Triplicate.
The alarm went off in a flurry of obnoxious beeps. Lois peeled open one eye, glared at it, and then decided it was too far away to turn off and just tuned it out.
Clark solved the problem for her by reaching out one long arm and smacking the snooze button. It was only a temporary reprieve, though. She knew, somewhere deep in the part of her brain that was actually awake, that in just ten minutes it would go off again. And again. And again, until she finally got up.
"Who set it, anyway?" she grumbled under her breath, shoving her cold nose into the crook of Clark's neck and ignoring his instinctive flinch away. It was his fault that the covers had gotten pulled down, anyway.
"You did," Clark said sleepily. "Doctor's appointment, remember?"
Oh, that. "Shit," she said. "Does that mean that I have to get up?"
"Yeah," Clark said. "But it's not that bad."
"It's early morning on our day off, Kent. How is it not that bad?"
"Lex made coffee," Clark said.
"Oh, well, why didn't you say so?" That was lure enough to get her sitting upright. The motion caused the covers to get even further disarranged, and Clark made a protesting noise before pulling them back over him.
She glanced over to his other side, just then making the connection between "Lex" and "coffee" and "awake." Lex wasn't in his usual spot on the other end of the bed, wrapped around Clark like… well, she didn't have a metaphor as it was too early in the morning, but suffice to say that Lex clung like a clinging thing when he was asleep.
He always slept on one side of Clark while she slept on the other. They didn't talk about it, but they both knew that Clark was their point of connection. Which wasn't to say that they weren't attracted, or that they didn't like each other, but they didn't love each other the way they both loved Clark. Sometimes, Lois still thought of herself as part of a couple, and had to remind herself that Lex was part of their lives now. It wasn't a decision that she regretted, ever, but every now and then she had a hard time adjusting to the fact that Clark didn't belong to just her anymore.
"Why is Lex up?" she asked, running one hand through her hair. Shit, it was really tangled. Was gonna take forever to get the knots out enough to shower.
"Unlike us, he actually has to work today," Clark said into the pillow. "From home, though. Go bother him and let me go back to sleep."
Well, fine, if he was gonna be that way. Lois dragged herself out of bed and wrapped herself in the silk robe that Lex had conveniently left lying there (the man was an angel) and made her stumbling way towards the kitchen, which is where the divine coffee scent was wafting from.
She found her favorite mug (It was bright yellow with "Ace Reporter!" written on it in black letters with an overly cheerful smiley face next to it. Clark, the enterprising boy, had painted a pair of fangs on the smile.) and filled it with coffee. Coffee, oh coffee, that fabulous beverage, the drink of the gods. With every slow sip, Lois could feel energy flowing back into her veins. Thank god for caffeine.
She wandered out of the kitchen and into the den, where Lex was cursing at his laptop and a haphazard stack of papers at his elbow. Lois would be worried, but it hadn't taken long for her to realize that this was just Lex's business mode. If he wasn't irritated at something or other, then things were clearly not going well.
"Thanks for the coffee," she said, and he looked up at her with a small smile. Not the blinding smile he always had for Clark, but warm and sincere nonetheless.
"It was nothing. I how much you hate waking up early."
Once, Lois reflected, that comment would have been shaded by smugness and condescension- just another piece of information that could be used to control someone. Now it was said with affection, nothing more.
"Doctor's appointment," she said, and Lex winced.
"Needles," he explained when she gave him an odd look. "If you'd been through as many blood tests as I have, you'd hate them too."
Lex Luthor never offered up personal information for nothing. Except he did, now, to her. Other changes could be chalked up to Clark's all-pervasive influence (she could testify to its power personally), but this was different.
She let none of her thoughts show on her face, just took another slow sip of coffee and headed for the shower, letting her fingers brush his shoulder as she walked past.
The doctor's office was mostly empty, for which Lois thanked God. She didn't think that she could deal with human stupidity at the moment.
She was wondering about the comfort she'd felt waking up in Lex's apartment that morning. She and Clark had been sleeping over there more and more frequently, but until now she had always woken up with that vague, disorienting sense of, Where am I? Oh, Lex's penthouse.
Only this morning she'd woken up and thought, someone turn off that fucking alarm, I'm staying home today. Home. And she'd been in Lex's apartment, hadn't even thought about the fact until she was driving towards the doctor's office.
She'd thought that it was weird that Lex wasn't in his usual place in bed. Since when did they have a usual place in bed? For that matter, since when had her favorite coffee mug migrated from their apartment to the penthouse? And since when had she stopped whining about the longer drive to get to the Planet?
She honestly didn't know when it had happened. It had only been four months since that first night with Lex, so how had this… domesticity happened so fast? It had taken her longer with Clark to move in with Clark, and they'd clicked from the very first kiss.
"Ms. Lane?" someone said, and she looked up to see the nurse standing in the open doorway.
"Yes?"
"The doctor will see you now."
She followed the woman back into the doctor's office and spent the next hour being poked and prodded for her yearly checkup, thinking hard all the while. She and Clark hadn't moved in with Lex, though. Sure, they had clothes there, and slept over a lot, but they still kept their own apartment. And they slept there plenty of times.
Well, okay, not so much. In fact, it hadn't been for almost two weeks, since that last big story on a drug cartel, where they'd been working around the clock and had only crashed for a couple of hours a night. After it hit the printers, she and Clark had gone back to Lex's place, and they'd all gotten very very drunk and had had lots of sex before collapsing in his overlarge bed for almost two days. Well, she'd slept for two days. Clark, the bastard, had been up and about the moment the sun came up the next morning. Stupid solar-powered aliens.
"Ms. Lane?" the nurse said, catching her attention again. "If you'll follow me, you can be out of her in just a few minutes."
"Sure," Lois said, and followed her back to the front desk.
So the two of them were practically moved in anyway. So what? That didn't mean anything.
"Ms. Lane, do you need these papers in duplicate?"
"No," she said absently, digging in her purse for her checkbook, "I need them in triplicate."