*5*

The air this high up in the sky is cold and fresh and crisp, sharpened by the tang of electricity and rain and ozone, but it cannot erase or even dampen the memory of Lois’s scent and texture and taste. He is no longer anchored to the Earth at all, loose and free and drifting, but still all he can think about, all that consumes him, is bound up the small, slender frame of a single woman.

Lois Lane.

He read her articles and admired her writing long before he ever knew what she would come to mean to him. Even when he first met her and felt himself bowled over by the confidence and competence and sheer presence of her in the flesh, he had not imagined just how much she would come to mean to him (how much pain she could inflict with a smile, and how much pleasure she could impart with a kiss). Just a week ago, sitting on a park bench and listening as all his dreams evaporated into thin air, when she asked him for a favor and he found he still could deny her nothing, he had not known what she could do to him. What she could make him feel. What she would give him, with trembling hands and tear-filled eyes (the key to her heart, but only through a confusing maze, a hidden gate, a back door, because everything that is worth anything at all takes time and patience and care).

Clark floats up so high that the United States curves away below him in a tapestry of topography, scents and sounds blurred into a distant haze rolling like fog at his feet, and he cannot stop smiling. A week ago today, Lois kissed him. A week ago today, she told him good night (as if she wants to say it every night for the rest of their lives; as if she wants him to say it to her every night). A week ago today, she started calling him so that they can exchange good nights, among other things--teasing banter and amusing anecdotes and news about friends, and little secrets spilled among their exchange of words as if they are not each afraid to really open up to the other.

A week ago today, he feels like he was finally given a real chance. Not one gilded with tears and steeped in secrets. But a chance freely offered and truly desired.

She laughs now, when they see each other (and does not blink away salty tears). She touches him (without pausing in between or calculating what it will mean). She kisses him at the end of every date (freely offered; freely accepted).

One week, and it is still not like holding onto a hurricane or flying through a tornado, but it isn’t like walking through a minefield either. Instead, it is like floating in the center of an opaque lake, ripples spreading out in concentric rings on every side while hidden depths plunge below him, waiting until he gives himself over fully to each ripple before allowing him to sink further into the unknown places below. It is like their friendship, already established, already rooted and planted deeply, but budding and blossoming and stretching thick branches to the sun. It is easy and beautiful and sometimes messy but real.

Guiltily, Clark shakes himself from thoughts of Lois (an all too common occurrence) and drifts lower so that he’s within hearing distance of the teeming mass of humanity below. He’s been spending a lot of time with Lois (not enough for Clark; too much for Superman), and he needs to make up for his caped absence from Metropolis. He can’t have anyone wondering about where the superhero is, where he goes, what he does instead of saving people (can’t have anyone start to wonder about disguises and secret identities). And if he is Superman now, he might be able to make it through another evening with Lois without having to leave her in the middle, only a bad excuse and sharp regret lingering behind him.

So, steeling himself, he closes his eyes and lets his hearing broaden and reach out, searching for cries of help.

It doesn’t take long.

For the next few hours, he has no time to think of Lois beyond a flicker here, a snatch of an image there, a tidbit of information stored up to pass along later (beneath some excuse of Clark’s as to how he came by it). He is inundated with panic and fear and anger and relief, with blame and gratitude and disbelief, the emotions of those who encounter Superman so strong, so potent, it still takes him aback. He combats it, weakly, with his own anxiety (fading, now, after so many months as Superman) and the professional calm he cloaks himself in (easier, every day, as he closes in on a year of adopting this alter ego). Behind him, he leaves a trail of trembling people, cursing criminals, competent emergency workers. From Beijing to Fawcett City to Rio de Janeiro to Montreal to Keystone City to Seoul (everywhere, anywhere, following the calls for help and the sirens and the alarms and the scent of terror), and finally back to Metropolis, to this place that smells and sounds and feels like home (home because Lois smells, always, ever so slightly, ineffably, of the same scents that make up the Big Apricot; of ocean and ink and steel and something more, something undeniably Metropolis).

It’s not the stench of smoke and ash and burning metal that alerts him to the fire consuming a low-rent apartment building not far from the harbor. It’s not even the shrill sirens piercing the air as the fire department heads toward the emergency.

It’s the screams.

In everything Superman has seen, in all the disasters Clark Kent has attended (invisible and unseen, a ghost in the shadows), it is always fire that conjures up the most extreme fear. The deepest desperation. The deadliest panic.

Flames that lick the walls and turn a place of safety into a deathtrap. Smoke that clogs the air and congeals lungs and burns eyes. Burning metal that scorches flesh and buries exits and sends people screaming with the urgent, painful fear that they will be trapped until the fire eats their bodies away to leave only charred bones behind. Electricity fizzing and sparking, always threatening a larger disaster, a higher body count.

Clark can smell a fire from miles away. But he can smell the terror and the sweat and the ashy tears and seared flesh from even farther. It lends him speed that even Superman thinks of as extreme; he’s always surprised, later, to realize how quickly he arrives at fires (he’s always horrified, later, to realize how late he is and how much damage is already done).

This one is bad, the lower five levels of the building already engulfed in flame, the top ones consumed in smoke rising to congest the blue and golden sky. Two fire engines are there, water spraying from hoses, beating back the conflagration, but the second floor is the hottest and no one can get through to search the top floors for any stranded souls. Clark pauses just long enough to make sure the firemen see him, and then he dives in through a shattered window.

The next moments are a blur of action. Listening for heartbeats. Searching for signs of life. Moving as quickly as he can, shoring up unstable foundational walls and blowing out the tongues of flame that separate the firemen from the uncleared levels. Intent, always, for any live wires, any sparks, any gas tanks. A blur that passes around him in crimson and carnelian and tangerine, and yet each moment, each instant, is simultaneously crystallized in his mind, rife with sensation and sound, sharp enough to puncture through everything else in his head (to silence his dread and waken his focus).

On the third floor, he finds a family of three. He has the father wrap his arms around his neck from behind and scoops the mother and child up one in each arm. He maneuvers until he can fly horizontally with his feet pointed straight ahead, heads for a stable wall, kicks open an entrance large enough to get them out. He sets them down next to the arriving ambulances and then plunges back into the inferno. Tongues of flames engulf him, lick upward, twining around his arms and legs (he remembers the first fire he ducked into, the barn with the screaming horses, Old Ben Hubbard’s grandson huddled in the back corner; he remembers his terror that the fire would hurt, and then his terror when it didn’t because how much of a freak did this make him?), catching at his cape, rebuffed by his aura.

He ignores it. Moves on.

A young woman, unconscious from smoke inhalation. A few children, safe and climbing toward an open window thankfully (he has found children dead before, wreathed in smoke and guarded by flames, and every time, he thinks he will not survive finding it again). An older couple, trying to make it down the stairs. A cat, hissing and scratching at his impervious skin.

He deposits the cat next to the crowd of people watching their home burn and hopes its owner finds it. It will have to fend for itself for now; he hasn’t made it through the entire building yet. And there are too many people around him, too many heartbeats clamoring for his attention, the heavy stench of heat and fear and collected humanity drowning out anything from the fading building. The firemen are pulling back, not able to get any farther up the crumbling staircases.

Turning his back on them all, Clark lets the world pause around him as he speeds forward and up and through, around and around, barreling through every door, listening at every floor, x-raying every heap of rubble. He cannot leave before he knows for sure (before there is no doubt, no room for nightmares to take root in and grow to choke him in the dead of night with haunting what-ifs). He left a building before (years before Superman), wanting to disappear before he could be found out. He left, and the next day, in the paper he’d written a meaningless, forgotten article for, he’d read of an older woman (very much like the one who’d regaled him with Chekhov in a derelict theater his second day in Metropolis) who’d died. Trapped in her room, alone in a tiny space, choking for air, cremated without the benefit of ceremony; gone without even farewells from her family.

Never again, he thinks firmly, and focuses intently.

But there is nothing. The building is empty, and the fire is so far gone there is nothing to do now but pull up and out of the building, hover above it, angle himself away from the crowd below, and take in a breath. A real, actual breath, deep and full, more than he usually takes in. When he lets it out, he feels the sense of relief he always does, being able to relax in just this one way, for this one moment, to actually let out all the air in his lungs instead of siphoning it out bit by miniscule bit.

And it’s done. The fire is out. The building is gutted, blackened, but still somewhat standing; its neighbors are still safe from all but smoke damage. Everyone is alive; no one has been badly hurt.

Clark begins to let himself relax.

And that’s when he hears it.

“Oh, Clark, Clark, Clark. Always so predictable.”

Instantly, he is soaring, ascending high above where anyone can see anything clearly about him (not features, or eye color, or freckles; not height or weight or mannerisms; nothing that can connect him to Clark Kent). He looks down to the milling crowd below, searches them for anyone looking up toward him. There are many--Superman hasn’t been around long enough yet to not garner stares wherever he appears--but he sees nothing out of the ordinary. No one who looks suspicious (of his quick disappearance) or triumphant (at discovering his secret) or devious (with dangerous plots to unmask him to the world).

He widens his search, perusing the blocks on either side of the burned building, looking for…he’s not quite sure. Looking for anything he should be scared of, he supposes. Anything that means he needs to flee to Smallville and pack up his parents and get them to safety (and Lois? would he have to bring her too? has he already endangered her before he even entrusts his secret to her?).

He finds nothing.

He’s not the only one named Clark; the man could have been talking to anyone. Clark tells himself this, over and over, a dry repetition that means less with every recitation. It could have been anyone, speaking about anything. It doesn’t have to mean anything. His hearing had been extended farther than he usually kept it, after all, letting the cacophonous sounds of the city encompass him in a continuous deluge, still on the alert for anyone he might have missed. The sound could have come from anywhere within ten city blocks on either side--at least. And there are, he tells himself yet again, other people named Clark.

“There’s no reason to panic,” he mutters to himself, and resists the urge to fly to Smallville anyway (to his place of refuge, the arms that have always held him and comforted his fears). He’s been there so often lately, begging for advice on what to do about Lois, that to come again (particularly with concerns about a man speaking his name while Superman hovers in the air) would do nothing but alarm them.

(And, he admits silently, in the tiniest corner of his mind, he does not want to leave Metropolis. He does not want to leave Lois. And he cannot let his father advise him to do so, not when that would mean having to confront just how selfish he feels, how possessive he is of this one chance to win everything he’s ever wanted.)

Perhaps in penance of his own fear, Clark makes himself take long, swooping arcs around the city, his hearing still expanded past the streets just below him. A headache builds up behind his eyes (stress more than the hearing, he thinks, because he can count the number of headaches he’s had on less than two hands), but he keeps moving, keeps listening, keeps watching, pausing only occasionally to help where needed.

Eventually, hours later, he lets himself begin to relax. There have been only three mentions of Clark in the city since the fire--two from an assisted living home where the residents were watching It Happened One Night, one from a job interview with an applicant whose last name was Clarke.

No whispers about Clark Kent spreading through the city. No headlines or special news reports. No one taking the information to Luthor and bartering it away for money and a private island.

Clark drifts up high enough to release his breath in a gusty sigh of relief before heading down to the streets. Still, he makes sure he lands far away from his apartment, and he is careful to walk as casually (as humanly) as he can through the streets, pretends to stumble a time or two, stops to buy a warm pretzel with mustard (it’s strange how few people believe Superman actually eats), and finally arrives home with a shiver into his jacket as if the temperature bothers him.

Nothing super about Clark Kent. Nothing out of the ordinary or special at all. Just a regular guy, taking a walk and thinking about job options while passing the time before his date with a beautiful woman.

Who confessed her love to Superman after the ordinary man offered her his heart.

Clark shakes his head, hard, swallows to bite back the residual pain. It’s stupid to still feel hurt about that, he thinks. She’s dating him now, and she calls him to say good night, and she kisses him as if she wants to keep kissing him. (But it still aches, in a deep, hollow place behind his breastbone; he wonders if it always will.)

He’s distracted from both fear and pain when, minutes after he arrives home, he hears Lois walking up to his door. It makes him smile to hear her authoritative knock again, to see the way she strides in as if she owns the place, already saying hello (just like old times, before he thought his confession had scared her away). It makes his heart turn as light and fluttery as his cape to see the way she pauses, really looks at him, then gives him a soft, shy smile. “Hello, Clark,” she says again, and bites her lip.

“Hi,” he manages.

And she smiles again, goes up on her tiptoes, and grazes his cheek with her lips. He freezes, doing his best to memorize every instant--the weight of her hand on his forearm as she balances herself, the scent of her minty breath ghosting past his ear, the sheen her lip gloss leaves behind on his hypersensitive skin (the surge of sheer hope in his chest, to know she does it because she wants to).

Only when she steps back, allowing a rush of cool air to flow between them, is Clark able to gather his thoughts enough to say, “I didn’t know you were coming over.”

Her shy smile slides into a sly smirk so fast Clark falls in love with her all over again. “That’s why it’s called a surprise, Clark. If I told you I was coming over, it would ruin it.”

“Thanks for explaining that,” he says with his own smile (too wide, too happy, too giddy to be a smirk). Then, daringly, wonderingly, he reaches out and slides a careful finger down her cheek, memorizing the sensation (the struck look casting sparkling reflections in her dark eyes). “You don’t have to go out of your way, though, Lois. You surprise me every day without even trying.”

She licks her lips, and Clark can’t help but follow the movement. “Well, I don’t want to ruin my record, then.” She blinks when he lets his hand slip away, then flourishes a pair of tickets. “Here. Surprise!”

The tickets are smooth, small, simple. The words printed on them in stark black are anything but: METROPOLIS MAGIC SHOW!

Two tickets for a show that starts in just three hours.

He looks up at Lois, staring at her (with an ordinary man’s eyes, because a Superman’s have not deciphered her yet), trying to see beyond the nonchalant, nervous attitude. “But…you hate magic.”

She rolls her eyes. “But you don’t. Besides,” she shrugs, lets her hand rest on his arm, “it’s starting to grow on me. A bit.”

A flash of memory comes to him, the chance he’d taken, the florist he’d passed by in a blur of wind, the roses he’d left on her desk, the questions for two weeks afterward as she relentlessly pestered him, trying to find out how he’d accomplished the trick. He has to duck his head to hide the smile on his lips.

“Thank you,” he breathes, and engulfs her in a quick, heartfelt embrace.

“Oh, good,” she says lightly (but her arms clasp him with more force than usual). “I was a little afraid our late run in with Constance and her amazing hypnosis act might have ruined the allure for you.”

Keeping his arms wrapped around her waist, he draws back enough to smile down at her. Truthfully, he is a lot warier about the idea of magic now, knowing how vulnerable he is to it (when Superman cannot afford so dangerous a weakness). But Lois has gone out of her way to get these tickets for him. Because he (Clark Kent) likes magic shows. Because she knows he likes magic shows. He doesn’t think he’s been so touched by her since she told him Superman wasn’t just a story (since she told him good night, and kissed him).

“Even if it had ruined magic for me, this would restore all my enchantment,” he tells her, and smirks at her slight flush (the heat emanating from her cheeks intoxicating against his skin this close).

“Well, hurry up, then!” she snaps, shooing him toward his bedroom. “Get dressed. If you’re fast, we’ll have time for dinner before the show.”

But for once, Clark doesn’t follow her direction. Instead, he steps closer (watching, listening, for any sign that she is made uncomfortable by his show of confidence) and cups her warm cheek. He wants to say something sweet, something reassuring; he wants to tell her again that he loves her. But he gives her his own gift, and says nothing at all (does nothing to bring back that uncomfortable, cornered look she gets when he reveals too much).

He does lean forward, though, slightly, slowly. Gives her time to duck away, to start talking at a hundred miles a minute to disguise her embarrassment, to slap him.

She tips her head up. Her eyes flutter closed, her dark lashes laying like warm snowflakes against dusky skin.

He kisses her.

He’s kissed her before (he’d count them, but they always feel dreamlike and he’s afraid of confining them to real numbers and mundane reality), more this week than he once thought he’d ever be able to. Each time, each kiss, each moment when her arms wind around his neck and her body leans fully against his, he thinks it is more (more beautiful, more humbling, more profound) than he can bear. His body fills up with light and air and happiness. His mind spirals in the unfamiliarity of a freefall. His heart stutters and jumps and pounds for freedom from its suddenly fragile cage.

She kisses him, and Clark thinks he could die (and that is so strange a feeling, so alien a notion, that it seems otherworldly, to know he is vulnerable and mortal and yet still, somehow, so alive).

“Dinner,” she murmurs, breaking away from him. It takes her a moment to open her eyes and let her hands fall from his chest. “I skipped lunch, so dinner is a really good idea.”

Clark chuckles. “Dinner it is. I did promise you chocolate desserts if we dated, didn’t I?”

“Promised?” she scoffs. “I think you mean ‘threatened?’ And I hope you’re not still holding out hope that you can control me with chocolate.”

“Hey.” Clark pauses in his trek to his room to arch an eyebrow at her. Grinning, he holds up the tickets in his hand. “I got the magic tickets, didn’t I?”

She throws the pillow from his couch at him, and Clark laughs as he ducks into his room. Behind him, he hears her laughing too, and as soon as he’s closed the bathroom door between them, he’s floating in elation.

They have plenty of time for dinner (with a dessert Lois pretends not to want but ends up eating most of off his plate), and make it to the show early. Clark leaves his glasses where they are; no need to try to figure out the secrets, not tonight, when the woman at his side is more mysterious, more entrancing, than any of their illusions.

Superman is needed only twice during the evening. Clark excuses himself both times, and breathes a sigh of relief both when Lois doesn’t tease him for it and when neither of the rescues take longer than ten minutes each. He knows that if this continues (if she does not break his heart and go back to Luthor, or just decide that she can’t love the ordinary man), he will need to tell Lois his secret. He knows that he only has a limited amount of time before this turns from keeping her safe to just keeping a secret. But…but things are still so new, so raw, so frail that he cannot think on it for long. He cannot bring himself to imagine how angry she will be when she discovers what he’s been hiding. (He cannot let himself think of a future where Lois knows him and accepts him and loves him anyway, still, despite, because…)

“Clark,” Lois says when the show is over and people are beginning to stream toward the exits and confetti rains down over them, catching in her hair and making her gleam in the stage lights (she looks like the stars in a night sky, so close he could almost reach out and touch them; so far he could fly forever without quite reaching them). “Why do you like magic so much?”

His heart thuds in his ears. His breaths stir the confetti drifting in front of him. The room is dark and crowded and noisy, but he feels as if he and Lois are alone, in a bubble of stillness and silence. Lois rarely asks Clark personal questions like this; she rarely turns her clever, probing mind in his direction (and Superman is relieved and Clark is hurt). But she is now, and for some reason, it feels as important and weighted as the tickets.

“I guess,” he says slowly (wanting to give her the truth; wanting to stop lying even, or especially, in the little things), “it’s because I like to believe that there are things we can’t explain. Things that can surprise us. And also, in a world where people routinely fear what they don’t understand, it’s nice to see something that confounds and surprises people being accepted and loved by so many.”

She blinks at him, a furrow in her brow. “That’s… I never thought of it like that.” Abruptly, she clears her throat and stands, shaking out the wrinkles in her dress. “I still don’t like mysteries, though.”

“So no more roses?” he teases (glad the world has returned to normal; relieved Lois did not laugh at his answer).

Her smile is sly and mischievous and nervous all at once (she is confounding and mysterious and attractive, and if there is any magic in his world, it is all her). “Well, if you can make them appear even faster than the last time, I might consider it.” She slides her arms through her coat and starts forward, deftly avoiding a few passersby.

“In this crowd?” Clark pats down his windswept tie and slips his free hand through hers, biting back a grin when her fingers weave, of their own accord, through his. “It might take a bit longer than three seconds just to get to the door.”

“Magicians need to always be improving,” she chides him mockingly. “What are you going to do to one-up yourself?”

“That is a challenge,” he agrees, and then he takes his hand from behind his back and hands her the single, chocolate rose, wrapped in tinfoil colored to mimic the flower, all red and green (and so very symbolic). It had been too good an opportunity, when she turned to slip on her coat, for him to pass up. It had taken only a split second to dart out to the novelty vendor wagon outside the theater and drop the money where the rose had been. It would take him a lifetime to fully catalog and savor all the variations of surprise and awe and quiet, simmering interest on her face as she looks up from the rose to him.

“Red,” she murmurs. “Not yellow.”

He swallows (hopes his hand does not shake, held out between them). “Not yellow,” he agrees.

There’s a moment of arrested stillness (of panic). Then Lois smiles. And she reaches out. And she takes the rose from him.

“I like red better anyway,” she says, and slips past him.

Clark stands there, breathless, astonished, almost giddy, before he thinks to turn and follow her. She smiles at him over her shoulder, opens her mouth to say something, pieces of confetti shaking free of her hair to pepper her shoulders.

And he hears it.

“Clark--”

Just his name, in a baritone voice, from someone maybe sixty or a hundred feet away. Then it’s gone, swallowed up in the clamor of voices and milling bodies. No trace of anyone staring at him or watching him or singling him out. Nothing to pinpoint where it came from. But he knows he heard it. He knows someone said it.

And he is afraid.

*