Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Specimen 3/?

- From Part Two:

Lois breathed a sigh of relief. "It's Lois Lane. Dr Klein, would anyone at LexCorp have known?"

"About Clark?"

"Yes. Who else would I have been talking about?"

"Why not say his name?"

She shrank back against the wall as someone walked by. "I'm not really in a good position to talk freely right now. I think I might know where he is but I wouldn't know who he is if he is there, so I thought I'd call you."

Klein sighed tiredly. "You babble a lot don't you? There does seem to be an indication that some of the research was funded by LexCorp. Do you know where he is?"

"I think Luthor has him at their headquarters, maybe even in his penthouse."

She heard movement and the rustling of papers. "I'm coming."

*.*.*.

Part Three

*.*.*.

Clark sat moodily on his bed. He had been cooped up in his room all day. True, he was used to it but Luthor had promised him his freedom and he wanted it. He wanted his freedom more than he'd ever wanted anything before. He knew that he was acting like a spoilt child but he didn't care. Lex hadn't even bothered coming to see him again after last night. He had tried to leave but every time he opened the door, Asabi appeared, asking him what it was he required. "Luthor," he had told him the last time. "I know he's here, he's at that party downstairs. If he won't come and see me then I'll go and see him."

Asabi had been a little surprised that Clark knew about the party. Clark thought that everyone from Bureau 39 would be shocked to learn how much his powers had grown since he had been brought here. He doubted it was anything to do with his so called 'freedom', he knew now what he had suspected from the start, that he was as much of a prisoner here as he had been at STAR Labs. Maybe it was the sunlight that was making him stronger, he couldn't remember seeing actual sunlight before. He had spent most of the day staring out the window, watching the people of Metropolis go about their daily business. Of course he was far too high up to be seen by a human, however with his alien abilities Clark could very easily see them, right down to their molecular structure. He had never been able to see anything so clearly before, even when it was right in front of his nose.

Eventually, Lex had come to see him and had assured him that they would have a proper conversation tomorrow, when he had the time Clark deserved to be given. Lex had also told him that if he really wanted to come and meet his guests, then he would be able to find him something suitable to wear to the gathering. He had declined the offer, deciding instead to stay and sulk in his room.

Which was what he was doing when his attention was caught by the sounds of something happening outside his bedroom door. Before he had even thought to look through the wood to see what the commotion was, the door opened slightly and Dr Klein slid through. Klein pressed his finger to his lips and Clark said nothing as the scientist moved further into the room, looking worriedly at the door. Then the door opened again, to emit the most beautiful woman Clark had ever seen, not that he'd seen many. She was wearing a long, black dress that clung flatteringly to her body and showed off her slim figure. She flicked back her brown hair with a toss of her head, glancing back at the door. "I don't think we're going to make it back unnoticed."

"I told you to wait outside," Klein told her irritably. "You shouldn't get too involved in this. It's dangerous."

"Oh, please. If I hadn't been with you, you wouldn't have even made it into the building," she scoffed, then stopped in her tracks when she saw Clark, who hadn't been able to take his eyes off her since she entered his room.

"You must be Clark," Lois managed to say, knowing that it sounded stupid. She didn't know what she'd actually expected the 'alien' to look like, but she hadn't imaged him to look so take-your-breath-away-stunning. If all aliens looked like him, she might start hanging around crop circles, trying to get abducted.

"Yes. Who are you?"

Dr Klein looked at the pair, immediately missing the electricity that was flying between them. "This is Lois Lane from the Daily Planet, she's been helping me find you."

Clark shook her hand. "I've read your work Miss Lane, it's very good. Are you going to be writing about me?"

Lois blushed as she tucked her hair behind her ear. "I don't know yet. It depends on whether it would be safe or not."

He looked downcast. "Not, I would imagine." Clark managed to take his attention away from Lois as he focused on Dr Klein. "Are you here to return me to Bureau 39 because I don't want to go. I want to leave here, I don't trust Luthor, but I'm not going to go back either."

Dr Klein looked aghast at the suggestion. "No, no! No, I'm not letting you go back. Truth be told, I don't know what to do with you."

"Why did Luthor take you in the first place?" Lois asked, plunging back into the proceedings with her journalistic enquiries, cursing herself for allowing Clark's appearance to blind side her for so long.

Clark shrugged. "I don't know. I don't think I want to."

"Well I do." Lois said firmly.

"Please, Miss Lane," Klein looked at her imploringly, "we've found Clark, can't we leave it at that?"

Lois shook her head. "No, we can't. Bureau 39 must be desperate to find Clark and if we actually manage to get him out of here, Luthor will be too."

Klein groaned. "Yes, well. How *do* we get out?"

"How did you get *in*?" Clark asked. "Every time I try to get out, Asabi appears."

Lois smiled at him with a wicked glint in her eyes. "I'm very good at getting into places I'm not supposed to."

"We waited until they switched guards." Klein told him, not so cryptically.

Clark looked through the doors, realising that his strange abilities might actually be useful while he was on the run. "There are guards there now. They won't change for three hours and Asabi'll probably appear before they leave."

"We're stuck then." Klein said, sinking down onto a chair in defeat.

Clark paced over to one of the windows and looked out at the darkness. "Dr Klein, I have made some strange developments since my liberation."

"Really? Is this absolutely the best time to discuss it?"

"Maybe not discuss, no," he turned to face his new companions. "I can fly, Dr Klein."

"Clark, please! I am not in the mood for jokes."

"I am not joking. If we could open those windows, maybe I could fly the pair of you to the ground. Obviously I have only flown in this room and I do not know if I could carry you, although I managed to fly with the bed, which I would imagine is heavier than the pair of you. It's just a thought."

Lois stared open-mouthed at the man floating in the air, his feet a good distance away from the floor on which she was standing. She glanced at Dr Klein, who had his head buried in his hands and was therefore completely oblivious to the spectacle right in front of him. "Dr Klein, maybe you should actually look at Clark," she suggested.

He did. "Oh."

*.*.*.

Lois turned on the lights to her apartment as she came through the door. Clark cautiously followed her in, staring at the place in awe. After a long argument with Klein she had grudgingly conceded that maybe it would be better for Clark to stay with her than with him. Bureau 39 already suspected Klein of aiding Clark's escape so they were probably watching his place. She couldn't be certain that they weren't tracking her as well, considering that she had been seen talking to him by some of the scientists at the scene of the fire, but it was less likely. She shut the door behind him and bolted it, then she rushed over to the windows to make sure they were locked too. She wasn't taking any chances. As she stared out of the window she remembered the flight from Clark's room to her car. They had tested his theory with him flying them around the room, each holding one of his hands. Even that hadn't prepared her for the sensation of actually flying like that. It had been breathtakingly magical. Or it would have been if it hadn't been for Klein's fear forcing him to squeal from the second they took off to the second they landed. Lois had instinctively trusted that Clark wouldn't drop them but even so, she could understand how it could be unnerving to suddenly have nothing but a man holding you up in mid-air. Even Clark had been nervous. Lois almost chucked her bag and coat onto her sofa, then thought better of it and hung them up instead. "You're gonna have to sleep on the couch, I'm afraid. My sister Lucy took the spare bed to college with her so people could crash at her's, not that it was very comfortable anyway, but it was better than the couch."

"That's OK." He was still stood by the door, uncertain what to do.

Lois sighed with relief as she finally took her rubbing shoes off. "Make yourself at home, don't just stand there. Do you want something to eat or drink?" She headed into the kitchen area.

Clark moved to the couch but he didn't sit. "You don't need to go to any trouble."

"I'm just making myself a hot chocolate. It's no trouble to make one for you as well."

"I've never had a hot chocolate. They just gave me water to drink, sometimes I had a juice or smoothie."

"That's not what I asked. Do you *want* one?"

Clark found himself smiling. He was irritating her. He irritated the scientists too, he did it to prove a point but he liked irritating her for a different reason. He found it entertaining, almost endearing. "Yes, thank you, Miss Lane."

She groaned as she fumbled in her cupboards for a second mug. "Please, don't call me Miss Lane. My name's Lois."

"Dr Klein calls you Miss Lane."

Lois paused momentarily, considering his response as she spooned out the powder into two cups and waited for her kettle to boil. He had a point, she wouldn't insist on Klein calling her 'Lois'but she wanted Clark to. "Yes, but I call Dr Klein, 'Dr Klein', not Bernard."

"So," Clark moved towards the kitchen, watching her with great interest, "if I had a surname you'd be calling me Mr Whatever?"

She poured out the hot water, stirring the liquid in the mugs. "Oh, call me whatever you like," she snapped at him. It had been a very long night and she hadn't expected to return with a house guest.

"Very well," he smiled at her as she looked over at him, "Lois."

Oh dear, this wasn't good, she thought as she felt butterflies flutter in her stomach. Lois had to focus, she had to remember her rule about not getting involved in her stories. OK, so truth be told she was already deeply involved in this story but Clark was having a very strange effect on her. She loved the sound of his voice saying her name, loved the way he looked at her and she loved flying with him. She'd only known him for an hour, and she was already beginning to have feelings about him that she shouldn't. If only she wasn't busy thinking of a way to make him say her name again. She held out one of the mugs to her guest. "Here. Be careful though, it's hot."

"I don't burn," he told her as he took an experimental sip of the drink. Lois was amazing, she barely blinked at this knowledge. She didn't seem to care that he was an alien, either. She didn't seem fascinated by his physiology, how he perceived things or anything like that. She was just treating him like a normal human being. He liked it. He liked the chocolate too.

Lois finished her drink quickly, then put the mug in the sink. Clark was taking longer, savouring it. Poor man, Lois thought, it wasn't like it was even a decent cup of hot chocolate, just some cheap stuff she'd bought from the store, yet to him it seemed to be the most delicious thing he'd ever tasted. Well, she reasoned, it probably was. She doubted Bureau 39 bothered with gourmet chefs to feed their specimens. "I'll go and grab the spare bedding for you."

"Thank you." Clark watched her disappear into her bedroom, wondering how he was going to be able to get any sleep knowing she was nearby.

*.*.*.

Donna Wicks was not looking forward to this meeting. She was sure that her boss, Jason Trask, knew about the fire at STAR Labs and knew that it had been started outside Clark's room. He seemed to know more than she ever told him and as far as she knew she was the only member of the team at STAR Labs who had anything to do with him. Still, after a day had passed and there had been no word from Washington, she had contacted him. Of course Trask hadn't immediately responded. It wasn't until halfway through Luthor's auction, when Donna had all but forgotten about the trouble surrounding the alien's escape, that the message had come through. He was waiting for her at her apartment. Donna had no misconceptions about what was waiting for her when she returned home. She pulled into her car-parking space and hurried into the building and to her apartment's door. As she fumbled for the key, a shadow loomed out of the darkness. "I can hardly believe, that with a code red situation on our hands, you decided to go to socialising."

Donna paused. She gripped the key harder but made no attempt to open the door. "I was under orders from STAR Labs."

"You work for me."

"And still have a cover to maintain."

"What cover? The alien's gone!"

She thrust the keys back into her bag and folded her arms, glaring at him. "Yes, Trask. I have tried to make everyone believe that he did it himself but all the evidence points to someone having taken him. Which means we can still get him back without having to admit his existence."

"Him? Dr Wicks, *'him'*? The alien is an it. It is not a human, it may look human, but it's not."

"Is this really the most important thing for us to discuss right now? I refer to him as a him the same way I would talk about any male animal as a him. He just happens to be a male alien."

"It might not have a gender."

Donna sighed. No-one else at Bureau 39 truly believed Clark was the alien threat Trask did. Most were just exited to have the opportunity to study an actual alien. So far from what they could tell, Clark could be classified in the same genus as humans, although his differences were enough to show him to be either part of a subspecies or another species altogether. Science fiction would probably class him as a humanoid, as some of the geekier technicians liked to sporadically point out. The trouble was, he was all too human and a lot of the scientists quit after working with him a couple of times, calling it 'unethical'. A few had tried to break him out in the past.

"He does," she insisted, "he's male. Obviously, we know nothing about Kryptonian life but from what we know about life here on Earth, he's male."

Trask glowered at her. "I shall agree with you on one point, Wicks. That is not what I am here to discuss. What happened?"

She glanced at her door. She didn't really want to discuss this in the hallway but she knew Trask. Donna was not about to let him into her home, especially in his current mood. "As far as we can tell someone found out about Clark, decided to either release or capture him and broke into the vault. First they went and took the meteorites--"

"All of them?"

Donna shook her head. "No. Just all the ones we kept with him. The ones the geologists and astronomers were studying are still in STAR Labs. We have managed to recover some samples from them but not all. Hopefully we have enough to subdue him when we find him. After they had got the meteorites, they set alight to the room before working on Cl... the alien's door. Once they had opened it, we think they must have knocked him out. We found traces of his blood on the floor and evidence of his body being dragged out of the vault. Those tracks stopped in the car park."

"So someone kidnapped it and drove off with it?" Trask surmised.

"As far as we can tell, yes."

"Who?"

Donna watched Trask. The man seemed normal and rational now, but that meant nothing. No, she wasn't about to dump Klein in it just yet. She'd speak to him before she threw him to the lions. Despite her doubts over his loyalty, she liked Bernard Klein. He was a good scientist and a nice man. If he came clean to her, she'd try and protect him from Trask. "We don't really know. I'm interviewing all the scientists tomorrow to try and find out if they had anything to do with it or had told someone about the alien. Someone's got to know something, this was planned. Whoever took him, they knew what they were doing."

"They had inside help?" Trask was beginning to look dangerous again.

"I'm not sure but the chances are that they did." She moved forward to try and calm him down. She knew that her chances of succeeding were slim to nil, but she couldn't risk Trask rushing off and doing something stupid, so she decided to try her best. "Listen to me. I'll find them, you know I will. As soon as I know who it is, I will tell you and back you in whatever you plan to do to them but let's find them first. We can't risk drawing too much attention to ourselves by getting the wrong man. Especially while it's still out there. If the public find out..."

"Fine," he snapped, heading for the exit. "You're right, but I want answers Dr Wicks or it's your head that's on the line. Someone *will* pay for this."

To Be Continued...