The VW Bug had seen better days. Painted a garish pink, it was as ugly as Lois remembered, with torn seats, that strange smell coming from the passenger side floorboard, and the air conditioner that didn’t work.
This was the car that she’d sworn she’d never step foot in for the rest of her days. She’d worked long and hard to earn enough money to get away from this embarrassment of a vehicle.
In her original life, it had been the first car she’d bought for herself, after she’d left her father’s house. It had been all she could afford, even with money borrowed from every friend she had.
She had the money for a better car, but she didn’t have the time. If she bought a new vehicle, she’d spend all her money at once, leaving nothing for expenses. If she bought used, she wouldn’t know until it was too late that the transmission was smoking, and she’d be on the side of the road stranded.
Renting a car was out of the question. Her driver’s license and face said she was seventeen.
Lois scowled. At least she knew exactly what to expect from this car. It was a mediocre, smelly, gaudy piece of junk, but it was sturdy and dependable. Also, she’d known exactly where to go to find someone who wanted to sell a car. “I’ll take it.” Six hundred dollars was cheap. At least it left her plenty of money to travel with.
*************
“I’m going on a ski trip for a couple of days,” Lois said. Without the constant badgering which had made existence such hell for the both of them the first time around, he’d sunk into an apathetic mood.
He gestured absently from behind the paper, and Lois scowled. She felt old irritations rising to the surface and found herself opening her mouth to speak. Grimacing, she stopped herself and counted to twelve. She didn’t have time for this.
She grabbed her bags and headed out the door. Just because she’d been seventeen didn’t mean she hadn’t been right the first time around. Lois threw her bags onto the passenger’s side seat, slid behind the wheel and grimaced. Everything was as she had remembered it, down to the half broken knob on the radio and the strange stain on the passengers side floor.
She reached down and slipped the vehicle into gear, and pulled out of the driveway.
The traffic wasn’t as bad as she remembered, and Lois was soon out of the city. The radio was on with a deft twist of the broken knob, and the car was flooded with the sounds of the Beach Boys. Everything was going to be great. All she had to do was find Clark.
************ Everything was NOT going to be great. Lois scowled at the sign. Cars crowded together for a what seemed like a thousand miles. Her car windows fogging up due to a long forgotten problem with the defroster. She’d had that fixed the first time around…
She pulled out, trying to head for the turn off, and a group of teenagers in a convertible almost slammed into her. In traditional Metropolis fashion, Lois rolled her window down and yelled. Her horn didn’t work. She was tempted to add a gesture, but saw an opening and rushed to fill it.
She slid forward three spaces, and then found herself trapped…again.
She cursed to herself. This was going to be a fourteen hundred mile trip almost, and no one knew where she was going. That was a recipe for disaster, especially as she had five thousand dollars stashed in the trunk in the front of her car.
Somehow, the radio station had decided to play nothing but country music…old style country music. An unending diet of Hank Williams and Patsy Kline.
“I’m so lonely I could die.”
Lois groaned. This trip was going to feel like it lasted forever.
************
Lois stared at her reflection in the bathroom mirror. The place was run down and seedy, but she’d stayed at worse places during stakeouts. If she was really the seventeen year old she looked like, she might have been more worried, but years of karate lessons and a purse filled with mace were great equalizers.
Nevertheless she’d put a chair under the door. She was as tired as she’d ever been, exhausted. It wasn’t just the hours she’d been driving. It was that the temporary high she’d been on for the past three days had begun to fade. Seeing her grandmother, hearing Clark’s voice…it had broken through the fog of depression she’d been wandering around in for the past two years, almost.
In the garish, washed out light of a cracked motel mirror, those things seemed far away. She could feel the overwhelming feelings of depression returning. What did she really expect would happen when she reached Smallville?
Did she expect to show up and have Clark fall immediately to her feet, proposing marriage and children and a life together? Lois was enough of a realist to know better.
The relationship she and Clark had built before was gone now forever. They’d developed their relationship naturally, slowly developing trust. They’d become friends almost immediately, but the true depths of love had taken years to develop.
Pausing, Lois had a sudden thought. Clark had asked her out almost the first day they’d worked together. That showed that he‘d probably been attracted to her from the beginning. It might be easy to attract him, but whether she’d want him as an eighteen year old boy…Lois didn’t really know what to expect from Clark.
It seemed likely that the things that made him unique…his innate goodness, his innocence…those things would still be there.
Sighing, Lois washed her face. There wasn’t any point worrying about it. She’d know what she needed to know tomorrow. Lois’s sleep that night was fitful and restless.
***************
Lois relaxed. She’d driven twelve hours yesterday, and eight more today, with more time for fuel and food and bodily necessities, but she was finally reaching the outskirts of Smallville.
She didn’t really know the town; other than the first time she’d gone with Clark, she’d been there only a handful of times to visit the Kents. She wished she’d been able to tell them about what she was planning to do…that she’d been able to tell anyone. But in the wake of the panic overtaking the planet phone lines had been down and airports congested. Lois hadn’t been able to risk not being able to get back in time to make the trip.
Whatever else happened…whether she or Clark were ever able to find anything together or not, she was going to spare Martha Kent the pain of seeing her son dead. Clark was going to live.
It was a Saturday night, and Lois could see carloads of teenagers driving up and down the main street. Lois stiffened as she stopped at a red light, and a crowd of teenagers pulled up beside her.
A girl was driving, and the car was stuffed with too many teenagers. Looking distinctively uncomfortable in the back was a familiar figure.
Clark’s face was thinner, less well developed than it had been when he knew her. His hair was long and shaggy, almost hippyish, and his sideburns were full. In the car filled with laughing, excited teenagers, he was an oasis of calm. He was staring out the window, ignoring the blonde attempting to put her arm around his neck.
The teenage driver floored her accelerator as the light turned green, and Lois found herself cursing as she stamped on the accelerator attempting to follow.
The VW bug wasn’t able to accelerate well, and it’s top speed was nowhere near that of the yellow firebird. The other car sped away in a cloud of smoke, and all Lois could do was drive as quickly as she could trying to catch up.
It was twilight, and the sky was rapidly darkening. Luckily for Lois, it was a straight country road, and the town rapidly faded away behind them. All that was left was the open road, and the sight of the distant lights ahead of her.
They were soon joined by other lights, and Lois could see the firebird turning on a dirt road leading to a house on a hill. The house was brightly lit, and as she approached, she could see that there were other cars surrounding it.
There were fires behind the house; it was obviously a party.
Lois wasn’t dressed for a party; she’d been preparing herself to show up to his house with her cover story firmly in place. She’d do the interview and she what she could see. This…this was something completely different.
Still, from the looks of the few people she could see in the distance, things were fairly casual. Lois pulled up onto the grass, parking in the darkness a good twenty feet from the nearest car. She couldn’t see any other cars coming down the road, so she started rifling through her bag.
It was wintertime, but there was only a slight chill in the air. Lois slipped on her favorite burgundy blouse and the leather jacket her grandmother had gotten her for Christmas. It was warm, and it looked good on her. Lois had loved it the first time, and it wasn’t too bad this time around either. Leather never seemed to go completely out of style.
She checked her makeup for a moment, then slipped out of the car, nudging the door with her hip where it stubbornly refused to close. There was a trick to closing it the first time, one she’d long ago forgotten.
Walking slowly through the darkness while trying not to stumble on wayward clumps of grass and holes in the ground, Lois made her way over to the first bonfire. The entire field behind the house was in a huge depression. In the distance Lois could make out a huge pile of gravel.
The ground turned hard, and covered with pebbles.
It was a substantial party. A quick head count showed Lois that there were more than sixty people here, not counting those moving around in the darkness that she couldn’t see.
She stayed on the periphery herself, not sure how welcome she would be as a stranger, or whether she would attract the sort of attention she didn’t want. She’d done too many stories about female victims to not be aware of what could happen.
Lois stiffened as she saw him, sitting at the edge of a fire.
******************
He shouldn’t have come.
No matter what the others thought, he’d never fit in with them. Their interests ran no further than Friday night football, drinking on Saturday, and working in the feed store during the week. The fact that he was in college set him apart from them in ways that none of them wanted to admit.
His secret set him apart from everyone in the world in ways he was only now admitting to himself.
For most of his life he’d been able to wrap himself in his parents’ love. It had shielded him from most of the loneliness. Whenever the pain had become too acute, he’d been able to remind himself that he was blessed with people who loved him, good people.
Leaving home hadn’t been easy. Smallville was all he’d ever known, and going even as far as Wichita had seemed like a stretch. Part of him had wanted to believe that he’d always be happy on the farm, but the rest of him knew.
There was an entire world out there, waiting for him. He had a deep seated need to know who he was, what he was.
As she slid up beside him, Clark grimaced. He’d told Lana that things were over between them, but she hadn’t listened. He’d almost decided not to come when he saw her in the car along with Pete and Lisa.
Lana wasn’t the one.
She had prejudices, things that led him to believe that she would never accept him if she knew who he really was.
Clark had experienced feelings toward women, of course, but somehow they’d always seemed more muted than the ones his friends talked about. He’d never felt compelled by his hormones, and at times he’d been forced to wonder if there was something wrong with him.
Part of him desperately wanted love, but his parents had taught him better than to simply spread himself around. Love, sex, it all meant something, and sharing himself that way wasn’t fair to the other person if he couldn’t tell them the truth.
He’d never be able to truly love anyone who didn’t love all of him.
Movement caught his eye; at the edge of the firelight.
A girl was staring at him. She wasn’t anyone he’d seen before, but she was beautiful. Slender, with a long neck and long brunette hair. She was staring at him with a stricken look on her face.
She was beautiful.
He gasped. It was if a world which had always been in black and white was suddenly in color.
So this was love.
**************
Lois gasped as she caught him staring at her.
His eyes should have been blinded by the firelight, but she’d have sword that he saw her. The blonde beside him snuggled a little closer, and Lois found the sharp stab of envy. This was her time with him, the time they were meant together. Her time wasn’t coming for another ten years.
She’d made a mistake coming here. Clark wouldn’t be in danger for years, and if she left everything alone, he’d be certain to live to see the day. But everything she did changed things a little, increasing the chance that he might make different choices, turn left instead of right.
What if she came to work at the Planet in 1993 and he never showed up because he’d been hit by a train or something because she’d made him late with her phone call.
Lois didn’t mind changing her own life. Her own life hadn’t been a picnic. Most of the changes she could make were for the better. Clark on the other hand had experienced a wonderful life before meeting her. He’d traveled the world, been loved by his hometown, and had the closest thing to perfect parents she’d ever seen.
Lois began backing away into the darkness. She stumbled a little, and looked down for a moment. When she looked back up Clark was gone from his former position.
She stepped backward and found herself slipping and falling onto the hard gravel.
Quick footsteps approached. Lois looked up and saw him standing there, silhouetted by the moon.
“Are you all right, miss?”
Lois closed her eyes for a moment, then accepted his hand. He pulled her up easily, and Lois’s hand tingled where he’d touched her.
He didn’t release her hand until several moments after he should have.
“Are you all right?”
Part of her felt as though nothing could be more right. The rest of her worried that nothing was ever going to be all right again.
