Wrong Place, Wrong Time, Wrong Clark TOC can be found
HereWhere we left off in Part 157 …“Whoa, man, what’s this?” Jimbo asked, picking up a photo of Clark and Cat outside the Metro Diner.
“You don’t want to know,” Clark said, snatching the photo away from Jimbo and adding it to the others. Jimbo had already picked up another photo. Clark held out his hand. “It isn’t what it looks like.”
Jimbo handed him the photo. “It never is, is it?”
“What do you mean?”
“In TV shows and movies, whenever someone gets caught in a compromising position, they always say ‘it isn’t what it looks like’ and, yet, it always
is what it looks like,” Jimbo replied.
“Thankfully, real life isn’t as cut and dried as that, Jimbo,” Clark said. “What did you want to talk about?”
“I came here to apologize for pushing Lois at Luthor at the Magic of the Night Ball…”
Terrific. Out of one minefield and into another. “You didn’t push,” Clark corrected, refusing to meet his gaze, and hoping he would change the subject.
“I totally blocked you. Jimmy said that you and Lois were...” Jimbo’s voice faded as he picked up the picture where it appeared Cat and Clark were kissing. “Jimmy said you were ‘the King’ when it came to women, but
Cat? She’s engaged to another man now, CK. She and Lois are friends. Well, maybe not friends per se, but colleagues. Anyway, I came here to tell you to fight for Lois, to tell her how you really feel, because I thought you were a stand-up guy and deserved better…”
“Lois is engaged to another man, too. Maybe my relationship with her is exactly what I deserve,” Clark murmured, ignoring Jimbo’s accusation regarding Cat. “Perhaps it’s the universe’s way of telling me I don’t belong here and should never have come.”
“Well, CK, I doubt the universe speaks to us quite as directly as…”
An explosion from below shook the floors and walls of the newsroom.
Part 158***********
Shockwaves***********
Clark made sure that Jimbo and the others in the newsroom exited down the stairs before running into the storage room to change into his Suit. Several more explosions rocked the building during those few minutes. He could hear windows bursting downstairs and people screaming.
Superman first zipped down the back stairs to the Printing Department, where most of the major damage was concentrated and where he had seen the explosions with his x-ray vision through the floor. Vats of newsprint ink had caught on fire causing the room to fill with smoke. He scanned through the smoke and found a charred body near one side of the room. The sight hit him like a sucker punch to his gut.
He tried to x-ray through the smoke, but the flares from the fire made that difficult. He reached out with his hearing, but between the explosions, the crackle of the fire, and screams coming from upstairs it all blurred together. “Anyone down here?” he called. Chip and Luthor had transferred Jimmy to work in this department, so he should have been down here when the room exploded unless he had already headed out to lunch. Clark hoped the dead body wasn’t his friend, but it was too badly burned for him to accurately identify in the midst of the crisis.
He heard a groan and found Jimmy lying on the ground next to one of those vats of burning ink. Superman lifted the nearly unconscious Jimmy into his arms.
“Explosion,” Jimmy murmured. “Out of nowhere.”
“Hold on, Jimmy,” Superman coaxed. “I’ll get you out of here.”
“My arm!” Jimmy groaned. The right side of his work suit was soaked through with hot ink.
Superman blew a cooling breath on his arm and headed them out of the smoke. Upon reaching the stairwell, Clark found it had been knocked loose, blocking the fleeing workers trying to exit. Even though he was not back to full strength yet, he was still able to lift the fallen stairwell to help with the evacuation with one arm, while continuing to hold Jimmy with the other.
As soon as everyone in that area had escaped upwards, Superman leapt up to the upper landing and to the front doors of the building. He delivered Jimmy to the first available ambulance stretcher and returned inside to help find more casualties.
He had brought several more people out from the lower levels and was about to check the upper levels, when he heard a man calling, “Cat? Cat, where are you?”
It was Phil, and he was pushing against the throngs of people leaving the building.
“Cat?” Phil called again. He grabbed some random woman. “Have you seen Cat Grant?” She shrugged and he let her go.
Superman set a hand on Phil’s arm. “I’ll find her, Phil,” he said, rushing inside.
“Thanks, Superman!... How…?” Phil replied before his voice faded into the other noises.
“Cat?” Superman called, zooming up the stairwell. He was sure he had sent her down with Jimbo, Perry, and the others from the newsroom. Why hadn’t she made it outside?
Two floors up, he found her in the corner of the landing with other people still filing past. She had a gash in her forehead and she leaned against the wall, looking unstable and disoriented. Without a word, he scooped her into his arms and she passed out in what must have been relief.
“Stay with me, Cat. This isn’t the time to sleep,” he said as he ran through the crowd at the exit. Garnering his strength, Superman tried to fly, but found he was still grounded.
A stretcher rolled up to where he was processing what would be the best for him to do for her. Clark knew that he would have to pass her into another’s hands if Superman was to save anyone else. He looked up at the waiting EMT. “She has a gash on her forehead and passed out when I reached her. I don’t know how much smoke she inhaled in the stairwell,” he said.
The EMT nodded.
Clark gazed down at Cat and brushed a lock of her hair off her forehead. Then he returned his gaze to the EMT. “Also, she’s two months pregnant.”
“Thanks, Superman,” the EMT replied. “I’ve got it from here.”
“You’ll be fine, Cat. Phil’s here. He’s looking for you,” Superman murmured, and then turned back to re-enter the Daily Planet.
Phil was standing right behind him, gaping at the hero. “Cat… she’s… she’s…”
“Take good care of her, Phil,” Superman told him, patting him on the shoulder. “She needs you, especially now.”
Phil’s eyes widened as his finger pointed and his mouth fell open further in a familiar gesture that Clark hadn’t seen since moving away from his home dimension. “You’re…!”
Clark nodded. He stepped out of the way so that Phil’s gaze caught sight of Cat on the stretcher.
“Cat!” Phil rushed past him to his fiancée. “Sweetie, I’m so sorry.”
Clark’s lips tried to smile, but his day would not allow it. Another scream echoed from within the building. At least, Cat would be okay, Clark thought as he raced back inside. Phil was the right choice for her, or would be if he could ever make up for his awful ultimatum.
What was the point of a secret identity if keeping it only hurt the ones he loved?
***
After Henderson received that radio message about the Daily Planet, Lois knew that she had to get down there and see if any of her colleagues were hurt. She had seen on the television at S.T.A.R. Labs that Superman was already on the job, but still she needed to be down there. If Lex had put Kryptonite in the bomb, she wanted to be there to get Clark the help he needed.
In her gut, she knew that Lex was behind the bombing. It was too much of a coincidence that someone attacked her at nearly the same time as the Daily Planet; although, she bet Lex would spin it as someone was after
him. Lex knew that the Daily Planet was one of the last mouthpieces of truth about Superman and by gluing Kryptonite dust to the underside of her large diamond engagement ring, Lex had signed a declaration of war against Superman. By having the attacks happen at the same time, Lex was testing Superman, just as Clark had suggested someone had been doing when Superman first appeared. Only this time, Lex was testing Superman’s morals. Which did the man care about more, one woman or the newspaper that had supported him since minute one?
Unfortunately, Lois also knew that if she were to show her face down at the Daily Planet, someone from Lex’s inner circle was sure to notice. At the moment, Lois had fallen off Lex’s radar and she would like to remain that way until she was ready to reappear. For her own safety and that of her investigation, she couldn’t go down there as Lois Lane. She also knew this opportunity for freedom probably wouldn’t arise again until she was able to send Lex to jail or she ran out on him on their wedding day, whichever happened first.
God forbid it should ever get that far.After a quick detour to change into the disguise she had left in her dojo locker, a bewigged, now super short-haired spiky blonde Lois headed downtown to the Daily Planet… what was formerly known as the Daily Planet. Lois could see the smoke from where she stepped out of the cab several blocks away and felt her heart constrict. As she walked closer, keeping to the far side of the street, she felt as if she was stepping into a different world, a movie set of her life. It all seemed surreal. People passed her with grey streaked faces, red eyes, and coughing. Lois could hear a ringing in her ears, even though she had been nowhere near the explosion when it had happened. Her heart tightened even further as she realized that she was to blame for what Lex had done to the Daily Planet.
She blinked and saw herself at her old desk, feet propped up as Clark begged to talk to her and she stubbornly ignored him to order some item from a clothing catalog. Then the building shuddered and glass shattered, as a deafening blast roared from the basement of her second home. She jumped to her feet and heard Clark shout as if through water for the Daily Planet staff to ‘get out’ as he ushered everyone to the stairwell. He hadn’t needed to tell her twice. Halfway down the stairs, she had glanced back but didn’t see Clark anywhere. Another explosion encouraged her to keep going, knowing that Clark could take care of himself.
She opened her eyes from the blink and realized that she still was standing on the street down the block from the Daily Planet. That flash of memory or alternate reality she had just experienced hadn’t happened and she guessed only a second had passed. It was as if her brain was telling her what would have happened had she not quit her job at the Daily Planet to investigate Lex.
It wasn’t her fault. Lex would have bombed it anyway.
She had left her beloved job and the man she loved to try to stop the crazy billionaire bent on destroying her life, and nothing she had done had made a whit of difference. If Lois could figure out a way to extricate herself from her current predicament, she would. Unfortunately, she could only see freeing herself in three ways: a) she uncovered something that would put Lex Luthor away forever and strip him of all his power, money, and influence; b) she went on the run; or c) Lex killed her. Well, there was always that fourth option. She could fake her death, blame it on Lex, and spend the rest of her life as Wanda Detroit, singing songs in some dive bar on the Florida panhandle.
Lois decided that option ‘a’ was really her only choice. All the others had Lex winning and after his attempt on her life that afternoon – ‘death via sick hero’ – all those other options were entirely unacceptable.
Blending into the crowd, she was able to observe Perry and the Jimmys by an ambulance as a paramedic examined Jimmy’s arm. Eduardo and Valdez were giving statements to detectives. She saw a stretcher being loaded into an ambulance. The woman had a gash on her forehead and a splint on her ankle. Lois recognized her as Cat Grant when Cat lifted up her head to ask the paramedics to allow a doting, geeky man into the ambulance with her. Either Cat had a major concussion or that was Phil.
Lois shook her head in bafflement and gained a little bit of healthy respect for Cat. Perhaps her waters ran deeper than a puddle.
Superman brought out yet another survivor and she was so glad that his exposure to Kryptonite wasn’t slowing him or the recovery efforts down. She had noticed earlier on the television that his cape was still in shreds. She figured he must not have had time to return home to switch it out for another cape between his exposure and the explosion at the Daily Planet. Yes, it definitely was too much of a coincidence.
She watched as Superman stopped to speak to the fire chief before picking up the hose. Then Superman leapt on top of the fire truck, ran up the extended fire department ladder, and jumped into the upper stories of the Daily Planet building. She hoped that no one else noticed, but Superman didn’t fly. He still wasn’t fully recovered.
After the fires inside the Daily Planet seemed to become manageable once more, Superman exited out the main doors carrying a man in a business suit. Lois couldn’t see the victim’s face clearly, but the anguish on Clark’s was unmistakable. A paramedic worked on the man for minute before shaking his head in Superman’s direction. Clark faltered, only just catching himself as his knees gave out. Whoever this victim was, Clark knew him and blamed himself. He rushed back inside the building, and Lois knew it was in a vain attempt to find more survivors.
Lois turned away from the death and destruction. Two blocks later, she caught a cab and told the driver to drop her off at Aunti Pasto’s Restaurante, two blocks down from Clark’s apartment.
***
Clark sat on his sofa with his head in his hands. He wasn’t sure how long he sat there before he heard a knock on his front door. He ignored it for two reasons. One, he still hadn’t changed since the fire, which claimed the lives of one yet to be determined Printing Department worker, Chip Peterson, and the Daily Planet newspaper. Two, he knew by the heartbeat that the person on the other side of that door was Lois.
She knocked once more without ever calling out for him to let her in. A few seconds later, he heard the unmistakable scraping of a couple pieces of metal with the inner workings of his deadbolt lock.
Clark didn’t even raise his head. What was the point, anymore?
The door swung open and he heard Lois draw in a breath. “Oh, so you are here.”
“If you’re going to kill me, can you at least be quick about it?” he muttered.
The door shut. “I’m not here to kill you; although, you probably deserve a good beating,” Lois replied. He didn’t hear her move, so he assumed she still stood just inside his door.
“You’re one to talk,” he grumbled.
“We’ll get to me in a second.”
“I don’t know about that. The last time I went first, it didn’t turn out so well for me.”
“Trust me,” Lois requested.
“Sure, why not? It’s not like all those other times I trusted you recently haven’t blown up in my face. So, I’ll trust you again, just this once, since you’ve already promised not to kill me,” Clark snapped in a sharper tone than he had spoken to anyone in quite a long time. “It’s not like this day can get any worse.”
“Oh, why did you have to go and say that?” she said, and he knew she was right. Open mouth and stick in jinxed foot.
“So, what have I done now?” he asked.
“You broke your promise.”
Clark sighed, and his shoulders fell even lower. “And which promise was that?”
“That you would never leave me,” she replied.
“I…” He paused. That day, Perry’s birthday in fact, when Lois had her vision of the two supermen battling to the death over her, she had made Clark promise that he would never disappear on her. “I promised to never
willingly leave you unless you send me away. Trying to kill me earlier, I would say, fits into that grey disclaimer area.”
“Do you…” Her voice trembled. “Do you hate me?”
Clark closed his eyes in an attempt to block the tears from escaping. “I… I could never hate you, Lois.” He took a deep breath. “I love you.” Although, frankly, he didn’t like her much at the moment.
He heard her take a step closer.
“You love me?” she scoffed, disbelief permeating her words.
Yeah, that’s probably the wrong thing to say, even if it is true.“If this is how you show a woman you love her, we need to work on your execution,” Lois said, taking another step. “No pun intended.”
Clark dropped his hands from his face and stared down at the floor between his boots. A Kryptonite bullet through the chest might be the least painful way to end this conversation.
“First…”
“Please,” he pleaded. “Don’t bring up the park.”
“First,” Lois repeated, taking another step towards him. “You believe me capable of not only physically hurting you
on purpose, but actually killing you with premeditation.”
Clark winced.
“I wonder how you could ever love such a woman.”
“Love makes you blind,” he replied.
“Oh, don’t even think about going there, Chuck,” she warned.
“Sorry.”
“Second,” she said, stepping down from the top stair. “You would even consider leaving and burdening the woman you claim to love with the knowledge that every person’s death from then on out was on her hands, because Superman wasn’t around to save them and he left Metropolis because of her.”
Her words scratched against his freshly healed wounds as if it were possible to reopen them. Lois might deserve that fate for what she had done to him, but if he truly loved her, he wouldn’t inflict that on her. He realized how he had made a cake of things. Again. “You’re right, Lois.”
Her footsteps stilled. “Right that you don’t love me?” Lois asked after a moment of silence. Her voice sounded rough.
“No,” Clark admitted. “The other one.” The one where he was once more guilty of treating her badly, no matter what evils she had perpetrated on him. Although, after that day’s adventures, he wasn’t sure how capable Superman was at saving anyone.
“Thirdly, you thought it possible that I could tell you one week that I love you and the next accept
in earnest the marriage proposal of another man,” she said, stopping at the bottom of the stairs.
A strange fluttering sensation tickled the inside of his ribcage. If he hadn’t known that his heart was lying in powdered form on some rooftop in Suicide Slum, he would have sworn it had started up again. He swallowed, not daring to glance back to look at her.
“What do you recommend such a man do to redeem himself?” he asked.
“Two things,” Lois answered. “First, you must solemnly promise never to abandon me or Earth until after my death…”
Clark pressed his eyes shut and gave a brief nod of his head.
“And secondly…” She set her hand on his shoulder. “You need to forgive me for being even worse at showing you how much I love you.”
The air seemed to still with her words as if time stopped and breathed inward on the anticipation of his response.
“You love me?” he whispered, savoring the warmth in her hand as it rested on his shoulder.
“Why else do you think Lex hid Kryptonite on me, you lunkhead? Because he heard me call to you that I love you, when you hovered outside my apartment that day after the park,” Lois said.
Clark’s eyes flew open, his mouth suddenly dry. “You… you were speaking to me?” he sputtered as all the puzzle pieces fell into place.
“Of course, I was speaking to you, Chuck,” she murmured, bending down to place her mouth next to his ear. “I’m nobody’s Minha, but yours.”
He turned to gaze at her over his shoulder, but her lips took hold of his instead, claiming them for her own.
Clark knew he would never admit it aloud, but if ever he were to die, while kissing Lois was the way he wanted to go. He had considered that option on the roof earlier, when she started covering his face with kisses. Fortunately, a part of him rebelled against the idea of giving up completely.
The chill that had sunk into his bones since his exposure to Kryptonite that morning, melted and left him flushed with warmth. For the first time in many weeks, he felt alive again.
Lois loved him.
Clark lifted his hand to the back of her head to deepen the kiss. Even if this was all a delusional fantasy or another trap, he wanted to experience every bit of it. Her hair felt strange, coarser, but that didn’t stop him drawing her closer. His nose bumped against something hard and cold on her face.
“You cut your hair?” he murmured, reluctant to pull away and yet unable to curb his curiosity. “And are wearing glasses?”
Lois chuckled and moved slightly away. “It’s a disguise.”
Clark opened his eyes and looked at her for the first time since she had entered his apartment. She wore a hideous royal purple tracksuit, huge round glasses, and had on a wig of short-cropped
blonde hair.
She spun around. “Do you like?” She certainly looked very unlike Lois.
He held out his hand. She set her hand in his and he led her around the edge of the sofa to the cushions next to him. “If it brings you back to me, I don’t care how you look.”
Instead of sitting down on the couch, Lois rested herself on his knee and took his face in her hands. “I’ve missed you, Chuck,” she said.
“I haven’t gone anywhere,
Minha,” he murmured, resting a hand on her slender neck and running his thumb up and down it. He wanted to lose himself while trailing kisses over the same area.
“Except when you were in Brazil,” Lois replied. “And didn’t I hear that you were seen in England?”
He shrugged. Yet, it wasn’t as far away as she had gone. “What are you doing with Luthor, Lois?”
Her hands glided down his neck to his shoulders and ended on his chest. “I was trying to protect you,” she whispered, and he saw that her gaze was focused on his chest rather than his eyes.
“Come again?”
Lois sighed, but didn’t lift her gaze. “When I went to visit Lex during Nightfall, he offered to protect me from the asteroid. He had a bunker built and copied my apartment into it. The thing was, it was a perfect copy down to my sheets. At this point, Lex had only been in my apartment three, maybe four times, and never for more than a few minutes at a time and he’s
never been in my bedroom. I realized that the only way he could have made such a perfect copy of my apartment was if he had been studying it for a while. My mind instantly jumped to the surveillance equipment Super…
you removed after I was shot and…”
“The Voyeur,” Clark said. He wished he could say that being right made him feel better about this, but it didn’t.
She nodded.
He lifted her chin, so that he could look her in the eyes. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You had amnesia, and I didn’t want to worry you.”
Clark wished her words would’ve reassured him, but they didn’t.
“Anyway, after I discovered that you’re…well,
you,” Lois said with a weak smile. “I realized that the only way you could’ve been hurt was if someone had exposed you to Kryptonite. It was clear that someone was trying to kill Clark Kent, between almost being hit by that car and your abduction. I figured that someone obsessed enough with me to not only hide cameras in my apartment, but also replicate it in his secret lair, wouldn’t let stooping to murdering the man I’m dating stop him. To prove my theory, I pretended to break up with you to see if the attempts on your… well, Clark Kent’s life, ended, and they did.”
“
This was why you broke up with me?” he stumbled over the words coming out of his mouth. This was as bad as his idea for breaking up with her. The idea he had dismissed as undoable because it would’ve been too painful. “To prove that you were right?”
Lois rolled her eyes. “Hello? Weren’t you listening? ‘
Pretended’ to break up with you. The ‘ruse’, remember?” She tapped his forehead with her knuckles. “Where’s that great memory you’re always bragging about?”
Clark pressed his lips together. “I don’t always brag about it.”
She waved off the distinction.
He slid her off his lap and onto the couch before standing up. “It didn’t feel like a ruse to me.”
“I’m sorry if our lines of communication were cut, but…”
“Lines of communication? What lines? What communication? You didn’t tell me anything,” he grumbled, running a hand through his hair, only to remember that he still had it slicked back for his Superman persona.
“It hurts, doesn’t it?” Lois retorted, before her glare softened. “Anyway, I told you to ‘trust me’. If you
had, you would have known that I never stopped loving you.”
His mouth dropped open in stunned disbelief. Had she just tried to turn his anguish from the last month back on him? “How long did you expect me to blindly follow you, holding onto that one last scrap of hope? Until you returned from your honeymoon?”
She jumped to her feet. “That’s not fair. I would never cross that line, even to save you.”
“Lois, you went out on dates with another man without telling me. You left the Daily Planet without informing me. You accepted his proposal and rejected mine. You…”
Lois stuck a finger in his face. “You’re to blame for that rejected proposal and you know it.”
“Why? Because I made it too soon? Well, excuse me for panicking into a bad decision when the woman I love appeared to be climbing into bed with the devil,” he returned.
“
We’re not sleeping together!” she shouted. She took a deep breath and seemed to be trying to calm herself enough to lower her voice. “You lied to me about who you are. I’m sorry if I hurt you, Chuck, but a marriage proposal should only be given with full disclosures, otherwise any agreement made must be considered null and void.”
“Does that mean that you’re not really engaged to marry Luthor?” Clark asked.
“That’s exactly what it means,” she shot back. “Because I never plan… I’ll
never marry him.”
Despite those words being a good two weeks late, they were still good to hear. “I tried to tell you my secret earlier, but we…
I kept getting interrupted. Hey, in my defense, at least I didn’t tell you to try to get you to accept me,” he said with a weak smile.
“That wouldn’t have made a difference, because I already knew,” Lois threw back haughtily.
Clark put his hands on his hips and stared directly into her eyes. “There was a time when I could’ve flown into your apartment in this uniform and taken you straight to your bedroom without a peep of protest from you, and you know it. I never crossed that line. I told you from the beginning that Superman…” He moved his hands up and down to indicate his uniform before returning his hands to his hips. “— doesn’t date.”
“Your loss.” She crossed her arms and glared right back at him as if taunting him to try that stunt now.
He focused up at the ceiling and shook his head. She was impossible. It was impossible.
Lois placed her hands on his biceps. “There have been more times when you could have walked into my apartment as Clark Kent and had your way with me,” she admitted.
Clark lowered his gaze to hers and saw that she wasn’t teasing.
“I love you…
all of you,” Lois said. “Part of the reason why it hurt so much that you didn’t tell me your secret, was because I was in agony. I was in love with the world’s two best men and I had to choose only one of them. I would force myself to choose one-half of you, and then the other half of you would smile at me and I’d be lost again. It was tearing me apart to think that I would ever be tempted to cheat on the man I love.” She took a step closer to him, and he didn’t hesitate wrapping his arms around her and drawing her to his chest. “Or love two men at the same time.”
“Not the ‘world’s best’,” he amended.
She put her arms around his neck. “Most definitely. I had Cat check out all the other contenders, and she agrees that you’re the best,” Lois attempted to say this seriously, but then burst into a grin, which he then wiped from her face with a kiss.
Her lips were soft, warm, and inviting.
Since she started her ‘ruse’, he had felt more alone than he had the previous summer when she wouldn’t talk to Clark, yet, couldn’t stay away from Superman. Kissing her now felt as if finally finding Earth after a long cold journey in unfriendly space.
Returning to his old dimension would never have been ‘heading home’, because Clark knew for a fact that home was wherever Lois was, and she lived here.
***End of Part 158*** Part 159 /Checks watch/ Hey, look! It's February!
Comments
