Worry and Wonder
Lois held a hand to her back and groaned as she stood up from kneeling on the kitchen floor, her hair falling out of her ponytail and sticking to her forehead. She was wearing dish gloves and cleaning the hard to reach spots under the cabinets in the noontime sun, wondering at a world before modern cleaning solution. Richard was vacuuming the living room while keeping an eye on Jason, who was currently working on a puzzle in front of the TV. The vacuum cleaner had created a level of white noise in the house for so long that the relative quiet that followed his turning it off startled her. Lois was still rattled from a long night, and was too tired to do this much longer. She peeled the gloves off her hands and made an announcement to the house.
"I am taking a shower."
Richard, who had clicked to the mid-morning Saturday news show upon walking over to sit with Jason, acknowledged her. They cleaned the house together every Saturday, sorted and dropped off the laundry at Wash n Fold down the street, attended to any outstanding bills or family issues, and then got take out. Sunday they woke up late, usually watched morning cartoons with Jason in bed when he sought them out at around 10 o'clock, and then Richard would attempt to cook breakfast. For the rest of the day Lois would hang around in her pajamas, either working on her latest article, making phonecalls, or very rarely reading. Jason went to art classes in the afternoon, and then they got take out. It had been the same, give or take the art classes, for two years. Lois couldn't stand it, but accepted it.
"I'm done too, I'm just going to listen to the news and then take mine after yours." He mussed up Jason's hair and smiled down at him, picking up a puzzle piece and peering down at Monet's Water Lilies, Jason's favorite puzzle.
Lois watched and did not bother to sigh at Richard, reminded in these small moments that he was wholly unsuspecting that the boy next to him was not his son. It tore at her, and the nagging guilt that she had recently become accustomed to wrapped its away around her stomach and held tight. She turned towards the stairs, thinking longingly of the tub upstairs when a voice behind her made her tense.
"Superman announced today that he will be rejoining the NASA funded Ulysses Project, an international space-walk collaboration founded with him in mind eight years ago by the United States and the fourteen governments now involved in the International Space Station, or ISS..."
Lois looked around, interested. It seemed important to her that he would listen to her advice so soon after hearing it.
"'... in which the range of tasks performed and the drastic decrease in risk for human lives promises to make massive bounds forward in humanity's understanding of the cosmos and our work in space,' said a NASA representative at a press conference late this morning..."
Lois remembered the joy this project had brought him when he first started working with NASA. 'He is the truest astronomer of us all,' she smiled to herself.
"...the announcement came suddenly this afternoon, and NASA indicates that they had not been in communication with Superman about the project since his sudden reappearance on Earth three and a half months ago..."
"You look happy about it," observed Richard, who had turned around to see her reaction.
"It was a fantastic project, don't you remember it?"
"Yeah, but I didn't really follow it. You know what space does to me," he chuckled. Richard did, indeed, have a particularly hard time imagining the vast concepts needed to even begin to appreciate such an unknown. Lois also wondered if it was some secret fear; an inability to realize one's insignificance has lead many people down the dark alleys of ignorance, afraid to turn on the lights. It irritated her, and was actually one of the things she brought up whenever they had their 'how can you not care?' fight. But it was such a small irritation that it really did not matter.
She responded with a simple, "Mmmm," and turned back towards the stairs. She was three steps up when Jason's voice piped up.
"Does Superman go to space a lot?"
She answered automatically, as usual, still ascending, "Not too often, baby, and not for too long, or he'll suffocate." Lois had always planned to use age five as a milestone for when she would stop hiding the harsher realities of life from him. Simple facts, like that without air, people die. Fun stuff.
"So he doesn't live there?"
Jason loved astronomy, what little he knew of it in his short life, and asked to go back to the planetarium more often than any other local child adventure.
"Nope, but he was born on another planet, far away."
"How far?"
"So far that it takes two and a half years to get there." Lois had paused on the stairs, looking back down at Jason who had turned himself around on the couch, leaning on the back cushions.
"Wow," he remarked sagely, wondering on the word as he dragged it out, "Does he miss home?"
"He doesn't really remember it. You once lived with me somewhere else, but you don't remember it, do you?"
"Nope."
"So you don't miss it." Logic. Good foundation for a personality.
Jason seemed satisfied, the news anchor was reviewing the project's prior accomplishments, including the first ever space walk that featured astronauts debating the feasibility of having Superman bring them pizza. Lois chuckled as she walked further up towards her promised shower, picturing him walking into a pizzeria and then pointing to the heavens. She just barely heard Jason asking Richard another question about Superman before closing the door behind her.
The reality of Jason's parentage was only just sinking in, despite her knowing about it for over three months. Up until the second Lois handed Superman his invitation it had seemed surreal, like a reality she would never really have to deal with. Now, all she could think about was when Richard was going to find out. How was it going to happen? When Jason broke his first piece of furniture, when he set something on fire, when he jumped through the floor instead of just off the second-to-last step?
And how much of Superman's powers were in him? Would he exhibit all of them, but at half strength? Perhaps only some of his powers, like the vision and the flying without the hearing and the speed? Or perhaps they would never manifest themselves outside moments of extreme duress, as on the yacht?
Lois was dreading the day, either way, when she would either have to tell Richard or be found out. The decision now rested with her, whether to seize a time and get it over with or wait for it to explode around her. Obviously, the former was the better choice; Lois herself would much rather be told than have to find out such a monumental secret. Knowing this did not make it any easier, and she took a moment to look about her bathroom, the only part of the home she had made with Richard that she could currently see.
Despite all the internal compromising, all the regret at having to move in with a man, all the initial resentment she had felt towards the un-named and unborn lifeform inside her, Lois had grown accustomed to this life over the last four years. Only recently, and usually only at night and in the silence of inactivity, did the pulsing urge for freedom return to her blood. It was as if her entire outlook changed with the setting of the sun, with the memories that cool summer air and endless evenings brought her, and this had all been reinforced so strongly over the last two nights that it was now beyond ignoring. Now the Cleaning Saturdays and Lazy Sundays just irritated her to think about, the dish gloves laying discarded in the sink downstairs mocked her through the floorboards.
As she got undressed, pulling off the dirty clothes she usually cleaned in, she pondered the reality of her life. Lois had always wanted excitement, always craved a less than ordinary life, and thought sadly that she had most certainly achieved it, but not at all in the way she had planned. Underlying the peaceful domesticity all around her was the knowledge that she would have to tell her fiancé that his son was a half-alien bastard child of a superhero that she regularly denied ever having slept with. Somewhere in the ether, a manifestation of Lois was smiling, amused beyond words at this reality, casting the die again to see what would come up...
Warming the water and looking at herself naked in the mirror, she felt a moment of private, secret longing: a more peaceful life that wouldn't involve so many chains around her; a peaceful life on her terms. The Lois of five years ago would have never dreamt of imagining such a thing, but motherhood had changed her, in so many small ways that she was sure only she could see. This train of thought led to another: a private shame at Jason's conception, a new agony along with the reality of his genetic roots, and her consciousness contracted again to that burning secret inside him.
'What have I done?' warm water soaked her hair, flowing down her back, 'How many lives have I ruined?' Lois turned around, closing her eyes under the deluge, 'What do I do?'
Thoughts of Superman came unbidden to her stream of consciousness. She saw their conversation about their son, heard his voice, saw him watch her shyly from under a single curl. For all her guilt, she could not deny herself the thrill of him in her life, the danger it was to speak to him in secret...
Lois was careful in the way she spread the soap across her body as her movements strayed into fantasy, unable to deny herself these thoughts in the privacy of her mind, where they could harm no one but her. If she could not remember conceiving life, then at least she could imagine it.
Lois walked into the kitchen to Richard opening mail on the island and tossing opened envelopes into the recycling, "There's a letter from your alumni foundation, the cell phone bill, flyers, and Clark sent a note that he can't come to Jason's party."
Lois was pouring herself the leftovers of that morning's coffee, "He mailed it? He works three feet from me, I put it on his desk yesterday," she shook her head as she put the mug in the microwave, "Clark."
"Quite the character, eh?" A casual way to bring up the very man puzzling him lately.
"He's not a character, he's just, Clark. You know, the way he walks, his geeky everything..." she trailed off as if the rest were self-explanatory, grinning at the microwave door.
"How long have you known him?" Richard knew perfectly well how long.
Lois answered anyway, "Eight years, since I was twenty-five and during my second year Upstairs."
'Upstairs' was the term used by the entire building for the 25th floor, where Perry kept his office and the most important members of the newspaper. The editor-in-chief had historically always kept his or her office there, (something about a superstitious founder and the original office being a space steeped in mojo) and it was the place where each editor in turn kept his or her best and brightest. Richard had learned this tradition of the floor in his first year there, mainly through word of mouth and inference. It seemed you needed to learn about it this way, no one ever told you.
In recent times - as printing technology got more advanced and compact - whole floors of the historic Planet Building were leased out to other publishing firms, including a popular news magazine and a small non-fiction publisher. To his knowledge, the staffs of these other operations also referred to the floor as 'Upstairs,' despite many of them actually being above the location in question. They were certainly all equally intimidated by his uncle.
"You know, I always wondered at his selection." Usually a collection of the greatest newspaper minds, Richard found his uncle's 'Upstairs' a band of dysfunctional misfits, all on different frequencies and rarely working with any measure of synergy.
"Mmm?" Lois took her coffee out of the machine and placed it on the counter.
"Doesn't it seem like a bit of a motley crew?" he went on, "Remember the eight months I actually spent in International? Tyler down there is a newspaper genius, and while he does run the department he doesn't have a desk Upstairs..."
"…And it's a bit odd to include people like Clark and Jimmy and that crazy guy over by Marissa, right?" It seemed that she had heard this query before. She smiled as she opened the refrigerator and got out her non-dairy creamer, "Perry is a newspaper genius, and while Don Tyler is a journalist among men, he's not enough of a risk for him," she was stirring in sugar, "You're right, though. We're the freaks, the crazies that no one knows how to react to, what to do with, whether we'll excel or fail; Perry is as much a ring master as an editor."
"You don't belong there." He was trying to convey what a good reporter he truly knew she was. Her name would be remembered in the annals of history when hundreds of people died nameless every day...
"Don't I? Richard, I made it to the 25th floor at twenty-three, I had just finished college and took a year off to live as an intern in the basement. Wouldn't it take someone a little crazy to make enough of an impression to end up making front page headlines one year later?" She harkened back to her wild days with her soon-to-be five year old in the other room and her hair in a towel, the picture of domesticity.
"What did you do?" He had always just assumed she'd been there forever, she was Lois Lane, she didn't have humble beginnings...
She laughed, "I got an interview with the Pope."
Richard didn't believe her. His response was instant.
"What?" he asked flatly.
"On his last tour of America," she said it matter-of-factly and without a hint of humor. She smiled at his look.
"And how did you do that?" The Pope? Lois had spoken to the Pope? How did he not know that?
"That's a secret," she sipped her coffee and glanced around to check on Jason and his puzzle. He had a very long attention span.
There was a thoughtful silence, but for two very different reasons.
"What did Clark do?" Mousey, goofy, clumsy, love-struck Clark...
"Perry hired him onto the 25th the day he met him," she took another sip and leaned against the island, looking down at Richard who was still sitting with the letter opener in his hand. She didn't seem impressed, didn't remark on how odd it must have been, at the difference between her experience and his.
"So, all he needed was the interview?" That doesn't seem very likely, but then again, his uncle had instinct and Richard had read as many of Clark's articles as he could find, and heard all the stories, and saw all the awards...
"I guess so. Or maybe there was something nutty on his resume, like a PhD in Journalism at twenty-six..."
"Really?" asked Richard, impressed.
Lois laughed at him, "I have no idea Richard, it's more likely he listed the types of tractors he's qualified to operate."
So Lois didn't know either. Well, she probably didn't care, he was afterall, just Clark.
"You think he's quite the oddity." He wanted to ease into the way she treated him, at once like no one else and yet crueler than usual, despite the way Clark obviously felt about her.
"He's just Clark." There it was again, the self-defining definition that annoyed him so much lately. She did not respond to what he assumed was an expression of expectation, inviting her to please elaborate. He mentally sighed and decided to move on; keeping Lois moving was the best way to explore her, or else she'd pick up on the pattern and slam shut like a blast door.
"I don't picture you belonging there, anyway. You should be the editor of Metro or-"
"I run Metro and everyone knows it."
"But I mean officially, and downstairs, with your own office."
He went too far... Lois was glaring at him, throwing daggers with her eyes and looking ready to argue.
"Despite its recent reputation being Upstairs is still as much of an honor as it ever was. And if I were to suggest one of us doesn't belong there, I might be advising you on where you are better off. That's my floor; me, Perry, Jimmy and the rest of the crazies. You'll notice that the stories spread across the globe on the AP line are ours, that we've managed to report more history than the entire building? We had some of the only non-state sanctioned photographs from Soviet Russia, the only interviews with the Capricorn before he blew up the British Embassy, we've gotten the first presidential interviews with every administration since Teddy Roosevelt-"
"And you have Superman."
"Yes, and Superman, who doesn't use any other media firm as his personal outlet. And there's no need to look into that, Richard, as if I'm insisting on my place just because I keep rights to his exclusives. He is my story, he got me my Pulitzer and don't think I'm not still proud of it even if I refused to accept it in public."
They weren't fighting, but Lois was riding high on righteous indignation. All the aprons, dollies, and fruit baskets in the world wouldn't make her look domestic now. In fact, Richard entertained a mental image of Lois pounding the streets of injustice, hair in a towel and holding Jason's hand.
He didn't say anything for awhile while she drank her coffee.
"Why did my uncle hire Clark?"
"Why aren't you curious about Jimmy, what is this sudden fascination with Clark?" Lois was squinting at him, tearing the innocence from his bones.
Damn.
"It's probably because I've really only just met him. He appeared out of nowhere, latched onto you, was crowned the belle of the ball around the Bullpen out of the blue, he got a desk in the middle of the floor..."
Lois laughed at him, not taking a word of it seriously.
"...you let him be your partner-"
Lois interrupted him, "Let him? Clark is my partner, he just went on a really long vacation," she said this like it was the plainest fact on the table, as if pointing out a tidbit in one of the flyers on the counter, there for all to see. Richard actually looked down at the counter, expecting to see her words written there like a script.
A cog clicked into place somewhere in Richard's mind, turning a gear in a ponderous machine that was as of yet without a definable purpose. Lois had been waiting for Clark; it changed everything, every notion that he had ever had about Lois and her working method. He had thought up until this instant that Lois truly wanted to work alone at all times and had just let Clark be her partner, subsequently kicking him around like a second-class citizen in order to work out her impatience and frustration with the situation.
In fact, it was the opposite, skewed in the eye of his mind, that Lois was acknowledging that the space has been reserved, that she considered him a companion already, incomplete in her work without him rather than resplendent in her natural solitude. The distinction was everything. He was overwhelmed by it.
Overwhelmed.
"But he had left the Planet, how could you know he'd come back, and that Uncle Perry would just put him right back in the Bullpen?" His voice sounded full of disbelief to his own ears.
This question didn't really register with Lois. She stared at him, "Where else would he go?"
He still couldn't place the man that was Clark with the conceptualization of him that was the focus of this conversation. Richard tried another route.
"Did you miss him?" Richard knew he was accessing a very private part of her, told himself to remember that for all her distance, Lois did show him things about herself. He was frankly beyond curious now, all other thoughts of Clark mere drops compared to this flood.
"He's my best friend," she said with a tone that once again implied that this was the entire answer in and of itself and that there was no need to elaborate; as if never mentioning her best friend for the last five years was tantamount to erecting a shrine of memories next to her monitor. She confused the hell out of him.
"Clark Kent?" How could she say that with the way she treated him? He was still trying to lead back to that, but was getting sidetracked and more incredulous every second.
"What, is he too lowly for me to be friends with? Is that what you're really skirting around, the fact that you can't believe who I associate with when I would have the choice of any of the great staffs in the paper? That I should spend my lunch hours with the goofiest man at the planet and his small fry side-kick instead of heads of departments and other headline writers?" she guffawed, "Look around the Bullpen, Richard, they're the realest people there, the greatest human beings I know, and while I may be at the top of every food chain in that building, they are still the people who know me best. I'm just as messed up," Jason was in the other room, "as they are, and they're the only ones who don't notice."
She said this passionately and without anger; she was only trying to relay the importance of this to him. He remained silent, always using a lack of reaction to let her know she was making good points, and that he had no counterargument. He had actually been referring to her attitude towards him, not her selection of friends. She had made a different point and he sat in contemplation of it before she went on.
"Did you have close friends as a child?"
Richard looked up at her, her eyes and skin bright in the afternoon light streaming through the skylights above them. He knew she had a very big issue with childhood friends, but not because she had ever said anything. Instead, Richard had gotten an idea of it by overhearing a conversation between Lois and his uncle a number of years ago.
"Yes, I did. And you know Jake obviously, we've known each other twenty-six years..." he gestured towards the other room, as if Jake were there and not currently white-water rafting in Colorado.
"I had no one. No one. We moved every eight months, usually only staying long enough for me to trade phone numbers with a new friend here and there. Sometimes I would be able to call them for a few months after we moved again, but that was it. Look at Clark and Jimmy, Richard, and even Kyle and Guy and Marissa... if you can't recognize it like I can, if you can't see the same loneliness in their eyes, then you should know that we are what it looks like to grow into adults without ever having had a true friend, to always wonder who really liked you and who didn't. For me, it was born of my circumstances, so despite being quite a 'popular' personality, I am still a loner born and bred. Clark is a bumbling farm boy in the big city, Jimmy is a mama's boy trying to be a man in his own shoes.
We're a collective of outsiders, half-brilliant and half-crazed, and working against deadlines in a prestigious paper. But we have literally saved each other's lives, tackled one another for flying bullets, held each other as we watched other people die, and would do anything for each other."
She gave a moment for these words to sink in. Richard's face was blank as he waited.
"We keep each other's backs, and that's why Perry put us all together. He's a genius because he realizes that the heart of a newspaper, just like that of any other major think-tank, should be made up of the most desperate and dysfunctional people he could find. He made us wrap our personalities around each other like a collective and we collaborate with a loyalty that keeps us at our jobs. It's practical, too: not only does he have one of the best floors in the world, but he knows none of us would leave such a sense of belonging that we never had before.
"If you're confused by Clark's popularity in the Bullpen, it's just because of who he has to deal with, the very celebrity other people feel should grant me the right to hand-pick my own staff," she rolled her eyes at herself, Richard watched her silently.
He must have looked very confused. She had thought her last point made it clear, thinking Clark's popularity must be the source of his confoundment rather than, well, the last five, silent years.
"Then again it might be his ravishing good looks and homeboy charm..." she laughed and turned away, shaking her head in that familiar way and heading over to Jason, finished with answering questions for the day.
"Oh, yeah, right..." he trailed off, distracted.
If she had meant to explain herself to him, Richard could not help but think she had done a better job of explaining Clark, for his devotion to her was born of being in the shadow of a great and beautiful woman, someone he would have never expected to give him the time of day. The lost-puppy look filtered through his mind, dancing around images of intense passion he had caught here and there from inside his office. Knowing all this, Richard couldn't find it in himself to be angry at the way Clark sometimes looked at his fiancée; in fact, he found it very sad considering the utter disregard she had for him, despite proclaiming him her best friend. He thought it too pathetic to deny the poor man the few moments he allowed himself when he thought no one was looking.
Richard felt a rare surge of loneliness, thinking about the way the Bullpen had never accepted him despite his being at the Planet for almost six years, and watched Lois as she spoke to Jason, thinking that she truly was a good person, through and through, even with the way she treated her comrades sometimes.
He was sure he had heard what she hadn't said: Lois was such a good friend to Clark and Jimmy exactly because they would never have thought she would be. Whether they knew this or not, Richard could not tell, but from knowing Lois he thought he must be right about her side of it, at least.
As his gaze went back down to the mail, unseeing, he couldn't help but continue to wonder at what it was that got Clark on the 25th floor from day one, what it was that made him the natural exception to every unspoken rule in the minds of his colleagues.
Maybe it was the accent.
Later that night, Lois finally had some time for listening. She clicked on the machine.
"There, it just happened again, what did you do?"
"Nothing, I only turned my head."
"Do it again..." Lois moved closer to him, looking directly up into his eyes with frank wonder.
Superman's eyes glinted in the moonlight, not like a cat's, but unlike anything she had ever seen. It was as if there were little flecks of metal in his irises, small bits that caught the light while the rest of the tissue did not. Their faces were very close; a blush had started to rise across his naked cheeks, his expression filling with wonder at her and her proximity. He waited until she was very close and turned his head.
"No, you keep looking at me, move your eyes."
And with obvious reluctance, Superman moved his eyes away from her, and towards the moon shining bright between two buildings and onto her balcony.
"How often does it do that?"
A question directed towards the glowing orb, full in the summer's air, making the two buildings it shone between reminiscent of great monoliths at ancient altars across the world.
"I don't really notice..." Lois was moving her face around his, trying to see his eyes from all different angles, using her usual curious approach to understanding the phenomenon present there, "It's beautiful..."
"Yes..." he was talking about the moon, she was talking about his eyes, he turned back to her, now inches from his face and on her tiptoes, "...it is."
Lois remembered this moment, and the tension between them, the small flame that would end up burning them alive, how the blush on his face used to turn her on more than the most skilled sexual advances-
The balcony door slammed open, Lois jumped in her lounge chair.
"Oh! I'm sorry!" Richard emerged, carrying a sleeping Jason in his arms and obviously encumbered. Lois clicked off her recorder.
"What are you listening to?"
"Notes on the Henderson story from two years ago."
"Ah, listen, I'm putting him to bed, would you like anything from downstairs?"
"Some wine?"
"Good idea." Richard moved back into the house, closing the door behind him. Lois looked out across the bay, lit less by the moon and more by the not-so-distant skyline, and wished she could see her old apartment. She clicked on the recorder to hear the rest of the conversation before Richard returned.
"You've never noticed it...?"
"I guess I've never looked into my own eyes by moonlight..." his voice was rough instead of humorous, as she assumed he had intended it to be; he was very obviously overcome by her. Her feet were sore from having to stand so far up on her toes, and she suddenly went back down on her heels, breaking the spell...
"I should go..." there was regret in both of them, nothing like the burning hatred for the distance they needed to maintain that would develop later in their friendship. Lois clicked off the recorder.
She looked out across the bay, waiting for Richard sans headphones, wondering what had stopped them that night and so many others, what kept their lips apart, their desires unfulfilled...
The door opened, "I figured red."
Lois reached out a hand for her glass and took a sip. Richard, rather than joining her in the other chair as she had guessed he would, stayed back and behind her, reaching down to rub her shoulders after putting down his glass.
"This was a rough week."
"Yes, it was..." He had no idea. They looked out across the bay in mutual silence, both thinking about the same man and doomed to not realize it. Lois turned her head into Richard's hands, inviting him to continue.
Superman's voice lingered along the burned edges of her synapses; his eyes came to the front of her inner eye. Richard's attention to the back of her neck was tracing lines down her body, warming her to the touch of a man in the present, and as Lois finished the rest of her wine and stood up she made a decision to take Richard to bed, right then.
Dragging him along by the bottom of his shirt, trying to ignore the pleasantly surprised look on his face, Lois outright used Richard against their three hundred thread-count sheets for neither the first nor the last time, but was sure to shut the blinds against the moon as she did so. It was anger, a lack of fulfillment, a desire to have some control over something in her life in that instant. She truly cared for Richard, she did, but was too lost in his physical dimensions to distinguish his lines from another's in the muted darkness. All she had now was her imagination in the mess of secrets, lies, and forgotten moments that her life had become...
"It's like... looking into a blue diamond..."
Superman smirked down at her one last time that night, amused by her trite statement, as Richard moaned quietly against her cheek.
"May I quote you on that, Ms. Lane?"