Sorry for the delay in posting this week, guys - stupid college arrangement stuff 
Hopefully I'll be better next week 
Part 8The contents of a mug of coffee were really quite interesting if you thought about it, mused Clark Kent as he sat staring bleakly into said mug. The way the rich brown swirled around restlessly inside it, never still, never silent. Kind of like Lois’ eyes, except not nearly as deep. He could drown in Lois’ eyes. Pools. Dark pools of light.
//Pools of sorrow, waves of joy.//
He smiled as he recalled the old Beatles song. John Lennon and Paul McCarthy – what a team. Just like Woodward and Bernstein. Coffee and sugar. Lane and Kent.
//Waves of joy... I wish.//
It had been months since he’d smiled, he realised grimly. With Lois’s absence from his routine, the vast cavern of emptiness inside of him yawned wider and deeper with each passing day. There was little to smile about in his life. How can you laugh at emptiness?
The last time he’d even felt that telltale twitching of his cheek muscles had actually been just earlier that day. Watching her stride down the platform from the elevator. Listening to the familiar tom-tom rhythm of her heartbeat, his sensitive nose picking up the faint traces of her shampoo. Coconut. Always coconut.
The instinct had died as she swept past him, the chill wind of her cold rejection whistling through the yawning abyss inside of him, reminding him again just how empty it was. These days it was so vast that he thought it could go on forever. He knew just what would fill it, though. A kind word, a shapely hand on his shoulder, a warm smile – even if she just *looked* at him. Just once. That was all it would take. To talk to her, to hear her talk back, even if it was just to shun and ridicule him. Just hearing her voice would soak up the oceans of loneliness.
Taking the step towards this had been difficult – having to postpone it had been torture – having to wait still more when he finally arrived back at the Planet had been hell. Stepping into the bullpen just in time to catch the swish of her skirt in the door of Perry’s office, he had immediately felt the deep boulder of disappointment settle firmly about his shoulders and had drooped back to his desk, with his cape between his legs – figuratively speaking, of course. She had been in there for what seemed like hours on end; he had resisted the temptation to zone in on the conversation, or to x-ray through the shuttered doors. He did have *some* pride left, although it was slowly diminishing every second he had to spend without talking to her. In fact, if she didn’t come out soon, he might just have to throw himself upon her neck and beg her forgiveness.
Disgusted with himself and his melancholy thoughts, he emptied the contents of his cup out into the small houseplant that was currently taking up residence on his desk. Just doing that small, altogether cruel-to-the-plant action brought a strange, wistful ache to his throat and a tightness to his chest. Strange what habits partners picked up over time.
The door swung open, and he almost leapt out of his seat. There she was though carefully looking away from him. His eyes followed the pendulum swing of her hips as she walked back to her desk, and his heart rate increased dramatically. How was it that a woman who acted so abrasive and coldly to him could hold such power over him?
Standing up nonchalantly, he picked up his now-empty coffee cup and meandered carefully around his desk. To anyone who wasn’t aware of the situation between Lois and Clark, which would be most of the people working at the Planet, Kent was taking a well-deserved break to re-fill his coffee cup.
Unfortunately, Lois’ desk was not next to the machine.
But hey, it didn’t *need* to be next to the machine. All it took was a quick detour – he could pick her cup up on the way – and then he would know. He would know what she was feeling. He could look in her eyes, ask her softly if she wanted some coffee...
And she could turn him down, flat.
He spied her mug sitting forlornly at the very edge of her desk, just waiting for an elbow to come flying out of nowhere and knock it to the ground. Moving at just barely-human speed, he swooped in, snatched it, and was gone again before she knew what hit her.
He could almost hear her rolling her eyes.
Coward. He was a coward.
Refilling their mugs took all of two minutes, and he took a long, drawn-out sip, watching her carefully over the top of his glasses. She was focusing intently on the screen – a little *too* intensely, truth be told. There was a faint line of pink edging its way along her jaw-line, even as she tried to hide it with her hair. She was aware of his presence, all right.
Enough with the undercover surveillance, already. He wasn’t trying to scare her. He just needed to know that she wasn’t made of stone. He would try and talk to her now. Surely even Lois could see reason?
Turning thought into action, he made his way carefully down into the heart of the bullpen, making sure not to spill his coffee on his way. Glancing down at the murky liquid again to strengthen his resolve, he set it down carefully on his desk and started strolling over to Lois’s.
Finally. The next few moments were crucial. If she rejected his friendly greeting, he would know that it was hopeless trying to pretend that nothing had happened. He would have to get down to the nitty-gritty stuff of trying to explain exactly why he had kissed her and then ran out on her. However, if she returned it... he would know that she wanted to put the past behind him just as much as he did. He would know that she wanted to get back to their comfortable friendship, their stable partnership, their friendly alliance. Never anything more, but he could live with that, as long as he had her. The ugly, raised scar on his heart would either be completely healed or ripped open in the next few seconds.
He held his breath as he neared her desk...
…and let it out in one long, disappointed puff as a hand clapped him on the shoulder. His whole body protesting at the action, he swivelled around slowly and groaned as the face of his Editor came into full view. Not *now*! Not *right at this moment*! *Why*?
“Kent... can I, uh, see you in my office for a minute?”
Clark started. What... what was wrong with Perry? First of all, he had *asked* to see him in his office. Not demanded. *Asked*. Second, his gruff, gravelly tones had been replaced with a soft, almost indistinguishable murmur. Perry... murmuring?
He sighed and nodded, before regretfully pouring the extra coffee that had been meant for Lois into the bin. With one last, regretful look at his partner, who was still working diligently at her desk, and a certain amount of trepidation, Clark followed the Editor-in-Chief into his office.
* * * * * * * * *
Lois exhaled deeply, feeling the relief swirl and settle deep in the pit of her stomach. Perry had stopped him in time. She was safe.
She was safe.
He had been about to try and talk to her. After all that time, he had picked the precise moment when she couldn’t get away from him. She had been darting in and out of the Ladies all day, hoping to avoid him; unfortunately, this had prompted Ralph to ask if she had a bladder problem. A baleful glance had informed him that such a remark didn’t merit an answer, but had done little to hide her flaming face, and she had almost fled back to her desk to sink into her chair, closing her eyes. This couldn’t continue. She would go crazy.
That was why she had started panicking when he had begun to lope over towards her desk. She had known exactly what was coming, and burying her head in a mound of paperwork wasn’t going to stop him this time.
She had felt his eyes on her all day – surveying her from his desk, on the other side of the newsroom, boring into her as she stepped out of the elevator in the morning, scorching her sensitive skin as he peered over the top of his glasses pleadingly when she yelled for Jimmy and finally scanning her as he refilled his cup of coffee. She had focused on her screen and begun to type, hoping desperately that he wouldn’t come over and start reading her screen over her shoulder – she was typing nonsense, after all.
When he had started loping with that graceful, long-legged ease across the newsroom, her heart rate had heightened and she had begun feeling light-headed. If he tried to talk to her – if he so much as glanced in her direction – her self-control would collapse and she would throw herself at his feet, begging him to kiss her one last time.
Growing up in a house where mechanical faces, mechanical feelings, mechanical lives were a speciality had in fact served her well. Her face, which had turned as pale as marble due to her time shut away from the sun, now assumed both the coldness and rigidity of that material. She stopped writing in her notebook, turned her attention back to the screen, where she had been typing her nonsensical sentences just moments before, and began to hammer at the keyboard, staring blankly at the monitor. Not daring to look up until she felt the telltale draught that meant Perry had opened his door behind her, she had felt the stones that had lodged in her stomach turn into feathers as he clapped Clark on the shoulder and gestured towards his office. He was obviously going to tell him about her decision. After he had, Clark would never come next or near her again. He would hate her. He would never speak to her or have anything more to do with her.
That was what she wanted.
Wasn’t it?
So why did the idea make her so miserable?
Lois shook her head firmly. Those thoughts, horribly dangerous as they were, could only get her into trouble. Trouble with a capital ‘C’.
She snuck a surreptitious glance over her shoulder at Perry’s office. The blinds were tightly closed, and she gritted her teeth. The tension was killing her. Would he hate her forever? Would he be angry with her? Would he be sad that their partnership had come to an end? Would he be *relieved*? Like a surfer, cruising down the long, narrow ‘tunnel’ of water, never sure of whether or not the board would slip out from under their feet until the wave crashed upon the seabed, she had no way of knowing.
Afterwards, Lois was never sure whether or not she was the only one in the newsroom who had heard the muffled “No!” which had emitted itself from Perry’s office. It had certainly sounded loud enough to her ears. A moment later, she was dashed upon the jagged rocks of Clark Kent’s desperation, blazing out of him as he stormed across the newsroom like a bull before coming to a halt directly in front of her.
“What’s Perry *talking* about, Lois? What have you done?”
* * * * * * * * *
Clark stared down at his partner - *ex* partner – his face a tight, stiff mask of misery as his world crashed down around his ears. His world. His world, which revolved around her.
Lois. Sitting there so calm, so cool in her chair – unaware of the fact that his life had just ended. She had just effectively stopped his heart, placed it in stone, wrapped it in barbed wire, set it on ice.
//Tread softly because you tread on my dreams...//
Tread. Yeah, right. He would have fetched her the cloths of heaven, if she had asked. He had spread his dreams under her feet, and she had stamped on them.
She not only stamped on them, but stamped on them with the proverbial leather boots, leaving them torn, ripped, defamed, and splattered with clay. Disrespected. His dreams. She had shattered them like cheap panes of glass, the splinters heading directly for his heart and lodging there.
His heart.
“It’s for the best, Clark,” she retorted stiffly, her face unreadable. She swivelled her chair around, facing towards the monitor and began typing laboriously.
Clark stared at her back as she drove her words of glass into his heart. Her shoulders were stiff, the muscles of her back clearly outlined by her suit, taut and tight. Her whole stance spoke of anger, of outrage – but what had she to be angry about?
He had been the one who had been betrayed. He had been the one who had been hurt. He had been the one who had stayed up night after night, visions of sweet torture dancing in the purple space behind his tightly shut eyes. He had been the one who had wished, time and time again, that he wasn’t what he was. He had wanted to un-make himself – disconnect his molecules, the atoms that made up his body, and let them float into empty space.
There was a difference between atoms and nerves. Atoms couldn’t feel. They couldn’t think. They couldn’t love.
He had been the one who had been torturing himself for the past three months, her honeyed lips and smile coming so teasingly, tauntingly near to him until he woke in a daze of sweat-soaked hair and blankets tangled around his legs, confused into thinking that she was there until the air of his cold apartment revived him, sharply, unmercifully. Telling him that it had all been a dream. She wasn’t there – she had never really been there. Only when he slept, when visions of her taunted him, teasing him into a state of insanity. Visions in which she came to him, moulding her body and soul to his in a way that made his heart thump impossibly fast and his breath catch in his throat, lifting him higher and higher until he looked down and realised that he had never flown before now. And she was there. Always, always there with him – like an angel, bearing him to new heights of passion, of love, of everything. Including new heights of anger. Anger which came to him suddenly, shakily, when he woke and realised that it had all been a dream. Nothing was real. Nothing was real any more, now that she was gone.
She had never felt any of that.
She had made the decisions, all of them. She had torn the thread that had linked their lives together in two, impossibly easily. She had refused the love, the life of her partner, her best friend, her confidant. She had ripped his dreams in two in one simple sentence: “I just don’t feel that way about you.”
And when she had succeeded in demolishing his future and ripping his soul apart, she had asked him to contact another man for her. A man who she adored, idolised, hero-worshiped. A man who was nothing – nothing but a paper-thin imitation of a person. Nothing but an ordinary man who was helplessly, hopelessly in love with her, dressed up in a spandex suit.
Nothing.
She had called for him – and he had denounced her, scorning her with his selfish, petty anger. She had hurt that night, he knew; she had probably cried herself to sleep, hugging the teddy bear that the same man whom she had just rejected had won for her. And then she had woken up and run into the arms of the biggest, most disgusting, most dangerous criminal Clark could remember coming across. She had put his ring on her finger. She had made promises to him – promises that required a living, beating, loving heart – and she had made them twenty-four hours after begging Superman to love her.
She had done all that. And then she had run to him when it had blown up in her face, seeking comfort in the form of his arms, his chest, his neck. Depending on his love for her – relying on the fact that he was so infatuated, so foolish, that he couldn’t refuse her if his life depended on it.
She had gambled. And she had won.
He had taken her home, made her coffee, kissed her on the forehead and put her to bed. He had stayed with her until the wee hours of the morning and then left. Hadn’t come near her for two weeks afterwards – not until that morning when Franklin Stern had made the first step in bridging the cavernous gap that existed in the heart of all of them: the gap which the Daily Planet had previously filled.
When she had needed comfort again that morning, he’d been there. He’d taken her home and made her coffee, again. Talked to her. Tried to comfort her.
And she had repaid his kindness, his love for her, by giving him a glimpse of heaven – a taste of the waters of life – and then taking it away. Taking it away with the memory that still existed in his mind – of the light which had danced through her eyes on that evening, as she made a complete and utter idiot of herself without knowing she was doing so. The night she had proclaimed complete and undying love to Superman. That image had lurked behind his closed eyelids as her soft mouth pressed fire and heat against his, and her curves melted into his strong chest, until he had to wrench himself away, consumed by the horrific, gut-wrenching pain of knowing that if Lois had a choice between him and Superman, the hero would still be at the head of the list.
He couldn’t live with that. So he had run.
//Yeah, you ran... ran out on her... in the middle of your kiss...//
He shouldered the small, guilty voice of his conscience out of his head. She had done... he had...
Okay, so maybe she had a reason to be mad at him. But it was so tiny, insignificant, infinitesimal compared to the oceans of pain that had almost drowned him in the last six months. Watching her be wooed by Lex, knowing that she didn't trust Clark enough to heed his warnings and steer clear of them, hearing that she was considering the devil's proposal, had come first. That had been terrible, but the last three months had been even worse. He was the victim here -- he was the injured party. He was the one with the right to be mad. Not her.
She had never had to live with that knowledge, that pain that stabbed through his heart each time he saw her. She was bad at loving; she loved too hard.
It was too hard.
And now she had done it again. One more betrayal. One more deceitful manoeuvre. One more lie, one more trick, one more thing done behind his back. Toying with his life, his happiness, his love. Throwing it away like a cheap rag. She had held him on a string – the rusty string of their friendship, like a flower that had passed the heat of summertime and was now withering away. She had taunted him with the withered flower of their partnership and then had shredded it in front of him, singing that old nursery rhyme softly, mockingly...
//He loves me... he loves me not... he loves me... he loves me not... he loves me... he loves me not... he loves me... he loves me... he loves me...//
The knowledge had been used against him. In three months, he hadn't figured out what took mere seconds of staring at his partner's so stiff and so self-righteous back. She had used his devotion as a weapon against him – a weapon that was not as lethal, but nonetheless equally as painful as Kryptonite. She had shot him in the heart with the Kryptonite bullet of her direct defiance of his passion. She didn’t care.
She didn’t care.
The knowledge made Clark angry, angrier than he’d ever been in his life. She had no right to toy with him like this. He was a grown man; he could make his own decisions. He wouldn’t let her see how much this was hurting him.
“You’re right, Lois.” It flowed out of him, truer than any lie he had ever told. The rhythmic banging of her fingers on the keyboard stilled, and she turned towards him, her coffee eyes staring, big and round as the moon that had filled them with light on that fateful evening.
“I am?”
Her voice was filled with uncertainty, and Clark’s heart contracted with rage. She had no right to sound so hesitant, to fill him with such cruel hope. It wasn’t fair.
“Yes.” His voice sounded far away, detached even to his own ears. “We obviously can’t work together any longer. As of this moment, the writing team of Lane and Kent is officially over.”
* * * * * * * * *
