I'm posting this as an early birthday present for Sara K, whose birthday is tomorrow. Hope it's a good one, Sara! 
~ Betrayed ~
Part 2 of the Eternity trilogy(Part 1 of the trilogy is
Summer Dreaming ).
The past is gone, we've been betrayed
It's true
Someone said the truth will out
I believe, without a doubt,
In you.
- 'Eternity', written and performed by Robbie Williams "MRS LEX LUTHOR FEARED DROWNED, LAKE SUPERIOR"
The bold headline stared up at Clark, and he almost doubled over with a pain he'd had no idea he could experience.
She was dead. Lois. Lois was dead.
He thrust a dollar bill blindly at the street vendor, grabbing the afternoon edition of the Metropolis Star in return and staggering to the nearest piece of wall so that he could lean against it and read the story. And yet for several minutes he just stood staring blankly at the newspaper, seeing nothing.
Lois was dead.
How could she be dead? She was so young, so vibrant... so beautiful.
And so sad.
Married to a man who didn't value the precious prize he had. Who he was sure didn’t love her. And, he suspected, whom she didn't love.
But she was dead.
Not that it should affect him like this, he told himself angrily. This grief... this tearing, searing agony. She wasn’t his. She would never, could never, have been his. That was why he'd left, after all. She was married to another man.
He barely knew her! So why should he feel as if he'd lost the other half of himself?
Because he'd loved her. And she was dead.
She’d been alive only yesterday! How could it have been only yesterday that he’d walked with her on the sand, close to her, hearing her voice as they conversed, aching to hold her hand?
Only the day before, he'd actually held her in his arms. Just briefly, when he'd caught her as she'd stumbled, but it had been enough to make him yearn for her. He'd been so aware of her that it had been almost painful, and he'd had to force himself to let go of her and step away before he'd given himself away. She was married, after all. He'd always believed strongly in the sanctity of marriage. How could he possibly allow himself to take any kind of step towards intimacy with a married woman?
His behaviour hadn't been quite so ethical the following day - yesterday. Again, that aching sense of awareness had been there. And she'd been looking so sad, so wistful, that he hadn't been able to help himself. Stepping closer to her, raising his hand to her face, had felt inevitable. Impossible to resist.
And how he wished now, with a need that was savage, that he’d completed that kiss. He’d been so close he could feel her breath against his lips. She’d leaned towards him, too, telling him that she'd wanted it. Wanted him to kiss her.
And he, fool that he was, had whirled away, stopping it.
He could have tasted her, known how it felt to hold her in his arms for more than just an instant, to feel her lips against his.
Now she was dead, and he didn’t even have the memory of her kiss to comfort him.
The memory of a kiss with a married woman? Drawing comfort from something so completely wrong?Unable to reconcile his ethics with his gut-wrenching yearning to have tasted Lois’s kiss just once, Clark clenched his jaw and forced himself to look again at the newspaper article.
There was a photograph of her, a head and shoulders view. God, she was so beautiful! And one of the grieving husband, too.
Lex Luthor. The man who had been lucky enough to be married to her. The man who, if Clark’s guess was right, hadn’t appreciated what a prize he had in his wife. The man who’d abandoned her only a month or so after their wedding, leaving her alone and clearly desperately lonely...
... so lonely that she’d been willing to let a stranger take advantage of her.
Lex Luthor. Handsome, faintly smiling, expensively dressed, the billionaire’s face stared back at Clark from the photograph. So this was the man Lois had married. He was older than her, perhaps by as much as fifteen years, Clark thought. How much had they really had in common?
Perhaps, judging by the way Lois had seemed to welcome his own company, the way she’d seemed to need his approval of her writing, very little.
Lois. His gaze strayed to her photograph again. It had been taken at her wedding, he suddenly realised, taking in the significance of the white gown she was wearing. Her hair had been swept up in an intricate style, but she wore no veil; the photo had probably been taken later in the day. And she was so beautiful.
And dead.
Why was she dead? Why her? Drowned - but what was she doing in the lake in the first place? Couldn’t she swim?
Or... hadn’t she wanted to?
The tight hand already clutching his heart clenched even harder. Had she been so unhappy, so miserable that she had taken her own life?
And he stilled, his entire body feeling as if it had turned to stone. Had
he played a part in this? By spending time with her, flirting with her - for he had been, he admitted - even coming close to kissing her?
Don’t jump to conclusions, he told himself, even as the dread and guilt grew inside him to unbearable proportions.
You don’t know how she died. You don’t know what was going through her mind. You don’t know anything about her.And the best way to find out what had really happened, he thought, realising that he still held the newspaper in his hand, was to learn what facts were available. Acknowledging that he’d been putting off reading the article, as if delaying it would somehow postpone the reality of her death, Clark steeled himself to scan the text.
It had happened some time last night, the paper said - mere hours after he’d left her. According to a statement from the grieving husband’s spokesperson, Lex Luthor had arrived at the beach house after midnight, having flown up after he’d finished a long day’s work in Metropolis. He’d intended to surprise his wife. But the house had been in darkness and, seeing that his wife had taken sleeping pills again, Luthor had gone to a spare bedroom to avoid waking her.
“Mrs Luthor had been having difficulty sleeping for several months,” the statement said. “After their marriage, Mr Luthor’s physician prescribed some high-dosage medication, which Mrs Luthor had taken occasionally as the need arose.”
And so, according to the newspaper and Luthor’s account, Lois had awoken some time during the night. She had got herself a glass of water - a half-full glass with her prints on it had been found in the kitchen, together with some water spillage. And then, still drugged and sleepy, or even sleepwalking, she must have lost her way, stumbling out onto the beach and into the water instead of back up to her bedroom. Footprints across the sand, stopping by the water’s edge, bore this out.
The household staff, the Star reported, had given the police a statement which accorded with Lex Luthor’s account.
Sleeping pills. He hadn’t known that Lois was having trouble sleeping.
But then, why should he? Why should she have told him, a stranger, something like that? His gaze shifting again to her photograph, Clark reminded himself of all the times when she’d abruptly changed the subject whenever he’d asked her anything personal, or when the conversation went in directions she clearly wasn’t comfortable with.
He’d been a stranger to her. Someone with whom she’d whiled away a few boring afternoons. Someone she probably wouldn’t have given the time of day to if she’d met him in Metropolis.
And he’d been idiot enough to have fallen in love with her. With someone else’s wife.
He should never have come back to the beach after that first day. It wasn’t as if he hadn’t been aware of the danger he was in - he’d known, right from when he’d first looked at her properly, that he was attracted to her. And once they’d started talking he’d been lost.
It had been the purest chance that he’d been there in the first place. He’d promised himself a few days before heading to Metropolis to job-hunt. Although he’d been all over the world, he hadn’t seen all of the wonders his own continent had to offer. And so he’d decided to explore the Great Lakes. And, in that lonely 500-mile stretch of coastline between Sault Ste Marie and Thunder Bay, there had been hundreds of beautiful beaches, with glistening white sand and sparkling blue water, surrounded by tall trees. And other than a few public beaches accessible to tourists, they were all empty. No-one to see a man drop down from the sky under cover of the trees and take a stroll on gleaming sand.
And so he’d done just that... and met Lois. And fallen head over heels.
Why had he gone back? Why?
Because he hadn’t been able to resist. It had been as simple as that. He’d told himself that he could be sensible, that he could enjoy her company without letting himself get too close. That he could control his feelings. And - the biggest excuse of all - that she’d seemed lonely. He was doing her a favour, and getting the pleasure of Lois Lane, famous journalist’s company at the same time.
Fool!
He’d even, in some bizarre, idiotic attempt to impress her, dressed up! Nothing formal, but he had gone back to the farm to dig out some of his less disreputable casual clothes. He’d wanted to look more attractive in her eyes. How crazy was that? As if a currently-unemployed reporter could possibly compete with Lex Luthor when it came to the quality of his clothing. He’d bet that Luthor had never looked scruffy in his life.
He’d risked so much in going back day after day. Risked his heart, of course - and lost it. And he’d also risked his safety, and that of his parents - something he had just not let himself think about. If Lois had ever got curious about just how it was he’d managed to get down onto that beach: a beach unreachable from the road, a beach which was only accessible from the lake - or the air.
If she’d had the faintest suspicion that a man could fly, and that he was using that superhuman means to get himself onto her property day after day...
No, of course she wouldn’t have worked that out. After all, who other than himself and his family had any reason to believe that a man - even if not human - could fly? Regardless, if she’d probed him about how he’d got there, beyond her question on that first day, a question he’d avoided, he could have been in big trouble. He’d been courting danger on that score each day he’d returned.
Just as he’d been courting danger to his heart...
Only yesterday, this vibrant, beautiful, talented and sad woman had been alive. Alive, and almost in his arms, her skin soft and tempting beneath his palm, her scent fresh and inviting.
And today she was...
...floating somewhere in Lake Superior, waiting for the police or some Canadian rescue service to find her body.
If they found it. Lake Superior was enormous - bigger than many seas. And deep.
Of course, the grieving husband was Lex Luthor. And he had more resources at his disposal than some countries did. Surely a man like that would spare no expense to find his wife’s body.
But by the time they managed to find her, she could be unrecognisable.
If they found her at all.
He could find her.
He could find her today - in the next hour. While there was still a chance that she would be Lois, the beautiful woman he’d fallen in love with. While there was still a chance that she could have a funeral, that her body could be laid to rest properly and reverently.
Yes, Clark. You could be doing something useful rather than sitting here mooning over a photograph. The voice in his head spoke so clearly he could almost hear his father say the impatient, affectionate words. And, yes, he was wasting time just sitting staring at the picture of a woman he could never have. Would never have had, even if she hadn’t died.
He needed to find a safe place to take off, and then get himself, unseen, to Canada.
**********
The least-populated route, when considering airline flight paths as well as terrestrial life, was due west: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Michigan, and then heading north-west from about Wisconsin, across the northernmost tip of Minnesota and from there into northern Ontario. He shot across the Lake of the Woods and headed for the north-eastern edge of Lake Superior, close to Lex Luthor’s private beach.
The lake was dark and forbidding today; storm-clouds were in the air and the water was a dull grey, far from the sparkling blue of earlier in the week. The beach looked cold and uninviting, with no hint that a lovely, vivacious woman had sat there with her laptop day after day.
The beach. The beach across which Lois had taken her last steps, stumbling to the lake, only to... what? Fall in face-down and drown, unable to get up again? Feel the water lapping at her feet and decide to go for a paddle - he remembered how she’d loved to walk at the water’s edge, letting the waves brush her ankles - only to lose her way, getting deeper into the water than she’d planned and getting swept away by the tide? Or, in her sleepy imagination, had she dreamt that she was swimming, and simply drifted off on the waves?
Perhaps the footsteps on the sand would give him a clue, Clark thought. Assuming that they were still there, that the wind and the waves between them hadn’t covered them over, hiding every trace of evidence.
He paused in the air about half a mile from the lakeshore. There was no activity on the water, which did surprise him: surely the police and the coastguard should be out on the lake by now, searching? Where was the grieving husband, crouched at the side of a boat, gazing intently, anxiously, into the water, an agonised, desperate expression on his face?
Why was no-one searching for Lois?
Or had they all given up? But it was too early to have called the search off for the day; there were still at least four hours of daylight left. It was only late afternoon.
Unless they’d already found her body? It was possible, he supposed, despondency seeping through him. Dully, he wondered why. What did it matter who found her? She was dead. And the sooner she was found, the better, before the water and its residents did her any further harm.
But he knew why it mattered. If he had been the one to find her, then he would have seen her once more. Even though she was dead. Even though the body he recovered would not look like the beautiful, fragile, vibrant woman he had known, had fallen in love with.
A sound caught his attention. In the air nearby, a helicopter hovered low, a searchlight trained on the dark water below. So they hadn’t found her - assuming that the chopper’s crew were looking for Lois and not someone, or something, else.
He hesitated, then - ensuring that he was far enough above the helicopter so that he wouldn’t be seen - he looked towards the beach-house, straining his abilities to the limit in an attempt to find out what was going on.
He glanced at the beach first, and noticed footprints - many of them, too many to identify individually. One of the sets had to be Lois’s, but it appeared that numerous people had traced her steps down to the water’s edge; presumably looking for her, trying to find the path she’d taken, investigating. No clues there, so. He shifted his attention to the interior of the house.
Lex Luthor - it had to be him; the man had an air of someone used to commanding and to having his every wish obeyed the instant it was uttered - was pacing up and down a large living-room, a telephone pressed to his ear.
“...and I want some action
now! I want this matter cleared up and the file on my wife’s death closed so that I can leave this godforsaken place and return to Metropolis with my wife’s body as soon as possible... Yes, I am aware that the body has not been found yet, and I am also
less than happy about the degree of urgency with which the search is being conducted... Yes, of course I sent them away! They were upsetting my staff and myself and making no progress whatsoever - what?”
Shocked, Clark stared at the man in the beach house. Where was the grief, the devastation of a man suddenly widowed? Okay, he could understand anger, in the circumstances, but this was controlled anger. It wasn’t helpless emotion. And the things the man was saying...
the body, wanting to leave as soon as possible - although that might be understandable if Luthor was anxious to get away from a place which would certainly have bitter memories; and just who had he sent away? People - officials - who were supposed to be helping to find Lois?
But the man seemed far too calm, too much in control of himself. Did he have any feelings at all?
If he had been Lois’s husband in this situation, Clark couldn’t help thinking, he would be devastated. He would have lost the most important person in the whole world to him. His love. His life. His entire reason for being.
Lex Luthor seemed far more concerned with being able to leave the area and return home than he did about the fact that his wife was dead. Or about finding her body.
Something wasn’t adding up here.
Or maybe he was judging a man he knew nothing about far too hastily on the basis of too little information.
Yet he did know some things about Lex Luthor. He knew, for example, that the man had left his wife alone, here, at this house only about a month after their wedding. He knew that Lois had been lonely - and if he'd known that, why hadn’t her husband? The impression he’d gleaned from the very little that Lois had said was of a man who saw his wife as a convenience - a possession, perhaps, even as a trophy - rather than as someone he loved to distraction.
Was it even possible that Lex Luthor wasn’t exactly mourning the death of his wife? That he saw her death as an inconvenience which was keeping him away from more important matters, such as his business interests?
Clark shook his head. He was coming to conclusions about the man on the basis of far too little information: in fact, based almost entirely on prejudice, on the fact that Lex Luthor was married to the woman Clark had fallen in love with.
He made himself look away from the house; he’d come to search for Lois, after all. If she were there to be found...
The sky over the lake was dark today; a storm was definitely coming, he thought. It seemed fitting that the glorious sunshine and clear blue skies of the past week should have disappeared. It would probably rain within the hour; this corner of Lake Superior mourning for Lois Lane.
Clark began to sweep slowly up and down the part of the lake nearest the beach, using his special vision abilities to enable him to look below the surface of the water. It became dark and murky a few yards from the shore, and visibility was frequently obscured by undergrowth, fish and other lake-life, bits of trees and other debris.
There was nothing to be seen.
After several minutes’ searching, it occurred to him that he should pay attention to the direction of the tide, and so he widened his search towards the south-west.
Still nothing.
He sighed despondently, but kept going, even though part of him was protesting that it was a waste of time. That she could be anywhere. That she could have sunk somewhere into the murky depths where he could never find her.
And then he saw it.
Something... it could be a large piece of driftwood, or... maybe a body? In shadow, floating half on the surface of the water about a mile from the shore, and half submerged. He focused, finding even his powerful vision insufficient to show him what he needed to see. Was that hair, or just weeds?
He darted down, heart in his throat. And was rewarded for his searching. It was Lois.
She was draped over what looked like a large tree-branch, her head barely above water, her limbs mostly submerged. Just drifting along, out towards the centre of the lake - where she would probably never have been found.
But he’d found her. And Lois Lane - Lois Luthor - would have a proper funeral. But he would mourn her here, alone in the lake, before he took her back to her husband - to the man who had the right to be with her now.
He, after all, had only been a passing acquaintance in the life of the woman he loved; the woman who’d died too young and too alone. Before she’d had the chance to fulfil even half of the potential she so clearly had - the potential which was being stifled as long as she’d allowed her husband to incarcerate her on this beach in the middle of nowhere.
Anger, raw and consuming, coursed through him. What use were all his powers, all these abilities with which he’d been gifted with, if he hadn’t been able to save Lois’s life?
Why hadn’t he known that she was in trouble? Why had he left her yesterday, fled back to Metropolis? If he’d stayed... if he’d been keeping watch over her, she could be alive now, instead of floating lifeless on the surface of a sea-like lake.
Why? Why Lois?
He could fly. He could see far, far further than the human eye. He could hear over distances which would amaze scientists. He could outrun any vehicle ever invented. Yet in this situation he was helpless. Impotent. Left weeping, mourning, because he hadn’t been able to save her.
He was useless. A waste of matter, human or alien.
And, again, he was wallowing in his own emotions, ignoring what needed to be done. He had to get Lois out of the water, even though it was too late now to help her.
“Rest in peace, Lois - I wish I’d had the privilege of knowing you sooner,” he murmured as he flew to her, to pull her drowned body out of the lake.
**********
...tbc
