A/N- Alright, here it is! Part 2 of Appear, Disappear. Hope you enjoy it! *cackles wickedly*
12. Appear, Disappear
(part 2)
"Not even earth can hold us
Not even life controls us
Not even the ground can keep us down
The memories in my head
Are just as real the time we spent
You always be close to me, my friend
This is not the end."
-Bravery
When Oliver had produced what he proclaimed to be the hottest tickets in town, Lois had been anticipating Aerosmith or a Bangles reunion tour or something. She had most definitely not signed up for yet another round of The All-American Rejects.
She supposed it was sweet of Oliver to take her to a concert by the band that had been playing during that first pseudo-date at Lex's benefit masquerade. Ordinarily, it would have been the kind of thoughtful move to give her butterflies, but they hadn't really been together long enough for it to carry much weight. If they'd been together over a year, if it was some kind of retrospective thing, she would have put up with music not to her taste in order to join him in a trip down memory lane. Two and a half months- good months though they had been- didn't justify it, not yet.
But relationships were about give and take, and so she pasted on a smile and swayed back and forth to the beat and pretended for Oliver's sake that she loved rock designed for those just leaving the teenybopper phase. She held his hand and she let him kiss her and kept up a great pretense for the first half of the show.
During the short break between sets, though, Oliver ducked out to fetch them some drinks, and Lois let out a sigh of relaxation. Keeping up the Happy Lois mask was taking its toll, and once he was out of sight it was an almost physical relief, like she'd zipped herself up in a too-tight dress and was finally home and able to free herself. Lois Lane was not a woman made for pretenses. A few minutes where she didn't have to pretend she was exactly where she wanted to be would be wonderful.
The concert was being held in an open-air football stadium. Oliver (being Oliver) had gotten them seats on the field, right up in front of the stage. Lois took the opportunity of his absence to wander past the metal barricades to approach the now-empty platform, inspecting the setup curiously.
A few roadies were scurrying over and around the stage, resetting the lights and equipment in preparation for the next set. She watched them work with intent eyes.
One of them, a short black man about her own age, hopped down off the stage. He wiped a thin layer of sweat from his brow with the back of his hand and swore softly under his breath.
"Rough night?" she asked sympathetically.
The guy glanced at her in surprise, and shrugged. "No worse than usual," he said, casting an appreciative eye over her form-fitting jeans and the provocative emerald shirt she'd chosen with Oliver in mind. Lois ignored it- boys would be boys.
"I always thought it'd be cool to work as a roadie," she commented off-handedly. "Getting to see behind the scenes on all the different bands..."
He rolled his eyes. "Oh yeah, putting up with every prima donna and his drug habits, it's a real dream job," he said with a wry smirk.
She grinned, taking a liking to the young man. Despite his obvious bad mood, there was something immediately warm and likable about him. "You know what I mean, though," she said.
He nodded. "Sure, but this is Wichita. We don't exactly get big names coming through here too often. Can't speak for everybody, but I know for me, a job is a job. And the pay? Sucks."
Lois grimaced. "I hear ya," she said.
"It's getting to be a real problem, apparently," he said. He cast a thoughtful glance at her, then said in a conspiratorial tone, "I'll be straight with you, some of the other guys are seriously talking about a strike."
Lois's interest was beyond piqued. This otherwise snore-inducing night had suddenly gotten very, very engaging. "What's your name?" she asked.
"Pete," he said.
"Lois Lane," she replied in kind. "I'm a freelance reporter."
His eyebrows rose. "Shoulda guessed," he remarked under his breath, with a soft smile she didn't understand on his face.
"Tell me more about this situation, Pete," she said. "Do you guys have a union...?"
Clark arrived in the Planet basement the next morning, having received a call from Chloe that she might have a possible lead. He was unsurprised to find Jimmy attending her when he caught up with them. The day before, Chloe had suggested that with her new beau's background in radio tech, he might be able to provide them with some insight if Clark's radio static lead actually panned out into anything concrete.
"I know that Lex Luthor Lost is a juicy headline, but tell me again why we're searching for the root of all evil?" Jimmy asked as Clark entered the room.
"I'm not doing this for Lex," Chloe said. "After talking to Lana, I've got to put my skepticism in check. I mean, she really cares about him."
Jimmy laughed. "Women are such a mystery."
"Amen to that," Clark said, by way of announcing his presence.
"Hey, CK," Jimmy said good-naturedly. "Are you here to help with the search for the man nobody misses?"
Clark couldn't help but smile at the enthusiasm that belied the other man's cynical words. It was pretty clear that Jimmy had that same fired-up attitude about getting to the bottom of a mystery, any mystery, that was Lois's hallmark as a reporter. He might not like Lex much, but it was plain that he was perfectly willing to dive head-long into the search.
"Yeah," Clark replied. "I may not be a reporter, but I'm pretty good at finding needles in haystacks."
Jimmy grinned broadly, and opened his mouth to reply, but at that exact moment, Chloe exclaimed, "Lana!"
Clark turned and saw his ex standing there, looking pale and very drawn about the mouth. She didn't appear to have put on much makeup, and although her clothes were as tastefully-selected as ever, her ordinarily well-groomed hair looked a little unkempt. Sympathy filled him, quite unexpectedly. Clearly she was really worried for Lex.
"The hunt for Lex is on!" Jimmy proclaimed heartily.
Lana smiled thinly. "Thank you, Jimmy," she said with a sincere effort at warmth. She looked around to include Clark and Chloe in her next statement: "Thank you guys for being here. I don't know what I would have done without-" She broke off, her throat audibly closing down on her as her eyes clouded up.
"Hey, we're here for you," Chloe said, putting a concerned hand on her friend's arm. "And we might have found something."
She guided Lana over to her desk. Clark and Jimmy followed the girls.
"I was able to access Lex's surveillance files, and there's one particular still from the other night that you might wanna take a look at."
Chloe pulled up the image in question, a captured frame from security footage of the night Lex vanished. Immediately, Clark's eyes were drawn to a spot in the middle of the picture. Directly in front of Lex's seizing form, there was a spark of... he wasn't sure what. It looked a bit like snow on a television screen, but here it was appearing in mid-air.
"What is that?" Jimmy asked.
"Can you clear it up?" Lana asked simultaneously.
Chloe shrugged. "There's not a lot to work with," she said apologetically, "But I'll do my best."
Lana's cell rang. She answered, and after a brief exchange with whoever was on the other end, she muffled the mouthpiece of the phone against her black woolen jacket. "It's Lex's security," she said. "They want to give me an update. Excuse me."
She bustled out of the bullpen, leaving the other three still staring at the computer screen.
"I gotta say, CK," Jimmy said, "It's really big of you being here. I mean, seeing as you and Lana used to be... whatever." He fumbled a little over it, clearly having started out with the intention of saying something a great deal more blunt, as was his wont, but rethinking halfway through his sentence.
Clark shrugged. "Just because she's with someone else doesn't mean I want her to be unhappy," he replied.
Jimmy's eyebrows went up in an almost comical fashion. "That's impressive," he said. "If I ever let Chloe get away, and some guy she was dating went missing, I'm not sure I could be that generous."
Clark shot the briefest of glances at the blonde, who had bitten her lower lip in response to Jimmy's statement. He wasn't sure whether if it was from discomfort or from appreciation of the sentiment, but it suddenly made her look stunningly like her cousin.
At that moment, Lana stuck her head back around the corner. "Clark, Chloe... I have to go," she said. "If you find anything else, please let me know, but there's... um... something back at the mansion that I need to attend to. Jimmy, thank you for your help."
The other three called out polite goodbyes as Lana all but fled up the stairs.
Clark watched Lana go with a baffled expression. He had never been able to see Lana's heart the way he had wanted to, but he still knew her very well. And he knew that something wasn't quite right. It wasn't just that Lex was missing. Something had changed just in the last few minutes. He wondered if it had really been Lex's security on the other end of that call. He debated following her, but ultimately decided that it was best to leave her alone.
Oliver parked his car in the alleyway behind the Talon, intent on heading up to the apartment to have a few words with his girlfriend.
As he headed for the back door of the little coffee shop, he passed by Lois's friend Lana in conversation with a bespectacled man wearing an infinitely terrible tie. Lana bore a restrained look of deep concern on her face, he noted with a small measure of curiosity. She gave him the barest of nods, which he returned, before accompanying the short man toward the end of the alley.
He quickly went inside, hurrying up the stairs and rapping urgently at the door.
Lois answered quickly, her cordless phone cradled between her right shoulder and her ear. She waved him into the apartment, then held up a finger indicating that he give her time to wrap up her conversation.
"Yeah... yes... no, I'm telling you, Perry, this is a good story. Not front-page stuff, but... no, it can't all be front page, Perry. Even I have my limits!" She wandered in the direction of the kitchen. "Well, yes, I want that, but that doesn't mean ignoring good stories just because they're not The Story of the day! In case you hadn't noticed, right now that particular story would be the bombings in Greece, but unfortunately I'm not in Greece, am I? An article about the exploitation of road crews across the country is a perfectly legitimate story, and it's surprisingly juicy."
She had leaned back against the counter, fully prepped for an eye-roll, but whatever her mentor said next caused her to shoot upright. "Are you kidding me? What is wrong with you? You should know me better by now. I'm not just in this for kicks, Perry. I'm in, one hundred percent, and you know I stand by my stories. You don't need to keep testing me like this."
They spoke more amicably for a minute more after that, while Oliver waited impatiently perched on the arm of the sofa. Finally, she wrapped up the conversation.
"Sorry about that," she said. "I swear, you'd think after acting as my self-appointed sounding board for two months now, Perry would be done pushing me to see if I'll back down from a story under a little pressure."
Oliver shrugged. "Maybe he's just trying to keep you challenged."
"Maybe."
"Hey, do you know who it was Lana was talking to out in the alley?" Oliver asked.
Lois's expression became puzzled. "Lana's here?"
"Yeah. I just passed her earlier. She was talking to some guy with these coke-bottle specs... sound familiar at all?"
She shrugged. "Nope. Doesn't ring a bell. And speaking of... what has you ringing my bell at this time of day? I thought you had a board meeting?"
"Delayed until tomorrow," he informed her. "Queen Industries' CFO got caught in a blizzard in Switzerland."
"Bummer."
"Yeah. So, um... I thought we should talk," Oliver informed her.
Her eyes shut down, those infamous barriers he had been doing his best to crack down shooting rapidly up. "Uh-oh," she said, too cheerfully. "Call me a pessimist, but good things don't usually follow that phrase."
Oliver shrugged. "It's not bad, it's just... I guess I'm a little concerned."
"About what?" she asked.
It was difficult to say this. He hadn't wanted to bring it up at all, being even better at avoiding emotionally uncomfortable situations than Lois herself, but then he remembered how she had looked and sounded, laughing with Clark Kent in his barn at Thanksgiving, and knew that he had to head off potential problems before they had a chance to take root if he had any chance of keeping Lois Lane's attention.
"Lois, are you... are you getting bored of this? Of me?" he asked, opting for honest vulnerability rather than reverting to humor.
Her expression wrinkled up; she had clearly been caught off-guard. "What do you mean?" she asked. "Are you?"
Oliver was taken aback. "Of course not!" he exclaimed. "You're one in a million, Lois. Any man who gets bored when he has you in his life would deserve to be committed."
A soft smile pulled at the corners of her mouth just long enough for him to catch a glimpse of it, and then it was gone. "Well then, where's the problem?" she asked.
"The problem, Lois, is that you pretty much ditched me last night," he said.
"I was chasing a story," she said, narrowing her eyes.
Oliver restrained a sigh. "You had the barest lead ever," he pointed out. "And it wasn't time-sensitive. It could easily have waited until this morning. Can you blame me for feeling like I got blown off?"
Lois's arms were crossed defensively and her expression was unreadable as she said, "Oliver, this is who I am. Maybe last night I was kind of looking for an excuse, but it had nothing to do with you. I just wasn't so crazy about the band. But I can't help that I drop everything to run down stories; I've finally found something I love to do, what I was made to do. I've always been like this, and now I have a way to actuallyuse that to make a difference in people's lives."
Oliver felt himself falling a little bit more in love with her as she spoke. He was pretty sure, though, that it would be the wrong time to drop the L-bomb. Especially because, even though he understood her reasons for running off the night before, he still wasn't too happy about it, or with her. "And I respect that," he said. "But I still would have appreciated something a little more concrete than a twenty-second voicemail saying you were off to interview roadies for an article."
"Duly noted," she replied, her stance and expression softening. "So what do you say, since you drove all the way out here to the boonies, that we make it lunch?"
He grinned, feeling better if not entirely relieved. "I think that's an excellent idea," he said emphatically.
Raya glanced out across the harbor, shading her eyes with one graceful hand. The sun was setting, and as the golden orb dipped down toward a horizon shaped only by the gentle waves of Puget Sound, the lens effect of the atmosphere warped the yellow star's appearance. Now looking huge and a sullen scarlet that stained the clouds, it could almost have been Rao casting baleful light over the West Coast.
A light wind had sprung up along the shore. If Raya were not impervious to temperature, she probably would have been cold. Seaside so late in autumn wasn't so comfortable, she was given to understand. For appearances sake, she probably should have at least put on a jacket. The last thing she wanted to do was arouse human suspicion.
Her quarry still eluded her.
Two more dock workers had turned up over the past twelve hours, eviscerated and left as little more than steaming piles of meat and bone fragments, but she had been unable to trace the Zoner. She was positive he hadn't left the docks, but whatever ability he had to cloak himself was more effective even than she'd anticipated. She was going to have to change her tactics.
Raya approached the problem as she always did: scientifically. What did she know about the being she was stalking?
The fugitive was hungry. He fed on bones, particularly the bones of bipedal humanoids. He was on the hunt. Although capable of attacking many people at once, he had displayed a preference for picking off his targeted meals one by one.
Logically, then, her best choice was to fly over the docks and see if she could spot the Zoner the next time he attacked someone, keeping a particular eye on workers alone or in pairs on isolated areas of the wharf. She hadn't wanted to take to the sky if she could help it (flying being a little too conspicuous), but she took a gamble that the darkness stealing over the land as the sun slipped deeper beneath the horizon would conceal her from upturned eyes.
Raya lifted off at top speed, rising several kilometers into the sky above the bay. From there, she hovered, all her superior senses tuned to the goings-on at the wharf.
The breeze, stiffer at this altitude, played with her hair. The sounds of the bright city just beyond the docks lured her with the promise of a much more enjoyable evening than the one she was currently experiencing, but she had a mission. Jor-El had saved her for a reason, and she was sure now that the reason had been to help Kal-El just as she was doing now. She would help him protect his beloved Terra, and all the people who called it home.
A faint yelp was carried to her on the wind, and Raya turned her head, the better to hear. Sure enough, she caught the barest sounds of a scuffle and when she focused her enhanced vision in that direction, she spied the fugitive at last. Leveling her body out, Raya shot forward; silhouetted by the last rays of the sun, she streaked like an arrow toward her target.
Lana had been quiet ever since she arrived back from wherever it was she had gone after she got that mysterious phone call, Clark had noted. It made him wish that he had listened in on her when she left after all. Something else had happened, and whatever it was, she wasn't sharing.
"Is everything okay?" he asked, hoping that maybe she would talk about whatever had happened.
She pasted on a forced-up smile that looked more like a grimace of pain. "Fine," she said curtly.
The pair of them were following Chloe and Jimmy through the twisting labyrinth of the Daily Planet's sub-basement in the direction of one of the empty rooms in which Jimmy had set up the equipment he promised would help them find Lex. Though most of the rest of the building was deserted by eight in the evening, this far underground the fact-checkers were still going strong, and a few of the office doors stood open.
"Lana..." Clark said, hesitantly, "Did something happen?"
"No. Should something have?" she asked, and if he hadn't been paying attention, he would have believed her.
"It's just, you seem kind of tense," he pointed out.
"Lex is missing," she said in that same clipped tone. "Why wouldn't I be tense?"
She was hiding something. It had always been a problem of hers, Clark reflected. Lana hated being left out of the loop with a passion, but she had never had any compunctions about withholding information herself, when it suited her. He hadn't really realized it until now, but he was beginning to see that she was pretty fond of keeping secrets, herself. As they walked, Clark thought about their shared history and began to see a pattern. Yes, Lana had kept a lot of secrets over the years, hadn't she? Some of them had been big and some of them small, like all her little white lies to Whitney, but the fact was that she hid things. Did that make her a hypocrite, he wondered. Maybe. But perhaps it wasn't surprising that Lana preferred to play her cards close to her chest, considering the life she'd lived.
Clark thought he might be starting to understand why it bugged her so much when he would hide things from her. The difference was, when he lied to her, he was doing it to keep her safe. He wasn't sure who Lana was protecting.
It was an unnerving series of thoughts to be having about Lana, the girl he'd loved as long as he could remember, but he was glad. He had made a conscious choice to try to move on from Lana, because he didn't want to be hurt any more. Maybe this was just part of the process. How many times had Chloe and, for that matter, Lana herself, told him that he didn't really see her? He remembered a conversation they'd had back in high school, when she'd told him she feared he had her on a pedestal she could never measure up to. Was this what she'd meant by that? Maybe it was time he got to know Lana Lang, his friend and ex, instead of Lana Lang, the girl he'd fallen for long before he'd ever spoken to her.
"It's right down here," Jimmy called back to them, pointing down yet another branching hallway. "Brace yourselves, because I think I've figured out what happened to Lex."
Lana's pace noticeably picked up, but Clark had frozen in his tracks.
An office door belonging to one of the proofreaders stood open. The pair of men inside were hard at work, their television turned down low in the background. This was what had caught Clark's attention.
"...explain the mysterious series of explosions and seismic tremors rocking the dockside south of Seattle," a female newscaster's voice exclaimed in harried tones, "but police have cordoned off wharf and an elite strike force has been called to the area."
The grainy footage that was obviously being aired live which accompanied the reporter's narrative showed from a distance the cargo stacks along the wharf lit up by a series of small fires, and every so often a burst of new flame would briefly illuminate the scene.
Clark's eyes were glued to the TV, barely hearing Chloe call to him in confusion.
"I just... I can't believe what I'm seeing!" the reporter said.
On the screen, a tiny figure in white and blue lifted into the air, barely visible in the night. Beams of bright light burst from the figure's eyes, striking something not visible to the camera. An unholy roar sounded, muffled by distance, but still audible on the television. Clark knew immediately what was happening.
He turned away abruptly, to see Lana, Chloe, and Jimmy all staring at him.
"Clark, what's the matter?" Chloe asked.
"I have to go," he said urgently.
Lana's dark eyes grew wide, then narrowed in confusion and a modicum of anger. "Go?" she asked sharply. "Why?"
"I don't have time to explain," he said, turning away from his friends.
Lana reached out and grabbed his elbow roughly, jerking him back around with surprising force. "Clark!" she exclaimed. It was a tone he recognized. He had only ever heard it when they were fighting over something serious. "How can you leave right now?"
"Lana, it's important," he said.
"That freak has Lex trapped somewhere!" she spat angrily. "What could possibly be more important than that?" It wasn't really a question, though. It was an accusation.
Ordinarily, Clark would have backed away and patiently extracted himself from the situation, or perhaps asked her what "freak" she was referring to, but there wasn't time. Raya was in trouble, he was sure of it, and he'd be damned if he was going to let her get hurt.
"Lana, let go of me," he commanded. "You know me. If this wasn't urgent, you know I'd stay and help however I could, but this cannot wait."
Lana dropped his arm as if scalded, looking at him with eyes brimming with betrayal.
"I'll be back as soon as I can," he promised. Then he took off at a quick jog back around the corner.
Once he was sure he was out of sight of Lana and Jimmy, he switched into super-speed and became a streak of scarlet racing across the Great Plains, angling northwest for Washington.
The beast leapt into the air, making a grab at Raya's ankles. He almost caught her, missing only by inches... which was impressive, because she was almost a mile up. She sagged in exhaustion, knowing she wouldn't be able to keep airborne much longer. A few minutes previously, he had bitten her, and apparently his race produced some kind of toxin, because she could feel herself weakening. Her Kryptonian physiology and the effects of the yellow sun were the only things that had saved her from immediate death, she was sure. Even as strong as she was, the creature's venom was having some effect.
Below her, he impacted with the ground, shattering a ring of concrete several yards in diameter. He turned his head up to look at her with a dumb, thuggish grin on his face and malice in his bulbous yellow eyes. Raya shuddered.
This fight was not going well. She had miscalculated from the start, and she was paying for it. Initially, she had thought to sneak up on the creature and render him unconscious before he was aware of her presence, but he was both faster and stronger than she'd given him credit for. He had moved just quick enough to avoid the principle blow she had intended to land on him with her first attack, and had retaliated with a bestial ferocity she had a hard time countering. He had inflicted many wounds on her very quickly, including the vicious bite that had infected her system. That was when she had taken to the air, knowing that there was no way she could fight him hand-to-hand. Kal-El might have managed it, with his better metabolism and masculine build, but she had only a few months of solar energy stored and she was too small in comparison to her opponent. She was going to have to go about this more cleverly, because brute strength would not win her this battle.
Raya fired her heat vision again, but it didn't have the same strength than her previous attack, that had left the skin on his back bubbled and red. The venom in her blood was weakening her powers.
The creature made another leap for her, and to her horror, Raya realized that her failing flight path had taken her into his range. As he neared her at terrifying speeds, she performed an acrobatic flip in midair, skittering just out of his range in the nick of time. As he sailed past her on the downward curve of his jump, she used her momentum to strike out with one boot-clad foot, catching him viciously across the face. He let out a furious roar of pain, and his surprisingly graceful trajectory was disrupted and he went tumbling end over end back to the ground.
Thinking quickly, Raya used the last of her flight reserves to shoot downward at incredible speed, slamming directly into his injured back at the exact moment he collided with the ground.
If he had landed anywhere else, it would have been a killing blow. By some misfortune, however, the Zoner's leap had carried him to where the smaller fishing boats came in at a series of wooden docks. As Raya collided with him a thick wooden pile pierced his shoulder, eliciting a howl of pain. But rather than slamming him with terrific force into the concrete that covered the shoreline, the pair of them plunged straight through the dock they landed on and into the freezing waters of the Sound.
Raya lifted out of the water and managed a limping flight to the shore, where she had to grab onto a nearby crate to keep her feet.
The Zoner was slower to recover but recover he did, hauling himself over the shattered end of the pier by sheer brute strength. Blood poured from the shards of wood protruding from his right shoulder, and his left eye was reduced to a bloody pulp where she had kicked him, but he was still standing strong.
"How the hell are you still standing?" she spat out.
"Strong bones," he replied through mouth dripping scarlet. "Strong blood."
He wasn't invulnerable, not like a Kryptonian, but there were races out there who were nearly so, and Raya feared that her opponent was one of these. He certainly had a pain threshold that was off the charts and that, combined with her own flagging powers, made her very afraid that she was in over her head.
"I'm sending you back to hell where you belong," she said, nonetheless. If living through Krypton's two most deadly wars had taught her anything, it was that sometimes bravado could buy you enough time to do something clever.
His bloodied face contorted. "You can't send me back to the Phantom Zone!" he growled.
"I can and I will," she bluffed.
"You would have if you could," he said.
Okay, she'd give that one to him. He might be thick as a rock despite his incredible physiology, but he at least could use rudimentary reason. On the other hand, the few seconds he'd been distracted had given her a chance to catch her breath. She still felt weakened, but she was no longer on the verge of collapse.
At nearly twice the speed of sound, she hurtled across the yards between them and landed a series of painful blows to his leathery skin. She knocked him back and back again, giving him no chance to recover and no way to counter her speed, until he tumbled right off the end of the pier once again. He floundered in the water, disoriented and hurting from her attack, but she was sure he'd recover. Surprisingly, however, he sank out of sight beneath the water's surface.
She paused a moment to debate whether leaping into the water to confront him was a wise plan (on the one hand, she could hold her breath under water and she was pretty sure he couldn't, but on the other hand, she'd be slower underwater and her agility was her only real edge at this point with her other powers flagging so dramatically).
Before she could make up her mind, Clark sped up to her.
"What are you-?" she gasped, surprised.
"You made the news," he said. "I thought you might be in trouble, so I came as fast as I could."
Raya smiled at him. "Thanks," she said. "Your timing couldn't be better."
Clark touched a swelling, bloody knot on her forehead. "You're really roughed up," he said.
"I've been hurt worse, Kal-El" she said, brushing away his fingers.
"Where did he go?" he asked.
She glanced again at the turbulent water beneath them. "I think he sank."
Clark looked down as well. "Don't suppose we can just cross our fingers and hope he drowns or something?" he muttered.
Raya snorted, an action she immediately regretted because she was pretty sure her nose was broken. "I wouldn't bet on-"
Before she could finish her sentence, the wooden slats beneath them splintered and the creature they were discussing erupted up between them, grabbing Clark by the collar as he shot past and causing Raya to lose her balance and fall into the water all over again.
The Zoner slammed Clark into the shore, landing heavily on top of him, stunning him long enough for the hulking creature to pin him securely.
Clark struggled fruitlessly, his limbs pinned at just such an angle that he couldn't get free to land a blow.
The Zoner licked his lips, a mad gleam entering his sickening eyes. "Your Kryptonian blood must make you strong," he growled. "Perhaps I should taste it... and then little Blue-Eyes, too." One hand with its grey-green claws in place of fingernails reached out toward Clark's throat.
Abruptly, he was yanked from his place atop Clark's chest and slammed backwards against the concrete.
Raya had intervened. Her move saved Clark, but inadvertently put her in harm's way. She was weak and her reflexes were slow, leading her to stumble as she tossed their foe over her head. She dropped down to one knee, but the slip gave the Zoner enough time to recover and grab her by the throat. He lifted her high into the air, then slammed her down over his knee. Her bones made a sickening crunch as they broke, and Raya screamed.
"No!" Clark shouted. He had scrambled to his feet and launched himself toward the embattled pair, but not quickly enough. The creature thrust his hand through Raya's supposedly unbreakable skin as though it were made of butter, reaching through her flesh for the base of her spine, but Clark got there first.
He seized the beast by the wrist, yanking him off of Raya's prone form and gripping so hard he could feel the Zoner's bones being pulverized beneath his fingers. His opponent let out an animal roar of pain, lashing out with his free hand to knock Clark back.
Clark recovered quickly and threw a tremendous punch, and the creature staggered back, clutching his face where Clark had shattered part of his skull and stumbling to his knees.
He took the reprieve to return to his injured friend's side. She lay on her side, body contorted strangely, her face very pale and her blonde hair lying in a tangle all about her head. He took Raya's hand gently, brushing golden strands from her face. "Raya?" he enquired in a low whisper. "Can you-?"
But he shouldn't have turned his back, because the Zoner recovered much faster than Clark had anticipated. He grabbed Clark from behind, yanking him away from Raya and lifting him up in the air, too.
"That really hurt!" the Zoner growled.
Clark flailed, trying to land a blow on one of the already injured areas and break free, but the way he was held precluded that possibility.
And then, suddenly, the creature let out a raspy shriek like the whistle of a tea-kettle and collapsed. Clark rolled and recovered his feet, trying to work out what had happened.
A hole had been ripped clean through it, the edges of which were steaming faintly. If the beast had anatomy even remotely like a human's, his heart had been ripped clean out. Someone- or something- had killed the other combatant, saving Clark in the process. He looked around, and caught sight of only a faint streak of red racing across the horizon. He hesitated for a moment longer, watching the place where the streak had disappeared in hopes that he or she or it might reappear, but the night sky remained dark.
He turned around... and there was Raya. She lay in a pool of blood, her wounds obviously grievous.
Clark rushed to her side. "Can you hear me?" he asked gently, placing an arm around her shoulder.
Her eyes were half-lidded, but she made an effort to look at him. "Sorry..." she started, then coughed, before continuing: "Sorry I c-can't... share in your d-destiny..." Her voice was low and weak, not much more than the barest breath of air passing through her vocal chords. He was pretty sure one or both of her lungs had been punctured.
"Don't talk," he said. "I'm going to get you help."
Raya made a weak motion that might have been intended as a shake of the head. "Won't... help..."
He felt his throat constrict and his eyes started to burn. "No. No!" he protested. "No, you're gonna get better. I'll take you to the Fortress, maybe Jor-El can-"
He fell silent when her hand touched his chest. Although he could tell it caused her a great deal of pain to move, she had reached out and placed her palm flat against his solar plexus. She stared at him with those huge blue-green eyes, her gaze very clear and very direct. "It's alright," she said in an amazingly strong voice. "Don't... don't you dare blame y-yourself." It was an imperial command, and she held his gaze for a long moment, impressing her will on him by the sheer force of her eyes.
Then her body went slack, her hand dropping from its place on his chest, and her eyes closed.
Clark let out a shaky breath, pulling her warm body close to his chest. "No," he whispered. He closed his eyes hard against the tears, refusing to believe it. He buried his face in her fair hair as he struggled for composure.
"No!" he protested again, this time angry. He surged to his feet, cradling Raya's broken body in his arms, and he ran faster than he'd ever run before. Employing a trick he'd learned from Bart Allen, he accelerated to approaching light speed, running on water right across the Pacific until he reached a place where the sun shone on the other side of the world. When he arrived somewhere in the Middle East where a noonday sun was blazing overhead, he laid Raya gently down on a flat boulder, arranging her limbs and using his x-ray vision to carefully reset her shattered spine.
Then he waited. He waited for the sunlight to work its magic.
But minutes passed, and her heart did not beat.
"Raya?" he whispered, brushing back a lock of blonde hair again. "Come on. You survived in the Zone for twenty years. You can fight this."
She did not open her eyes. Her bones did not knit back together. The wounds on her face and body did not heal. She just lay there in her white shirt and blue jeans, blood staining her clothes and matting in her hair.
Clark dropped to his knees, his heart already accepting what his head would not. He clutched at her slim, cooling hand with both of his own and rested his forehead against the edge of the stone she lay on. The tears he had struggled successfully against back in Seattle came pouring hot down his face, and he sat there by her side until the sun passed overhead and twilight fell over the Eastern Hemisphere.
Jimmy looked around the empty space designated Level 33.1 on the LuthorCorp floor plan with skepticism on the brain.
The had successfully rescued the heir to the Empire of Evil, and Jimmy had to admit, he was way more proud of that than he probably should have been. But hey, it had been a masterful piece of technological triumph, if he did say so himself. Though he could have done without the front-row seat to Lex Luthor giving Chloe's best friend a tongue bath in the aftermath.
It turned out that Lex had been kidnapped by a former mental patient with the ability to skip between frequencies. The bespectacled Mr. Bronson had wanted Lana to reveal the existence of some secret laboratory- supposedly housed on this floor- where meteor infected people were held captive and experimented on. And to be honest? Jimmy was pretty sure he hadn't been all that crazy.
"Whatever was on this floor wasn't your typical cubicle farm. There's enough power pumping in here to light up Metropolis," he observed.
"Something tells me it wasn't just for the fluorescent lights," Chloe said by way of agreement.
"Well, it's just a matter of time til I get to the bottom of it!" Jimmy proclaimed sincerely.
Chloe put her arms around his neck, giving him that sexy flirtatious smile that drove him crazy. "You really manned up and got right into this fight," she observed.
"See? You had nothing to worry about. We saved the day, and we didn't need Clark after all."
She giggled. "Are you kidding? Clark can't hold a candle to The Infuriator."
Jimmy was just leaning in to kiss her when Lana exited the express elevator. He groaned internally. Was a chance to kiss his girlfriend uninterrupted too much to ask for?
"You guys find anything interesting?" Lana asked.
"I've got to say, this all just feels a little strange," Chloe said, stepping out of Jimmy's arms. "Have you ever considered the possibility that maybe Bronson was telling the truth?"
Lana scoffed, but Jimmy noticed that her hands were clenched tightly enough to make her knuckles turn white. "And this was some secret laboratory? Chloe, I don't think Lex would have given us clearance if he had something to hide," she said. But she sounded like she lacked conviction.
"Lana, you've got to admit, Lex does have history..." Chloe pointed out.
The tiny brunette squared her shoulders. "I know," she said. "Lex has done some bad things in the past, and I know he was less than honest with me about the halfway house. The thing is... I know him. You can't prove 33.1 existed. But even if it did, morally questionable or not, I would still understand why. These people who have been infected by the meteors... they're dangerous. A lab like the one Bronson imagined would be unethical, but learning about these freaks would help us to protect ourselves."
"Yeah, but locking people up? Don't you think that's a step too far?" Jimmy pointed out.
Lana shrugged. "Yes, it would be. But like I said... you can't prove that this lab was anything more than the figment of Bronson's imagination."
Jimmy admittedly couldn't argue with that, but he was pretty sure Lana was wrong. There had been something unusual on this floor, and he wanted to find out what it had been.
"Now, if you'll excuse me," Lana said, "I have to go. Lex said he had something he wanted to talk to me about."
Just north of Smallville, between the state park and the farmland, there was a patch of unrestricted timber that bordered on a few soybean fields. A little creek ran through it, and it had been a favorite play-place of Clark's when he had been a child. He found it a convenient place to escape to now, to be alone with his thoughts. He had no desire to hole himself up in his loft just now. He just felt... stunned. Like it hadn't really sunk in yet.
They had held a funeral for Raya that afternoon, three days after her death.
It had just been himself, Chloe, and Martha. They had performed traditional Kryptonian funeral rites, which he had researched in the Fortress. It seemed appropriate. Raya had loved Earth, but she hadn't belonged to it the way he did. A human ceremony wouldn't have been fitting.
Martha had helped him clean the blood from her face, and he had used candle ash to inscribe the symbols of her names on her forehead. 'Raya' had been given precedence, but he had included her former name as well. The girl Kivana Lei-Ra deserved to be rememberd just as much as the woman she had grown into, and he thought (though he knew she would never have said it out loud) that she would appreciate being honored as a member of her House.
Chloe had read a piece of poetry. His mother had laid flowers around Raya's body. It had been a fitting tribute, but so much less than she deserved.
Clark had incinerated her with his heat vision. On Krypton, she would have been burned on a pyre, but no ordinary fire would touch the flesh of a Kryptonian even in death. He had collected her ashes in a little earthenware jar his mother had provided. He had carried it to the Andes, to the high peak where she first told him about his parents, and scattered her ashes there in the snow. He thought she would like that. She had loved that part of the world.
And now he was back here, in Kansas, wandering around in the woods because he didn't know what else to do with himself.
He knew how the ensuing weeks and months would go. He would grieve, and he would move forward. He would do his training with Jor-El and he would stop the rest of the Zoners, both for Raya's sake and for his own. But right here? Right now? He was at loose ends. It was hard to wrap his mind around the fact that he was the Last Son of Krypton once more. Left alone all over again.
"Smallville?"
Clark looked up at the last person he had been expecting to see. "Lois?" he asked. "What are you doing out here?"
She shrugged. "Well, a reporter's only as good as her last article, so I'm taking your advice and running with the irregularities I found in the immigration numbers. I thought maybe if there were some people in the country illegally, they might be working as farm hands so I came out to this edge of town to see if I could talk to anyone and I was walking along the edge of the field-" She gestured through the sparse trees to where the fields beyond were visible, "-and then I spotted you walking around in here so I thought I'd come say hi."
Despite himself, Clark smiled. He was pretty sure she hadn't taken a breath that whole time. "Never let it be said that Lois Lane doesn't take her job seriously," he said.
"So what are you doing out in the middle of nowhere?" she asked.
Clark looked down at the ground, sighing. "Just walking," he said. After a pause, he added, "Raya died the other day."
Lois's eyes widened. "Oh my god," she breathed. Before Clark knew what was happening, her arms were around him in a tight embrace. "Clark, I'm so sorry," she said, her breath tickling his ear.
Clark wrapped his arms around her in return, not questioning the gesture. He needed this, he realized. His mother had offered her maternal support and sympathy as she always did, and Chloe had done her best to help him honor Raya while somehow managing to skirt tastefully around the edges of the emotional fallout of losing her, but this was what he had really needed. Lois was solid and real and warm and just as she had once before, when another blonde he'd cared for had died far too young, she kept him grounded and offered comfort without pity.
"I'm so sorry," she repeated. "I know how important she was to you."
"Yeah," he said.
And then they were quiet. For the longest time they were quiet, and it wasn't weird, and it probably should have been weird because they weren't really the hugging kind of friends, but that was didn't really matter. They were the kind of friends who gave what the other one needed, and right now he needed exactly what she instinctively knew how to give him. He could have cried. He didn't, because he was pretty sure he'd cried out all the tears Raya would have wanted while he waited hopelessly for her wounds to heal, but he could have. Lois wouldn't have minded, and the bizarre thing was that he wouldn't have either. That was just how they were.
Lois had never been good at coming up with the perfect thing to say at times like this. Give her half an hour and a piece of paper and she might be able to find the right words, but there was a reason she put her foot in her mouth so often. Having the right words spur-of-the-moment wasn't her style. But she'd always been an actions-speak-louder type anyway. Besides, she knew Clark too well, and she knew that what he needed right now wasn't empty condolences or more sympathy, he needed someone to lean on. That, she could do.
Maybe it should have been weird, just standing there holding onto each other, but it really wasn't. She and Clark had never been big with the awkward.
After so many minutes, Clark let go. She stepped away gracefully and looked away quickly, and then it was a little weird.
But Lois didn't do uncomfortable silences. "Tell you what, let's go have a drink," she said before any tension could build up.
He looked at her quizzically, and she rolled her eyes. "Oh, come on Boy Scout," she said. "I know you're not twenty-one yet, but guess what? I am. So here's what we're gonna do. I'm gonna pick us up a six pack, we're gonna go back to the Talon, and we're gonna have a drink in Raya's honor."
Clark hesitated, but ultimately said, "That sounds good."
She put her arm around his shoulder. "Come on, Smallville."
They traversed the border between woodland and winter field until they reached where she had parked her car. As she slid into the driver's seat, her phone buzzed. It was a text from Oliver: We still on for tonight?
Lois hesitated. She hadn't seen much of Oliver the past few days, between writing up her roadie article and trying to juggle personnel complaints at Mrs. Kent's office in Topeka, and she'd been looking forward to their date. But a glance at Clark, how tired and drawn he looked, told her all she needed to know. He needed her.
She sent a message back: Sorry, something's come up.
A/N- I'm extremely sick. Reviews are medicine. (No, seriously, me and my thoroughly pathetic immune system have been really sick for almost a week.)