Disclaimer: I don't own Smallville or any Superman-related things.
A/N: This may seem completely out of left field for me to write, but I actually am a regular viewer of Smallville, which also pushed me into liking Superman in general. I lurk over at the Television Without Pity forums, and their conversations about the Chlois (Chloe is the real Lois) theory really caught my attention and made me think, and now I only wish the show would go in that direction. So this is my slightly-vague one shot of a future where Chlois happens.
XXX
Sometimes, Lois Lane forgets her past.
Over the years she's fabricated such an intricate and detailed tale about her history that she even has herself fooled once and a while. Anecdotes from a childhood she never lived, adventures from an adolescence she never experienced, made-up characters surrounding her white lies just to add a real human touch. The phony facts and memories roll off her tongue with such belief and conviction that even the most inquisitive reporter would have trouble finding fault with her words.
(Lois Lane knows, however, that if she were the one hearing these faux stories, she most certainly would be able to claim them false in an instant. She has a knack for finding the truth.)
She likes the times when her mind is clear and she can picture, really picture, the images she's describing in her own head. A middle-class girl with two parents and a normal upbringing in the city of Metropolis, average academic grades but exceptional skills at following leads and getting the story, the entire story, dreaming only of working someday for the world-renowned Daily Planet.
The girl's smile is always large, in her mind's eye, with long, dark hair and brown eyes, her mother's hand holding hers tightly so she doesn't get lost in the city, her father on her other side, hailing a taxi so they can go see the play they've had tickets to for weeks.
(That never happened, of course, but as she's telling Jimmy Olsen, the young and eager photographer, about her first time going to see a famous theatre production with her 'parents', she can't help but convince herself that it's the truth, the whole truth, and nothin' but the truth.)
The only downside to those moments, the moments when Lois Lane pretends she had a wonderful childhood, is when she snaps back to reality, usually when her cell phone rings or her computer alerts her to a new e-mail or the editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, Perry White, squawks at her to get a move on.
Because that's when she's forced to remember a girl with that same smile, but with blonde hair and hazel eyes and a missing mother and a workaholic father and a house in the tiny, suburban farming town of Smallville, hours from the big city of Metropolis. Still with average grades and exceptional reporting skills, dreaming of working one day at the Planet, but with a love for the weird and unexplainable, and a best friend who was both of those things, and more.
And a name forgotten with time.
A girl with a completely different identity from the Lois Lane the world knows now as one of the most aggressive and outgoing reporters in the field.
Once there was a soft and sweet and caring girl, nosy but with a certain spark. Years sharpened her edges, her spark igniting into a fire that seemed to take over her, her soft and sweet and caring side disappearing behind a mask of determination.
Lois Lane often finds it ironic that she continuously proclaims that she's searching for the truth, while her own falsehoods stare back at her in the mirror every day.
Sometimes she wonders if it was all a dream, hoping she'll wake up in her bed after imagining green rocks and people with powers they shouldn't possess, using them for good and evil alike; odd happenings in the small hamlet of Smallville time after time after time, usually directly involving herself and her friends. A bald billionaire playboy in a mansion with countless rooms, an evil and ruthless man making deals with a sixteen-year-old girl, a beloved friend gone before high school is finished, a beautiful girl running a coffee shop claiming the attention of most of the male population, a man and a woman acting like second parents, a cousin willing to give her own name to help another reach their goals. A boy with dark hair and green eyes with amazing gifts who only wanted everyone to be happy.
Lois Lane never wakes up from those dreams, because it's reality; all of it is her true past. The characters are real, so tangibly alive and so much more complex than the pictures of the pretty, happy people she paints in her stories. She's reminded of them constantly, each and every one of them, as if she can never escape them no matter how hard she tries.
Especially the boy, the boy she loved so much for so long she thought she'd go crazy. The boy who was her best friend, her protector, who trusted her with his secret.
Secret's out, Lois Lane thinks every time she glances at the front page of the newspaper that declares a headline along the lines of 'Superman Rescues…', or 'Superman Saves…', or 'Superman Battles…', not able to help but recall a boy who thought he'd never make a big difference in the world, who doubted himself, who could only imagine himself as a farmer in Smallville, just as his (adoptive) father, and his (adoptive) father's father before him.
Sometimes, she wonders what everyone in Smallville would think of her now, years after her 'disappearance'; if she returned home for a visit, the famous Lois Lane going back to her roots, but no one would even realize who she truly was anyway, because Lois Lane is nothing like that other girl, except for that smile…
The smile that, in the end, ruined her carefully-crafted web of lies in one fell swoop. Her heart had stopped the moment the boy with dark hair and green eyes, a man now and hardly anything like how she remembered him, entered the Daily Planet looking for his desk, more bumbling in his movements and stumbling in his speech, pushing up his dorky glasses every five seconds.
On the surface, not at all the Clark Kent she remembered being in love with.
But then his appearance in Metropolis had coincided with Superman's entrance into the city, and Lois Lane once more saw the boy in his loft at sunset talking about how he wanted to make a difference in the world, and she saw the girl with cornflower hair beside him, assuring him that he would.
Her past had returned, colliding with the present.
When they'd been (re-)introduced, there'd only been a flicker of recognition on his face, forever handsome even behind those silly spectacles, because she'd smiled in the same way the girl from that other lifetime had. But she'd quickly schooled her features and gotten down to business, pretending to be disinterested, and he'd seemed to brush it off. Apparently the years apart, the natural dark locks, the brown contacts and the take-no-BS behavior kept his questions at bay, just as she'd always hoped they would.
But not for long. A few months later she'd smiled again, that same way, after they'd completed a tough assignment right before the midnight deadline, and he'd noticed it again, and that was when the questions had come.
By three o'clock in the morning she'd divulged everything to him, unable to hide the truth from the boy, now this man in front of her, once again her secret hero. He'd been shell-shocked first, then angry that she'd never told him because he'd spent years searching for her, then confused as to why she'd run away and changed her identity, and then understanding after she'd explained everything, and then embarrassed when he'd admitted he'd developed a crush on her.
Lois Lane, always in reporter-mode, had teased him only slightly about his crush before conducting an investigation of her own, wanting to know why he was hiding behind thick glasses and a wishy-washy exterior when the world was calling him Superman.
He'd said he was trying to forget his past and start over. That he was trying to put Smallville and everything kryptonite-related that had happened there behind him. (Boy, she knew that feeling.)
Then he'd asked her out, once again the boy she had known, and she couldn't refuse. She only insisted he keep calling her by the name 'Lois'.
Five months later and Clark has become one of the best reporters the Planet has seen, also secretly helping Lois's career grow to new levels by giving her numerous exclusives with Superman, including one interview she jokingly titled 'I Spent The Night With Superman' that Perry White had absolutely loved and put into the next edition of the paper. Lex Luthor, the bald billionaire playboy Lois and Clark were both trying to forget they'd spent much of their teenage years with, is beginning to pose a new threat to Metropolis and, more specifically, Superman.
Sometimes, Lois Lane forgets her past. She gets wrapped up in her imaginary world where she had an ideal childhood that led to her ideal job and her ideal man. Everything is sparkling and shining there.
But sometimes, Clark Kent accidentally calls Lois Lane by her old name, the name of the girl from a long time ago, the girl with the yellow hair and hazel eyes but that same smile, and she can't help but remember everything, the good and the bad, and it doesn't sparkle and shine so much as cloud and fuzz around the edges.
The Daily Planet office is empty now, leaving Lois by herself sitting at her desk staring at her computer screen, thinking. Everyone in their right mind has gone home, Clark included, unless he was detoured by someone in need of Superman.
In the silence of the darkened room, Lois Lane decides to utter the name she hasn't spoken in almost a decade, wanting to test it out and see if it still sounds the same:
"Chloe Sullivan," she says slowly but firmly, and then she repeats it, accenting each syllable, the words washing over her and making her a little tingly. She sighs at the foreign feel of it, surprised her cousin's former title of 'Lois Lane' is now more familiar than her birth name.
"Lois?"
She glances towards where the voice came from, near the window, and there is her knight in shining armor- though his choice of armor is a blue and yellow suit and a red cape, but her hero nonetheless. She smiles at him softly, another unfamiliar gesture, and she worries in the back of her mind that the old her is trying to resurface.
"What're you doing?" he asks, and he's the truest version of Clark Kent Lois believes exists; not the mild-mannered reporter, or the amazing superhero, but somewhere in between, and this version is all hers. Sometimes her fellow co-workers in the office ask what she sees in the goofy Clark, and Lois only wishes she could explain to them what she sees when she looks at him.
"Just thinking about some stuff," she replies, turning her computer monitor off and grabbing her purse, her heels clicking as she walks across the marble floor towards him.
Clark seems concerned. "Why were you…," he begins, and then trails off, and Lois knows he heard her moments before, probably without even using his super-heightened-hearing.
"I could go for some Chinese right now, how about you?" she asks coyly, admiring him in his suit. It really is quite impressive.
(Lois Lane wouldn't admit this out loud, but she's pretty glad she was right all those years ago, back in that former lifetime, when she told this man, then a boy, that she was the kind of girl he'd grow into.)
He rolls his eyes and crosses his arms over the 'S' on his chest, the symbol of the house of El, or so he'd explained to Lois when she'd asked. "Let me guess. You want to go to China for it?"
"No," she protests. "I want you to go to China for it and then bring it to my place. I'm telling you, it'll be much faster if you just go without me."
She knows he isn't going to say no. "Fine," he agrees easily with an exaggerated scowl.
"Great, then I'll see you soon with real Chinese food," she sums up, kissing him on the cheek and turning abruptly to leave the office.
Her hand is on the doorknob when he calls out to her once more: "Chloe."
She turns slowly, her hand still on the knob, ready to turn to enter the hallway. "Yeah?" she asks carefully, guarded.
"Leave the past in the past," Clark counsels in a very Superman-ish way, and if Lois weren't so surprised by his advice she would have laughed. He's come so far from his moping attitude when they were teens, not that either would ever mention it.
As Lois Lane is heading downstairs in the elevator, she decides to take Superman's advice.
Leave the past in the past.
So she does, once and for all.
XXX
End.