IV
Kara Who?

Kara spilled her guts that night.

We were hanging there. The man who looked like Clark, and me — we hung in the sky against all odds and I didn't know what to think.

"You can fly," I said, starting to tremble from the cold, or the adrenaline or who knows what. "You can fly."

Someone shouted something, as though from a distance — but his mouth didn't move. He was watching me. I looked down, down past our dangling feet, and there was a crowd gathering below: pointing and shouting and lights flashing from cameras.

One of the girls turned her face up and looked right at me: glimmering blue eyes catching mine, and I knew it was Kara, and wondered how she got there so fast.

"What is 'Superman'?" asked Kal-El. He was still studying me.

I breathed in, and blinked slowly. Culture shock. He needed a definition for a word that didn't exist: something I had just made up, something anyone would understand.

"You," I said, "someone who can do things that," I paused here, "things that mortal men can't do. Someone who can fly."

My hands had fallen against his shoulders, fingers digging into them. I needed to get a grip.

I looked over my shoulder at the Luthorcorp building. Lex was standing at the shattered window, watching us both as if this were the last thing he had expected, and as if he had planned for it all along. My hands twitched, and stung.

I looked back at Kal-El, still studying me — doing what? Commiting my face to memory? Trying to understand my body language? His face was so human and at once so alien: distant, incomprehensible.

I had to get a hold on my emotions, this time.

"Why do you look so much like Clark?" I said, and my voice broke towards the end, because why should he? How dare he?

"I am Clark." There was no trace of a lie: eyes dark, open, saying things in a language I didn't understand.

"How can you be Clark?" I asked, "You said Clark was gone. You said he was d— you said he was 'gone'."

But he just repeated it: "I am Clark." I wondered if he had no means to explain it, who he was, where he came from. And too late I realised we were losing altitude, and too soon we were standing on the pavement, surrounded by shattered glass and thronging people.

And he was gone.

I only realised how warm he was when his hands were no longer around my waist, when the cold started to seep into my bones and I shivered in my heart.

"John King, Daily Star. Come on, Lane —"

"Robert Renolds, WGBS News. Ms Lane, can you —"

How the other half live.

I looked up again at the window I had fallen through. Lex had disappeared. The sky was empty — black, partially billowing grey cloud. I shuddered.

"Kara Kent. Lois —"

She gripped my elbow, stronger than expected, and tugged my arm. I gave way, and fell slightly, and then ducked past the reporters still angling for a quote and into the alley behind Luthorcorp where we broke into a run.

Kara is the first person I remember running one step ahead of me. I didn't remember her being this fast in Smallville: she wasn't panting, she wasn't slowing; she was throwing caution to the wind.

"I hardly know where to start," she said, back in my apartment, around the corner of the kitchen table from me with coffee steaming in the space between us.

One thing I learned pretty fast as an interviewer: awkward silence is often the best way to start someone talking, whether they know where to or not. I was never fun for me, but I particularly I hated to do it to Kara — hated to slip into that role at all.

She gripped her mug in both hands and blew on it, shifting in her seat. Then she looked back and me and shrugged, and said, "I guess — you know Clark is adopted, right?"

I nodded.

"Well, his adoption was kind of unusual. You know —" she paused. I felt something catch in my throat and swallowed.

"Is Clark an alien?" I asked, quietly. She looked at me, wide-eyed — afraid suddenly, tentative, and relieved — and nodded.

"Are you an alien?" I said. Again she nodded, and I closed my eyes, allowing this information to sink in.

"But it's not like —" she said quickly, agitated. I opened my eyes and looked at her. Her mouth fell open, hip bottom lip quivered. I smiled slightly, and she relaxed. "It's not like we're all that different," she said, "this is our home now. Clark doesn't even remember Krypton."

Krypton.

"What's happened to him?" I said. There were so many more questions I wanted to string together and add onto the end, but I bit them back — I couldn't do that to her. That wasn't fair.

"I don't know," she said. Then she leaned back in her chair and looked at the ceiling. "Look," she said, "Clark's father — my uncle, Jor-El — sent an AI with him, a computer, to carry out his wishes. I don't trust him, I didn't trust either of them."

Kara was so like Clark, really. This was the most distressed I had ever seen her, and she was keeping it together: brewing under the surface, a nuclear storm contained by her skin.

"What happened, Kara?"

My voice didn't shake. I wanted to reassure, and reassure myself.

"Clark didn't tell me everything," she said, looking at me with honesty in her eyes, "I know it. I know this computer has done something to him. He left, and now he's come back and he's..."

"Like this." I said. She nodded.

"Lois, I'm sorry," she said, shaking her head now and leaning forward on the table, "I'm so sorry — he told me not to tell you. And I tried to find him after I got your call but the world is a big place, you know? I couldn't find him."

"It's alright," I said. "It's okay." Then I breathed out through my mouth, "It's my fault he's with Lex." I closed my eyes, "Damn it."

I heard Kara snort. When I opened my eyes again she was forcing down a smile. She shook her head, "No Lois, really — I insist." She placed a hand on her chest mockingly, "Let me pick up the blame."

I felt my mouth split into the first real grin since this whole mess started. And on the surface I could never admit it, but Kara was the sister Lucy never had the chance to be.

We settled into a more comfortable and contemplative silence after that.

I thought about how much Kara had lost in her life already. Five years I wouldn't know where to start understanding: I never really had a home or anyone who was close enough to lose.

Then for a brief while I'd had both: the smell of corn on the wind, deep in my heart, and so many other things.

But Kara had had so much more torn away from her, and I would never understand how that felt.

"Kara," I said, looking over at her, "what was it like where you're from?"

Kara stayed with me in Metropolis after that night.

And at the same time, the whole world fell to pieces and was remade. How could it not?

Perry was waiting for me when I walked into the newsroom the next day — the day my name hit the front page of every major newspaper in the Western hemisphere. He was right at the epicentre of activity, he stared out at me, down the space between the desks, through the people around him, and right into my skull.

He just nodded silently, and I knew to follow him into his office.

The first thing he said to me that day was, "I hope you've got your copy to hand."

I had already put it on his desk.

"Two things have happened, Lane," he said, "which you might — understandably —" he glanced at the bandages over my hands, "not have heard about yet. Number one, whoever that guy is who saved your life yesterday, he went on to do more of the same across the globe. You were first. We at the Daily Planet are planning on having a field day, are you in?"

My lips twitched. Good old Perry: good news first. I nodded.

"Number two," he said, and here he shoved his hands in his pockets, "yours is not the only name that's going to be associated with this guy. Lex Luthor has been going on about how 'intimately involved' he is with Luthorcorp — how true that is remains to be seen. But we'll keep an eye on him."

I crossed my arms and braced myself. "Is Lex pressing charges? About the break-in?"

He snorted. "He says he invited you there — and that you tripped and fell through the double-glazing."

I raised a sceptical eyebrow. Then shrugged. "Maybe we'll just let that one slide without investigation, Chief." I didn't always need my methods disclosed.

"For the last time, Lane —"

But I was already out the door.

I stopped thinking about the picture in the drawer by my bed at night and started staying later at work. I would climb up onto the roof as the sun set, glinting against every window in the city, and stand there with the Daily Planet globe rotating and creaking behind me, calling his name.

I called him by many names, but he didn't come. He remained distant: saving people, appearing with Lex, and dressing in black.

Building PR for Luthorcorp. Because that's what it was: I realised, as soon as Lex announced his run for the Presidency.

"How could people forget so soon?" Jimmy asked me, as we had looked, horrorstruck at the press release. "They didn't forget Watergate."

"Lex is no Nixon," I said, leaning back against the desk and setting my jaw, "he hasn't been impeached — yet."

But I was quietly confident: burning inside with anticipation.

Kara and I had a plan.