The first time Superman lost a truly pivotal battle, beyond any hope of recovery, it was with his mother.
He was pacing in the bright little kitchen on the same linoleum floor he had paced as a boy, with the same dent beside the table where he'd dropped the new deep freezer twenty years ago, carelessly carrying it in with one hand.
"What I don't understand is how I didn't see it coming till now, Mom," he said finally. "I don't know what kind of master of disguise I thought I was. Am I really that arrogant?" He looked up and sniffed the air. "And are those oatmeal?"
Facing him across the cabinet, Mom looked up and laughed; she had been trying to stir the dough quietly so as to hear him with her good ear. "Yes, to just that last question. It's mainly this Lois you're worried about?"
Clark looked over at her, her hands at work with quiet purpose spooning out balls of dough from that one small bowl, while her mind ticked off everything that happened around her. He hadn't yet mentioned Lois in the conversation. Always truthful as a boy, even while flagrantly misbehaving, he still found it more difficult to keep secrets from his mother than from the investigative staff of the Planet.
But he had realized long ago that there could be no mistakes here. The conversation which would end in being asked why it was so important not to tell Lois how he felt, and who he was, must never begin.
So he had been very selective from the start in what he told his parents about her. Everything about her work, very little about their friendship, and nothing at all about her effect on him. He was careful to bring up Perry and Jimmy, and his latest Luthorcorp leads and all his battles, more often than he did his partner.
For all the good it was apparently doing.
"About figuring me out directly?" he replied, carefully casual. "She has the best shot of any of them. But I don't think it would matter where the dam broke, if it came to that. That's not really the problem." He smiled wryly. "Though why do you suppose I picked journalism? Did I understand I would be working with reporters?"
She looked up from the cookie dough and laughed. Since her cataract surgery a few weeks ago, with the milky phosphorescence gone from her right pupil, her gray eyes looked very much the way he remembered them as a boy.
"You know, sweetheart, that was always the first way you planned to save the world. Being figured out isn't what you're afraid of?"
He breathed in. It had taken him some time, and been a job driven only by will and habit, to find a way to talk to her about his decision that was true at core, but free of details that could only hurt her.
"It's not why I have to give notice."
She sighed. "And I haven't heard anything yet to help me understand why you keep saying that."
Clark made himself smile and looked back at her. "Oh, don't mind me. Mostly, I keep saying it so I can get used to the sound."
She finished the first sheet of cookies, and then something occurred to her and she slapped her forehead. He watched her start to belatedly turn the oven to preheat, and then suddenly remember he was there and look up at him.
He actually laughed a little. He came around to her side of the cabinet, knelt in front of the oven and pulled it open, and preheated it for her in his own way. She mussed his hair, slid the cookies in, and started the second sheet.
Clark stood and got back to his pacing. "That moment of drama where someone, I don't know, rips my glasses off…that's just the end point. God forgive me if I let it get that far. First come the times when your friends could use your help with the daily things, and you have to let them flounder. Then…" He trailed off and shrugged, tired of the train of thought, well aware she knew where it was going.
"Then it gets," she continued for him, "to where they know you well enough to assume you don't keep big secrets from them, and then it all feels like lying. Everything is your lies, and their pain."
He looked back over at her. "That's about right."
"And this line was crossed at 9:10 P.M. two days ago?"
He had called home at that time, to make sure they would be in that weekend.
And, he thought ruefully, had evidently sounded a touch less casual and spontaneous than he intended.
"Sweetheart, for heaven's sake, what happened?"
He blinked, unprepared for the question, momentarily at a loss. Both because he couldn't imagine something truthful he could tell her safely, and because the grief and shame were so fresh that even that little cue brought them back washing over him again, almost intensely as they had the first time, two days before.
"Martha?" Dad's voice came from the back bedroom. "I can't find my nail gun."
Their eyes met over the counter.
"I'll take care of it, Mom." Clark turned to head down the hall. She held up a hand to stop him.
"Don't. We have a whole routine worked out. Just hold that thought." She wiped her hands off on the towel and headed out for the bedroom.
Clark sat down at the table and looked at nothing.
The past six months had been full for him of bombs on airliners and riots on the west coast, and the exhausting snail's-pace grind on the unsolved mysteries of the siren music.
He had worked dearly for every scrap of a lead on the mysteries of the speaker crisis, amidst the federal security lockdown that had followed it. He had found that the brain imaging of the recovering victims all showed the same areas of hyperstimulation, the footprints of their madness; he studied their names in the strange language of neuroanatomy, Brocka's and Wernicke's areas and the pineal gland – the homes of speech, and hallucinations.
He had stopped forty-four murders, eighty-three muggings, seven suicides and a light-borne plague. He had been ambushed once with red kryptonite and twice with green, and the second had come close enough to make him use a week's vacation recovering.
He had fought a bleak and marathon week of battle among the slums of Shadyside with a many-suckered leaping creature not made for this world. He was afterward informed that it appeared to have been a larval form, and felt that on the whole he preferred the kryptonite. He had walked through the most secure and sterile research labs in Metropolis, working with brilliant scientific minds on dark mysteries that lingered with him long afterwards.
Jimmy had taken him to six different B monster movies, and he loved them all but sat through King Kong in particular a second time.
Those months had also held the happiest moments of his life.
He had dropped character with Lois the night after the speaker crisis for many reasons, all converging under the light of one desk lamp in the dark bullpen that pivotal, quiet evening.
She was penetrating it already. It had been slipping for months, and his whole cover was at stake. Some new balance had had to be found. And it was getting harder to bear the accumulating weight of thousands of the daily troubles it caused her, large and small. And that halfway point had looked safe – it had seemed that maybe, after all his fears and nightmare scenarios, it was not so rigid a dilemma after all.
And then since that day, his new half-freedom had been sometimes purely intoxicating, full of the unimagined delights and possibilities she had opened for him that night, when she accepted the poor bits of truth he could offer her, and asked for nothing more.
Being able to talk with her plainly, wrestling with that sharp and leonine mind, was unlike anything he had ever done before. They had talked for hours, about the city elections and the underworld coups, and the stunning prevalence of asthma in the children of the roach-infested one-bedrooms of Shadyside. Lois, with a little drawing out - preferably in a back booth in a run-down little bar, where she would invariably find one of her contacts to introduce him to - would dissect the men of Metropolis and of history for him. Her penetration of their lives and fears, similarities and differences, was almost eerie; the minds of the dead and the living were all equal to her; she judged and exonerated them all as if they were the next day's headline.
"You're penalizing him too harshly for not being a visionary, Lois," he would push back, caught up in the moment. From the corner of his eye he was checking on the three different people in the room carrying concealed weapons; none had an apparent inclination to use them, but one was hanging a bit close. "Suffrage in his day was like abolition a century before. The next generation will condemn us for tolerating something that's a fringe issue today."
"Name one fringe issue today as simple, as black and white, as those were. Not including the roaches."
"Cigarettes," he replied cheerfully. He had worked her down to two a day and was on schedule to have her off by Christmas.
She looked at him for a long moment, her dark eyes unreadable. Then she rolled her eyes. "Oh, Clark," she would say, and then smile at him, so heart-stoppingly beautiful in the dim and smoky light that it took his breath away.
How can other people function at all, he had wondered at times, faced with the piercing joy of being alive, when they're free like this, every moment of every day?
And then she would change the subject, and launch into a didactic on interviewing hostile sources or marking contacts as unreliable, guided by some unseen master plan of things he needed to know.
Half the time, twenty minutes in, one of the wickedly-armed strangers might slide into the booth and greet Lois with a kiss on the cheek, and turn out to be a contact she had wanted him to meet.
"You're both wrong, by the way," one said cheerfully by way of introduction, as if he had been part of the prior conversation and the last twenty minutes had never passed. "By the end of his life he was retracing his steps on suffrage. But it all started too late for him. You can only ask people to change what they are by so much."
He looked at Clark. "But you, Mr. Kent, are right about the cigarettes. Maybe she'll listen to you. Change that, if you can."
The increasing time he spent with Lois was also bringing him face to face him with the odd awkwardly timed distant cry for help. Most of his rescues were too quick and low-profile to make the news, but they would make police reports. He had been concerned, initially, that all the pieces were there if the temptation proved too much for her. "Off to work on the Clark project?" she used to ask him at first, with a carefully level tone. "Never mind, I don't want to know." But later she had started retracting the question as soon as it was out, and then, with visible effort, biting it back altogether.
Then, about the same time that the first child kidnapping case first broke two months before, she had begun to wear down.
Clark had been doing flyover searches of the city for the missing children four nights a week since that day. Lois herself had been grinding along on the case for a month now, longer than she was used to going without a break in a story, and was showing visible signs of wear. She ran on righteous anger and black coffee when on such stories, but two weeks on that corrosive fuel was usually her limit. Longer, and she started to fray.
He had long suspected that that, rather than byline hunger, was the real reason she focused so obsessively on cracking them before that.
So that evening two days ago, to the periodic sound of Lois pounding vengefully on the keyboard in the background, he had been looking over the long-awaited civilian lab analysis of the speaker components, for the twenty-first time since it arrived that morning. It had taken this painfully long, even as Superman, to get clearance to have them analyzed.
The little cellophane-like cone-shaped film did indeed function like a normal speaker diaphragm, bending to sound with a unique degree of curvature for each frequency. A function for which it seemed pointless to be made of a substance utterly unique within materials science.
Entirely independent of deforming properly to transmit sound at multiple frequencies, the little diaphragm lacked the unique single resonant frequency that was the birthright of every object studied by every physicist since Tesla.
It would resonate as a single piece, without bending at all, at any sound frequency.
This was a less helpful insight than he had hoped for, having noted it already the moment he found and crushed the first speaker. The diaphragm had felt, he remembered, like a live thing in his hand, vibrating even lying flat on his palm with every jackhammer or idling engine within earshot.
He pulled the speaker he had kept out of his desk drawer and popped it open to get the diaphragm back out. He fingered it like a photo, by the edges. It was pearly and translucent; looking through it, the spectrum of visible light was subtly and disturbingly altered, straight things slightly curved, separate objects strangely converging.
Except at the one smoky melted mark where Lois, ever empirical, had flamed it with her cigarette lighter.
He leaned back in his chair, cheating a bit to keep his balance. What might be more helpful was an analysis of what it did with frequencies outside the sound range entirely, in the light or even the particle spectra. What on earth would it do with a pulse that had the wavelength of an electron?
He was just beginning to wonder if any in-state laboratories had that capacity. Or on-planet, anymore, for that matter.
Then an argument in one of the courtyard apartments six blocks over broke his concentration. He froze and listened till it ended harmlessly enough, with a slamming door.
Then he realized that the sunlight on his paper was orange and angled low across his desk, making the opposite wall glow. He raised his head.
It was almost six. Across the room, Lois was at her desk eating a doughnut for dinner, typing away, hunched over wearily in the atrocious posture she always slipped into when she thought no one was looking.
He dropped the speaker in his pocket. He came up behind her silently and rested his hand on the back of the chair, peering over her shoulder at her latest opus.
- disappearances which till this fourth one seemed to be standard ransom-motivated kidnappings -
Without looking back, Lois broke off half her powdered doughnut and handed it back to him over her shoulder. He took it from her fingers, accidentally dropping half the powder on her shirt, and took a bite.
Reflexively, as he had done so many times over the past six months, he scratched her back with his free hand, down between the scapulae, as he read.
- but which police detectives, since the latest addition of Jason Montano, 7, to the victim list, have been suspicious may be linked by their parents' common affiliation with the University of Metropolis.
"A little down, and to the right," she said absentmindedly. She moved the cursor up to one of the earlier paragraphs. "One 'F' in 'sycophant', or two?"
"Three," he said promptly, obediently moving down over the thoracic ribs. "The third one is silent."
She swatted at him, scattering the powder to the floor, and leaned over even further to hit the spellcheck, rubbing her eyes. When the proper spelling came up on the screen, she put her head down in her hands and laughed.
He looked down at the curve of her back. The trapezii and erectors spinae were in near-spasm, so tight they were pulling the ribs towards convergence as they fanned out from the spine.
Without thinking, as he had done so many times for his mother with her chronic lower back pain – which Lois was headed for, if she didn't start sitting straighter - he started rubbing circles along the deep paraspinals with his thumbs.
A moment later he thought better of it. He dropped his hand and dropped down in the chair facing her at the end of her desk. He pulled the little speaker out and fingered it in his hands on the desk
Lois pushed her chair back a bit and swiveled it to face him. She reached over and took the speaker out of his fingers. "So was there anything new in the lab report, the twenty-first time?"
She was trying not to smile, and failing utterly. Her deadpan always broke down in mid-sentence. Half-laughing, every shadow and contour of her face dear and familiar, she was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.
He laughed and shook his head. "Lois, I try so hard. But obsessiveness never worksfor me like it does for you."
"That's because you lack compulsiveness." Maybe her deadpan wasn't hopeless after all. Then she looked a bit more thoughtful. "Actually, I think you do your best work when you're doing six things at once. Like my sister the other night, correcting all my theology while she was making dinner for three hundred."
He blinked. "Really?"
"Really." She looked over at him fondly. "I was going to get you a Playstation, and I bet it would have gotten you a Pulitzer." Then she smiled wickedly. "But I was afraid you'd give it to Bill, so Luthorcorp wouldn't know you play video games."
He laughed aloud. Sarcasm, now, she could slice iron with. They both sighed, her gazing off at some point on the wall behind the computer screen, him looking out through the window wall, at the soaring glory of the glass skyscrapers reflecting the orange-gold sun.
She looked down at the speaker in her hands. Automatically, as they had each done so many times in the past six months, her hands did the deconstruction, popping open the black cone-shaped casing to expose the little diaphragm sitting inside.
The casing was the other peculiar, and even less satisfying, aspect of the apparatus. Curiously, it was reversed, with its cone narrowing down to a point in front amd the smaller diaphragm cone within it pointing in the other direction. This left a curious, empty little chamber behind the diaphragm itself, with a little shelf sitting in the middle.
On which nothing, in any of the three hundred identical little cases seized in the raid, had ever been found.
She looked up at him, turning it over in her fingers. "What are you thinking at this point?"
"About the speakers?" He sighed. "I don't know." He told her about his half-formed thoughts about how the diaphragms would handle other spectra. "We thought they must be strange, and we wondered how they worked. This confirms they're strange, and I still wonder how they worked."
"You sound so underwhelmed."
He sighed. "Not underwhelmed. Just a little chastened." He looked up at her. "How far will we get doing it this way, Lois? Is this chamber really meant to hold anything? Does it have anything to do with why this setup drove people mad? Or, if this diaphragm had another unrelated function, was it doing something else entirely?
"So many phenomena have passed through this city. Some of them had twenty arms with suckers on them. We bring in NASA and Fermilab and the NIH to explain them. No one ever can. At the last minute, we figure out just enough to stop them, or survive them. And then they pass."
He leaned forward. "But I have a theory."
She smiled. "Tell me your theory."
"The thing we never learn to pay attention to, that I have no idea if I'm getting closer to, is this. How do we keep it from happening again?"
The sun winked down behind a skyscraper roof, and her face was half in shadow. He watched her, her eyes studying his face, making the conscious decision not to ask him if this was part of his 'project'.
"And this time," she said softly instead, "that's eating you alive."
Clark sighed. "At six months and counting, it feels more…like being chewed and never swallowed. At the end of the day, the answer depends on how these diaphragms were made."
"Specifically," she continued, "does it lie in the raw materials –"
"- or the process." They looked at each other gravely across the table, in grim unity.
Then he glanced over at her screen and said, "Your case has been riding you hard too. And, unlike mine, it's a current issue."
"Actually," she said after a moment, sounding like her old self again, "it's funny you should mention that. Read to the end."
He reached over and turned the monitor to face him.
Today, however, according to police detectives, a new and disturbing line of connection appeared. Each of the four children also lived within thirty feet of a location of one of the rare speakers to appear in the suburbs toward the end of the siren crisis six months ago.
So rare, in fact, that there were only four of them.
Children kidnapped from, presumably, parents who had been targeted during the crisis.
Two thoughts struck him at once. First, that what these parents had in common had just become his most promising lead.
And, second, that the children were leverage. Which meant, he realized as a knot in his heart suddenly loosened, they should be alive, and in the hands of men with no reason yet to hurt them.
He would do yet another flyover tonight.
"Apparently, though, the parents aren't giving police a thing about being pressured for anything but ransom money. Three guesses why."
He realized it was also the first time she had sounded genuinely alive on that case in weeks.
"You'll make sure Superman knows? I haven't spoken with him much for two months, since that time at your place."
He looked down at her. Other than the timely rescues she tended to require on the job – from three high unstable structures, one hostage situation, and one planned electrocution by lightning rod in the last month alone – he had visited as little as possible while in uniform lately. In part to keep down rumors of a connection between them, and in part because he was increasingly uncomfortable actively playing two separate people to her.
And, in part, because that time at his place that she mentioned had come a bit close to home.
It had been a few days into his post-kryptonite recovery week, when the pounding headache and the crippling weakness were gone, but he still couldn't get his feet off the ground. He would wake, starving, between dreamless sleeps that stopped for no shores of day or night, just long enough to eat ravenously before dropping down into unconsciousness again.
And then came one time when, still in cape and uniform, boiling water for three boxes' worth of pasta, he heard a knock. He crossed the room, pleased that the dizziness was almost gone, and started to unlock.
Just as he turned the knob he realized his deep vision was finally back, when he saw Lois clearly through the solid door on the other side. There was nothing for it now but to open it.
She stared at him.
He stepped back to let her through the doorway. "I think the last flight to Smallville left an hour ago," he said carefully, painfully aware he was on ethical ground which didn't even qualify as shaky.
"It doesn't matter. It wasn't urgent." She stepped in, just over the threshold. She looked at him curiously for a moment more, and then, right on cue, dropped her gaze and started looking around for something else to fix her eyes on. "Is this where you usually come to…rest?"
He closed the door behind her. "This hasn't happened enough yet for me to form a habit. But it's one place."
He felt the sudden spike in the room's humidity and, moved by a dark premonition, turned back to the kitchen. "I'm sorry. One moment." He was still moving stiffly, and was aware of Lois' eyes noting it.
He picked up the pot out of the sink. The water had, in fact, vaporized entirely. From the looks of the glowing scorch marks on the inside of the pan, his heat vision was back in force as well.
"How are you?" she asked softly. She had come up to the other side of the kitchen cabinet, facing him, resting her hands on the bar. "No one does any work since it happened. Everyone's watching the skies." She hesitated. "Me, too."
He looked up into her eyes, forgetting for a moment how it unnerved her. "Flight is the last thing to come back."
He saw her eyebrows rise in understanding, and then, her dark eyes widening with worry.
She reached for the pot, as if to set it on the stove. He caught her wrist between his thumb and forefinger. He tipped the pot forward, so she could see the scorch marks still glowing faintly on the bottom. She blinked.
"Don't worry, Lois," he said gently. "It comes back quickly. There won't be time for a crime spree to start." Then it occurred to him to let go of her wrist.
She looked up and met his eyes for just a moment. "Oh. No, I was just thinking…how did they set that ambush at all?"
"Meaning, how do I keep it from happening again?"
She nodded solemnly.
He ran the water into the pot again and it sizzled up in clouds of steam between them. "Kryptonite," he said mildly, "is a very short-range weapon. The subatomic particles decay before they get more than two meters out. If you make bullets out of it, it explodes in the barrel. If you case them, the casings bounce off just like ordinary bullets. The main thing is keeping my distance from anything made of lead that might be hiding it." He reached over for the salt, and his arm gave him a last twinge of pain.
"And this occurred to you," she said wryly, apparently without thinking, "at which point in the process?"
Then she visibly remembered she was speaking to the last son of Krypton, and looked horrified. "Superman, I'm sorry. That was…"
He tried not to smile and failed. "In my defense, I was…distracted. There were too many people, and too many bullets flying around them. I should have surveyed more carefully first, now that this bait idea is spreading."
She was silent for so long that he looked up and saw her gazing at him, in her own reverie. When she felt his eyes on her, she looked back down at her hands on the counter. "You play a very difficult hand," she said softly.
He smiled a little, shutting off the water. "It has compensations."
Lois looked back up at him. He saw there, with some surprise, a touch of that same look she had worn a different night. When she was saying, Clark, he's finished here. I'll take care it.
"Including," she agreed, "grateful citizens to bring you carryout. Give me twenty minutes. Or I'll never be able to look in the mirror again." She turned away with evident relief and paused at the door. "I know you're tired. I'll bring it, and I'll leave. I promise."
She had been good as her word. And afterwards, wolfing down three orders of kung pao chicken as if he hadn't eaten for a week, he had been both touched and unable to shake the sense of having let yet another, not quite tangible, piece of his cover slip away.
Now, standing in the newsroom, looking down at her, he realized she was still waiting for a reply. "Sorry, Lois. My mind wandered. I'll make sure he knows." Ethically shaky doesn't begin to describe it..
She nodded and rubbed her eyes. He realized for the first time how tired she looked.
"Clark," she said abruptly after a moment, looking back up, "I want you to come with me tonight. Down to the warehouse district."
"Okay. Why?"
"I want to introduce you to someone."
He blinked. The someones, without exception, were her contacts. They had so far included cops, pawnshop brokers, bartenders, club muscle, federal desk agents, federal field agents, and most shockingly, a copy editor for the Star.
This would be the third in a week. Sixteen, in the two months since she had begun to take him around. Heaven only knew what fraction that was of the total size of her little empire.
"Clark?" Perry White was in his doorway, the door just cracked with his yellow desk lamp light behind him placing him almost in silhouette. "Can I talk with you a minute, son?"
Clark looked back at her inquiringly.
"Go ahead." She waved him over. "I need to proofread this anyway."
He followed the chief into his office, where his lone desk lamp lit the chaos of papers on his desk. Perry sat back on the one free corner, pushing back several stacks and threatening to start a domino effect that would send something on the other side to the floor.
When he saw the solemn look on his chief's face, Clark stepped back and closed the door behind him. "What's wrong, Perry?"
"I'm not sure, son. I thought I'd see if you could tell me. Sit down."
Clark blinked. He backed up onto the couch and sat.
"Now Clark, is there anything going on with Lois I ought to know about? Any trouble in her family, maybe?"
Lois' family, to his knowledge, consisted of her mother on the east coast and her sister Lucy in Our Lady of Metropolis convent. She spoke with her mother twice a month and with her sister, it now occurred to him, on the rare occasions when she admitted to wanting guidance.
"Not that she's mentioned. Can I ask why?"
"Or maybe in her own life? Big changes, big worries?"
Clark tilted his head. "What did she say when you asked her, Chief?"
Perry chuckled grimly. "I did ask her, your stab at subtlety notwithstanding. She told me her only problem was being harassed by nosy paternalist editors asking too many questions."
"She said that the first time?"
"No," the chief admitted wryly, his eyes sparkling a bit. "The sixth."
"Perry," Clark said softly, "what is this about? She's tired, since the kidnapping case broke. I know it's been hard for her. I don't know what else to say."
The chief sighed and rubbed his eyes. "I don't think I have to tell you about the role of discretion in the office here, son. Am I right?"
Perplexed, and beginning to feel an inexplicable sense of foreboding, Clark nevertheless reflected that the jury was still out on the ultimate quality of his discretion. "No, sir. This is already more than I'd feel right repeating."
Perry looked at him for a long moment, and then nodded. He got up and went around the desk, and sat back on his leather swivel chair with a creak, as if this were not a corner-of-the-desk type of subject.
He sat for a moment, looking down at the one bare spot in front of him, perfectly still. Clark had the disturbing sense that his chief was composing not a sentence but a paragraph, in classic journalistic order.
"Lois' peculiar genius is not, whatever a few jealous half-wits and spurned suitors say, just being persistent and frightening as hell."
Spurned suitors? Clark suddenly found his visual recall going off through the faces of the male Planet employees with a mind of its own. Not…Bill? He mentally slapped himself and refocused.
"Her gift and…her calling…is feeling out patterns from very minimal clues," Perry went on. "Now, she's a journalist, rather than a psychic, because she has the discipline to test them, and to drop them again when they don't fit the facts. But she's the best young journalist I've ever had because – that is, no slight on you at all, son, I know you know –"
"No, sir," Clark said softly. "She is. It's God's truth."
"That's right." Perry paused in his exposition and a little warmth came into his eyes, when he registered the comment. Clark found himself holding back a ghost of a smile, looking at the old warrior on his creaky leather throne, that gray patriarch of the Planet who, like Clark's own parents, had no daughters of his own.
"She's that good, because she feels things…moving together in lockstep, that look to the rest of us like separate beasts. If I could teach that to my other reporters, I would. Hell, if I could harness it myself, I would." He sighed and rubbed his forehead a bit, and Clark wondered irrelevantly how many successive prescriptions he had burned through, reading four decades' worth of copy.
Then he looked up, and his gray eyes held Clark's. "And if I could…" He spread his hands helplessly. "If I could get it back for her…"
Clark felt his sense of foreboding tighten, harder than the knot he had been carrying all these nights of searching for four children under ten. He was gripped by the strange sense there was something here he understood without understanding.
He had read more than half, but certainly not all, of Lois' prolific output. Was there something, at least from within their closeness over the past six months, that he had missed, or half-missed?
"How is it you see," he asked finally, "that it's missing? Sir?"
Perry steepled his fingers and looked down at the desk again. Clark had the peculiar sense he was watching the older man use his own version of deep vision, peeling back one day's article after another in his mind to follow Lois' work through time.
"Well, that's a bit of a pattern in itself, now," he replied. "And when it comes to such things, I'm…well, I'm not Lois. It took me a good while to be sure of it. But Clark, the girl was like…a flash of lightning…"
A magnificent, dark-eyed girl laughing in a smoky room, who could turn her own deep vision on me if she chose, and leave me no secrets at all.
"She used to make these leaps all the time, son. It used to scare the hell out me, how many different theories she could generate and kill in a day. Her recent stuff…well, her fact checks are as good as ever. She's not sloppy. But she's also not cracking these things like eggs any more. You know the police detectives used to come to her for her leads? The ones who could choke their egos down their throats. Not that she made that easy."
She's been working on this child kidnapping case for a month now.
Perry got up, and Clark, surprised, watched him start to pace the room for the first time he'd ever seen. It was as if a dam had burst. "It's not bad work, son. It's not performance measures that I'm looking at. I will say it's taking her half again as long to generate copy as it used to – I don't remember the last time she went home before I did, and my wife almost leaves me over the Planet every Christmas. But the thing I can't figure out is, what's happening to Lois Lane?"
He turned and went back the other way. "The farthest I can get with it is this. Lois has never worked well with…noise. I've felt that she…heard the turning of the wheels of men's brains and machinations because she kept a silence around her. I think it takes a whole heart, a whole person, to live inside the mystery."
He stopped dead in front of Clark, and turned and pinned him with his eyes. Clark had the sudden sense that the pacing, and the seeming open-ended reflection, had all been working together to disarm him and to bring them face to face in this moment.
"Is there something I need to understand about her heart, Clark?"
Clark blinked, startled that such a thing would have occurred to his chief as possible, wondering what that meant from this man who had apparently watched a parade of suitors failing through the years. And though he knew himself innocent of the question inside the question, he felt, strangely enough, under this peculiar cloud of unfolding half-understanding, as if he were naked and guilty.
Finally he looked Perry in the eye and said, "I'd never knowingly put Lois through anything that would have…this fallout, chief. But it doesn't really matter. There's nothing going on between us."
Perry grunted. Clark had the sense that to add to that would look evasive, and he willed himself to stay silent. But a moment later, as his dim sense of the pattern and its ties to him continued to focus, there was a question he had to ask.
"How long have you been seeing this?"
Perry sighed and sat back on his desk, visibly relaxed, or deflated, whichever it was. He looked back up at Clark. "About six months now."
Clark felt stray fragments of the last few months, snagged silently in his memory till then, break loose and tumble into place together. He watched them form a vague pattern, and more drop in to damningly confirm it, with a sinking dread, like a man watching a car crash below him from his high-rise window. He began to feel sick.
Oh, no.
He thought of Lois, that night six months ago, looking up at him with habit and trust warring in her eyes. Of that astonishing, utterly unprecedented moment when she chose to support him without questioning him further.
Of all the questions she had bitten back over the months that followed, all the correlations she had left uncharted, and all the pure gifts of wisdom and connections she had made him for his work.
You can only ask people to change what they are by so much.
About the extraordinary, undeserved lack of bitterness she had shown towards the man who had asked her, every single day for six months, to keep walking with her eyes closed.
He felt a little unsteady. He closed his eyes. "I may be able to help, Chief."
He looked up and saw Perry tilt his head a little. The chief's mouth worked for a moment as if he were going to speak, and then he was silent.
Which was, in the presence of a troubled subject already volunteering information, good interviewing technique.
"There are," Clark said carefully, "some favors, and some extra work she's been doing for about that period. I think, in part, it may be wearing on her more than she admits." He ran a hand through his hair, gripped by the simple certainty that things had to change, not yet at full strength for grappling with the how's and when's. He looked Perry in the eye. "Let me figure out how to shift the weight off her."
And, as his intuition flashed unbidden through each point on the decision tree, through each scenario and its final outcome, he felt compelled to add, "Things might get worse before they get better."
Perry looked at him for a long moment and then, abruptly, he nodded.
Clark was struck by the comparison with Lois' troubled eyes, looking into him that other pivotal night. Perry was not, as he had said, Lois, and he knew it. He had no involuntary compulsion to know how things would improve, or exactly why they would first get worse, if both his staff desired to keep it private. He would sleep fine, this night and all nights to come, if he were only satisfied that she was safe and well.
Clark turned to go.
"Clark."
He turned back. Perry was resting his head on his hands, and he looked for just a moment more deeply uncertain than he had ever seen him.
"Am I really helping her by pushing this issue here, son? I'm interested in the work as a marker of her state." He looked up at him helplessly. "I don't give a damn whether she breaks another case or not ever again, if she were happy."
Touched, despite the chaos of dread gathering shape inside him, Clark nodded at his chief.
"Yes, sir. She isn't happy." He knew it was the truth as he said it. And when I saw it, I blamed the case. "She's just…" – the word occurred to him, and it astonished him to be using it in reference to Lois – "subtle about her unhappiness. You saw it better than I, and I'm grateful for that."
Perry looked at him, and nodded slowly. "All right, then."
Clark let himself out and shut the door behind him. Feeling like a man walking to the gallows, he circled around the corner in the darkness which his vision penetrated like daylight, to think for a moment. He leaned back against the wall.
He had not planned to, but he found himself looking at her, as off at her desk in the little pool of lamplight she rubbed her forehead and pushed her hair back out of her face.
With sickening clarity he looked back over the past six months, seeing clearly for the first time how the pieces of her life had slowly swung around like compass needles to restructure themselves.
Around him.
Around exploring his thoughts and passions, and getting to know him as if for the first time. Around teaching him her tricks, and introducing him to her sources. Around devoting herself fiercely to the help of a man who held a secret between them like a moat, and asked her not to do the one thing that for her was like breathing - unravelling it.
And rarely complaining at all, and never showing him what it was costing her. Only looking a little weary, and having to work longer to write less. Never mind, Clark, I don't even want to know. Let me just teach you how to do…some other damn thing.
He was so deeply ashamed that for a moment it was hard to breathe. Of his selfishness and of his blindness. Of not realizing that he had never gained a new half-freedom at all by what he had told her - only shifted half his burden over onto her.
And in retrospect, of his smugness. It seemed incredible he had ever thought of her as lacking self-control.
He felt the warm temporary world he had lived in for the past eighteen months, and most sweetly for the last six, that had felt so stable even as its hours remaining ticked away, crumble beneath him with every moment.
And there was further to go tonight before his work was done. He swallowed. Be a man, Kent. Follow it out to the end.
There's no room in her life right now for another man.
No sane man would want the dregs left over from what she gives me, regardless. Was anyone who might have deserved her even spurned already, because of her responsibility to me?
The surrounding decisions had been made long ago. Whether she ever, ever loved him or not, there was no getting involved with her, or any woman, without telling her the truth, without her understanding the implications it would have for her life. That would be as cheap and shallow a seduction as ever happened in a Shadyside rave with the help of a sedative dissolved in a martini.
And there was no having that conversation while his parents were alive. Especially while someone at Luthorcorp might still have speakers whose music pulled out people's secrets, and plenty of other people knew how to use old-fashioned torture.
Then Kent, you self-serving hypocrite, how was this supposed to end? Or did you really hope she might wait another twenty years for you, and never ask why?
He looked back at her, working away writing up someone else's discovery that should have been hers. He felt his anger at himself give way to grief - for her over what was past, for himself over what was coming.
He watched her typing, her breathing, her hunching over and searching the spellcheck, her sweet, mobile face as her eyes tracked over the text. He fixed them all in his mind.
It was time to end it.
He came up behind her in the dark and then sat down in the chair at the end of her desk. She had a search on one of the parent families up in one window.
She looked over at him and smiled before going back to her sentence, and he fixed that bright glory in his mind as well, and felt sick to his stomach.
"Lois, honey, this is no good for you."
She looked back at him, startled.
Not the surprise of confusion, but the deeper shock of intimacy imposed without warning or consent, of having another creature reach out a finger uninvited and touch it to the sore spot on her soul. Her heart began to pound up into the hundreds range.
In the silent half-dark he watched her face. It hardly moved at all, but his exquisitely perceptive senses, focused for once together on a single point, read the things that passed through it as clearly as the written word. He saw her consider responding with incomprehension, to cover it all, and then dismiss the thought, ashamed. He saw the terrible temptation to fight him on it, and felt his own rising terrible half-hope that she would.
Then she sighed and said nothing.
Seeing her fundamental lack of surprise, he thought of all the visits to her contacts, all the accelerated investigation teaching, and the final piece fell into place.
He reached out and swiveled her chair to face him. "But you knew that, didn't you? How many more techniques did you want to be sure I knew? How many people did you have left to introduce me to?"
She closed her eyes and looked like she was struggling for words. She was usually so magnificently articulate. He knew she was aware, as he was, that each word said here would close and open doors, that one is never quite prepared to say a new truth for the first time.
Finally she said simply, "I'm sorry, Clark." She took a deep breath. "I wanted so badly to be able to do this."
You can only ask people to change what they are by so much.
"I thought I could. And when I realized how hard it was…you had to at least have the tools. I didn't have a timeframe. My planning's not as precise as yours. I just…didn't know what would happen. I'm sorry."
"You have nothing to be sorry about. The fault was mine entirely." He was surprised by the self-directed anger in his own voice. More gently, he went on, "Just make me sure I understand. Is this about secrets?"
She turned and looked at him. He saw, beneath the thin film of tears, an intensity that was strangely disturbing, something bottomless and unsuspected that he could not name. "It includes secrets, yes." She gave him a half-smile
Not trying to joke. Asking him to respect her privacy, as she had respected his.
"I don't…completely understand it myself," she finished lamely. Then she turned, ludicrously, back to her computer for a moment, suddenly intent on making final revisions, blinking too fast.
He closed his eyes for a moment. She had, he reflected, perhaps more right not to be pressed for explanations than anyone alive. So instead he said,"You want to hear my theory?"
She looked back at him with a sudden affection that looked utterly genuine. "Of course. Tell me your theory."
"I think you've been pulled by…a good heart into a role you were never made for, that no one should have expected you to take. Serving something you can't see, depending on someone else's judgment."
And, it occurred to him, dizzyingly, staying blind to what you could easily have figured out by now.
Not because it's beyond you, but because I asked you not to look.
Her answering look was full of gratitude and surprise, which stung him to the quick.
He took a deep breath. Finish this. "And you should never have been expected to give so much to a guy who, as much as he…" He paused.
Be a man already, Kent. "As much as he worships you, can't promise you anything will change. Ever."
She said nothing.
"I'm so sorry, Lois. I should have realized long ago that this wasn't sustainable."
She closed her eyes. The thin film of tears over them was thickening and wavering, and the surface tension wouldn't hold much longer. And she had, he was certain, no more desire than ever to cry in front of him.
"Clark," she said finally, opening them, "is there still no way…I hate that I'm asking this, but…"
Oh, God, Kent, get out of here. Do you really think you can refuse her if she asks you now?
Whatever she saw in his face, she stopped and swallowed hard. "Never mind. God, I'm sorry."
He got up, trembling the way he had for a day after the kryptonite ambush, unable to stand meeting her eyes anymore.
Into the bit of breathing space created by breaking eye contact, he said as steadily as he could, "I'm overdue to check on my parents. I promise, I won't be in tomorrow or Friday. Maybe some of those kids' parents will talk to you. After that, I'll…I don't know. I'll figure something out."
He bent down and kissed the top of her dark head. She sat very still.
Now leave her alone.
Without knowing how, he got as far as the newsroom door.
"Clark."
He turned back. She was mercifully silhouetted in her lamplight.
"I don't want you to think that…I mean, you should know. That it was good for me."
He put the door between them, to get out into the night.
In novels he had read, this was the part where the characters went into merciful shock and went home to sleep for twelve hours. It didn't, so far, seem to apply to the sons of Krypton. He hoped that maybe it did to the daughters of Earth.
He had a flyover search to start.
"Clark?"
He was back in the kitchen, sitting at the wooden table in the chair that bore the scratches of his booster seat. Mom was there in the shadows in the hallway, and he wondered how long she had been watching him.
She sat down opposite him, with the bag of pill bottles in one hand and the pill organizer box in the other. She shook them all out in the table and popped off the first lid. Numbly, he reached over to twist off the others.
"Where were we?" she asked, very gently.
Not quite able to meet her eyes, not quite able to stop himself, he said, "We were talking about pain."
A long moment passed, and his hypersensitive hearing focused ludicrously on the wall clock's second hand ticking, and the whirring of the internal gears that drove it.
"Sweetheart," she said gravely, "There's something I need to explain to you."
Her steady hands paused in their pill sorting and she reached over to lay a hand over his wrist. It was shrunken, the veins exposed by the thinning of the subcutaneous fat bed. He watched the arthritic metacarpal heads grind against each other as she patted his arm and winced.
"You don't understand what pain means for humans, Clark."
He looked up, stung by the injustice of that, stung by its coming from her.
"Do you really believe that, Ma?" he said after a moment. He was surprised by the intensity in his own voice. Lois standing across the table in the diner, the pistol muzzle at her temple, her brown eyes wide with terror. Lois sitting in the newsroom, blinking back her tears, saying, "Never mind. God, I'm sorry." "I don't think you can even imagine how much…"
He trailed off, unable to complete the reciprocal injustice. Because, of course, she could imagine very well.
And what had he just given away?
"That's not what I meant, sweet boy," she replied softly, covering his hand with hers. "I know you have a limitless capacity for pain." She gave him a half-smile, and he smelled the first waft of the cookie dough baking, the egg proteins starting to polymerize. "When you were six years old, you cried for a month when one of the guernseys came down with hoof and mouth."
"Emma," he said, automatically, bemused. "With her tongue always flopping out the left side of her mouth."
"But you don't respond to pain the way we do, love." She leaned forward, her gray eyes fixed on him. "If you did, there would be some part of you resenting me and your father every day of our lives."
Her words went through him with another jolt of recognition, the eerie intimacy of being understood all too well. Not the resentment - he could no more resent hiding his identity for her, whatever the fallout, than resent air for his having to breathe it.
But when had it dawned on her, that she and Dad were the hub of the wheel on which all his plans and his silence turned?
Can I keep any secrets from anyone anymore?
He looked up at her helplessly and said the only true thing he could. "Ma, I've never felt that way for a moment. I never could."
"I know that, sweetheart. You're incapable of mixing your love with bitterness. You don't protect yourself. You just stand there and take it."
She sighed and ran her hand through her gray hair. "It's different for us. When our love hurts badly enough for long enough, something changes." Her hands made a small, helpless gesture. "We can't help it. Either we start to love less, in self-defense. Or else the love doesn't change, but the joy bleeds out of it, and we can't get it back."
And he thought of Dad, of the man who had taught him how to be a man, now wandering down to the interstate at two in the morning three times in the last week, so that Ma had had to start hiding the house key at night. And how long till I'm dragging him back kicking and screaming and accusing her of stealing his medicines or his breakfast? Or the tools she had to box up after she caught him showing the Pattons' toddler how to use a nail gun? There was nothing to say.
He put his big hand over hers and made a mental note to dementia-proof the barn before he left, so Dad could putter around in there.
And her comments applied to his life under one assumption only. So that he had, really and truly, no secrets from her at all.
He looked out the window at the salt-and-pepper of snow on the black fields, at the purple haze of the bare border trees' branches against the sky.
A quote from one of his journalism professors came back to him, a verdict about two facts that were connected only in appearance. Another case, people, of 'true, true and unrelated'. He shook his head to clear it. All of this changed nothing.
"I believe you, Mom. But it's irrelevant. I never expected Lois to…love me, or be attached to me, in any way. I never planned for that. I still don't. I already know I bring her more pain than joy. And the sooner she's able to protect herself -"
"- Yes, I know your plan, Clark," Mom cut in.
Something in her voice pulled him back to look at her. He saw there a steeliness he had last seen at the age of sixteen, sneaking home after making elaborate crop circles in the south field all night for Dad to find at harvest. He had opened the porch door without a creak in the dawn half-light, to find her standing there with her arms folded across her chest, saying, You go tell your father what you did, son. Or I will.
"I was giving you the justification for my plan. I'll tell it to you. It's very simple."
She got up to get the cookies out before they burned.
On the way to the oven she looked back at him and smiled crisply. He had the disturbing feeling that seventeen generations of Kansas farmwives, bakers of cookies and guardians of all shortsighted children, their own and those born to others, were looking back at him through her eyes.
"Sweet boy," she said gently, "you have that one flaw that brings down all the real heroes. I think you got it from your daddy. You always think the hardest course is the only one God ever gives you."
She slid her hands into the potholders and pulled the sheet out and set it on the stove, and the smell exploded a hundredfold in the warm kitchen air. She crossed her arms and looked at him steadily across the room.
"You think no one else has the right to carry any burdens. But in this world everyone still has to. I do, and she does. You try to carry them all, and you'll fall out of the sky. And all you accomplished was denying folks their right to a say in which burdens they bear."
His heart, much more adaptable than his head, was pounding
"And I won't bear seeing you do this because of a possibility you're so afraid of that you won't even name it. And neither would your daddy."
He had the sudden, dizzy thought that maybe his offense against Lois, like against his family, had been telling her not too much, but too little. He felt light, numb, paralyzed, free, wild, joyful, terrified. He hoped she would stop and hoped she would go on.
"You go tell that girl the truth, son. Before it's too late. Or Iwill."
Then the piercing light of her gaze softened a little and she turned back toward the cookies. Her back to him, she added thoughtfully, in an entirely different tone, "It does seem like her writing's been a bit distracted for the last few months. Don't you think?"
