part2
***Metropolis
Dinner was a subdued affair. They didn’t even try the safe topics. No small talk about work, articles, investigations, or office gossip. No talk of how they might redecorate the downstairs or when they might get to Smallville again. Clark kept one hand on Lois’ clenched fist throughout the meal. He knew how much courage it had taken her just to come down, to sit across from him. To face him.
“You know I’m still your best friend, right?” He broke the heavy silence unthinkingly. But once he said it, he knew it was angle he needed to get things started.
Lois met his gaze for only a minute, before dropping them to her plate, which had apparently become quite fascinating. She didn’t answer.
“Because I am. First and foremost, before everything else, Lois. Your friend.”
She nodded her head, pushing her food around the plate with the utmost of concentration.
“So, why don’t we start there? I’m not your…boyfriend, future husband, or…the father of your child. I’m your friend who wants to know how you’re doing.”
“I…can’t, Clark,” she whispered to her plate. “Please.”
They had gotten to this place more than a few times before. And each time, at the ‘please’ he had retreated. She broke his heart, this Lois Lane that he hardly knew. He knew if he continued to acquiesce to her pleas, they would never be anything more than co-dependant roommates with a baby. Not the family they needed to be, that they were meant to be.
No more wasted time, he told himself. Not one more minute.
“Are you mad at me, Lois?” he asked flatly.
This shocked her enough to look up. Her mouth opened, but nothing came out.
He raised a challenging eyebrow at her. “Because if you are, just say so. I can take anything but the silence.”
“How could you think I was mad at you?” she asked in quiet wonder.
“How could you not be?” he threw back at her, grimacing at his own tone, but needing to break the shell that she wore so comfortably. “Tempus-”
She flinched, but he pressed on. The man was just a man. Best to say his name and shrink the myth that had grown around him; making him all powerful, all evil, and fully in control of them both.
“Tempus,” he repeated deliberately, “took you because of me. That is the sole reason for all of this, Lois. The bottom line. If you weren’t the woman I love, he would never have looked at you twice.”
“Clark, that’s…that’s…crazy,” she asserted, scowling at him.
“How’s it crazy, Lois, if it’s the truth?” He scraped his chair back abruptly from the table, pulling her up with him. He propelled her forward into the living room and with one hand on her shoulder pushed her down onto the sofa. That she had come so meekly hurt him. He sometimes felt he could steer her anywhere- to work, to home, to her parents, to his parents- and she would just come along and never question.
“Dammit, Lois,” he exploded. “Open your mouth!”
She was on her feet trembling in front of him. “You…shut up!” she railed, her finger jabbing him in the chest. “You…don’t know what you’re talking about! And stop trying to take this on yourself. That is just like you. This is all *your* fault, right?! And poor Lois is nothing but the victim.”
“You don’t like being the victim, Lois?” he shot back at her. “Then stop acting like it.” He gathered his courage and once more placed his hand on her shoulder, pushing her back down onto the sofa. She didn’t go quite so willingly this time, which thrilled him.
“Clark Kent,” she growled, “lay your hands on me one more time…”
“And what, Lois,” he mocked her. “You’ll be really, really quiet? More a mouse than you already are?”
She bolted out of her seat and leapt at him. He softened his body as her fists rained down on him.
“Don’t hurt yourself, honey,” he told her smugly.
Lois cursed and kicked and punched until she was breathless. Her fists which had been pummeling his chest, eventually came to rest there. Winded, she leaned against him. He stood completely still, watching the minutes tick off the clock on the mantle. After a time, he raised his arms and wrapped them around her. Her arms came around him in return.
“Ok,” Lois spoke into his shirt front. “You ask and I’ll answer. An interview.”
Clark smiled for the first time in a long, long time. So long he couldn’t remember.
“Have a seat, Ms. Lane,” he replied. “And thank you for accepting my interview request. I promise-” He gently tilted her face up to his. “-you’re in good hands. You won’t regret this.
***
“Clark?” Lois asked from where she was seated in the chair. Clark looked up from his notebook. She had suggested an interview, and he was going to do his best to make it just that. A question and answer session, note taking included.
“Yeah?” he answered her softly, hoping she wasn’t going to say she’d changed her mind. He didn’t want to force another confrontation. He would if he had to. But he so deeply didn’t want to.
“Kiss me before we get started,” Lois ordered.
“Is this standard practice, Ms. Lane?” he queried with a half-smile. “I mean, I know you gave several interviews on your return to Metropolis. I was even at a few. But if this is how the others got started…”
“Shut up, Kent.” She glared. “Bring that big mouth over here.”
He left his chair and knelt in front of her, curling his arms around her, pulling her towards him. She grabbed the back of his head and brought their lips together. She kissed him until he was dizzy. When they parted he gasped,” Is this a ploy to throw me off the subject at hand, Lois. Because…well, it’s working.”
Lois smiled at him. “No. That’s just in case.” She paused, swallowed hard, and he felt the increase in her heart rate. “In case you don’t want to after this,” she finished plainly.
“I’ve told you, honey, there isn’t anything you could tell me that would change…”
She cut him off. “Let’s put that promise to the test, then.”
“Deal.” He returned to his seat, picked up the notes he had been hastily scribbling when he’d realized she was deadly serious about this being an interview. He knew this was his chance. Their chance. If they could get this right, the future was theirs.
As casually and professionally as possible he asked her the number one question on his list, and in his heart. “Can you tell us apart?”
Lois didn’t pretend to misunderstand him. And she seemed ready for it. “You and the other Clark?” She looked to him for confirmation. At his nod, she answered. “Yes.”
“And what are the differences? And for that matter the similarities?”
“He has your face. Your eyes. He flies. Leaps tall buildings. He’s your double. The first time I saw him he was running into the building late for work. Sound familiar?”
Clark didn’t rise to the bait. “And what, besides his tardiness, was your first impression of him?”
“I felt an overwhelming relief to find a Clark Kent. He was an anchor. He offered a safe place in the form of a man who I knew before, and who I…loved and trusted.”
“And how did he react to seeing you?”
This was desperately important to him, as he well remembered the anvil that had fallen out of nowhere and struck him senseless at his first sight of Lois Lane. He needed to think that was unique to him, and only him, in every world, in every galaxy. He didn’t let any of that bleed into his voice or face, though. Just kept his eyes on the page in front of him.
“That’s easy,” Lois grinned, getting into the swing of things. “He gave me a polite smile and ran right past me.”
“He...? Wait, I thought he offered you help right away. That he took you…home, and that you basically never left until…Wells…”
“Was there a question in there?” She tilted her head at him, the picture of puzzlement. “He did. But that was almost two weeks later.”
“He walked past you every day for almost two weeks?” He couldn’t believe it.
“Ten days,” Lois affirmed.
“How…how long until you…married him?” Clark had tried to keep that casual, but he knew he hadn’t quite brought that off.
“A few months,” she answered with what sounded like apology in her voice.
He consulted his notes for some time.
“Why so fast?” he returned at last.
“Because I had nothing. No possessions, no family, no other friends. And no way to get back, that I knew of. No idea what had really happened or why. Because I was lost, and he was…as close to you as I could get.”
“So, you married him because he was basically me?”
“No. That isn’t fair to him. He was…is… wonderful in his own right. Honest, caring, kind, loving, generous. All the things you are, Clark,” she tagged on quickly, but he shook his head at her. He needed to know all of this, no varnish. “And he’s different from you, too. A bit more direct. A bit less unassuming. In some ways he’s more like me.” She stopped and watched as Clark scribbled some nonsense on his paper.
“And he was my friend. My true friend. The one person in the world who really knew who I was.”
“I can certainly appreciate that,” he told her quietly. “So you married him and made a home with him…”
“Something you told me you understood,” she began a bit defensively. “On the night I returned you said…”
“Please.” He held up a hand cutting her off. “Who’s running this interview, here?”
He waited for her nod to continue.
“You made a home with him. You worked with him. You…went to bed with him.”
“Eventually,” she stated, this time with no apology.
“Not before, but on your wedding night?” he asked in a somewhat strangled voice.
“Not for a few months after the wedding, no. He said waiting was ok.”
He studied her for a while. She looked right back at him. The quiet was not uncomfortable. In fact, something, some spirit that had haunted their home, which had hovered between them for weeks and weeks, seemed to have lifted.
“How close together was your last…encounter with him to the one…with me?” He had put the notebook down. All pretenses of the “interview” dropped.
“We were together the morning of our first anniversary.” Lois leaned forward, putting her elbows on her knees and keeping her eyes glued to his. “I left and came home to you, by the time difference, I’m guessing, no more than a week later. And you and I didn’t wait.”
“Why didn’t we, Lois?”
“Because I needed you too much.”
“And when you were with him, and when you were with me…there were differences?”
“Yes.”
“And those are…?”
“Simple. I loved him. I always will. For who he was to me. For what he gave to me so selflessly, never asking for anything in return. And you…are the man I am in love with.”
Lois didn’t make a move towards him, but the space that had been between them seemed to have evaporated. “Whose eyes I can’t stand to read pain in. Whose arms I always want around me. Whose body fits mine. Whose heart is tied to my heart…by a chord that even time and distance couldn’t break.”
He dropped his head into his hands. Blinking against the tears that wanted to come. “I think that will be enough for today, Ms. Lane,” he rasped.
“Not quite,” she contradicted him in a tone he hadn’t heard from her in too long. “Look at me, Farmboy,” Lois ordered.
He took a deep breath and pulled his eyes to hers. “Take me upstairs,” she suggested softly.
She didn’t have to say it twice. Seize the day, Kent, he told himself as he flew her up the stairs, the future is now.
***Metropolis2
Minutes to spare, the hottest team in town, or rather the revised version of that team, hit ‘send’ on their article, and watched in satisfaction as Sorenson, their somewhat put-upon editor, raced to his desk to receive it.
“I never doubted you two,” he hailed them from his office, mopping the sweat from his glistening brow.
“Dinner?” Clark turned dancing eyes towards her. “Movie? We have to celebrate. This is a big one, Lane.”
“I…no,” Lois began. “Um…I think just home.”
“Yeah?” He looked very hopeful. “We just…head home? Maybe I’ll cook or go pick us up something?”
“No.” She shut him down just as she shut her computer down. “I want to be…alone tonight. A little privacy, for heaven’s sake, what does that cost?”
“Ok,” he agreed easily. “You go. I’ll hang out here, or find something that needs doing, or fixing, saving, you know.” He moved to take her coat down from the rack, holding it out for her.
“You don’t get it.” She glared at him, snatching the coat from his hands.
“Oh, believe me, I get it,” he replied mildly, sitting back down and glancing at his watch.
“What do you get?” she asked him through narrowed eyes.
“Two hours and seventeen minutes,” was his smug reply. And it was smug, there was no other description for it.
“I’m supposed to know what that means, am I?” she tossed over her shoulder, shrugging her coat on and stomping towards the elevator.
“You know what it means.” He didn’t move from his chair, and even had the nerve to smile and give a friendly wave.
She punched the elevator button with enough force to summon it immediately if it knew what was good for it. She wouldn’t take the bait. He so obviously wanted her to, and he would be sorely disappointed. The elevator, though, didn’t seem to realize how grave the stakes were, moving at a speed that matched a snail climbing up hill…under the weight of dozens of other snails…crawling through molasses…dripping in quicksand.
“I’m taking the stairs,” she announced furiously.
“Since you kissed me,” he answered the question she had most definitely not been going to ask.
“Wh…? What?” She whirled around. “What is that supposed to mean?!”
Behind her the elevator doors opened and closed again.
“Your turn around time, Lane,” he countered pleasantly. “Two hours and 17 minutes since you kissed me until you want to pick a fight. That’s a record, you know. I think we’re improving.”
“That,” she pronounced with supreme dignity, “does not deserve a response.”
He chuckled. He actually chuckled. Like he wanted to be killed, or something.
“Good night then, Mrs. Kent.” He grinned. “See you at home…later.”
With that he moved past her towards the stairwell.
“You…you…” she sputtered.
“Yes?” He paused in mid step. “Need something?”
“Oh, very much so,” she whispered seductively, licking her lips for good measure and taking no small satisfaction in the way his face changed, his posture changed, the very air around him changed.
“Yes?” he asked again, though this time with no where near the confidence he had before.
She moved towards him slowly, placing one arm around his neck, letting her hand play with the hair that just touched his collar. The other she ran up and down his chest. “Answer a question for me, Clark, and we’ll go have dinner,” she fairly purred.
He eyed her warily, but made no effort to resist her advances, though his arms stayed at his sides.
“What…?” he croaked. “What do you want to know?”
The hand that had been stroking his chest clutched his tie and yanked. “Where did you get the tie?” she asked in a voice dripping in venom.
“Where did I…?” His face clouded over, the heat that had been his eyes fading into confusion. “My tie? What?”
“Where did you get it?” she repeated back to him slowly so he could follow. He wasn’t too bright after all.
He slipped it out of her fist and examined it. Then he got that look. Not the ‘there is a cry for help and somebody needs rescuing’ look, but the ‘I wish I could cry for help and somebody would rescue me’ look. “Oh,” he said. “Oh.”
“Is that my answer?’ she snapped, turning away from him, pretending to be sorting through the things in her briefcase.
“Lois bought it for me,” he said quietly. “Some time ago.”
She glanced at her watch. “Two hours and twenty-five minutes, Clark. From our kiss to the mention of your wife.”
With that she pushed past him and walked to the stairwell, for real this time.
“You brought her up,” he offered quietly.
“Why are you still wearing the things she bought you? Why are all her things still in boxes in our…your home?” She knew how that sounded. She knew it sounded bitter and jealous, and even insecure. It wasn’t any of those things. She was a reporter. She asked the difficult questions. Knowledge was power, and all that.
“We can’t…erase her, Lane,” he sighed. “We can’t pretend she wasn’t here. What do you want me to do? Go through my wardrobe, go through the house, throw away everything she touched?”
“No way, Clark!” she gasped dramatically. “I mean that would be a sacrilege, right? Desecrating the memory of saint Lois like that? I couldn’t ask that of you.”
“Here’s that fight you wanted,” he told her grimly. “Happy now?”
“How can I be happy?” she flared, appalled to hear the crack in her voice. “I’m living a lie, walking in the footsteps of a woman beyond reproach. I’m in a sham of a marriage…”
“Do you want out?” He stopped her rant with those words.
Behind them Sorenson scurried from the bullpen, apparently trying his best to appear invisible. They had both forgotten him.
Clark barely spared their departing boss a glance.
“This will be all over the newsroom tomorrow,” Lois groaned.
“Maybe that’s how you want it?” he suggested. “Grounds for divorce.”
“You want a divorce?” She made herself say that carelessly. “Time to lay this charade to rest? We file the papers and then this is done, since *she* used *my* identity to make it legal.”
“Why does the tie bother you?” he countered somewhat incongruously.
For reasons she would never be able to explain later, the question caught her off guard. She tried and failed to cover the tears that wanted to come. Turning her back to him she at last made it into the stairwell.
“I’m going home,” she choked out. “I don’t want you to come, ok?”
He was behind her, his warm hands on her shoulders, his hard chest against her back.
“Why does the tie bother you?” he breathed into her hair.
“It’s ugly,” she finally sobbed. “She could *not* have loved you, giving you a tie like that! It’s a sign, Clark. You’re just too sweet to see it. She was trying to make you…ugly! Trying to alienate you from everyone else. Trying to make you into a…a stupid, ugly tie-wearing guy.”
“I don’t want a divorce,” he replied, apparently finding something in that logic he wanted to hear. “Let’s go home.”
“Can we fly?” she asked, cringing at the pleading sound in her voice.
In answer he wrapped his arms around her, turning her towards him and tucking her head into his neck. They floated soundlessly up the stairwell, to the roof and up.
“Let’s take the long way,” she sighed.
“You got it,” he answered.
***Metropolis
Clark left her that night. He crawled reluctantly out their bed in the predawn hours to the sounds of a three-alarm fire in Suicide Slum. Tonight he didn’t wake her. A reversal of the habit he had gotten into since they’d moved in together. If he was leaving, no matter the hour, he would kiss her awake, tell her where he was going and when he hoped to return. Sometimes she would get up and wait for him. Sometimes roll over and mutter a groggy ‘good luck.’ For the first few weeks, though, Lois had insisted on coming with him, no matter what the circumstances.
They had gone round and round about that. It wasn’t only heavy silence that had hung over their home. There were plenty of petty arguments, as well. They couldn’t seem to talk about the big things, but the little things they would fall apart over. Where did you leave the keys? Why can’t you remember to hang up your towels? You washed your cape with my whites and everything I own is pink. That sort of stuff. Some of it was a normal part of getting used to sharing a space with someone. But most of it was just creating noise around the real issues, drowning out the unsaid between them.
But Lois’ refusal to let him go anywhere without her hadn’t been a little thing. Clark had humored her, initially. Humored them both, actually, as he was no more eager to be away from her. Superman would take her and drop her off a safe distance away from where the action was. But he was always distracted by the knowledge that she was close by, in potential danger. And after a couple of times, the members of the press had started to notice and speculate. He had made her a target for Tempus already. He wasn’t going to parade her around for the criminal element to see. If Superman couldn’t leave Lois Lane’s side, then he was finished as an effective force for good. They had both realized that. So, a compromise had been forged. He would wake her up from now on. She would always know where he’d gone. And, he vowed, if she needed him, she just had to call. He would drop everything and everyone else. It wasn’t going to happen again, like it did last time.
But tonight, for the first time since their return to Metropolis, he didn’t wake her. Instead he spun quietly into the Suit, feeling somewhat guilty, but hoping, also, that maybe after this evening’s conversation, and what had followed, they were on the road to “normal.” Lois was exhausted, pregnant, and sleeping deeply. So, maybe this would be ok. He opened the window and floated out, closing it carefully from the outside. For just a moment he allowed himself the luxury of looking at her, stretched out in the middle of the bed. The woman he loved desperately, carrying the child who would be theirs, asleep in the bed they had just shared. The thought ‘too good to be true’ flitted through his mind, but he squelched it. It wasn’t too good to be true. It was what was meant to be. They deserved this, both of them. And they had paid for it many times over. The alarms persisted and with a full heart Superman rocketed away.
***
Tempus came for her while Clark was gone. He had just waited for the bed to get cold. He placed a hand on Lois’ shoulder, waking her, and telling her how delighted he was to see her. The window was activated behind him, casting a blue-white glow about the room. She tried to call for Superman, but her voice failed her.
“You did so well in the other Metropolis, Lois. I thought we might see how many Clark Kents find you irresistible. Call it research. How many Clark Kents can one Lois Lane marry? This inquiring villain wants to know.”
He pushed her through, her arms and legs too tangled in the bed clothes for her to run or fight. And she fell and fell and fell into darkness. Completely alone. Again.
***
Lois surged forward in the bed, sweating and gasping for breath. She fumbled for the lamp. Her nightmares didn’t usually get this far. If she started to thrash, Clark was always there. He always seemed to sense her distress. She suspected he still slept tuned in to her heartbeat. Something he’d confessed to her once in Smallville in her first days back. It soothed him, he’d said, and also alerted him when she needed him. By the time Tempus would activate the window, Clark almost always had her up and in his lap. His voice loud enough for her to know he was there, and she should wake up and see that everything was ok.
“Clark?” she whispered into the empty room, hating the quiver in her voice. “Clark?”
He had gone.
Lois stood on unsteady legs, fighting the urge to yell for Superman at the top of her lungs. It had to have been an emergency. She knew that. No need to panic, he would be back. It must have been big, or else he would have alerted her. Maybe he hadn’t had time. But he would come back. And Tempus wasn’t here. And she was fine. Both she and…the baby were fine. For a few minutes Lois stayed where she was, her mind furiously circling that same mantra- Tempus wasn’t here. Clark was coming back. She was fine. Tempus wasn’t here. Clark was coming back. She was fine. Lois didn’t want to do what she sometimes did on nights Clark had to leave. She didn’t need to do it. She was fine. He’d be back.
She watched the clock steadily for a few minutes, trying to hold herself still. She could read a book, maybe. Or just sit back down and put the television on. Superman might be mentioned.
She could go downstairs and fix something. Tea. Or see if there was a dessert left over since they’d skipped it tonight.
She could do something besides just standing here, chanting uselessly to herself.
Or…that other thing that she did sometimes that Lois knew, in the pit of her stomach, meant she was crazy. Trembling and sick inside, she walked to the bathroom and shut the door behind her. Locked it. Clark wouldn’t try to come in if he knew she was in here, but still. Lois reached behind the towel bar and pulled the permanent marker from where she kept it taped. She drew her shirt off over her head and uncapped the pen.
<Don’t do this,> one part of her pleaded. <You don’t have to.>
<< Take care of yourself, and the baby now, too,>> another voice soothed. << It doesn’t hurt anything, and you’ll sleep better.>>
She didn’t hesitate any longer. She needed to hurry. If Clark came back and found her doing this, he would…would…she didn’t know what he would do, but he wouldn’t let it go, that was for sure.
“My name is Lois Lane,” she wrote in clear block letters across her torso. “My blood type is O+. If you find me, please call CLARK KENT at the Daily Planet, Metropolis, New Troy. Or Perry White. Thank you.”
The words ran from just under her breasts down to her navel. If she was dumped somewhere, if she was hurt or bleeding, or unconscious, she would be identified and helped. There had been a Clark and a Perry in the altworld, so she reasoned that would be the case in any parallel universe. She hoped so. Checking that everything she’d written was clearly legible, she added one more line.
“I am pregnant.”
Feeling better, though not meeting the eyes of the woman in the mirror, she carefully returned the marker to its place and pulled her shirt back over her head, tucking it into her pajama bottoms, just to be sure. She went back to bed.
***
Superman hovered over the brownstone for an eternity trying to process what he’d seen.
He had left the fire in the middle of the incident. All citizens had been evacuated and he’d alerted the department chief of other immediate demands. That hadn’t been questioned. And it was perfectly true. He had promised Lois that if she called, he would come.
How exactly he had heard her whispers and accelerated heartbeat, he didn’t know. He had been across town, things had been chaotic. But Clark had just known that she needed him, that she wasn’t asleep. Since she had returned his radar, where she was concerned, was extra sensitive. Superman had stayed only long enough to check there were no bodies in the path of the fire and to yell to the firefighters that he was going.
Then he had flown home and, from hundreds of feet up, sought out Lois. He had halted only because she had. She was standing perfectly still and he couldn’t figure out what the problem was. When she had moved to the bathroom, he’d felt foolish. She was pregnant after all, getting up in the middle of the night was not uncommon. Lois had probably just woken up and wondered where he was.
Clark had flown down lower, headed for the window. He was just making sure that their neighbors on either side were well asleep before entering, when he’d caught a glimpse of what Lois was doing. He paused, arrested at the sight of her, and floated noiselessly over the roof, watching and reading with a lead weight in his heart.
tbc
