The first time Lois uncovered one of Superman's secrets, she didn't even get a byline. By the end of that day, it was the last thing on her mind.
The day began grey, still and silent. The cool, overcast streets of Metropolis were misty and nearly empty on her way in.
When she stepped into the bullpen the atmosphere was subdued. The Planet, like the city outside, was still crouching, like a beaten dog who thought this whipping was over but knew it had been fooled before.
Her head hurt and her body ached like it had for a week, as if it had forgotten how to heal. She stood on the threshold of the newsroom, looking around a little aimlessly. Her thoughts were grinding along slowly. She shook her head and pulled it together enough to head for the coffee machine.
For a week till the day before yesterday, the people of the city had been locked in their homes, eating food from cans, stuffing wet towels under their doors, and throwing their radios out their high-rise windows onto the streets below. A few, with a heartbreaking ignorance of auditory anatomy, had tried cutting their ears off with their own kitchen knives.
All had been desperate together to keep from hearing the same seven-note tonal sequence, playing out at random-seeming intervals, from changing corners and alleys of the city. Presumably, from speakers, that no one had manufactured and no one had installed, and afterwards no one could find.
Of those they were caught in it, ran all the eyewitness reports, some started screaming and others just leaned on the walls and wept. All went stumbling off into the streets, sometimes running from things that weren't behind them, spilling out half-coherent details of all their precious and guilty secrets to anyone and no one. It was beginning to look as if most of those confessions, when understandable, were true.
Even otherworld-weary Metropolis, a city growing hardened to being the battleground of evil geniuses and the crossroads of the warring dimensions, had discovered it could still be shocked.
She looked back over the typing desks as her cup filled. Clark was already there, holding up his forehead with one hand and circling words with another. She filled another cup for him, two creams and two sugars. It always made her think of the way a five-year-old would take coffee, given the choice.
For the last week she had been running the dispatch flyers, churning out speaker location updates four times daily to warn a city that had become afraid of its televisions and radios. She had been typing on bone-sore fingers and sleeping four hours a night. She had been trying with mixed success to hold herself back from being snappy and unjust, while Clark ran the Planet's perp investigation and silently steered her away from opportunities to spill coworker blood, and thought she didn't notice.
She had even been, she realized with a flash of gallows amusement as she stirred in the creamer, too tired to maintain the involuntary awe of Superman that still plagued her, when the Man of Steel landed on her balcony two nights before.
She had been hunched over the coffee table reading the last Reuters bulletins on the crisis, hearing the thunder crack outside and praying that maybe the humidity would ruin the speakers. And then, as in a handful of times before, there was a moment when she realized she wasn't alone.
Usually it made her heart pound and her mind go blank with confusion, while her feminist sensibilities cringed in embarrassment.
The Man of Steel, she had long ago reluctantly admitted to herself, had the same effect on her he had on everyone else: awe, a sense of smallness, the eerie conviction of being in a strange and holy presence. And the urge to either fall silent or babble uncontrollably.
Unlike most people, though, she suspected, she found that feeling utterly distressing. There was a Lincoln quote she had once come across that had never left her. "A woman is the only thing I am afraid of," he had said, "that I know will not hurt me." Lincoln, at least, had understood.
And so she spent most of her energy, in his presence, on forcing herself to act like an adult – ideally, a reporter - and not a starstruck groupie. He never stayed long, the rare times he came to her for news, and she had begun to suspect it was out of tacit deference to her own inability to handle it. Which made it all that much worse.
The situation was helped not at all by all the recent romantic nonsense circulating about the two of them in the tabloid press. She shuddered to think what he would think if he came across it.
That night, though, ground down with fear, it was purely relief that she felt when she saw the iconic form outside, his cape shedding the rain and those massive shoulders, always still like the single pivot point of the universe, housing their silent and godlike power.
Thank God, it's only Superman.
Usually on his rare, unpredictable visits, always scrupulously proper, he waited outside for her. This time, apparently feeling that a talk out in the open air might not be quite the thing, he rapped on the patio doors and she got up to let him in.
He hesitated in the dark just a moment. Then he stepped over the threshold into her apartment for the first time in the year they had known each other. He reached behind him and drew the doors closed.
He looked around briefly, curiously, at the bright little den in the lamplight. Then he looked back down at her and folded his arms across the great crest on his chest.
They said together, simultaneously, "Are you all right?"
She nodded. "Can I get you something?"
He shook his head. "Thank you. There's no time." He ran his hand through his coal-black hair and studied her for just a moment with that dark alien gaze she had always found so unreadable. Which of all the chaos of human thoughts was he subject to?
"Clark's all right, too," she said after a moment. "He's killing himself, of course. But otherwise, all right." She thought about him, typing like a madman with a phone on each shoulder and his glasses slipping down his nose, and smiled.
She had realized early on that out of all Metropolis, the Man of Steel had chosen her quiet, spectacled partner as his confidante, and she thought well of him for that.
It had taken longer for her to notice that he seemed to like her company as well, in his enigmatic way, beyond regularly saving her from the burning buildings and twenty-story falls that were her occupational hazards. And then she had slowly come to realize, through their rare conversations on her balcony when he came for news, that there was no haughtiness in his reserve, that he was gentle, honest and respectful.
She could see it, and was aware when he was present that she genuinely liked the big, quiet superhero, while simultaneously wrestling with utter self-consciousness every moment of it.
He smiled briefly. "Good. Can I ask, what have they given you on the latest appearances?"
"What time frame do you want?"
"Six hours."
"Three downtown in the fashion mile. One on the East Side, at the entrance to the third ward park. One at the Shadyside subway stop. Do you want the layover map?"
He shook his head. "I'll remember. How are your dispatches getting out?"
"All right, so far. But we're running out of safe delivery routes. They're going to start taking longer." This is so much easier, she thought irrelevantly, with the help of exhaustion and disaster.
He nodded. "I may be able to help with that, if it comes to it. At some point that will take priority. I'll check back with you tomorrow."
She nodded. "I'm going to try something different in the morning. Nobody's talked yet with the actual victims. We don't even know if they…answer questions. Maybe I'll be able to tell you –"
"Lois," he said softly, "don't do that." He reached out and almost took her shoulder and then, as he always did, thought better of it and dropped his big hand. "You have to stay away from them. Don't get anywhere near them. Don't let them get near you."
She blinked, baffled. "The victims?" There had been no reports of any assaults or aggression by any of them.
He nodded.
"Why?"
"Please, tell me you won't do it."
"Why?"
He shook his head. "I have to go. I promise you, they won't answer your questions. They'll just keep making their confessions. Please, don't do it." And he turned to leave.
It was so typical of him that there in that waking nightmare, with her city turning slowly into hell around her and its only hope standing in blue and crimson in her living room, she found herself momentarily simply exasperated.
Everyone knew the Man of Steel didn't lie. What no one else seemed to notice was that he sucessfully avoided every question he didn't want to answer. She was beginning to suspect that an urgent crisis elsewhere was one of his favorite tricks. "Superman."
He turned back.
She opened her mouth to make her usual futile effort to get more from him, to appease the god of reporters. But looking into those weary, holy eyes, she hesitated just a moment. What sort of struggle left Superman so tired?
Then he seemed to shake it off.
"And Lois," he said, after a moment, as she was just about to speak, with a ghost of a smile playing at the corner of his mouth. "About the articles in the Enquirer…"
And his other trick is distraction!
And it's working.
"…when this is over, please, try to discourage that as much as you can. So will I. It's dangerous for you, to have anyone think you might make a good hostage to control me."
Keep on target. Chew through that one later. "But about the victims…the people of Metropolis should know, if-"
He shook his head. "I'm truly sorry. I can't answer you. Please stay away from them."
And then he was gone.
And then the next morning, as the Planet reported triumphantly, Superman had saved the day. He had managed at last to catch a hired thug in the act, installing a little self-degrading one-use speaker. Through him came the distribution gang and their equipment. The sting went down that afternoon and the city was safe. None of them had known who they took their orders and their payment from, or why seven notes that did nothing when played by ordinary instruments could drive men mad when they came from these speakers.
Which made a reasonably good initial article, and Lois, exhausted, was for once in no mood to dig deeper.
Not that she had a choice.
You have to stay away from them.
A cup in each hand, bracing herself before starting down that path, she set down her satchel beside Clark. Wordlessly she handed him his coffee and then noticed there were three empty ones on his desk already.
He gave her a brief, grateful smile. "Hey, Lois. Would you maybe look over these for me?"
She smiled slightly. Clark was always a little helpless right after a major Superman rescue. She had noticed it for almost a year now, but still didn't understand it. For two or three days after every near-catastrophe, he spoke very little, dropped everything he touched, and stuck to her like glue. She had long ago abandoned the thought that he was resentful of the Man of Steel – it was hard to imagine Clark resentful of anything. But those stories seemed to affect him in some deep, involuntary way, and it always took him a couple of days to bounce back.
Not, she thought wryly, that she felt at the moment like a paragon of resilience herself.
So she put her hand on his shoulder silently for a moment and then took the first article from his hand and sat down.
It was the timeline and analysis of the crisis Perry had asked him for. In usual Clark style, he had handed out anonymity and off-the-record like candy to everyone who asked for it. He could never learn to be rough in the service of truth. And in usual Clark style, she thought, sipping her black coffee, it was surprisingly good regardless.
Then she hit the part about how the greatest speaker density had been in the slums, about the strange almost-pattern of their appearances and removals. And then the blank space where the conclusion ought to be.
"Clark."
He looked up, his dark eyes enormous behind his herculean prescription. "What's wrong? Too choppy?"
"No! The part about the speaker distribution."
"Too speculative?"
"No." She blinked a couple of times and looked back down. …a pattern especially notable for its total inconsistency with the geography of low-hanging potential power access… "No. I think you might really have something."
"I have everything," he agreed cheerfully, "except a conclusion."
Lois sat back and tried to corral her sluggish thoughts into order. "You've already chased it down all the standard lines?"
"I did income levels, zoning districts, ethnic majorities, zip codes, police precincts, voting records–"
She had a vision of the just-defeated outgoing Mayor Daley, cackling as he whipped up revenge in in an evil electronics lab in his basement, and laughed involuntarily. "What about paper subscriptions?"
"Oh, I already know the Star was behind it," he said gravely, with the flawless Clark deadpan it had taken her six months to recognize. "And I can't prove it yet, but behind the Star…"
"…is Satan," they finished together.
He gave her his sweet smile for just a moment. Then the exhaustion came back into his face and he rubbed his temples.
He was definitely fighting a Clark funk. She would probably wind up having to bring him lunch, or he wouldn't eat all day.
"The only thing I've been thinking about that I haven't checked yet," he said after a moment, "is industry ownership."
She blinked. "That's not a bad idea. But it would be…difficult. Very time-consuming. Because you'd have to trace each factory's parent company back to its fifty minority shareholders, that then turn out to all belong to the same holding company. You can't stop till you hit people. I don't think you've done that before. You think you're up to it right now?"
He smiled wryly. "I really look that bad? Maybe this afternoon, then. Maybe this morning Jimmy will let me do some of his obituaries."
Lois laughed.
Then he reached over for the second piece and a new little note of weary pride came into his voice. "Now, read this one."
He reached out to point at one line, and Lois, with a dark premonition, caught hold of his coffee cup just before his sleeve brushed over it.
He gave her his typical sheepish look, but there was a peculiar absentminded reflexiveness to it.
"Start with…well, start with the beginning." And then he was up and off, no doubt in genuine search of Jimmy for extra obituary work.
Watching him go, she was puzzled, as she had been more and more often lately, at the way he hid his burning intelligence behind those coke-bottle lenses and overturned coffee cups. There were some elements, like the tie in the coffee trick he pulled once every two weeks, that seemed to purely amuse him. But there were others, like his willful near-total obliviousness to bullpen one-upsmanship and mutual exploitation, that she found baffling in light of the analytic abilities so patent in his work.
And that can be my investigative piece for tomorrow. Because all of Metropolis will care. She turned back to the second article.
It was his followup work to the week's crisis, on picking up the pieces, a fluff topic he had cheerfully accepted.
He started with Superman giving the press briefing, in his usual simple manner, with an utterly characteristic tribute to the civil servants of Metropolis. "The heroes of this city are its corps of civil engineers, who uncovered the workings of this plan at tremendous personal risk, and pinned down its weakest point. They, and all the civil servants who kept the skeleton services running, are the ones who should be answering your questions. Thank you."
From there he had gone on to the week's war-stories of those very people. And the wives and husbands, parents and children who had followed their jabbering loved ones across the open spaces for days and nights through the deadly broken silence of that week, to keep the more standard city predators at bay.
And he finished with the unlooked-for miracle that had followed the end of the nightmare. The morning after, when those who had gone mad picked themselves up trembling off the streets, not sure how they had gotten there, but all half-remembering the same nightmare, and went home to their families and showers. The moment when Metropolis had begun to heal.
In the dull weariness of that gray morning, looking up across the room at him and Jimmy laughing over something, she found herself smiling.
She had been a devoted and, she admitted, sometimes ruthless servant of truth for all her adult life. She had chased down hypocrisy, exploitation and corruption in its service with a fury so intense it sometimes woke her from sleep, and sometimes disturbed even her.
And she couldn't have made this piece work. Shining quietly throughout it, top to bottom, was Clark's gentle, equally intense love for all manner of truth. Not only for exposes but for backstories, nuances, silent understandings, extenuating circumstances. And imagine if he'd just try for an assignment he didn't have to make worth doing .
Lois circled and annotated a couple of places where he was shy of data. Then she set aside Clark's issue to wrestle with her own, the Man of Steel's enigmatic warning.
Don't go anywhere near them.
She sighed and got up in search of the latest tallies on the casualties.
She stumbled through the rest of that day, half-working on her real projects, circling back to the problem between crises, and trying to keep Clark from beheading himself with the file cabinet.
And finally, when she got home, her head still throbbing, she locked the door behind her, rubbed her eyes, took a deep breath and went to the balcony door.
She found herself hesitating a moment at the threshold, struck by how quickly it had come to feel wrong to step outside. Then she made herself step out and close the doors behind her.
The evening air was cool and smelled cleaner than usual. She leaned on the balcony rail, took a deep breath, and waited.
Then she heard his groundfall behind her, as she had suspected she would.
Superman came up silently beside her at the balcony, his cape lying like heavy velvet in the still air. She looked over at him, thinking of the strength that could bend the course of the planets curled up at rest in those massive arms, always ready in the way eternity was always ready.
Thinking of the fact that two hours and sixty pages into her search, the obvious conclusion had been confirmed. Eighty-two people had, in fact, gone mad in areas where no speaker was in earshot. She had been struck by the image of a hapless commuter turning the corner and running into one of those shambling horrors of a man…humming a seven-note tune.
How many people had turned and hummed that tune to the sisters, husbands, children who tried to follow to care for them?
No wonder Superman had looked shell-shocked.
He folded his arms across his broad chest beside her, looked at her, and waited for her to speak. She tried to keep focused straight ahead, wondering if it would postpone the Superman effect, wondering if it would still affect her at this moment.
"Why didn't you want people to know it was…transmissible?"
Unsurprised, he sighed and looked out over the skyline silently for a moment. "Because I knew by then it was also reversible. Because half of this city is armed, and people would have started sniping the victims from their windows."
And he was, of course, right.
And you were afraid, if you told me, I'd publish it? And would I have?
Instead she asked, "What was it?"
Fixing her gaze ahead, over the streets cutting between the high rises and the many-colored cars crawling along below, she saw him from the corner of her eyes. He looked at her for a long moment.
Finally he said, "I don't understand it completely. It was…an unresolvable tension. An imperative question. And whatever it was, none of them knew the answer. They went mad trying to answer it."
She took a deep breath, and turned and looked at him. "How many of these secrets do you keep?" And do I get to be upset about them?
He smiled briefly, almost helplessly, as if the question itself were funny. Then he looked grave again. "As few as I possibly can. I'm…sorry it makes things harder for you."
What did truth demand, in such a situation?
She was silent. A year ago, she realized, she had been sure what was owed to the world and the people of Metropolis. A year ago she had been confident all secrets were dark ones, and that truth was synonymous with exposure. She thought, irrelevantly, of Clark knocking over his coffee and the gentle brilliance in that aftermath piece.
"Lois…it's probably best I not be here in broad daylight." An escape, or the simple truth. Or both.
"Be safe," she said finally, softly. "Thank you for warning me."
He checked himself, in the act of crouching to take flight, and turned back to look at her. "It really is as few as I can."
Then he was gone.
And so she was in a pensive mood when she came back to her desk at nine that night, after breaking down and napping. She felt much steadier after the nap; unlocking the deserted press room and coming in through the after-hours half-darkness, she felt almost like herself again.
Until she picked up the evening preprint of the next morning's edition from her desk, and saw the front-right corner article, with Clark's idea under Bill Wechsler's byline.
Standing there, staring down at the 64-point headline - "Luthercorp Properties Spared Alone: No Speakers Found on Company Grounds" – weary disgust struck her such a sideblow that the pages rattled in her hand.
Two days ago we weren't sure if we would live or die or go crazy. Who survives something like that and gets right to work stealing stories about it? Who thinks he's in second grade and can get away with this?
From force of habit, she catalogued simultaneously, Luthercorp knew this was coming. They must have bought themselves protection from their underworld contacts…instead of, God forbid, warning the authorities.
Gripping the preprint up to the light and watching it tremble in her fingers, she heard soft footfalls and then smelled Clark's aftershave behind her. He was becoming as bad a workaholic as herself.
Without turning around, barely keeping her voice steady, she said, "I will end him."
"Lois, what are you doing here?" he asked softly. He came around in front of her and leaned back against the desk, facing her.
She turned the preprint around and handed it to him, not trusting herself to speak.
He took it from her fingers and looked down at it, briefly, and then back up, and smiled ruefully at her.
He was, she realized, utterly unsurprised.
Because, no doubt, this wasn't the first time.
She had the sudden heartbreaking conviction that, surrounded though he was by a chief and a host of colleagues who loved him like a wayward, accident-prone little brother, Clark had watched this happen – how many times? - and never said a word.
"Clark," she said, trying for his sake to keep her voice as gentle as she could. She took hold of his big hands where the paper rested. They were warm, and she realized for the first time that the room was a little chilled. "Why didn't you ever tell me? He's finished here. I'll take care of it."
He looked down at their hands, holding his very still, and seemed to gather his strength together. He looked back up at her, his dark eyes grave and wide behind his glasses. "Please, don't. What matters is that the story gets out, right? The truth, not the byline."
"That's drivel, and you know it."
He laughed once, and looked up at her with helpless affection, the article clearly forgotten in an instant. "Don't bottle things up inside all the time, Lois. It's not healthy. Tell me what you really think."
Six months ago, it occurred to her in passing, he would never have made free to tease her. And no one else does now. Not even Perry.
"I think – you're making jokes about this? Is that always how you cope with journalistic rape?"
He blinked at her, surprised, and Lois felt a little ashamed and looked away.
After a moment he said, solemn again, "Does it really seem like such…incarnate evil to you? After everything we went through in the last week, does one guy stealing a story, because he doesn't know what else to do, really remind you of that thing with the fifteen-year-old cheerleader in Shadyside?"
She sighed, remembering that Superman rescue that had come almost too late, and how dismal and withdrawn Clark had been for a week afterwards, as if he couldn't get it out of his head.
"It was a cheap analogy. I'm sorry. About the analogy."
She rubbed her eyes and stepped back, saddened, her heart still pounding from the anger of a moment before. She looked at her closest friend, his long legs folded up in front of him as he sat on the desk with his feet on the swivel chair, troubled not at all by his situation but deeply by her description of it.
Why does he do this? Why is he so indifferent to being dismissed and underestimated, not just by this overgrown middle school bully, but by his friends?
Why does this man, who loves truth and backstory so much, accept sitting in the shadows all the time?
"Clark, why?"
He looked at her and tilted his head. "Why what, exactly?"
She came back and stood in front of him, feeling a little reckless, as if she were back stepping out over that balcony threshold.
"Why do you let this stuff happen? God, no, you invite it. Everyone else can think you don't notice, but I know you do. You know better than this."
Seeing the nonplussed look on his face, she relented a bit. "Look, I'm not upset with you. I just…you know you're worth ten of him. Why do you let this happen to you?"
He was silent for a long moment. "Most of the time, I really don't notice the coffee," he said absentmindedly, as if to himself.
The coffee?
He looked up at her with those dark, expressive eyes searching her face. "Does it really hurt you that much?"
Watching the innocent get trampled in front of me? Or knowing there's any truth at all that goes unexposed?
Or knowing that with all my charging around in the name of truth and the innocent, I can't get anything out of Superman and I failed to protect you?
"Are you so used to it," she said finally, "that it doesn't even hurt you any more?"
As she watched, there was a kaleidoscopic shifting in those eyes, as if, locked unmoving in some subterranean struggle, he finally simply ceased.
Clark sighed and ran a hand through his unruly hair. In a different tone he said, "All right, sweetheart. It's all right. I'm sorry."
He leaned forward and steepled his fingers, eyes fixed on her face.
"I let him take this story," he said gently, "once I realized where it was going. Because I don't want three articles attacking Luthorcorp inside of a month to all carry my byline."
She blinked.
He had been looking in a different direction all along.
It was as if the earth beneath her had suddenly turned lucid, to reveal vast and nameless behemoths gliding along silently that had been there forever, under her feet.
Luthorcorp?
Sweetheart?
"You gave it to him?"
"Well, no, I didn't." He smiled wryly. "But it does work out well this way for both of us." And then he laughed out loud, once, as if he couldn't help it.
He looked, she realized, exactly as if had been holding it back for years.
The other explanation for his amiable tolerance of the way he was treated, she realized belatedly, was that it had nothing to do with either habit or ignorance. That it came from a self-confidence so vast and profound, he had never felt threatened at all.
"Clark, what…what on earth are you playing at?"
He was silent for a long moment. "Well," he said finally, "I didn't realize it bothered you this much."
She waited.
"And Lois, there are things I…like very much about being seen this way." He looked directly at her. "It's so much easier to talk with people."
She thought for a moment, irrelevantly, of her faltering conversations with the Man of Steel, and then of Clark laughing with little Jimmy over the layout. It occurred to her Clark was probably a great deal easier to talk to than she was.
Stay on track.
I don't want three articles attacking Luthorcorp inside of a month to all carry my byline.
"So those are the perks…but your real reason for acting oblivious to office politics is so people will steal your stories, so Luthorcorp doesn't mark you as an enemy? That's not a bit of overkill, for an expose on one irresponsible company?"
He smiled for a moment. Then he looked grave again, for all the world like a small child about to swallow his medicine without a fight. "The…work I'm trying to do is very long-term."
She blinked. "This is still exposing Luthercorp we're talking about?"
"It includes exposing Luthercorp, yes," he said carefully. "There's more there than you think. But Lois…" He spread his hands helplessly. "I can't tell you any more about it."
"Is Perry part of this? Jimmy?"
He looked up at her. "Lois, I'm sorry. I can't."
"And what will they say, if I ask them?"
"Please don't."
So that's a no.
She looked at him in utter confusion, this sweet-hearted man with his disturbing depths. He looked genuinely, disproportionately worried. Why doesn't he want them to even think about this?
And why wouldn't he tell me?
Then an unwelcome thought arose. Exactly how much of his concerns had she been wrong about?
"Clark," she said slowly, "Have I…ever done anything to make you think I might try to take this myself?"
He looked up at her, genuinely startled, and then she saw understanding and pity chase each other over his face. He reached one hand out towards hers where it lay in her lap, and then thought better of it and let it drop.
Instead he leaned down and forward, looking her in the eye. "I could never think that," he said gently. His dark eyes were steady on hers. "Do you think I don't know who's watched over me all this time? Or what it's cost her?"
She dropped her gaze first, to the floor, completely unprepared.
He straightened up. "Lois, it's not mine to tell." He hesitated and then added, carefully, "It…could expose people."
He's protecting sources.
Or something.
A year before she would have pressed him without hesitation, certain he couldn't understand the magnitude of what he was dealing with, certain he would bungle it.
Certain that whatever it was, the world needed Lois Lane to know about it.
She thought of Superman standing in her living room, silently bearing a truth he knew would serve only the devil. And then suddenly, dizzingly, of those addled victims of the music, handing out like candy the most profound of their secrets and their loved ones'.
Had all of them, too, once been sure they could be trusted with the secrets of others?
Lois looked him over there in the half-light. The big blunt-fingered hands spread in front of him, his broad, still shoulders, his dark eyes looking back at her steadily, grave and calm and utterly lucid. It seemed incredible she had once thought him weak.
And what do I do from here? Badger him? Use being upset to try to blackmail him, since it worked so well in pulling him out this far? Poor Clark, with no balcony to escape off.
She sighed, thinking of all she had learned over the last year about truth. About how perhaps it was not after all the lean and hungry god she had made it.
About how perhaps truth too was patient.
So all she said was, "Someday, will you tell me?"
He looked up. His eyes searched her face and she felt, in the afterglow light of his half-revelation, strangely exposed. How much more was he able to read there than she had thought? She looked down, a little flustered.
"If I possibly can, yes, I will."
And that would have to be enough.
He's still liable to get eaten alive.
And I still have to protect him, if I can. And his super-secret project. When he needs it.
"So, Clark," she said finally, "do you know how to hide your IP address when you're browsing internal sites?"
He blinked. Then he looked at her for a long moment, silently, in gratitude and relief.
Then he said, "You can do that? I always just use the public library."
The public library? She rolled her eyes. "Oh, Clark. I mean, I'm sorry, I'll stop doing that. But let me show you." She pushed him gently to one side and scooted up to his terminal.
He turned to look at the screen. He folded his arms across his broad chest, and then, belatedly, he chuckled. "It doesn't bother me, you know."
Yes, and if you've ever fainted in your life, I'm Lex Luthor.
But she just laughed with him. Time enough for that. For now, computer skills.