Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Undercover Reporter: Resurrection (2/17)

Sometimes, in the very back of his brain, just for a moment, he even wished that they could leave behind the rest of the world – including the mess he’d made of their lives. They could live far beyond the reach of the masses he hid his identity from, far from everyone who’d known Clark, who wanted to hurt Lois, who inimically sought Superman.

And she would be safe.

And they could have a life – together.

But, he reminded himself, that wasn’t what Superman did.

He cast those thoughts aside, determined to clear his mind. Instead, he mentally calculated how much time was left before she’d be in his arms again.

Focusing back on the lights of the nearing Denver International Airport, the jumbo jet on his back felt lighter at the thought of seeing her.





Lois’ day had started out simply enough.

For the last few weeks, she’d been tracking down a group she suspected of fencing stolen diamonds. Aside from the intriguing little detail that her thieves seemed to already be rolling in dough, it had been a fairly arduous, time-consuming and, alright, boring investigation until tonight.

The story was another in her series on the continuing plague of the ‘House of Luthor’ and its fallout in Metropolis. Sick of stumbling upon Luthor’s also-ran, would-be successors through their acts of public malice, she’d decided to take the reins and put the criminals on her timetable, instead of the other way around.

With a little unofficial help from her favorite precinct sparring partner, she’d acquired her own copy of the Luthor Corp look book. Of course, there were far too many people to just start investigating them one by one. Besides, not every one of them would turn out to be a criminal, even though Luthor’s corruption had been disturbingly wide.

So she’d drafted a little more unofficial help, this time of the super variety, in acquiring – or ‘borrowing,’ as she’d phrased it to him – an old Luther Corp hard drive from the partly pillaged office building.

A little more unofficial help from her trusty office lock-pick turned hacker, and she was able to access all of the now defunct property deeds and inventory lists from the once mighty Luthor Corp.

Materials ready and allies aligned, she got to work.

Cross-referencing all of the buildings on the inventory list with Luthor’s shell companies had been laborious, to say the least. The more companies she had to slough through to find a connection, the nastier the contents of the building would prove to be. It was the type of thing she’d normally hand over to Jimmy. But she’d noticed that Luthor liked to hide unlikely little details right out where you could see them, and Lois had made an in-depth, posthumous study of the real Luthor. So it only made sense that she, the world’s only, unofficial expert on the mind of Lex Luthor, painstakingly took the project on herself.

No matter how creepy or surreal it was to continually retread the tracks of her perfidious paramour. She'd swallowed down any concept of an emotional cost for this penance. After allowing Luthor to get as far as he did unchecked, she felt it was her duty to clean up the mess she'd allowed to be made. And, she conceded, it was a bit easier to stand with a certain super beau by her side.

So once she'd finally made it through the cross-referencing bonanza, she held a list of locations short enough for her to check out in person. It would take her a while – even longer than it took to make the list. But she could do it.

Plus, any other part of this investigation would be better than sitting around reading down the list of real estate holdings her almost-husband had owned during his duplicitous reign as criminal overlord.

In her role as the unofficial Luthor Corp clean-up girl, dubbed so by the appreciative detectives at the MPD, and reluctantly accepted by her very anti-anything-Luthor partner, she meticulously inspected run-down warehouses, abandoned chop shops, ‘private’ docking slips and a series of other cobwebbed edifices across the city. The locations were spread out, most of them nondescript places that someone’s eye would naturally pass over. Luthor had cleverly hidden most of his criminal dealings in plain sight.

…if someone knew where to look.

Now Lois knew.

And when she had some super help, things tended to go even faster.

Having such an easy excuse to go flying brought an irrepressible smile to her face.

At least, it had, at first.

She still loved to fly with him. She just wished she could find as easy an excuse to spend time with Clark Kent as she did with Superman. In the days after they’d found their way back to one another, she’d been so relieved to have him back that she was content to take him as she’d found him, regardless of which Suit he’d been wearing. But as time had passed, she’d started to miss the ease and anonymity that came with Clark Kent.

It had been harder trying to date a superhero than she’d initially realized it would be. They couldn’t be seen together frequently, which meant what she considered an obsessive amount of discretion. She had to pretend not to care for him if anyone else was around. And even alone, she rarely saw him fully shed the Superman persona and just relax.

The longer she spent with the man who now only wore the Suit, the more she realized that it was Clark Kent that she’d fallen for.

And she missed him.

It helped, though, that Superman was still moonlighting as her undercover reporting partner for the Daily Planet.

After their first stake-out together on Mercy Graves’ fledgling drug running op, she’d come to believe there was a code to the main inventory list. The more innocuous the listing’s tag, the more nefarious goods she’d find. Graves’ warehouse had confirmed that anything related to ‘electrics’ was drug-related. ‘Office supplies’ turned out to be some kind of equipment that had been ruled as medical, but looked to her like it belonged on the set of a Frankenstein movie.

But it wasn’t the drugs or medical experiments that perturbed her.

It was the ‘antiques.’

The tag was spelled with an ‘x’ on the documents – a special marker to those in the know that this was one of Lex’s very special interests. So when she first saw the ‘Antiqxes’ label, she knew it wasn’t a simple typo.

In fact, she’d bet Superman’s cape that ‘antiqxes’ was the code word for kryptonite.

It was finding that 'antiqxes' tag that led her to discover that her own over-protective mode, once switched on, rivaled Clark’s. She’d made it to both locations that had listed ‘antiqxes’ in their inventory within the first 3 hours of her search.

Both had turned up empty.

She'd nearly burned the second building down in response.

Did this mean that someone had beaten her to the kryptonite? Was there someone out there who wanted to hurt Superman and now had a weapon that could actually do it? After all, only a small group of people would have spotted the ‘x’ code. Of those, the number that were actually free to pursue the treasure where ‘x’ had marked the spot shrank to an impossibly small group after the arrests that followed her near-miss of a wedding. Now it looked like one of them had beaten her to kryptonite not once but twice.

Her anxiety level rose and remained.

It had felt like Lex himself was laughing at her, reaching up from his grave to trip her. Every time she thought she’d escaped him, there was another reminder that Lex Luthor was still all too present.

Despite her perturbation, she’d been forced to pursue other inventory tags when ‘antiqxes’ only turned up dead ends.

Tonight, the building she was visiting had listed ‘women’s sanitary products’ on the inventory. As Lois searched, she’d found that Luthor had injected his cruel sense of humor into the tags, just like every other part of his business. Lex might have pursued pleasure, but he’d never had much use for diamonds as anything other than convenient bait for women. Knowing him, she was guessing that the ‘women’s products’ tag would lead to her diamonds.

A misogynist right to the end, she thought, scowling. The man had been truly irredeemable.

The storage warehouse holding the ‘women’s sanitary products’ was owned by a shell company that was eight whole degrees away from Luthor Corp. Since it was such a distant connection on the paperwork, she had initially pegged it as one that stored something very, very bad. That hadn’t quite added up to diamonds in her mind, but maybe there was something she was missing. After all, she was still cracking the code of Lex’s labeling system.

When she got there, the “Luxe Soaps” sign hanging over the door had reinforced her suspicions. She hadn't yet decided if it was caprice or hubris, but Lex always marked his territory with ‘x’s.’

She’d been to this particular run-down facility already a few weeks back. When it had been completely empty, she'd crossed it off her list and left. On a hunch, she returned again the next week – to find it still empty. Even the decaying signage out front suggested that the Luxe Soaps building was long out of business, both legitimate and illicit.

But she couldn’t shake the nagging feeling that someone had been there, that Luthor had left behind something insidious. She’d developed a sixth sense about this kind of thing, since her unofficial appointment to the Luthor Corp clean-up crew. All of his facilities had something nasty hidden away in them. After all, he hadn’t planned on his business ending that ill-fated day he was supposed to marry her. Therefore, it struck her as even more suspicious to find this one completely clean.

And so she went back.

The third time she dropped in with no results, she had called in a little super-assistance. His eye had turned the building over twice at her insistence, but he hadn’t seen anything Luthor-worthy.

But then he’d asked her if she’d noticed the fresh tire tracks. They looked like they’d already been driven over, so it was impossible to track the tread. But they were wide-set, which might have come from a pick-up truck or cargo van, they’d concluded.

The tracks began, or ended, she supposed, along the back door. The door itself was the metal type that rolled up and was wider than standard. You might not get a van in, but you could get something sizable out.

She’d snuck in alone twice more later that week, but the building remained innocent. Frustrated, but unwilling to let go of this lead after her ‘antiqxes’ failure, she called in her super support again and asked him to keep the building on his radar.

As usual, he didn't disappoint her. The next week, her investigating partner had stopped by to tell her the news that there were fresh tire tracks at her mystery warehouse again. That was twice in a row that the tracks had shown up on a Tuesday night.

She’d decided it was high time for a good, old-fashioned stake-out.

Now she just had to wait a week.

Lois had never been very good at waiting, and just the thought was making her twitchy. But she did have a few other research projects to tackle in the meantime. Plus, a slow week seemed like the perfect time to try and talk Clark into a dinner out – in a foreign country, perhaps, to lend them anonymity, and and in a dimly lit restaurant, perhaps, to lend them atmosphere. Maybe then they could finally pick up on that conversation they’d started all those weeks ago about their page 8 story.

She grinned, her mind skipping back to a recent memory of sailing smoothly through the skies, cool night air on her face, strong arms holding her close.

No, she decided, a slow week could definitely have its perks!