From last time:
“The paper’s been put to bed, chief,” Clark announced as he walked across the deserted bullpen toward his boss’s office. Perry appeared in the doorway.
“Good work, son,” Perry said gruffly. The older man surveyed the newsroom, the domain he ruled over. “It’s getting late; you should get home and enjoy your last weekend of complete freedom.”
“Thanks,” Clark replied with a weak smile.
Perry started back toward his office, but paused and turned back around. “You’ve been doing a hell of job,” he said. “I couldn’t be prouder of you.”
Clark merely shrugged. He’d only been working full time again for a few weeks to transition into Mike Burns’s job. Beginning Monday, he would be the new Managing Editor at the Daily Planet. “I spent years running a planet, chief. It shouldn’t be that hard to help you run the Planet.”
Perry laughed. “Have a good weekend, Clark.”
“You too, chief,” Clark responded.
********
New stuff:
Clark woke with a start and looked around the darkened bedroom, somewhat surprised to find himself alone. He tuned in his hearing and picked up two heartbeats in Jon’s room.
He also heard his wife’s voice.
Fly me to the moon
And let me play among the stars
She crooned softly. Unable to help himself, he got up and quietly padded toward his son’s room. He found Lois sitting next to Jon’s bed, singing him a lullaby. Jon’s heavy-lidded eyes closed and within moments, he was asleep. Lois kept singing, making sure her little boy was truly soundly sleeping. He smiled wistfully as he watched them. Eventually, she stood without making a sound and extended her hand to him as they quietly retreated from the room. He kissed the crown of her hair and started back toward their bedroom.
“Did he have a nightmare?” he whispered. She merely nodded. He wished, not for the first time, that his dreams didn’t make him a heavier sleeper than she was. It was awful to know that his little boy couldn’t come to Mommy and Daddy’s room at night when he had a nightmare because his father was practically a loaded weapon when he slept. Thankfully, Lois was so in tune with Jon that on the unusual occasions when he had a nightmare, she was generally awake before he was and she was there to soothe him back to sleep.
They got back into bed and he pulled her into his arms, as if by instinct. For a long moment, neither said a word. “You okay?” she whispered at long last.
He sighed and thought about her question. “Yeah,” he responded eventually. “I am. Work is good. Better than I thought it would be. I like it a lot more than I thought I would. And it’s a relief, having you know everything. Not having to hide. I just wish…”
“That you could snap out of it? Be completely and finally free of that place?”
She really did know him too well. “Yeah,” he agreed. “Every time it feels like the hard part is over, there’s something else.”
Lois took his hand and interlaced their fingers. “It’s hard,” she said. “I wish it weren’t. I wish I knew what to do. How to make it easier for you.”
“You’re amazing. Lois, I wouldn’t have survived this without you. You’re the only reason I can keep going.”
“I love you,” she said. “And I swear to you, no matter how bad it seems, that isn’t going to change. I’m not going anywhere. Yes, it’s hard for me, too, but I’ve lived without you. And I don’t ever want to know what that’s like again.”
He closed his eyes. He was hurting her. Not by being with her, but by assuming her love wasn’t strong enough to endure this. “I’ve let you down,” he said.
“Honey…” she began, but he had to finish.
“I need to have more faith in you. I need to have the faith in ‘us’ that you have. Every step of the way, you’ve supported me, you’ve taken care of me. And I’m still always so afraid that the next thing, the next problem is going to be one too many. It isn’t fair to you. You’ve loved me more than any man could ever hope to be loved. Thank you.”
She kissed him. It was a soft, lingering kiss at first. But as she threaded her hand through his hair and he rolled onto his back, letting her slight weight settle on top of him, he deepened the kiss. Her tongue met his and she sucked gently on his lower lip. He groaned breathlessly.
“Make love with me, Clark,” she whispered.
She didn’t even have to ask.
********
“I’m glad you decided to come in,” Dr. Friskin said as she held the door open. “I know a lot has happened since the last time we sat down to talk.” She closed the door behind them. Lois sat down on the leather couch.
“How have you been?” Dr. Friskin asked simply.
Lois bit back a sigh. “I know why it was so hard for him. I know that what he had to do was something he could never have imagined. That taking a life goes against everything Superman stands for.” She interlaced their fingers. “I want him to know he did the right thing. That I love him even more now than I did on the day I married him. That he’s a wonderful father and husband. And that I’m proud of him.”
“But surely this is taking its toll?” Dr. Friskin ventured.
“It hasn’t been easy,” Lois admitted. Just the thought of the emotional wringer she’d been hauled through repeatedly brought stinging tears to her eyes.
“And?”
“Honestly? It’s exhausting,” she confessed, her voice breaking on the words. “I’m trying to be strong, I swear.” She wiped away the tears that brimmed up and spilled over. “I can do this. I can be what he needs me to be. But not twenty four hours a day. I can’t be afraid around him. I can’t have doubts. I just....” A sob shuddered through her body.
Dr. Friskin handed her a tissue. “It’s all right, Lois. You don’t have to play the superhero around the clock. You need to allow yourself to feel whatever it is you’re feeling.”
“But he’s so afraid that he’s becoming a burden. I can’t let him think that. I can’t be a basket case around my husband.”
“Lois, you have to be honest with him, the same way that you want him to be honest with you. But it’s perfectly understandable if you need some more private space to deal with this. You have to take time for yourself to do that. Whether that means coming here and venting whatever’s bothering you, or finding another way to experience these emotions. But you can’t just bottle them up.”
“So I’m not an awful wife if I have a good, long, hard cry?”
Dr. Friskin smiled and shook her head. “Not in the least,” she assured her.
********
“Help!”
Lois stopped instantly mid-flight and turned toward the cry for help. She rocketed across the sky toward Chinatown, focusing on the source. She zeroed in on a young woman, running desperately from a trio of men. Her clothing was torn and tears streamed down her face. Ultrawoman dropped down between the woman and her pursuers.
“This isn’t your concern,” the young man she’d pegged as the ring leader said with a sneer. He was gutsy. Not very bright, but gutsy. She wondered if he was just the head of one of the local Asian gangs or if he was plugged into something more serious. At the moment, it didn’t matter.
“Actually, yeah it is,” she said.
“You don’t want problems with us,” he retorted as he stepped toward him. “She belongs to us.”
“No she doesn’t,” Lois said, her temper flaring. Nothing in the world made her angrier than people who wanted to make someone else feel less worthy just because they were born the ‘wrong’ color, or the ‘wrong’ gender, or in the ‘wrong’ place to the ‘wrong’ people. Behind her, the girl was sobbing.
One of the punk’s two silent goons sneered as he cracked his knuckles. Lois stepped forward. “Do you think you’re scaring me?” she said.
“You should be scared,” big mouth retorted.
In a blur, Lois grabbed all three of the punks. She turned back to the young woman. “Don’t go anywhere,” she pleaded. Ultrawoman flew the three cretins to the closest police station, promising to explain to the cops what was going on when she got back.
Bare seconds later, she was back on the stretch of darkened street in the heart of Chinatown. The young woman had tried to run away, but Lois had no difficulty picking up on her heartbeat. It sounded like a frighten rabbit’s. “It’s okay,” Lois said softly as she approached the girl, hiding in an alley. “I’m not going to hurt you.”
The girl finally looked up at Lois, her eyes filled with tears. “Please help,” she said, her accent thick and hard to decipher. Lois didn’t think she spoke much English at all.
“It’s okay. I’m going to take you to help, all right?” She wasn’t sure the girl understood, but she didn’t resist when Ultrawoman picked her up and started to fly her to the hospital. When the girl was safely in the admitting department, Lois headed back to the police department. They’d want to send a detective down to talk to the victim.
Her reporter’s intuition may have been rusty, but she knew there was something going on here. It wasn’t a simple assault. It wasn’t even just local gang violence. Those three punks were willing to stand up to Ultrawoman when they should have been running scared. That meant they were either remarkably stupid, which was possible, or they had an organization so powerful backing them, that they didn’t think they needed to be afraid.
********
“Lane, what are you doing here?” Henderson drawled as he stood up from his chair in the hospital waiting room. “This isn’t your beat any more.”
“Old habits, Bill,” she replied with a shrug. She handed him one of the two cups of coffee she was carrying. “I heard about the attack, wanted to see if you guys knew anything.”
“You’re covering petty assaults now?” he asked suspiciously as he took a sip of his coffee. He smiled. Probably because she remembered that he liked his coffee black. They both sat down on the hard, uncomfortable chairs.
She looked at him through narrowed eyes. “Are you claiming this is a petty assault?”
Henderson shrugged diffidently. “It might be. What makes you think it wasn’t?”
“The perps,” she said. “Ultrawoman didn’t seem to think they were ordinary street thugs. Thought they might be connected to something bigger.”
“Like the Triads?” he asked.
She tried not to show too much interest. “Is that your theory?”
“One of them,” he replied. “The punks aren’t talking, unsurprisingly. About an hour ago, some slick $600 an hour lawyer shows up, claims he’s representing all three of them.”
“They didn’t seem like white shoe law firm clients,” Lois replied.
“No kidding,” Henderson said.
“If this goes deeper, Ultrawoman’s going to want to help,” Lois offered.
“Well, send her my way,” Henderson said. That was exactly what Lois wanted to hear.
“Thanks, Bill,” she replied as she stood up and walked out of the waiting room.
********
“All right,” Clark said as he worked his way through the agenda for his third ever weekly staff meeting. “Where are we on the trade negotiations piece?” he asked.
“Treasury’s giving us the runaround on an official statement, but they’re going to sign the deal tomorrow,” Mark Butler, the trade and economics beat reporter, said.
“Fine, write it without the statement, and be prepared for a last minute re-write,” Clark said.
“You got it, boss,” Mark replied. He tapped his notebook a few times with his pencil before standing up and walking out of the conference room.
Clark looked down at the next item on his agenda. “What about the Navy’s screw-up in the peacekeeping mission in West Timor?” The series of blunders had resulted in one of the Navy’s floating hospitals being sent to a conflict zone without the proper complement of protection and under-resourced and staffed for its mission. He and Lois had had to spend the better part of a day ferrying in personnel and supplies to the ship. It had been a colossal, unnecessary waste of time that could have been avoided had there been better planning at the top.
The Planet’s defense correspondent chimed in. “The Pentagon can’t get its story straight. First it was an unclear request from the U.N., then it was a series of technical mistakes. Now it’s the ground commander’s fault,” she said, her voice dripping with contempt. “Maybe if the job of Assistant Secretary for Stability Operations wasn’t still vacant after six months, they’d actually know what they were doing over there.”
Clark frowned. The government not being terribly forthcoming with information wasn’t an excuse for a vague and uninformative front page for tomorrow’s paper. “Do we have anything else on the hold up in the Senate of Commander Coleman’s confirmation?”
“I’ll have the write up on your desk in an hour,” Lois said, startling him.
He looked up, puzzled by the self-satisfied grin she wore. “You’re working on this?” he asked.
“A source has gotten confirmation on the senator who’s put the secret hold on the nomination. You’ll have the exclusive for tomorrow morning’s edition.”
He blinked several times. “Are you sure this’ll stay quiet until tomorrow morning?”
“No one else’s D.C. correspondents are even close,” she replied triumphantly.
“Okay, then,” he said. “That’s all I’ve got. Let’s get to work, everyone.” His staff stood up and shuffled out of the conference room. Lois lingered behind, walking toward the head of the table where he was still seated.
“So who is it?” he asked, his curiosity getting the better of him.
“What, you can’t wait an hour?” she asked with a smirk. She sat down on the table and crossed her legs. He couldn’t help his eyes wandering southward toward her long, perfect legs. God, he loved the skirt she was wearing. It wasn’t particularly short, but when she crossed her legs like that, it hitched up just a little bit farther. Clark finally managed to look back up at her eyes. The expectant expression on her face puzzled him. She’d asked him a question, hadn’t she?
“Huh?” he said inarticulately.
She shook her head and grabbed his tie as she leaned closer to kiss him. Her skin smelled like vanilla and she tasted like coffee. He felt her smile against his lips. “You seem a bit distracted,” she said.
“Are you trying to get me to forget about your story?”
“It’s Senator Martin,” she said. “He’s been holding up a bunch of confirmations – judges, ambassadors, deputy assistant secretaries of whatever until he can get Congress to pay for a transit museum in East Nowheresville.”
“You’re kidding?” he asked.
“Nope,” she replied. “But now that people are going to be able to blame him for screwing up a humanitarian military mission, he’s likely to quietly release the hold.”
“But you’re not going to let him get away that easily.”
“Not on your life.”
“Your interest in this wouldn’t have anything to do with Ultrawoman’s friendship with Commander Coleman, would it?”
“The longer you keep me here, the later my story is going to be,” she demurred. He knew his wife thought the world of Sarah Coleman after the Navy doctor’s work in Kinwara and last Christmas in Indonesia.
He kissed her again. “Do you really want to leave?” Clark asked.
“Maybe not. But they’re starting to talk out there.”
He could hear the gossip, too. Groaning, he stood up and kissed her one last time. “To be continued later,” he promised her.
She slipped off the table and smoothed out her skirt. “Oh, and I’m working on something else. If it pans out, it’ll be big.”
“Aren’t you supposed to be a columnist?”
She shrugged. “I’m not going to turn down good stories just because I’m getting paid to complain about politics now.”
********
“Lois, do you have to pick a fight with the Triads?” he asked under his breath. He stared at his computer, pretending to work, but every time Lois got one of these ideas, he got knots in his stomach. It was almost like the old days, back before she was invulnerable.
“I’ll be careful,” he heard her whisper from her office. “Ultrawoman will go after them; I’ll keep Lois Lane, Clark Kent and the entire family away from this. Are you going to help me?”
He shook his head. “Have I ever been able to say ‘no’ to you?”
She was packing up her files in her office. “I’ve got some leads I want to check out. It won’t take long,” he could hear the excitement in her voice, even though she was trying to control it. “I’ll see you at home. I’ll bring the research. You pick up the Chinese.”
“Cantonese?”
“How about Szechuan?”
Clark smiled. “Anything for you.”
“I love you, sweetheart.”
“Love you, too,” he replied.
********
“Hold onto my hand,” Clark said gently as Jon tried to run out ahead of his father.
“Okay Daddy,” Jon replied.
They came to the intersection just across the street from the park and waited for the ‘walk’ light to illuminate. “Look both ways, right?”
Jon nodded as he looked in both directions and cautiously stepped out into the crosswalk with his father. They entered the park just north of a playground, near a big patch of open grass where teenagers were playing Frisbee. Clark handed his son his tiny baseball mitt and backed up a few paces.
A year ago, they’d done this for the very first time. He was amazed at how much bigger Jon was now. He was still learning, but he was more coordinated, too. Able to throw the ball farther. Braver and more excited to explore his environment. And he was always asking questions.
They’d gone to the Centennial Park Zoo the week before. In the penguin exhibit, Jon had frowned as he stared at the strange birds, some of which were taller than he was. “Daddy, is a penguin a bird or a duck?” he’d asked.
Clark had smiled to himself and suppressed a laugh. “What do you mean?” he’d asked his little boy.
“They swim like ducks, but they look like birds,” Jon had declared.
Clark sat down on the bench in front of the penguin exhibit and lifted his son up to sit right next to him. He explained what it meant to say something was a bird. How they had feathers and eggs, and how some of them swam while others flew and yet others, like the chickens on Grandma and Grandpa’s farm, just walked around on the ground. As Jon listened and nodded and asked questions, it was like getting an amazing view into how his little boy thought. How he tried to make rational sense of everything that went on around him. How so much of the world was still new to him.
In just about a week, Jon was going to start nursery school. At home, with his parents, he wasn’t just listening to stories any more, he was learning to read some of the words himself. And with tremendous pride, just the day before, he’d declared that J-O-N spelled Jon.
As they enjoyed their game of catch on a warm Sunday evening at the end of summer, Clark realized that while he’d missed so much in those four years, he’d been there for so many of the milestones in his son’s young life this past year. And, in an odd sort of way, he was thrilled by the fact that his son had come to take him for granted. Jon expected his father to be around – to read stories with him and take him to the park or the museum, to play dinosaurs with him and make sure he brushed his teeth.
Jon knew that his daddy loved him and would take care of him. To Jon Kent, it was a simple fact. To Clark Kent, it meant the world.
********
Police Raid Prostitution and Sweatshop Rings in Chinatown
By Lois Lane
Superman, Ultrawoman and the Metropolis Police Department launched a series of coordinated raid against seven massage parlors and four garment manufacturers in the Chinatown section of Metropolis. Dozens of arrests were made and immigration authorities are currently attempting to ascertain the status of numerous individuals detained in the raids. According to Police Chief Kelly Raymond, recent immigrants—most of them suspected to be undocumented—were being forced to work in dangerous, hazardous conditions which violated not only state and federal workplace regulations, but numerous criminal laws. “Individuals of all ages, including children were forced to work more than sixteen hours a day, six or seven days a week in conditions not seen in this city since the Four Square Shirtwaist Factory Fire almost a hundred years ago. Young women who had come to the U.S. in hopes of working as nannies or waitresses were forced into prostitution,” Chief Raymond stated. The Police Department has issued no comment as to whether it believes that these operations were part of a larger criminal enterprise….”
Clark dropped the paper on his desk. She really was something else. The dismantling of Intergang years ago – in which Lois had played no small role – had left a vacuum in terms of organized crime in the city. The Triads had apparently tried to fill it. But attempting to do so under the noses of two superheroes and the best investigative reporter in the world seemed dumber and dumber in hindsight. Metropolis must have been too tempting a target to abandon, even if the criminals were playing pretty deep odds on this turf.
Wordlessly, Lois walked into his office and sat down in one of the two chairs across from his desk. She picked up his brass nameplate and fidgeted restlessly with it.
“Great work,” he said.
“So why do I feel so lousy?” she asked.
He frowned sadly. “Because even though we stopped it, these guys spent months making hundreds of people’s lives a living hell.”
“You know, it’s self-centered of me, but part of it, is this anger at their temerity. How dare they come into our city and try to do this to the people we protect? Who did they think they were? Why did they think they could get away with it?”
He sighed. “Because they preyed on the margins of society. Illegal immigrants, runaways, people outside the system. They figured no one would notice. No one cared enough about these people to fight back.”
“And who knows what’s going to happen to the victims now,” she mused ruefully.
“Commissioner Raymond said the Feds were considering helping the victims get status if they assisted with the investigations and prosecutions.”
“Have the Feds already taken this out of the DA’s hands?” she asked. Her maudlin mood cleared for a moment and he could see the investigative gears turning as her eyes lit up. “
“The U.S. Attorney’s got it out for the Triads. His Organized Crime section thinks this goes all the way back to Hong Kong. Drugs, counterfeiting, extortion, sex slavery, the whole sordid mess.”
She gave him a half smile. “Looks like those sources haven’t dried up on you.”
Clark shrugged in response. “Perry wants to meet with us tomorrow to talk about an ongoing series.”
“But you have concerns?”
He nodded. “This is going to get more and more dangerous. And not for the two of us.”
“I know,” she agreed. “But who do we give this story to? Who doesn’t have a family to protect? Or who wouldn’t worry for their own safety? And it’s not like we can just let this go and pretend it never happened.”
“You’re right,” he said as he lifted his glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose. He knew there were sources who wouldn’t talk to Superman or Ultrawoman, but might talk to Lois Lane or Clark Kent. Frankly, it was still more likely that they would talk to Lois – even a year later and all his assiduous attempts at avoiding the spotlight, his profile was a little too high. “We should talk to my folks,” he said. Although he knew how they would respond. His mother would tell him that she wasn’t going to let gangsters and thugs intimidate him out of doing his job out of a concern for her safety or his father’s. But what about Jon? To an extent, his parents had assumed the risk by supporting him in becoming Superman. Jon hadn’t. If it started to get dangerous, they would have to get Jon and his parents, and her parents, too, out of town. He hated the thought, but hard choices were hardly new to him.
