The first time Lois made Clark feel like an utter heel, she wasn't even upset with him.
The day had begun with promise. He had been working for the Planet for four months and had published articles on corporate good citizenship; corporate corruption; education in the slum districts; crime in the high-rent districts; vagaries of city politics; the weekly near-miss urban catastrophes involving heights, fire or runaway heavy machinery; and Superman. He had been shot too many times to count and had rescued eighty-two people from certain death and five cats from treetops, and no one so far had tried to kill him with kryptonite, which he felt was a hopeful sign.
He had discovered that his greatest knack and joy was with the bird's-eye-views of the issues, mapping out whole systems of justice or production or social services for the people of the city to see and say, That's why it works like that. That's structural violence, an unjust system. That's the weakest point. That's where I fit.
He had also discovered within the first month that in order to be laughable as a secret identity candidate, he had to remind himself to drop or bump things once to three times daily and start most of his conversations with apologies, but his natural naïveté was entirely sufficient as it was.
In Smallville he had known some individual people to be petty, aggressive or manipulative. But all of his relationships were stable, broken in like old gloves, clear and honest. In Metropolis, where most of the people were strangers to each other and most of the games were zero-sum, the assumptions were different, and he couldn't adjust.
The other possibility that occurred to him in darker moments, that all of the same things went on everywhere and his naïveté was truly hopeless, he refused to linger on. Some things had to be sacred. He was ruefully aware that most people wouldn't consider Smallville one of them.
As it was, he was aware of all manner of evil in principle, but he could never anticipate it in practice. It never occurred to him that this sobbing widow could be twisting twenty-eight years of past or this round-faced middle manager who doted on his children could be keeping two sets of accounting books. Not until Lois gave him her faintly exasperated, grouchily affectionate look and repainted the whole picture for him in the cab on the way back to the office. In retrospect he was always a little exasperated with himself as well. It seemed the only people he could learn to expect evil from were a quiet corporate physicist named somebody Luthor, who had given him inexplicable chills from the other side of a crowded press conference, and one or two sports writers in the bullpen who always made him think of the bullies of Smallville High.
Which was why he had found himself inordinately amused by getting a small victory out of the morning staff meeting. He had been at his desk reading their latest "final" draft of the latest Superman runaway train rescue, correcting Lois' atrocious spelling and making a mental note to do a fly-over of the whole urban track system before the next time it happened. He was letting his tie dangle into his coffee and wick it up.
He recognized her footsteps entering the building five floors down, and fought his daily battle for the self-discipline to keep his eyes on the paper till he might reasonably have been expected to hear her.
Not until she swept by him, dropped her satchel on the desk beside him, and wordlessly fished his tie out over a paper towel, did he admit to himself he might have let it sit in there for that very reason.
He looked up at her sheepishly and was rewarded by that same afterwards-in-the-cab expression. He wondered if it would be in character to give it that name and point it out to her. Probably not.
"Are you ready?" she asked him, eyes now focused down on scrubbing the paper towel into little shreds on the bottom half of his tie. She tried with fair success to flick the shreds off with her hand, and blotted the back of the tie one more time before she dropped it and looked up at him. "I hate having to sit in that second row of chairs against the wall."
"Sure, Lois." He gathered up his papers and followed her in, and sat down beside her in the second row, where they always ended up despite her best intentions.
As the last few stragglers wandered in, he looked up at Mr. White sorting his agenda on the other side of the table. The Chief's eyes darted back and forth over his notes with every appearance of total absorption, but his heart was going over a hundred and twenty beats a minute and his pupils were dilated to five millimeters. Good excitement, Clark wondered, or bad?
"Hey, Clark," said Bill Wechsler, dropping down beside him with a friendly-looking whack on the shoulder. "People wear a lot of coffee-tone ties at the Smallville Gazette, circulation three hundred?"
He had sighed internally, disturbed by a parallel that rose up in his mind unbidden, between poking sticks at a country boy and using undocumented seven-year-olds as heroin mules in the clubs of Shadyside. He had known for a long time that the weak were preyed on wherever they went. But it always unnerved him to see it played out between the law-abiding citizens, as an integral part of the normal lives he was trying to protect.
He heard the muscle units firing as Lois stiffened beside him. She always grew so upset in these situations, less about the attacks themselves than about the glove of friendliness over them. Whenever she took him aside, furious for him, in the aftermath of times like this and tried to explain what had just been done to him, it took all his self-control not to catch those small, wildly gesturing hands between his and say, "It's all right, sweetheart. Like in Goethe – I do not understand everything, but still, many things I understand."
Of course, part of her fury was her smoldering guilt at finding the sound of judgment in Bill's tone all too familiar. He would have liked to tell her to stop beating herself over that.
And of course, she would never have let him get past the word "sweetheart".
He snapped out of the moment's reverie when he realized that this time she was starting to get to her feet. Her store of patience, never large, had apparently been exhausted. In another moment she'd be up with her finger in Bill's face, if not her hands around his neck.
So he had looked up at Bill and smiled.
"Gee, Bill. It's so nice of you to include the Sunday-only subscriptions," he said cheerfully, with wide Clarkian eyes, "every single time you bring that number up."
Lois choked on her black coffee beside him and punched him in the arm, which was reward enough, and relaxed a little in the chair.
He was spared having to find a way to embarrass himself again by Mr. White clearing his throat noisily for order. "All right, children, simmer down. King, you first. What have you got?"
The chief started down his usual rounds of the states of the pending pieces. But for most of the meeting Clark had found his attention wandering, from his poor little moment of triumph, to his half-conscious habitual scanning of the city's sounds for trouble, back to that same moment of triumph, and on to seven-year-olds recruiting five-year-olds as drug mules. Maybe it would be better to leave that part out of the article so the readers wouldn't jump off their rooftops in despair.
He was so preoccupied with six things at once that he was only half-tuned to finding out why Mr. White was so wound up. After it turned out to relate to the suburban branch of the Micelli 'family business', not his story, he tuned out entirely.
And so it didn't require any acting at all to look completely caught off guard a moment later, when he realized simultaneously that Lois' heart rate had jumped from her normal athletic baseline in the sixties straight to the one-twenties, and that Mr. White had fallen silent and was looking directly at him.
He thought again ruefully, as he had many times since coming to Metropolis, than in designing himself he would have focused less on superior sight and hearing and more on superior powers of concentration.
"Come on, Clark. Don't you have any questions?"
"What? Sure, chief. Uh…Whatever you think is best."
The editor blinked. "I realize it's putting you on the spot and all…but you can still ask me what I'm talking about."
He was undone beyond any chance of cover-up. No need to make a special effort to look clueless again after all. Clark shook his head to clear it. "I'm so sorry, Chief. What are you talking about?"
"Lois, tell him what a 'sweet sixteen' is."
Lois turned and looked at him, her face solemn. "It's a 1930s term for your first undercover assignment, Clark," she said levelly. She looked back at the chief. "Appropriately enough it was first used, for undercover police, in the golden era of gangsters."
With the perfect clarity of his peripheral vision, he had kept his eyes focused forward while he watched the wordless gaze she turned on her chief. She was horribly uncomfortable, her heart pounding along so fast her that venous refilling was starting to back up. But she was visibly struggling not to say anything so publicly and gripping the armrests to keep herself seated.
The room was silent as Mr. White looked back at her steadily, with an not-unkind expression. The chief took a breath and steepled his fingers. Lois tilted her head and a faintly quizzical element came into her eyes. Clark was aware of something passing between them without knowing what. She sat back with a visible effort, took a deep breath and said nothing.
She had succeeded in holding herself back, for the first time in his recollection. He wondered if it would be in character to congratulate her afterwards. Probably not.
Only then did Mr. White look away, back to Clark. "Not into the lion's den, son, of course. Just on the…expanding edge of the Micelli family territory. One shopkeeper to another, to find out what kinds of offers of 'protection' are being made in the neighborhood."
"Chief…wow! That's fantastic. Thanks, Chief. Mr. White."
He had pondered the ironies of going under cover with a third identity for the next fifteen minutes till the meeting ended. He thought about poor Lois, trying not to embarrass him in front of the whole staff, certain he would find a way to get himself hurt. Then he heard a fender-bender at the traffic light at Fifth and Reeve, and he got distracted again.
Later, packing his things for the day trip, he had heard snippets of Lois's private conversation with the chief. "-NOT ready for this. I thought you wanted me to protect him. So why are you trying to get him killed?"
"In a bookstore? Come on, Lois. The man's earned a chance for advancement. Do you want him to spend the rest of his life as your puppy? Actually, don't answer that."
He chuckled and kept packing.
Now, eight hours later, folded up on the floor with his arms cuffed behind his back around a ceiling pole, staring into the perfect darkness of a warehouse subbasement somewhere in Shadyside Industrial Zone, he realized that his naïveté was in fact far more dangerous than kryptonite.
Behind him Lois was breathing a little raggedly, cuffed around the pole with her back to him. He heard the breaths that should have been sobs slap up against her closed glottis, where she held them back. He was keeping silent, alone with his own grief and guilt. He was waiting for her breath to steady so she could reply to him without being, Loislike, embarrassed by her voice cracking.
His sweet sixteen had been doomed before it began. The little bookseller he tried to compare notes with, on encounters with menacing customers in trenchcoats offering devil's bargains, had been flagrantly terrified. He had wished acutely that Lois, skulking around the outside of the building looking for signs of family-style 'rearrangement', were there to read the expressions behind the fear. To say, Oh, Clark, come on! The guy was dripping with not just fear but ambition. That sort of man would casually recommend a diner to us, and then call the family to sell us to them, in hopes they'll think of him when they need a man to run the front shop for a brothel.
Let's go straight home, Clark, and not go drink cold coffee in an empty Shadyside diner with just the gray-haired night waitress washing up in back , where eight men can come in and grab us and put a gun to my temple and leave you to choose between watching me sob with terror and breaking your cover forever.
What surprised him now was finding that knowing she had never really been in danger was no consolation.
His perfect visual recall, usually under his voluntary control, was firing randomly every few moments on that single image - the devastation in her brown eyes, the gun against her head - in a pattern he recognized as an early post-traumatic stress disorder criterion. Exposure to the felt threat of death or grave harm, or witnessing another person exposed to the same, combined with a sense of personal inability to stop it.
I had hoped to avoid ever feeling that last part.
"Lois?" He couldn't stand it any longer. "Are you all right?"
She laughed raggedly in the darkness and he felt a little ray of hope. "This really makes me appreciate my family. My wrists hurt, is all. What about you?"
'You don't have to point that at her,' he had said in the diner, letting his voice tremble a little. "I don't want any trouble. Be a man and turn it on me if you want."
And whether it was the honor element of Sicilian machismo, or the confidence that the unstable moment had passed, the stubbled one had lowered the gun and motioned the others to take hold of their arms instead.
"Uh…I'm all right. I…I think I'm sitting in something."
She snorted and then lost control of the next few breaths and then locked it down again. "I'm sorry. At least it doesn't smell like a puddle of gasoline…"
"…with a trail up the stairs to a cigarette lighter someone's about to drop, yes," he finished ruefully for her. Was it possible she was taking this better than he was? Could she even have been hamming it back in the diner? "But I think our chains are tangled up together. If I move back like this –" and he reached back to pinch her cuffs out like dough between thumb and forefinger, stretching them just slightly –"does it help?"
She jiggled her hands a little and said, astonished, "That's much better. I thought they were just too tight."
"Good. I hate when the cuffs don't fit properly." Get hold of yourself, Kent. You're not going to erase the last hour from her soul by making her feel obligated to laugh. You're out of character. If you have to do this, if she has to go through this, do it right.
Do it right, so the other people you love don't wind up like this some day, staring into the stinking darkness, only this time alone without you in a soundproof room lined with lead, wondering why their son hasn't come to save them, while you find out if you can bear to do whatever devil's task is set as their ransom.
"I'm so sorry, Lois," he said wearily after a moment. "I didn't know what to do." With unfeigned bitterness he added, "This one really was a job for Superman. I'm sorry you got me instead."
She was silent. Not wanting to hurt hapless Clark, he thought, but unable to lie to him, poor inflammable girl whose gentle heart got control of her at the most inconvenient times.
Then he heard the chains clinking behind him and felt her little hand on the back of his. It was cold; the fight-or-flight response was clamping down all her peripheral vessels to shunt blood to the heart and brain. He kept himself from warming her hand between his by reminding himself it would only make her feel awkward.
"Clark," she said softly, "I know you won't believe this, but I don't actually compare you with him."
He froze, feeling suddenly, strangely, like a man wandering at home who saw a new door unfold out of the wall in front of him.
"We all play the hand we're dealt. He got…powers and wonders, and he plays them well. You and I…that's not our hand. We just do our best."
Sitting there in the dark and the silence, the words touched him like a lick of fire in a part of his soul he'd never known existed. He felt them sink into him, without knowing where they went or what they touched. He looked up wordlessly into the darkness. It made him think involuntarily, illogically, of waking up in grade school on the first day of summer vacation.
He was about to try to fumble together some way to thank her, something to say that would be both in character and real, for giving him such an otherworldly gift in such small words.
Then he realized a few moments had passed, and suddenly she was sobbing aloud.
"Clark," she got out between gasps, "the barrel was so cold." He felt her shuddering in the vibrations transmitted through the pole. "It was so cold. I don't know why."
Feeling like another man would have felt from a punch in the stomach, afraid he might literally vomit, Clark learned something new that moment. None of the little games of might-have-saids, might-have-dones that he'd thought of as daily trials of his resolve had been anything of the sort. What took all his strength, what left him trembling and short of breath, was keeping himself from peeling off their handcuffs like paper, lifting her off the floor and cradling her dark head against his chest and saying, "It's all right, honey. Superman's here."
Instead he fished a tissue out of his back pocket and passed it into her hand, and then they both laughed bitterly at that futility, with no way to get it to her face.
Through the blindfold on the way in, he had seen demolition signs on the hacked-down doorway. The building was scheduled for tomorrow. They would be found on the sweep-through within six hours.
And never again, he decided in the stinking darkness, would he pretend his double life hurt no one but himself. She was too close to not be burned by it. He would always be able to give her safety, and never security. Keeping his cover would cause her hurt again and again, in small ways and large ones.
But at least he would never again pretend otherwise. He would never again play the victim with his self-pitying, if-only, romantic fantasies. Because any time he did, he would be back in the Shadyside Diner, watching her with a gun at her temple while he stood there, with all the power and the glory of the blood of Krypton and the sun of Earth in his veins, and did nothing.