As a child, Lois had believed in Superman. Her parents had loved the movie and they’d loved the values it had represented.
She’d grown up believing that good would triumph over evil. As a child she’d believed that people lived happily ever after. Her parents had seemed immortal, all knowing. They’d been the cornerstone of her life, and no matter how far she chose to stray she’d known she could always go back to them.
Her world had shattered the day she’d been visited by two state troopers with the news that her family was dead. Suddenly all the awards she’d won, all the work she’d done, all of it had become meaningless.
There were no happy endings and good didn’t always triumph over evil. Along with the loss of her parents had come the loss of the security that everything was always going to be all right. The world was a scary place.
Yet while she’d felt threatened on an individual level, she’d still felt safe in general. She was in the middle of the most powerful nation in the world and while accidents and crime were sometimes a problem, she’d believed people were basically safe.
Although she’d remained outwardly calm, the fall of the twin towers had shattered her world once again. She’d been forced to see the world in a different way and she’d lost what she’d thought was her last remaining innocence.
Now, floating a thousand feet in the air above Arlington, Lois found her view of the world shifting again.
Lois had always considered herself a pragmatist. Aliens weren’t abducting rednecks in cornfields no matter what the National Enquirer said. Simple herbs and spices from the kitchen cabinet couldn’t cure all diseases.
If life existed on other planets, it was so far away that man would never know about it. The psychic friend’s network was a scam designed to take money from the desperate or foolish. John Edward couldn’t speak to the dead and Ralf Nader was never going to win an election.
Although she believed in God, she didn’t believe that He intervened much in human affairs.
The world made sense. If it wasn’t fair and it wasn’t safe at least it was real.
Other universes were just physicists’ fantasies. Alternate worlds didn’t exist.
Men didn’t fly.
It was strange. The few times Lois had fantasized about being in this situation when she was a young girl she’d thought it would be different. She’d always assumed that flying would be terrifying. She disliked heights, hating the feeling that she could lose control at any minute and go tumbling to the ground.
Yet here there was no sensation of falling. There was no sensation of movement at all. Instead it felt as though the air was still around her and as she felt her heart race beginning to decrease, she felt a sudden sense of calm coming over her.
She was holding onto him tightly, so tightly that had he been a normal person it would have been painful.
Instead, he said, “I’ve got you, Lois.”
The feeling of his arm wrapped around her was reassuring. He was strong, and for some reason Lois found that she couldn’t believe he would ever drop her.
“But who’s got you?” Lois asked. It was the first thing to pop into her head, a line from a movie that she’d spent most of her adult life despising.
When she’d first heard the line in the movie, it had seemed silly to her, corny even. She’d been a tough audience, ready to dislike it on principle alone. Now it seemed almost appropriate.
His face brightened into a smile; he’d seen the movie and he caught the reference. His smile was almost boyish, and it made him look even more handsome. For the first time Lois felt herself beginning to relax.
As she began to relax, her mind finally began to work again. She’d been so shocked that it had felt as though her mind had come to a halt. Now that it was working again things were starting to become clear.
Her mind had been performing all sorts of acrobatics for days trying to fit the facts into her theory of the world. The truth had simply never occurred to her because as far as she’d been concerned it had been impossible.
Even now her mind should have been running over a hundred possibilities. Maybe she was dreaming; someone had put a hallucinogen in her drink; she was in a coma, or insane. Lois would have expected her mind to come up with a thousand reasons for why what she was experiencing wasn’t real.
Men didn’t fly and superheroes didn’t exist. It should have been a constant. It had been like saying the sun rises in the east.
Yet somehow Lois couldn’t seem to make those leaps anymore. Her view of the world had shifted and she knew now what she’d avoided even thinking about then.
“You weren’t hanging off of that plane, were you?” She asked the question slowly, almost afraid to look at him. Below them the city began to move even though Lois still had no sensation of movement.
He shook his head slightly. “I was trying to save them.”
Simple and direct. He wasn’t bragging that he’d lifted an entire plane by himself, despite the obvious impossibility. But for a man who could fly, what was impossible?
“You don’t climb tall buildings either.”
Clark smiled slightly and shook his head.
Lois had a sudden uncomfortable realization that Clark smelled nice. He’d put on some sort of cologne and it reminded her that she had pressed herself up tightly against him.
It reminded her of another fishy smell he’d had recently.
“Did you have something to do with that fishing boat off Alaska?”
“I did what I could,” he said. “I think I could have done more if I’d gone in openly.”
There had been several broken bones and cases of the bends, but no one had actually died.
“You saved a friend of mine,” Lois said. “And all those other sailors.”
It was stretching the point a little, but Kendall had been someone Lois had admired.
Clark was silent for a long moment, and the lights beneath them began to move even faster in the darkness. They were leaving Washington DC behind and moving out into a broad sea of darkness interspersed with small clumps of lights.
“I paid my way through college on an Alaskan crab fishing boat,” Clark said finally. “I didn’t have a lot of money, and it was the fastest way I knew to make tens of thousands of dollars for a couple of week’s work.”
Lois blinked. She didn’t recall any version of Superman having ever worked as a fisherman.
“I didn’t lie to you,” Clark said. “I’m not Superman and I never was. But I worked with people just like that for four years in a row. I met their families…I couldn’t let them die if I couldn’t do something.”
“You were a fisherman?”
“I really did do security work in Nigeria too,” he said. “I traveled the world after college.”
At least that was the same as the last incarnation she remembered.
“I’ve worked as a cook in Shanghai, a dishwasher in Berlin…worked a Renaissance faire in Kentucky…anything that didn’t require a lot of documentation or commitment.” Staring out over the horizon he said, “I’m my own person, not some sort of cartoon.”
For the first time Lois noticed that they were heading out over open water. “Where are we going?”
“France,” he said. “Where else?”
“Just like that,” she said, “We’re going to France.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t have my passport,” Lois said.
At the moment she didn’t have much of anything except the purse which was strapped tightly to her side. The feds had probably already grabbed the rental car and its contents, including both of their changes of clothes.
“I don’t usually bother,” Clark said. “Unless I’m going to stay a while.”
“It’s almost four thousand miles,” Lois said. “What do you really think you are going to accomplish?”
“There has to be some sort of an explanation for this,” he said stubbornly. “This isn’t just happening. There’s a reason for it.”
He still believed that there was justice in the world, that the world was safe and that it made sense.
“What if there isn’t?” she asked.
“There’s a pattern,” he said, “and a pattern means there’s a trail we can follow. I can fly us both to Paris in thirty minutes.”
Lois blinked. She’d just traveled by plane from overseas and the flight had taken more than fourteen hours.
“They’ll see us on radar,” she said faintly.
“I’m sick of hiding,” he said grimly.
**********
As the water flew past beneath them, Clark could feel the woman in his arms beginning to gradually relax. After a while she actually seemed to begin to enjoy the flight. It wasn’t some mystical magical moment like he’d seen in the movies; his Lois didn’t seem like the kind of person who was intimidated by anything for long.
Although they had been skimming the water, when Clark saw the lightning flashes up ahead, he consciously allowed himself to rise. Within moments they’d broken the cover of the clouds and were looking down on them.
Lois stiffened beside him then gasped as she was finally able to see clearly what was all around her. The moonlight seemed almost unnaturally bright. She turned her head to look at him and she slowly began to smile.
It hadn’t been like this the few times he’d tried to take Lana flying. He’d wanted to share this, the one thing he enjoyed more than anything. It should have been a way for the two of them to connect over something that was just between the two of them.
Instead she’d behaved a lot like Cyrus had, screaming before eventually becoming quiet. She’d never relaxed enough to see just how beautiful the world around them was.
Lois Lane, despite only having limited things to see was already enjoying this far more than Lana had during their whole relationship.
She turned toward him, bringing her face close to his.
“I just don’t understand,” she said.
“What?”
“Why you ever come down.” Her face brightened into a smile, and in that moment Clark felt his heart skip a beat.
She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
She’d been an attractive woman when he’d first met her, but somehow with each encounter she grew somehow prettier than she had before.
One way or another, this wasn’t going to end well. Clark doubted that the governments of this world would ever let him live in peace. He was too powerful, too dangerous to be allowed to live unmolested.
If he wasn’t able to find a way home he would always be on the run. It wasn’t the sort of life someone like Lois should ever have to live. Although he was bulletproof, she wasn’t and it would only be a matter of time before someone found her when he couldn’t do anything to save her.
If he did return home he would have to leave her behind. She had an entire life here, one where she was a success and he couldn’t ask her to give all that up for him, especially when he had Lana Lang waiting on the other side.
All of that assumed she’d even be interested. It had taken Lana a while to get over her natural revulsion over his inhuman nature. She hadn’t said anything, but it had been there in her eyes. Even now she didn’t particularly enjoy being touched, especially in public, unless she was establishing her territory in the presence of another woman.
He’d gotten the feeling that there had been times when he made her flesh crawl. She hadn’t said it, and maybe he was simply projecting his own insecurities, but the feeling was there.
That feeling wasn’t there for Lois, although whether it was because she simply hadn’t considered the implications of his being an alien, or whether she was simply special he didn’t know.
All he knew was that she was one of the two people he’d met in this reality who he trusted even a little, and the other one was a homeless schizophrenic.
The best thing he could do was keep quiet. He needed her far too much to alienate her with unwanted advances, especially when she considered him to be already in a relationship.
*********
At these speeds, Lois felt a light breeze on her face. She suspected that without whatever it was he was doing to protect her she wouldn’t have been able to breathe or see and the unpleasant image of the wind ripping her face off kept her from questioning the whole thing too much.
The world didn’t make sense, after all, so there wasn’t any point in asking too many questions. It worked, and if it seemed to violate the laws of physics, well that was just a sign that nobody knew all the laws of physics yet.
She frowned as the clouds below them became lit more and more often with lightning.
Turning to him again, she said “Wow, those look really violent.”
Clark had been silent for several long minutes, seemingly lost in his own thoughts.
“There aren’t any storms forecasted for this region for a couple of days,” he said.
“How do you know?”
“It was on Myron’s screen before he called up the old information.”
Lois blinked. She hadn’t even noticed the screen, and she doubted that she would have remembered what it said based on a glance at it.
Just how powerful was he? She already knew he was strong enough to lift an airplane and a ship, that he could hear things from a long distance and see things she couldn’t see. Did he have all the powers that Superman traditionally had?
What if he had powers that weren’t in the comics? As he’d said, he was a real person and his history was different from the one she knew.
Maybe he really could read her mind.
Suddenly the image of Margot Kidder wondering the same question didn’t seem so hokey. Lois felt heat rising to her face as she felt herself flushing.
Could he smell the effect he had on her? Could he hear her heart racing and did he know what it meant?
She felt him stiffen beside her and then they were suddenly diving into the storm.
Soaking wet, Lois found herself instantly responding.
“What the hell are you doing?” she yelled, heedless of whatever super hearing he might have.
Of course, considering the sound of thunder, he probably wasn’t using much of it.
It was the next flash of lightning that made her suddenly mute.
A huge flock of birds were flying in the storm, birds that were immediately familiar to Lois. They were spiraling down, as though to seek shelter from the storm despite the fact that they were all above open water. They should have been flying to rise above the storm.
A moment later the rain stopped and Lois saw something moving.
They were moving again suddenly, and for the first time Lois had a sense of the true speed they were moving at. The lightning had stopped, but the moon at broken through the clouds.
A moment before it would have hit the water, Lois saw Clark grab something out of the air.
It was the front half of a passenger pigeon, cleanly bisected.
She grimaced, but at least the thing didn’t seem to be bleeding. It looked as though it had been cauterized.
Closing her eyes for a moment, she said, “Where’s the other half?”
Already scanning the skies, Clark said, “I can’t see it. I think it’s on the other side.”
“The other side of what?” Lois felt a little stupid as her mind tried to grasp what she was seeing.
“I think the other half of this pigeon is back in its original universe. I think it was coming through when it closed.”
