I've already received the first threats ( weak attempt at humour).
I think you'll soon notice why I said you would kill me. I'm not a fan of deathfics, so this is
NONE. I think I've said this once in a while.
Disclaimer: No, I'm not suffering from any strange kind of early on - setting mental disease, that makes me forget what I've written previously. Blame it on Classicalla
She wanted unexpected plot-twists. See where this leads you
(Thank you by the way. And thanks to LaraMoon for beta-reading this remaining sane enough to finish the story)
From part 7: “Lois, I’m not a baby and I’m not totally invalid. I need to get up, Dr. Klein advised me to walk around. Speaking of that, have you seen my crutches?”
“They are next to your bed, Clark,” Lois replied.
“They aren’t, else I would have seen them.” He shrugged.
“I didn’t take them.” Lois stated. “Time for breakfast now. Your mother had already prepared most of it. So, don’t worry about the taste!” She said wryly.
“As if I would, darling.” Clark kissed her when she came close enough to him.
Part 8: Everything was according to his plan, so far. He was quite content. Kent was suffering. And not only Kent; every single one of his targets reacted just the way he had planned. And none of them knew that he was behind it, yet. Kent and Lane soon would know it, but that wasn’t going to help them. The only one to blame for their death would be “p53”. This was going to be great. A perfect plan that wasn’t relying on others. Soon their way would lead them to “p53”, not to him. Then his revenge would be complete.
* * *
They didn’t find the crutches, though they searched the whole house. Neither Martha nor Jonathan had any idea where they could be. Jonathan had promised to get new crutches as soon as possible. Clark had had breakfast in bed. After that, he tried once more to get up. His strength was gradually returning, enabling him to hobble on his hurt leg. He needed a wall to support him and couldn’t walk far, but that was better than having to stay in bed. Clark knew that his healing ability was slowly kicking in. He decided to keep silent about the pain he was feeling. Lois would put him directly back into bed if he admitted the hurt.
Lois saw no point in staying at home. She would be able to find out more about Carla and the stranger who had attacked Clark if she went to the Planet. Actually, Clark had convinced her to go to work. Martha and Jonathan were there to support him and he seemed to obey his mother slightly better than he did Lois. Since she never listened to what he said, she couldn’t actually blame him for that.
So Lois entered the newsroom of the Planet at about ten o’clock in the morning. She noticed that Perry was checking his wristwatch with a hint of anger on his face. Lois didn’t really care since anger had seemingly become his second nature over the last couple of days. Clark being ill provided her with the excuse for not coming at all. Perry should honor her effort instead of shooting angry glances at her.
Perry remained silent concerning her coming late, but Lois would have said a lot if he had dared complain. But apart from his glances she didn’t see any of him. Jimmy came instead and placed a mug of coffee on her desk. She looked up at him, smiled and leaned back in her chair.
“Thanks, Jimmy,” she said.
“You’re welcome. After all, it’s just coffee,” he replied with a grin.
“I don’t mean just the coffee. You did a good job with your investigation. We owe you one,” Lois smiled at him broadly.
Jimmy blushed at the praise and mumbled a thank you. He looked over to Clark’s desk and for a moment a question seemed to be on the tip of his tongue. However he didn’t ask it, instead he left Lois and strolled through the newsroom, searching for work.
Lois drove her attention back to her work and loaded her computer files. The stories she and Clark had been working on Monday were already published. They had vanished from her desktop and remained in the archive. Lois didn’t look at them. Perry had given the new stories to other reporters, since he knew that Lois and Clark weren’t coming to work. There were a couple of appointments, though, that she needed to attend this morning. Lois had still a bit time left to go through her notes on Carla.
She looked at her desktop, searching for the file name, but she didn’t see it. For the thousandth time she promised herself to finally organize her computer. She looked a second time, but the file still wasn’t there. Did she remember the wrong name? She shook her head. What other name might she have chosen? But none of the other possibilities were anywhere to be seen either.
That led her to the conclusion that someone had deleted that file. Perry? She knew very well that Perry wouldn’t really stop his reporters from digging out the truth. Even if he didn’t believe in a story, he gave each one a chance. They had found some of the best stories in events that had looked rather boring at first. And the death of a human was something worth investigating.
She didn’t really consider Perry as a suspect. Who could it be? Carla’s hotel room had been devastated, her murderer had been searching for something. Maybe he had thought that Lois’ computer file could harm him in some way. So had it been him? It scared her that someone would walk into the Planet and go through her computer.
Of course he couldn’t really delete her files. There were frequent back-ups during the night. It would take her a little time to get back the file, but she could work on it later.
Lois sighed and stood up to go to her first interview for the day. Clark would be concerned now if he knew that someone, possibly a murderer, had been in their newsroom. And of course he wouldn’t allow her to go anywhere alone. Well, she never cared for that.
* * *
Her appointments filled nearly the entire day. None of them were interesting and she silently whished that she had stayed at home with Clark. She would finish one interview and barely have enough time to get to the next one. It was one of those days that were stuck in routine work. It didn’t leave her much time to think about Carla and the lost files. When Lois returned to the Planet in the early afternoon, she had a whole lot of writing to do to finish the articles in time.
She already knew that she wouldn’t find the missing files today. At least not by herself, so she waited for Jimmy to have a bit of spare time. But Jimmy seemed quite busy himself, running around and going into Perry’s office repeatedly. Lois assumed that Perry was working on a story himself and had asked Jimmy to do some of the research.
It was already evening by the time Lois stopped feeling like she was buried under a pile of work. She finished her last article and submitted it to the editor. She leaned back, pleased that she had finally managed to write the last story and allowed herself to think about returning home. Lois wondered what Clark had done all day.
When Jimmy saw that Lois relaxed in her seat instead of typing frantically, he approached her with another mug. This time it was tea, since it was so late in the day. He placed it on her table and received a smile.
“Thank you again, Jimmy. You saved my day, do you know that?”
“With pleasure, Mrs. Kent, with pleasure,” he replied teasingly. “Tell me, where’s that husband of yours? Perry’s already breathing fire and brimstone. A dragon is a lap dog compared to him. I offered to ask you because I didn’t want to see you dying so soon in your life.”
“Why’s Perry so angry? The two of you should remember that Clark is injured. He can barely walk. He’s not up to coming to work yet,” Lois said, annoyed that Perry was still so testy. She remembered him being the most understanding boss she had ever had. Where was this guy now?
“Clark injured?” Jimmy asked, obviously surprised.
“Yes, injured,” said a man, through clenched teeth.
Clark was standing in the middle of the newsroom, leaning on his crutches and watching Lois and Jimmy. Then he approached them, leaning heavily on his crutches. His efforts looked a lot more deft than the evening before. His arms were strong enough now to deal with his body’s weight. His face was a sheer expression of confusion.
“Boy....what happened to you?” Jimmy said, barely believing what he saw. Clark seemed so healthy all the time that he almost considered him invulnerable. It was a shock to see that theory proven wrong.
“Jimmy?” Lois shot him a glance as if he had become crazy.
“What’s the matter? Ain’t I allowed to ask?” Jimmy complained.
“We already told you yesterday!” Lois stated impatiently. “But I’ve no time to discuss this with you. Jimmy, I need you to dig out some files that were on my computer on Monday. Someone has deleted them.”
“Someone has deleted files from your computer?” Clark said, alarmed. “Those about Carla?”
Lois nodded. Jimmy looked very confused and opened his mouth to say something. He shook his head, rethinking his words, closed his mouth again, only to reopen it a moment later.
“You were here on Monday? Wow, you’re darn good at hiding,” he said hoarsely. “No one has seen you here since last Friday. And what does that mean, you’ve told me yesterday? I didn’t see you yesterday! Why do you think Perry is so furious? He’s been scared to death all week because he couldn’t reach you for days.”
“Huh? I clearly remember calling you yesterday. You even came over to give us the results of your investigation. Are you suffering from some strange kind of amnesia? After all, it would be your turn,” Lois replied, laughing though she saw nothing funny about it.
Clark had remained silent, stuck in his own thoughts. But his expression had changed from confusion to sadness. He cleared his throat to draw Lois’ and Jimmy’s attention to him.
“I don’t think Jimmy’s suffering from amnesia. Something weird is going on, Lois. I called Henderson today to ask him if he had any news about the murder. He said that he had never heard of a Carla Seefeld,” he explained. “I barely dare to say it out loud, but we seem to be the ones getting crazy.”
“You don’t mean that we imagined what happened this week? What about your leg?” Lois asked, refusing to believe what was becoming more and more obvious.
“Hurts like hell,” Clark admitted. “Must have happened.”
“Okay, let’s assume Carla didn’t die on Monday. Was there a fire at S.T.A.R. Labs?” Lois decided to give the whole idea a try.
“What?” Jimmy shouted.
“I take this as a ‘no’,” Lois replied with a nod. “But we did take the weekend off, didn’t we?”
“Yes. You told me that Clark’s parents were going to visit you,” Jimmy agreed.
“Okay, so somewhere between Friday and Monday something happened to us,” Clark stated. “Let’s do a little brainstorming here. Any ideas?”
“Alternate universe?” Lois offered. “Tempus gives it a new try?”
“Virtual reality? Xavier has been able to escape or someone else has started to follow in his footsteps?” Clark brought in another idea.
“Have you opened any cupboards in the last couple of days? And don’t we need a virtual helmet or anything like that?” Lois mentioned.
“I don’t remember being near anything related to computers in the last days. So maybe virtual reality isn’t it,” Clark decided. “Tempus is a possibility. But can he stay out of sight for days? He is so vain that I barely believe he wouldn’t let us know it was him sooner.”
“It might be someone else, anyway. We can’t possibly know every villain, though I sometimes get the impression that we do,” Lois said with a wry smile.
Both Lois and Clark found it very disturbing that someone seemed to have such an influence on their lives. It had been awful enough that Clark or rather Superman had been shot. But how was it possible that they had been in another universe or wherever they had really been? The worst of all was that they couldn’t be sure what was real and what wasn’t. Had Martha and Jonathan really lost their farm? Unlike Jimmy, they remembered what they had endured during the week. Assuming it was indeed an alternate universe they had stayed in since the weekend, when had they left it? This morning? An hour ago?
The disappearance of the crutches had gained a new meaning in these circumstances. It was the first sign that something had been different from the day before. Somehow, between the week-end and sometime on Wednesday, they’d been living in separate worlds. Jimmy hadn’t been in their home.
“There is another possibility occurring to me,” Lois whispered to Clark. “What if we hadn’t been in another universe yesterday, but are now?”
“You may be right. That would explain why Tempus hasn’t shown up yet,” Clark nodded.
But how were they supposed to find out? They couldn’t do it on their own, so much was sure. Since Jimmy knew Lois, they couldn’t be in that alternate universe Lois already had visited. Why were things always becoming so complicated around them?
* * *
Somehow they had escaped his influence. He wasn’t really sure how, but it didn’t matter, anyway. He was prepared for it. He would have loosened his grip on them within the next couple of days, anyway. He had relished every single moment, but he didn’t regret that this part was over now. He had longed for the next step, though he had waited patiently, drinking in the sweet bitterness of the unfulfilled. His revenge would soon reach its climax now. He would await that moment with the same patience. Every single moment that brought him nearer to his goal increased his longing. And it intensified the tension that called for release, making his revenge more and more exciting.
All he needed now was to put the actors at the right positions. He would start with “p53”. Kent and Lane didn’t need his attention. They were smart enough to figure out on their own how they would solve this puzzle. If they didn’t, he would guide them to their destination, though he would be disappointed by the couple. He closed his eyes, concentrating on “p53”.
