***
Lucky Leon: Perry White
***
“It was a really great date, and now I’m-I’m completely panicked, and I have no idea what to do next!”
She’s going to cry. Lois Lane, star reporter, three-time Kerth Award winner, hard-nosed journalist…and the waterworks are coming, and Perry is caught totally flat-footed. He’d been prepared for anger. He’d geared himself up for volatile explosions as bad as Pompeii, for eruptions that spewed lava and left behind ash. He’d gotten all ready for the return of Clark’s aloofness, that numb distance he’d employed like armor during those terrible days after the Planet’s temporary destruction and Lois’s engagement to Luthor.
All that preparation…for nothing.
Perry holds his hands up uselessly in the air, mouth gaping soundlessly. This isn’t a volcano. It’s a rainstorm--and not even one with hurricane-force gales or crackling lightning. Just soft showers and mournful thunder loud enough to make the faint-hearted curl up under a blanket. This was nothing like the Lois Lane Perry knew and had based all his plans around.
And Clark?
Well, Perry could only imagine how lost he was feeling when Perry himself couldn’t spot even a flicker of a roadmap anywhere nearby.
So, caught in the steam of his own interrupted rant, Perry did what he could. He opened his arms and tried to think of something comforting to say--something besides the incredulous demand at where the Lois Lane he’d hired and taken under his wing had disappeared to! But even as Lois filled his arms in a clumsy embrace, he came up empty, all his words washed away in the storm.
A really great date. Which, coming from Lois, Perry figured, meant Clark had somehow just about achieved perfection. So of course here they were. Perry felt like calling Clark into the office just so he could chew him out for not arranging even the hint of a foible. The state of his newsroom aside, didn’t that young man realize he was setting impossible precedents for men everywhere?
But then, Perry just hoped Clark would be around for him to call into his office. Because anger and distance? Well, Perry already knew from loads of past experience that the Planet—and his best reporting team—could survive that. For all his grumbling to Jimmy, he would bet everything he had on them emerging on the other side of a volcanic debacle with a shaken friendship and a strengthened partnership.
But tears? Tears and hugs and the sight over Lois’s shaking shoulder of Clark slinking out of the elevator with despair the very opposite of numb written all over him?
Perry didn’t know what would come of this. All he did know was that it was almost enough to make him cry himself.
***
