Lois slept fitfully and rose early, finding herself very uneasy without Jason nearby. They'd been separated for so long, the longest yet, then he'd been with her for only a few moments, it seemed, before he'd run off to Clark's. She wasn't even sure how he'd found Clark's apartment let alone gotten there on his own. Just thinking about it made the hairs on the back of her neck stand up with worries about what could have happened.

Doesn't he know that we spent the past few weeks in hiding so that those creeps didn't kidnap him?! she thought, desperately wanting a cigarette, but Clark had thrown out the pack she'd smuggled past Richard. Instead, she took a deep breath and had a glass of water, willing herself to calm down and think about anything but cigarettes. But no, she reminded herself, we made it into a vacation for him. He had, has, no idea of the danger.

Her mind landed upon Bill Ganelon's voice, muffled by the smoky room and the thick door, "… experiments…" She couldn't remember if he'd actually said the word in the particular tone she was remembering, but even a created memory was enough to make her want to call Clark and insist he bring Jason to her immediately.

"You're up early," Richard remarked, pouring himself a cup of coffee from the carafe Lois hadn't touched—for once she hadn't needed it, her own thoughts and terror enough to wake her up.

"I'm worried about Jason," she admitted. It was a conversation they would've had ten months ago, no problem. Now it seemed odd to be sitting in the kitchen in the early hours of the day, just talking, waiting for things to get started.

"You're a very good mother, Lois," Richard said after a moment, a fond look creeping across his face. "I don't know how you ever thought you couldn't do this."

Lois thought back to the late days of her pregnancy, when it had finally hit her that there was a child growing inside her expanding middle and it would soon no longer be inside of her and instead would be in her arms and in need of care and love. She'd feared she didn't have the patience for it, didn't have the heart for it—she'd been telling people for years that she didn't, had been told by plenty that she didn't. Lucy had been her biggest supporter, Richard right behind her, always encouraging. It had been one point during his absence that Lois had desperately wanted Clark back—she had tried not to think about her missing partner. Sometimes it seemed like he hadn't left that big of a hole to fill, Jimmy got her coffee in the mornings then Richard did and she certainly didn't need a partner at work. But there were times, like when she really needed to lash out at somebody but didn't want to drive anybody away either, or when she needed to be knocked down a peg without realizing she was being knocked down… or when she just needed to hear Clark say, "Sweetheart, it'll be fine, just relax, you're brilliant." Then she had really missed him.

She had never, of course, mentioned him, let alone missing him, to anybody, though. That was too personal. He was just a friend from work, but he was her only friend from work. She had colleagues, contacts, acquaintances, sure, just not friends, really. She was close to Perry and Jimmy, she was romantically involved with Richard, she had a passing rivalry with Gil and Polly and the other reporters who were at the top of their sections. Clark was her partner, though, her friend. The guy half the bullpen still thought was Jason's father (the other half, of course, thought Superman was Jason's father).

Lois heaved a heavy sigh and poured herself a cup of coffee. It wasn't that she hadn't thought she would be a good mother. She liked kids well enough, wanted kids even—eventually. She had just been worried about loving somebody so much that she would stop driving on in other things the way she wanted to. It seemed selfish and adolescent, looking back, but it had been what she'd been worried about.

Breakfast passed quickly—Lois forcing down toast while Richard skipped it altogether to get dressed. "I've got to go to the Planet and get some boxes to pack everything up, and to tell Uncle Perry I'll take the job."

"Need me to do anything around here?"

"Could you see if we've got any boxes lying around that I could use?"

"Sure."

Then Richard had gone, and Lois had gone out into the backyard to watch the sun finish rising. Not for the first time she wondered what a sunrise felt like for Jason. Kal-El (she found herself unable to call him Superman when she thought about their personal moments after the official part of their old interviews ended, or where it concerned Jason) had once tried to explain to her what the sun felt like to him. He'd run out of adjectives, lapsed into Kryptonian, tried again in English. 'Wonderful' had been as close as he had come, but he hadn't been satisfied with it.

The sunrise was beautiful, pale pink and yellow playing across the horizon over the harbor, tinting the few puffy white clouds left over from the previous afternoon's storm. Lois decided that if it felt the way it looked 'wonderful' would indeed be an inadequate adjective.

She was about to turn inside and get dressed before calling Clark when Superman drifted down from the clouds, looking refreshed, bathed in the morning light even as it turned to the blue of what would be a fine summer afternoon.

"Good morning," Lois said suspiciously, his appearance bringing to mind his parting words again.

"Good morning, Miss Lane." He looked the way he always did. He sounded the way he always did. That tug at her heart wasn't there anymore, though; it was nice. Just a memory.

As she dwelled on the lack of a 'tug' she realized that there was indeed a tug, she was just refusing to acknowledge it.

She continued to do so, looking up at him as nonchalantly as she could manage; "To what do I owe your early-morning visit?"

"I noticed you were out here and thought I'd say hello, is all," he said, landing lightly in front of her. She glared, then almost laughed when she realized that the reason she was glaring was because she knew he was lying, and she knew he was lying because of the way his chin was tilted, of all things.

"You're lying," she informed him blandly, eyes still narrowed at him though no longer glaring as she found it almost humorous.

"I beg your pardon?"

"You once told me you never lie and now you're lying to me."

"Only a liar claims to never lie," Superman quipped back, looking light and almost energetic for a moment before his shoulders seemed to broaden and he looked at her straight on. "I found another body this morning. In the harbor, just downstream from where the little girl's body was found."

"Is it related, do you think?" Lois asked, motioning for him to follow her into the house as she went after her tape recorder. "Was it a child?" her throat was tight.

"No, it wasn't a child," Superman said, sounding almost relieved. Lois had her tape recorder between them, worrying her thumb nail on the opposite hand as she held it aloft.

"Thank God for that."

"Indeed," Superman shifted his weight for a moment then settled again. "The police are still working to identify the man, but he's definitely no child; middle-aged, balding, a bit rotund…"

"What is it?"

"There was kryptonite on him when I found him."

"What?"

"Fake kryptonite, like the stuff that was in the bunker I found you in after you were kidnapped."

"So it's definitely connected to the Napper Neighborhood case, the Boss?"

"I couldn't say either way at the moment," Superman said in such a way that Lois felt he was giving an affirmative.

"Any other information you can give me?"

"Not at the moment, other than that the body was recent, no more than a day or so."

"That's good, though," Lois said, more to herself than Superman. "Nobody's had the time to clean up yet. Maybe we'll get some new leads."

"Maybe," Superman agreed, though his eyes weren't in it.

Lois clicked off the tape recorder and tossed it on the couch next to where they'd come to stand, still worrying her thumb nail She had a lot of questions she wanted to ask him off the record but no idea how to go about asking them.

"Is Jason here?" Superman asked, cutting into Lois's thoughts. She blinked at him—he'd sounded so hopeful.

"… No," Kal-El raised a curious eyebrow. "He's at Clark's."

"Why?"

"He ran away!"

"Why would he do that?" Kal-El asked, almost probed. Lois paused a moment to look at him before answering. He looked curious, if anything; concerned, maybe.

"I don't know! It's not like him at all!" Lois burst out. She'd been waiting to burst out at somebody since she'd realized what had happened. Richard had seemed to be in a similar state but had also refrained from reflecting his worry onto her, neither really sure why they did so.

"Was he upset about something?"

"I don't think so—he's usually so mild! Even when he was a baby he hardly cried, let alone threw a temper tantrum! The so-called 'terrible twos' were a daydream… I didn't think he'd ever run away like this!"

"Still waters run deep, Lois," Kal-El said gently after a moment. She looked up at him, listening closely. "I don't get mad very often, but when I do…" he sighed and Lois could tell there was a story behind the sigh she'd like to hear one day. "If he's with Clark then I'm sure he's fine," he gave a smile that hardly seemed to reach his cheeks, let alone his eyes.

Lois's mind grabbed onto what he'd said, knowing it was important somehow but not knowing why. Before she could press him for answers, though, his head twitched to one side ever so slightly and he excused himself to speak to the police about the body that he had found that morning.

- - -

Clark absolutely hated when a morning began with a body in the harbor. Bodies exposed to water were simply disgusting. Besides the fact that they were dead, which was off-putting in itself, they were also bloated from absorbing water if they'd been in the harbor for any length of time, and scraped up and raw from the current dragging them across harder surfaces.

The body of Ernest Milton was one of the least pleasant things Clark could imagine waking up to. To say Ernest had been a bit rotund was polite, to say he had been a rather fat man was an understatement and not nearly as polite, to say he had been quite huge was closer to the truth.

Clark had awakened to the first rays of morning sunshine, remembering a nice night with Jason waiting for the boy to get tired, working on his laptop while Jason colored. Eventually, they had slept. The love seat in the tiny study was a comfortable fit for Jason's small form and easily made into a bed by the addition of a few sheets, a pillow, and a blanket. Jason had made the study into his bedroom, unloading his suitcase and spreading out, then falling asleep comfortably on the squishy couch. The study, like Clark's bedroom, didn't have any windows, and the French doors had thick curtains, so they could both manage to sleep through the first rays breaking the horizon. Or they would've if Clark had remembered to close his door.

As it was, Clark woke at first light and made breakfast, the scent and the sun rousing Jason as well. Eggs and bacon to order later, they both dressed for their days and Clark wondered how everything would go down. Then he'd heard it—it was a sound he'd long dreaded, ever since his first week in Metropolis, and particularly since he'd pulled little Leslie's body out of the harbor.

A phone call to Smallville and a quick cross-country flight saw Jason back at the Kent farm helping to feed the chickens and do other morning chores, leaving Clark free to investigate the swooshing, sloshing noise.

Ernest had washed up beneath the commercial docks downstream of the warehouses of interest and their small docks—those were older warehouses, the majority of them empty, their docks and the warehouses themselves built to accommodate smaller shipments and abandoned when the larger warehouses and docks to match had been constructed next door to supply a growing city.

Unlike Leslie, Ernest hadn't been weighted down, simply restrained. He'd probably been a big guy when he'd been alive—he had at least four chins and arms nearly as thick as Clark's thighs—but he'd soaked up water after he'd been discarded, making him even bigger. He'd been beaten and then shot executioner-style in the back of the head, his hands tied together in front of his gut with plastic ties, his ankles as well. What was left of his scalp was mostly hairless, suggesting he was balding or mostly bald. The harbor had not been kind to him—Clark surmised he must've dragged along the bottom for some reason (Perhaps he was weighted down and somehow came loose?) as he'd been scratched up something awful, chunks of skin missing, especially lower on his body.

It hadn't been a pleasant sight, wedged up near the shore under the dock, bloated and blue.

After he'd called the police, he'd stepped back to let them extricate the body themselves and hung around long enough for his wallet to be taken out of his pocket along with three flat, sharpened kryptonite shivs. He knew immediately that they were fake, but that made them all the more interesting.

Unable to do anything as Superman, Clark had gone to alert Lois to the trouble, ended up talking about Jason. He was sure from the look on his face before he'd departed that he'd said something he shouldn't have, but, for the life of him, he couldn't think what it was.

"Clark, you're just in time," Martha said when he landed, not noticing how distracted her son was as she was distracted herself. "Ben's going to be here any minute."

"What are you two up to today?" Clark asked casually, watching Jason chase one of the straggling chickens around the yard trying to get it to return to the coup—they, the chickens, weren't used to be stuck right back in the coup after they were fed. Shelby was at Clark's knee, watching Jason as well. Clark would've sworn the dog was smiling.

"We've got a plane to Washington D.C. this afternoon—we're leaving for the airport in about ten minutes, that's why I hollered for you to come back so quick," she explained, giving him an apologetic smile. He smiled back, prepared to tease.

"So what's in D.C.?"

"Oh, you know," she rolled her eyes at him; "The White House, a couple of monuments, various other tourist attractions."

"Oh…"

"It was time we had a vacation is all."

"Well," Clark said. He knew Ben Hubbard's daughter lived in D.C., last he'd heard she had become a vegetarian and was running her own corner book store. I wonder what she has against plants…? He shook his head slightly to clear it, grinning at his mother in the most infuriating way possible. "Have fun, Ma. It's a great city."

"We'll try our best."

"Thanks again for watching him on such short notice."

"Not a problem. He was a great help."

Jason chose that moment to walk over with a proud look on his face.

"Got 'em in there!"

"Good job, Jase," Clark chuckled. Martha shot him a look and glanced at her watch.

"Well done, Jason—you beat Clark's old time by ten seconds," Jason burst out laughing at the look on Clark's face and Martha sauntered back into the house with a satisfied smirk on her lips.

- - -

Richard flipped through Jason's pictures more slowly, taking a 'break' from the morning. He'd gone to the bullpen and informed Perry that he would be leaving for Berlin the following afternoon, secured his travel plans with Accounting, and gone to the basement and collected as many cardboard boxes (folded flat and ready to be smashed) he could carry. Arriving home he'd found Lois dressed and in the office at her computer, ear phones plugged into her tape recorder and a quickly-filling word document open. He suspected that if she wasn't obligated to help him she would be out on the prowl, looking for quotes or the like.

Past the picture of the goat, a crooked view of the yellow farmhouse, and the old dog as she rounded up the chickens, was a picture Richard hadn't been aware of: it was taken that first morning after their arrival, when Jason had woken to watch the sunrise with Kent. Kent was looking out at the sunrise over the cornfield, looking relaxed and wearing his pajamas with a boot-clad foot up on the first rung of the fence he was leaning on. His glasses caught the light horribly, but it was almost an iconic picture. A Clark Kent Richard had never seen before.

Just like the Lois I see when she's around Kent isn't a Lois Lane I'm familiar with, he brushed away the thought and flipped to the next picture.

The next picture was simply the sunrise Kent had been viewing over the corn. It was very pretty. Lois sitting on the porch steps, just dressed, with her cup of coffee looking groggy. Lois meeting the horses, holding out a carrot to one and looking uncomfortable while Kent's eyes glinted as he watched her from behind.

Richard scowled at the next picture, one of himself as he slept on the living room couch—he'd done that a lot, his shoulder bothering him when he was conscious to feel it. Seeing the pictures now, though, he realized he had missed a lot at the farm. A lot of opportunities to bond with Jason… to win Lois back.

He sighed and flipped through the next couple of pictures without real interest. Jason had gone with Kent to a hardware store one afternoon and Jason had taken pictures out the window—most were blurry, but they all depicted a quaint little town exactly the way Richard pictured a town called 'Smallville' to be, right down to the old guys in the rocking chairs on a porch outside of the grocery store. Inside the hardware store, Jason took a picture of Kent and an auburn-haired woman, both looking happy if slightly uncomfortable to see each other. Richard smirked, seeing a bit of the Kent he was used to in that photo.

Jason seemed to have really enjoyed the Fourth of July celebrations, as he'd used up almost an entire roll on it. The day began (the photos all had date tags in the bottom corner) with a photo of Kent playing with his dog while his mother looked on from the porch; Mrs. Kent always seemed to be content—Richard wondered if she was just happy to have her son home or if she was always in a good mood. There were a few more pictures of Kent with his dog following him around, Kent doing chores in the barn.

The guy looks so different with just a change of clothes, Richard observed, looking over a few pictures. More comfortable in his own skin when he's not in a suit.

Jason, Richard figured, must've liked the Kent brothers a good deal, as he'd taken a ridiculous number of pictures of them. Benji and Kent after Benji's arrival, Rick pulling up in a plume of dust while Kent and Benji stood still with tolerant frowns on their faces, Lois waving her hand around to clear the dust and Kent smirking in the corner of the shot. Rob and David and their wives, the clumps of Kents as they greeted each other.

It occurred to Richard that the angle of the whole thing was very odd, as all the adults looked so much taller from Jason's angle. Richard, as he was usually sitting off to the side in the pictures he managed to make it into, was the only one who didn't look like a giant with a rather prominent chin.

There was a series of photos from the Fourth that Lois had taken—Kent, Rick, and Jason had grouped together against Benji, David, and Rob for a game of soccer. Richard had enjoyed watching it—he made a note to himself to ask Jason if he could have one of the many snapshots to take with him; he wanted the one that was a close-up of Jason as he attempted to dribble the ball across the dusty driveway, smiling broadly at the camera held by his mother as he did so.

The next picture made Richard laugh out loud once, but the quiet of the kitchen swallowed the laugh and made it creepy, spoiling his moment. The focus of the photo—the wonky angle told that Jason had taken it—was the huge pile of fireworks in the dusk waiting for the celebrations; however, Kent was approaching in the background holding a lighter and grinning as broadly as he did in the office when he was assigned a sentimental human interest piece. Anybody from the bullpen would say that photo spelled disaster at best—loss of limb, massive fire, anything of that sort. Richard only remembered a rather pleasant fireworks display.

So maybe Kent knows how to work fireworks. How the hell does that work? The man can't even navigate around a trashcan without making a mess.

Richard chuckled to himself, remembering Clark winking at Lois as he said, "It's okay, I was a boy scout," before he lit a few sparklers for Jason. Lois had laughed and Martha Kent had pulled her into conversation with Rick, and that had been that.

The pictures of the fireworks themselves were very blurry, more like colored dots on all black, or just plain all black. Jason didn't exactly have a night setting on his camera.

There were a few general pictures from around the farm—the chicken coup, the room Jason was sleeping in, Kent and Lois sitting on horses while Kent tried to teach Lois the basics of riding and Richard and Martha doubled over with laughter in the background—before the pictures from Jason's birthday began. Jason had run out of film in the middle of the party, but that hadn't dampened his spirits in the least.

Richard grinned to himself. Jason had had a good time in all that, at least. There was no evidence in the photos that they weren't simply visiting the farm on a vacation, that they were hiding from men trying to kill them.

There was only a single picture of all of them that worried Richard, even though he knew it shouldn't—that it shouldn't even matter to him, as he was going to Germany.

It was from Jason's birthday party, and, as it happened, he had been the one to take it. Jason had just opened the last of his gifts and was hugging Martha Kent. The elderly woman was grinning and squeezing him back, doing her part to play a grandmother of sorts. It wasn't that pair that concerned him, though; it was Lois and Kent. Kent had an odd look on his face. He was happy, the edges of his mouth were quirked up in a faint smile, but he also looked serious and almost sad. As though he were looking at something that was happy and sad at the same time and he wasn't able to decide what to feel. The other disconcerting bit was that Lois was looking at him, was seeing the same expression Richard was, and she was grinning one of her real grins.

Kent's look almost said 'I wish that were really her grandson she was hugging,' and Lois' look said 'he could come to be her grandson.'

Richard shuffled the pictures back into order and set them aside, picking up a flattened cardboard box and folding it back into shape. It promptly flattened again when he paused to look around for the packing tape.

It's going to be a long day, Richard decided, locating the tape and struggling with the box for another moment. His mind left the photos and moved on to packing.

- - -

Lois emailed the half-ass story to Perry, hoping he'd assign it to Clark when he got in. Lois had the day off by default to help Richard pack for his transfer; her partner, though, had to work.

She glanced at the clock, again, and saw, again, that it was still too early to expect Clark to drop by with Jason. He had another hour before the morning meeting and, with Clark's scatterbrained lifestyle, she suspected he'd be dropping Jason off in about forty-five minutes and then rushing out to get to the Planet on time.

She smirked at his imagined antics and shut down her laptop, descending the stairs and standing at the base of them for a moment to watch her former fiancé. He had a few boxes standing in a corner and was going over the book shelves, pulling off his books (Lois had labeled all of her books before she'd moved in, claiming it had been a habit since she was young as she didn't dare admit she just wanted to have all of her stuff labeled in the event that things fell through between them) and stacking them neatly in one of the boxes. He used his right hand more than his left, his shoulder still being stiff.

"Should I start on the bedroom?" she asked, trying to sound chipper and not quite succeeding. Richard gave her an odd look over his shoulder as he put another few books into the box.

"Sure, good idea."

She would've frowned at him, but he was already facing the book shelf again, flipping open her copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel and checking his movement to put it in his box when he saw it had her name in the front cover.

She picked up a roll of packing tape and a few flat boxes and turned to go up the stairs again. She had her foot on the second step when Richard's voice called her back.

"What happened to us?" she turned and looked at him curiously. "We used to be happy together, didn't we?" the look on his face and the tone of his voice screamed that he needed an answer, an honest one.

Lois stepped off the stairs and set down the boxes and tape, sitting on the bottom step and contemplating a moment. He was still holding her copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, not having shelved it even though he'd turned around to do so.

"Yes. We did," Lois's response was thoughtful. "But Superman and Clark came back."

"And I was no match for the old competition?"

"It wasn't that you didn't match up, it was that it made me see what had changed, made we want to go back… It made me think about old times," she was lost in memories for a moment before she bit her lip as she looked across the room at him. She wanted to phrase it properly so that he'd understand without hurting his feelings. "I was going in twelve different directions at once and nothing matched up. I wanted the old days but I was stuck in the new days. I was restless but not unhappy…

"Clark was always my rock. It just took his not being there and me settling down enough to realize that I wanted to settle down… and Superman was a shock to our relationship…"

"I understand," Richard nodded after a long pause. She looked skeptical. "Believe it or not, I think I do."

They were silent a moment.

"Seeing you these past few months… Lois, I didn't even know you had ever been different than you were," she smiled a half smirk of a smile. She had been much different in the time that she'd known him than in her life before. "And then you were acting different and I didn't get why you were changing, drifting away even more than before," he wasn't smiling anymore and neither was Lois. "And then I got it. While we were at the farm—when I saw you and Clark together. The camaraderie. The simple fact that he knew exactly how you took your coffee even after five years."

"That's a little creepy, if you think about it."

"That's devotion."

Lois raised an eyebrow at him and he threw his hands up defensively, almost dropping the book. He gave her a half smile and shelved the book quickly before turning back and crossing his arms over his chest, leaning back against the bookcase and speaking slowly.

"I don't claim to know what happened at Niagara Falls, but I do know that whatever happened changed you guys. Maybe he realized you were in love with each other and you didn't."

"Maybe," Lois repeated after taking a moment to catch up with his nonsequitor, but her head was no longer in the conversation. She was trying to remember what had happened when they were in Niagara Falls, because she knew that Richard was right, that Niagara Falls had changed everything. That it had been important and that she couldn't remember.

"Do you think I just fell from the sky one day and decided to save the world?"