Through Their Eyes

----Prologue

-June 7, 2008-

"Hey, are you finished with that?"

"Yup. Go ahead and take the rest of it."

Lois reached over and grabbed the remainder of Chloe's fettuccine alfredo and pulled it in front of her, discarding the few crumbs of her veal parmigiana. "Thank god for having a regular salary. I love being able to go out for dinner without feeling like I'm putting a strain on the bank account."

"Cuz, the way you eat, I don't know that you'll ever save up enough for retirement. Seriously, if you ever eat without me you're going to have to order two dinners just to fill up. I sometimes question whether or not you're six months pregnant with as much food as you put down."

Lois swallowed the bite she had been chewing and smirked at Chloe. "Don't worry, Chlo. I always seem to be eating with you, Clark or the both of you. There's always somebody to mooch off of, though Clark does tend to inhale his food." Lois paused a second to think. "You know what, I think a visit to Mrs. Kent is in order for some home cooking next weekend."

"That sounds great, Lois. Dad's been wanting to see me for a few weeks, but we've been so busy that I keep having to put it off. And who in the world can turn down a home cooked meal at the Kent farm?"

"Exactly. I'll call her and let her know we're coming when we get home." She took another bite and looked around at the little bistro they were in contemplatively. "As strange as it seems, I miss Smallville. Not the crazies that tried to kill us on a weekly basis, mind you, but just the feel of the town. Being in Metropolis... this will always be the place I refer to as home, but Smallville will be the place I always think of as the place I grew up... did I explain that well?"

Chloe smiled, taking a sip of her water. "I know what you mean. I moved there and thought nothing could be worse than going from the city to tiny Dullsville. But it grows on you; it worms its way into your heart and pretty quickly has you thinking about going back. Of course, it helps to have family there."

Lois nodded. "Indeed. Family is always good, be they blood or a small family on a farm that offered to put you up for a few nights and ended up giving you a home."

After paying the bill, they walked out into the summer night, arms linked and laughing as they thought about their time in Smallville. Suddenly Chloe pulled her arm away from Lois and groaned.

"Damn! I forgot my tapes from the interview at the Planet!" She smacked herself in the forehead and walked over to the street to hail a cab. "I have to go back and get the tapes so I can jot down notes tonight. Your interview tomorrow is fairly pointless without them."

Lois walked over to Chloe and gave her a reassuring pat on the arm. "Chlo, I can get by without the notes."

"Getting by is not doing your best. There's no point to being a team if I don't hold up my end of it, so I'm going back to the Planet. You should come with me. We'll stop on the way back and get some ice cream, my treat for being the most forgetful person you know."

Lois laughed at that. She knew that to be very much a lie. "Chloe, this is the first thing I remember you forgetting. I am the most forgetful person I know. Smallville is a close second." She paused a second, thinking over that statement.

"Seriously, he always makes up lame reasons for showing up and hanging out with us. He'll drive hours just to come to the Planet and sit around for twenty minutes while we work. Then I ask him why he came and he starts stammering and mumbling about having nothing else to do. He's the lone worker on a farm! How does he have nothing to do?"

Chloe bit back a smile. She understood why Clark didn't want to tell Lois about his secret; it wasn't like it was anything new. It did make comments like that somewhat difficult not to comment on. It was odd, though... Clark had been showing up at the Daily Planet more often recently and was only stammering when around Lois. She'd have to ask him about the meaning of that tomorrow when he inevitably came to sit with them or ask for her help.

She finally waved down a cab and turned to face Lois. "Are you sure you don't want to come? Free ice cream AND you don't have to walk by yourself. It's a win/win situation." She opened the cab door, said a quick hello to the driver to make sure he didn't take his car elsewhere and turned back to Lois. "There's already been one attempt on your life, Lois. You need to be careful. Come on, nothing like ice cream and safety to make your young cousin happy."

"Chloe, I can walk by myself back to our apartment. It's a ten minute walk, and even in this less than top notch area of the city I can survive by myself. I promise, Chloe, nothing will happen that I can't handle. Besides, I wouldn't mind kicking some ass tonight. I'd work off a few of the calories I just took in."

----Chapter 1

She couldn't remember her pillow being this soft, nor the sheets and blankets, but she wasn't going to complain if somebody had decided to replace her stuff with superior products. She rolled over and quickly found herself grumbling at an intrusion into her peace by the sunlight streaming into her apartment. She turned back the other way and buried most of her face back into her now inordinately soft pillow.

Maybe she'd had a visit from the pillow gnomes, and they'd taken pity on her and provided her top level stuff. If so, she was definitely going to send them a thank you note in the near future. Maybe they were like Santa, and you just address the card to 'Pillow Gnomes' and the postal service would get it there...

With a long groan, Lois sat up, her eyes still closed. Coffee was definitely needed. Pillow gnomes only made that fact abundantly clear, and thinking about them any further would just make her think she'd lost a marble or three more than she suspected. No, coffee was more than just needed, it was just plain necessary at this point.

She threw the sheet off her lower body and swung her feet over the side of the bed, not bothering to open her eyes. Finding her way around the apartment, especially her own room, with closed eyes wasn't a problem for her. With a silly amount of effort, she made herself stand before she talked herself into five more minutes, which would inevitably be another hour.

At as slow a pace she could take, Lois began walking towards the bathroom, stretching her arms behind herself as she walked. She began planning her morning, figuring she needed to finish up some notes before she went off to do the interview Chloe had been so hasty to get her own notes last night that Lois figured they'd been done to perfection.

The team of Lane and Sullivan, or Sullivan and Lane depending on who you asked, was going to do top notch work if Lois had any say in it, and she knew Chloe felt the same. It was odd, but she couldn't remember seeing Chloe come home the previous night. Something to talk to her about later.

With a loud thump, a surprised grunt and a seemingly endless tumble backwards, Lois found herself opening her eyes for the first time since she'd awakened to stare at the ceiling. She cursed morning and its effective efforts at disorientation when something struck her as strange. That wasn't her usual ceiling. She turned her head to the right to find herself staring at a wall that was very foreign to her, but a dresser she knew well. She'd found the thing cheap when she and Chlo had moved in to their place.

She closed her eyes and rubbed her face a few times with each hand, making sure that she was awake and not just having a vivid dream. Slowly, she let her heavy eyelids lift from where they rested and glanced at the dresser again. It was definitely hers, but the wall behind it was certainly not. It didn't look like it wanted to change into her wall any time soon, either.

Lois shot up to a sitting position and found another wall that didn't belong to her in front of her, where the bathroom door was supposed to be. She looked around the room, seeing a slightly open door that was where the bathroom seemed to actually be, two more closed doors and a large glass door that was flooding the room with sunlight. Her eyes settled on a bed she'd never seen before, along with pillows and sheets that weren't hers. This explained the heavenly pillows and thoroughly quashed any pillow gnome theories.

Coffee. Coffee would save her from this... this delusion.

With more speed than Lois thought she had, she stood and ran to the nearest door and found a closet full of clothes that she didn't recognize and didn't want to examine. She turned and started running to the other door that could lead out of this room when she froze, eyes wide and breathing ragged as she backed up a few steps.

She hadn't just aged the usual eight hours over night. More like eight damn years.

"Ok Lois, it appears you went and pulled half a Rip Van Winkle here. Don't panic, don't panic, don't panic..."

She hadn't been here when she went to bed last night, that was for damn sure. Thinking about it for a moment, though, Lois realized she couldn't remember going to bed last night. Why the hell couldn't she remember what had happened after the restaurant last night? She didn't have any of the after effects of drinking herself into the ground, which was generally what made her forget things.

Lois decided to stop focusing on what she didn't know and focus on what she did. She had come awake in a room that wasn't hers, but had her dresser in it. Time had obviously passed, but just how much she couldn't be sure yet. That could be told from the way she looked. Not old, per se, but definitely older than she remembered being. Had the realization of her new age not been so shocking, she'd have been giddy about how good she seemed to look.

Her hair was its natural dark brown, which struck her as very odd as she hadn't had it that way in years. and she looked like she'd matured but didn't have any signs that she was getting up there in years. She figured herself in her early thirties, give or take a couple years. At least she hadn't woken up fifty.

'This is not exactly normal,' Lois thought. Not even by Smallville standards could she proclaim this as something that could possibly happen.

Shaking herself out of a mirror induced stupor, Lois decided she needed to get from wherever she was back to somewhere she knew. She could always go to the Kent farm as use it as a safe house if all else failed. She needed to know where she was, though, or else she'd have a hell of a time figuring out where exactly to go. Her best bet was out beyond the glass doors. Balcony, porch, whatever it was, it allowed for a quick establishment of location.

She headed over to the doors and grabbed a handle, then looked down to see what she was wearing. Looking at clothes had taken a backseat to having no idea as to what was going on, but giving people outside a free show certainly wouldn't make the day go any better. She glanced down and found herself wearing a plaid shirt that didn't quite make it to her knees.

Lois nearly shuddered then headed back to the closet she'd found earlier. She was just glad she'd realized what she was in before anybody had been given the chance to spot her. That would have raised a whole set of questions she'd be glad to deal with never, ever.

Rifling through the clothes at her disposal, she found a whole mess of business attire; slacks and coats, skirts, and various colored bouses that all looked somewhat expensive. She got to the end of the women's clothes and found herself going through men's attire. Nothing helpful, at all.

She withheld an exasperated sigh and eye roll and headed over to the dresser, going through drawers until she finally found a pair of jeans and some white t-shirts. The jeans fit her, a bit snugly and not a style she was used to. The t-shirt was apparently that of a man, and not a small one. She shed the plaid and pulled on the t-shirt to find herself draped in it. 'Still better than plaid,' she told herself. At least she wouldn't be extremely embarrassed by her clothes while she explained about how she had no idea what was going on to the people dragging her away to Belle Reeve or whatever facsimile they had around here.

Lois quickly moved across the room, not bothering to go around the bed. She pulled open one of the glass doors as quietly as she could and found herself staring at large buildings in front of her. It didn't take her long to spot landmarks that put her somewhere quite familiar. She was in Metropolis, and by the proximity of the Daily Planet globe, in the heart of the city.

"Okay," she said softly to herself. "The last thing I remember, Chloe is off to the Planet to get her interview tapes and I'm walking home to our small but cozy apartment after a nice dinner. Not drinking excessively, that I recall. So it only stands to reason that I wake up in an apparently nice apartment in downtown Metropolis feeling like I've lost years I don't remembering gaining!"

By the end of her statement to the air, Lois found herself nearer to a growl than simply speaking. Pounding a hand down on the railing in front of her seemed a great idea right about now to let off some steam, but doing so might alert whoever was around. The steam would have to stay exactly where it was for now.

Doing her best to reign in a temper that was trying its best to misbehave, she took a few deep breaths to calm herself and slow her heart rate a bit. 'Sneaky, not noisy,' she thought. She went back inside the room, closing the door behind her quietly and headed back to the closet, hoping to find a pair of shoes she could use for running. With all the suits, though, she figured there probably wouldn't be anything without some sort of heel.

Lois found nothing with a big heaping side of nothing on the side in the closet and the rest of the bedroom. She couldn't even find a stray sneaker hiding under the bed among the dust bunnies that weren't there. She searched the closet one last time and finally resigned herself to the flattest dress shoe there was. She pulled off the tee and put on one of the blouses. If she needed to disappear in a crowd, it'd be a lot harder to follow somebody that blended in with the business crowds on the street. Hopefully, she could at least get to the street.

Taking a moment to try and grasp all that was happening, Lois leaned her head up against the door jamb and rubbed a bit of the tenseness out of her neck. Loose and ready was a lot better than tense. She needed to stop thinking of the problem and start thinking of the solution. She was roughly a decade older than she remembered, and not far from the heart of downtown Metropolis. Everything else was unknown, which was not good. Too many things could go wrong. Hell, too many things had gone wrong already.

'Solutions, Lane! Not the problems, the solutions!' Limited options and limitless possibilities. It was time to stop acting the victim and make some folks regret whatever it was that could be going on. She marched over to the one door she hadn't used and flung it open, continuing her march into a nice looking living room.

"Okay, I don't know what the hell is going on or who the hell thinks they can do this to Lois Lane, but I am pissed and want some... answers?"

Lois glanced off to her left where something had been caught in her peripheral vision and found herself staring into a small pair of green eyes belonging to a little girl looking up at her from a perch in the middle of a couch. Her face was framed by wavy black hair that fell down and framed her face as it made its way slightly past her shoulder blades. She had a bright smile the Lois would swear belonged to somebody she knew. "Morning, mommy."

That was probably why.