So at the end of the last part..
~~~
He picked the phone up again to call his apartment and check his messages.
An old one from from Lois made him smile… “Clark, it’s Lois. Although if you don’t recognize my voice yet, then maybe you should be in a different business. Anyway, I just wanted to let you know I am on my way over. We just got a breakthrough in our story, I’ll tell you about it when I get there. You have exactly ten minutes to be ready. Don’t be late. I don’t like waiting. I’ll, uh, see you in a few…” He pushed #9 on the pay phone.
Message saved.
Mom… not important. #3.
Message erased.
Perry… not important. #3.
Message erased.
Mrs. Cox… “…to send Superman to discuss a matter involving Ms. Lane …”
Clark hung up the phone, wondering what Luthor could possibly want. He ran into a nearby alley, made sure no one was around and changed…
~~~
HAVE A LITTLE FAITH IN ME
PART 3
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Confused. She was confused.
She wanted to believe he was all the things she was telling herself he was. A monster. A deceitful, dishonest, horrible man. But her memories were starting to wrestle with the newfound perspective. And the memories were winning.
Staring at a list of name combinations in her wedding book, under index N… she could only see…
Square dancing in Smallville…
Sitting in a dumpster, grunting, throwing a cabbage at his head, only to have him catch it and throw it into a garbage bin, that boyish grin directed at her. That grin…
Playing games at the Honeymoon suite…
She could hear their voices echoing in her subconscious…
***“Maybe, somewhere, buried incredibly deep inside me, is some small, eensy weensy, microcosmic, although highly unlikely possibility that I feel some sort of unmotivated, completely unrealistic attraction to you.”
“Just as long as you’re being honest with yourself, Lois…” That grin…***
His wonderful massages…
Those hugs, always at the right moment…
Feeling the weight of his gaze on her and catching him… looking at her in that way….
The time they had worked late at his apartment… although they did find time to just relax and have a few laughs, not just work… and then he walked her home. She was shivering halfway there and he took his sweatshirt off, insisting that she wear it. He wore only a tee shirt, and she remembered thinking he looked so good, then chastising herself for having such thoughts about HIM… and the sweatshirt smelled good…
The sweatshirt she fell asleep in the other night…
She just kept remembering… battling her memories…
Kissing in the honeymoon suite… such passion. So perfect…
Kissing in the airplane … so sweet, so gentle…
Kissing goodbye during the heat wave…
Goodbye…
She slowly drifted into unconsciousness, her lack of sleep from the week catching up with her. She slumped over the table, on her book, putting wrinkles through ‘Lois Lane Luthor’ and ‘Lois Luthor Lane’ and ‘Lois Luthor’ and ‘Lois L. Luthor’…..
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“Is this man serious?” Clark wondered to himself, listening to Luthor request Clark’s and Superman’s presence at the travesty that was the wedding the following day.
“You live in a fantasy world, Luthor. Neither Clark, nor I, will ever support your wedding to Lois,” he said adamantly.
After that, Luthor continued talking, ranting like a madman. A confident madman. A man with a plan… Clark was starting to feel just the etchings of fear creep up on him. He couldn’t explain it. But he all of a sudden felt as though he were walking into a trap. Luthor was confident… too confident. He kept up his own confident persona, telling himself that he would make a quick exit as soon as the opportunity presented itself to him. He wasn’t often afraid, and the sensation was foreign to him. But he didn’t like it, and he knew he needed to get out of there….
“…which leads me to my next point, Superman…”
…soon…
“Luthor, I’d love to stay and chat but I have better things to…”
He was just about to turn and leave, but suddenly he found himself inside a cage that seemed to come out of nowhere. His own nervous mind was preventing him from noticing much. He just knew there was a cage around him that wasn’t there a moment before.
As his nervously working mind was starting to make things around him more confusing, other things were starting to become clearer…
The false alarm…
“Confidence,” he told himself… “Bars won’t… hold me Luthor,” he said out loud, beginning to feel just as he had at the bank, talking to the security guard. He was staggering. He knew he was in trouble… trapped.
An image of Lois whizzing by in her Cadillac, looking so… free… filled his mind. He wondered why, when he could tell his life would be in danger any moment, was he thinking about Lois driving the monster’s car…
“Oh won’t they?” he heard him ask, holding a contraption in his hand now.
“When did he pick that up?” he wondered. He hadn’t noticed. He was chiding himself for foolishly hanging around in this cellar for so long… for coming at all… but Lois…
He made a quick move to break the bars… he needed to do it fast and get out of there… he lurched himself forward, making contact with the bars, but they didn’t bend… he did.
Pain… lots of pain. In waves. In masses. Shooting pain through his entire body. Cold concrete. “When did I end up on the floor?” his confused mind wondered. “I need to get out… to get to Lois…”
Luthor was talking again… his voice sounded like it was slowed down one hundred times… sounding all deep and distorted, like a monster. Clark couldn’t make out the words. He was talking to him from the other side of the bars. The free side…
No, now he was opening the door. “I just need to get up and run out the door, past Luthor…” he thought, but his body wouldn’t let him move. Paralyzed. Trapped. Afraid…
“I live in a fantasy world, do I?” he heard him ask, his words starting to make sense.
“Clark Kent knows where I am!” he yelled out, showing more strength than he actually had.
“Yes, I’ll have to kill him too…”
Clark started to feel close to passing out. Pain was everywhere. He was trapped by it… in it. He could see that Luthor was no longer in the cage with him. He was locked in again, berating himself for not finding the energy to get out when the door was open.
This was bad, Clark knew. No one knew he was down there. He was going to die… soon.
“Watching you die is something I will cherish forever,” Clark heard him say, and saw him switch on a camera. “This way I will always be able to enjoy it. On a low day, it will lift me right back up. Oh yes, I will enjoy watching you slowly die, over and over again. Look at you, on the floor… maybe it won’t be a slow death.”
He started up the stairs, to leave him in the cellar to die alone. He stopped halfway up the stairs and turned to him. “Oh, and don’t try to escape. First of all, you won’t be able to. And second…” he broke off, pointing two fingers at his own eyes, and then turning his hand and pointing his fingers at the camera.
And then he was gone.
Clark was coughing uncontrollably. He was getting weaker by the moment. He could feel his life force weakening… life starting to leave him. He told himself he just had to hold on… for Lois. For them.
*** “have faith that everything will work out in the end…”***
He could hear his mother’s voice, and he knew he had to grab onto that faith that she talked of. It was all he had. All that might save him.
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***“Lois, please!” his voice boomed in her ears. Then he sounded softer. “Please…” Like he needed her, calling to her. “I can’t… hold on…” his voice said, sounding weak.***
Lois sat up quickly, shaking off her sleep in an instant. She was suddenly wide awake and very much shaken up. HIS voice had not taunted her in her dreams. Her own voice did. This was just disconcerting.
A nightmare… he sounded so….
She shook her head, trying to forget. Forget how he sounded so alone, so scared… so in need of her. “Get a grip, it was just a dream,” she told herself.
She needed to forget… forget the memories that were starting to take over her mind, forget his voice that was now haunting her dreams.
The one thing she didn’t want to forget, the one thing that was getting harder and harder to remember, was the reason she was angry… so angry… to begin with. She wanted to hold onto her feelings of betrayal that he had inflicted.
Hold onto the hurt.
“Remember how he lied… never trusted you… LET you embarrass yourself… Forget the rest… the good things.”
But those good things had a way of flooding her all at once, taking over and heightening all her senses. She told herself that with time that would go away and she would be okay. Happily married to someone who didn’t hurt her deeply and lie to her, and she would not even be inclined to ever look back at her life before… her life with Clark...
But it was getting hard to remember why she was so mad at him. So hurt. She had a death grip on that anger, not wanting to let it go for anything in the world. She deserved to hold it and to own it. But she felt it was constantly, little by little, being ripped away from her. She felt robbed. By him.
Like he had done before, he was again breaking down all the walls she built for herself, all her defenses, breaking through her barriers, touching her heart.
She looked at her watch. 4:04 am. Her eyes shot open wide. It was her wedding day. She was to be married in a matter of hours.
She still didn’t have a dress picked out, a hairstyle to wear or a name to call herself once the whole thing was over. And if that were not enough, she still couldn’t shake his voice, calling to her, out of her mind.
“Is this what it’s supposed to be like?” she wondered furiously.
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Dying. He was dying. He could feel it. He had spent the majority of the night lying on the floor, trying to concentrate on an inner strength and power to knock one of the walls off his cage and escape. Every now and then he would get himself up off the floor and run, with everything inside of him... all his anger, all his power, all his love… And he would hit it so hard, sure it would break. But it never did. It was only hurting him more. He eventually realized that he would kill himself sooner if he kept making direct contact with the bars. His body was aching from all the hits he was taking from this method of escape.
No… he decided to just have faith. Someone would find him…
“Lois, please….”
He was lying still… couldn’t move. “I can’t… hold on….”
He just lay there, unable to move and struggling even to breathe. His life was waning and he was dying alone…. holding onto nothing but a little faith…
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Finally, she had chosen a dress. She decided to just keep it simple and wear her hair straight. She was standing in front of three long mirrors looking at the beautiful woman staring back at her.
“Oh, sweetie, you look beautiful!”
Lois turned to see her mother bound excitedly into the room. She immediately stepped off the step she was on and ran into her mother’s arms, the way she used to when she was a little girl.
“Mom, you came!” she cried into her shoulder.
“I RSVP’d, didn’t I?” her mother asked, clearly concerned that her daughter didn’t seem to think her own mother was coming to her wedding.
“Yes, but…” Lois trailed off, crying into her mother’s shoulder.
“Oh, honey, it’s okay. This happens to everyone before the big day. And you’ve been under a lot of pressure; you put this together in just barely a week and a half. The tension is just getting to you, honey.”
Lois nodded in agreement with her mother, but couldn’t convince her tears to believe her mother’s words. They just kept flowing as if something much more than wedding-planning tension was wrong. And she knew it was true. The lies she had been telling herself for days, which had served to build walls around her and especially around her heart, were starting to crumble… becoming but meaningless crumbs in the process.
But she had grown so accustomed to telling herself these things that she just kept on… forcing herself to believe she was doing the right thing.
“Thank you, Mom. I really needed you here,” Lois said, pulling herself together, wiping at her eyes.
“You really do look beautiful, sweetie,” her mother repeated.
Lois smiled appreciatively at her mother. “So, is daddy coming? Or… or Lucy?”
Her mother’s smile turned to a sympathetic frown.
“They can’t… they…” she started.
“Don’t you dare, Mom, don’t you think up an excuse! I want the truth. Why aren’t they here?” Lois demanded, knowing her mother’s getting-ready-to-tell-a-lie tone. She’d had years to learn what it sounded like.
“They don’t like Lex Luthor. Your father has some theory about him that he’s responsible for all sorts of bad things…Nothing he can prove, of course.”
“Like HE should be passing judgment on others,” Lois mumbled, clearly upset.
“And Lucy just thinks there is something more to him than meets the eye. She thinks you could do better…”
Lois met her mother’s gaze, a serious expression on her tired, tear-stained face. “And you? Do you think I’m marrying a monster?”
“I’m your mother. And its your wedding. I wouldn’t have missed it for the world. That’s all you need to know. As long as you’re happy. Don’t worry about them. You have me, and all your friends. Am I going to meet them? The infamous Perry White, Jimmy Olsen and Clark Kent that I am always hearing so—“
Lois didn’t answer. She stepped back up onto the platform and looked into the mirror. Her mother got the hint. They weren’t coming either.
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Blackness. Everywhere. Clark could no longer even open his eyes. It was due to sheer will and faith, he believed, that he wasn’t dead yet. He couldn’t move, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t really think… he just… existed…barely…
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