Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found
Here Part 31 Part 32********
Recovery********
Lex Luthor sat in his secret office, not the fake one he let everyone see, the real office. The one where he got all his important work accomplished. A stern expression marred his face. It had been a good plan: Menken kidnaps Lois, Lex saves Lois and kills Menken, and makes Superman look like a fool, Lois gratefully jumps into Lex’s bed. Where had it all gone wrong?
His eyes narrowed. “Clark Kent.”
Xerxes raised his head at Lex’s voice with a hopeful whine. Lex reached over and scratched his golden dog’s ears. “No, not yet,” he said, and the dog set his jaw back down on his paws.
Lex returned to his computer, and with a click of his mouse, he had four views of Lois Lane’s apartment up on his monitor: her living room, kitchen, her bedroom, and, his favorite, her bathroom. He hadn’t bothered to have Lois’s guest room monitored, but if he had known beforehand how lithe and exotic Lucy Lane was, he would have for the entertainment value alone. Not that he wanted to watch her bed that blond kid she hung out with. At least when
she showered, she did more than soap, rinse, wash hair, and get out. Lucy certainly was the more
creative of the two sisters.
Lex should have known that Kent was a problem back when Lois had told Superman that she had dreamed about kissing the bespectacled flunky. Unfortunately, Lex had focused more on the fact that Lois had dreamed of him and what effect that had had on their resident hero. Superman had laughed at Clark Kent being competition, so Lex too hadn’t taken Kent seriously. Novice error, and he couldn’t believe he had made it.
Nothing was happening at the Lane apartment. Lois must still be at the hospital. He made a note for a bouquet of flowers, roses, to be sent to her first thing in the morning.
He typed some commands into the keyboard and the view switched to a few days earlier, to the night Menken in his idiocy had put a hit out on Allie Dinello. Lex fast forwarded to the end of Lois’s phone call with Kent. She hung up on him, just as Lex remembered.
As he watched Lois change her clothes and brush her teeth he reviewed his motivations why he hadn’t been worried that Lois hadn’t considered calling him. Lex was older, more respectable, the type of man a young woman wouldn’t call and wake up in the middle of the night, even when in trouble. That was a definite problem in their relationship. Lois needed to depend on him more, trust him more. She was the type of woman who wouldn’t put out for a man she didn’t trust fully and completely. That was why he had come to her tonight to offer his assistance with her father. For some reason, Lois brushed off his dinner invitation, and more importantly his suggestion to help her father, to instead continue her plans with her co-worker Kent.
On the monitor, Lois went to bed and turned off the light. That was where he had stopped watching the other day when he had reviewed the tapes. He knew from previous experience that the only “approved” activities in Lois Lane’s bed were work, reading, TV watching, and sleep, nothing with entertainment or informational value. If she fantasized, she did so silently and without moving. Never once had she called out for anyone in her sleep. At least, not during that first month. After that, Lex had stopped watching in such detail, out of boredom.
He fast forwarded ten minutes and noticed what he had missed before. Lois Lane’s bedroom light went on for a minute as she climbed out of bed and slipped on her shoes. Then she grabbed her purse and keys and left the apartment – never switching on any of the living room lights.
He fast forwarded to the next morning. Lois returned to the apartment in the same clothes as the night before. So, she had left in the middle of the night and returned home in the morning. He may be old enough to be Lois’s father, but he knew what that meant.
A few clicks of his keyboard, and he switched the view to Lois’s desk at work. He scrolled the video forward to when Kent came in, alone. Lex checked the timestamp, and saw that it was shortly after Lois had returned to her apartment. The man was clean shaven and not appearing worse from lack of sleep. Lex couldn’t get a good angle of Kent’s desk as his camera and microphone faced Lois’s chair. He rewound the tape until Kent arrived, and walked past Lois’s desk again. Kent slowed down, smiled, and continued on.
Lex couldn’t believe he had missed the clues, despite their subtlety.
He fast forwarded the video to when Lois came in. He saw that Kent met Lois at her desk, which he never had done before. Lois rested her head against Kent’s chest. Damn! Lex turned off the ‘mute’.
“Don’t expect that I’m going to come over again and crawl into b…” Lois started saying before that boyfriend of Lucy’s interrupted her.
Lex switched off the monitor. “Well, there it is, proof, conclusive, that Lois’s relationship with Kent has changed,” he said to himself, banging his fist on his desk.
Xerxes raised his head again in anticipation and nudged Lex’s leg.
“I know, boy. Not now,” Lex reassured his dog with another scratch to his ears.
One day,
the one day Lex hadn’t reviewed Lois’s work day tapes, she had moved on to
another man, a younger man, a nobody. He flung his arm out across his desk, knocking his lamp, pen holder, and papers onto the floor, causing his dog to scurry under the table.
Did Superman know that Lois was now bedding her co-worker? Lex wondered. Was that why Superman showed up too late to stop the bullet? Lex grinned. That would have been poetic. The
one time Superman had been late, maybe punishing his girl for stepping out on him, she got shot.
No, Lex sighed. Superman didn’t know. “A shame.”
Xerxes whined in disappointed and rested his head down on Lex’s shoes.
Superman had been guilt-ridden in only a way someone full of innocence could be. He trusted that Kent fellow. He trusted Lois. It was a little bit of a victory that she had cheated on Superman, but a hollow one because Lex hadn’t been involved. If Lois would cheat on Superman with Kent, it opened up the possibility she would with someone else as well. Lex would need to rid Kent as his rival for Lois to continue his plans to castrate Superman, and to do that he’d need information on the man.
Lex pressed a button on his console.
Asabi entered and bowed. “Yes, sir?”
“Full work up on Clark Kent.”
“Clark Kent, sir?” Asabi echoed as if unfamiliar with the name.
“Clark Kent!” Lex yelled, snapping on the video showing Lois and Clark embracing at Lois’s desk the other day. “Lois Lane’s new partner!”
Asabi nodded.
“Video, work and home, history. I want to know every place he’s ever worked, every woman he’s ever touched, every dirty secret, everything!” Lex barked, disliking incompetence. Asabi should have known who Clark Kent was. Maybe it was time to bring Nigel St. John back fully on staff as his major domo. The man had been demoted long enough for that mistake he had made by allowing Kyle Griffin to get caught.
“Consider it done, sir,” Asabi said with another bow.
Lex needed some release after his dismal evening. “Asabi, inform the twins that I will be needing their services tonight.”
His man nodded. “If I may be so bold, sir,” Asabi interjected. “—and remind you that Monique Kahn is still a guest at the manor house. I thought perhaps it was time to release her back into the wild.”
A twisted grin crawled over Lex’s lips. Ah, Monique. She had grown cocky after he had bedded her, even going so far as to suggest shooting Superman with an Uzi. She had been a talented, if boring, partner. Her two months of being locked in the basement cell of his manor house, living on his servants’ leftovers, must have increased her enthusiasm for pleasing him.
“Call the heli-pad, tell them I shall be there momentarily. Then call Nigel. Have him ready Monique in my chambers. Tell him that we’ll use the whip tonight,” Lex ordered with a smile.
And the blindfold. “And then cancel all my morning meetings and inform the twins I’ll see them upon my return.”
His manservant bowed.
“And, Asabi, we have a loose string dangling at police lock-up, make sure that it’s snipped.”
“Already ordered, sir,” Asabi said and left.
Perhaps Asabi hadn’t outlived his usefulness.
Lex leaned back in his chair, lacing his fingers behind his head. “I
will bed Lois Lane, if it’s the last thing I do.” He glared at the video monitor image of her and Kent. “For it certainly will be the last thing she’ll do.”
He snapped off the monitor and stood up. Crossing to his wall of weaponry, he spoke to his dog, “Which do you think, Xerxes? The Uzi would be poetic, but the crossbow…” He grabbed that weapon off the wall. “Ah, but the crossbow would be more sporting.”
Xerxes danced excitedly at his heels.
“Come on, boy. We’re going hunting.”
***
After they had wheeled Lois into prep her for surgery, Clark went to call Perry and got quite an earful, mostly about how the Chief should have been contacted earlier. Clark wasn’t at all surprised when both Perry and Lucy showed up within the hour of receiving his phone calls.
The hospital staff wouldn’t let Clark go back and keep Lois company as they prepped her for surgery because he wasn’t family. He stood by the doors they had taken Lois through and watched her using his x-ray vision, wishing he could be there for her. Luckily, while he was busy making the phone calls, the nurses had time to cut away Lois’s shirt and jacket and put a hospital gown on her. Since Clark didn’t want the first time he saw Lois shirtless to be when she was in the emergency room with a swollen, distorted, and bloody arm, he was glad to have missed that.
After another fifteen minutes of waiting, and seeing Lois look around and ask for him and getting the run-around from the hospital staff, Clark hadn’t been able stand the space between them any longer. He hated that Lois would go into surgery thinking that he had abandoned her in her hour of need. He found an empty OR staff dressing room with fresh operating gowns, and quickly borrowed a set. Then he walked through the doors they had taken Lois through and went straight to her room as if he had every right to be there. Nobody gave him a second glance.
Clark took an extra second to look through the clear accordion-type doors to see if she was alone. She was sitting there by herself; her arm was back in the sling and wrapped loosely with gauze. She looked annoyed and, even worse, bored.
“Please tell me you aren’t here to draw more blood,” Lois snapped when he slipped into her room and shut the door. “Has anyone been able to find Clark, yet?”
He turned around and smiled nervously at her, watching as her expression went from angry to relieved to angry again.
“Where have you been?” she growled.
“I see they haven’t given you anything for the pain yet,” Clark retorted.
“They have, but it hasn’t kicked in,” Lois said, pinching her lips together. “Did you call everyone I ever met to inform them that I got shot? Or were you trying to hunt down my father?” She looked him up and down, just realizing his change of clothes. “What are you wearing?”
“They wouldn’t let me come back here because I’m not family, so I needed to improvise,” Clark explained with a shrug, moving closer.
“I asked for you by name, requested that they look for you, and they told me they couldn’t find you,” she said, her eyes getting damp from tears.
He took hold of her left hand, despite her IV, and held it in both of his. “I’m sorry, Lois.”
“You’re my partner, dammit, that makes you family,” she said, leaning her face against their hands. “I’m thinking seriously about writing a piece about the lack of humanity in this place. Do you know that they cut off my jacket and shirt without even a by-your-leave from me?”
Thankfully, he did not. He sat down on the bed next to her.
“It would have been nice for a little warning before my entire chest was shown to everyone in the room,” she said with an annoyed shake of her head.
“Don’t think about it,” he murmured, moving his finger down her cheek. “I don’t know how long I have before they discover I’m not approved to be back here with you.”
“Screw ‘em.”
“I’d rather not anger the people who are in charge of fixing your arm and making you better,” Clark admitted.
“When you put it that way…” Lois said with a slight chuckle. “Nah, screw ‘em.”
Clark wanted to kiss her. He wanted to confess that he had been lying to her and finally tell her the truth, the whole truth… well, okay, not the whole ‘I’m from another time and dimension’ truth, but the whole ‘I was born on another planet and have been flying around in tights’ truth. But the hospital wasn’t the place for those kinds of truth. He wanted to tell her that he loved her, that he wanted to be with her, and would be there for her without fail from here on out. Unfortunately, without the
other confession first, this second admission probably wouldn’t be as warmly received.
“You don’t know how much it means to me, Chuck, not to be alone here and dealing with this on my own,” she said, closing her eyes.
He imagined that she was doing it to enjoy the caress of his finger on her cheek, but knew that wasn’t the reason. There were a hundred more likely reasons that she closed her eyes as he touched her, but this was the one he chose.
“Anytime, Lois.”
Inspector Henderson came to interview her shortly after that. Clark had slipped back out to the waiting room. He had heard the nurses discussing about taking Lois into the operating room just a few minutes later.
Clark found Cat in the OR waiting room when he got there, and she instantly hugged him. He knew he probably shouldn’t have called her, but she was the closest thing to a best friend he had in this dimension, in either dimension in fact. Cat knew the one thing about him that nobody else did. How much he truly cared for Lois.
“Thanks,” Clark said, stepping out of the embrace. “You didn’t need to come down here.”
“Hey, I’ve never been on Lois’s cheer squad, but when the captain of the football team calls me because his best girl gets shot, I figure I better be there with bells on,” Cat said, with a flip of her long auburn hair, causing a jingling sound. She was wearing a pair of bell earrings. “Plus, I might get a chance to witness Lois in writhing pain, and that’s always a bonus.”
Clark crossed his arms, pressed his lips together, and raised a brow.
“Too soon for jokes, then?” she said with a wink. “Gotcha. So, Lex Luthor, huh? Where are they going to find his remains? Or aren’t they?”
“I wish.” He sighed. “Inspector Henderson just finished interviewing Lois, before they wheeled her into the operating room.”
“And?”
“He’s Lex Luthor, what do you think?”
Cat rolled her eyes. “Slap on the wrist and told never to do it again?”
“If that,” Clark said. “Menken was pointing all kinds of fingers at Luthor when I dropped them off, so at least there’s that.”
“Who?” Cat asked, shrugging her shoulders.
He shook his head. “Do you even read the
Daily Planet, Cat? Max Menken, the man promoting the Ultimate Fight Night, the money behind Dr. Sam Lane’s cyborgs.”
“So, Max is saying that Lex is the money behind his money?” Cat asked.
“We’ll see,” he said, glancing over towards the operating room and tilted down his glasses. He got an eyeful. The surgery was already underway. He could see Lois lying unconscious on the operating table and the doctor – a surgery resident – working on her arm. Clark turned away. “Oh, God, Cat. I can’t do this anymore.”
“Do what?” Cat inquired, obviously lost. “Chase after Lois? Hey, it just so happens, I’m still available.”
“Be
him,” he murmured.
Perry arrived at that exact moment. He set a gentle hand on Clark’s arm. “How’s she doing, son?”
“In surgery,” was all Clark could say.
“No, no, no,” Cat protested, and pulled Clark away from the Chief. “You can’t drop a bombshell like that and expect me not to say anything. You can’t do that.”
“Why not? What good am I if I can’t be there for the most important people in my life?” Clark replied in a hissed whisper. “Protecting Lois is my top priority now.”
Cat shook her head. “Oh, she’s going to love that.”
“What? Do you think she’d rather have been shot?” he retorted.
“It’s
not your fault!” Cat countered.
The Chief wandered up at their raised voices. “What’s going on?”
“Clark thinks he’s to blame for Lois getting shot,” Cat ratted him out.
“Thanks for broadcasting my private business there, Cat,” Clark snapped.
She crossed her arms and raised a brow, giving him a ‘you don’t want to go there’ expression.
“I’m sorry. You’re right,” Clark said, holding up a hand. “I’m not thinking straight. I can’t think straight; Lois is lying over there with tubes in her, unable to use her arm for at least the next six weeks, and the man who did it is going to get off scot free, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about it. So, yes, I’m a bit peeved.” He started to pace. “Come on, Lois is my… She’s my…” He glanced up and saw both of them staring at him expectantly. “ – my partner, for goodness sake. I care.”
Perry smiled knowingly, and patted him on the arm. “Son, Lois is a fighter. She’ll come out of this all right. Stronger than she was before.”
“I know that, sir, and I’m going to make sure it never happens again,” Clark promised him.
“Uh-huh,” Perry said, contemplating that scenario. “Well, that’s good. You discussed this twenty-four hour protective detail with Lois, did you?”
Clark hadn’t had a response to that inquiry, but he couldn’t see what problem Lois would have with it, except that she had a problem with every idea that wasn’t her own. Lucy, and the two Jimmys, arrived a few minutes later.
The doctor eventually came out and announced that Lois made it through surgery just fine, and was in recovery. If everything continued as it should, she would be ready to go home several hours later, sometime in the middle of the night, he explained.
Clark volunteered to stay, and insisted that everyone else go home. Nobody argued the point with him as it was already nearing midnight.
Cat was right. They could all see right through him and knew how he felt about Lois. He only hoped that Superman had stopped being so obvious. Cat and Perry headed back to their respective homes, with the Chief informing Clark that his job for the next few days was to keep Lois from coming into work.
“Done,” Clark said with a nod. It was his favorite assignment to date.
James, who was looking more like his normal self again after his bout with Tommy Garrison a few days before, mumbled under his breath to Lucy. “Five bucks says she’s back to work by Monday.”
Lucy accepted that bet and turned to Clark to give him a hug. “You bring her home and then go back to your apartment and rest. I’ll take care of her in the morning.”
“Thanks, Lucy, but I’m going to let Lois decide what she wants,” Clark said. “If she needs me to stay, I will.”
“You’ve never been to Lois’s house of torture, have you? There isn’t a comfortable seat in that apartment. Where will you sleep, Clark?” Lucy asked, and then her eyes went wide as a possibility came to her. “No! Absolutely not! I mean, I think it’s great that you and Lois are back together again, but Lois is injured, and she needs her rest and so do you if you’re going to deal with her head-on.”
Clark’s brow furrowed with a shake of his head. “What are you talking about?”
Lucy’s jaw dropped, and she turned to look in disbelief at the Jimmys. They both shrugged back at her. “You’re not sleeping with my sister,” she stated plainly.
“No, I’m not,” Clark responded, surprised that Jimbo hadn’t explained the facts to Lucy.
She threw her hands up into the air. “I don’t understand you old people. Whatever floats your knickers. I just have to say, you and Lois are made for each other, in a strange bizarre way… perfect.”
Clark decided he was going to ask James what Lucy was talking about at another time.
One of the longest hours in Clark’s life passed pacing in that waiting room. Lois was in recovery. The nurses were monitoring her for possible complications while she came out of anesthesia. Finally, unable to endure the separation from Lois another minute, Clark asked a nurse if he could sit with Lois until she came to. This nurse was sympathetic to Clark’s plight, and had seen him pacing in the waiting room for hours, led him to the almost empty, dark recovery room where Lois slept.
“Why aren’t the lights on?” he whispered to the nurse.
“Conserves energy, plus helps the patient sleep. Ms. Lane is the only patient in this recovery room. It will be full of patients soon enough, at the moment we’re still waiting on some of those gunshot wounds to come out of surgery,” the nurse explained. “Hopefully, by then, Ms. Lane will be on her way home.”
Clark sat down next to Lois’s bed in the darkness and took hold of her left hand.
“Clark?” Lois whispered, her voice shaking. “Is that you?”
Her voice surprised him. He squeezed her hand and leaned forward. “You’re awake?”
“No, I’m talking in my sleep,” she snapped. “I’m constantly dreaming of you and calling out your name.” Despite the darkness, he saw her roll her eyes. “Can you tell me what I’m doing in a broom closet?”
“You’re not in a broom closet, Lois.”
“Supply closet then,” Lois said, glancing around.
“It’s a recovery room, which will fill up with those gang members from the emergency room shortly enough,” he explained.
“Oh,” she said, and exhaled in relief. “It felt like a broom closet. I mean, all those beds folded up against the wall. I was beginning to think that if you were knocked out, they figured you wouldn’t care and would just stick you in any old room until something better became available.” She gazed at him, and he could see the panic still near the surface. There was an unspoken fear there that he would be sure to ask her about another time.
Clark brushed her hair out of her face. “Why didn’t you let the nurse know you were awake?”
“I didn’t even know there was a nurse in here until I heard you guys come in,” Lois confessed. “What are you doing here?”
He shrugged. “I didn’t want you to wake up alone.”
“Well…” Whatever sharp retort she was going to make, actually stopped at her lips. “Thank you.”
Clark smiled. “You’re welcome.”
“Now, get me the hell out of here!” she hissed.
There was the woman that he loved.
***
The elevator doors opened in the lobby of Lois’s apartment building. Clark set his hand on Lois’s back, gently guiding her inside. Lois moved closer to him and sagged against his arm.
“You’re not going to tell anyone about this, are you?” she asked.
“Lois, you getting shot by Luthor is front page news,” he said, surprised that she would even think it wouldn’t be. “Maybe not above the fold with Menken’s cyborgs going on a rampage and attacking people, but definitely front page.”
“What do I look like? An idiot?” she snapped, then pulled Clark’s jacket closer around herself. The police had taken her jacket and shirt as evidence in the shooting, but luckily Metropolis General supplied her with a loose-fitting, Velcro-closing shirt with the words ‘I was patched up in the ER at Metropolis General Hospital and all I got was this lousy shirt’ printed on the back. “Rhetorical question. I mean, this…” She paused as the elevator came to a stop and the doors opened. “— us.”
They stepped into the hall as Clark’s brain raced through the myriad of possibilities of what she meant by ‘us’. He knew ‘us’ meant something completely different for him than it did to her.
“I mean that I need you to help me, that I can’t do this on my own, that I’m weak… that I broke down,” she said, squeezing her eyes shut.
Yep, ‘us’ meant something different to her than to him.
“Lois, you were shot. Nobody is expecting you to be some tough…” Clark almost said ‘Rudolpho’, but didn’t know if he was a film heartthrob hero in this dimension. “Action movie star.”
“Don’t they?” she asked, glancing up at him.
Clark ran his fingers down her cheek and shook his head. “No, Lois. Not anymore. They know you’re human.”
“Great. I’ll have to work on that or ‘Mad Dog Lane’ will be replaced with ‘Sweet Puppy Lane’,” Lois said as they stopped in front of apartment 501. “This is me.” She gazed up at him and covered his hand on her cheek with hers. “Will you help me?”
Help her? With the door? Inside? Prepare her some food? Get ready for bed? Take a shower? Clark swallowed. “Of course.”
Lois went to open her purse and retrieve her keys, but he set his hand on hers ‘indicating that he had this’. She leaned against him, her left arm wrapping around his neck, as he started opening her plethora of locks. He pushed open the door and slipped the keys back into her purse. Lucy had left on an end table lamp for them, so the apartment wouldn’t be dark. Clark glanced down at Lois leaning against his chest, seemingly uninterested in entering her apartment. She must still be exhausted from the anesthesia.
A moment later, he had her cradled in his arms. He knew he shouldn’t have picked her up, especially not like Superman would, but he felt overprotective at the moment. He expected her to start demanding he put her down or, worse, figure out that he had been lying to her about his alter-ego, but she didn’t. She smiled. It was a wistful, pain-killer induced smile.
“I dreamed of this,” Lois murmured as he carried her inside and shut the door. She sounded half-asleep.
“Dreamed of what?” he asked, walking in the direction of the bedrooms.
“You carrying me over the threshold.”
Clark stopped and glanced down at her. Did she mean
him, Clark? Or
him, Superman?
Her eyes fluttered open to see why they had stopped moving and saw him watching her. “It was a dream, Clark, nothing else. We were on assignment in a hotel’s honeymoon suite as husband and wife.”
He exhaled.
Of course. “So, you’ve dreamed of being Lois Kent?” he teased, unable to stop the deepening of his voice as he said her name like that. He had dreamed of that too, but for him it was becoming a real fantasy. Clark continued into the bedroom with the open door.
“Lois Kent? Lois Lane Kent?” Lois repeated as if sounding out that name for size as her brow furrowed. “That’s funny.”
He pressed his lips together. “I don’t think it sounds funny at all,” he murmured, setting her down on her bed.
“No,
Clark,” she said, sounding apologetic. “Odd funny, not ha-ha funny. I mean it...” She shook her head. “No, never mind.”
He set down her purse on her dresser. He needed to hear more, but not so far away with him standing and her sitting. Finally, he settled on kneeling next to her under the guise of helping her with her shoes. “Tell me.”
“It’s just one of those feelings I get sometimes… like I was trying the name on for size. I wish I could explain it better. Like it was a dream, only not. It makes me sad,” she said.
Clark squeezed his eyes shut. Putting their names together made her sad? He tried not to take it personally, but was finding it hard not to. He felt her hand caress his cheek and tilt up his jaw. He opened his eyes and saw her staring at him.
“Sad, not because I was marrying you, but because I was marrying someone else… the wrong man,” she explained with a shake of her head as if she couldn’t explain what she herself didn’t understand.
“I’d never let that happen,” he said, and then realized that sounded a bit heavy handed for a friend. “I mean, marry the wrong man, Lois. If there was someone out there who made you happy and you truly loved him, I wouldn’t stand in the…” Clark knew as soon as the words escaped, he had said too much.
“There is only one man for me, Clark,” she whispered, her hand sliding through his hair to the back of his head, drawing him nearer. “Only one man I can ever see myself marrying.”
“Oh?” he wondered, resting his forehead against hers. Their lips were almost touching.
“Uh-huh,” Lois said, breathless from his proximity, but she wasn’t pushing him away. She wasn’t stopping him.
Clark closed the distance and brushed his lips to hers.
***End of Part 32*** Part 33 So. Any
Comments ?
