A/N: This is the action chapter, and far and away the hardest one so far to write. But bear with me; I need the setup. Comments on the flow of the action and the characterization would be tremendous.
The impact was like a canon shot. The steel door doubled over and shrieked out of its floor tracks, as Clark leapt to his feet. It twisted horribly around its last upper corner still lodged in place, hit the ceiling with another clang, and dropped to the floor.
And then, as he braced himself, there was a chitinous scraping, insectile but ponderously heavy, a behemoth scuttling…away.
The doorway was empty.
For a moment, nothing moved, except the door wobbling to a rest on the floor.
Clark started to charge, as the first of the children started to wail.
"Clark!"
He checked himself and looked back at her. She shook her head. "Don't do it. You just know it wants us one at a time."
He smiled ruefully. "If it leaves, and gets airborne, it doesn't need us at all." And then he turned, and his footsteps pounded through the hall out to the factory floor on the other side.
She stared after him a moment with dawning horror, and then scrambled to her feet and yanked at the chain, furiously, futilely. It caught her up short - she couldn't even get in line with the doorway to look down the hall. Good point, Clark. Except the part where you prevent that, singlehandedly.
Jimmy was creeping along the walls toward the doorway, listening, bracing himself, as if he thought he could surprise it. But then, maybe it doesn't know how many of us there are. Maybe he can.
She caught herself still pulling absurdly at the chain, and dropped it. She felt a childish desire to kick the pole.
The scuttling ended abruptly, in silence.
Then Clark's voice rang out from the factory floor. "Stay back! Away from the door!"
Jimmy flattened himself against the wall and glanced back at them; the children in the corner were all out of the direct line. His eyes and Lois' met for a brief moment. Then he poked his head around the doorway.
And she watched him watching, as the hallway broke into a chaos of sounds – legs, or wings, or something else, slamming, scraping, scrabbling along the floor, hitting the walls with hideous force, rubble tumbling down in the wake. Oh, God. No human tissue can take that.
There was a moment of silence, and another series of crashes, more distant. The children howled more intensely with each crash. But something changed in Jimmy's body as he watched.
"Jimmy!" she hissed.
He turned back to her, as the crashes outside ended in silence again, and he mouthed over the wailing, "Superman," before turning back.
Her heart jumped. And then she thought, but how much of him?
"What about Clark?"
Without turning, he shook his head. "I don't see him. He's not in the hall."
Silence fell again outside; she heard a man's voice, and for a dizzying moment, she couldn't tell which one of them it was.
"Go back to your home, if you can. You'll find this world defended. We've faced your people before."
Superman.
If it understood, it made no answer she could recognize. More crashing, more scrabbling, and then another silence, as if they had broken apart again.
"Jimmy! How's he doing? Can you see anything?"
He turned back again. "I think it's…a close match, right now. It keeps breaking free, but he keeps catching it." He hesitated. "I still don't see Clark."
Clark, Lois almost yelled out into the silence, and then caught herself. No telling if he was hiding. Or trying to circle around behind it silently - to do what, to such a creature? Or…not. Don't think about that now. She looked down at the chain in bitter frustration, and swore at it. Under her breath, for the kids' sake.
Jimmy took a deep breath. "I'm going to look for him." Their eyes met for a moment, gravely, and then he slipped out.
"Or maybe you can't go back," came Superman's voice, calm, intense, as if resuming a conversation. "Stand down and stop, and I'll protect you in this world, if I can."
More crashing, on the factory floor, then from beyond one of their side walls. And then there was a final blow that rattled the walls. And then silence.
The kids were wailing unabated. She turned to shush them.
And there behind her, the little girl on the floor was trying to get up on her elbow. Her eyes, fixed on the floor, were open.
Then Jimmy came pounding back into the room, gasping. "They're gone! Through the wall, Lois…they're outside."
She stared back at him, uncomprehending for a moment, while his eyes were drawn past her to the girl. "What about Clark?"
He pulled his eyes back to her and shook his head. "Nowhere. I looked…all over."
There wasn't time to do anything to a body. Oh, God, please, there wasn't.
But can Superman fly?
The little girl raised her head to look up at both of them for a moment, still drawing in breaths far too big, too fast. Then she dropped it again, exhausted. Lois thought, peripherally, what a horrible thing to awaken to.
There was another crash from outside, somewhere near. Their eyes searched the walls and ceiling, futilely, for the next sign of what was happening.
And then her eyes and Jimmy's eyes fell on the steel door, lying on the floor, crumpled from the creature's blow. They looked at each other.
Wordlessly he knelt and wrestled it upright; it was heavy and awkward, and he had to walk it over to her on its corners. Lois knelt and stretched the chain out taut between her arms. He wrapped his arms around it, lifted it a foot off the ground, and dropped it on the chain.
The clang made her jump; it started to topple, and he scrambled to keep it upright. He tipped it and they looked underneath.
Not even dented.
Come on, damn it. She wrapped the chain around her hands on both sides for a grip, and pulled it taut again. He hoisted the door and slammed it down with his own strength behind it. One of the kids whimpered.
Nothing. It gleamed imperviously at them
"That chain," he said, disgusted, "is not normal."
She gave herself one moment to scream inwardly, and then pulled it together. Maybe I should be flattered I got it after all. "Jimmy," she said steadily, "where are all the others?"
He knelt in front of her, one arm bracing the door, and shook his head. "I didn't see anyone. I mean, I didn't look far. But with that thing ready to hatch…and they'd been wrong once already…I wonder if they didn't lose some faith in their dealers."
She smiled grimly.
"Lois," he said after a moment. "I didn't find any…tools."
The little girl coughed aloud. They turned their heads to look. She was sitting up, her arms wrapped around the pole.
"Are you okay, honey?" Lois asked her, absurdly, trying to sound calm. I'm sorry about all the banging, and the chains, and the thing that wants to lay eggs in you.
The girl looked up and fixed her with a strange, steady intensity, something wordlessly adult on her face. Her lips parted.
And then the far wall thundered and shuddered, and a spiderweb of cracks shot out over the face of the concrete. The children shrieked and pressed against the corner wall.
Jimmy yelled, dropped the door, and ran for them. "Come on! Come here! Come on!" They hid their faces, and he grabbed them by scruffs and arms and pulled them across the room toward the door, into the far corner.
The little girl prudently moved to put the pole between her and the wall.
Another crash, and the wall sagged inwards at the impact, rubble tumbled to the floor, and through a head-sized chink in the concrete they saw night.
Less than an hour had passed since the diaphragm went down. But what rules applied to transmitted kryptonite? Could he fly yet? Could he even take this beating?
And Clark should have been back by now.
Jimmy was back up with the steel door, trying to lift it up another hopeless time. She opened her mouth to stop him, but when she saw the look on his face, she closed it, knelt and spread her hands again. They were trembling. Last try, Jimmy.
The door rang on the concrete. The children's wailing increased in intensity.
"Damn it!" Jimmy howled. He lifted it again, slammed it down, put his weight on it, and rocked it back and forth over the chain.
Quite a metal, she thought grudgingly. Wonder if Luthorcorp manufactures this stuff. Okay, enough.
She looked up at him. "Jimmy." He was twisting the door back and forth over the link, with a horrible grating sound. "Jimmy."
He stopped and looked down at her, panting. She shook her head.
He took a breath. He knew what was coming. But he would do it, if she gave him a plan. "You have to go get the G.M.P.D. Now."
"No."
"Yes."
"No."
"Jimmy! They'll cut us free. The sooner you get back…"
"Don't patronize me!" he snapped.
She stared at him in surprise. And then with dawning guilt. She sighed. "Okay. I'm sorry. Just go get them. And we'll do our best here."
He looked wild, defeated, heartbroken, furious, panting down at her. "We'll find another way. There must be something here. It's a damn factory."
Another blow on the outside wall, higher up. Dust and rubble pattered to the ground. That thing's no fool. It knows where we are.
She looked back up at him. "Jimmy."
"Lois, stop it –"
"Jimmy, for the love of God, stop with the macho! This isn't about you."
Unwillingly, guiltily, he tore his eyes over to the kids in the corner.
"Take it like a man and go. Those things had eyes - try to stay under cover. You may have to leave the kids somewhere, to go for help. Underground, maybe. If this is Shadyside, try the public housing off Coburn for a phone. And tell the G.M.P.D., when they open fire, we don't know if…he's bulletproof, just now."
She stopped, at the end of her list, her heart pounding under Jimmy's desolate eyes. The deserted Shadyside factories went on for miles, and they both knew it.
"And Jimmy…if you find Clark…"
If you find Clark, what?
Don't give him more than anyone can handle, sweetheart.
She sighed. "You'll know what to do. You'll know. "
The wall took another blow. Jimmy closed his eyes for a moment. Then he turned and dragged the door to Lois' pole, and leaned it there for support. "Maybe," he said softly, "you can use it as a shield." She nodded.
He bent roughly, clumsily, and kissed her cheek. She smoothed down his cropped hair. Then he broke away, tears shining in his eyes. He hesitated a moment, as if he were searching for words. Then, as if he realized there was no perfect goodbye would make anything all right, he turned away and reached for the kids against the wall.
"Come on, guys. Stay close to me. We're going home. It'll be great. Just stay close – Howie, put your candy bar down and give me your hand. Dawn, you get Howie's other hand. Okay."
He pulled them through the door; he looked back without pausing for a moment and then moved on, and called back over his shoulder, "I'll get them, Lois. They'll be here, in no time."
"I know you will, soldier," she said softly.
Then they were gone.
And Lois turned back to the little girl who had been wordlessly holding the pole, watching everything. She wasn't sure if she meant to comfort her, or question her, or both.
But the child had turned away a moment before, and was watching the cracked far wall intently, as if she knew it was going to –
Implode. The concrete burst inward, dust clouded the air, and then there was a chaos of scrabbling sounds in the room.
Through the dust came a sleet-grey tapering shape, resolving into a mantis head as long as her body, full of mandibles and many-sided eyes, glowing with the milky light of all the eyes across the diaphragm. Out of its tangle of legs beneath its carapace, several lifted, delicately.
As Lois stood frozen, unable to look away, the child got to her feet, holding on to the pole. She stood facing the creature, silent. And it paused in its advance, cocked its head, and regarded her with those hundred-faceted eyes. It chittered at her.
Lois took a deep breath, to yell something to distract it.
And then the child chittered back.
Lois stared at her, incredulous, with that distant but now familiar sense that her paradigms were about to be brutalized yet again.
Then the thing advanced again on the child, its many legs moving up and down like pistonworks. The girl retreated behind her pole, back straight and defiant, chittering still. And then the thing swung its hind section forward beneath it, doubling over, folding impossibly flat. An orifice in its hind tip dilated.
Where the eggs are. Oh, Jimmy, you were right.
And then Superman was there, from behind them, pounding through the hallway door, cape flashing, slamming into the creature with a sickening smack.
It skidded back halfway through the hole in the wall, and scrabbled for purchase on the broken edges for a moment while he tightened his arms around it. Then the wall crumbled and they fell back into the sky, the creature flailing, the pieces of the wall falling close behind.
And as the dust clouds cleared, with the wall ripped away, she saw the city and the clear cool night beyond it for the first time.
They were eight or so stories up, with the lower factory roofs and smokestacks ranged out below them as far as she could see, puddles slicking every surface under the yellow floodlights. And in the moonlight in the air below them she saw Superman and the creature grappling in deadly, titan silence.
Lois's hands were trembling; her mouth was dry and she knew her breathing was ragged. But she stepped around the pole, twisted awkwardly because of the cuffs, and knelt in front of the little girl. Who was most certainly not normal.
Forcing her voice steady, trying to organize her questions by importance in good pressed-for-time investigative style, she said, "What do you know? How powerful is it?"
The child looked at her gravely. And in those blue eyes, she realized for the first time, there was that same milky luminescence that had stared back at her from a compound eye a moment before.
She drew back, her heart pounding in her ears. But the little thing only cocked her head at her and said, sadly, breathlessly, in a voice like any little girl, "It's not only him who gets new power from your sun."
Lois blinked. Oh, God. Oh, no.
The thing's a…super…something.
And this child-creature knows about Superman. Which may be the worse of the two.
The little girl-creature took a deep breath. "It lives…for hours, only. After hatching." She coughed, a deep, racking shudder that doubled her over. "Less here, in this killing air. It won't be able to fly far. It will try for us again."
It occurred to Lois, as all her paradigms cried out for mercy, that those deep and desperate gasps came from lungs meant for another world altogether.
A crack shot through the air; they both jumped and turned to look. Hovering in the air forty feet from the window, the creature was trying frantically to break free of the Man of Steel, who was hanging on by one slick foreleg as it flailed. And then it backwinged, and swung its knife-edge hindsection desperately round, faster than sight, and struck him in the chest.
There was a sickening crack, two unbreakables colliding with inconceivable force. And he lost his grip, and fell, arcing out of her sight.
She closed her eyes and let out a shuddering breath. He might, or might not, be able to take the fall. But for them, it was over.
The thing clutched the edge of the wall and swung itself back inside the room. This time it moved urgently, rapidly, though its legs trembled beneath it, as it swung itself round to position at the girl-child. Its slick ovipositor opened; almost delicately, it positioned itself, and the slim thing shot out like a dart, faster than the eye.
And rebounded, without a scratch, though the child tumbled back flat on the ground.
It's not only him who takes strength from your sun.
The creature scrambled back to all its feet, brooding, heaving, gill-like flaps opening and pumping on its sides.
Which would make me the only one in here who's not invulnerable. For all it matters now.
Evidently coming to the same conclusion, it looked up and cocked its head, and fixed one hundred-sided eye on Lois instead.
She backed behind the pole, at the limits of the chain. She was not going to go down jerking at it frantically, like the monster bait chicks in one of Clark's B movies.
The creature advanced and swiped aside the steel door propped up there, with one swinging leg, like a sheet of paper. It bent on itself horribly again, folded like paper, and positioned. She watched it dilate.
Oh, God, Jimmy, be safe, be all right. Clark, if it got you, I pray it was quick. Superman, I'm sorry. I tried so hard.
Please. Let it be quick.
And then Superman made groundfall between them, and the floor shook beneath him.
The creature checked itself in mid-strike, and fell over itself backwards.
With his broad back to her, his cape brilliant in the bare light, he looked more massive and unmoveable than all the structure round them. The room was suddenly small, and dingy, and very fragile. There was fury in the set of his shoulders, like a wrathful king, as he watched the thing scrabble on the floor.
Apparently, flight was back.
She wanted to laugh with giddy joy, like a small child. Instead she got hold of herself and called out, as the thing scrambled to its feet, "Superman! It's like you, under our sun."
Advancing on it, with his back to her, he stiffened momentarily, and she knew he had heard.
But do I believe her, about the rest of it? And then she realized, thinking of the urgency in those milky eyes, that for the moment, she did.
"She says it's dying," she added, coughing in the concrete dust. "Hours."
Then the thing lunged forward, trying to dodge round him; doubtless wary of trusting his grip on those slick forelegs again, he caught its mandibles in his two hands and wrestled it to the ground.
As it scrabbled on the floor, its head in his grip, as he pinned its carapace between his legs and tangled it in his cape, he looked up at her for a fraction of a second. In that instant she felt his eyes peeling through her skin and flesh, tracing her bones and blood vessels, searching for harm.
How, in light of recent events, did I ever consider his eyes alien?
He turned back and slammed the thing's head to the ground, cracking the concrete beneath it. She heard him mutter, "It hasn't been hours?"
She laughed, grimly, and caught herself on the verge of asking him about Clark as he wrestled with it.
But then the thing curved its hindsection round toward her as he wrestled with its fore, and he swung his head around and blasted his heat vision at it. The air around her crackled and the room shuddered with the energy, and steam hissed out of the cool night air.
And as she pulled back and covered her ears, she thought, so that's back, too, and despite everything, she smiled.In all the fears of kryptonite and madness for the last two days, she had almost lost track of the reason the skies of Metropolis were a place of awe. She flashed absurdly, for a moment, to Clark's kitchen, and Superman's hand on her wrist, holding her back from the cooking pot.
The thing shuddered and retracted its ovipositor, twisting around impossibly to protect it, while its carapace hissed with heat.
So, do you like our world now? Do you?
I know, Lucy. I'm sorry. Once it's dead, I promise not to judge it.
And then it was too hot, and she buried her head in her arms, and was about to call out to him, to stop before her clothes caught a spark. He must have had the same thought. The crackling stopped in abrupt silence, and she opened her eyes as he rocketed into the thing again, knocking it back out through the fallen wall.
And they were back in the sky.
But it was different now. He didn't need to keep his grip. He didn't need to be so cautious. He only needed to keep it away from them. He knew, and the creature knew. And they broke apart in midair and regarded each other in silence, feeling the balance of power shifting around them.
It occurred to her, in that razor's edge near-stillness, that she had seen the Man of Steel many times in action, but never in battle.
She had seen him douse fires, break walls, carry victims, and freeze floods. He had taken bullets and bomb blasts for her. But all of those things were, to him, like opening a jar or thumbing a cigarette lighter. He had done them with quiet matter-of-factness, like a man opening a door for a stranger whose hands happened to be full. He had made it look almost ordinary.
But there, as she watched, the power she had always seen curled up at rest and ready ceased to wait.
Welcome, Superman. I was hoping you would come.
The crack of their collision was like thunder. The air crackled with his heat, as the thing covered its eyes and blocked with its body. Then he was too fast to see, and then it was, too, all impact and velocity and fury, only visible in the strobe-light snapshots when they broke apart.
It was like a dream, in a Sisyphean hell. Again and again the creature made a rush, for their room - or now, apparently rethinking its fixation on the bird in the hand, for the open air. Again and again, he knocked it off course into the walls below, or flung it back against another building. She traced their trail by the destruction. Pieces of smokestack rained down from above, the factory walls became riddled with holes, they punched through the roofs of other buildings and wrestled out of sight in the depths of other factory floors.
They wrestled on the floor above her, and the ceiling spiderwebbed with cracks. And then they were off again.
Then Lois heard the child-creature coughing beside her, and turned back with a pang of guilty wariness. She had almost forgotten it was there. She looked in its milky eyes, wondering what its role was and what pity she should feel. Finally she said, "This air…is it killing you?"
The little thing looked up at her gravely. "Not quickly." She cocked her head and glanced outside at the crumbling factory district. "This is a strange world, Lois Lane."
She leaned forward and fixed it with her eyes. "Who are you?"
The little creature looked of all things, embarrassed. Then she sighed, again, like an unfamiliar gesture. "Fifth Lateral Kingdom Police Department." The child shook her head, oddly stiff. "They caught me so easily, when I came through. I should have…called backup." Then those sentences were too much for her, and she leaned against the pole, gasping again.
Of course.
Lois sighed. It was time to let her tired paradigms go altogether.
She opened her mouth, to ask whatever the appropriate follow-up question to that might be. Why didn't you speak before? Is your backup coming to save you? How about, 'any idea how Clark's doing?'
As if it read her mind, the little thing got out, "His power, regrowing, gave me hope. Before that, we were all of us dead already."
So not worth talking to.
And people think I'm harsh.
"What else can you see? Or sense? What about Clark?"
The little thing looked at her, and then out at the combatants, puzzled. "I don't understand. I see what you see."
Lois followed her eyes, and saw them crash together once more, over the dawn skyline.
But it was changing. The strength that could change the course of planets was now just absorbing one blow after another, unflinching and bottomless. As the thing's rushes grew shorter and less steady, Superman had stopped making his own charges and blasts of heat. He just blocked it, took its force against his chest like a rock breaking a wave, and thrust it back again. And again.
So implacable. And still so young.
How many times had he stood in a breach between worlds, blocking it with his body, and told no one? Like writing an article for someone else's byline.
Clark, I know why you love him. He's a lot like you, after all.
The thing rushed once more, and he blocked it. And this time, it crumpled against him.
His arms reached out around and clasped it, almost gently. Like a faithful young angel of death, discharging his duty, no more and no less, he held it still. He watched the legs shudder and the gill folds shutter open and closed, as the orange dazzle of the sun broke over the skyline.
When it stopped, she realized she had stopped breathing, too.
Superman drifted to the ground to lay it down, eight stories below.
And she thought again, Clark, and finally felt a foretaste of the cold desolation that might be coming.
But there wasn't time for that yet. She turned to the little girl, who was nodding with satisfaction, panting as hard as if she had done it herself. Perhaps what she had done was no less difficult.
"What happens now?"
The little thing looked up at her. Its luminescent eyes were strange, alien, but not unreadable after all. The expression was sorrow, and relief, and pity.
"Raveners are not permitted in this world. They know that well. The punishment will be terrible." She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked up at her again. "For you, there will be no more…diaphragms. No more speakers."
Footsteps pounded up the factory floor. G.M.P.D.? Marshall and his men, back for the pieces? Lois closed her eyes a moment and prepared herself to turn. The little girl looked behind her and then back at her, coughed, and said clinically, "And I think you'll cry, now."
If it's Marshall or his man, I may have to get him close, try to strangle him with the chain.
Sorry, Lucy. But I think He might understand.
She turned.
And there was Clark, pounding through the doorway, his jacket ripped, the dawn glinting through the shattered wall on his broken glasses.
She shook her head, and opened her eyes again. He was still there, staring at her in the doorway, looking her over, alive and breathing. More wonderful than daylight, or freedom.
As she felt just the dawning foretaste of a wild, reckless joy, Clark crossed with fluid, deadly grace past her to the child. Placing his body between it and Lois, he knelt and fixed it with his eyes. In a deadly quiet voice, he said, "What are you? What do you want here?"
Lois dropped to a sit and leaned forward on her arm against the pole. "Why, Clark," she said weakly, hearing a strange laugh from her own throat, "she's F.L.K.P.D."
He looked back at her. God, he has beautiful eyes.
Then the child, still holding onto the pole, cocked her head at him. "Are you the Lord Protector of this world?"
Lois looked back up, ready for more madness. Clark's eyes widened behind his broken glasses. He grew very still, as he always did when he was nervous, and his every move and breath was as new and precious as the first dawn. The world's mad, all the worlds are mad. But he's alive.
"Here, in this moment," he said finally, slowly, "I speak for this world."
She did make a mental note to talk to him later, about delusions of grandeur.
"What is it you want?" he asked softly.
The child let go of the pole, gingerly; she wobbled a bit but kept her balance.
And then she sank on one knee and bowed her head before him. "Your forgiveness." She coughed and gasped again. "This world should not have been breached for many years. And never like this." She looked up at him, shamefaced. "Not all of it…is like this." And then her legs trembled and she doubled with another coughing fit.
Clark tilted his head; his one hand reached out and hovered halfway between them. "You're not well. What do you need?"
She looked at him, with wonder in those opalescent eyes. "Are there many others like you, here?" Her breathing was slowing now, wearing out, and she could only get a few words out between breaths.
He grew very still again. "There are as many as there need to be."
The child-creature laughed ruefully, wearily. "Very good. Not to trust too easily, with a strange world."
This world alone is too big. One room, my bedroom, is about the right size.
And Clark, by the way, what's she talking about?
The little thing looked back up at them again. "There is nothing here like our air. But eggs hatched in a host from this world…they could have breathed this as their own. And all your world could not have stood against them." That wore her out completely, and her chest stopped heaving for a moment. Lois and Clark glanced at each other. And then she sucked another breath in.
She looked at Clark. "There should be no more breaches while you live. Though I know, now, you'll be watching."
Then she looked at Lois. "And it was you who sealed it. Well done."
And then something in the way she said it hit her. Lois looked at her more closely. "Wait a minute. Aren't they going to…take you home?"
The little thing looked at her, baffled. "No more breaches."
She looked back and forth at their newly horrified expressions. "Even if we were so…cavalier, what you burned took centuries to build. It's not so easy."
Which explains why no backup ever came.
Finally, looking at their faces, she smiled a little and said, "It's not what it looks like."
And her eyes flared and dimmed and she curled into a fetal position, and dropped on her side, and stopped gasping.
Just as that tired doorway finally cracked and crumbled, and the ceiling above, laced with cracks, began to fall in.
Clark stumbled over to Lois, pressing her down, shielding her with his body as one thing tumbled after another, after another. She buried her head in his chest, under his jacket, seeing those little eyes flare and fade again, and she wished dimly that it would just become clear, already, exactly how they were supposed to die.
And half the buildings in Shadyside are crumbling now, too. God only knows if Superman will make it back in time.
And then there was silence. He let her up, one hand still over her head. They looked around, at the obliterated doorway and the ominous sagging of the ceiling. The new spiderweb of hairline cracks encompassed her pole.
Lois pressed her forehead into his warm chest for a moment, getting control of her breathing. She gave herself a moment to feel his arms around her, the rise and fall of his chest, his hands smoothing her hair.
Then she took a deep breath and pulled back and looked at him. There was no time for probing the child-creature's strange questions, his strange replies or her strange not-quite-death. She fixed him in her mind instead - his dark eyes, those ridiculous glasses, the big gentle hands knocking over coffee cups and unwrapping candy bars and typing in-depth four-parters about mercy and justice.
"Clark," she said softly, "You have to go. Half of Shadyside's falling down. He may not be back in time. Try to dig out, before it all comes down."
He took her cheeks between his palms, his black hair moving a bit with the dawn breeze, the crack of sunlight over the skyline falling in his dark eyes as they searched her face. She noticed, irrelevantly, that when the sun hit his eyes and lit up their depths, he didn't blink at all.
"Lois," he said mildly, his voice trembling with weariness, "All those buildings are vacant. Do you ever let guys who want to rescue you stick around?"
Lois smiled a little, and leaned into his hands. There was more to say, but he knew it already. And all his willful optimism would change nothing. And he must know that, too.
She said quietly, "Please. I already lost you twice, this week alone." She tried to laugh a little, but it came out all wrong. She held up her wrists, the chains clinking. "We took on two dimensions, but I still can't do a thing about these."
He took her little hands in his big ones and turned them over, palms up. He looked her over with his old bottomless, searching gaze.
And she realized that he was in fact going to take this of all moments, and this of all places, to finally make his own confession. All her agonizing over it seemed so laughable now, like a child's nightmares in the light of day. Though he'd better, for the love of God, talk quickly.
Her eyes were blurring with tears, for him, for her, but her heart was weirdly calm. She was finally, utterly, certain that in this world of invulnerable parasite wasps, breaches between dimensions, and otherworld policemen struck down in the line of duty, there was nothing he could say that would astonish her.
"You don't have to, honey," he said gently, looking down at her hands. "You don't have to." And then, softly, looking back up at her, "Lois Lane, forgive me. For I've sinned against you time and again."
And he took the cuffs between thumb and forefinger and peeled them apart, like paper.