I didn't plan to post it already but after having a very exhausting and long day I need something positive.
Thanks to Morgana and Darth Michael for all the hard beta work they put in. As english is my second language I really hope my mistakes were not too bad...
You are great and I loved your comments, they made the story so much better than it was before.
This story needs a WHAM warning, it was inspired by the first line challenge - thanks to folc4evernaday for that line. You'll understand the need for the warning when you read the first line
Feedback is very welcome, the next chapters will come after a few days depending on how much time I have in the next days.
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Chapter One
"I killed him. I killed… Superman." Lois lowered the kryptonite laser. Everything around her faded from existence as memories began to flood in.
All she could see was the brightly clad man in front of her. All she could feel was his pain and grief stricken gaze on her. All she could hear was how he said her name.
*Lois* he had said it as if this one word, her name, was the only thing on his mind. It broke her heart.
Hot tears were filling her burning eyes before streaming down her face, leaving salty trails in their wake and with the tears all energy seemed to drain from her body.
It was a bright sunny day but regardless of the sunrays on her skin all warmth left her body and her life.
What had she done?
She never would have thought that she could murder someone and least of all Superman. He was her hero, her friend and her savior.
As she sank down on her knees everything came back to her.
*~*~*
After being abducted by Lex and her turbulent rescue she had lost her memory. Then, in an attempt to help her, Lois was admitted to Metropolis Neuroscience Center and her treatment would be handled by Maxwell Deter a highly recommended neurologist. He agreed generously to take her in as his patient. They also introduced her to Elias Mendenhall, another well renowned specialist. At that point she thought they seemed almost too eager when she met them for the first time; that should have made her suspicious from the beginning.
On the other hand she had never been good with the ‘touchy feely stuff’ as someone once had put it. She had never been in a warm caring family and she had learned early on that trust was something hard to find and easy to lose. Even when she had begun to trust someone, she quickly learned her trust was misplaced. Every person had an angle.
She rediscovered that when Mendenhall sold her out as a killer. She would have killed Perry, who wasn’t just her boss but who was like a father to her. If it hadn’t been for Superman she would have succeeded.
A few days after the incident with Mendenhall, Lois went to *Max*, as he insisted she call him. He said using first names improved the trust between therapist and client. Trust, he had explained was a necessity for his form of therapy to work. *Max* always touched her, he had put a hand on her shoulder when they met for the first time and after that he often took her hand in his when they stood face to face. He even brought her presents like a bouquet of yellow and red roses or chocolate.
Something with this presents felt wrong but she couldn’t tell exactly why. She knew even then deep inside her heart that she loved chocolate and that those flowers were not only her favorite but they had a special meaning to her. When she had asked Mendenhall during one of their sessions she couldn’t remember much afterwards. The memory of his treatment also came back now. Mendenhall had influenced her to think of it as a normal behavior.
After the arrest of Dr. Mendenhall she wanted to ask if she could go back to work. She felt that staying in her room with nothing to do made her go crazy. Perhaps she could even return to her own home instead of her room in the Center. Although she made tremendous improvement due to his treatment – so he said, she felt as if she had ants in her pants. She knew that she already remembered some things. She remembered her parents, working with Perry, Jimmy and Clark, her sister Lucy and most of what happened in the world and Superman, her other best friend and hero. But she couldn’t lose the nagging feeling of something important still being hidden. She already asked Clark about it but he seemed oddly silent. At least at work she could investigate herself. She felt as if everyone around her knew something she didn’t.
She hated being left out of a secret.
When she arrived at the doctor’s office something seemed odd and she hesitated only seconds before her knuckles met the wooden door to knock.
She remembered overhearing *Max* talking to someone on the telephone, he was telling the other person that hypnotizing an individual to do something completely against their will was extremely difficult and would require a very intensive session and the use of some of Mendenhall’s devices, which were currently sealed away in his office, waiting to be brought to storage at the police property room. It was clear to her that *Max* tried to increase his payment.
While she was listening to the phone call she also discovered it was a Lex Luthor on the other end. When she heard that name she froze, a memory was triggered.
She was back in the underground of Metropolis, someone with curly hair – Lex – her mind provided after a moment, Superman, someone who looked like her and herself were there. The men fought passionately with words. Lex was stuck – literally between a rock and a hard place and held her hand in an ironclad grip. The person who looked like her was lying lifeless on the ground, was she dead? Yes, Lex killed her, her inner voice provided.
Superman, who seemed very desperate and weak, begged and argued to get her free. He shouted desperately against the noise of the increasingly unstable cave. “Luthor, you say you love her, you say she is everything – then let her live. *Give* her that. Do you want me to beg again?”
Finally the trapped man released her hand and with a sad smile he told the hero “And you said I couldn’t love. How little you understood me.” Then he looked at Lois and added “How little anyone ever did.”
She slowly remembered that Lex seemed to be buried under the tons of cement. The roof had collapsed shortly after they had left the area. Lois, Superman and a nice woman who they found trapped on the way barely made it out. He saved the her as he always did, even after being shot at several times with the quantum disruptor. He ignored his own weakness and guided her when she stumbled. Unfortunately as a result of the strenuous day he hadn’t seen that a part of the ceiling was coming down, hitting her head. Lois didn’t remember much of the escape after that due to the injury. Nonetheless she remembered hearing them talk through the haze. The other woman sounded a bit shaken when Superman freed her. Strangely she seemed was more concerned about Lois’ well-being than herself.
According to her memories Lex had died then! How was it possible that he was still alive?
The shock of this discovery made her gasp aloud which led to being discovered by Deter. Although she tried her best to get away from the crooked doctor, she somehow ended tied up on a chair in his office. She remembered a golden watch being dangled in front of her face.
The next thing she could recall was driving in her car to a deserted spot in Hobbs Bay the next morning. She parked next to an area lined with rotten wooden crates and large tarnished and ancient shipping containers, each one of them was covered in several layers of gang tags and bright graffiti. The gangs used them as their own language. They were telling stories of countless fights and served as a colorful record of threats and leadership only to those who were able to read them.
This was the area where Lois had informed Clark she wanted to meet Superman. She told him that she thought there was still something fishy going on in the Neuroscience Center after Mendenhall was caught.
*~*~*
As she sat there on the ground something was still nagging in the back of her head, the feeling she was missing something important. Were all of her memories back? She couldn't be sure.
She looked into the face of the man lying a few feet away from her.
Then it hit her with full force… Clark and Superman, they were one and the same! She killed Clark, the love of her life. The only man she’d ever really loved. And also she killed Superman, the man who was Metropolis’ resident superhero and so much more.
Only now she began to put everything together.
Max had hypnotized her and used Mendenhall’s machine to turn her into an assassin, just like before when she was being used in an attempt to kill Perry.
Behind all of this was Lex Luthor, the most malicious mastermind she had ever known.
Clark and Superman were dead.
Lex had ultimately won!
CLARK… was dead, killed by her, the woman who was supposed to love, cherish, and protect him.
She lost everything. Despair crept into her whole body. She felt empty and utterly lost. The weapon fell from her hand; its heavy metallic noise as it struck the ground wasn’t even registered by her. It didn’t matter anymore.
Her life had ended.
All she wanted was to run over to Clark to hug him, shake him, to do anything to assure herself he wasn’t dead. She wanted to feel his skin still warm under the tips of her fingers and she wanted to hear his heartbeat, to feel his breath going through her hair.
There was nothing she wouldn’t do to bring him back to life.
She wanted to be near to him but she couldn’t move because she was afraid. She was afraid to look in her beloved’s face, in fear that she would see his eyes staring empty into nothingness or worse, see betrayal and hurt etched forever into his eyes by death. His beautiful brown eyes which were so full of life and love every time she had looked into them would be haunting her forever. There was so much more love in his gaze alone than she had believed herself worthy of, before she had known him.
She was afraid that his arms, which held her countless times with so much strength and even more gentleness regardless of the guise he was in, would be limp and lifeless.
And she was terrified that his lips wouldn’t be able to kiss her anymore. She was afraid that the lips which told her countless times of his feelings with words as much as showing her would never be there to share some of his strength and love with her.
It was as if the sheer terror of what she had done had glued her to the place she was standing on. A part of her feared that she wouldn’t want to get up once she went into his embrace for one last time. Another part of her feared that she would lose what was left of her will to live if she did get too close to his dead body.
And yet another part of her wished she would do exactly that.
‘Clark wouldn’t want that.’ She knew with a conviction, even if the wish to lie within his arms forever was strong.
Had it really been just a few days ago she and Clark were about to get married. She could still feel the thrill and the joy she experienced then.
They were happy just a few days ago…
That was before Lex swapped her with a clone, kidnapped her and made her believe that Clark was the antagonist from her novel when – due to her amnesia – she herself believed to be Wanda Detroit.
She could see him standing in the floor of the hospital. She could feel the hopeful gaze on her as she was brought to him. First he called her ‘Wanda’ for the fear that she would still think she was the heroine from her novel. When it didn’t work he tried “Lois” to which she reacted. Little did he know she only reacted because he had looked her directly in the eye and her reaction was more of a question than an answer.
The raw pain when he understood that she didn’t recognize him in the hospital then sent an additional dagger through Lois' already broken heart now.
All she wanted to do was curl up somewhere never to get up again. The stench of dead fish, oil, and a composition of several other unpleasant things which had bothered her since she got out of her car faded to the background. The indeterminable mix of dirt and rusty metal and probably countless other things which had made crunching sounds with every one of her footsteps suddenly became a welcoming bed for her to lie down and stay there in hope of being near Clark forever. She felt seedy and used and unbelievably sad.
They made her kill Clark. It couldn’t be real. There had to be someone who played tricks with her mind.
‘No, no… no… no this has to be a bad dream, it can’t be true!’ She thought desperately, pinching herself in hope of waking up. She pinched again, again, and again until both her arms hurt but to no avail. Nothing changed, everything was still there. Clark’s lifeless body in the brightly colored suit was still there, lying in the bright sun. His skin was pale with a greenish hue and seemed slightly sweaty. He had his arms around his stomach as he always did when exposed to kryptonite. His cape was lying partly over him like a blood red blanket, covering his legs.
Although this was her personal nightmare, it wasn’t a dream.
It was as if even the weather was mocking her. If it was according to her feelings it should be a stormy night with enough rain to wash everything – including her and the evidence of what she had done – away. She wished for an angry thunderstorm with lightning and loud thunder, there should be hurricane level winds and natural disasters.
But the weather stubbornly refused to bend to her will. It was still a nice sunny day with not one cloud disturbing the blue sky. The temperature was warm but not too hot and the only wind was a slight fresh breeze which brought over the slightly salty smell of the sea, its freshness contrasted to the smell of dead fish and junk around her.
Another thought struck her: H. G. Wells! Hadn’t he always tried to preserve the timeline? A dead Superman would certainly influence the timeline. Shouldn’t he be here by now to help her and save the day? Lois looked around, desperately clawing at every straw she could think of but she saw nothing. But sadly the elusive writer and his strange contraption would not appear. She was completely alone.
She was still all alone with Clark’s body. She had killed him, she alone had done what countless of criminals – including Lex – hadn’t managed to do.
How would she explain what she had done to Martha and Jonathan, the people who had welcomed her into their family with open arms? How would she explain to them that she killed their only son? How would she explain it to Perry, Jimmy and the police? As far as they were concerned, the machine responsible for her misery didn’t work anymore.
How could she tell them what she had done?
How could she still go on?
She couldn’t even think straight. Her head hurt from the returning memories, the crying and the guilt. Her thoughts were turning ’round and ’round in her head.
What should she do now? Call the police? Confess what she had done? Would they believe her that she wasn’t responsible? Did it matter if they convicted her or not?
No, her life had ended anyway the second Clark’s life was over. It didn’t matter if she would end in prison, on death row, or if she was lynched by a mob. Her body might be alive but her soul had died.
Without Clark she was merely existing.
She was completely caught up in her despair never noticing a movement nearby.
tbc...
