is so still, so calm, so uncharacteristically unworried. He could be in shock from the bullet wound, or maybe it’s whatever drugs they gave him (if they gave him any at all, a question she doesn’t bother to ask because knowing just exactly how cruel Trask is won’t help her any at the moment), or…
Lois’s movements still. She falls motionless, her mind turning, running, scanning through the possibilities. She can’t believe it. She won’t believe it. And it doesn’t make any sense, but…
“This isn’t a test, is it?” she blurts out. She studies James closely, squinting to make him out more clearly in the shadows. “I mean…that’s impossible. Trask wouldn’t--you wouldn’t work with him, but…”
The twist to James’s lips is entirely too cynical for someone as young as he is. He rolls his head back against the wall and hisses in his breath when he accidentally jostles his shoulder. “N-no, Lois. I mean, yes, I h-have tested you since I first agreed to meet you, of course I have, but this…this is not a test.” His voice drops lower, beads of sweat visible on his brow, his cheeks, his upper lip, shimmering in the light that dances off the dark, silvery water puddled all around them. “I wish it were.”
Strangely disappointed (because a test, even if cruel and extreme, would be better than this), Lois turns back to her useless tugging at the pipes. “This isn’t coming free,” she finally admits. Her wrists are bruised from moving against the bonds, and she temporarily turns her attention to trying to untie the ropes with her teeth. All she ends up with is a mouthful of coarse strands and the taste of copper against her gums (not quite peppermint but just as bitter).
“M-maybe just as well,” James says, almost inaudibly. “Trask has a lot of men with him, probably all that’s left of Bureau 39. P-plus, we’ve been here a couple hours besides however long before we woke up, so we might not be anywhere near Coast City or a-a-any kind of civilization.”
“You have a watch,” Lois points out, more to ignore the ramifications of what he is saying than because she cares what time it is. Clark planned to be gone all day anyway, moving his parents and settling them in wherever it was he took them. And with a whole day devoted to Clark duties, he will probably choose to stay out all night answering the cries for Superman. It could, conceivably, be a day or more before he returns to the suite and realizes they are missing.
“A w-w-watch,” James stutters. He is shivering, hard, uncontrollably, sweat dripping down his cheeks. “Right.” He looks down, curls his hand over the face of the timepiece. “It’s not…not working.”
He’s going into shock. Or, more likely, has been in shock for a while now, and that, piled on top of the wound in his shoulder and his broken arm and whatever Trask’s men did to stitch him up, is now resulting in a system shutdown.
“James!” Lois abandons the stubborn pipes and falls to her knees at his side. “James, talk to me. What can I do?”
“I’m j-j-just…r-really c-c-cold.” He doesn’t sound calm or in control anymore. He sounds like a little boy, a young kid playing dress-up in his father’s clothes and pretending to a maturity he only has because the world is far too cruel of a place. He sounds lost and alone and scared.
He finally sounds helpless, and contrarily, Lois wishes he would go back to that unnatural calmness (wishes he would reflect more Clark-traits back at her because that is all the Clark Lois will ever be able to get from now on).
“It’s okay,” Lois says, even though it is not, even though things could not possibly get more not-okay. She says it because he needs to hear it (and she needs to say it, to have control over this one tiny thing) and because she wants to help him, to give back to him. Because she does not think she will ever be able to face Clark again if she has to tell him that his adopted brother died in her arms. “It’s okay, James. We’re going to be okay.”
She maneuvers herself until she is sitting propped up beside him, her bound hands resting on his knee to give him as much of her heat and touch and reassurance as she can. He stiffens, rigid, wracked with shuddering chills, for just the smallest instant before he is leaning down into her, resting his head against her shoulder. She tries to press closer, wishes her hands were free so she could wrap her arms around him, protect him from anything and everything outside this cell with her own flesh and blood and bone and fractured heart.
“I’m so sorry,” she whispers against his hair, heedless of the mud and grime crusted into it (heedless of everything but his body spasming against hers and the deathly pallor to his skin and the catch in his breathing as he tries not to cry). “I’m so sorry. You told me I’d bring him nothing but pain, but I didn’t believe you. And now this is all my fault. Trask only found us because of me.”
“N-n-no!” James tries to pull away but falls back against her. The bone-jarring collision hurts, but Lois takes it stoically, braces herself against the wall to give him more support. “D-don’t ap-pologize. I…I was w-wrong, Lois. I was so m-mad at you for that story. F-for hurting him. I wanted to m-make sure y-y-you could n-never do it again. But…but he was so w-w-wounded after Nightfall. P-probably before, too, but h-he hid it better then. W-when he came back, all hurt and bruised and hollow, w-we couldn’t help him. He j-j-just sh-shut himself down. That’s the reason I finally went to s-s-see you, because even though y-you could hurt him, you were a-also t-the only thing that could make him react. Could ground him and pull him in, a-and we needed th-that. He needs that m-more than a-anything.”
“But he loves you,” Lois says. She’s not sure if she is reassuring him or resenting the truth of that sentence. “You and his parents--you’re the only ones that stayed with him. The only ones that still saw him as Clark.”
“Th-that’s not true.” James huddles closer to her heat. She wants to believe that his chills are getting better, but she thinks it would be a lie. His skin is ice-cold against hers, except his cheeks; when they brush against hers as he speaks, she feels a feverish heat. “You s-still see him as Cl-Clark. In fact…” He takes in a huge, gasping breath. “I think you always saw him as Clark. I think th-that’s why you were s-so mad when you f-found out the truth. He thought you w-would only s-see Superman, but it’s the o-opposite, isn’t it? You th-thought the story would only hurt Clark, not S-Superman.”
The truth of those words hits hard and deep and terrible. Lois stares blindly ahead into the darkness and feels the world spinning beneath her, opening up in a gaping hole that sucks her down and under and away.
“Yes,” she hears herself say. “I know it probably makes it seem worse, but I…I didn’t think it would… He was Clark, annoying and endearing and too close, and he was lying even after I’d started to believe he wouldn’t, and when I found out, I just…I thought he’d have to stop the charade but he’d still be there. I just thought...that it was a game, and I'd win. I didn’t think that he’d be gone forever. I didn't think we'd both lose everything. I…I didn’t think,” she finally finishes, and wishes she had more to say in her defense. But she doesn’t.
She didn’t think.
She didn’t realize.
She didn’t stop to consider.
She made a rash decision and let anger guide her, and now here they are six months later and the world is a darker, colder, crueler place and James is dying in her arms and Jonathan and Martha are in hiding and helpless and Clark has no idea just how much danger he is in or just how alone he is about to become.
“I’m sorry,” Lois whispers again, but James makes no reply, slumped bonelessly against her, and there is only the echo of dripping water to answer her.
She is sorry. So very, utterly, completely sorry.
But it doesn’t matter, because no amount of apologies, no amount of regret or guilt or ripped up articles or watered plants or board games can ever erase what she did. She can say she is sorry for the rest of her life, an endless litany of regret and guilt, but it won’t change anything.
She is trapped in a prison of her own impulsive choices, and there will never be an escape. Not for her. Not ever.
*
