Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Investigate: Alternate Possibilities (1/5)

Note: First things first—stop right now if you’re not caught up through Investigate: Horizon (Act V) and you don’t want spoilers! If you’re not caught up and/or don’t care about spoilers, the prologue should provide enough context for you, I think? That, and you might want to know that this Investigate Superman/Clark goes by Kal a lot, and
Summary: “[It’s] strange, you know, missing someone you’ve never even met. I tried to find her, but…it’s impossible.” Help from an unexpected source suddenly makes the impossible...very possible. A special vignette in the Investigate universe of Blueowl, intended to be read after Investigate: Horizon (Act V).

Author’s Note: Given that Investigate: Horizon is now the fourth of the five stories in the series I’ve BR’d for Blueowl, I really shouldn’t be surprised that she keeps surprising me! But not only did the act’s main plot surprise me, so did the little “detour” she had planned for Kal on his way home to Lois. I surely squealed with delight when she told me! And likely gushed happily about how amazingly happy my dear altClark would be. Then, somewhere between me mentioning I would LOOOOVE to see the look on his face when he sees his Lois and then wondering about the fact that poor altClark might have trouble believing the news...well... I signed myself up to write this story! So I have to say a huge thank you to Blueowl for creating this situation AND then letting me write it.

A huge, super thanks to SuperBek and Blueowl both for their feedback, comments, and suggestions as I wrote!

Investigate: Alternate Possibilities
by KSaraSara

Prologue
by Blueowl

...from Investigate: Horizon (Act V)

“When we arrive, it is imperative no one sees you. So wait above the clouds until her room is empty before going in,” Wells said.

“What happened to Lois here?” Kal asked.

“A few years ago, she had tracked down some gun smugglers in the Congo. From there, I have only rough guesses, nothing concrete, other than that she was moved to the long-term care facility earlier this year after being relocated from a mission hospital in another country.”

“What are her injuries?” Kal asked.

“I suppose it is best I prepare you,” he said heavily, resigned. “Again, I don’t know how this happened, but her files state that when she was first brought into the hospital, she had internal injuries and third-degree burns on her body, including her face. Most of that damage has healed as well as can be expected, but the heart of the matter is the trauma to her skull and brain, which is why she’s in a coma. Truly, it's a miracle she’s still here.”

Kal took a deep breath and brought his fist to his mouth.

“Alright there, my boy?” Wells asked.

He nodded stiffly. “Yeah. Just hard to imagine that happening to Lois. Any Lois.”

“Yes. It is distressing,” Wells agreed solemnly.

A moment later, they materialized in the alt-world.

Kal looked around. It was night, and they were in a field behind an outcrop of trees, away from prying eyes.

“The facility is that way, and her room should be on the third floor, west side. The name they have her under is Maria Hughes,” Wells said. “Long story that I’m still working out.”

“Alright. Any idea on how much time I may have?” Kal asked.

“I can’t imagine more than an hour,” Wells estimated.

Kal nodded as another thought came to him. “That should be plenty of time.”

“I’ll wait here,” Wells stated.

“If at all possible, when I leave, Lois will be fully healed. I can’t imagine the consequences of that being small,” Kal said pointedly.

“I understand. I’ll address it if need be,” Wells said.

Kal stilled. He frankly doubted Wells truly understood, and Kal was hesitant to elaborate, simply because . . . this man did not fill him with much confidence.

If this Lois was as bad off as Wells had said, there would be lasting consequences for Lois once Kal healed her. Like Melissa, she might even obtain an aura of her own, which was anyone’s guess to what it could mean for her.

Kal couldn’t keep that knowledge from any Lois.

“Okay,” he told Wells, before disappearing into the sky.

He shot beyond the facility, seeking the nearest post office. Ignoring his conscience, he broke in after checking for cameras, snatched a paper, pen, and necessary postage, and wrote the fastest letter he had ever penned before dropping it in the outgoing mailbox and leaving a few dollars on the register.

Hopefully it would make it to the States once things had settled enough and Lois had returned.

He shot back to the facility, and a minute later, Kal was waiting above the clouds over the room of this world’s Lois Lane. Waiting for the nurse to leave.

And then Lois was alone in the room.

He shot down before he allowed himself to fully process what he was flying into.

The smell of sanitizer slammed into his nose as he softly shut and locked the room’s door, but the sight of the fragile form on the bed struck the center of his heart far, far, harder when he turned around.

The scarring from the facial burn was in clear sight, and the hook-ups to the life monitoring and sustaining equipment were substantial, including a ventilator.

Without much conscious thought, he approached the bed and relaxed his aura, just enough, and expanded it around her as he took hold of her scarred hand.

It was Lois, but definitely not his Lois. However, as harmed as she was, she was still beautiful. Her life force sang, however distantly.

He slowly exhaled and peered deeper, both with his eye and his aura.

The trauma was worse than what Wells had summarized. A part of her liver had been removed as well as the kidney on that side, and he could sense the reduced blood flow to the rest of her liver slowly causing a decline in function. The bottom most lobe of her right lung had also been removed, and, from the shape of her ribs, it was clear they had been the reason such a surgery had been required. Burn scars covered her face, neck, and both hands, and the skull fractures, while now healed, had left her brain to cope with the aftermath, and it wasn’t getting better.

He took a deep breath and braced himself as he knelt at her bedside. There was no time for hesitation.

He gently placed his left hand on her forehead with his right hand in her own, knowing skin-to-skin was best.

Distantly, he wondered if his alternate self would one day place his hand where he was, and if he would find as much joy in her as he did in his Lois. He hoped so. No one should have to live their life alone.

With that extra motivation, he allowed his aura to saturate her.

The pull from his center was intense, but not as severe as he had prepared himself for, though that may have been due to being distracted by her body healing and feeling how much her life force resembled Lois’s.

Beeping from the machines began to sound, but he paid them little mind. His attention was fixed on Lois, oblivious to the sudden activity happening outside the room.

The old burns on her hands, face, and neck bled away, leaving behind baby-like, pink skin. The scar tissue from the surgeries evaporated, and arteries and capillaries grew and branched out, revitalizing choked areas of tissue and pockets of struggling brain matter. Slowly dying organs surged back to life and her partial liver grew to its former size, once again carrying out its full function. Her incomplete lung strengthened, and he had to react to her fighting the ventilator by abruptly removing the ventilation tube from her throat.

“The door is locked!” someone exclaimed.

“How could that have happened?! Who has the keys to this hall?” another shouted.

Kal forced himself to his feet, his vision swimming with emotion and exhaustion.

The IV lines that had been attached to Lois fell free, and he could feel her awareness scratching to the surface. The sound of a key entering a lock roared in his ears just as he managed to collect himself enough to locate the window.

He shot out and into the sky without a moment to spare.

“Kal! Good heavens, are you alright?” Wells asked as Kal landed heavily not far from the time machine.

He fell to his hands and knees, panting.

“That . . . that was pretty close,” he gasped.

“But you did it? She's better and no one saw you?” Wells asked anxiously.

“Yes . . . and no one saw me,” he agreed, his breathing still ragged. “But they’ll have two mysteries: her recovery and . . . the locked door to her room. Argh, and the window.”

“Given the alternatives, that’s perfectly acceptable,” Wells assured, even as he grew more concerned by Kal’s state. “Are you okay?”

“I need sunlight. Get me home,” Kal wheezed, climbing into the wicker chair of the time machine.

Wells quickly nodded, turning dials before pulling the lever. “Hold on!”


Chapter 1

Lois woke with a start—breathing fast and looking around, trying to get her bearings but failing. There was panicked shouting all around her, people rushing into the room she was in. A room she never remembered entering.

It looked...it looked like a hospital room. But not quite.

People in white coats and blue scrubs swarmed around her, clutching at wires and tubes that had fallen and continuing to speak frantically, mostly to each other, while pressing buttons on machines, silencing their beeping. Their English was...accented, Spanish, maybe.

When the chaos finally died down, they all looked at her with alarm and confusion and then began firing so many questions at her all at once. She couldn't seem to keep up or understand or fully grasp their complete sentences, only a word here or there: how...what....miracle...no scars...breathing...magic...impossible.

Lois had hardly caught her breath, and her mind was still reeling. They were calling her Maria—Ms. Hughes—and it suddenly all came back to her with an intense flood of memories.

Gun smugglers. Discovered. Captured. Tortured. Escape. And then...on the run. By foot. Then in a vehicle. And the ill-fated trip through a minefield. Explosions. Then blackness.

“Where am I?” she finally asked.

The cacophony of voices fell to a hush at her words, and one of them answered, a woman in well-fitted scrubs with a name tag that read Jessica. “You’re in Lisbon, Portugal.”

Faint, indistinct images and sensations tugged at the edge of her consciousness, not quite a dream, but maybe memories. A crushing weight against her skull and chest, sharp, stabbing pains throughout her body. Then a sense of relief that must have been the point at which she’d lost consciousness.

How had...? She was alive and felt...fine. Better than fine. If it weren’t for the confused and anxious medical staff circling what was clearly a hospital bed, and her decided disbelief in some sort of afterlife, Lois might have assumed she was somewhere otherworldly.

They all hovered, now apparently all out of words, speechless, as if they couldn’t even figure out what questions to ask her. An image flashed in her mind, and she exhaled slowly—scars covering her face and a breathing tube down her throat. A pulse of anguish came with it, and she had to bite back a whimper.

Well, she had questions if they didn’t. “I was...hurt?”

Heads nodded and eyes shifted from each other and then back to Lois.

“And...now I’m better?”

More nodding, but hesitant, still looking bewildered. The woman, Jessica, shuffled her feet, her eyes darting to the open window and then the door, her brow creasing in confusion or worry. “M-much im-improved...” She glanced down at her shoes and back up again. “Ms. Hughes? Was...was there anyone in the room with you?”

Lois shook her head automatically, unsure of her answer but less sure she could trust these people. She also decided it would be unwise to correct the assumption about her identity until she knew more about where she was and what had happened since the off-road Jeep had exploded with her inside it. She swallowed thickly as she wondered what had become of the other passengers and the driver, and if he had perhaps steered them all into the minefield knowingly.

If she was twice-escaped already, she needed to be careful. “I...am I cleared to go home?”

The staff eyed each other again, and a bespectacled man in a white coat nodded to a woman in a white coat, who responded with a short nod of her own as she removed the stethoscope from her neck and approached Lois.

Lois sat nervously, trying to breathe in and out normally while the doctor—Dr. Silva according to the name stitched into her white coat—poked and prodded and shined lights in her eyes, reporting to the team in rapid-fire Portuguese. Finally finished, Dr. Silva stepped back and conferred in hushed tones with the others, who cast anxious glances at Lois every so often.

Sadly no stranger to being captured and held by those she was trying to put away, Lois stayed quiet for the moment, just eyeing them. This situation was definitely the most unusual one she’d ever been in—and more concerning was her lack of short-term memories. She had no idea if these people were her rescuers or her captors. Until she figured that out, she needed to play nice, feign innocence of all investigative cri—activities, and hope they’d offer more information during the course of their conversation.

Dr. Silva stepped forward once again and faced Lois. “Ms. Hughes...you were nonresponsive...in a persistent vegetative state for—”

“You mean in a coma?” That...didn’t seem right. “For how long?” she asked. Though having been in a coma would explain having no memory of time that had passed since the explosion.

Eyes cast about the room again, and no one answered immediately. The doctor’s hesitancy unnerved Lois.

“What aren’t you telling me?”

“Your condition has been steadily declining for the past few weeks. We...hadn’t expected...” Dr. Silva trailed off as though she was searching for the right word. “...this.” She nodded in Lois’s direction.

“What does that mean?” And why were they being so evasive, so suspicious?

“You—you...” One of the other doctors tried to speak.

Jessica spoke up, taking a few steps past the doctor and toward Lois’s bed. “You’ve been in a coma for two years now, Ms. Hughes. Until a few weeks ago, your condition never changed. We thought that—”

“Two years?!” Lois exclaimed, her heart beginning to race. “How did I even get here, get to Portugal?” The last thing she remembered before the Jeep...she’d still been in Africa.

“The ​​Mission Internationale Mont-Sinaï near Brazzaville—sometimes they get overloaded with patients...given, uh...well, you realized, I’m sure, the dangers of the country... In any case, you were brought here earlier this year, and...”

“I just woke up? And...” She turned her head to look at Dr. Silva. “I’m fine now, right? Cleared to go?”

It wasn’t until several hours later that she was actually cleared to leave. They’d insisted on running a battery of tests—and after they’d told her about the severity of her injuries, she’d agreed. The doctors and staff were still left scratching their heads after they’d run every test and scan they could think of. Nothing could explain why or how she’d woken up without any of her previous scars or injuries.

But Lois had the answers she needed—she was leaving with a clean bill of health...somehow even healthier than when she’d left Metropolis so many years ago, save for two things. Some emergency surgery performed at the mission hospital had apparently required the removal of a small part of her right lung, which didn’t seem to have regenerated as the rest of her body had healed. And she was still missing her right kidney from having donated it to Lucy ten years ago. But other than that, she was fine. Better than fine. So fine, in fact, that her scar from the kidney removal was...gone. And so was the scarring on her left leg from the time she’d broken it freshman year of high school.

She had plenty of time to be baffled, scared even, at how she’d managed to escape near-death and come out better off. When she got home, she could have all the feelings she wanted.

Home first. Feelings later.

The following morning, she found herself standing in front of several very bewildered-looking officials at the U.S. Embassy in Lisbon as she explained, not so patiently, that she was indeed the Lois Lane who had gone missing four years prior.

After a year held prisoner, almost a year on the run, and apparently two years in a coma, Lois was finding it near-impossible to wait as long as this process was taking. It’d taken a call to no fewer than five U.S. government officials and one stunned and verklempt Perry White—who she’d heard bark a loud “Judas Priest” through the phone, startling the ambassador. Then, finally, she’d secured her way home.

She’d lucked out; there’d been a single seat left on the last trans-Atlantic flight of the day. Luck. Or a miracle. And it had to have been the former, because her return from the brink of death could have only been a miracle, and miracles didn’t happen twice in one day.

Comments