*20*
Poison.
It’s not a word she’s considered before. Not really. Not as how it applies to her. Some, bitter and angry, have called her stories poisonous, and Cat has not been above referring to her workaholic ways as a sort of poison, but real honest-to-goodness poison? That’s not really been something that’s ever mattered to her.
But now it does. Now it matters more than almost any other word at all, because Trask is about to leak poison all through her veins and because…because Lois is poison herself.
Poison: anything that tends to harm, destroy, or corrupt.
That’s her to a T, right down to the last comma and period, isn’t it?
From the moment Clark came into her life, standing and reaching out a hand she pretended not to see, she’s been harming him. Put-downs and barbs and insults, and maybe they seemed to roll right off of him, but not all poisons are fast-acting. Some are slow and insidious, building up in the bloodstream until the luckless person collapses with a system already too corroded to be healed.
But she wasn’t content with letting him die slowly. She’d destroyed him, utterly, in one moment. An article, a secret revealed to the entire world, and when he’d come to stand in front of her (asking her what, why, how could she possibly do this to him when he had never done anything to her except save her life and be her friend), she’d known exactly what to say to drive the last nail in his coffin. “You’ve always claimed to stand for truth and justice--isn’t it only fair that everyone knows the truth now?” she’d asked, because she hadn’t been content destroying Clark Kent--she’d wanted to destroy Superman, too (she’d wanted to make sure he knew she didn’t see Superman, godlike savior, when she looked at him, but rather Clark Kent, liar and deceiver and betrayer).
And then, when she should have called it quits and left him to the pitiful remnants that were all he’d had after she was finished with him, she’d come searching for him again. She’d found his haven, woven herself through it, pretended she wanted closure, wanted to help him, to save him, but all along, what had she been doing? She’s been corrupting him, tainting everything she touches, ruining his life all over again, leading his enemies to him (wanting him to save her).
The tension between the Kents and James and Clark and her.
The earthquake.
The doubts Clark has now about what he should do with his life and just who he is.
James dying right in front of her.
All because of her, weakening the tenets of his life, fracturing the contentment he has managed to miraculously find all on his own.
Poison.
She is poison to him. His own personal Kryptonite. She’s pretended that she isn’t, donning her own secret identity of friend, ally, help, but her mask is nowhere near as good as even Clark’s thin, frail glasses. He’s pretended that she isn’t, pretended that her presence doesn’t rend and tear and slash at him. Pretended that he can endure her presence and invite her closer, and ignoring, all the while, that he is bleeding out from the inside. But even he cannot take the pretense all the way to its natural conclusion.
So it’s better this way. Better to let the needle pierce her skin and the liquid Kryptonite draining from that IV bag to slide through her veins. Better to stamp onto her flesh her poisonous qualities, like a disclaimer, so that there can be no more pretending. No more masquerading. No more dreaming of different choices.
She’s Kryptonite, green with bitterness and jealousy and resentment in a Smallville tent. Green with sickness and guilt and regret in a Daily Planet newsroom. Green with the real Kryptonite that will bar her from forever getting close enough to Clark to finish the job she’s been making her life’s work (that will save him from ever having to worry about her ruining his life again).
Because, sometimes, people can recover from poison. If it’s identified early enough. If it’s diagnosed and treated and avoided forever after.
“Better to have Kryptonite for blood than the red blood of a traitor,” Trask says, and maybe he says more, but Lois does not bother to listen.
Instead, she turns her face away, to the wall, and listens (impossibly) for the sound of James’s watch. Listens for Clark coming to save her and the man he loves as a brother. The man who never betrayed him, never left him, but who will destroy him if he dies before Clark gets here. The man Lois would do anything to save because Clark needs an ally, a friend, a brother, far more than he needs his betrayer (his Kryptonite).
*
She’d accompanied Clark to the Festival and met his parents and accepted their offer to stay with them. There was no better way to keep an eye on Clark, after all, than to stick close to him and follow him when he tried to sneak off on his own. She tried to listen in on their hushed conversation in the kitchen after they’d all come back in from outside in a rush, but the stairs had creaked and given her away. When she’d entered the kitchen with some excuse about hearing the fax machine, they’d all been staring at her with faux smiles.
Lying. All of them. Hiding something from her. Looking at her as if she was the outsider.
Whatever this was, she’d realized (so vindictively, so triumphantly, and later, she will cringe inside at the conclusions she drew) that this story was even bigger than she’d thought if they were all trying so hard to keep her out of it.
The next morning, she’d come downstairs and seen the Kents crowded around a truck driven by a battered-looking man. They’d waved him off and watched him leave, and when they’d come back in and found her, she’d done her best innocent impression.
The Corn Festival hadn’t given her any new information. Not that she’d been trying too hard. The real story wasn’t the people she was interviewing; it was the man she kept an eye on all morning. Constantly bracketed by his parents, Clark hadn’t tried to sneak away, hadn’t exchanged whispered conspiracies with anyone, hadn’t done even one thing to show that he was trying to edge Lois out of a possibly award-worthy story.
She’d almost given in. Almost shaken away her suspicions and let herself buy the dress she saw at a stand. Almost let herself smile and laugh with Clark and enjoy this glimpse of a side she’d never guessed he had. She’d laughed when he’d tried and failed (and later, she will draw conclusions about a green stone, and realize what Kryptonite is and what it does to him) at a strength game. She’d given him a few extra tickets and helped him win her a black and white teddy bear.
Just lulling him to a false sense of complacency, she’d told herself when she wondered what she was doing. But the truth was that Clark was a far more compelling man than she’d ever given him credit for, far more intriguing and endearing and almost impossible to resist.
“That’s who I am,” he’d said. “Clark.”
And she’d laughed. (Later, she will cry instead.)
But she’d still had suspicions, and she hadn’t gotten to be the youngest Kerth award winner, three times, by not following every lead.
So she hadn’t told Clark that she was going back to Trask’s camp. She’d gone alone. Avoided Sherman and the guards and snuck toward the boundary and made her way into the main tent.
And when Trask’s hand had come around her throat from behind, when he’d whispered his greeting into her ear, his breath hot and smelling of army rations, she’d done what she always did.
She’d bluffed.
*
She can’t hear or see James anymore, and that worries her. Scares her, actually. He’s lost so much blood and endured so much pain and been thrown around far too often. But he is strong (stronger than she ever imagined), so she cannot doubt him. She has to believe that he is still alive, still breathing, still screaming silently out for Superman.
She has to believe that Clark will get here in time to save him.
“How long does this procedure take?” she asks, to stall. To know. To do something other than just lie here passively.
“Not long,” Trask says, far too unconcerned for her liking. “We’ll drain the Kryptonite into your veins, infusing your blood with its radioactive properties. It’s a crude process--quite painful, I believe--but effective.”
Lois stares up at him. She does not think she has hated anyone more in her entire life (except herself, every moment of every day since that Smallville afternoon). “How do you know? Have you tested it?”
“Turns out Bureau 39 isn’t entirely without allies after all.” Trask smiles and shrugs. “Before Superman went after him and put him into prison, Lex Luthor was quite helpful. Found and donated a large chunk of Kryptonite to the cause. A true patriot.”
She feels, abruptly, nauseous again. Her stomach roils within her, remembering a date that wasn’t an interview and a kiss at her door. Remembering charm and his hand curled around hers, and not only is he a criminal, but he’s also capable of wanting to torture and kill Superman.
She wanted to be a reporter to help people. To uncover secrets and publish truths and right wrongs. But instead, all she has done is help the very people who are willing to go to any lengths to pull a hero from the skies, the criminals who attack a man giving his whole self to help and heal and protect. She told a secret that should never have been told, published a truth that in the telling became a lie, and turned the greatest right she has ever known into the greatest wrong she could ever commit.
Harming and destroying and corrupting--that is all her career as a reporter has done.
Her name is going to go down in history books. It’s already there. And she would do anything to erase it, to blot it out of those black and white halls of fame. She would do anything to be anonymous and unknown and happy (with a smiling, friendly Clark Kent at her side, running off to save the world with some lame excuses she wouldn’t see through because she doesn’t want to lose this man who came so unexpectedly into her orbit).
She would do anything to stop this vicious cycle. To stop hurting him. To turn back time and undo her mistakes.
“Don’t worry, Ms. Lane.” Trask pats her hand. He seems a million miles away, so distant, so removed, so inconsequential that she has to force herself to concentrate on him. “Soon, it’ll be all over. Soon, the alien calling himself Clark Kent will be dead, and Earth will be safe once again.”
A needle pricks the inside of her elbow, the cold pinch of punctured flesh. Liquid fire spider-webs up and down her arm.
Lois screams.
*
She’d thought Trask a nutcase, no more dangerous than any of the dozen other crackpots she’d run into over the course of her career. She’d thought she could handle him. She’d thought there was no way he could do anything too bad while she was onto him and Clark was on his trail and the police were aware of his presence on the Irig farm.
She should have looked around and realized that anyone who could put together an operation on such a large scale, with all the official seals of approval, was more dangerous than the average criminal. She should have listened to his raving about Clark and Superman and a meteor rock found right here in Smallville. She should have taken him seriously (only one mistake in a long line of many).
“You think Superman is a hero?” he’d asked her after a whispered conference with a soldier who’d poked his head in and asked to speak to him. She’d tried to overhear whatever news he’d imparted, but hadn’t had any luck. “You think he’s some shining beacon of what it is to be ‘super’?”
“He is super,” she had said defiantly. Later, she will think back on her stance--so defiant and proud--and her voice--so confrontational and aggressive--and she’ll wish that she was half as strong as she’d thought she was. She’ll wish she had remembered to be defiant and aggressive and independent later. She’ll wish she hadn’t been so easily manipulated. “He’s a hero the likes of which you’ll never be able to aspire to. I know you think you’re doing the world a service, but he’s the one who’s saving us.”
“Really? What is it you called him in your article? A ‘paragon of truth.’ The ‘defender of justice.’ Fighting for the American Way. But he’s an alien, Ms. Lane. A creature from another planet, anathema to our way of life. He no more knows what it is to be human than a rock does. But he does know how to pretend. To lie. To put on a mask and play a part.”
“Superman doesn’t lie,” she’d proclaimed, as if she’d known him all her life. As if he’d confided in her and taken her to his home and introduced her to his parents and shown her who he really, truly was (as if he’d been her friend rather than a stranger she’d met mere weeks before and spoken only a couple dozen words to).
Trask had sneered at her, so condescending that he couldn’t quite pull off the pity he seemed to want to show her. “Why don’t we just test that theory,” he’d said, and then he’d pulled her out of the tent, down dusty paths into another tent beside a larger one, and he’d clapped his hand over her mouth and held her impossibly close to him. He’d started whispering words she couldn’t quite distinguish, instructions that only made sense when she realized he was wearing an ear-piece and was talking to a soldier in another tent.
A soldier who was talking, in turn, to Clark Kent. Her erstwhile partner. Her would-be betrayer. He’d come to check the camp out, too, apparently, without her (or maybe, she’ll realize later, so much later, when she is already alone, he’d come to find her, to save her), and fallen into the same predicament she was in. And now he was being questioned by Trask’s man, his voice so distinctive, touched with that meek confidence so unique to Clark.
“We knew you’d come eventually,” the soldier was saying, a delayed echo to Trask’s whisper threading chills across Lois’s ear. “You’re predictable. Or you were. Seems like you have some skeletons in your own closet, though. You were adopted, weren’t you?”
“I don’t see what that has to do with anything,” Clark had said, calmly.
“Everything,” Trask’s puppet had said, and his own tone was menacing, intent, deadly. “You came to Smallville just before Bureau 39 found and acquired a certain ship with a very distinctive symbol. You were adopted and raised here--and then the records turn kind of spotty. You showed up in country after country, always taking odd jobs, always moving on quickly. An unusual, though not exceptional, history…until one takes into account the strange meteor rock found right here in your hometown. A rock that has an…odd effect on you.”
Clark had been silent for a moment, so long that Lois had wondered what had happened to him. Finally, he’d said, “I don’t know what you mean,” but even Lois, in all her ignorance, had known he was lying.
“We saw you!” Trask had hissed in her ear, and the soldier had relayed it. “Last night, your parents showed you a sample of the rock Wayne Irig found on his property, and you were completely incapacitated. Not quite so super anymore, eh, Kent?”
Lois had been confused, left behind, not sure what kind of bizarre twilight zone she’d stumbled into. She might as well have been mouthing Clark’s awkward, stumbling denials and questions for him, just as much of a puppeteer as Trask.
Until the soldier had said the magic words.
“We have your parents. Right now, they’re safe, just a little tied up. But one word from us, one twitch of the finger on the gun, and the human traitors that harbored you all these years will be gone forever.”
And Clark had disappeared, replaced by Superman.
A cold, confident, assertive voice. A calm, measured tone she’d heard before. Words that Clark wouldn’t say, but that Superman would.
As if Clark had been there one instant, and Superman had replaced him the next.
As if Lois had suddenly switched realities.
As if the world had turned upside down.
“Don’t hurt them,” Superman had said. “They have nothing to do with this.”
“Don’t they?” Trask had demanded. “Don’t they? They took in an alien child as their own and raised him to be the perfect chameleon, the consummate con artist. They took in an imposter and they sheltered him until he could grow up and bring the alien armies down on us. Nothing to do with this? They might as well have signed humanity’s extinction papers along with your false adoption records!”
“If you hurt them,” Superman had threatened in a low, dark voice that didn’t match either the superhero or the reporter Lois had thought she’d known, “you will regret it.”
“How?” the soldier had asked, laughing. “Right now, Superman, you’re no stronger than me. Right now…you’re powerless.”
“Still think he’s a hero?” Trask had demanded of her, pushing her down until she sprawled in the dirt, boneless, still, frozen in disbelief and incomprehension. “Still think he stands for truth and justice? You don’t even know who he is, Ms. Lane. And you never have. And you never will. He’ll always be lying to you, always be using you, laughing at how inferior he thinks you are. He’s no hero, Lois Lane. He’s just a con artist.”
She wishes, later, that she had ignored him. That she had denounced him. That she had screamed so that Clark would know she was there, that he was not alone, that he was not powerless. She wishes she had done anything but what she had actually chosen to do.
She had said nothing.
She had done nothing.
Until she wrote her article exposing Superman. Until she spoke that jagged, poisoned question that killed Clark Kent.
Until she destroyed herself right along with him.
*
There is fire inside of her, searing, boiling heat expanding and contracting through her veins until she thinks her skin will explode. She can feel the path it takes, up and down her arm, reaching out, spreading like a contagion, roaring toward her heart where it will be carried to every inch of her body, turning her into a living, breathing radioactive piece of Kryptonite.
Trask is saying something, just like always. Probably more manipulations, more whispers and taunts and questions that mask themselves in pointless insanity only to slip insidiously beneath her armor to deliver its toxin to her heart. He’s shouting, yelling, and there are people moving over her, and a wind that rushes past her with such force she wonders if she is dreaming (a nightmare, again, of things disappearing as soon as she touches them and newspaper ink spreading out from her hands to drown everyone around her and turn them into ghosts). There is a surge of lightning across her arm and then the pinch of punctured flesh and a soft noise (like a whimper, a cry, a gasp). The fire spreading outward, gaining in intensity and heat, suddenly slows and dulls. Still there, inside her, still moving along in its inexorable path down the branching rivers of her veins, but no longer coursing through like the tides, like rapids and highways and stories gone viral.
Voices over her, more of them, two bouncing back and forth, questions and answers, one shuddering and one stuttering, both of them inherently familiar, so reminiscent of something good that she wishes she could open her mouth and speak.
There is another burst of wind, slower, colder. And then she is alone.
She can’t open her eyes. Can’t bring herself to push past the blaze of liquid heat still searing inside her (can’t drag her focus away from willing her heart not to accept the poison moving toward it) long enough to look and see what has happened to leave her so completely isolated. There is no sound, no awareness of another presence, only her and the echoing expanse of empty space.
Until there is a caress of wind, and a voice murmuring to her (interspersed between more of those breathy whimpers), and there is a hand tracing the contours of her face (cooling the fever burning through her cheeks even as it awakens the dulled, liquid fire within) and an arm slipping under her shoulders, and Lois begins to weep.
Because she knows this touch. She knows this voice. She knows this care, this attention, this feeling of safety.
Clark is here. He is here and Trask is gone and James is rescued and she is being lifted and carried to safety, and Lois wants to scream and weep and rage at the world. He is here and he is touching her and his every breath is edged in pain, and she is hurting him again, and why didn’t he just leave her there for the police to handle? Why didn’t he stay at James’s side and leave her behind, rescued and saved but no longer hurting him? Why does he let her do this to him over and over and over again?
She wants to say his name; she bites her lips hard enough to make it bleed (bleed out tainted blood that can only burn and sear Clark himself, brand him with the strength and potency of her presence).
She wants to lift up her arms and hug him as tightly as she can and refuse to let go; she clenches her hands into fists that draw crescent-shaped pinpricks of blood (tinted green with agonizing, weakening radioactivity).
She wants to do everything that she closed the door on six months ago; she does nothing.
She did nothing before and it destroyed him.
She will do nothing now and it will save him.
She said too much before and it killed him.
She will say nothing now and he will be healed (of the taint her own presence brings down on him).
He carries her for what seems like forever (the last minutes she will ever get to spend with him, trickling away into nothing). She wonders why until she realizes that he can’t fly, not while she is touching him. He can’t use his super-speed, not while he is carrying her.
He cannot be Superman while she drags him down.
He cannot be Clark while she lifts him up before the whole world.
Eventually, she hears him call out, and then he is opening a car door and placing her (so carefully, so gently, so reverently) down on a car seat. He sits beside her, but he does not touch her, and she lets his voice drift over her head (telling the driver where to go; talking, in public, again, and all because of her; just as she took away his voice, now she takes away the sanctuary of his silence). An indeterminate amount of time later, they pull up somewhere and Clark is lifting her free and there are voices and movement all around her.
“It’s okay, Lois,” Clark whispers to her (and his breath threads past her hair just like Trask’s did, but it is so different as to be alien, so welcome as to be entirely human). “You’re going to be okay now. You’re safe.”
But there is a ragged edge to his voice as he speaks, pain lending its own signature to the voice she once thought she would never get to hear.
Poison.
She is poison to him.
So she turns her face from him (to separate him from her touch; to hide the tears trailing down her cheeks and tickling her neck) and relinquishes herself to the foreign, safe touch of regular, ordinary, mundane humans.
*
Trask had left her at the camp, abandoning her so he could accompany Clark--Superman, she had savagely reminded herself as she sawed uselessly at the cord binding her to the chair--to the Kent farm where he would… Well, she wasn’t entirely sure what he planned to do there, only that he had some huge green rock he’d thrown in the back of the van with a chained Superman and he’d wanted to take care of Superman--Clark, she had thought incredulously--along with the Kents.
She’d worked to get free, and when her own efforts had proven useless, she’d recruited Sherman and swayed her to her side. They’d gone for the sheriff, and she’d met up with Jimmy, and he’d told her about his signal watch, and Lois had scoffed and hardened because what good was it to call for Superman when he was currently allowing himself to be tied up for whatever reason and pretending to be her reporting partner? What use in calling for a superhero who could claim to stand for truth and justice one minute and then lie right to her face and coerce her own secrets from her the next?
When they had arrived, pulling up in a squeal of tires and the flurry of dust-clouds, the barn was on fire and Trask was beating Clark, and the green rock was glowing malignantly, and Lois hadn’t known what was going on or what to do. She’d watched bruises appear on Clark’s face, watched blood spring from the cut in his lip and the burns on his hands (from where he’d tried to put out the fire in the barn, she’ll assume later), and she’d been utterly confused. Because he didn’t have his glasses on and he was obviously Superman, but he was hurt and wounded and unable to beat Trask, and that was something that would only apply to Clark, not to the superhero she’d been in love with since he’d swallowed a bomb and smiled at her.
But then Trask had lifted his arm, and there’d been a gun in his hand, and when that gunshot had sounded, Lois had been so sure that it suddenly, fatally didn’t matter anymore what she thought or believed or had found out.
But his gun had dropped to the dirt, a look of surprise on his face as he’d turned to face Rachel, whose own gun was pointed unerringly at him. Clark (or Superman, in that one instant, it hadn’t mattered who he was, only that he wasn’t dead) had stood upright, proud and defiant, refusing to bend and fall beneath the agony scrawled across his battered features.
And the second gunshot had sounded, and Trask had clapped a hand over his bleeding shirt, and the grey van she’d seen at the campsite (where she’d seen Clark chained and Superman flinching away from that green stone now at his feet) had pulled up, and Trask had dived in. There had been more gunshots after that, more bullets sent to chase after the remnants of Bureau 39, but Lois hadn’t been paying attention.
All her focus had been on Clark, bending and grabbing hold of the green rock (and the smell of searing flesh had momentarily overpowered the stench of smoke and blood) and he’d tossed it out into the lake. Then he’d been running--right past her, as if he didn’t see her. As if he didn’t care that she could see him without his glasses (as if he had known she wouldn’t see past his masks and lies even with those ridiculously nerdy glasses gone). As if she didn’t mean anything to him now that she knew his game.
He’d dived past flames and into the barn, and he’d come out with his parents, both of them choking and coughing and soot-stained and still ridding themselves of the ropes that had been tied around them. Clark had collapsed in their arms (or maybe they had collapsed in his; it was hard to tell), and they had hugged and embraced.
And Lois had watched them. Expressionless. Motionless. Finally believing. Finally comprehending. Finally understanding exactly how much of a fool she had been played to make of herself. Finally realizing that the entire time she had thought she was on the inside, on the front lines, in the know, she’d been a dupe just like all the rest.
Jonathan and Martha had looked over Clark’s shoulders. She thinks, later, that they had been about to smile, to laugh in relief that she was okay too, and to invite her into their embrace. She thinks, when she can think past overwhelming emotions, that they had wanted to include her. But at the sight of her, at whatever her eyes showed, they had both fallen silent and they had not smiled and they had held onto Clark all the tighter and closed their eyes on her.
And Lois had turned away.
*
She is unconscious for twelve hours. When she wakes up, the news is full of the reports of Trask’s death in a fiery explosion out in the wastelands fifty miles north of Coast City. She doesn’t know where James is (or if he is even alive) and Clark isn’t there. The doctor comes in and tells her that whatever Trask had tried to inject her with has been purified from her system. She’s clean now, he tells her, and she wants to laugh (she wants to weep, and she would except she feels too hollow to do anything but stare numbly at whatever happens to be in front of her).
They keep her for observation for a day. Clark comes to visit her, but Lois leaves specific instructions with the nurses that she doesn’t want any visitors at all, even if he does wear a red cape and save people in his spare time (especially if he wears a red cape instead of silly ties and makes a habit of saving the very people who are worst for him).
She knows now that James was right, all those months ago when he sat across from her and mopped up her mess of spilled tea (cleaned up her mess of broken superhero and dead partner). She knows that she should have listened to him and stayed in Metropolis to drink salutes to a fallen friend with Perry. She knows that it was a mistake to ever believe she could possibly help Clark.
When they finally bring her a phone, she buys a single, one-way ticket back to Metropolis. From now on, Lois Lane is just as dead as what-might-have-been, and there is no going back.
*
