AN: My first venture into the Superman fandom! Just saw the movie, loved it, saw it again, needed to read and write more about the goings-on. So I've penned this fic from Lois' point of view. It takes place a few days after the events of Superman Returns. It's my attempt to flesh out a little more this fabulous character and some of the decisions/reactions from the film.
Reprisals
By: OneSongKatie
Lois shivered in the cool night air, crossed her arms tightly around her body. Standing in front of her house, gazing sightlessly at the dark water all around her, she suppressed another shiver and squared her shoulders. She turned her eyes heavenward and sighed.
God she needed a cigarette.
Fishing in the pocket of her robe, she felt only soft cloth and empty space. Lois stifled a curse. Richard had taken to stealing her cigarettes whenever he found a cache. Guess he discovered the bathrobe pocket.
Figures, she thought idly.
Lois appreciated how dedicated the men in her life were to her health. Generally.
Not tonight. Tonight she needed a damn smoke.
Lois tucked an errant strand of hair behind her ear. With no nicotine to stimulate her brain, she could no longer suppress the churning torrent of thoughts, thoughts about recent events. About her swiftly crumbling grip on calmness.
When had her life become so complicated? She really wondered. She couldn't pinpoint the precise moment everything began to spin beyond both her control and her comprehension.
But she could estimate. She could get pretty damn close.
Him.
Meeting him, loving him. Somewhere in there, Lois decided. Somewhere around the day she met him.
That's when her life had careened away from anything resembling normalcy.
Lois once again crossed her arms in front of her chest, warding off a chill that did not seem wholly caused by the coolness of the evening.
Above her, she noted a bright ¾ moon casting the shapes around her yard in unnatural silver tones, lending the events in her mind a fittingly surreal stage to play upon. The slight wind bit through her robe's thin cloth. She felt so tired. Deeply tired, weighted down.
She didn't even know his real name.
Lois remembered a time when that was deadly alluring. There was danger there, electric and alive—being held by a man whose identity was as hazy to her as the skyline over which they flew.
She liked to think then that she didn't need to know his name to love him. She loved him. That was enough. She told herself the connection they shared transcended tawdry details like real names, identities. Little things didn't matter. Their love necessitated evaluation on a grander scale.
She had only to stare into his eyes to feel the depth of his love. He didn't lie, his eyes didn't lie.
Those eyes.
Eyes of the same earnest blue she could see set upon the face of her son.
An impossible thing, that. Impossible, and yet Lois knew now it was not merely possible. More than that it was stark reality.
Jason was his.
Lois inhaled deeply the crisp night air, feeling the full gravity of what she knew to be true. It seemed momentarily that the weight of it crushed her, made her feel claustrophobic.
There could be no denying it now, no taking it back or persuading herself that the signs weren't there.
No taking it back. The words echoed in her ears. Would she?
She considered for a moment, let herself think about before all of this, and the ease with which she had once sailed through life. She was Lois Lane, hard-nosed reporter. Nothing could slow her momentum.
The Man of Steel might deflect bullets with his chest, but she could do it with a well-synced, haughty stride, a narrowing of her eyes—and of course a flick of her pen. A woman of steel. If not in actual practice, then in essence.
But to go back, now, spin the world backward and return to an old life that felt so long ago now.
She knew in her heart the answer. Knew she'd never go back. Even if she could, Lois found it inconceivable to imagine a life without Jason, a life without the rush of emotion she felt upon hearing his voice, seeing him learn new things, watching him grow. Her every thought was of him, for him.
When he was born her world changed, shifted on its axis to revolve in a new direction. She held his tiny finger in her hand and crossed a threshold from which she could not return. His life was linked inextricably with her own.
Of course when she first discovered she was pregnant she reacted in a way that would refute that claim.
But she was so afraid then. Afraid of the possibilities.
She had been seeing Richard, an easy relationship born of her own still smoldering anger and his emotional accessibility. There was understanding there. She and Richard shared a fluency, their bond lacked any trace of earth-shattering proportions. A great relief for her, and, ultimately, a rebound relationship that swiftly took on more stable scope.
She assumed more than knew the child was his. Assumed because she could not shake the notion, nor ignore that she felt very strongly—that there was a very real possibility she had slept with Superman.
At first she didn't remember.
Her body told her what her mind could not recall. It was as if there was a cloud, gray and dense, shrouding a portion of her memory.
Such a strange feeling, to sense constantly that you had forgotten something important, something you needed to remember. Like a red string tied around a finger. A shape at the edge of her vision, that when she'd turn to see it, would disappear.
It was maddening. And, one day, Lois decided to stop. It was an easy decision, easy as flipping a light switch 'off.' Like getting a shot of Novocain in her heart. She buried any nagging suspicions, stopped trying to break through the cloud, crack her memory code.
Instead she willed Richard to be the father. She decided it too wholly inconceivable for any alternative to be true.
Not to mention she was angry as hell in those days. Whether due to hormones or the flat fact that the last person in the world she would ever expect had in no uncertain terms abandoned her. With nary a word. She was hurt, wounded, and that made her furious.
She smiled sadly, remembering. It had been easy to transfer any anxiety she felt over her pregnancy in addition to how much she was hurting. Take all of it and fuse the emotions into a single coil of white hot anger.
Though on occasion it occurred to her that he left everything behind, not just her, she found little solace in the fact. She wasn't everyone. She should've mattered more. Lois didn't care how selfish that sounded.
Because in the end, she didn't matter more. Not even enough to warrant a goodbye. Lois remembered how alone she felt then, even with Richard. She felt alone, cast aside.
But mostly she was fucking angry.
And that was that. Richard was there, solid. A good man to be counted on.
Ultimately Lois knew, that she could look at the sky night after night and wait for him to appear, like a white knight out of a storybook. Sit and wait for silly notions of fairy tales and love to come true. But she also knew that while she waited, she would be chained, turning. A well of wishes.
No. She couldn't. Wouldn't be made weak like that. She began to think maybe love as she'd originally envisioned it was really only a fable. A fake. Just a mural on a ceiling, or a children's fairy tale. A bedtime story she'd told herself.
No longer. Lois remembered the vehemence with which she uttered that phrase. She'd bitterly convinced herself that if he was out there somewhere, he wasn't looking or waiting for her.
And she did love Richard. Maybe in the beginning she was too damaged to see it. But now, she knew that he was there when she needed him to be—a trait which afforded him a significant advantage in her eyes.
And most importantly, Richard would make a fine father to her child.
And he has been, she added silently with more than a little regret. He loved Jason, with an intensity that still surprised her.
And that mattered. But it didn't change anything.
Lois remembered how hard she tried in those days to cast aside her suspicions, crush the tiny voice that knew the truth.
As the reality of her pregnancy sank in, however, she began to feel more than see flashes—impressions of almost otherworldly soft, silver sheets—white linen material peeling back and away revealing impossibly warm, hard skin beneath—gentle hands leaving trails of heat wherever they touched—his voice next to her ear murmuring barely audible words of love—her name over and over.
Sensations residual and real that sent shivers down her spine in the recollection.
And now? Now Lois knew these to be her memories, distorted somehow, but undeniably real.
All of it, Luthor, everything, confirmed the long-obscured suspicions she'd had. All the signs that she'd seen but keenly ignored until now.
Jason's difficult pregnancy and what everyone thought, mistakenly it would seem, to be a significantly premature birth. All of his health issues.
And now she possessed proof, irrefutable and solid as crystal.
Crystal that glowed deadly green.
Lois let her arms hang at her sides, closed her eyes again, felt the chilly wind brush the sleeves of her robe away and then toward her arms.
She remembered with potent fear Luther waving the sculpted green mass at them, threatening, leering. So taken with the intricacies of his own genius that he did not initially detect.
But Lois noticed Jason's apparent fatigue the moment they were escorted to the boat's main chamber and deposited in the desk chair.
The child had settled in her lap, slumped against her immediately, impossibly still. She'd been too afraid then to dwell on how strangely motionless he was. She took it for fear.
The discovered presence of Kryptonite upended that theory.
As Luthor brought the glowing green toward Jason's face, Lois felt her son's breathing almost stop, as he seemed to flatten further against her body.
Lois tasted acid in her mouth, felt her own breathing speed up, realizing as Luthor did.
Who is that boy's father?
She wished the name she answered was the truth. Wished it with everything inside her.
But the clammy sweat she felt on Jason's forehead made the name she gave a lie.
She knew beyond doubt then.
And when Jason saved her…she began to feel real fear.
Lois recalled almost in slow motion Luthor's henchman grinning, holding the fax machine's detached cord, silencing her plea for help. In the end her subterfuge had failed, her ingenuity no match for the vigilant gaze of a no-name thug. Lois grimaced at the weakness she'd been reduced to.
She couldn't defend against the larger man's blows, but she wasn't afraid then for herself
If I die what will happen to Jason?
Over and over the thought repeated, resounding in time to the man's steps toward her, to her pounding heart.
Lois recalled with vivid detail the room, the man advancing upon her. How she looked up from where she'd been thrown, watched the man happily select a bludgeoning tool, met his grisly, smiling eyes as he prepared to end her struggle.
And then the man wasn't there anymore. But neither was the piano.
She looked across the room. Jason stood, wide-eyed, arms outstretched. It took Lois a moment to register—Jason, the piano, and now the barely visible but clearly unmoving henchman.
Her son. Small for his age, sickly and fragile. Had killed.
To protect her from a very bad man, she knew. Someone intent on brutally killing her. If Jason hadn't…acted, Lois thought, suppressing a shudder, she'd be dead.
Still the implications of what he'd done.
Lois had no idea how to even begin to help him or comfort him. He hadn't talked to her about it, but she remembered the look in his eyes on the boat, after it happened.
A mother knows when her son is frightened. Hell, she was frightened. But Jason never mentioned it.
Still, he seemed okay. Not deeply traumatized as, perhaps, Lois conceded, he ought to be. He was quieter than usual these days, more contemplative. She wasn't sure if he understood what happened, or more troubling, that he understood exactly what happened.
He was just a little boy, after all. And he needed to be told—deserved to be told—the truth. Jason was not stupid, far from it. He would have questions. If not now, then sometime soon, he would have questions.
Would she be able to answer them? Lois grimaced. She didn't know.
She felt again the faintest twinge, the loosened grip on control, her life spinning into chaos.
Lois once more closed her eyes against dangerous, unraveling thoughts, pulled her arms tightly around her body. No matter how firmly she hugged herself, she couldn't shake the chill. Then she felt a new gust of wind on her face.
About damn time he showed up.
Without opening her eyes, Lois said, "Thought you might drop by."
"I was in the neighborhood."
She opened her eyes. He floated a few feet of the end of the yard, above the water. The water was a shapeless dark beneath him.
"How's the general state of the world this evening? Light on disasters?" Her voice sounded glib to her ears, certainly more fluent than she felt. Good. Keep it up, Lane.
He smiled almost imperceptibly, touched down on the lawn a few feet away. "Nothing of note. But the night is still young." He was playing the word game, too, Lois noted. Keep it light, keep it safe. Fine with her.
Lois wanted to ask him why the hell he was here. She wanted to ask a lot of things. Like what she was supposed to do now with Richard, with Jason, with him. How her life had been changed irrevocably the last few days and yet hadn't, on the surface, changed at all. She was terrified for her son, for what the simple act of growing up held in store for him.
What about his health problems, would they disappear as he matured?
Frankly, Lois was still fuzzy on the details of the kid's conception, but she didn't know how in God's name she would ever find a way to ask that.
Instead she kept quiet while he continued to describe his encounters—a fire he'd extinguished in Miami, a bomb threat he'd sorted out in Washington. Newsworthy, but not anything that would be particularly gripping on-page, the reporter voice inside her head judged.
She watched him, wondering if this was going to be a regular thing. Her standing outside in a bathrobe, him stopping by for a late-night chat. In the days since he'd left the hospital she'd seen him twice. She started to contemplate how many times she'd see him in the next few days. Lois stopped herself. Not constructive.
She concentrated on what he was saying, something about a hostage situation in South America.
He stopped speaking. His face darkened a little. "No sign of Luthor, though." He walked toward her. Now he stood in the thin beam of light cast by the porch lamp. Light enough for her to note his handsome features didn't seem any worse for wear after everything that happened. Of course not.
She nodded. "He always was good at that—the running and hiding part."
The shadow on his face grew more pronounced. He seemed almost…defeated. "I know. I just, the idea that he's out there…" He trailed off, looking up at her, fixing her in a more direct stare. "It doesn't sit well with me."
Lois shifted under his piercing gaze. "He seemed…" She searched for words. "Darker. This time. Harder." Lois allowed reporter voice to speak more, mused aloud. "You have to wonder what happened to him in prison."
He considered her a moment. "He talked to you? While you were on his boat?"
Furrowing her brow, she nodded. "He wanted an interview. I think he wanted to make sure his plans got the publicity he thought they deserved. You know him." Looking up Lois noticed he was frowning. She met his eyes questioningly.
He clenched his jaw. "Sorry. The idea that he had you and…" He paused, met her eyes. "You and Jason. It makes me…" He trailed off again, looked down for a beat. "The thought….bothers me." He finally finished.
Lois nodded. "Well, I bet he regrets taking us with him now anyway." She said quietly. She grimaced. "Or at least the goon with the tattoo does."
He looked at her quizzically, not understanding. Lois pursed her lips, glanced fixedly at a spot on the lawn.
"I sent a fax with coordinates to the Planet. The guy caught me." She softly narrated with as little detail as possible, not quite ready to tell this story with any sort of emotional embellishment.
Lois continued to speak to the ground. "I was…he was going to kill me." She looked up sharply. "Jason hit him with a piano."
He stared at her, taken off guard. There was a pause in which Lois attempted to gauge his reaction to this news. His eyes were dark; she couldn't make out his face the way the shadows fell. He finally spoke. "Does he…has he said anything?"
"Not to me." She continued to observe him intently.
He was silent. He glanced up at the house, seemed to be watching Jason through the walls. Apparently nothing was amiss there, he turned to meet her eyes.
"What do you think we should do?" He asked her finally, in a quiet voice that made her squint towards his figure in the dark, trying to read his expression once more. Unable to discern from shadowed light, she sighed, answered with a resignation that surprised her.
"Beats me. This wasn't exactly a chapter in any of those 'baby books' my mother sent me."
"Should I talk to him?"
She shrugged. "What would you say?"
"I don't know, that it's okay? Does he understand what happened?"
"I don't know!" She felt a flare of emotion. "Frankly I don't even understand what happened!" He was silent, pensive. Lois took a deep breath. "Did you do anything like this when you were his age?"
"I guess. But my parents…" He stopped, looked at her.
She raised her eyebrows. "Your parents. Your Mom didn't happen to write a 'How To' novel for parents of superhuman children, by any chance?"
He smiled thinly, not answering. Lois understood. "I get it. Don't want to reveal too much, endanger the super identity."
"Lois that's not…"
"Although if you can't tell me, after everything, then I don't know who you can—."
"No one." He interrupted her, his voice rising in emotion. "I tell no one. That way nobody gets hurt. If the bad guys don't know who I am then they don't know those close to me who can be used, who can be hurt, because of me."
She shook her head. "Luthor knows." Lois met his eyes. "Luthor knows Jason is your son."
He looked aghast. "How?"
"He had Kryptonite. Jason…reacted to it. "
She could feel waves of apprehension reverberating from him. "Did it…hurt…him?"
"I don't think so. He was very still. Like it was hard to move. Luthor guessed. And the piano…I can only assume he put two and two together." She saw his worried expression, added "But no, I don't think the Kryptonite hurt him."
He seemed to breathe a sigh of relief. "Lois, I'm so sorry."
Lois closed her eyes. This conversation could not veer further from any desired path. "You're sorry." She repeated. "I know, you said that already."
He looked stricken. Lois felt a pang of remorse, he was trying to communicate with her and she was still letting fly jabs about his absence. About which he was clearly miserable.
He spoke, startling her from her self-recriminations. "I'm, lately that's been how I've felt all the time. Lois, I'm so sorry." His face was pale in the thin beam of light as he stepped towards her. "I regret so many choices I've made." He continued, his eyes imploring, searched her. "Most of all, I regret how much I've let you down. If I had stayed, I would have been here with you. For all of this." He turned to look sadly at the house once more. "I could've helped Jason." He said more quietly, almost to himself. His voice was grieved, harsh. "My parents taught me control, and I should've done the same for my…child. My son."
She felt emotion crest inside of her, pushed it back down. Lois couldn't stifle a single tear from falling from her eye.
He stepped toward her, finally closing the distance between them. He stood fully in the light now, brushed the tear from her check. She couldn't stop herself from giving in as he gently wrapped his arms around her, tucking her head under his chin. She closed her eyes against the warmth of his chest.
He whispered into her hair. "Lois…I want you to know that…I'm going to make amends. I can't ever regain the time I lost, with you, with our son. But I'm going to try and make up for it." As he spoke he stroked the back of her neck with his thumb almost imperceptibly.
Almost. Lois closed her eyes, instantly recalling in muddled detail another time he'd touched her this way. She tried to suppress the tiny shudder his touch elicited, remembering herself.
She took a step backward. She had to get far enough away to think clearly. She remained close enough though that she could still read his eyes clearly.
She searched his face, imploring. "Why can't you just tell me? At least give me your real name—you have no idea how odd it is that I don't the name of my child's father."
"Lois, we've been through this. The last time you looked too hard we—" He stopped abruptly, alarmed by this last admission.
"The last time? What last time?" She stopped, her breathing hitched. "My memories." She realized. "They're real."
He was watching her intensely, his brow furrowed.
Lois stepped toward him, searching his eyes. "What happened?" She demanded. "Why can't I remember?"
He met her gaze, grasped her shoulders in his hands, he seemed about to kiss her. Instead he said softly. "I loved you too much."
Before she could ask anything else, Lois felt a whoosh of air. He was gone.