Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Ghost Of A Chance 16/20

*16*

Her hands are bloody, her arms are bruised, her shoulders feel like they might be nearly dislocated, and her throat is scraped raw from screaming. None of it does any good.

Wherever John Doe has brought them, Clark comes…just as her source said he would. He cannot get close, though Lois can’t understand why (she hears the word Kryptonite, remembers the article she wrote and Clark so beaten and the name he bestowed on Trask’s paranoia, but it doesn’t make sense here). He does not hear her, no matter how she shouts and cries. She cannot reach him, cannot hold onto him and keep him here (cannot convince him that she didn’t want to break his heart and hurt him so badly and provide John Doe with all the ammunition he needs to send him off willingly to his death). All she can do is slam herself over and over and over again against the barrier holding her here in this strange, unearthly box, suspended amidst a cosmos her eyes slide away from.

She can hear Clark and John Doe (Tempus, this man, her source, who lied to her so adeptly and took her to a future she now cannot understand; who manipulated and used her and pointed her at Superman with all the accuracy of a master marksman). Her breath is lodged deep inside her, building and building, pressure that can only be relieved through an explosion great enough to destroy her (but, oh, it would be worth it if it destroyed Tempus too).

“Doomsday,” Tempus says, and Lois shrieks and hurls herself at the barrier.

“Don’t, Clark!” she cries. “Don’t listen to him! Don’t let him destroy you!”

But Clark cannot hear her (and even if he could, why would he listen to her now, after everything she has done to him, after all the lies she has told him?), and he stands there and talks to Tempus (and this is a mistake, no one knows it better than Lois, who made it herself and broke Clark’s heart and vanquished Superman and brought devastation down on herself).

“Where is Lois?” Clark asks, once, then again, and again, and blood drips from torn fingernails and sliced hands as Lois, frenzied, scratches and claws at the slippery, evasive barrier.

“I’m here!” she screams. “I’m here, Clark! I’m safe, I’m okay, don’t listen to him!”

But it doesn’t matter. Her warnings fall unheeded, as if unuttered, and only her lies can reach him, only her false untruths allowed to stand.

“Please,” she whimpers when she hears the crack that follows Superman’s speedy exits. She huddles in on herself against that barrier, stained with her blood, echoing with her screams, and has no strength to move. “Please, Clark, don’t do it.”

But he’s already gone, and she is as alone as ever.

*

She never should have gone to see him (the latest in a long line of never-should-haves stretching far back into the distance). She should have let him be, given him all the space he needed, and focused on finding something she could do to help him (to save him, even though she could never say those words out loud again, could never even think them without feeling bile rise up to choke her). But she was selfish and lonely and scared, and she hated seeing his bleak, hollow eyes every time she blinked, so she let herself be weak and she went to see Clark.

Not that it did either of them any good. It only served to carve more lines into his face, etched deeper with every moment of his silence. It only made her realize just how much she’d lost (given up for a future she’d never see and that would never exist now). She’d left in tears she tried to hide, in sobs that erupted before she could ever reach her place. And then she’d compounded her mistake with another one (when would she ever learn her lesson? when would she learn to be strong?).

As some perverse form of penance, she’d been avoiding the visions of that happier, better life ever since she irrevocably broke Clark’s heart, but coming back from that silent, shuttered Clark, she’d caved. Just like every addict she’d ever interviewed or written about, she’d justified this latest fix (because maybe there’d be something in them to help him; or, she’d admitted deep down, to help her figure out how to win him back). She’d curled up on her couch and let the flashes pour in.

Old ones, new ones, scenes she’d already written down and some she’d never imagined--but they all had one thing in common: Clark smiling. Laughing. Looking at her with love scribed across every line of his being. Holding her hand. Wrapping her up in his embrace. Kissing her. And then, for the first time, she’d thought of giving into to the one flash she’d never let herself see--considered seeing, feeling, what it would be like for Clark to kiss her and not stop. For her arms to wind around his neck and his to lift her so lightly into the air. For sheets beneath her back and his warm weight over her. For the feel of his hands in places they’d never been and his lips following. For the taste of his skin on her tongue and the glint of moonlight off his eyes, so open and easy to read…so heavy with the weight of all he felt for her.

She’d ignored the disorienting crush of the migraine…and considered it…and closed her eyes…

…and when she’d opened them, John Doe was there, with that box in his hands and a smile on his lips and the light reflecting off his glasses.

“Ms. Lane,” he said, and then he reached up and took the glasses off with a cocky smirk. “Recognize me now?”

And now she was here, in her sheer prison, able to hear Tempus send Clark off to his death.

Here, huddled in on herself and helpless. A dupe. A puppet. A victim.

A villain.

*

The shimmer of the portal blinds her. When she blinks the stars away, she finds herself splayed out on cold concrete, the scent of wine so potent it stings her nostrils and makes her cough. The sight of her own hands chokes her again, this time in surprise. No blood. No scratches. The fingernails all intact. No bruises along her forearms, no ache in her shoulders--no sign that she was ever held in that impermeable prison.

For just an instant, she lets herself believe that she imagined it. That Clark is really safe and there is no Doomsday and Tempus is only a bumbling time-traveler trying to correct his mistake and willing to listen to her when she says there has to be a better way.

But that’s too good to be true, and it wouldn’t explain the shame and guilt that coats her soul in ash. So she finishes coughing, swallows once, and then struggles to her feet.

Tempus stands in the corner of a cage (a cage? but yes, that’s the only word for it, green bars enclosing him with her in the middle of what looks to be a vast wine cellar) and smirks down at her. He’s leaning back against the bars, his arms crossed over his chest, and Lois has never hated anyone as much as she hates him in that moment.

“You know,” he remarks, “for as many times as I’ve done this, as many worlds as I visit, this is always the moment I look forward to most--when you look at me and know there is nothing you can do. When you look at me and finally, really see me. I mean, yes, it’s fun to play the good guy”--and he bends to scoop his glasses up off the floor, puts them on, laughs at her glare--“but nothing compares to the moment of revelation.” He pulls the glasses off, drops them to the floor, steps on them with undisguised malice. “The moment you realize that I’ve won again.”

“Won what?” Lois hears herself ask (once a reporter, she supposes). “What’s the point of all of this? Why all the stupid lies? The trip to the future? The weeks of making me--”

“Making you?” His eyebrows rise to his forehead in exaggerated surprise. “Hardly an effort at all, I’d say. Lois Lane is just as much a do-gooder as her husband, after all. Show her a worthy cause, throw in a couple ‘for the greater goods,’ add a bit of flattery here and there, and she’ll do anything I need her to. You know, they always tout her as the more unpredictable one of the two, but as in so many other things, they’re wrong--you’re just as much of a straight arrow as he is.”

She gapes at him, then says, dumbly, “He’s not my husband.”

Tempus shrugs, unconcerned. “Not this one, maybe. But trust me, where there’s a Clark Kent, there’s a Lois Lane, and marriage is always in their cards if I don’t get there first. It’s disgusting, really--makes it hard to believe in free will.” He smiles, then, so abruptly Lois actually flinches back, as if the smile is itself a weapon. “Which is where I come in. Can’t have people going around believing in all those shades of black and white, not when gray is so much funner.”

“So what?” Lois looks at him in scorn. “You just go from world to world, timeline to timeline, and ruin our lives? Why? Why do you hate us so much?”

“You could be a bit more grateful I didn’t just leave you in that place--the space between worlds. Stay there long enough and it’ll rip you into a million pieces as it tries to take you to each and every reality it can find.”

“Why?” she demands shrilly.

Taking a step toward her, Tempus mimes a yawn. “You know, years ago, I would have had a long eloquent answer to that--Utopia, boring, channels on TV, all very rational and reasonable. But I’ve been doing this a while now, and I’ve got it boiled down to one sentence, all very simple and easy to understand, even for you.”

“What?” She tenses, wants to lunge forward and grab him, smash him back against the bars, grind his face into as many pieces as the lenses of his stupid glasses. “What possible reason could you have?”

“Because I can.” When she just stares at him, he laughs and moves even closer to her, completely unafraid. Openly gloating. “Think about it--a Superman with absolute convictions. A being who disproves the ages-old adage about absolute power corrupting. Incorruptible, invulnerable, oh so powerful, and yet…I can destroy him. You. Both of you. Your future, your legacy, the Utopia that spawned me. I’ve spent countless lifetimes traveling from world to world to do what all the Luthors and Metallos and Brainiacs and Nors can’t do--bring Superman to his knees. They all go after his powers or his secret identity or his morals, when the answer is staring them all in the face the whole time: Lois Lane.”

The room spins around her. There’s a spike drilling through her head again (it was gone while she screamed warnings at Clark in that strange, incomprehensible place, but it’s back again now, stronger than ever), and terror clutching at her spine, but Lois can’t look away from Tempus. It’s not the glasses, of course, but she does feel like she’s never seen him before. He was a weird stranger, probably crazy, when she first answered her door to his knock and heard him rambling about the future and saving Superman. He was an old man who’d made a mistake, a source who was helping her save Superman, before she began to resent him and fear him and even hate him. But now he is a monster, and she thinks this is the truest vision of him. An old man, wrinkled and white-haired, shoulders beginning to stoop, middle beginning to round, the veins prominent in his hands…hatred in his voice and scorn in his eyes and insanity dogging his steps.

“Lois Lane is the fastest, surest way to destroy Clark. Not by killing her--you--no, that’s too fast, too easy, and Clark Kent is too much of a paragon,” he sneers, “to fold so easily. Not by outing him to the world and making him live in hiding--you two always seem to be able to make a go of it that way. It took me years to think of it, but it’s the simplest thing: make you the weapon. Turn you against him. He can survive your death, even if it does make him look like a kicked puppy for decades afterward. He can survive under a different name. But to have the woman he loves in every lifetime break his heart? The perfect solution. The perfect weapon.”

Lois staggers (shrinks away from the weight of those words, he loves in every lifetime, contrasted against the lie she believed all this time: that she was a mistake, that they were never meant to meet at all), tries to make it look deliberate but doesn’t think she succeeds because his eyes narrow and his lips purse. The movement does have the benefit of forcibly breaking her stare from him, and she finds herself looking over his shoulder, finding a television screen. It’s muted, but it doesn’t matter. The pictures are enough to bring the entire world to a sudden, shuddering halt.

A beast half as tall as the skyscraper he stands near, gray and spiked and so alien. And in his hand, a small figure, clothed in blue and draped in red. Fire pours from those small, shadowed eyes, gray skin blackens and singes and glows, and Superman’s gone while the creature opens its mouth and screams silently at the blur above him.

“Why Doomsday?” Lois makes herself ask as she stares at this threat she could never have imagined. “If I’m such a perfect weapon…if turning me against him is so foolproof, then why bring in a Kryptonian beast to kill him?”

Tempus furrows his brow and stares at her as if she’s asked the most ridiculous question he’s ever heard. “Doomsday isn’t to destroy Superman,” he scoffs. “Doomsday is for you, Lois.”

Her back hits the bars with a clang that echoes and reverberates through her. “What do you mean?”

“Well, I’ve already broken Superman--his ideals are crushed, his naiveté ruined, his dreams turned to ashes. If it were just me and him, I’d let him live out the wreckage of his life. But then there’s you. And the only way to destroy Lois Lane…is to kill Clark Kent.”

The cage is shrinking around them. She’s claustrophobic, locked up in a tiny space with a madman, with a monster, and she’s terrified (that he will succeed in destroying her; that she will kill him). The bars swim and flicker, the ceiling above seems to fold inward, the floor wavers beneath her feet. She grabs hold of the bars behind her and devotes all her attention to remaining upright (to trying to ignore Tempus’s scent, wine and metal and scorn, surrounding her as he nears). For an instant, there are two Tempuses--the one hovering over her and another one, sitting in an armchair eating popcorn, laughing about commercial breaks. She blinks and there’s only one.

(She curses herself then, because that was a flash of could-have-been, and he’s in them, Tempus is in them, she could have been seeing him, learning about him, she should have known he was a monster.)

“What’s wrong with you?” he asks suspiciously. “Usually you’re all full of spunk and wisecracks. I’ve never seen one of you shaking in your boots before.”

She squeezes her eyes shut, reaches for those elusive visions, concentrates. And sees Tempus in front of a campaign poster, the name John Doe written over it. Clark, no, there are two Clarks, both of them facing down Tempus at a press conference, one Clark, one Superman. Lois whimpers (she can’t lose it, not now; she has to help Clark, has to find something to stop Tempus). Dimly, she feels herself sliding down the bars, crumpling on the floor.

Another flash, Tempus dressed in black with a Stetson on his head and a pistol in his hand. Tempus facing a short man dressed in an old-fashioned suit with a bowler hat on his head. Tempus standing over Clark (but not her Clark, there’s something different about this one, more timid, not quite as open) as he writhes in pain beside a rock that glows green.

“Hey!” The sudden sting of a slap jars Lois away from the flashes, but she’s disoriented when she sees another Tempus in front of her. Is it him? Is it a flash? For a dizzying length of time, she cannot tell what is real and what is not. It all blends and blurs together until the only thing she is still sure of is that Clark is in danger.

“What is this?” Tempus is muttering (she thinks, anyway). “What do we have here? Oh, sneaky, aren’t we, Herb? I guess I’m not the only one who’s learned a few tricks along the way.”

He reaches out for her, a hand with something that beeps and flashes lights, and Lois flinches back, bats away the hand. “No!” she gasps defiantly. “I don’t know why you gave me these visions, but I’m going to use them against you.”

Tempus laughs. Laughs, and Lois actually reaches out to claw his eyes out but he grabs her hand and holds it down. “Taunting you with visions of a life you’ll never lead does have a certain flair to it,” he agrees, “but this wasn’t me.”

And he brings down that strange device on her head. Pain rips through her, and Lois actually feels her scream rip through her skull. Fire burns behind her eyes and she’s blinded by a slew of images that go by so fast she’d need Clark’s super-speed to process them all. Another scream that scrapes the inside of her skin, and then suddenly, as if a switch has been flipped, the pain is gone. So is the headache.

So are the flashes.

Tempus stands and pockets the beeping device with a tsking sound. “Ah, Herb, you always are just a couple steps behind.”

“W-what…” Lois dry-heaves (Tempus draws back in disgust, she notices with some satisfaction), then tries to finish her question. “What was that?”

“A nuisance. Herb’s always trying to stop me. He’s a little slow realizing the futility of his own existence. I put up a dampener around this world so he couldn’t follow me, but he must have thought trying to upload you with your future soul might work to warn you about me. I could have told him you’d be far too stubborn for something like that to work--and I’m surprised he took the risk. Much more of that and your mind might have split in half trying to accommodate two lifetimes. You’re lucky I still need you.” She has no time for more than a flash of interest (of hope) before he adds, “What good is winning if there’s no one left to hear you gloat?”

She shakes her head, wishes she were thinking clearer (wishes she could really understand what he’s saying), but does finally make it to her feet. Without the headache blurring her thoughts, without the flashes at the edge of her vision every time she blinks, without the pain distracting her, she actually feels…not strong. Not well. But better.

(And hollow, somehow. Empty, and alone, as if the flashes had been an actual companion.)

“The way you talk…” She trails off, stares at Tempus, at the pocket where she can see the outline of that window device. “How long have you been doing this--hunting down Superman and hurting Clark and breaking me?”

“It’s not called a life’s work for nothing,” he drawls.

“But how many times have you done this to us?” She steps forward, her hands clenched into fists.

Tempus sighs impatiently. “You didn’t recognize me when you saw me, so this is probably my first visit to your world--that is, unless Herb intervened again. But it doesn’t matter which Clark Kent and Lois Lane I find; you’re all alike. All good, all predictable, all in need of a good, strong wake up call.”

The flashes are gone, the constant presence that she’s come to depend on (to crave, even, in a way) for so long, the images of a life that’s been ripped away from her. Ripped away from Clark, who deserves it most of all and who is now battling a beast that could far too easily kill him. In their place, she feels a sudden cold, still purpose. She’s been leaning on those visions, telling herself that even if her life is ruined in the here and now, at least somewhere she and (more importantly) Clark are happy. But now they are gone, and she knows that there are Lois and Clarks out there who have been hurt and broken and even killed by this man, this monster, in front of her.

“You’re never going to stop, are you?” she whispers. In the claustrophobic cage, in the cavernous cellar, her whisper carries and resounds and circles and sounds again until it takes on the sound of inevitability.

Tempus laughs his harsh, rolling laugh that swallows up the last echo of her words. “You’re still not very bright, are you, Lois? Of course I’m not going to stop! There are thousands of Supermen still out there for me to torment. Thousands of Lois Lanes to use and then destroy. Why would I stop? I’m at the top of my game.”

She kicks him. He staggers back under the first kick, catches her foot on the second and twists. She falls, but is up immediately, launching herself at him in a whirlwind of fists and feet and knees. There’s a part of her mind focused only on him and the way he seems to know her moves before she makes them (of course he does; how many times has a Lois Lane attacked him?). There’s a part of her that is trying, still, to catch glimpses of the fight still showing, choppily as cameras are taken in and out of commission, on the TV. But most of her? Most of her is locked into one solid, irrevocable purpose.

Tempus may know her, but she’s been listening to him. He knows a Lois Lane who is as idealistic as Clark thinks (or thought, a few weeks ago, as he held her in his arms and soothed her migraine) she is. He knows a Lois who is a hero, who will become an icon for a paradise. He knows a Lois he has destroyed. And she? She is something new. Something harder, with jagged edges and dark pits where there used to be morals. She is the bare bones of what she could have been.

There is a Lois, somewhere, who made the colossal mistake of accepting Lex’s proposal. There is a Lois, somewhen, who got to fall in love with Clark on her own terms, in her own time. There is a Lois, she hopes, who never answered the door when John Doe knocked, who never played with her best friend’s heart and never let him march forward to his own doomsday, who deserves a future where she is happy.

But she is not that Lois. She is a Lois who has made every mistake there is to make. She is a Lois who can see her Clark bloody and broken on a television screen. She is a Lois who knows that Tempus will never stop, never learn the error of his ways, never leave Clark, any Clark (and all of them might as well be hers, they all deserve so much better), alone.

She is a Lois who is already broken and beaten and bowed.

And she has nothing left to lose.

Tempus blocks her moves defensively. He thinks she wants to incapacitate him so she can get out of the cell. And any other Lois might But this Lois wants him right here, in an enclosed space, surrounded by a radioactive metal that clangs with an almost harmonic ring when she slams his head against it, once, again, again. He’s dazed, confused, struggling. Lois tears at his pockets, pulls out the window, and then, abruptly, is stumped.

She’s seen him put the portal in the air and throw her into it, trapping her in a prison with no escape. She’s seen him enlarge it and let her step through into a Utopia that began to decay only after she began to believe John Doe’s lies. But she has never seen what he pressed or did to make it transform from a box into that portal.

Hurt flares up in her back and she staggers forward, dropping the portal as Tempus tackles her. The box flips in midair, topples toward the ground…and enlarges, hovers, shimmering, above the cement. Her moment of uncertainty ends. Tempus is behind her. She can hear him take a breath, ready to gloat again.

He has no time.

Lois whirls, slams him back against the bars, then retreats. He follows, smiling, certain he has the measure of her, that she will hurt him only enough to try to get away, that she is good and moral and still believes in black and white. That she is a Lois Lane a Superman can love.

He lunges for her. Lois ducks. She gets behind him. She crashes into him with her whole body.

There’s a moment where everything seems to move in slow-motion. A moment where there are multiple futures spread out before her.

One: Tempus regains his balance and subdues her and makes her watch as Clark is torn to pieces by a mindless beast.

Two: Tempus teeters on the edge, but does not fall. Lois knocks him out and finds a way out of the cage, and makes her way to Clark, only to watch him die.

Three: Tempus kills her and escapes and moves on to unending worlds to wreak his havoc, a swathe of destruction even wider and crueler than Doomsday’s left behind him through the multiverse.

Four: He falls into the portal and is ripped into a million pieces, forever permeated through the endless worlds he sought to make less (because anything without Clark there, without a man who hopes and loves and believes so fervently is less in a tragic way that makes tears spring to her eyes even to contemplate).

Multiple futures, all right there, hovering in front of her. But unlike the flashes, where she could see them but could not choose them, this one she can affect. She can make it happen.

What is one more crime? What is one more sin to stain her conscience? What is one more cost when she has already sold her soul?

Nothing.

She curls her clean, unharmed hand into a fist, and punches Tempus with every bit of force she can muster (with all the hatred and resentment and fury clashing inside of her).

And he vanishes, swept away into a prison that will become a coffin.

On the television screen, a tiny form in red and blue is trapped in the cage of spiked hands that rend and tear, and slammed into a building.

Tempus is dead, Lois thinks numbly (staring at her hands and wondering why they look so clean when there is blood all over them), but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t still won.

*

Later, when she thinks back on it, she will remember the next moments only in flashes (and she will laugh, ha ha, because there are no more flashes now, not of the future, so she makes them of the past). Staring at the portal. Staring and staring and staring until she thinks she will still see it when she is old and gray and senile, that brown box with a blue shimmer like a doorway, all covered in metaphorical blood.

She doesn’t remember coming up with the plan. She just remembers kneeling and picking up the remnants of those crushed glasses and using them to pick the lock of the cage. Taking hold of that portal (did it really burn like a brand into her hands or was that only her imagination?) and watching it fold in on itself. So innocent and harmless looking; so lethal and dangerous. Like her, a matched set.

Later, she will read the reports and realize the wine cellar was beneath LexTower, but she can never remember making her way up into the building proper. Never remembers recognizing where she is. She does remember walking down an abandoned street in the direction of screams. She remembers the image of a steel beam thrusting up toward the sky next to a pile of rubble. She remembers sirens and the roar of helicopters. She remembers walking (so slowly, so purposely) past a group of people running the opposite way.

The smell of dust and concrete and asphalt and metal will always make her remember her first sight of the trail of destruction left by Doomsday, so she supposes the scent was heavy around her. She thinks she probably got blisters from climbing over debris and overturned cars. She probably saw bodies and blood and bone. But all she remembers is that first image of Clark.

The thick dust of pulverized concrete swirling aside in the wake of movement she sensed before she saw. The comparatively bright colors of his Suit (though it was in tatters and covered in ash and dust and who knows what else, so surely it was muted, but she remembers it bright and vivid and defiant), the quickness of his flight, the sparks of red shooting now here, now there, from eyes so gentle and kind and wounded. She remembers how utterly large Doomsday was. How he could follow the swoop of Clark’s flight without faltering or being distracted.

She remembers the winds that buffeted her, shockwaves from the force of their blows. She remembers yelling his name, and seeing him come to a sudden halt, turned in her direction, stunned and disbelieving. And she remembers Doomsday slamming full-force into him (like she had with Tempus) and the high, piercing note of her own scream slamming her back into alertness.

Only when Clark rises once more into the sky, slow and looping but still flying, does Lois breathe again.

“Clark,” she says again, quiet and calm, forcing herself to a measured cadence. “I hope you can hear me--I have a way to get rid of Doomsday. Tempus’s portal. If he goes through it, he’ll be torn into multiple worlds and end up in none of them.”

A simplified interpretation maybe, but Clark doesn’t deserve to have a life on his conscience, too. Better to let him think of it as an endless loop. Maybe it is, after all; it wouldn’t be the first time Tempus lied. (She wishes she could believe that, but she can’t; she can feel the sin of murder branded all across her soul.)

There’s a sudden gust of wind, a flash of primary colors, and in the midst of that blur, she hears his voice, as if it’s dropped from the heavens itself. “I have to push him through it?” It stuns her, because even before she registers those sounds, hanging in the air long enough for her human ears to recognize them as speech, she can see Clark already, still, fighting Doomsday, trying to hold him to the harbor.

Quickly, she shakes her head and tries to catch up. “He has to go through it,” she says. “I don’t think it matters how.”

Clark launches a sudden, full-out attack on Doomsday (Lois wonders how he gets the energy, how he can stand to move at all, to keep coming at this beast that spears and strikes and savages him), culminating in throwing him up so high Lois sees the flare of atmospheric flame, so fast her ears ring from the sonic boom. And then Clark is there, standing in front of her, and she almost faints when she sees the blood that paints his body, the bruises that shadow his flesh, the tears in his Suit and skin, the exhaustion staining his eyes and slumping his shoulders. He’s always so graceful (more so as Clark than Superman, even, because Clark doesn’t hold himself with the same rigid tenseness the hero does), but now he is stiff and slow. But he stands, upright. Still here. Still alive. Still fighting.

He looks at her, meets her gaze, and Lois feels her stomach bottom out. It’s the look from before. The look that swallows her up in tenderness and drowns her in love. He reaches out with battered, crimson hands to cup her cheek, infinitely gentle (and the contrast between this and the blows he delivers to Doomsday is enough to boggle her mind).

“You’re okay, Lois?” he asks in a voice that rasps (and yet still possesses kindness above and beyond anyone else she’s ever met). “You’re okay? He didn’t hurt you?”

She is hurt. She’s so hurt she doesn’t think she will ever recover from it (will never not see Tempus’s form teetering there on the precipice), but that’s not what he means and it doesn’t matter anyway. “I’m fine,” she says. “I got away.”

“And Tempus?” His gaze goes past her, clawing through boundless space and solid objects to look for the monster (the dead man). No matter how hard he looks, though, she knows he will not find him, not unless his extraordinary vision can show him the life that blots her hands with a stain she will never be able to remove.

“He’s gone,” she tells him (the truth, for once, but it tastes as terrible as the lies). “Here’s the portal. Just drop it and it’ll enlarge on its own.”

As she hands him the box (glad to rid herself of it), it doesn’t escape her notice that he is watching the sky, listening for Doomsday’s return. “He can’t fly,” Clark explains when he looks back at her, “but he falls fast.” Even as he speaks, she sees the fireworks explosion of Doomsday’s return.

Clark straightens his shoulders, tries to stand taller (cannot do anything to hide the hollows under his eyes or the gashes carved out of his flesh). “Make sure you stay well back,” he warns her. He’s right in front of her, but distracted and damaged and so distant.

Suddenly, desperately afraid, Lois grabs his hand. “Clark. The military has to be mobilizing. Maybe we should wait, see if they can get it to--”

“He’s too fast,” Clark says. And then, abruptly, with no warning, he is completely and overwhelmingly focused on her. He tugs her toward him with that careful, non-pressuring touch. “I’m so glad you’re alive. And safe. That’s all that matters in the end.”

He is warmth and devotion and concern and pureness of heart and everything good (and probably pretending, right now, that she is the Lois from before rather than the liar and murderer she is now, but she doesn’t care; she will be whatever he wants and she will give him whatever he needs). And she is so scared, so absolutely terrified, because she cannot even begin to imagine a world without him.

He turns to look up, leaving, flying off to face a danger so great it has killed an unknown number of him before, and of their own volition, her hands latch onto him, pull him back to her, craving the intensity of his attention, his whole-hearted focus (in case this is the last time she will ever feel it).

“Clark,” she gasps, and wills him, with all her fractured heart, to believe her, “I love you.”

He’s touching her. Her hand. Her elbow. Her cheek. Her hair. Her jaw. All over, as if memorizing her (as if replacing the feel of Doomsday with her). His eyes are alight with all the radiance of the sun, eclipsing color and light and life apart from him, away from him, without him.

“I love you too,” he says (like goodbye). His smile is soft and gentle and beautiful (like the last ray of sunlight before eternal darkness). His hand on her cheek is benevolent, consecrating, loving (like the touch of an angel, a ghost, rather than a living man). “Thank you for trying to save me.”

Then, shocking her, he kisses her, quick, searing, too short, too fast, too little (not nearly enough to last her a lifetime). And he’s gone. And Lois is terror incarnate. She is chewed up and devoured and burned alive by the acid pain of panicked, frenzied fear.

“Clark!” she screams as he collides with Doomsday, both of them in the air, a ripple of concussive force spreading out in concentric rings to knock her to the ground (but she doesn’t notice, doesn’t care, because her world has already incontrovertibly shifted). “Clark!” she screams again (while she still can; while there is still someone alive who answers to this name that comprises her entire universe).

But it’s a mistake (and she knew that, she did, she should have stopped herself, she is always hurting him and causing him hurt, and if she could trade places with him, she’d do it in an instant), because he looks over to her and suffers for it when the creature hits him almost out of eyesight. She has to be calm. She cannot distract him. He needs her to be strong for him. So she forces herself into a steel body cast, like armor to strengthen her limbs, to lock herself in place. And she cannot be silent, so she recites a simple mantra for him (for herself).

“Clark, don’t die,” a whisper pealed out between them, like a contract, like a bargain (like a hopeless plea). “Please don’t die. Don’t die. Don’t die.”

Because Clark has never denied her anything. Because he has always given her everything she’s asked of him. Because she can never stop asking for the impossible.

It takes long moments (full of blasts that knock her over, again and again, of monstrous shrieks from Doomsday and the occasional cry from Clark; of dust and rubble and blood and despair), but these do not fade to flashes of memory. They are sharp, imprinted on her eyelids so that they haunt her dreams for years afterward. Every time the creature slams a fist or a bone spine or a building into Clark, every wound that spreads across his body, every cry of pain that mars the other, meaningless sounds, all of it printed like stark, black, painful ink across the landscape of her mind.

Long moments that seem to fill an eternity, but finally Clark has lured Doomsday into a huge parking garage (Lois remembers parking there herself, shopping with Lucy, stopping at the nearby coffee shop, meeting Molly there to buy an outfit for her job interview at the Planet; it held memories once, but now it holds only terror and pain and a hope she can’t quite catch but can’t release either).

She knows she should be keeping her distance (she cannot bear to do anything else to break Clark’s concentration), but she has stayed close enough (or maybe just looks hard enough to convince herself she sees it) to see the blue shimmer of an opened portal. It’s small, too small for Doomsday, but she thinks that a technology advanced enough to open on cue will be able to accommodate whatever weight and mass approaches it (she hopes, because she cannot bear the alternative).

Doomsday leaps away, that tiny bit of red and blue circles him, strikes, darts away, lures the gray beast back to the garage. She cannot see Clark as anything other than a small blot of color against the dark gloom, but she knows he is hurt and exhausted, depleted of everything but fierce will and devotion. She knows it is taking everything he has to go after Doomsday yet again (still, how long has it been, how long have they been here, fighting and hurting and rending?), but he seems to find a burst of strength.

With another sonic boom, Clark is there behind Doomsday, reaching out, wrapping his arms around the spikes rising from his head. Then, in a feat that rivals any he’s ever accomplished before, he lifts the beast straight up…and drops him, kicking and shrieking, into the portal. But Doomsday is a creature of instinct, feral, savage as he claws his way up, trying to rip himself out of the portal. His spikes slash through Clark’s chest, but Clark is Superman and he hits him once, again, again, heedless of the great red and white swathes being rent through his torso. And then, with a last scream, Doomsday is gone in a final flash of blue-silver light.

And the building crumbles and shatters and falls over every bit of bloodied blue and red.

“Clark!” Her scream interrupts her mantra, disrupts her heart rate, collapses her lungs.
She runs, crying, sobbing, stumbling, falling, crawling, bleeding, calling his name. There is no movement, no shaking and subsiding as he shrugs the debris away from him. No triumphant hero pushing aside the remnants of that old parking garage in the crater of his victory.

“Help me!” she shrieks. “Help me, please!” She screams it as she lifts boulders and throws them carelessly, digging, digging, digging as her hands are bloodied once more and her fingernails break for real and her arms are bruised and shaking. She cries and yells and shouts and howls (anything to make noise; to fill the awful silence that is crushing her). Because Superman has always come to her call. Every time she’s needed help, he has swooped in to her rescue, with the flurry of his cape or the tap of a coffee mug at her elbow.

He has always come for her. He has always rescued her. He has always answered.

But there is nothing. No sound. No blur of primary colors. No shy smile and the gleam of light behind glasses. Nothing except the sounds of wreckage settling, and her frame-wracking sobs, and her lonely screams echoing in an empty sky.

*