He offered Lois a sheepish grin and reached for the handle just as she reluctantly moved to stand beside him. She still didn't look convinced. In fact, she seemed to grow pale as he added force to his actions.
"Wait! Don't op…" but the rest of her words were lost as the floor opened up beneath them.
And now:
Lois cursed silently and did her best to keep her limbs tucked close to her body as she slid down into the depths. The sudden loss of footing had jostled her and she had dropped the flashlight; it had fallen to the ground and rolled clear of the opening just before they fell. Now, not only were they falling, sliding and bouncing down into the deep, but they were doing all of those things in the dark.
Finally – mercifully - she slid to a halt in a place where the chute narrowed and leveled off. For all she could tell, they were at the bottom of some type of pit.
"Oofft." The wind was forcefully expressed from her lungs as Clark landed on top of her.
"Sorry." He tried to move, but the space and position they were in made it nearly impossible.
"Hold on," Lois wheezed. His movements were making it harder for her to catch her breath. "Just give… a minute…" She gently leaned her head back against the wall that had stopped their downward slide and closed her eyes. Her head was hurting from having smacked against the wall on the initial landing, her ribs and lungs were sore from having cushioned Clark's fall, and her ankle was sending out painful throbs of protest.
"I told you I had a bad feeling about that handle," she commented when she could breathe again and her various ailments had calmed. She opened her eyes and allowed herself to adjust to the dark.
"Who could have known that there was a hole in the ground?" Clark asked.
"Right, because an open chute in a mine shaft is farfetched." Lois's answering smirk was lost in the darkness.
"Normally, you're the voice of temperance and sobriety," she muttered.
She tried to adjust her position when she felt Clark lift his weight from the half of her body that had padded his landing. In the limited space, the best they could manage was to each lie on their sides facing the other. Any further movement was impaired by the walls pressing against them on all sides. The movements had only succeeded in wedging them more securely in the gap. "What was the reason you said you were here for again? Something about saving me?"
He looked satisfyingly sheepish. "There's still time. It looks like we might be here for a while."
Lois rolled her eyes and looked up. Given the distance of the small beam of light that they could still see from the flashlight, the shaft opening was nearly twenty-five feet above them. They were definitely going to be here for a while. "Care to explain why you felt the need to come after me tonight?"
Lois couldn't see Clark shrug but she felt it. "You have a knack for finding trouble," he responded flatly.
Her eyes narrowed. "Trouble has a knack for finding me," she retorted pointedly. "But why the sudden concern? I haven't talked to you in over a month."
"You haven't talked to anyone in Smallville in over a month. People were worried… I came to check… and here we are."
"Here we are," Lois agreed with a light scoff.
--
Clark frowned at the apparent sneer. "Why haven't you been back to Smallville in over a month? Chloe's practically taken over your apartment," he chided, knowing that Lois tended to be territorial.
"Just as she wanted it," Lois said under her breath, not meeting his eyes.
Clark titled his head. "That's not true…"
She cut him off. "Tell me something – when you were referring to those people who were worried, was my cousin one of them, or was it mainly your mom?"
She smirked when he hesitated. She had her answer.
"What happened between the two of you?"
"Nothing happened." Lois awkwardly lifted a hand to move the hair out of her eyes, careful not to elbow Clark in the face while doing it. "It was more like a bunch of little happenings. Basically, I got tired of pretending not to notice the cold shoulder I was getting from both of my closest friends."
Clark slowly released a breath. Her words had hit home. "I'm sorry. I know I've been a little preoccupied lately…"
He had been unusually self-centered with the whole Phantom Zone aftershock and later with the Lex and Lana relationship. Chloe had been his sounding board so it was only natural that they spent time together, and the information they shared hadn't been stuff they could share with Lois. He hadn't meant to shut Lois out, and he was sure that Chloe hadn't been doing it on purpose either. "…But I know Chloe wouldn't want you to think that she doesn't care."
Lois's eyebrow arched. "Yet, what was her position on the whole Operation Hunt for Lois scheme?"
Clark dropped his chin. Chloe hadn't been supportive of the idea at all. At the time of the discussion, Chloe's lack of interest had bugged him a little. It had almost seemed as if she was relieved that Lois wasn't around; almost as if she were happy to have Smallville and its inhabitants back to the way it had been before Lois had blown into town. He knew that Chloe was a little territorial herself – but upon thinking those things, he had immediately discarded the theory… Now, compounded with Lois's sarcastic barbs, those thoughts were sneaking back up.
--
Lois could tell what thoughts were tumbling through Clark's mind even though she couldn't see him clearly. "It's okay, Clark – really. In a way, I can even understand where she's coming from. Things tend to happen for me in a way that it doesn't happen for other people. Sometimes it can be intimidating."
"What do you mean?"
She ran her tongue over her teeth as she tried to think of a way to put it into words. "When something interests me, I go after it. Most people spend a lot of time weighing the pros and cons of their actions so long that they end up with analysis paralysis and fail to do anything at all."
She paused again. "The difference between Chloe and I is that I'm going to get my big break because I'm not going to stop hunting it until I get it. Chloe's waiting for it to come to her. Journalism was her thing, but now I've got the bug and I'm going after it with all guns blazing. Since that encroaches on her domain – it's only natural that she's protective of everything else she considers to be 'hers'."
Clark seemed to consider that for a moment. "Like Smallville?" he asked.
Lois chuckled wryly. "Naturally."
"And you're okay with that? You're just going to hide from her?"
"I'm not hiding, Clark. When Chloe's ready to find me, she'll know how to do it," she replied, bristling. She then nodded in his direction. "It's obviously not a hard thing to do."
Shifting slightly she turned her attention back to the shaft above them. "So… any ideas on how this whole 'saving me' thing is going to work?"
Clark tilted his head to look up as well. "Okay, so it hasn't really gone as well as I planned," he conceded. He lowered his head to look back at her. "How were you planning to get out of this place before I came along?"
Lois's eyes shifted away from his. To tell the truth, she hadn't really thought that far along. Her brand of planning was to seek an opening and take it.
Clark sighed. "Looiiisss," he drawled, "why do you do this to yourself?"
Lois turned on him sharply, thoughts of escape momentarily tabled. "Why do I do what to myself?"
"Get yourself in positions where people hold knives to your neck! You work for the Inquisitor – somehow I don't think they would assign you to a story like this." His raised eyebrows indicated that he awaited confirmation of his assumption.
"I don't plan on working for the Inquisitor for the rest of my career," she replied, circumventing Clark's unvoiced question.
"There might not be a 'rest of your career' at the rate you're going," he muttered.
"Don't judge me, Smallville." Lois reached up to swat his chest and earned a banged elbow for her trouble. Grimacing, she returned her arm to her side. "You want to know what story I was assigned tonight? A write-up about an alien visitation claim from Cassie Morgan. It was ridiculous and implausible – not worth the time to write it or the time of anyone who has half a brain to read it."
"You don't believe in intergalactic travelers?"
Lois frowned at the term. "What I don't believe is that an intergalactic traveler would come all this way just to breed with Angel, Mrs. Morgan's poodle – a poodle who, prior to its apparent abduction and fecundation, was male."
Clark's expression briefly showed reluctant agreement before morphing back into one of self-righteous judgment again.
"No," Lois said, seeing the transformation happen. "Don't start."
--
Clark tried to sober his expression. He was learning that his face tended to reveal more than he wanted it to. "I'm sorry, it's just that I can't help but think that a story is not worth it when you could end up dead."
Lois was silent for a full minute and Clark found that he couldn't get a clear read on her aura. She could either be pissed or thoughtful.
"A story," she said flatly. His intuition began leaning toward the 'she was pissed' end of the spectrum. "That's all you think this is, isn't it?" She met his eyes and shook her head in disbelief.
"Let me tell you what I found out about this 'House of Dreams' we've stumbled into. Up in that converted mine there are about a dozen or more young women and young men who have bought into the lie that selling their bodies is the only way they can achieve a slice of happiness in their lives. What's worse is that most of them, if given the chance, would choose to remain skin brokers because the money they earn with just one trick is more than you and I could make in a year."
Her eyes narrowed. "There is a ring of people – of corporations even – that go around making this conversion with illegal immigrants, people who come to this country in search of freedom and civil rights. They go to these holding stations where immigrants are being readied for deportation and they take the ones with the most 'beauty' and the most 'potential', and they create places like this," she said, waving her hand to indicate their general surroundings.
"And as for that slice of happiness that they are promised… we are all promised the pursuit of happiness at no cost – and especially not at a cost this high. You might be asking, who am I to try to take on this world, or why I'm willing to try to create a change in the level of an ocean that I can only spit in, but my question is - how could I not? Someone has to stand for something."
She pointed to the shaft above them with blazing eyes, her tirade still at full power. "Someone has to stand for them. Right now, they don't understand that when the glamour and the money end, everything they've done and everything they've allowed to be done to them is going to come back in spades. You can't win every fight, but damn it, it's the fight itself that makes it worth doing."
She released a breath, finally having come to the end of her rant. "Just a story," she repeated. "No. Not even close." She dropped her head back against the wall behind her.
Clark was left speechless. Lois always had a knack for making him see the world in a whole new light. He had always been skeptical of the 'one person can make a difference' PSA. Here he was, a Kryptonian on earth, and all he had been faced with throughout his entire life were situations that constantly spiraled out of his control. Everything he tried to hold on to danced out of his grasp on a regular basis.
Thinking of Lois's words, it occurred to him for the first time that his motivation for holding those things close had always been self-centered.
One, he wanted to save the world from the Phantom Zone escapees because he had been the one to release them from the interstellar prison. Two, he had taken the role of protector against Meteor Freaks because the poison that infected them were remnants from his destroyed native planet. Sadly, those were only two of the more obvious examples. There were more where those came from.
On the contrary, Lois's motivations were always externally directed. Abashed, he realized that he should have remembered that before attacking her earlier. It was one of the things that he admired most about her – the other things that fit that description only spelled trouble for him.
He raised his gaze to look at her. Lois had closed her eyes but her tensed brow made it apparent that she was gaining no serenity from the action. He desperately felt the need to make amends but couldn't think of a good way to do so. Looking back up to the lip of the chute they had fallen into, he sorted through their limited options. Even though he wanted to burst through the walls to get them out of this situation, he knew that doing so would only result in the entire structure falling down.
"We should think about how we're going to get out of here…" he offered lamely, hoping that steering away from the previous conversation topic would ease the mounting tension.
Then, as if to put an addendum to their already dim situation, the flashlight died, taking away the small source of light they had.
"Damn."
"What?" Lois asked. Then, after a beat, she added her own take on the new circumstance, "Crap."
Obviously she had opened her eyes to see what had happened and had been confronted with darkness.
She sighed. "Hand me your phone."
The way Lois moved from subject to subject without segue or warning often left him confused. "My phone?"
"You do have your phone, don't you?"
Clark frowned. It was habit. "Well, yeah, but…" He couldn't figure why she would be asking for his phone when she could use her own.
"Does it look like I could hide a phone somewhere in this outfit?" she scoffed in impatient annoyance, having read his mind. "I left mine in my car. Do you have your phone or not?"
"It's in my back pocket…" he admitted, struggling to find a way in the cramped space to reach for it. "…but I'm not sure we'll be able to get a signal down here."
--
"It doesn't hurt to try," Lois replied tightly, trying to curb her rising irritation. She was wedged in the bottom of some old abandoned water chute in complete darkness and her arm was starting to tingle from having all of her weight lying on it for an extended period of time. The least he could do was work with her ideas – even if they weren't necessarily viable ones. Sometimes it was helpful to cycle through the bad theories just so the good ones could surface.
"I can't reach it…"
Lois groaned. This wasn't going to be pretty, but she had a sinking feeling that before the night was out, they were going to have to invade one another's personal space even more than their current positions required.
"Come here," she grunted, reaching out with her free hand and pulling Clark to her. She shifted the focus of her vision away from him as his body pressed flush against her, forcing her thoughts elsewhere as she awkwardly dug into his rear pockets to retrieve the phone.
She was still a bit miffed that she had gotten so uptight about Clark's earlier judgment of her actions. She didn't know why his misguided self-righteousness even bothered her.
Actually, that wasn't entirely true. She did know why it bothered her, but she didn't like what those reasons implied.
"I got it," she announced, clearing her throat after her voice came out a little too huskily.
Clark shifted back to his original position but it seemed that the space had somehow gotten even smaller. Pouring all of her mental energy into something other than the feel of his body pressed against hers, Lois lifted the phone into view and flipped it open. The light from the LCD display provided a dim eerie glow.
"No signal," she declared disappointedly after moving the phone to different spots in the air. She pressed and held the button to turn the phone's power off. The light it could have provided would have been nice to have, but the battery power was more important. Whenever they did manage to get themselves out of this hell hole, they would need to be able to make a call.
"I think I saw something," Clark said. "Just before you turned off the phone… there's some kind of tunnel branching off of this chute about ten feet up."
Lois frowned and looked up even though she couldn't see anything. She thumbed the phone back on but its limited range gave her no indication of what he'd seen. "Are you sure?"
"Positive…" he started to shift a bit. "We should try to stand up."
Lois nodded but wasn't really excited about the prospect of having to bump pelvises with Clark in the process. The chute walls had them pressed so tightly together that grinding was exactly what they were going to have to do in order to rearrange their bodies into upright positions. "Yeah, okay."
Lois felt a wave of lightheadedness and blinked it away. This was not the time for weakness, she scolded herself. Sucking in a labored breath, she started to push herself up. Clark started moving at the same time, and their combined efforts gained them nothing – other than a vinyl wedige on Lois's behalf.
She stopped moving. "Hold on. We need a plan."
Clark stopped as well. "You're right. Why don't you roll this way…" he began, shifting underneath her as Lois moved her body on top of his. His voice trailed off once she started sliding down his chest. Her intentions were to slide to a point where she could put a knee on the ground between his legs for balance, but the hitch in his breathing caused her to pause.
Meeting his eyes, her mind slid back to the kiss he had sprung on her earlier. It had been unexpected, but her reaction to it had been more so. She swallowed and forced herself to think of something else… namely their escape. The hit her head had sustained upon landing was obviously making her thoughts untrustworthy. She considered reversing the direction of her slide but found that she was at an impasse when she realized that sliding that way would leave him with a mouthful of…
Clark cleared his throat. "Um…"
"Sorry," she breathed, hurrying to complete her original move. She consciously created space between her chest and Clark's by bracing her hands against his shoulders.
As she moved off of him, Clark sat up and pulled his legs toward his chest in order to give her room to get up. She groaned and stumbled when she attempted to stand.
Immediately, Clark propped himself against the walls that were pressing in on them from the sides and rose to his feet. He grabbed her arm to help stabilize her. "Are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm just a little…" Lois blinked and waved a hand dismissively in the air. She bit back a grimace as she gingerly moved her weight to the uninjured leg. "I think my foot fell asleep."
"Why do you always do that?" he demanded. The tone in his voice indicated heavy frustration and annoyance. It surprised her a little.
"Do what?"
"Downplay everything and pretend like nothing is ever wrong or that nothing ever gets to you."
Lois ground her teeth and tried not to let his outburst fuel one of her own. "As opposed to acting as if everything that happens is a sign that the world is ending?" she shot back vehemently. So much for remaining calm.
She could tell without seeing him clearly that his posture had turned defensive. "What's that supposed to mean?"
Lois blew a breath aimed at her bangs. "Nothing."
"No, I want to hear it…"
"Look, Smallville, all I'm saying is that if you're looking for someone to play the damsel in distress to your tortured hero, you've got the wrong girl. I'm not your everyday weak, sniveling female who sits around waiting for some overgrown boy scout to come along and save her. You may think that the feeble desperation shown by the people in your fan club is an indication of a deeper connection, but that reasoning doesn't apply to me and it doesn't give you the permission to treat me as if it does. I can take care of myself and if I decide to downplay the seriousness of a situation as a means to survive it, it's probably because I've seen the way brooding and dwelling on things that are uncontrollable can make a person useless."
Almost as soon as the words spilled out, she wanted to take them back. The hurt emanated off of him like a pale aura. These were the times when she wished she had a little bit of that reserve she had just condemned.
"I can't apologize for caring about what happens to you… even if it makes you think I'm weak," he responded tightly. His voice was soft and level, making her remark to herself that he had done a better job than she of keeping his emotions in check.
Lois remained quiet for a moment. His hand was still supporting her arm - it had remained there even when she was attacking him. No, she didn't think of him as being weak for caring about other people, on the contrary, she was starting to think that he was the strongest person that she knew. After all, he managed to put up with her, didn't he?
Not many people had the nerve or the desire to do that… not even her own cousin.
"I'm always going to be there when you are in trouble," he added solemnly.
She swallowed. "Don't make promises you can't keep," she muttered under her breath in low voice that he wouldn't hear. "I didn't mean all that…" she offered apologetically.
But she knew that on some level she did… and she knew that he knew it too. If she was genuine in her remorse, she would have to show it… she would have to let him in a little.
"I tweaked my ankle a little when the floor gave away," she admitted haltingly. Revealing her own vulnerabilities was more painful than her sprained ankle. "I don't think it's serious, but it hurts to put weight on it."
Clark dropped to a knee and reached for her leg. "Let me check…It could be broken."
"It's not!" Lois exclaimed, frowning down at his head. "I need to keep the boot on for the swelling…" She trailed off in confusion when Clark released her leg and stood back up without having touched her foot.
He ran a hand through his hair roughly. "It's not broken," he agreed. "But if I had just listened to you about that handle…"
"Hey," Lois interrupted him with a hand on his chest. "We've been through that already - and we learned an important lesson: always, always trust my instincts." With a mental smack, she realized that she was doing the downplay thing again. It was hard to go against the natural grain of her personality… and she had to respect that the same principal applied to Clark. His was a tendency toward guilt – whether rightly assigned or not.
"Don't get all guilty on me," she cautioned. "It's an ankle, and it's still attached. You should be more concerned about the blow my head took when we landed."
The words didn't really bring about the reaction she had hoped for. "You hit your head?! Why didn't you say anything?"
Lois sighed. "It was more of a bump than a bang," she said. "My time in Smallville has accumulated so many ko's that I know the routine for head trauma – stay awake, stay alert, and look for signs of brain injury. At least I'm not to the point where a simple finger flick to the head could send me into dream land," she chided with a smug grin.
Clark seemed to pale suddenly but she decided that she wasn't seeing clearly.
"Signs of brain injury?" he repeated shakily.
"Head down."
"What?"
"It's an acronym," she explained, retrieving her arm from his grasp. "HDDWN. Headache, dizziness, a dilated pupil, weakness, and nausea. If I start slurring my speech, then you can start to worry."
She pressed a button on the phone in her hand to reactivate the LCD screen. When she clearly saw his pained expression, she gave up on tempering back her 'downplay' gene - in her defense, it was usually the only thing that was successful against Clark's 'broody' one.
"Don't look so guilty, Kent. I mean, yes, you did crash my investigation, and you were the one who turned the handle that sent us careening down into this pit… but you meant well."
...
TBC