The Longest Day

"Wow, Smallville. You look like shit."

Clark sighed and let his initial welcoming posture sag off his shoulders as he moved back from the door for Lois, letting the movement serve as an invitation over the threshold. He was exhausted.

"It's nice to see you, too. You're early, let me just grab my shoes..." and he made his way into his bedroom, letting the door close behind him with a soft click. This would not be perceived as rude to Lois, which he appreciated, and he started looking around for his shoes in the dim light, opting for the older, more worn-in pair as a compromise for still wearing his suit pants and shirt. Clark liked to maintain a very predictable pattern of dress in front of Lois, either cheap suits from Wedsworth's ("You know Clark, when I walk past that store on the way to my pizza guy I can see what you'll be wearing next season.") or hand-made suits from across the galaxy. Visual distinctions were an integral part of the illusion that was his life.

So, if he was going to sit in a stuffy car all night, he might as well have comfortable shoes. He found them under the bed with his x-ray vision, got down on one knee to reach for them, and stood up to regard himself in the mirror. He ran a hand through his hair and let out an audible sigh to his reflection.

He found Lois staring up at the unusually high ceilings in the living room a few minutes later. He was pleasantly surprised to hear the rather awed, "Did you design this yourself, Clark?"

"Um, yes, I did. It was inspired by a magazine, though..." He continued at her intrigued look, her arm still raised in reference to the intricate pattern of stripes, varying in color and width, which ran vertically up the largest wall of his living room. An ornate wall clock hanged in the middle as the focal point of the space. "My mom suggested I make an effort this time to, well, make myself a home instead of an apartment where I sleep. I was uh, a bit lost in spirit when I returned to Metropolis," he said this quietly, offering her something in return for her recent confessions to him, "And that was her advice to me. I can really only afford one major change at a time..." he gestured to his sparse furnishings (most of which clashed terribly with the subtle hues in the wall) and then through to the harsh, yellow kitchen that lacked any embellishment.

"Well, it's beautiful, honestly. This only took you three days?" she stood contrapposto and gestured back at the wall, her black slacks distracting Clark as they twisted tight against her legs when she turned. He gave himself a moment to hunger for her before sitting on his ottoman and slipping on his shoes.

"Well, the masking was the hardest part, really. That took some time, with lasers and rulers and, well, a lot. The paint was easy, it only needed two coats, so one coat was Wednesday morning, then Wednesday night, and then I took down the tape yesterday." He began doing up his shoelaces, "I need to touch up in several places, you see where the paint peeled away with the tape?" he slipped on his other shoe. It was all true, except it went a lot faster that Lois probably imagined it, and as he listened to the world news every night while working, he had to make a lot of detours in the middle of superspeed measuring.

"Ahhhh..." She still sounded impressed; he smiled to himself and stood up. This was understood as a signal to end simple conversation and Lois dove right in while they headed for the door. Clark picked up his briefcase.

"Henderson worked out of three primary buildings at the height of his operation, two of those smaller structures were subsequently rented out to other, legitimate companies, leaving the third and largest building in question."

Clark flicked the lock on the inside of his door and closed it behind them in the hallway. They started towards the elevator past pleasantly wallpapered walls; Clark did live in an exceptionally nice building. He temporarily justified it as karma.

They were waiting for the elevator.

"I know the area and I have an idea where we can stash ourselves without the police thinking we're suspicious."

The doors opened. Clark braced himself for another all-nighter with Lois, two in the space of thirty-something hours, and despite being very tired, grinned at the thought of it.

"Have you ever noticed," whispered Lois in the twilight-like glow of the dark car, "That people look at the radio when they're listening to it?"

Clark stared at her. They were listening to the baseball game. Or rather, Clark was and Lois couldn't help asking questions that he took the time to answer.

This time, however, he needed more information.

"Please elaborate."

They were parked on the top floor of a newly constructed parking deck, across from a dilapidated warehouse that had been spared the wrecking ball in the recent 're-development' of the South Side, "Okay. When we talk to one another, we look each other in the eyes - well, at least in this culture, bear with me - when the sound isn't actually there."

Clark loved the rare occasion when Lois would make quirky observations like this. Usually her keen eyes were reserved for true puzzles, not everyday occurrences.

"...because we acknowledge intelligence in the eyes, and watch them, and not the mouth, which is where the sound is really coming from. And with a radio, we don't look at the speakers or the antenna; we look at the display."

He blinked at her.

"That's fascinating."

He turned to look at the radio.

"And the tying run is on first..." interjected a worried voice over the conversation of the two actual commentators...

"I'm telling you, you can't teach a cat tricks," said a deep voice.

"Now, listen, you can't tell me that an intelligent species- " This voice was higher and spoke faster. Clark told her this was the voice of the announcer, the conveyor of the game.

"What? They aren't dolphins, Steve" said the deep voice-

Lois turned to Clark, he offered, "Color analyst. He provides anecdotal insight into the game and the players."

"And it's even up, two and two, Spencer at the plate!" interjected the first voice in a pause of conversation, obviously trying to compensate for the conspicuous lack of information coming from the commentators.

"Did you ever notice yourself going crazy when you were very tired?" Clark asked her back, "To the point where you start thinking that you're hallucinating?"

She reached out a finger and pressed it softly to the tip of his nose, "Welcome back, Smallville."

A few minutes later the announcers were talking about bakeries. Lois was staring out the windshield, thinking about cannoli...

She spoke up, "Do they just go on like this?"

"Sometimes, yes."

"Fantastic," she leaned over and picked up her purse, once again defeated by the almighty 'baseball.' She couldn't listen anymore; she had better things to occupy her mind. Lois dug around the bottom of her purse and pushed aside a mirror, hair clip, batteries, mace, cell phone (on silent), lighter, pencil, cork, single knee-high stocking, Jason's spare inhaler, and a tube of aspirin.

"Ha!" She unraveled the ear buds from around her old tape recorder and smiled at Clark.

"We can both listen to what we want, would you mind lowering that?" Lois looked out the windshield while he did so, surveying their quarry. Then she leaned back and fumbled in the darkness with the familiar machine. Clark seemed to relax a little and sat back, shifting to get comfortable. She suddenly grinned at him without his seeing; Clark was hilarious to her, often for no reason, even for just the way he struggled to make himself smaller.

"Comfy there, drunky?" She had been calling him that at least once a day for three days, which was insignificant in itself expect that it indicated an unspoken promise to call him that forever. Lois pressed the lever to raise the steering wheel so she could move her legs.

"Yes, Lois. Thank you."

Lois noted this sarcastic response in the files of her mind.

Lois sat back, put her ear buds in and went to push the little triangular 'play' button. She hesitated and turned to look at Clark again, awkward with long limbs all tangled in a small space. She could see his ghostly reflection in the passenger window and thought he looked lost. She stared at him for a moment, overcome with nostalgia. The rear windows were open and letting a cool August night sneak in, and the car smelled like upholstery and fresh concrete.

She popped out an ear bud.

"Hey, Clark?"

"Mmmm?"

"Can I ask you a question?"

"Always, Lois."

"Do you like Richard?"

His face changed in the glass; he turned to regard her, the baseball game still audible.

She went on to clarify, "Is he agreeable, a nice guy, honest, funny?" She was always exactingly precise with her questioning, even of her confidants.

Clark hesitated, but answered, "I have never had any reason to dislike him, he's always been agreeable and honest as far as I know. I don't know if he's funny." He made a hopeless gesture, which Lois read as the limit of his ability to articulate such thoughts under pressure.

She nodded. And then she turned back to look out the window, thinking.

"I know he's a good man, a perfect husband-to-be. But still I keep baiting him, mistreating him, because it's me, Clark. I'm the reason for all these men," she gestured throughout time, which was really towards the backseat, "And all this wreckage. I'm difficult, Clark, to say the least, and still these poor patient souls stand by me in everything, and I continuously sabotage these good relationships. Whether friend, lover, both, neither..."

She realized that is was obvious that she was talking about Superman at the end, someone with whom she had not had a relationship. That was what was really bothering her.

Lois had steamrolled Clark with sudden bouts of hyper introspection so many times that neither of them ever bothered to be surprised.

"One assumes that for something to be wrong in a relationship that it must be a matter of fault instead of a matter of fate, not in a spiritual or divine way, but just in the way that life throws so many pitches at you..." A nod to their recent conversations, she rolled her eyes but smiled, "...that it is impossible to live and love, unaffected by it all. Circumstance, not self-destructive flaws, may have had a role in these failed, um, relationships. Something neither of you can blame yourself for," Clark was struggling with this suddenly, his voice had broken. Lois leaned away from him, afraid she was making him overly nervous, "The threads of our Fate are spun on high?" He gave her a goofy smile, shattering the intensity.

"Why must you make me think the word 'cornball' all the time? Do you know what a ridiculous word that is, to always have to think it when I look at you?" She swatted at him. He turned away with a smile and tried to get comfortable again. The conversation was over as quickly as it began.

She shot a quick, "Drunky!" at him before turning back to her recorder.

His point was simple, but true.

Minutes passed, time had no meaning. He really did feel insane with unnatural exhaustion, and it confused him.

Clark was staring up at the sky through the window, yearning to fly, to escape this cramped feeling, but so utterly contented by sharing this simple night with Lois that he was happy to stay. He had angled himself so that he could see Lois' reflection by the pale blue light of her satellite radio whenever he brought his focus back to the glass in front of his nose. Her eyes were open, but glazed and unseeing. She was lost in thought, and he alternated between watching her and looking up at the sky here and there as he waded through the mire of his tired brain. The baseball game, a sound born in his childhood, was the same as silence in the solitude of his mind.

He was drifting in and out of sensations and impressions rather than thoughts. It was a kaleidoscope of guilt, fear, joy, love, jealousy, and a lurking confidence, of all things. From their conversation yesterday. A new feeling amidst the guilt, a hope for a future with his son... and Lois.

He was distracted by a change in Lois' breathing; it was now heavy and uneven. He turned his head a little and peeked at her; her face was away and towards the window, a lock of hair hiding her expression. He was worried that she was crying and had just opened his mouth to ask her what was wrong when she hiccupped into the quiet car.

'She's laughing!'

Lois always, always hiccupped when she was trying not to laugh. Clark had witnessed it at funerals, weddings, after stories that were really not supposed to be funny, and at Perry's wife whenever she spoke more than two sentences. She usually turned red as well, and would just end up laughing and hiccupping at the same time despite efforts to stifle herself.

He did it in an instant, there was no conscious thought, it was no more than blinking an eye or swallowing: Clark expanded his hearing towards her and froze stiff in his seat as he heard his own voice laughing back at him.

"But I can't, Lois!" his voice was full of mirth.

"I bet you can! Keep trying!"

"No!" he laughed on every word, "This is humiliating!"

"No, it's not, you could use this one day, now spin."

Lois teaching him to spin.

'Lois teaching me to spin!'

Clark was floored. He looked down at her hand and saw her old recorder and realized that it wasn't the first time he had seen it with her before tonight; she had been listening to their tapes! This seemed so entirely surreal to him that it took a few moments for it to sink it, and by the time it did, a thousand questions popped up anew. How many of these tapes must she have? She wrote dozens of articles on him, they had spent endless hours talking and reflecting together. Clark tried wildly to remember the ratio of times he saw her recorder to not, but he couldn't: it was as much part of the scenery as she was, familiar to him as Superman the hero and as Clark the reporter. He could not even imagine how many tapes there might be.

The voices were still in his mind, but the words slipped through the bottom of his faculties like water. 'Why, Lois, why? Are you trying to find something? Are you listening to everything, are you listening for something in particular? An answer to a particular question, a flaw in my facade, a moment you want to hold me to?'

He watched her in the driver's side window, saw the lines of her face glowing softly in the orange lights above the deck, watched her shoulders shake with silent laughter. She hiccupped. He melted.

'What coincidence is this?' he wondered. The very moments he had meant to recall for Jason, right here, as well as the birth of his love for Lois. He could meet her for a second time, get back all the small moments he had forgotten, and just in time to give him the strength to want her again.

Clark turned slowly back to the window, now very conscious of his every move, trying to be causal when Lois had no reason to suspect him anyway. He assumed his comfortable posture and began to listen with his entire mind, letting the hissing tape fill his consciousness. He remembered the circumstance: They were on her old balcony, it was a summer night like this one, and she was in slippers. This was when Lois began to systematically expose his every capability and help him reach a level of control over them that now saved lives in split second situations.

"Now hold still... alright, now can you float on a point of your body?"

He had been hovering before her, balanced on the toe of his boot on the ledge of her balcony.

"Isn't that what I'm doing?"

"No, you're balancing on something, I'm saying can you... here, float up," she gestured. He did. "Now all of you is, floating, hovering, whatever?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, where does the weightlessness come from? Your muscles, your skin, just your feet?"

He had no idea. "I see... you're wondering if I can hold myself up in mid-air with just a finger?"

"Yes."

"I have no idea."

A long pause.

"I think it's mental, not physical," he said finally, only coming to that realization as he said it.

"Ahh. Well, can you think yourself into holding yourself up with a finger?"

Minutes turned into potential hours. Clark had long ago lost the concept and Lois never set her radio clock ("YOU figure out how to do it, go ahead! Try!"). They sat in silence, perched in the open on the only tall structure for blocks, on a stakeout of all things, but so wholly engrossed that neither of them would have noticed even the most obvious of crimes. Clark had x-rayed the building yesterday: it was empty.

His eyes were heavy, his brain felt fuzzy, there was an uncomfortable feeling in the back of his throat that he always associated with being tired. Yet he remained awestruck by this experience, sitting side-by-side with Lois, listening to their old conversations. He was happy as both Clark and Superman; that one man would be welcome to spend this kind of time with her again, and that another should be so clearly sought after.

He was overcome with nostalgia, but also darkly amused at how close they always came, and how far the distance between The Truth and Lies of Omission. He thought it distinctly unfair that he should need to maintain fooling the most daring reporter he had ever met; it was quite difficult and yet surprisingly effective, considering who and what she was. Sometimes he was so close to telling her that he had to bite his tongue.

He set his mind back on the recorder, and was suddenly desperate to enjoy himself for once. This was, after all, quite amusing. He tried to access a distant feeling of affection, something lingering within the melancholy, a deep appreciation for these words spoken so long ago, a true happiness that he should know such a woman, a feeling of companionship across the center console.

Now he was asking questions.

"What do you hear right now?"

"I'm sorry?"

"Ambiance, street noise, random sounds; what can you hear?"

"Well," she paused, "I hear cars on the street, um, a radio next door, us, a plane heading towards GTR International," she probably pointed to the sky, "Um, air conditioners."

"Can you hear voices on the street?"

"No..."

"Two planes, not one?"

"Nope." Beat.

"Can you hear your own heartbeat?" he said this wonderingly.

"Are you testing your hearing or mine?"

"I'm trying to determine what a human hears, their range of hearing, the radius of sound that surrounds them. I would like to be able to only hear that, to better understand interacting with them and the world from their-" he paused, "-your perspective."

Clark couldn't believe he said this. He wondered at himself as he tried to remember asking that.

"Here, I've got an idea."

A waiting silence.

"Ah, now, can you hear the TV?"

"Yes."

Clark remembered her pointing a remote through the glass doors.

"I'll tell you when I can't hear it..." a pause, "... right... now. That is the limit of my capability. Does that make a good start? Here. I'll go back..."

He remembered smiling as he remarked on her idea.

No wonder people thought Lois was too crude; she took the most obvious and straightforward route in a world that circled through niceties and around logic. She was brilliant in her simplicity because she cut to the solution seconds after hearing the problem. Clark was smiling at himself in the reflection of the glass.

He tried to stop smiling as the voices went on.

"Maybe you can focus on a room, use the physical walls as real barriers of your abilities? And then envision smaller, mental bubbles, things you can use as walls..."

Time wore on, Clark watched Lois in the window and eventually just closed his eyes, too tired to both see and listen. Lois' heartbeat, the sound of air in her lungs whispered behind his increased senses as he focused his hearing continuously in her direction in the semi-darkness.

Clark had taught himself everything she suggested, had tried all of her experiments, puzzled through himself as an extraordinary being, and had also puzzled through the contradiction that was Lois Lane. He had learned as much about her as she had about him, but only through observation, not with the empirical, scientific method that Lois employed. And the world never knew, never got to see her as a trainer of heroes, a force of reckoning for his abilities, an integral part of every great thing he had ever done in that persona since meeting her.

Clark was awed by her, and wished he could properly convey it to the world.

He listened:

"What was your reaction to that type of vigilante justice?"

"I wish I could say that it was a terrible misdeed and that citizens of a nation must trust in their legal system and not take justice into their own hands, but I also know the power of righteous anger and grief. For a father to kill in such madness may be a crime of law, but not always one of spirit. If we must incarcerate him, let us not damn him as well."

The incorrect clock went from 7:46 to 8:25.

"I love fireworks, it's crazy. Fireworks define my childhood; everything for me is fireworks... Even the fall of Communism was fireworks!" came Lois' enthusiastic voice from years past.

Lois of now whispered into the silent car, breaking the sacred stillness that had grown between their warm bodies in the night. Clark was jerked out of his hallucinations by the sound of her voice; she must have thought Clark was sleeping, or maybe she didn't realize she said it at all. She murmured the words as if she was inspired by them, as if realization came down upon her with the single phrase:

"Red Square!"

"I haven't seen many, really," he responded thoughtfully, "At a few fairs," he added.

There was some thoughtful silence.

"What time is it?"

A few seconds later Clark literally jumped in his seat when Lois clicked off her tape recorder. He gasped and groped for the door for support in his shock. He really hated being startled. Today had been a very long day.

"Careful there, twitchy."

Clark groaned as he moved around. He might be superhuman, but he did get sore if he sat in a car long enough.

"Hello, Lois," he looked around the horizon for the sun.

"It's time to be happy tomorrow is Saturday," she said, answering his spoken question from so long ago and the unspoken query on his face right now. She started the car without preamble and sat back to let it warm up, "Wakey wakey, seat belt, get that blood pumping." She was putting her recorder back, wrapping the earbud wire.

Clark groaned again for good measure; his head hurt. He couldn't believe Lois' energy.

"Sleep in tomorrow, Clark. There's no six am harvest for you, let the chickens lie in." She was checking her cell phone and sighed, "Look at me, a terrible wife," she said this with dark humor, a self-chastisement that was still amusing to her. She threw the phone back in her purse with another sigh.

This statement made Clark's head spin with speculation. He put on his seat belt.

Lois shifted the car into reverse, catching his eye as she twisted her body to look behind the car. He was still quite overcome by the sudden shift from the twilight of memory and into the dawn of reality. He must have looked that way, too, since she paused.

"You all right, Clark? You look a little peachy," she asked softly. She always used words like that when she was actually concerned for him. He gave her his goofy smile, but by accident.

"Just a tired cornball."

She laughed outright at him, covering her mouth with the back of her hand and staring at him with mirth in her eyes, which were just as puffy as his were and frazzled looking in the dim light. She was a mess, too.

"I'm great, Lois."

He gave a moment to pause, she somehow knew to wait.

"Thanks for asking."