*21*
“Whatever they injected into your bloodstream, it was a completely foreign substance,” the doctor says as she signs the release papers. “There could be repercussions we’re not aware of at all. I encourage you to come back often. We’ll--”
“I’m not staying in town,” Lois cuts him off. She offers him a tight smile that does nothing, seemingly, to reassure him. “Don’t worry. I’ll visit a doctor in Metropolis.”
She means it too. She can’t afford to endanger Superman if he has to make a rescue near her. She doesn’t dare risk some other villain like Lex or Trask taking advantage of the weapon Trask has made of her. So even though it makes her cringe to think of it, she will see a doctor to make absolutely certain there is no Kryptonite left in her system.
The doctor keeps talking about staying in touch, letting him know who her Metropolis doctor is so he can send on what information they have on the Kryptonite. Lois nods and makes agreeable noises, and starts walking away. She needs to get out of here, to escape, before Clark decides to circumvent the nurse’s station and come visit her no matter what her allowed visitors’ list reads. She needs to be gone before he’s looking at her again with those earnest eyes and tempting her to give up on her noble, inevitable actions. She needs to flee while she can still do so somewhat gracefully.
Finally, after the elevator ride to the ground floor, the doctor is satisfied and leaves her to find the exit on her own. She is free, striding forward in donated clothes that are heavenly despite their bad fit simply because they aren’t stained with James’s blood. She can see the brilliant shaft of light that is the door.
And Clark appears in front of her. He is dressed inconspicuously, and he isn’t wearing the glasses, and the hallway is nearly empty, which means they’ll have a brief moment before he will be recognized.
She will have to face him after all. One last test before she can be deemed completely trustworthy (before she can leave him, safe, forever).
“Lois.” He smiles to see her (again with the smiles), as if he’s been worried. As if he’s had time to think about her on top of whatever James’s condition is and wherever his parents have ended up. “You’re all right! I tried to see you earlier, but…” He trails off, waiting expectantly for an explanation, but when she answers him only with silence (because why should she get to defend and excuse herself when he’s never had that same chance?), he shrugs. “I’m glad you’re okay. James is--”
“Don’t tell me,” she interrupts, and knows he will not let this be easy. He will not give up on her as easily as she gave up on him in his hometown. “I don’t want to know. Don’t tell me anything.”
His brow furrows. “Why not?”
“I’m not going to do this again.” She looks past him, over his shoulder, to that shaft of light that is her exit, like the light at the end of the tunnel, signifying the end of her life and the beginning of forever. “Trask only found you because of me.”
His expression clears, and Lois wants to scream because he looks almost happy, almost content, even with lingering shadows under his eyes from Kryptonite exposure (and she knows James is alive, at least, because he would not be content if James were dead). “Lois, Trask would have found us anyway. James and I recognized a few of the Bureau 39 men--we’re pretty sure that a couple of the times we had to move because of what we thought was the media, it was actually Trask’s--”
“Don’t,” Lois interrupts. “You can’t tell me, Clark, all right? I’m…I’m leaving.”
“I know,” he says, and she thinks he really does and is simply avoiding the enormity, the reality, of it by stalling. “That’s why I’m here. So I can take you--”
“To Metropolis,” she says, firmly so she will not be tempted to stay just a few more days. “I’m going back to Metropolis. I’ve already bought my plane ticket; the plane leaves in just a few hours.”
“Oh.” That’s all he says, and it’s even more heartbreaking than anything else he might have done (because he seems resigned to it, to people leaving; because he is not trying to convince her to stay; because he already looks so alone and abandoned).
“I have to,” she says. She wasn’t going to explain, but the words come bubbling up and out anyway (she has never been good at holding anything back: secrets, truths, emotions…her heart). “This isn’t going to work, Clark. I came because what I did to you wasn’t fair and I wanted to make it right somehow, maybe give us both the chance to find some kind of closure, but…but we haven’t. We’re not. You’re never even asked me the question that I know has to be burning you up inside. We haven’t addressed anything yet--”
“What question?” he asks, and she stares at him. She cannot believe that he is still trying to pretend he’s not holding anything back.
“What question?” she repeats incredulously. “Why I wrote that article! Why I ripped your life away from you!”
“All right,” Clark says, completely calm. Completely unreadable. “Why did you?”
She doesn’t want to answer. She’s been waiting for him to ask, has come out of her guest room every day with the expectation that she will finally hear him ask for her reasons, and now that it has finally come…she is not ready. But it’s better this way. Better to say it all out loud and get it over with. Better to dose him fully and completely with the poison so that he will never try it again.
“Because I was mad at you,” she says. “I was humiliated that you had lied and I had fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. I was so embarrassed at the radically different ways I treated your separate identities. I was so furious that I had just been starting to trust you--to like you--and then to find out you had tricked me… I was mad, and that’s the reason, Clark. The only reason.”
He is pale and silent. Closed off. Locked away once again, as if none of her efforts can last or endure past the lingering effects of her crime. As if even the cure cannot fully wash away the residual results of poison.
“I’m sorry,” she says, finally. Lets the words out in his hearing, and hears once again just how little they mean. “I’m so sorry. I know you probably told yourself that there was a good reason I did it, that Trask must have threatened me or that I had some grand plan.” There are tears streaming down her face; she wonders if they are glowing as radioactively green as the pieces of his homeworld. “But there was nothing redemptive, Clark, nothing to excuse me or justify what I did. And I know you wanted there to be--you had to tell yourself there was in order to let me back into your life, I’m sure--but the truth is that I was just…I was just mad and hurt and disappointed.”
“I know,” he says. She is shocked--no, astonished--because she had thought she sent him fleeing back into his shell, his cocoon, of silence. She had thought she would never hear his voice again. “I hoped you had a good reason. I wanted to believe you did it for me in some way. But I know you, Lois, the good and the bad. And so I knew all along why you wrote that article.”
“And yet, here you are, still!” she cries, frustrated and wounded and confused. “Ready to take me back into your life after yet another disaster, or crisis or calamity or whatever word there is to fit this! I came all this way to see you so we could face what happened, but instead you’re pretending like it never happened! I want to live in that make-believe world with you, Clark--really, I do--but it will never work, not long-term. I would spend the rest of my life, every hour of every day, waiting for the other shoe to drop. Waiting for you to finally treat me like I deserve. And you…every time you got mad at me for anything, you’d be holding it all back, afraid to let the dam burst in case everything came roaring out and couldn’t be put back in.” She calms, not wanting the curious onlookers to be able to overhear her, and takes a deep breath. Looks at him for the last time. Soaks him in, engraves the image of him, the feel of him, on every cell, stores it up so it can last her a lifetime.
“Some mistakes can’t be undone,” she whispers. “Some things can’t be fixed. What I did ruined…everything that might have been. And as sorry as I am for it, nothing I do can change what happened. You’re never going to be two men again. And I…I am never going to be a part of your life.”
And she walks past him. She waits (half-hoping, half-fearing), thinking he might come after her, might stop her and try to change her mind.
But he never does.
As she walks through those blinding doors, she looks back, just one final time (because she is weak).
Clarks stands in that shaft of brilliant light, untouched by the shadow her body casts; he is a dark silhouette edged in gold, impassive and unbroken. His back is still to her. He does not turn. He does not watch her leave. He does not look for things that might have been. He stands as straight and tall as he did at the edge of that pond in Smallville, while green poison writhed at his feet; strong and self-sufficient and surviving (away from her; apart from her), and for the very first time, Lois begins to believe that maybe he can actually survive this. Maybe he will be all right.
Maybe he is, despite everything, better after all. Maybe she didn’t completely fail.
She promised herself she would make him better. She doesn’t know that she can take the credit for this miracle, but she will take the knowledge of it with her, and she will be…content.
*
When Perry sees her, he falls still. He brightens--she thinks it is the first time she’s seen him smile since her new life began in the wake of Clark Kent’s end. He moves toward her, and she steps into his arms…and she falls apart.
It’s late evening (she came straight from the airport; Perry is all that is left of what feels even remotely like home) and there’s almost no one around, but Perry pulls her into the privacy of his office anyway. He keeps her enfolded, small and young and not wholly broken in his arms. He smells of ink, of newspaper, of the Daily Planet. He smells of familiarity and acceptance…and terrible, biting guilt. So she hugs him because she needs the comfort, but also because he is drowning in guilt too, and he needs comfort perhaps even more than she does.
Finally, when they both manage to pull away and pretend, with their customary awkwardness, that they are not wiping away tears and building back up ruptured walls around their emotions, Perry looks at her with a straight, level (terrified) look. His voice is gruffer than ever before as he says, “So. Didn’t really go that well from what I’ve gathered.” He sounds resigned. He sounds tired. He sounds defeated.
Not at all the Perry she’s known since he gave her a chance as an intern.
She thinks about her answer (because he deserves the truth, needs it as much as she does) before she says, “I’m not unhappy that I went. I think…I think I helped remind him that it’s okay to be Clark Kent every once in a while. I think he’s going to be okay. So, you know, it went better than it could have gone.”
Perry’s brows climb up his forehead. “Even with Trask?”
“What?” She frowns at him. She still feels stuffy and drained from the tears she just wept on his shoulder; maybe that’s why she feels behind. “How much do you know?”
“Maybe more than you,” Perry says.
She is reminded, suddenly and uncomfortably, of those days after returning from Smallville. Then, she’d thought she’d known everything, too, and only later had she learned all the pieces she’d missed.
*
She’d avoided Clark in the day between Trask’s escape and their plane ride back to Metropolis--easy to do when his parents refused to leave his side and Jimmy was always around, bubbling over with questions and observations and commiserations. When Clark seemed preoccupied and disappointed (not that he knew that she knew, though at the time she’d suspected he did). She’d kept her knowledge to herself, hoarded it, clutched it close and curled up around it and ignored everything else, like a greedy miser huddling around the last embers of a fire in a world of night.
The night before their plane left for Metropolis, she’d decided to give him a chance (echoes of Trask’s threats in her head, refusing to leave her be). She’d gone to him, sitting on the couch atop his blankets, and sat beside him. “Clark,” she’d said.
“Lois.” He’d smiled, because that’s what he does. “I’m so glad you’re okay. When I realized Trask had captured you…”
“Lucky for us everything turned out all right,” she’d said, watching him and realizing just how big his lie was (and, in retrospect, just how bad he was at lying).
His grin had been uncomfortable. “Yeah.” He’d reached out for her, but she had flinched away. She hadn’t meant to; it had just happened. But he’d been hurt, and tried to cover it up, and lied to her again. “Trask didn’t hurt us, though, in the end. You got away and my parents survived and I…”
“And you?” she’d prompted, begging him to tell her the truth. It would have all been better if he would be honest with her, she’d thought, and held her breath.
He’d shrugged. “And I’m fine.”
Fine. Fine without her. Fine with lying to her. Fine with pretending. She’d wanted to be a part of the superhero’s life since first meeting him. Clark had seemed to want to be a part of hers since he’d first met her. All of it lies. All of it a waste. All of it just window dressing to disguise what he did--and that, the costume and the persona and the lines she’d helped him come up with in that first ‘interview,’ were all just a disguise too. It had seemed to her, then, in her skewed, numb way of thinking, that there was nothing real to him at all (and she would make that reality, two days later).
“Clark,” she’d said, in one last effort, because this was important and it meant something and there was no other way for this to go (willingly or not, with his cooperation or not, the article had to be written). “Did anything else happen? Why did Trask come after you? Why did he think you knew anything about Superman?”
He’d paused, for the slightest instant, but she’d noticed it because she’d been looking for it. Then he’d given her a pale smile and said, “He was deluded, Lois. All his conclusions were just the ravings of a paranoid man.”
“Yeah, sure,” she’d said, her disappointment like a blow to the very depths of her being. She should have known, she’d thought, that Superman wouldn’t trust her, and she should have known that Clark was not as trustworthy as he’d promised to be.
She hadn’t spoken to him once on the plane ride to Metropolis, or on the taxi ride to her apartment. She’d left him with silence and shut herself in her apartment alone, and she’d written her exposé.
And the next morning, she’d destroyed him.
(Later, it will not escape her notice that the very things she used to punish him, silence and isolation, are the very tools that drove her to the brink of ruin herself.)
*
Pretending he does not notice her preoccupation, Perry leads her to the couch she’s sat on so many times before, and they both sit. A feeling of déjà vu sweeps over Lois like a warm tide. Late at night, alone in the bullpen, sitting in Perry’s office, about to hear him confide some news about Superman. She almost expects him to tell her that the military came looking for the superhero. Half expects him to tell her that they both killed one man but the remaining persona needs her now and she should go after him. It feels so familiar, this scene, and holds such a sense of coming full circle, that she’s almost afraid she dreamed everything that came before, and she will have to do it all again (and this time, Clark will hate her).
But she sits there anyway, passively, afraid to miss out on whatever Perry has to say. Afraid to lose another chance to see Clark before Kryptonite was ever released to flow through her veins in tangible evidence of her inner poison.
“Superman rescued you and Jimmy,” Perry explains, “but he must have been in a hurry to do it--and no wonder. When they released the video of the surveillance footage, you and Jimmy both looked awful.” He pauses to run a hand across his eyes, missing Lois’s expression of confusion. “He just supersped Trask and all his men out to some solitary desert and left them there so he could go back and get you and Jimmy to the hospital. Trask had some sort of homing beacon, though, and his remaining men were able to get to him in a van before Superman could make it back. By the time he did get there, Trask had started recording.”
“Recording what?” Lois asks, impatient and not sure she wants to hear this after all. She intended to avoid talking about Clark after she returned to Metropolis (avoid risking any residual harm; avoid tempting fate), but she can’t quite bring herself to stop Perry completely. She wants to hear this--needs to hear it--not from the impersonal news with only stock footage and neutral talking heads, but from Perry, who wasn’t there but who cares.
“They were filming themselves--and Superman when he showed up. Actual close-ups, Lois.” Perry sounds hoarse, wistful, and Lois is suddenly very glad that he didn’t see Clark before he’d recovered from the after-effects of Nightfall. Hard enough to see him when he was suffering from the lingering effects of the Kryptonite in Lois’s veins; no need to make it worse on the old editor’s heart by seeing Clark when he was so desolate that he seemed only a hollow shell.
“Trask was trying to frame Superman,” Perry explains. “He thought he could be some kind of martyr to the cause. They’re still analyzing the remains, but apparently he had some kind of self-destruct device that mimicked Superman’s heat-vision. His men got away from the blast--until Superman caught up with them a few days later--but Trask made a couple statements about how Superman was threatening him, and then he blew himself up. It was on every channel, really gruesome stuff, and I guess some people would have bought into it--if Superman hadn’t gone back to that building Trask was keeping you at, and released the security footage from that to the media too. The testimony of the Bureau 39 men he captured later revealed more of it, and the depths of Trask’s paranoid delusions.”
Lois is still, absorbing this new information. Comprehending what all this must have meant to Clark--being seen close-up by the world again, confronting the man who’d directly led to his outing. Wondering anew if she’s done the right thing in leaving him so soon, when his parents are still hurt and James is in who knows what condition.
“He talked,” Perry suddenly says. “In both the videos. Clark talked. It…it’s been so long since I’ve heard his voice, Lois. There’s so much silence nowadays.”
“I know,” Lois whispers, and leans into him, joining her loud silence to his. “I know, Perry. I hear it too.”
“Is he…” Perry hesitates, tentative, afraid to hear the answer, she supposes. “Tell me the truth, Lois--is he okay?”
“I think he will be,” she says, and feels strengthened by the truth of it. She has the image of him standing straight and facing away from her in that hospital corridor to remind her that he is not broken (like her; like Perry). “He has a strength of character that is stronger than any of his powers, and he has his family--and James is part of that now, Perry--and he wants to move on and be okay, so…so he will be okay. Maybe not today, but soon. We didn’t kill him, Perry. We didn’t completely destroy him.”
(Because she left when she did, before she could finish the job.)
“And you, Lois?” Perry looks her straight in the eye, searching for something, looking for hurt or defeat. She lets him look, knowing he will see the decimated ruins of her heart, but also knowing that he will see that the open wounds have finally scarred over. “Are you okay, honey?”
“Yes,” she says, and hopes she is telling the truth. She has no accompanying image of herself to hold to as proof that she will eventually make it past this. “Not today, but…one day, I will be.”
He gazes at her a long moment more, then nods. “Good. I’m glad.”
“Me, too,” she whispers in his ear as she hugs him, and hopes that he will be okay too.
*
When she gets to her apartment, her bag is there, sitting neatly in the center of the room. Atop the bag, perched incongruously, is the black and white bear from Smallville.
She’d thrown a few sheets over her furniture when she’d realized the search for Jimmy (James, and she shoves aside the accompanying image of bravery shining through blood, loyalty through bruises, defiance and resourcefulness through a single wristwatch) would take a while. She pulls the sheet off a couch now, lets it fall carelessly to the floor, and then sinks down on the stiff cushion. And she stares at the bag and the bear. Belatedly, as a cold breeze whispers across her cheeks, she realizes the window is open, left conspicuously wide (he didn’t sneak in; he announces his presence, even in absentia).
The bag is packed, its side bulging. The bear looks far too innocently happy, smugly smirking, unaffected by the fact that she has now left it behind twice, both times without looking back. Once in Smallville, because she didn’t want any reminders of how close she’d come to letting Clark in past her walls and how far he was from the Superman she’d built up in her head. And once now, because she hadn’t thought she’d want any reminders of how much Clark had let her in and how much she wishes she could let him in past the boundaries of her past choices.
Abruptly, she wonders what the guest room she’d claimed looks like now, stripped of all her things. Is there a different type of shampoo in the bathroom now, maybe strawberry instead of jasmine? Has he gotten rid of the picture of Metropolis’s skyline? What color will the bedspread be now? What will relieve the bareness of the closet with this bear now in her apartment?
Of course, she’s almost forgotten. Nothing. Nothing will replace the things left to make that room feel hospitable and welcoming. Nothing at all. The room is bare. The entire suite is empty, stripped of all personality and life. The room she never saw, guarded by that door with the lock she’d never breached--she’ll never know now what was inside, how much Clark kept of himself besides the glasses. The long rows of thriving plants have no one to tend them; they will die, neglected and abandoned.
James worked so hard after the earthquake to make sure the Kents could stay in that suite of rooms that had become their home. But there’s no way he could have saved it a second time (if he’s even feeling well enough to save anything right now), not after Trask and the media exposure he’d brought down on them. Superman had been seen too often, too frequently, on the west coast. His silence had been ruptured, his distance breached. There’s no way Clark wouldn’t want to move on, put as much distance as possible between himself and the site of so many unpleasant memories.
Lois Lane and Jason Trask. They had both found him there. They had both played their parts in trying to pull him down from the skies and shatter the glasses he clung to so tightly. Who would have ever guessed that those two names would go together, she thinks bitterly.
But she left, she reminds herself. She left and now she is far away from him, and he will be okay. She has to remember that. She will remember that (it’s the only way she will ever be able to find that okay she promised Perry).
Her legs shake when she makes herself stand. She forces herself steady. Reaches out a hand. And undoes the last thing Clark Kent will ever do for her (Superman might save her, incidentally or even individually, but packing her bag and giving her belongings back to her is the very last selfless, caring act from Clark Kent for Lois Lane). She picks up the bear, slings the bag’s strap over her shoulder, and walks into the bedroom.
She unpacks slowly, pointedly, reality overlaid atop the memories of her defiant unpacking that first morning at the suite. She had tried to force a place for herself there, done everything she could--nonverbally--to insist there was a future where her life could merge with Clark’s in some way. But now she unpacks clothes (still smelling, ephemerally, of that collection of rooms, that collection of people, she’d once thought could be home) and toiletries and laptop, like the final laying down of arms, the ultimate surrender of all her unvoiced, all-but-unacknowledged dreams.
When she sets her laptop down on the nightstand, a piece of paper falls and flutters to the floor. A tremor squirms through her stomach, a tremor that packs a punch leaving her breathless when she picks it up and sees what the paper is.
The note the Kents left her months ago, just days after her arrival. The small piece of paper she’d tucked away in her pocket like a magpie stealing bright and shiny objects forever outside its comprehension, and then had hidden under her pillow and played between her fingers night after night while trying to sleep (hugging the bear to herself when the nightmares struck).
“Lois, headed out for the morning. We left bread, butter, and honey for toast—Clark said that you’d think that was enough for breakfast, but if not, we should be back before noon. There’s juice or coffee in the kitchen. Make yourself at home.”
The note, dashed off rapidly, probably without much advance thought at all, but so indicative of care she didn’t (doesn’t) deserve, and the bear, won by a man accustoming himself to subpar limits and still trying to be a friend to the reporting partner he hadn’t asked for but had embraced (forgiven, repeatedly, over and over again, for crimes large and small). Two relatively unimportant objects that mean everything in the world to her. The only trophies she won in her desperate, foolish, guilt-ridden quest to undo her mistakes and win back any of the things she’d lost.
She sits on the edge of her dusty bed, and plays the worn paper through her fingers, and wonders why she cannot cry. She feels an ocean of tears surging and broiling within, but she’s dry, hollow, emptied of all but the last purpose in her life.
To keep Clark safe by staying far, far away.
At this point, even basic contentment is tragically far outside her reach.
*
She goes back to work as if she never left. Perry doesn’t tell her how he explained her absence, or how he made certain she could come back; but then, Lois doesn’t ask. She just wants to get back to living her own life (sans Clark, because that is all that is left). She just wants to get used to this normal as quickly as possible so that the pain of wanting something different will ease as if already dulled by the passage of unrelenting time.
Unfortunately, everything reminds her of Clark. The newsroom (touched by his all-too-temporary presence). Perry (so damaged, still, by how Clark left). The desk that still stands empty as a memorial (and she can still see that naïve journalist with ill-fitting suits and mismatched ties smiling over at her as he dared to tease her). Writing, which she’s trying to get back into doing again (because Clark’s efforts to give her this portion of her life back to her should not be so easily spurned), that above all reminds her of the vast, gaping hole in her life.
She spent the first months after her article trying to forget everything, doing her best not to think of it at all, pretending it all away by telling herself nothing more special had happened than writing an article like any other. Now, she can’t do that anymore, and the memories march forward ceaselessly, a constant assault that seeks to make up for lost time.
As pervasive as the memories are, though, she perseveres. First, because she has nowhere else to go and no idea what else to do with her life. This is what she’s wanted to do, where she’s wanted to be, since almost before she can remember; everything she did, every choice she made, had been to achieve her dream of working as an investigative reporter at the Daily Planet. But she has new dreams now, all of them cruelly dashed, and this is the only thing left to her.
The second reason she stays, though, is that gradually, as Perry gives her one small assignment after another, Lois begins to remember why she loves writing. Not the big stories (she doesn’t trust herself with that; every time she thinks of it, her nightmares resurface), but the small stories, the human interest articles. Puff pieces, as she once called them.
Now, she calls them her lifeline.
Other people’s tragedies, their triumphs, their travails--their stories--call to her. She loves being assigned words on a paper, researching them, and then coming face to face with regular people and seeing them, question by answer, unveiled, their masks peeled away to reveal either heroes or villains or something in between. And adrenaline sparks inside her, purpose fizzles at her fingertips--but only when she sits down, not to expose their secrets and the insights she’s gained, but to bring their needs to the readers of the Daily Planet. To reveal their endurance and heroism and efforts to an audience. To invite everyone out there to help them, to have compassion and to look beyond the surface and to make allowances for other people. To see the hero beneath the ordinary person.
She writes, now, like Clark.
They aren’t the kind of stories that will make her famous or win her flashy awards. But they help. They heal and soften and sooth the raw pain of her scars. They are like breadcrumbs leading her down the path of redemption.
Perry notices (he watches her all the time; she can’t figure out if he’s afraid she’ll disappear or hoping she’ll leave to go back to Clark), but he doesn’t say much (and this is easy to figure out; she knows he doesn’t trust his own judgment anymore, a mirror reflection of her). After a month, he asks her if she wants back on the city beat, and a bolt of panic spears through her.
“No,” she says quickly. Firmly. “No, Perry. I don’t…I’m not that reporter anymore. The investigative side of me is what brought us all”--she knows he’ll understand who she’s really talking about without needing to name names in a bullpen full of curious reporters all eager to hear the full story behind her ‘vacation’ in California--“to where we are, but it’s these human interest stories that will help me.”
“All right,” he agrees, seemingly unfazed by her life-changing decision. “Whatever you need.”
And he means that (she is not the only one who has made some life-changing decisions in the last seven months), but still Lois isn’t happy. Isn’t comfortable. Isn’t content.
This isn’t the place for her, not anymore. It holds too many bad memories, too many ghosts haunt the rooms, echoes of people who should still be here, and it is too dangerous, constantly luring her back to her old ways. Besides, she doesn’t deserve to be here. She is not good enough as a reporter nowadays.
And why should she get to work here when Clark Kent no longer can?
Her decision is made for her when she sees Clark again. He swoops through the newsroom late one night so fast she doesn’t even know he’s there until she feels a rush of wind, sees a blur of colors, and finds herself standing, upright and breathless, on the roof of the Daily Planet.
She doesn’t understand what happens next. Even weeks later, after countless hours of running it through her head over and over again, she cannot puzzle out what happened on that rooftop. She thinks he was testing her (but for what, she cannot comprehend). She thinks he was saying goodbye. She thinks he was making his own life-changing decision.
Or maybe it is none of those things. Maybe he has morphed again into a stranger she does not know, a hybrid made up of bits and pieces of pre-exposure Clark and Superman, and post-exposure Clark and Superman, and other things she has no part in, to become a new, post-Lois version. Maybe he has written himself a new persona, one she will not discover and cannot expose.
She just doesn’t know. She can’t read him, can’t decipher the coded terms he spills out like ribbons wrapped all around her, past her, behind her, not quite touching her but defining her nonetheless.
What she does know is that the time has come for her to move on too. To stop holding onto the past and to find out what this new, emptier life of hers has to offer without the remains of her old one dragging her down.
So the morning after Clark whisked her to the roof and then back to her desk without any warning, she debates with herself, then writes, then works endlessly to fine-tune what she wrote. She puts more thought and effort into this one piece than she has any other since before Smallville. Not a story this time. A letter.
A resignation letter.
She finishes, prints it out, and actually has it in hand to turn in when Perry calls out, urgently, “Someone turn the news on right now! Superman is giving an impromptu press conference.”
Lois gapes, soundless, motionless, her ticket to a new life dangling uselessly from her hands. The others are not so frozen, shocked and curious, a sea of noise and astonishment, and the TVs all around the room flick to life. No need to search for the channel; this press conference (the first of its kind in so very, very long) is on every one, preempting every program.
Superman. There. Larger than life, bright and bold and seemingly unaffected by these past long months. Standing on a podium in some exterior location she doesn’t recognize. Stepping up to the sea of microphones. Opening his mouth.
Behind him, she sees James, proud and smiling (no blood, no bruises, not even a splint to give away their shared experience in Trask’s clutches).
And beside James, as if he belongs there, as if it is not impossible for him to be standing, glasses and all, on the same podium as Superman, is Clark Kent. His tie does not match his shirt, his jacket does not fit, and he is the most beautiful (the most astonishing) thing Lois has ever seen.
And then, right there in front of the world, Superman speaks.
*
