A/N: My first Ficlet Friday! Ignore the fact that I'm nowhere near the length requirement. Of course. 
This one is for Sara (KSaraSara). She'll know why. (And I'll tell the rest of you in the feedback thread.) Thanks, as always, to Kathy for beta reading. Merry Christmas!It started with the best of intentions. As most disasters do.
Yesterday, they had been watching a breaking news alert on the television in the newsroom when the station cut to a commercial where a Hollywood family of four in matching aprons rolled out cookie dough with matching smiles while the narrator intoned a message about family togetherness at the holidays before plugging a chain of grocery stores that promised to make shopping a pleasure.
It had been right there on the tip of her tongue: a snarky comment about how many glasses of wine that woman had already downed and how long after the cameras cut off it would take for her to start screaming at the children about the mess in her kitchen. But then she had turned and caught Clark gazing all mooney eyed at the screen and realized that halcyon holiday kitchen was probably exactly like something out of his Smallville childhood. And the snark had died on her tongue as Clark began to wax poetic about his mother’s delicious Christmas cookies.
All week, Clark had been peppering her with little stories that painted a picture of Christmas in Smallville: the tree farm they drove an hour to every year so they could cut down the perfect Scotch Pine, the elementary school pageant he had starred in as a ten year old, his mother’s collection of hand blown glass ornaments, the wooden nativity set hand carved by his grandfather, and the Kent family tradition of opening one gift on Christmas Eve before bed. Everything he saw reminded him of a Christmas memory.
Her instinctive response to this reminiscing had been to roll her eyes and mock his small-town Norman Rockwell life. But given that just two weeks ago a head injury had robbed him of all memory of who he was and where he came from, she had curbed that instinct and decided to bite her tongue and let him indulge in his nostalgia.
All around them, their coworkers seemed inclined to indulge a little as well. The whole world had nearly ended in flames thanks to a meteor on a collision course with their planet, so she supposed it was unsurprising that everyone seemed a little more sentimental than usual this Christmas. And though she would never admit it aloud, the longer she listened to Clark’s Smallville stories, the more it turned out she was feeling a little sentimental herself. Facing not only your own mortality, but the fragility of the entire known world could do that to a person, she supposed.
This was Clark’s first year at the Planet, and that meant there was no way he was going to get to go home to Smallville for the holiday.
Personally, Lois was always happy to work both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day. It was the perfect excuse to avoid making the rounds of obligatory holiday appearances at the homes of extended family members to whom she’d like to forget she was related – or worse, dining alone with her mother and two decade’s worth of grievances of Christmas Past.
But Clark…. Clark adored his folks. And Lois could understand why. Even after getting off to a rocky start with them during her visit to Smallville a few months prior — accidentally accusing his father of being a crossdresser and condescendingly explaining what a fax machine was to his mother — they had been nothing but wonderful to her. They were warm and welcoming under the most awkward of circumstances, so it was no surprise that they had made Clark’s Christmases growing up the highlight of his year.
Clark was far too practical to whine about wishing he could be in Smallville for Christmas — not when he had just landed his dream job and was paying his dues by working the holiday. But she knew he was missing it terribly.
So, in a rare moment of holiday cheer, Lois had decided to surprise him by recreating Martha Kent’s famous chocolate chip cookies. Clark had insisted they were worshiped far and wide, and had gone on at length about how they melted in his mouth. The secret, he had insisted, was not actually in the recipe, but was all in the timing. The cookies needed to be pulled from the oven after precisely nine minutes and then transferred immediately to cooling racks so they would stop baking. That kept the bottoms from crisping up and made the cookies stay soft and tender.
So she had stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work to procure the ingredients listed on the back of the bag of chocolate chips and had followed the recipe to the letter, measuring each quarter teaspoon and dusting off her hand mixer to beat the batter for exactly five minutes. Everything was perfect.
Until it wasn’t.
She had set the timer for exactly nine minutes, just as Clark had said. But at six minutes, an acrid smell had begun to fill the room. And at seven minutes, smoke had begun to seep from the edges of the oven.
So she had tentatively opened the oven door just a crack, to investigate the source of the smell, and had been assailed by a black cloud of smoke that quickly began to fill the room.
That was how she found herself here – in her smoke-filled kitchen, coughing and cursing as the smoke detector above her head screeched. She waved a towel frantically in the direction of the smoke detector trying to clear enough smoke to shut the thing up, while simultaneously looking around the room for something, anything, she could throw at it.
She did not hear the familiar whoosh over the scream of the alarm, but when the smoke suddenly began to thin and the alarm ceased its screeching, she knew immediately the source of her rescue.
She turned, kitchen towel still clutched in her hand, and found the superhero hovering a foot off the ground, framed by her living room window, curtains billowing behind him. His hands were on his hips, shoulders back, head held high, his bearing as regal as ever. But his eyes twinkled and the corners of his mouth quirked up in an impish grin.
“I think your dinner is done, Ms. Lane,” he said.
Her cheeks burned. “Thank you,” she stammered. “I mean, I’m sorry. This isn’t a real emergency. You didn’t have to….”
“I was in the neighborhood,” he said, landing gently. “Are you all right?”
“Fine,” she said, turning off the oven and fanning away the trickle of smoke that continued to waft through the kitchen. “But I think these are beyond repair.”
“Here, let me help you with that,” Superman said, waving away her protests as he crossed the room and joined her beside the oven. “What were you making anyway?”
He opened the oven and stared at the contents, dumbfounded. He turned to look at her, and then back at the oven, obviously at a loss for words.
She peered around him and saw what remained of the cookie dough in charred blobs at the bottom of the oven.
“Lois,” he said incredulously. “Those are cooling racks. Baking sheets are solid metal.”
“I know that,” she said immediately. “I’m not an idiot. I just thought…well, I heard the key to soft, chewy cookies is that they need to go straight to the cooling racks as soon as they come out of the oven. So I thought if I could bake them on the racks that would save a step. I could just take them out and let them cool. Less room for error.”
He looked from her back to the scorched mess and said nothing.
Her cheeks burned again. “So much for that theory,” she said with a self-conscious shrug.
He laughed and waved her out of the way, reaching into the oven and removing the cooling racks, placing them in the sink, and then scraping the burnt dough from the bottom of the oven and depositing it in the trash can. “What’s with the sudden desire to bake cookies, anyway,” he asked as he worked. “Did you finally get caught by the Christmas spirit?”
“Oh, you know,” she said, rolling her eyes. “Clark….”
Superman stilled and then turned to face her, waiting for her to continue.
“It’s Clark’s first Christmas in Metropolis,” she said, as if that explained everything. When Superman said nothing, she went on. “He’s homesick. All day long, every day, it’s ‘In Smallville at Christmas we….’ whatever. I know he wishes he could go home for the holiday, but he has to work. So I thought maybe I could make him chocolate chip cookies like his mom’s for Christmas Eve tomorrow.”
Superman’s face was unreadable, but he was clearly surprised by her explanation given his lack of response.
“You were baking these for Clark?” he said finally.
She nodded, then rolled her eyes and shrugged. “So much for that idea. I just wanted to do something nice for him. He’s…my friend. I know I’m not always easy to put up with. I….”
She trailed off, unsure how to finish that sentence. Her feelings for Clark were so complicated, so confusing. He drove her crazy sometimes. He challenged her and butted heads with her and refused to be intimidated by her. But last week, when she thought she had only days left to live, she had realized he was the only person she would miss.
“You’re his friend too,” Superman said softly, jolting her from her memories. “You’re not hard to put up with. He doesn’t think that.”
She shrugged awkwardly. “I always say the wrong thing,” she said, cringing as her memory supplied a slideshow of cutting remarks. “I don’t mean to. I…. He’s a good partner. I never thought I could work with a partner before I met him. I’m not good at it. I’m not good at sharing. But Clark is different. I just thought if I….”
She waved a hand at the oven and sighed. She just thought if she could do something nice for him, he would understand that beneath all her bluster and hard edges, she cared about him and wanted him to be happy.
“He cares about you too, Lois,” Superman said quietly, as if he had read her thoughts. “And just between you and me, I don’t think he’s all that disappointed to be spending the holiday here with you rather than going home to Smallville.”
Her head snapped up, her heart racing in a way that she really didn’t want to think about too carefully. “Really?”
He nodded, and gave her a sweet smile. “Really.”
“Well, I…. There’s really no one I’d rather spend Christmas with,” she admitted. “But if you tell him that, I’ll deny I ever said it.”
Superman laughed and nodded his agreement. “Fair enough.” He tilted his head to the side suddenly, listening, and then gave her an apologetic smile. “I have to go.”
She nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “And…Merry Christmas.”
“Merry Christmas, Lois,” he said. Then he took a few quick strides toward the window, and was gone in the blink of an eye.
It was only after he was gone that she thought to wonder why she had spent this rare time alone with him discussing her relationship with Clark, rather than trying to get to know him better or asking him about his feelings for her.
Lois cleaned up the kitchen, rolling her eyes at her hubris as she scrubbed the cooling racks. She had been so sure that her brilliant idea was going to be a baking game changer. She didn’t have any more chocolate chips and didn’t have the energy to start the whole baking process over again anyway. She’d just have to find something else nice to do for Clark, she reasoned. Maybe they could grab dinner after work.
She fell asleep quickly that night and woke with the hazy memory of her dreams — carols by the fire and prairies covered in snow.
When she arrived at work, Clark was already at his desk, whistling something that sounded like a cross between jingle bells and a dying goose, and she couldn’t help but smile. What he lacked in musical talent, he made up for in enthusiasm, and it was contagious.
On her desk, beside her keyboard, was a steaming cup of coffee and a red and white striped tin. She sat and reached for the tin, turning it around in her hands for a minute before deciding to open it. By the time she eased off the lid, Clark was leaning against her desk grinning.
“My mom sent a care package,” he said with a grin. “Best chocolate chip cookies in the universe.”
“I thought you said they were the best chocolate chip cookies in Kansas,” she said with a laugh. “Did she get a promotion?”
“Trust me,” he said. “There’s nothing better. I asked her to send extra for you.”
Lois’ heart fluttered at the idea of Clark talking to his mother about her, asking his mother to bake cookies for her.
“Thank you,” she said, pulling a cookie from the tin. “They look amazing.”
She broke the cookie in half and smiled automatically at the way it bent and broke so easily, the chips soft enough that a smear of chocolate rubbed across her thumb. She inhaled the warm, sweet scent.
“Do you have plans for dinner?” Clark asked softly. “If not, I was thinking maybe we could go out and celebrate. It’s our first Christmas together. As partners.”
“Partners,” Lois echoed. “That sounds…really nice. I’d like that.”
Clark beamed at her, and he heart fluttered in a way that was becoming surprisingly familiar.
“Try your cookie,” he prompted.
She nodded, and then held out half to him. He raised an eyebrow in surprise, but accepted the half she had given him, and together they bit into their treats.
The cookie was soft and sweet and chewy and rich, and she could feel Clark’s warm, tender gaze on her face as she chewed.
And he was right; it was the best cookie in the universe.
