Previously:
Clark to Lois: “John Doe’s real name is Tempus. He’s from the future. I’ve dealt with him before. He can’t erase memories—as far as I know, anyway. But he can travel through time. That machine you described sounds like a soul-tracker. From what you’ve told me, I believe that Tempus traveled back to 1993 and switched your consciousness…with my wife’s.” --from ‘Foreshadowing’
Now: Flashback--
Lois Lane was ticked off. She’d been looking forward to this weekend for months. All the preparations were made. Even Superman had taken vacation time. And all it took was one obsessed psychopath with a piece of stolen technology to spoil it all. If only he’d followed his usual pattern. A show of firepower, a long smug monologue. Maybe she would have been able to disarm him and yell for her husband. But, no! All she’d had was one glimpse of the villain, just long enough recognize his smirk, before she was swept away in a flash of light and a wave of dizziness.
<Great! Just great! Leave it to Tempus to ruin our first weekend alone in two years! Okay, Lois, get a grip. You know the drill. Figure out where you are or when, then take it from there. Mr. Wells will be along soon to get you back home.>
She reached down to smooth her skirt, then up to smooth her hair in her usual nervous gestures. Wait a minute; something was different. She looked down at her clothes. She remembered this suit. She’d owned it years ago, but it hadn’t fit since she was pregnant with the twins. And her hair was short; it curled under above her shoulders in the simple page-boy cut she wore in her twenties. She placed her hands on her hips as she thought. Even that every-day motion felt different. She ran her hands along her waist and over her hips. Yes, it felt like she’d suddenly dropped a size or two. Reaching into her shoulder bag—<the one I lent to Lucy and never got back>—she pulled out her compact and took a peek. Yep. Her face looked years younger. And that make-up! Orange went out of fashion years ago.
<Well, here’s a new twist. Not only have I changed time, -or dimensions?-, but I seem to have changed bodies as well. At least it will be easy to blend in wherever -or whenever- I am.>
Alright, it was reconnaissance time. She needed to figure out two things: was she in her own dimension or an alternate one; and was she in her own time or, as she suspected, had she been thrown into the past? She was looking around her, trying to get her bearings, when a decidedly boyish Jim Olsen hurried up the street and grabbed her by the elbow.
“Come on, Lois! The Chief said not to bother stopping at the office first. The place is going to be a mob scene. We’ve got to leave now if we want a good spot. If we don’t hustle I won’t be able to get any good shots.”
Okay, this sounded familiar. This was a typical Lois-and-Jimmy-go-to-a-press-conference kind of conversation. Half-jogging to keep up, Lois followed Jimmy down the block and around the corner and helped him to clear a path through the crowd to stake out a position right in front of the podium.
This didn’t feel like a typical press conference, though. It was more like a cross between a press conference and a carnival. A Superman carnival. The air was full of helium balloons in the garish red, blue, and yellow of Superman’s suit. The street on either side of the platform was crowded with vendors hawking all sorts of Superman merchandise. And the usual crowd of reporters was joined by civilians of all ages, including several children. As she was trying to place this scene in her memory, a tall, handsome man strode onto the stage wearing a custom-made suit and a very large key on a ribbon around his neck. Lex. At the height of his power. He was joined by a woman Lois recognized as the former Deputy Mayor of Metropolis.
Now she knew where she was. This was her own dimension; she remembered being here ten years ago. Superman had made his debut only a few weeks earlier, and he was about to be given the key to the city. By his worst enemy. Of course, she hadn’t caught that little bit of irony at the time, but she did now.
Pulling a reporter’s notebook and pen from her bag, Lois stepped into her young-and-eager-reporter role. <Starring Lois Lane-Kent as the Young Lois Lane> she thought in wry amusement. Then she heard the excited murmur of the crowd and followed their gazes upward to see a *very* young Superman slowly descend to land awkwardly on the platform. Superman seemed dazed by the crowd. For just a moment, he wore the deer-in-the-headlights look that she had seen so often in her early days with Clark. He covered his discomfort with a typical Superman pose, placing his hands on his hips, but then he changed his mind and crossed his arms across his chest as Lex Luthor stepped to the microphone and began the proceedings.
“Oh, Clark! You really were a babe in the woods, weren’t you?”
She had meant to keep her musing to herself, but she realized that she had spoken the thought aloud, at least to Super ears, as Clark’s eyes instantly met hers and a frown briefly creased his brow before he resumed his carefully neutral hero face.
This was not good. She couldn’t afford to let on to anyone, and especially to Young Clark, that she was any different from the Lois Lane of this time. She didn’t know how long it would take Mr. Wells to notice the discontinuity in the time line, and she needed to preserve the original time line intact. Her future life depended on it. No more mistakes; from now on, she had to act, speak, *think* like the young woman she had been ten years ago.
********
Clark Kent felt like a fish out of water. Here he was, dressed in an embarrassingly revealing costume, surrounded by what could only be described as a lot of Superman hoopla, in front of dozens of reporters. And not only reporters; ordinary people as well, all of them there to see him. Well, not him really; nobody was here to see Clark Kent. No, they were here to see Superman, the newest, shiniest celebrity in Metropolis. Every eye was on him, and he wanted to sink into the stage floor and disappear. He was fidgeting, he could tell. He needed to get a grip. <Think confident. Think tall. Think steady.> And then he heard it.
“Oh, Clark! You really were a babe in the woods, weren’t you?”
It was only a mumble, inaudible to any ears except his own, but it had come from the lips of Lois Lane, who was looking straight at him.
<Oh, Lord, she knows! How can she know? Who am I kidding; how could she not know? How did I ever think a tight suit and a pair of glasses would fool the best investigative reporter in the country? No, the real question is what she intends to do about it. This could ruin everything.>
Somehow he made it through the rest of the ceremony, but he knew he looked as flustered as he felt. Through a sheer act of will he managed not to stare at Lois. He didn’t want to let on that he had heard her; information was power, and right now he needed all the power he could get. He thought about confronting her, but what if he was wrong? If she didn’t know, if she’d been thinking of something else when she made that cryptic remark, he certainly wasn’t about to blow his own cover. No. He needed to watch and wait, to confirm what Lois might know, but he would be keeping a close eye on his colleague from now on.
Clark’s first chance at testing his hypothesis came at the Planet staff meeting later that morning. Most of the staff were already seated when he arrived, and, as had become their custom, they had left an empty seat for him next to Lois. Clark took his seat and looked around for Perry to begin the meeting, just like normal. But his senses were completely focused on Lois Lane. On the outside there was nothing out of the ordinary. But her heartbeat had quickened as soon as he sat down. Just like it always did when she encountered Superman. And it jumped again when Cat Grant sat in his lap and kissed him. So, either Lois had developed a sudden attraction for Clark Kent, or she knew he was Superman.
There was another slight burst of excitement from Lois when he had to leave briefly to rescue a small plane. Again, he never would have suspected anything if he hadn’t been already listening for her heartbeat. So, if she did know, as was seeming more and more likely, she was trying to hide it. Why? Why was she not shouting it from the rooftops—or rather from the front page? The most ambitious reporter he knew was sitting on the biggest story of the decade---why?
Proof. That had to be it. She knew, but she had no proof. She must be waiting, biding her time until she could find the evidence she needed. If he was really lucky, she only suspected the truth. Maybe, if she couldn’t find the proof she was looking for, she would decide that her suspicions were incorrect. But, since this was Lois Lane, she wouldn’t be just sitting around waiting for the evidence to fall into her lap. She would be digging for it. Which meant that he would have to be more careful than ever, and he would have to watch her as closely as he could without her catching on. Oh, boy, this was getting complicated.
For the rest of the day, the pattern was the same. On the outside, Lois was her normal headstrong opinionated self, arguing with Clark at every step of their investigation of an “invisible” Robin-Hood-turned-hoodlum. But, on the inside, she had strong reactions to two subjects; Superman, which made sense if she knew or suspected the truth, and (which made no sense at all), marriage. Whenever the topic came up in discussing Allen Morris’s relationship with his wife, Helene, Lois seemed strangely aware and uncomfortable. No one without super senses would have known, but Clark was looking for anything unusual, and he could tell.
Then, at the charity bachelor auction that evening, Clark didn’t know what to think. It was the first time Superman had seen Lois since the ceremony that morning, and he was looking for her reaction. He had already noticed that she was aware of Clark’s presence in a similar way to her usual awareness of Superman, but now the opposite seemed to be true as well. She bid for the date with Superman, and she acted disappointed when she lost, but her heart just wasn’t in it. It was as if she didn’t really want to win a date with her hero, but was going through the motions for show. Then, when he appeared as Clark to try to comfort her, she acted as if she could only think of Superman, but her pulse was racing at Clark Kent’s nearness. What was going on in Lois Lane’s head?
Over the next days, Clark began wondering what was going on in his own head as well. He knew that Lois was at least suspicious of him, that she was hiding something from him, that she was just as focused on him as he was on her; in other words, that she was dangerous. But he still couldn’t resist the attraction, the fascination he felt for her. He loved working with her, the way their strengths complimented each other. He enjoyed the way she teased him, poking fun at his willingness to believe in an invisible man. He noticed the real concern she had for the Morrises’ relationship. Then, one evening on his balcony, as Allen Morris slept on Clark’s sofa, the conversation turned personal. As Lois was talking about the things she had longed for as a child --“something I don’t have, can’t have,” she’d said—he could see that she was on the brink of tears. Before he could give in to the temptation to pull her into his embrace, she turned the conversation back to him, but he knew what he had seen. Lois had a soft side, though she tried not to show it. If only she would let him in.
What was he thinking?! Let him in? No, he needed to keep as far away from Lois Lane as he could. That woman was Trouble with a capital T. And yet, he was drawn to her in a way he didn’t understand.
********
<Come *on*, Herb, where are you?> It had been several days since Lois had been transplanted into her young, single self, and she was not enjoying it. She missed her kids, she missed her house, she missed the professional and social status that she had become accustomed to over the years. But, most of all, she missed her husband. It was torture spending every day in close proximity to the young man who would become—but was not yet—the man she was married to, the man she worked seamlessly with every day, the man she fell asleep with at night and woke up to in the morning, the father of her children and her best friend, the man who shared ten years of history with her and seven years of the ultimate intimacy that was marriage. She was exhausted from the stress of trying to remember what she had done and said every moment of every day ten years ago. She was anxious to get back to her family and her real life. And she was lonely. She had almost forgotten how lonely her life was before Clark.
And now, she was also bored. She was sitting in the vault of the Metropolis Gold Depository, waiting for Superman to burst through the wall and save her and Allen Morris from slow suffocation. The first time this had happened she had been petrified, but now that she knew that Clark was on his way with a large bag of phosphorus, she was just plain bored out of her skull.
What was taking Mr. Wells so long? She’d placed personal ads in the Planet asking him to contact her. “LLK needs to talk to HGW” was pretty specific, she thought. If any of his research assistants were keeping an eye on the Planet archives they would bring it to his attention. Maybe she was going about this all wrong. She was trying to preserve the time line so that she would have the future she loved to go home to, but maybe Mr. Wells wouldn’t know to come help her unless something changed. But if something changed, her whole future could disappear, and it was that future she wanted to get back to. But maybe Mr. Wells wouldn’t know to come help her unless something changed. <Wait a minute…didn’t I just say that?...I mean think that…I mean…woozy…need to rest…need air…need to…Clark…need Clark…need…>
“Clark!”
There he was, bursting through the wall just like before, holding her in his arms as she gulped down the fresh air that flowed through the space left by his spectacular entrance. His head bent over her. He was going to kiss her, she could tell, but at the last minute he turned his head away, turning the kiss-that-wasn’t into a hug. Why had he done that? She wanted so badly to kiss him.
“Clark?”
Then, frowning, he was lifting her, cradling her against his strong chest as he had done so many times before. Gratefully, she lowered her head to his shoulder. His spandex-clad shoulder. Oh, yeah, that was why he couldn’t kiss her. They were in public, and he was…
”Superman!”
As he carried her out of the vault and into the fresh air, her thinking cleared and she remembered not only who he was, but also who—or rather when—she was. In her disorientation, she had reverted to her normal self, and she couldn’t remember exactly what she had said. Had she given too much away? What had her younger self said after Superman rescued her the first time? Oh, yes.
“How did you manage to make Barrow and his gang visible?” or something along those lines, wasn’t it? But he wasn’t answering her. He just looked down at her with that same frown still on his face and, without a word, carried her up into the Metropolis sky.
