“We’ve talked about this,” Lois said finally. “I said I wasn’t ready.”
She wasn’t ever going to be ready to talk about it. How it felt to have bones cracking under her hands, how it was to see herself as a monster.
How deep down in the darkest part of her, she’d liked it. After seeing what they were doing to the other girls, knowing that they’d done it for years, what they’d threatened to do to her. Her rage had grown during her time of confinement, and it had blended in with the rage she’d had in the past over other, similar things.
It wasn’t a part of herself that she could show Clark. He was too important, too pure.
He represented everything that she wasn’t. He was a good man, someone who had taken whatever freakish abilities nature had given him and turned it into a miracle.
Instead of death, he was life.
“You hurt some people,” Clark said. “I don’t think what happened with Olaf would have bothered you so much if you hadn’t.”
“Does it really matter?” Lois asked. “I can’t change anything I’ve done. All I can do is try to do better.”
“Sometimes it helps to talk.” Clark said.
“I’m not sure you are the right person for me to be talking to.” Lois said. At the hurt look in his eye, Lois asked, “What’s the worst thing you’ve ever done?”
Hesitating, Clark said, “I haven’t saved people. I’ve put the safety of my parents and my desire for an ordinary life over the welfare of people I don’t know. I’ve hidden and skulked in the shadows waiting for some sort of epiphany telling me how to be a hero.”
“So you’ve been within earshot of people in pain, and you haven’t helped them.”
Clark shrugged uncomfortably. “Earshot for me is a long way. It’s part of the reason I’ve mostly avoided big cities. Hearing all those people and not being able to do anything…”
“Have you ever hurt anyone, other than by inaction?”
Clark was silent, and then said, “I petted my dog too hard once.”
Lois snorted derisively.
“It’s not funny. I was ten, and probably about as strong as you are now. I could pick refrigerators up and it all seemed just great.” Clark shook his head. “I didn’t really understand just how strong I was.”
“Your dog?” Lois asked.
“He got better, eventually. He even forgave me, a long time before I forgave myself.” Clark sighed. “I never forgot that lesson, until tonight.”
“Tonight?”
“I never should have pushed Angelica into that shelving. I wasn’t thinking. I thought you were about to be killed, and I just…reacted.”
“Nobody was hurt.” Lois said.
“Because everyone was on unconscious on the ground, and the shelves were solid. Most of the people just had books hit them.”
“You threw her high,” Lois said. “So they’d fall the way they did. Subconsciously you were protecting people.”
Clark shrugged and looked away.
“Are you ever going to talk about the Congo?” Clark asked.
“I don’t know.” Lois said. “I like the way you look at me.”
Clark smiled slightly. “I like you too, Lois. I’m not sure what…”
“I really like who I am in your eyes.” Lois said. “At work, everybody has this image of me. Mad Dog Lane…doesn’t care about anything but the story. Part of it’s a little flattering. People respect me, politicians fear me.”
Lois took another bite of the noodles Clark had provided, and then looked up at him.
“You’re the first person who has looked at me like I’m a person in a long time.” Lois said. “I like that.”
“What about your family or Perry?” Clark asked.
Lois shook her head. “I’m a disappointment to both my parents. My sister sees me as a nagging fuddy-duddy, and while Perry has been a father to me, part of him will always belong to the Planet. I’m an asset.”
“I don’t see it.” Clark said. “I don’t think you give people enough credit. People can change if you give them the chance.”
“All I know is that you seem to like me for who I am.” Lois said. “And I need that. After what happened…I don’t like me.”
Clark reached out and touched her hand. Lois closed her eyes. It was exactly what she’d needed. Human contact had been so infrequent that it now consisted of isolated moments, times that she remembered.
“Ok.” Clark said. “I’m here if you need me but I’ll let it go.”
“Do you have any more of that…dumpling, whatever it is?” Lois asked, hoping to change the subject.
“Jiaozi,” Clark said. At her strange look he said “That’s the name of the dumpling.”
Lois opened a previously unopened box and discovered it was filled with steaming bamboo leaves. They were filled with rice and some sort of sweet filling.
“Really…where did you get all this?” Lois asked.
“We’ve all got our secrets,” Clark said grinning.
“Like why you keep slipping your glasses down?” Lois asked. “If you don’t need them, then why do you wear them?”
Clark sighed.
He really was an extraordinary man.
***************
“I really wish you guys would let me stay,” Jimmy said.
“Perry says the insurance people tell him it’s too dangerous. The paper could be liable if they keep throwing you into all the dangerous situations when you are already injured.”
It had the virtue of being true. Of course, that hadn’t stopped Lois from signing waivers in the past and going right back to whatever it was that had wounded her in the past.
Not that there had been many injuries. She really had been lucky. A twisted ankle here, bruising there. Numerous death threats.
She’d been bruised in her soul, but that didn’t mean that she couldn’t get back into the fight.
When she closed her eyes, she saw Marcus standing there, so loyal to his wife, and waiting for something to change.
She couldn’t wait. If things were going to change, they would change because she made them happen.
“You can keep up the work on the other end,” Lois said.
“When the chief doesn’t have me making coffee and running errands.” Jimmy’s voice was slightly bitter. A look at his too pale face prevented Lois from wavering.
“If it’s for the story, he’ll understand,” Lois said. She patted him on the shoulder, then watched as he entered the security line.
The line was monstrously long. He’d be standing in it for hours.
Lois turned to Clark and said, “Well, I guess we’d better get started.”
*************
The hospital administrators had all but admitted that there were entire clans of non-human people in the Los Angeles area, enough that they had procedures to deal with them.
So far, all they had were a lot of newspaper stories, a few inconclusive interviews, and a several attacks by creatures of the night. None of it reached anything close to the standard of being verifiable evidence.
Lois doubted that the Sunnydale police or the journalists who had worked at the Sunnydale newspaper would be any more forthcoming than the average citizen had been. They’d been actively involved in covering things up, or they’d been so incompetent that embarrassment would keep them from saying anything.
So they had to find some way to talk to the nonhumans themselves, which might be difficult, as they had a vested interest in staying hidden.
They pulled up onto the familiar street. Things were busier now, at almost noon, and the East Hills Teen Center seemed much busier than it had in the past few days.
Of course, it was Saturday, and school wasn’t keeping most of the teens away.
As Lois and Clark entered, Lois noticed one group of teenagers staring at her. She might have assumed it had something to do with how she looked, but they were giving strange looks to Clark as well.
As soon as they noticed her looking at them, they split away, and began to head for the exits.
“Anne!” Lois said.
Anne was talking to a young girl, who blanched when she looked at Clark.
That wasn’t the usual reaction young women had around Clark. Lois had been around him long enough to know that.
“I wasn’t expecting to hear from you guys so soon.” Anne said, frowning.
“Oh, we were just going to let you know that your information on Buffy Summers was a little dated. She was seen in a hospital not too far from here just a couple of days ago.”
Anne’s face lit up into a genuine smile. “She’s not dead?”
As an act, Lois couldn’t understand it. Anne had to know that they were on to her. She couldn’t believe they would be gullible enough to believe that she had just been mistaken.
“You didn’t call her?”
“I never had her number.” Anne said.
“I thought you knew her.” Clark said quietly. He was glancing around at some of the teens who were vanishing as they spoke.
“She rescued me a couple of times.” Anne said. “It’s what she did….does. Wow. I was so sure…”
“Why are the kids leaving?’ Lois asked. “Are they worried we’re police?”
The word should have spread about who they were and what they were doing. They’d interviewed several of the teenagers only the day before.
It was only certain small groups of teenagers who were leaving. The rest of them sat and talked with each other as though nothing was happening.
Which nothing was.
Anne shrugged. “Maybe you remind them of someone,” she said.
She was lying.
“Do you have some kids here who aren’t fully human?” Lois asked.
“It’s the people who abused them who aren’t human, Ms Lane.” Anne looked her in the eye. “We don’t discriminate based on race, color, religion or sexual orientation. That’s the law.”
It being a teen center, some people were excluded due to age no doubt.
“I’d say some of them just revealed themselves,” Lois said.
“Because they didn’t want to talk to the press?” Anne asked incredulously. “Half the kids here are on the run from someone. The last thing they need is their picture in the paper.”
“I’d like to talk to them,” Lois said.
Anne shook her head. “This is a place of safety, so that teenagers don’t have to feel harassed by adults.”
“We’re hitting a lot of dead ends because people don’t want to talk to us. When that happens, we have to just dig a little harder.”
Lois glanced around the room. None of the teenagers seemed to be listening.
“Should I be talking to Anne Steele,” Lois asked. “Or Sister Sunshine, Chantarelle…Lily…Joan?”
Her research the night before had been enlightening. Anne hadn’t lied about her history on the streets. She’d changed names frequently, but there were records of her from various agencies that had tried to get her help.
Obviously, one of them had succeeded.
Anne stared at her for a moment, and then shrugged. “You think you can blackmail me by revealing that I had a rough past? You think it’ll hurt my reputation with this group of kids? Most of them already know the basics.”
“Then we’ll keep asking questions until we find out the truth,” Lois said.
Anne sighed.
“There are a few places I tell my kids to stay out of. Most of them they already know to avoid.” Anne hesitated. “Are you sure you can handle yourselves?”
Lois nodded. Between the two of them, there was little that she and Clark couldn’t handle, other than magic.
She sighed and wrote down a couple of addresses.
***************
The first place they’d tried was a bust. No building of that number existed, which was odd, because the number was the only one missing on the block, with the rest of the numbers out of sequence.
The second was a seedy looking dive in a warehouse district. It looked to have been a converted warehouse.
Clark pulled his glasses down slightly, and Lois grinned up at him. It felt good to finally be in on the secret.
Clark had been so chagrinned at the thought of how obvious he had been; he obviously wasn’t the master of disguise he thought he was. She was going to have to show him the ropes.
He glanced over at her and shook his head. “It’s empty. There’s a bar in the back, and I can’t really tell what’s in some of the bottles, but otherwise it looks fairly legit.”
Except for the fact that it was a bar in a place that wasn’t zoned for bars. The outside of the building was nondescript, designed to blend in to the buildings around it. Without some hint of music from inside, or people spilling outside into the streets, you wouldn’t be able to tell this place was a bar at all.
It looked as though their chances to see a nonhuman had dropped yet again to almost nothing.
They were going to have to hope that Faith followed through on her call.
Lois glanced at Clark and sighed. They were going to have to-
He stiffened and a moment later, she did as well. There was a sound coming from the alley behind the building.
Carefully, Lois walked as quietly as she could in shoes with hard soles. Clark, beside her was absolutely quiet, and seemed almost to be floating as he moved across the street.
They rounded the corner, and they were treated to the sight of an industrial dumpster, a trash receptacle taller than a man, where warehouse employees could throw cardboard boxes and the refuse of their on site lunches.
There was noise coming from inside the receptacle, and Lois felt her stomach clench. She was sensing something inside, even if it didn’t have the overwhelming sense of evil that she’d sensed from the other supernatural creatures she’d encountered.
Lois picked up a bottle and threw it at the dumpster and the noises from inside ceased for a moment.
“Come out of there!” Lois said loudly, even as she saw Clark lowering his glasses yet again.
If it wasn’t for the fact that she’d never be sure what he was looking at without them, she’d insist that he leave them off.
His parents had made leaded lenses after he’d accidentally looked at his 5th grade English teacher, a three hundred pound sixty year old woman with an unfortunate skin condition.
“All right!” The voice from inside the dumpster was surprisingly mild.
From the opening, a face appeared.
It was horrible. Pale, red eyes and far too much skin.
“Hi!” The figure smiled, and it had fangs.
Lois’s hands itched for a weapon.
