*14*
“Lois, can I have a word?” Perry gestures at her as he walks past her desk. Lois startles, jarred from her ongoing investigation of (one way of putting ‘staring longingly at’) Clark’s desk (which is as empty as the news about Superman).
“What is it?” she asks, and belatedly realizes she probably should have tried to inject at least a little bit of life into her voice. It’s hard to remember that kind of thing, though, when there’s a chorus of cannons blasting steady pulses of pain against her temples and a metal band trying to shrink her skull inward (when her heart is empty and yearning in her chest and flashes of a better life taunt her and Clark is nowhere to be found). “I’m still working on--”
“Oh, do you still work here?” Perry interrupts with a mock expression of surprise. “I’m sorry, but when I stopped receiving any stories from you, I just assumed you must have quit without telling me.”
Oh. That kind of ‘word.’
Lois takes a deep breath (tries to summon up the concern this moment deserves) and follows Perry into his office. He moves behind the desk deliberately, sits carefully, places his hands very specifically on top of his desk--in short, does everything he can to broadcast just how much he doesn’t want to be having this conversation.
“Now,” he starts, and Lois finds herself sinking down into the chair she usually just paces around. “Is there something you want to tell me?”
“I…”
She’s spun whole days’ worth of leeway from the measliest of excuses. She’s made up stories and talked about investigations she’d never even started to get Perry to leave her be when she’s needed space and time. She’s done this moment (not as bad, not as desperate, not as never-ending as this, but similar) a dozen times before, and has never frozen or choked up or drawn a blank.
Until now. Until this moment. Sitting here in front of Perry, facing him in a remodeled version of the same office where she first met Clark. That meeting haunts her now--with all its what-ifs, and maybes, and possibilities. Maybe the worst thing that ever happened to Clark, first because she was told it was and then because she did her best to make sure it was the worst thing that ever happened to him. But still, somehow, maybe the best thing that ever happened to her. To meet Clark, to have him in her life, to see that spark of…something…light up his eyes for the very first time when he looked at her.
(The spark that flickered and sputtered and died under her manipulation.)
“Lois,” Perry says.
And Lois starts crying. Huge heaving sobs she can’t control, can’t hold back, can’t swallow back down to that dark gaping hole eating her up from the inside out. All the tears she thought she was too numb and empty to fill, bursting out of her in an explosion that seems devastating judging by Perry’s aghast expression but are merely the delayed aftershocks of the tragedy that’s already played out.
She brings her hands up and covers her face (wishes it were that easy), tries to ignore the temptation of those memories-that-should-be, and sinks into Perry’s awkward, sincere embrace.
“I don’t know what to do,” she sobs out. “I messed up, Perry, and I don’t know how to fix it.”
“Now, now, it can’t be that bad--”
“It’s Clark!” she cries, and then can’t speak again for several minutes. “It’s Clark,” she says again, when she can, when Perry’s hands on her back and his soothing murmur have cajoled her back to semi-coherency. “I broke his heart, and I don’t think I can take it back.”
“Ah.” He takes a deep breath, pats her one last time, helps her sit up straight, and even hands her a tissue from his desk (she takes it, and grabs several more, too, because a crying jag like this demands almost a whole box). “I…I was afraid it was something like that.”
“Has he been in at all?” As soon as the question is out, Lois winces at the pitiable tone turning her voice into a wavering mess. But she doesn’t take the question back.
“Uh, no. No, not exactly.” Perry rubs the back of his neck and stands to take a few steps away. “His parents called about a week ago. Said there’d been an emergency and he’d had to fly out to see them.”
“He didn’t talk to you?”
“No. They…said he was out. Helping, though they were a bit vague on the details of what he was helping with.” Perry meets her eyes, then, unexpectedly, and she knows he sees the stricken look she doesn’t have time to cover up. “Lois, darling, what… No, never mind, I don’t want to get in the middle of anything, but…you’re sure it’s something you can’t fix? I mean, that boy, he…he’d do a lot for you.”
Only a quick shuddering breath, another pass of a crinkled tissue, and Perry’s startled expression keep her from falling into another crying fit. She feels unsteady. Unstable. As if one sudden movement, one sharp word, and all her molecules will go flying outward, separated from the impermeable field that holds them together into one cohesive shape. As if she will simply stop being…and just…disappear.
“Have…have you ever trusted the wrong source?” Lois finally asks. She can’t quite make herself look up at Perry (can’t bear to see his expression when she reveals how badly she’s misstepped). Instead, she looks down at her lap, and the shredded, sodden remains of her tissues. “Have you ever believed the wrong person and…and just messed everything up because of it?”
Gingerly, Perry approaches her again and sits next to her. His hand dances along her spine for a moment before settling down onto the chair back. Moments like this, naked and sensitive and emotional, are not Perry’s favorite, she knows, but still he sits there, beside her, and Lois almost starts crying again just to feel someone, anyone, so close to her. (She’s been so alone, lately, watching the news as the world starts to notice Superman’s absence; sitting at home and looking through her cut-up, pasted-together journal of another life and wondering where her lying source is now; staring at the phone and her door and trying to talk herself into, or out of, calling or visiting Clark. She’s just been alone, and it’s hard, and it’s lonely, and it’s felt like a prison sentence.)
“I think every reporter makes that mistake at least once,” Perry says quietly. “A lot of ‘em make it more than once. The trick is how to come back from it.”
Lois nods dully. Nothing she doesn’t know. Nothing she hasn’t already told herself. (It still means something, though, to hear it coming from Perry.)
“Why do I always wait until things are completely broken before I stop to think maybe I made a mistake?” she blurts out.
His low chuckle surprises her. “Well, now, that’s just because you’re stubborn. And that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, you know. Why, the King himself--”
“Please, Perry, no Elvis stories. Not right now.”
“All right.” He nudges the trashcan over toward her. “You pick a path and you keep on it, Lois. It’s what makes you a good reporter--never letting anything stop you from reaching your goal. And all right, so it steers you wrong sometimes. It’s also what keeps you trying and trying until you fix the problems you see.”
She lets out a laugh that sounds jagged and poisoned. “That’s what I always told myself too. But this time…”
“Look, darling, you and I both know not everything can be fixed.” Perry shakes his head with a rueful smile. “But if I have faith in anything anymore, it’s that Lois Lane can come through pretty much anything.”
“But can Clark?”
The question hangs in the air like a drenched flag. White, and heavy, and speaking of surrender (or maybe just an admission of guilt).
Perry stares at her for a long beat, then smiles. Gently. Kindly. Knowingly. “I wouldn’t bet against that young man. Not for anything. And maybe you should give him a little bit more credit, Lois. After all, he’s lasted longer than either one of us would have thought the first day we met him.”
It’s comforting (like a justification). It’s calming (like an excuse). It’s not enough (like the truth).
“Yeah,” she says.
He’s strong. He’s invulnerable. He’s optimistic and idealistic and good, and Lois knows Clark can stand up against all the forces of this world without bowing or flinching.
But she also knows that he’s fragile, and vulnerable, and oh so very breakable. Because it is not his body that Clark entrusted to Lois.
It’s his heart, and that is made of something even more delicate than spun glass; it’s made of trust, and love, and faith (and she broke them all).
*
She’s coming out of Perry’s office (his trashcan filled with Kleenex, his face shadowed with a few more worried lines) and walks right into someone very solid. Her eyes ache from the tears, her head hurts with a constant pain, and she opens her mouth to snap at whoever got in her way.
She looks up. Draws breath.
Loses that breath all at once.
Clark stares back at her, his apology already half-spoken, rising from his mouth and then falling, misshapen and premature, to the floor to shatter between them.
“Clark,” she says (and it feels like a reprieve, unlooked for and fully appreciated, to be able to speak his name again).
She’s so close to him, close enough to feel the shudder wrack his frame (hidden, as usual, behind his boxy suit and distracting tie).
“Sorry,” he mutters, and steps almost a foot away. Waiting for her to walk away from him again. Waiting to get into Perry’s office (to give his resignation? to leave her behind forever? to leave Clark Kent behind?).
Sudden desperation (panic) surges through her in lightning waves of frantic desperation. “Clark, I need to tell you--”
He shoots her a look, then, different from any other he has ever given her. Jagged. Desperate.
Scared.
She stops--speaking, moving, breathing. (Hoping.)
He’s scared of her. Terrified of her. Of her.
“Lois, I…” He swallows, looks toward Perry’s office as if to a lifeline. “I can’t, okay? I just…you said it was over. So don’t do this anymore.”
And he’s gone, fleeing as he never has before (not from her; not from anything this world has thrown at him; not in any flicker of the never-to-be-future), ducking into Perry’s office and shutting the door firmly between them.
Lois leaves the newsroom--to give him space, she tells herself. (Doing her own running away, she knows.) Heads out into traffic, walks until she has blisters, wipes away tears.
And wonders how she’s supposed to accomplish any of her plans to confront her source if she can’t even talk to Clark.
(Wonders if the broken shards inside her breastbone will ever stop scraping along the interior of her soul and bleeding her dry.)
*
Desperate times call for desperate measures. That’s the only explanation for why she’s here, standing on the roof of a forty-story building, looking over the edge and hoping Clark is still in town. The wind scatters her hair in every direction, stings her eyes and gives her excuse for their watery state. Her hands shake, but her voice is steady as she calls for Superman.
“Please, Clark,” she whispers. “Save me one more time.”
It’s actually not as hard to jump as she assumed it would be (half the time spent readying herself for this last-ditch plan was mostly just coaching herself on actually stepping off firm ground into empty air). She feels almost free, in fact, tearing herself away from the dreams-turned-nightmares dogging her every step, ripping herself away from the mistakes she’s made. It’s liberating, to throw herself forward without knowing what will happen (and she hates it, because this is exactly what she’s been doing her entire life, and exactly the reason she is in the mess she’s in now, since it all started when she stepped from the known into the unknown with a completely false sense of bravado).
The lights of the buildings around her, the feel of the wind scouring her flesh, the billow of her clothes whipping at her body…all of it blurs and streams together into a solid, unending parade of sensation. There’s no room for thought or fear or regret, only sight and feel and sound.
Only one way forward. No way back.
The ground transforms from a featureless blur at the edge of her vision to a reality. It looms, larger and larger, until it threatens to dominate her entire life. To consume it. To destroy it.
Her hands tighten their grip on the only thing holding her silent.
But that’s the wrong thing to do.
Her mouth fills with cold, streaming air when she opens it, and all she can do to beat it back is to scream out his name.
“Clark!”
(It’s strange, that name that comes quivering and urgent from her throat, when she has spent all afternoon envisioning the scene with a different, newer name in its place. Strange, and yet somehow, completely unsurprising.)
She doesn’t have time to think he won’t be there. Doesn’t have time to worry that he hates her so much he will not answer, or is so frightened of her that he is no longer anywhere close enough to hear her. She only has time to notice that the myriad lights, all gold and green and red and glittering, look like stars. Like a galaxy pulling her in upside down and inside out (or maybe she was that way already, and it is her own perception that has flipped it).
And then there he is.
She feels him before she sees him. Is embraced by his warmth and his strength before she hears his heartbeat, thudding painfully fast against her ear. His cape flutters against the backdrop of artificial cosmos, wrapped around her by sheer momentum and the abrupt change of their direction from down (and nowhere) to up (and somewhere).
Her breath is caught in her throat, or even deeper, stifled at the bottom of her lungs, aborted before it begins. Her hands are still shaking.
In a swooping move that sends familiar butterflies dancing through her stomach, they are at the roof (back where she started, going in circles, over and over and over again). He sets her down, and she stumbles from the speed with which he separates them (but she can still hear the echo of that panicked heartbeat rattling around her eardrums).
Whatever expression he holds, whatever secrets the moonlight will reveal, is swept away when he sees the ropes attached to the harness strapped around her torso.
“Lois!” he bites out her name. Stern. Irritated. Even angry.
(She breathes a sigh of relief, because anger is so much better than resignation.)
“What?” she says defensively, stripping herself of the harness as quickly as possible, not wanting any distractions from this conversation. “I’m desperate, not suicidal.”
His sigh is explosive, but it’s the downtrodden slope to his shoulders that really makes her heart twinge. “Why would you do something like this? Jumping off a building?”
“Because I need to talk to you,” she says, searches his face for signs of that terror she saw there earlier, “and this was the only way I could think of to get your attention.”
His eyes are cold as diamonds, etched against his face by harsh moonlight. “Really? Because I feel like your last tactic worked pretty well at keeping my attention.”
She doesn’t need the headache nearing migraine level (despite the double dose of pills she took before coming here) or the flickering images that cause it to read his expression--hurt and anger and resignation and loss and remorse, all rolled up into a burden that Clark, of all people, should never have to bear.
“I’m sorry,” she says (a single blanket statement to cover up almost the entirety of her interactions with Clark). “I’m so sorry, but you wouldn’t talk to me at the Plan--”
“I can’t do this,” he says, hurriedly. And he’s standing at the edge, stepping back, moving toward that empty air that doesn’t mean the same thing to him as it does to her (though maybe it does, freedom and liberation and running away from the past). “Not now. Not yet.”
Her heart leaping forward to bang against her ribcage, Lois takes a hasty step closer to him, as if she could possibly pull him back down to the earth (to her). “It’s not what you think! I--”
In a move that single-handedly crushes her heart to dust, he holds up his hands between them. A shield. A ward. A move to protect himself from her. And the fear is back, scrawled all across his face. “Don’t you understand?” he cries. “I love you, and you’re breaking my heart! I can’t do this--”
“This is important!” she yells, cutting him off.
He stares at her, stricken.
“I…I’m not saying that…” Her words are gone. Her voice is stolen. Her plan is shot down to pieces before she can even try to complete it. “I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. Of course your…of course that’s important, I just…I need to tell you why--”
“I know why,” he interrupts, and much as he tries to mask it with anger, she hears the hollowness of his voice.
(And he’s always been wiser than her, always spotted danger so much more quickly, and he is so right to be so terrified of her, but he’s never been as good at protecting himself as she has, and it’s too late, because all his fears have come true.)
He takes a deep breath.” “Superman’s the mask when you thought he was the man.”
There it is. Spelled out for her. The key to escape from the prison cell her source made for her.
Except that to Clark, it’s not the key. It’s the cell door slamming between him and all his dreams.
“No!” Her hands hover near his arm, but he flinches. A tiny recoil that reverberates through her universe as surely as if the sun has just gone supernova. She cannot touch him, then, not when he is so very frightened of her (not when she so clearly doesn’t deserve the comfort of his touch).
“No, that’s not the reason. I…I did come to your apartment that night because I found out you were Superman, but that’s exactly the thing.”
He is bewildered, and swings away from her to hide it, casting the shadow of his profile against her like a ghostly touch (the only kind she will be allowed now). “You…you wanted to hurt me?”
“I wanted to save you!” she cries over the pounding of drums (of judges’ gavels, proclaiming her guilty no matter the extenuating circumstances). But she shrinks back immediately after, lest he turn from his perusal of Metropolis to gaze on her, surely just as flawed and corrupt as the city.
It’s too late. He is turning toward her (still so completely exempt of any trace of self-protection). “What?” His brow is furrowed, his tone distant, but he is looking at her again. He is looking, and he is listening, and this is her one slim chance (her last appeal).
“Just…just listen, all right, because I know this all sounds ridiculous, but I swear it’s true.” He isn’t flying away, isn’t reduced to only a speck of red and blue, so she takes a deep breath (wrests it up and out of the viscous bottom of her lungs and lets it go free) and launches into a rapid spiel.
“The night that I told Superman I loved him, and that I would even if he were an ordinary man--which under the circumstances I can see why you didn’t believe me, but is actually true--I was upset. Devastated. And I wasn’t thinking--well, never mind. The point is, I was angry and confused when a man knocked at my door. I shouldn’t have answered it--believe me, I’d do anything now not to have answered it--but I did. It was an older man with white hair and dark, really severe eyes covered up by glasses, and he knew things, Clark, things he shouldn’t have been able to know. He said he came from the future.”
She’s been afraid to look at Clark too closely (afraid of his reactions; afraid of knowing for sure with no more chances left for hope), but here he snorts out a soft disbelieving scoff. “Really, Lois? The future?”
“I know,” she blurts out, desperate that he not give up and leave, “but you believed in the invisible man, and hypnosis turned out to be pretty real, and you’re an alien, so just hear me out.” It comes out harsher than she intended; she winces when she sees Clark recoil, locking himself back behind walls (but he’s no good at making them, not experienced at it like her, and they are far too transparent, paper-thin).
“He had a kind of strange palm-sized box, and I was laughing at his claims when he did something to it, and suddenly there was a sort of window floating vertically in my living room, glowing and shimmering, and I could hear the sounds of a city behind its curtain of light. Well, you know me and how good I am at letting go of anything that could be a big story, so I went through it.”
“Lois!” She almost melts at the familiar tones of exasperation and concern shading his voice from a stranger’s to a friend’s. “How could you? What if--”
“It took me to the future, Clark,” she interrupts (because as encouraging as it is, his concern is months’ late; because now that she has released the floodgates, all of these truths, these excuses, these justifications, come spilling out in an unstoppable torrent, hopefully drowning out his anger and blame and hatred…but never, she knows, his fear). “It was Metropolis, but it was definitely the future. The technology, the newspapers, the people, the landscape, even. The future, but a better one.”
She dredges up another deep breath. “It’s called Utopia, and it’s all because of Superman. Because of you. The ideals that you fight for, the example you provide so we can all aspire to greater things, the amazing deeds you do--all of it, everything you are, created Utopia. A world where people are happy and crime is nearly nonexistent, and truth and justice prevail, and a hundred-foot statue of Superman stands in Centennial Park.”
Despite her better judgment, she has to stop then, just for a moment. Long enough to try to gauge Clark’s reaction. He’s listening. She’s not sure she can read any more than that from his stiff silence, but that’s better than she dreaded this would go, and there’s no stopping now.
“I stayed there for three days, just to be sure. To prove it to myself. I traveled a hundred miles and saw a new suburb that’s not there yet. I read history books from a random bookshop that doesn’t exist here. I visited the lobby of the Superman museum and read the pamphlets. I talked to people on the streets. It wasn’t a hoax, Clark, or a con. It was real. It is real.” She swallows. “And it was all fading away. In just the three days I was there, the city noticeably changed. The buildings got darker and grimier, crime started to spike, and your statue began to tarnish and rust, covered in graffiti. Utopia was dying, and it was because of me.”
The sentence falls like a death knell. She hates saying it, hates even more saying it to Clark rather than her source. Hates it because she’s seen the truth of it already, here in her own time, watching the happiness fade from Clark’s eyes, the bounce disappear from his step, the hope die in his heart. In a way, she’s watched paradise fall twice now, and both times, she has been the cause of its demise.
“I don’t understand,” Clark murmurs. “How could you be responsible for any of that?”
“We were never supposed to meet, Clark,” she says, and ugh, she wanted to do this without crying (without burdening him with her own grief), but her throat has a lump in it and her voice is watery and her vision is hazed with moisture as well as with the ignored visions of a parallel life. “John Doe told me that--”
“John Doe?” he says, cutting her off, and she wants to scream. She wants this all to be out in the open. She wants him to know everything. She wants to never again have to lie or pretend everything. (She wants to be a coward and let him have all the responsibility of making the decisions and knowing what to do with this impossible situation.) “You trusted a guy who called himself John Doe?”
“That’s…” She waves her hand vaguely through the air. “He said he couldn’t tell me his real name, that it’d give too much away or--I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. What matters is that he said you and I were never supposed to meet.” She talks faster, aware that Clark is frowning, his brows drawing down in negation, but he needs to believe her. (He needs to know she never wanted to hurt him.) “Something went wrong, and things were thrown off course, and we met. And because we did, all of Utopia was slowly but surely ceasing to exist.”
Clark is shaking his head. “How could our meeting possibly be a mistake--”
“Because I’m a distraction!” She pants heavily (wishes that this, of everything, was the lie). “I’m a distraction for you, Clark, and that’s all.”
His jaw clenches. He draws back another step in midair, his arms folding over his chest (like an extra wall to guard his precious, fragile heart from her). He is chiseled stone, granite, steel, every impossibly strong substance that can wall her away (and he doesn’t need practice to build walls, after all; or maybe he does have practice, to hide his secret from the world, and this is just the first time he has built them for her).
“John Doe…he said that you…you fell in love with me, and you shouldn’t have. You weren’t supposed to. You got so distracted--loving me and saving me all the time and chasing stories with me--that you…you never became a strong enough foundation for Utopia to be built on. It was founded and successful because Superman was everywhere, saving everyone, but instead you became fixated on me. And eventually, one time you didn’t save me in time”--she notices the painful spasm that ghosts across his rigid features at this--“and Superman disappeared. And Utopia never existed.”
She pauses, but he says nothing. Makes no reaction. Gives no sign.
And she is desperate. Panicked.
Guilty. Ashamed.
“I wanted to save the world,” she pleads with his unmoving profile. “I wanted to save you. Superman is here to help, and Clark always helps, and what better reward is there for that than a perfect world in your name? John Doe said you would never give up on me, never walk away on your own, that once you loved, it was immovable. So the only chance to get Superman back was to make you give up on the idea of love. He said I just had to make you happy for a while and then break it off. He said you would recover, that you would be stronger for it, and that you would be the hero the world needed.”
He turns his head, hiding even his profile from her. A slight movement, but it sparks an earthquake in her soul.
She takes a hasty step forward, her toes crushed up against the ledge, reaching out toward him. “I didn’t take you seriously, Clark. That day, on the park bench. I didn’t take your confession of love as seriously as I should have, and I’m sorry. I know now that you meant it, but I…at the time, I thought it was just a crush. A fleeting attraction. And he said you’d be fine, and who doesn’t suffer a few broken hearts in their lifetime? Everyone recovers and moves on--”
“Did you?”
She stammers, stunned that he can speak at all through his unmoving jaw. “W-what?”
“You’ve told me about how your heart was broken. Have you recovered?”
And she is speechless, because she hasn’t. She’s grown up and moved on (become the breaker of hearts rather than the owner of the broken heart) but there are scars on her heart still. Wounds where those pains never quite healed right but instead shaped and molded her. (And she felt nothing at all for Claude or Paul or anyone else compared to what she knows, has seen, has felt, that Clark feels for her.)
“I wanted to save you,” she finally whispers. A piteous plea. “I wanted to save the world for you, and I was in too deep by the time I realized the price was too high. He told me your pain would be temporary. He told me Utopia would be safe. And all I had to do was give you up--and I thought it would be worth it but--”
“He was wrong.”
She’s already shaking her head, already looking away. She’s made this denial herself (still thinks it, guided by those flashes of memories and futures, but it doesn’t matter anymore; it’s far too late). “Clark, I know it’s hard to accept, but I walked through those streets. I saw--”
“I don’t care,” he says, unbending. Unyielding. And he steps forward, his own feet right up against the ledge. Only that thin strip of concrete separates them. His face is cast into light, and she can see, behind the granite walls of his expression, the sincere earnestness shining in his eyes. “I don’t care what he said or what you saw. I believe you, Lois, all right, because I know you wouldn’t make something like this up. But it doesn’t matter. John Doe is wrong. You’re wrong. All of Utopia is wrong if it is founded on the premise that love is less important than some idyllic, idolized symbol high up above everyone else.”
And his arms uncross, and his walls fall away, and it is Clark, with his kindness and openness and compassion (and courage) standing in front of her. “Loving you could not possibly make me weaker or more ineffective or less in any way. Loving you made me stronger, braver. I couldn’t be Superman without you, Lois--there would never even have been a Superman if I hadn’t met you.”
“I don’t…I don’t understand.”
“Meeting you made me want to stay in Metropolis. Seeing your drive made me brave enough to try again after Perry turned me down in my job interview. You told me to bring a change of clothes to work. You gave Superman his name, and most of his ideals and quotes--you gave me the epitome of a hero that I strive to live up to. There is no Superman without Lois Lane.”
The air closes in around her. The lights are blurring and fading into shooting stars that streak by just out of reach.
“You…you just think that now,” she begins.
“I know,” he says. “Lois, where has Superman been these past two weeks?”
She pales. Thinks of all the empty news she watched, waiting in vain for mention of a Superman sighting.
“Exactly. He hasn’t been. And if there’s no Utopia without a focused, on-the-job Superman, then there is no Utopia without Lois Lane. I don’t know if this John Doe has read the wrong history books or if he has some kind of agenda of his own, but he’s dead wrong.”
Lois swallows, ignores the way the world is spinning around her (the vast chasm spanning in the foot of distance between her and Clark), and makes herself remember her plan. The notes she jotted down as she pored over that could-have-been timeline.
“That’s why I needed to talk to you so badly. I thought my source wanted to save Utopia, and that’s why I did all this. But you’re right--he cared more about Superman than he did Clark Kent. And that’s wrong. It made me finally realize that I think he actually wants to destroy Utopia. Destroy you.”
Clark nods. “It makes sense. A lot more sense than that he wants to save the world by erasing Lois Lane from my life.”
Flinching, she looks away. His words sound wonderful. Hopeful. Beautiful.
But he is cold. Remote. Earnest, yet aloof. He is standing next to her, but allows them to remain divided by gravity. And maybe his words speak of a future where they are happy together (a future she’s seen and envisioned and wrapped herself in so many times that there is a permanent path of pain etched through her mind), where he still loves her…but she thinks that he is speaking as much of the past as she has been speaking of the future.
He did love her. He was made better by her. He once patterned himself to her words and her presence in his life.
But not anymore.
You’re wrong, he said, and that’s that.
She made the wrong choice. Trusted the wrong person. Took Clark Kent for granted one too many times.
And now here they are. Allies by circumstance. Nothing more.
“I think I’ve heard this John Doe around,” he says unexpectedly. “And I think I know how to find him. When I do, do you know how to send him back to the future?”
“We traveled through the window he opened. I think he always carries it around with him.” She pauses, then adds, “I don’t think he actually spends much time here; he’s shown up in my apartment when he shouldn’t have been able to get in.”
“Do you think you can open the time-window?”
She frowns at him. “Why? If he’s targeting you, he’ll just come back.”
“I don’t think so.” Clark shrugs, a stiff, ponderous movement that makes her wonder if his every move hurts him as much as hers do. “If he really is trying to destroy Utopia, chances are there are people from there that would love to stop him. If we turn him over to them, he won’t be able to keep coming back and making trouble for us.”
“Oh. Of course. Good idea.”
For some reason, Clark flinches at that. “Yes, well, I do have some of those. Too bad you didn’t think of that when a strange man first came and abducted you.”
It hurts, and absurdly, that makes her feel a bit better. It’s so much easier to listen to a biting rejoinder than the beautiful words of love he gave so coldly.
Clark swallows, and looks away. He’s drifting, no longer pressed up against the ledge, the edges of his profile blending into the backdrop of lights and shadows. “The point is, if I can find this John Doe, can you help me get rid of him?”
“Yes.” She tries to stand straighter, feels the weight of it on her bones. “I can.”
And he’s disappearing. Leaving. Vanishing out of her life (and there will be only one more meeting between them, when they send John Doe back to his future while she prays it hasn’t been altered too badly). The knowledge that this might be the last time she gets to really speak with Clark gives her courage.
(Or just more desperation, enough to fuel another insane action.)
“Clark!” She reaches out, dangerously far over that long, exhilarating fall, and catches hold of his arm. It tenses to stone beneath her touch, though she doesn’t let that deter her. In the midst of all the confessions and truths, she feels something very important has been forgotten. The most important thing of all.
“Clark,” she says again, a quiet whisper. “I am sorry. I’m so sorry I hurt you.”
A ripple passes over his jaw muscles, a shadow over his eyes (fear over his posture). “Me, too,” he finally whispers, and then he’s gone, leaving her bereft in his wake.
*
