Clark fought to maintain his composure as his feet slapped the sidewalk, drawing him closer to the inconspicuous private labs of Dr. Virgil Swann. He'd arrived in Metropolis hours ago, but was really in no hurry to check in. They were operating on his timetable, and he felt a little guilty for making them wait, but he couldn't persuade his nerves to settle and he didn't want to face this group of strangers with uncertainty. He felt like he had big expectations to fill - he always felt that way - and didn't want to appear as the frightened country boy that he really was.
He had almost quelled his anxiety when a familiar voice pierced his adolescent paranoia.
"Clark!"
He raised his eyes to meet Lois, who was crossing over to him from the other side of the busy street, daring the traffic not to stop for her and her duct-taped suitcase. "Lois… hi?" Clark responded, inexplicably quizzical.
Lois looked amused. "You can't be that surprised to see me, Clark. I do live here."
Clark shrugged and donned his best false-confidence demeanor. "Well yeah, but it's a big city." He suddenly seemed to find the toes of his workboots absolutely enthralling.
Lois nodded and smiled. "Yes, indeed it is, but this is my street. My block, to be more precise. And, since we've gone that far, let's finish the race. You're standing in front of my building. Hardly a coincidence, I think, since I did give you my address."
Clark looked absolutely befuddled. "Your address?"
"I wrote it down and handed it to you. In person. Myself. On your own paper. You put it in your pocket. You were there, remember? Third grade penmanship? You made a pass at my suitcase?"
Clark suddenly reanimated. "Yeah, of course I remember, I just - I didn't look at it…" he pulled the slip of paper from his pocket. "Until now. I thought it was just your phone number."
Lois gave Clark a sideways smile and gave her suitcase a nudge toward the door. "So, you didn't see my address, and you happened to turn up here at my front door just as I'm getting home?"
"Some coincidence, huh?" Clark shrugged it off and Lois raised her eyebrows. "What?"
"Nothing," Lois answered. "Just - like you said - it's a big city." She pulled the door open and turned back to Clark, suddenly coy. "Do you want to come in?"
Clark swallowed his breath along with his first impulse. "Um, no, I should be going, I'm already late. Well, more late - I was late already, and now I'm… I'm more late. Yeah." Way to go, you're off to a great stop. Although she did invite you in… no, stop there, keep walking….
"Well, can you give me a hand with my suitcase?"
Clark's grin spread over his face with the electricity that comes with a biting comeback. "You've managed without hay-balin' muscle this long, right? I wouldn't dream of it." He turned his back to her and continued down the street, simultaneously triumphant and embarrassed. Now she thinks I'm an ass.
A somewhat dissimilar thought about Clark's ass passed through Lois' mind as she watched him walk away, but was quickly overwhelmed - or coupled with - an intense curiosity about where he was going and what he was really doing there. Instinct told her that something about "visiting old friends" just didn't fly - not for a fourth-generation small-town Kansas farmer, alone in Metropolis. She quickly stowed her suitcase in a closet near the door and set out after Clark.
You wouldn't guess from looking at the exterior of Kim's Handmade Furniture and Antiquities that a network of highly advanced laboratories was housed in and around its foundation. That of course was the point, although until now there was no real purpose for the secrecy other than Dr. Swann's slightly eccentric tendencies. An unassuming door in the small office in the back opened into what first appeared to be only a storage room for broken pieces and works-in-progress, but also served as a passage into the bowels of the building - where its real function lived. The entrance was reached by stepping through an old wardrobe with the backing removed, and into an elevator. Clark wasn't sure all of this was necessary, and couldn't judge whether he found it amusing or disquieting.
"Ah, Clark, we were beginning to think you'd changed your mind," Dr. Swann greeted with only slight agitation when the elevator door opened, revealing the central hub of the facility's nervous system. A bank of surveillance monitors lined one wall, and the wall opposite it was crowded with Cray supercomputers. A long conference table dominated the center of the room, the head of which was without a chair and clearly intended only for Dr. Swann.
"I'm sorry," Clark replied absently, taking in the scene. He was acutely uncomfortable. Although the lab was expectedly cold and clinical, he hadn't anticipated how much dread it would instill, bringing to mind his experiences at Summerholt. "I sort of got a late start."
"Did you run here?"
Did he run here? Lois chuckled silently to herself. Not unless he left two days ago and drank a case of Red Bull. Or maybe two. She had debated crawling into the conveniently located duct to the left of the armoire in the storage room, but having come this far she decided to let her curiosity guide her. She couldn't see anything, but she could make out voices.
"Yeah - " she heard Clark reply.
"Well then you should have been here hours ago, right? Your parents said you left at four, it's now almost ten." This was a new voice, insistent and a bit whiny, both of which seemed to annoy Clark. It certainly annoyed Lois.
"You called my parents?"
"Well you didn't show, we were getting anxious - " The new voice was defensive.
"Look, I don't have to do this. If I'm supposed to trust you - "
"Don't mind Dr. Ripley, Kal-El. He gets a little over-anxious." It was the first voice again - knowledgeable, almost serene.
There was a brief silence, heavy with discomfort. Then Clark spoke.
"Please, don't call me that. I asked you not to call me that."
Lois desperately wished she could see through the dusty metal to get a look at the expression that accompanied the quiet insistence of those words. Why is he calling him that anyway?
The serene voice continued. "Fair enough," he said, but with enough amusement to insinuate he knew something that Clark didn't - or just refused. "Well, despite Dr. Ripley's glowing first impression, you'll want to know who the rest of these people are. Dr. Bridgette Crosby will be supervising the entire process in my stead, as I can only do so much." He gestured with his chair to a smallish, dark-haired woman with determined features and a smart, black suit. She stood out against the rest of the team, which all donned white lab coats. "I'm sure Martha told you she came to help when you returned." Clark nodded politely, but with apparent reservation.
Lois couldn't even see him, but she could detect his apprehension. What is going on here? What process? Clark walks into a wardrobe and what - now he's in Narnia? What is a farm kid doing in a place like this, with secret entrances and a bunch of doctors?
"This, again, is Dr. Ethan Ripley. He's obsessive and overzealous, but he's the best at what he does. He'll be testing your fluids and tissues against known viral and bacterial threats, how they react to various chemical stimuli, as well as their regenerative capability." Dr. Ripley looked a little out of place, more like an athlete than a biogeneticist. "I can see the red flags going up, but don't worry - no tests will be performed on you directly until we're satisfied via abducted trials that they will be of no risk to you. Of course, we'd have to conduct direct testing at a later date, because that kind of assurance will take some time."
Regenerative capability? Lois tried to convince herself that she was hearing things. This just keeps getting weirder and more Roswell.
"Dr. Andrea Prescott will oversee general diagnostics, primarily testing the limitations of your various abilities. We're especially interested in seeing if anything other than lead interferes with your x-ray vision, and can therefore possibly protect you from Kryptonite. Eventually we hope to really study the limits of your strength and heat vision, but at present we are at a loss for the appropriate trials. We have a few frequency tests in mind for your hearing, but I must confess we're most excited about this latest development."
"What development?" Clark queried.
"We'll come back to that."
"Dr. Swann - "
"Let's finish with the introductions, first." Dr. Swann wheeled his chair across the room to the last as-yet-anonymous member of his research team. "This is Marin Blake. Technically not yet a doctor, because we recruited her before she finished, but she's been invaluable in her assistance to Drs. Ripley and Prescott. She did much of the designing and construction of the trials, and she'll be compiling and analyzing the data."
Marin smiled shyly. "I'm finishing school via correspondence."
Clark gave her a no and a half-smile before turning back to Dr. Swann. "Now, what do you mean, latest development?"
Dr. Swann smiled and waited, presumably for effect. "Why, your flying, of course."
Flying? Okay, x-ray vision, heat vision, super strength - and evidently speed, since they assume he ran to Metropolis - that all sent Lois reeling enough, but flying? Horrified at the gasp she felt rising in her throat, Lois tried to clap a hand over her mouth to suppress it, but it was too late.
Clark didn't need any special hearing to know something was in the duct overhead, especially now that that something had started to scramble for an escape, and quickly concentrated his vision to scan through the metal. "There's somebody in there!" He cried, and turned to force open the elevator doors. He pushed through the ceiling hatch and leapt up to the secret wardrobe entrance, slipping out the door just in time to see Lois tumble out of the low-set vent, coughing and brushing dust out of her hair.
"Lois!" Clark exclaimed, half perplexed and half enraged.
Lois stood, trying to control the wobble of her knees and appear as if it were perfectly natural for her to be crawling out of ventilation shafts near the entrances of secret labs. "Now this," she paused to catch her breath, "is a coincidence."
Lois tried to twist out of Clark's grip on her arm as they waited for the elevator to appear beyond the wardrobe. "Can you loosen up a little, please? Your hand is like a vise. Not that I really know, 'cause I've ever really used a vise, just the simile."
The blazing glare accompanied by blistering silence that Clark almost tangibly threw at her shut Lois up, at least momentarily. Levity clearly wasn't going to get her out of this scrape. "Look, Clark, I'm sorry I followed you."
"You should be!" He shouted, more fiery than she'd expected. She had always suspected it took something pretty significant to get a rise out of mild-mannered Clark Kent, and - well, she supposed sneaking into a hidden facility's ductwork to overhear that he might be some kind of mutant was fairly significant. "You shouldn't have come here, you - why did you follow me?"
Lois winced as his grip tightened. "Ouch, Clark! Seriously, I'm going to have a little trouble answering if I'm distracted by a broken arm."
Clark relented slightly in his grasp, but not in his temper. "Cut the banter, Lois. I want to know what you're doing here, what you heard, and I want to know now. Don't leave anything out. Where the hell is the elevator?"
The usual barrage of ready-to-fly quips that Lois kept on the tip of her tongue was noticeably absent in the heat of Clark's anger, and given what she had just learned about him, Lois feared that she'd made a grave mistake in treating the matter so lightly at first. What was he, after all? What had she discovered? What might he do to protect his secret?
Suddenly fearful, Lois tried to backpedal. "I didn't really hear anything, I swear, - well, I heard something about flying, I think - but he was kidding right? In a 'Red Bull gives you wings' sort of way?" She tried to smile charmingly, despite her trembling jaw. "Does it really matter what I heard?"
The elevator rose behind them then, and Clark guided her inside. "Since it looks like I can't trust you, yes, it matters," he hissed. "Chloe used to pry into my life too, you know. As close as you two are supposed to be, I thought she might have mentioned that I really, really don't like it." The elevator was taking excessive liberties about moving, as if time were a luxury it had in Luthorian proportions.
That doesn't make it sound like I'm getting out of here in one piece. "Clark, I can't tell you how sorry I am, really - how was I supposed to know I was going to overhear something like that? I thought I'd catch you dropping in on a girl, or something - I don't know!"
Clark tossed her arm away from him, as if touching her burned him now. "Why should it matter to you if I was? What business is it of yours where I go, or what I do there?"
Lois felt hot tears rising, but fought them back indignantly. "None whatsoever, Clark. I just thought you were somebody that - evidently - you're not, and yes, I'm sorry - again, I'm sorry, sorry, sorry, but I was curious, okay? About that guy I thought you were." Lois was getting really worked up now, half confessing and half defending herself, and the tears were no longer hiding behind indignation. She was scared and frantic, and really thought she'd wandered on stage in the middle of her own curtain call. "Damn, you got me! I admit it, I'm a hot-blooded American girl, and I was following a boy who caught my eye. Really diabolical of me, I know." She wiped away a trail of mascara and hoped that Clark couldn't tell her nose was running. She hated crying in front of people - or whatever Clark was.
Clark observed Lois in silence as she slumped against the opposite wall, looking uncharacteristically hopeless. "You often snag a date by hiding in a ventilation shaft?"
The venom had left his voice, so Lois raised her eyes again, hoping that might mean she'd make it through this misadventure. "No… it's murder on the hair. Plus the light is really unflattering."
Clark smiled in spite of himself. "Well, your sense of humor's still intact, so no permanent damage."
"Not yet," Lois snarked before she could stop herself.
Clark straightened up and leveled his gaze at her. "Lois, don't act like you didn't get yourself into this. That said, nobody's going to hurt you. I don't really know what we're going to do, but - look, I know that none of this really makes sense, and it's going to get weirder before it does makes sense, but I promise you'll be okay."
Lois wiped her eyes and searched her pockets for a tissue. "So, ah - this whole 'Real World' moment - can I plead temporary insanity and a little amnesia to go with it? Help yourself to some of that amnesia, actually… yeah." Oh, if I could ever take back words - and actions - now would be a great time.
Clark tilted his head to one side and gave Lois a lingering, unblinking look - a look that left her feeling deliciously unsettled. "I'm not sure," he shrugged. "There were one or two things you said that, uh - I think might stick."
Lois caught her breath, hoping in vain that she could pause time along with it. She straightened up and braced herself against the wall, letting her imagination give in to the thousand mini fantasies that sprung up to fit the moment, and Clark took a step toward her.
Then he stopped. "Why isn't the elevator going anywhere?"
Lois slumped again. Well, that was almost beautiful. "You, um - you forgot to push the button." Damn, stupid meddling button. You and Shakespearan friars - you all must die! She mournfully watched Clark push the offending button. Well, I'm not dying at least. I'm momentarily chaste, but alive.
Clark, Lois, and the elevator descended together into uncomfortable silence, until Clark broke it.
"You - um, probably should let me do the talking at first."
Lois nodded. "Yeah, probably."
The doors slid open, revealing Dr. Swann and his fantastic four, curious ducks all in a row.
"Uh, hi," Lois said meekly, despite Clark's warning. "I - uh, I'm Lois Lane." She held out her hand, in a gesture that she hoped carried an "I come in peace" effect, without saying something so cliché.
Marin Blake broke rank and stepped forward, a bright smile on her face and her own arm outstretched. "Nice to meet you, Miss Lane," she greeted, taking Lois' hand firmly in hers.
Lois smiled in return, but her smile quickly twisted into a grimace of pain when Marin pushed up Lois' sleeve and plunged a needle into her forearm.