Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found
HereWhere we left off in Part 13…Cat leaned forward and rested a hand on his shoulder. “What are you talking about, Clark? Lois adores you. I’ve never seen her act with anyone the way she acts with you.”
“With Superman, you mean,” he clarified, holding up a finger. “Me, I’m mud.” He sighed. “You’ll let me tell her first, won’t you?” he asked again. “Give me a chance to tell her the truth? To apologize? To say ‘good-bye’?”
“Whoa, there, Clark. Good-bye? Why would you need to say ‘good-bye’? Trust me, this whole secret identity thing won’t matter to her. As soon as she learns that you’re Superman…”
“As soon as the world knows I’m Superman, I can no longer stay here. Clark Kent will be no more. Everyone I’m close to won’t be safe: Perry, Jimmy, Lois, especially Lois, and even you, will be targets. Superman can’t have a relationship with any woman like Clark Kent can. Clark’s just some reporter, a nobody from a small town in Kansas. Superman fights against evil and villainy and such. He fights for truth and justice; he needs to be seen as better. Any woman associated with Superman will constantly be in danger; she’d be up for ridicule in the tabloid press, people would hound her night and day about her life with the hero, criminals and madmen would try to use her against me.” Clark ran his hand through his hair. “Men like Luthor,” he scoffed, knowing he would no longer be able to prove that man wrong. Clark had lost that battle already.
Cat shook her head, baffled. “Luthor? What does Lex Luthor have to do with Superman?”
Clark winced. Perry had told him not to voice her theory to anyone, and here he had gone and told Cat Grant. He was an idiot. “Nothing.”
“No, no, no. It wasn’t ‘nothing’. What’s going on?” she inquired.
He sighed, opened his mouth to speak and then thought better of it.
“Clark, I’m already up to my navel in this. What do you have on Luthor?” she repeated.
“Nothing. A hunch. Perry told me not even to voice my thoughts to anyone, because the more people who knew about this…” He snapped his mouth shut.
“Clark!”
He looked at her. If he had to return to his own dimension anyway… or would once he was revealed to this world as a tights-wearing freak, he might as well have someone else carry on his exposé. “I think Luthor was working with Antoinette Baines on the Messenger explosion and… Damn!” He smacked himself in the forehead. He jumped to his feet and started pacing. “Of course! The bomb placed on the Prometheus. Perry had said that the transport had been gone over with a fine-tooth comb, so it must have been planted
after the coolant problem was fixed. That in itself proves that Baines wasn’t working alone, because she was already dead. She must have been working with someone else, someone who
still didn’t want the Prometheus Space Lab to be viable, someone with the money and the means to buy or steal C7 explosive, break onto the transport, or hire someone to do so, and plant a bomb without being noticed. Luthor!”
He glanced at Cat and noticed her jaw was hanging open. “Luthor? Do you have any proof?”
“Nope. Just conjecture. I’ve got to fly up the Space Lab and get access to that control panel of the bomb, take it to authorities, see if there were fingerprints, anything tying anyone to that bomb,” he said, and turned towards the door. “S.T.A.R. Labs would be able to…”
“Clark, we’re not done here,” Cat’s voice stopped him cold. “That can wait.”
He sighed, dejected. Right, her exposé on Superman. There was so much good that he could do, if he were allowed to keep on being both Clark Kent and Superman. He reluctantly returned to the loveseat. “Okay, what else? What else do you need to know about me?”
Part 14“So, you’ve got the ability to fly. You can hear really well. You’re incredibly strong and fast. What else can you do?” Cat asked Clark.
“I can heat stuff up with my eyes and cool stuff down with my breath. I can see through anything, except lead. All my senses are…”
“Whoa… back up there. You can see through stuff?”
Clark shrugged nonchalantly.
“So…” she said, appearing to consider all the implications of that skill. “It really wouldn’t matter what I was wearing, if you wanted to see me naked, you could?”
He tilted his head off to the side and nodded. “Pretty much.”
Cat stuck a finger into her mouth. “Sexy.”
Clark groaned. “I don’t use it for that, Cat.”
She chuckled. “Right.” She obviously didn’t believe him. “So, back to what you were saying about ‘all of your senses’…?”
“And all my senses are really finely attuned to the world.”
Cat shook her head. “Explain that.”
“I can hear, taste, see, and smell things that regular humans can’t.”
“Regular humans?” she echoed, picking up on that one phrase. Her fingers lightly danced across his hand. “What about touch?”
He jerked his hand away. “Yeah, that’s sensitive too.” He swallowed; very sensitive, like when Lois had rested her hand on his arm while they had been waiting in Perry’s office earlier, or when her breath had tickled his cheek when they had been floating in the cloud.
“Hummm,” Cat murmured, a contemplative expression coming her face. After a minute of thought, she blinked her eyes and came back. She took a cracker off the tray and said, “I’m right about you, aren’t I? You’re one fantastic lover, aren’t you?”
Clark crossed his arms, squeezed his lips together, and gave her a look that read ‘you don’t really expect me to answer that question, do you?’.
She grinned her ‘gotcha’ smile like he had answered it anyway. “So, you
are compatible.”
Crap. He hadn’t even realized it had been a trick question. “Yes, I’m ‘compatible’. What did you think? That I was some Kent doll?”
Cat threw her head back and laughed. “Kent doll! Oh, Clark, you’re adorable.”
His brow furrowed, not understanding the humor in what he said. Bambi and Kent dolls were huge in his dimension. Heaven knew
he got teased enough for being a “Kent” while in elementary school. The kids’ ribbing had been cruel, especially when he already knew he was a bit different from everyone else. He remembered coming home in tears one day and his mother holding him. He hadn’t wanted to share his fears with them, but when he had, his father confessed that he had been taunted as a youngster too. His father had sat down with him and explained that learning to deal with other people, even the not so nice people of the world, was part of growing up. His dad had been a well-respected member of the local ReEarth movement, having convinced farmers around Smallville to go green or organic before it had become the thing to do. Clark knew if his father could move past being teased, he could too.
“Lois gets all the lucky breaks,” Cat said, bringing Clark out of his reverie.
“How’s that?”
“Oh, come on, Clark. How do you think I figured it out?”
He shrugged, taking off his glasses and rubbing the bridge of his nose. “I figured the glasses didn’t hide…”
“No!” Cat laughed again. “Deary, when
you – no matter how you’re dressed – look at Lois…” She shook her head. “No man has ever looked at me the way you look at her. Trust me, Clark, if they did, I’d be a one-man woman… well, I mean, within reason.”
Clark put his glasses back on. “So…? What are you saying?”
“That if you don’t want the world to know that Superman is in love with Lois Lane… Superman has got to stop looking at Lois as if he’s Clark Kent.”
His brow furrowed.
If he didn’t want the world to know… “You’re not going to write an exposé?”
“I’m not the b*tch in this triangle… square… flat line… whatever shape thing this is,” Cat said, popping another grape into her mouth. “If I wanted to out Superman I would have done so by now.”
“But you went into Perry’s office…” he sputtered. It must be some kind of trick. He wouldn’t let himself believe that she actually wasn’t going to tell everyone and their brother about him.
“Yeah, because I wanted to humiliate little Miss Priss because
I figured out that her beloved Superman was really the man she had been hitting with a wet noodle all week,” Cat said, leaning back on the loveseat. “But then I figured out that wouldn’t really be fair to you, to use you to get back at Lois. Anyway, I got her back good any…”
Clark scooped Cat into his arms and spun her around, laughing with glee. “Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”
“No problem there, Clark,” she told him, smiling as if she enjoyed seeing the happiness she had given him. “Wow, all this appreciation just for
not doing something to a man. Who knew?” Then she gulped and looked down. “Ah… Clark?”
They were hovering a good two feet above the floor.
He lowered them back down and he let go of her. “Oh, sorry, that happens when I get excited sometimes.”
Cat raised a brow and rested her hand on his chest. “You sure I can’t get a ride on that excitement machine?”
Clark took a step back. “Cat…”
“I’m just saying that it would be nice to try out the monkey bars in my bedroom without the harness sometime,” she said innocently.
He gulped, not even wanting to try to figure out what she had meant by that.
She ran a fingernail down his chest. “I’m sure you’d never let a girl fall.”
Clark blanched and turned away, revulsion at what he had done to Lana washing over him.
Cat set a reassuring hand on his shoulder. “Hey, Clark, I’m only joking. You already told me, ‘no casual sex’. I got that. You can’t blame a girl for trying, can you?”
He shook his head, but not turning back to face her either. He had bared his soul more than he had to anyone in a long time, with the exception of maybe H.G. Wells. “So, you really aren’t going to tell anyone?” He cleared his throat, before continuing, “I mean, you
really can’t tell anyone. No one can know, Cat.” He turned and looked at her, his face serious, Superman intense.
“Clark…”
“This isn’t a joke, Cat. No one can know that you know Superman’s true identity. If something were to happen to you…” His voice broke as he thought of how Lana had looked tied up in that warehouse down by the docks.
It had taken him almost a day to find her. Her face had been scratched, her clothes torn, her eyes wide with fear from all the bugs and mice crawling around in that place. He had burst in through the roof and accidentally knocked a fine layer of dust and debris on top of her as well. Instead of expressing appreciation that he come to save her, her eyes were like steel when they had looked into his. The first words she had said were, ‘I trusted you, Clark. I trusted that you would keep me safe; now look at me!
You did this to me.’
Cat smiled confidently. “Clark, you can trust…”
“Cat! I’m serious,” he said, placing his hands on her shoulders so he could focus directly into her eyes. “No one. No jokes around the office. No silly notes. No teasing me about my super gay relationship with the man in blue. Nothing. Not one word. No telling your mother, or your sister, or your best friend. No confessing it to your minister or priest or your therapist. No one can know that you know. Your life and the lives of all your friends and family and everyone at the Daily Planet will depend on it.”
Cat swallowed, before taking a deep breath. Slowly she exhaled and then nodded. “Okay, but…”
“There are no buts, Cat…”
“Damn straight there will be some buts, Clark. If I’m going to be your secret keeper, you’ve got to do some stuff for me in exchange,” she snapped. “I didn’t ask to know your secret. I didn’t ask for you to join my workplace and be so obvious about your love for Lois. I can’t help it if I’m the best reporter at the Daily Planet.” She stared at him and dared him to deny her that title.
“No, you didn’t, Cat,” he quietly agreed. He owed her a lot for not splashing his secret across the front page. “I’m sorry. I’ll work on my behavior around Lois.”
“And first chance we get, you’ll take me shopping in Paris, France, and carry all my bags,” Cat said, starting to walk around her apartment, thinking. Her eyes lit up and she raised a finger. “And should I ever need you – your extra abilities – for one of
my stories, you’ll help me out, no questions asked, no putting me off, and no byline shared.”
“I’ll help you out, but not to the detriment of my stories, the law, or a real emergency,” he amended.
“Fine,” she accepted with a shrug. “And I want you to defend me to Lois whenever she goes off on one her anti-Cat rants.”
Clark’s defense of Lois was interrupted by the loud high pitched whine of his beeper. He smiled weakly. “Uh… must be the office; may I?”
Through pressed lips, Cat flipped her hand towards the telephone and sat down on her loveseat.
“This is Kent,” he said into the receiver.
Cat picked up the stereo remote and pushed a button. Suddenly loud drums blared throughout the room.
“Kent, there’s been a new development,” Perry announced over the line. “I’m sending Jimmy with the van to pick you up.”
“I’ll grab a taxi,” he suggested not wanting anyone to get the wrong impression of his being at Cat’s place. He stared at her, hoping she would turn down the music.
“Where are you anyway?” Perry demanded. “My God, it sounds like jungle drums!”
“Just a sec.” Clark covered up the receiver and shot a glare at Cat. “Will…”
With a pounce Cat pulled the phone out of his hand.
“Clark! Quit playing games!” Clark could hear Lois’s voice shout over the line and he winced. “Where are you?”
“Lois, Clark is busy right now,” Cat purred into the phone. “Why don’t you give him a few minutes to freshen up first.” With a giggle, she passed the phone back and went to sit down.
Clark covered up the receiver and mouthed, “Thanks, thanks a lot” with another glare. Putting the receiver back to his ear, he said, “Lois, I can…” but he was speaking to a dial-tone.
Lois had already hung up.
He replaced the receiver on its base, his teeth grinding together. “Okay, I’ll defend you to Lois,” he agreed to Cat, but held up a finger in warning. “… within reason, but in exchange,
you need to help me win her heart.”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Clark, she’s already madly in love with you. There is nothing you could do to lose the woman. Just flash her some cape, and she’s yours.”
“Me, Clark Kent,” he corrected. “Not Superman,
me.”
She scoffed with a shrug. “What’s the difference? Just tell her who you really are.”
He took a deep breath and exhaled, wondering if she had heard a word of his warning earlier. “The difference is that I don’t want to be with someone who is in love with what I can do, but not with who I really am. I want Lois to fall in love with Clark, and you’re going to help me with that,” he said, pointing at her. “You.”
“Clark, I’m good, but I’m not
that good. Nobody is that good.”
“And you’re going to start,” Clark continued as if Cat hadn’t spoken. He walked behind her and set his hands on her shoulders and whispered into her ear, “By telling her nothing happened between us tonight.”
Cat smiled up at him. “Oooh. I think you’re wrong there, Clarkie boy, because I think jealousy is the way to go with Lois. She must already know that you think the world of her so…”
“I don’t care if it ruins your reputation of lioness of the asphalt jungle,” Clark said, leaving no room for negotiation in his tone. “… but if you want me to defend you to her, you will to do that for me.”
********
Partners********
Clark stood outside the conference room, took a deep breath, and exhaled. Who knew what Lois was thinking? He certainly didn’t. She had made it more than clear, on several occasions, that she didn’t care a whit about him romantically, now… now, she probably no longer respected him as a man either. Terrific.
Don’t jump to conclusions, he reminded himself and opened the door.
Lois sat at the conference table, flipping through papers. She glanced up at his entrance and looked at him as if he were a sorry piece of trash. “Well, look at what the Cat dragged in.”
Alrighty then, that answered that question. “You have the wrong idea, Lois,” he tried to defend himself.
“Cat Grant’s bedroom has more comings and goings than Metro Station. You’re just another commuter,” Lois informed him, almost with pity. Did Lois think he had feelings for Cat? That he was naïve enough to think that there was more, could be more, than sex between him and Cat? Not that there was even that, but she believed it.
Clark shut the door behind himself. “Lois, Cat and I had about as much sex as you and Superman did.”
The pity in her eyes disappeared as her focus became sharper, fierier. “Is
that what you think?” Lois snapped at him as she rose to her feet. “How many times do I have to repeat myself, Chuck? Superman and I do not have a sexual relationship. We have never had sex. It has never entered the conversation as a possibility…”
“Nor has it between Cat and I,” Clark said softly.
Lois flung out her hand. “But you were at her apartment!”
“Yes.” And Superman went to yours, he was tempted to add, but didn’t, since Clark shouldn’t know that detail.
She squeezed her lips together. “What kind of idiot do you take me for?”
Clark set his hands down on the conference room table and leaned towards her. “And what sort of man do you think I am if I am unable to say ‘no’ to a sexually forward woman?”
Lois sputtered and sat back down. “An alive one.”
He sighed and stood back upright. “I’m sorry, Lois,” he said with just the same amount of pity she had shared with him earlier.
She was flipping through the papers again. “You should be,” she retorted, then paused, glancing up at him. “For what?”
“That you distrust men so thoroughly that you actually believe that there isn’t a man out there that Cat Grant couldn’t seduce out from under you,” Clark replied.
“That’s not true!” Lois said sharply, and then lowered her eyes and her voice, “I know of one man.”
“Who?” Clark asked, even though he thought he knew to whom she referred.
Lois looked at him with an expression that read “duh!”
“Oh,
him.”
“Yes,
him,” Lois repeated. “He isn’t the type of man to be attracted to Cat’s overt charms.”
Clark stared at her, sorely tempted to reveal himself as Superman to her just to win this argument, but with her belief that he slept with Cat, it would than more likely backfire on him. He would much rather have her enamored with half of him than none. So, he allowed her total belief in Superman’s goodness to placate him for the moment. “Just tell me what’s going on,” he said, getting back to the reason they had called him into the office.
“What’s going on is that the warrant’s a phony.”
“A phony?” he sputtered, not knowing whether to be relieved or more worried. If those men weren’t government, who were they?
“Phony as a lock of Elvis’ hair from a Memphis souvenir shop,” Perry said, entering the conference room.
Clark hadn’t even heard the door open. When had the Chief joined their conversation? No, Lois wouldn’t have defended her
truelove with Perry standing right there. He must have just entered.
Perry held up some papers to Clark. “Our lawyers contacted the Justice Department, the FBI, State, CIA, the NIA; heck, they even contacted the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms people. Nada.”
Lois stood up. “Nobody in Washington wants to claim those boys.”
Clark took the papers from Perry and read through them in a second. “Then who are they?”
“All we know is that they think their job is to hunt down Superman,” Lois said with a look that told him those men would rue the day they tried to use
her to get at the Man in Blue. He couldn’t help but be impressed.
“Which makes it your job, boys and girls, to hunt them down first,” Perry told them.
“Us? Together?” Clark said, his brow furrowed as he turned to their boss. “I thought you weren’t partnering us up.”
“Well, this thing fell into both of your laps. As both your names were on those phony warrants, it should be a joint effort,” Perry explained, but then a knowing smile crept to his mouth. “Unless there’s a reason of which I’m not aware, that any man should keep you two asunder?”
Lois was suddenly by Clark’s side, very close by his side, almost holding on to his arm, close. “No reason, Chief. No reason at all,” she answered for the two of them.
“Huh?” Clark glanced at her, getting the distinct feeling he had missed a vital part of this conversation.
She smiled weakly at him and Clark wondered if it was in this Perry’s personality to not only rattle off Elvis analogies at the drop of a hat, but to also sneak in quips using Bible quotes.
Far be it from him to stop good fortune when it landed in his lap, as it happened so rarely, Clark nodded in agreement. “Well, let’s get to work then.”
Perry looked back and forth between them and grinned; it gave him the appearance of shaking his head. Clark and Lois turned back to her file on the conference room table as their boss left the room. After he shut the door, Clark heard Perry mutter, “Well, this should at least be entertaining.”
Clark contemplated that observation and said to Lois, “I thought you didn’t want to be partnered with me, that you didn’t need a partner, that I held you back…”
Lois pressed her lips together, but that didn’t make the scowl on her face any less noticeable. “I don’t and you do, but Perry is punishing me for stealing your jumper story with this teambuilding exercise.”
Ah, that explained it. Clark leaned back in his chair with a chuckle. “I’m your punishment?”
She gave him a look that clearly told him ‘if the shoe fits…’.
He glanced back at where Perry had left the office a few moments before, the words that the Chief had used still bothering him. “Does Perry always quote scripture like that?”
“Hmmm. Did he?” Lois said absently, while staring at the papers in front of her. “I didn’t notice.”
Maybe Clark had been mistaken. “Why don’t you catch me up? What do you have so far?”
***
They were still at it the next morning. So much for Lois getting her one-on-one Superman exclusive last night. So much for all that money she had doled out for that hotel room that she had never had a chance to sleep in. Hopefully, that could be counted as an ‘expense’ for her story.
“That should read: ‘a spokesperson for the FBI’…” Clark told her. He was sitting next to her at her desk as she typed their story into her computer.
“What?” Lois said, pulling her eyes away from her monitor and her distracted mind away from the Man in Blue. Clark didn’t just say what she thought he had said.
“In your second paragraph, ‘the FBI says it has no existing operations concerning Superman.’ The FBI isn’t a person; it can’t speak,” he explained.
Yep, he did. He actually had the gumption to try and correct her copy. “Clark, that’s why we have editors.”
It had been a long night, and she had just started to warm up to having him as her partner, but with her frayed nerves and lack of sleep, he better watch where he stepped with those golf shoes.
Cat entered, looking happy and well rested. Lois wanted to throw her computer at the woman. She guessed she shouldn’t fault Cat for not working as hard as Lois did on her stories; nobody worked as hard as Lois did, although Kent was trying. On the other hand, she could fault Cat for completely and irreparably humiliating Lois yesterday afternoon though.
“Good morning, Lois,” the gossip columnist said brightly, before sliding her fingers around Clark’s jaw and kissing his cheek. “Clarrrrr-k,” she purred as if the man had kept her up half the night doing gymnastics. “Sleep tight?” She walked over to her desk and blew him a kiss. “I did,” she implied suggestively before sitting down.
Clark’s jaw tensed as he glared at Cat. Something definitely had happened between them. Maybe not sexual, but something. He noticed Lois staring at him and said defensively, “Nothing happened.”
“You can do the horizontal rumba with the entire MetNet cheerleading squad for all I care, but keep your hands off my copy,” she said coolly, pulling her story out of his hand.
“Lois, I’m not…”
“CK,” Jimmy said, coming up beside him. “It is all over the newsroom. You and the Cat woman.” He held out his hands as if each one represented the two of them, then he clapped them. “I didn’t think anyone could come up with anything as juicy as yesterday’s raid, but you’ve done it.”
Lois stood up and marched off. She couldn’t listen to Clark gush about all the gory details of his tryst with Cat. She just couldn’t. Not after that woman had told the entire newsroom that, not only had Lois slept with Claude, super story-stealing scumbucket, but that she hadn’t been involved with anyone since then. How was Lois supposed to pretend to be interested in a man who was Cat’s leftovers? That would make her seem even more pathetic. Well, if that wasn’t a reason for them to break off this whole partnership, she didn’t know what was.
She knocked on Perry’s door. “Chief?”
He waved her in. “Lois, I was just about to call you…” He stopped speaking as he looked at her, an expression of concern coming to his face. “Is everything all right, honey?”
Lois shut the door. “I can’t, Perry. I can’t work with him. I can’t! Please, don’t make me.” She dropped into his visitor chair and buried her face into her hands.
“I thought you said you could keep your personal life out of this?” Perry said.
“He
cheated on me with Cat Grant! Perry, you know what that woman did to me yesterday…”
“She saved your butt from being hauled off by those government agent wannabes, who wanted to strip you down and probe you themselves. That’s being a team player.”
“By humiliating me?” Lois retorted, flinging her hand back at the scene of yesterday’s crime.
Perry shrugged. “What did Kent say?”
“That ‘nothing happened’,” she conceded grumpily.
He raised a brow. “And you think Kent went off with Cat because he thought what those men had been saying about you and Superman was true?”
Lois threw her hands into the air. “It doesn’t matter the reason! He did it, and now it’s all over the office about him and
her… and I … I …” Lois stuttered, not sure what her reaction should be if she and Clark had really had the beginning of a relationship.
“Yes, and yesterday it was all over the newsroom about you and Superman. Don’t you think you should give him the benefit of the doubt?”
“No!”
Her double standard wasn’t lost on him. “Lois, darlin’, didn’t you tell me that you slammed the door in his face after your date the other night?”
She shrugged with a pout. Maybe.
“Perhaps he thought that signaled the end of the two of you. Then he heard those rumors about you and Superman and assumed…” Perry said, paused suggestively. At her sharp glare, he went on, “… wrong. A man has done stupider things out of jealousy and hurt, Lois. I truly believe that Kent cares for you…”
Lois jumped to her feet. “Chief, I can’t believe you! You’re excusing his behavior! You think I should just forget it and forgive him?” she scoffed. “Never! What do I look like? Cat’s trash collector?”
The Chief stood up and put his knuckles on his desk. “Fine. Don’t give him the benefit of the doubt. Don’t forgive him. Hate him for all I care. You’re still partners.” His expression gave no leeway in this decision. He picked up a piece of paper from his desk and handed it to her. “The government wants to talk to you two about yesterday’s raid.”
She grabbed the note from his hand and headed for the door. “Thanks.”
“And, Lois…” Perry said, pausing to wait for her to face him again. “Don’t kill your partner. It doesn’t bode well for this teamwork exercise.”
Lois growled in frustration. “I’m making no promises.”
Perry chuckled. “Atta girl!”
She rolled her eyes and marched out of the office and back to her desk in time to hear Jimmy whisper to Clark, “Oops. Here she comes.”
As she approached, Jimmy stood up. “Great piece of journalism there, CK.” He held out his hand to her so-called partner and Clark actually shook his hand. They all knew that nobody had been talking shop.
“Sorry to interrupt your male bonding, but we actually got a break in the story,” she informed him.
Clark nodded, but didn’t speak, his jaw still tense. What? Was he offended by Jimmy’s congratulations? Men! She would never understand them.
***End of Part 14*** Part 15 Comments go here. Thanks!
