A.N.: Thanks for the reviews. The first chapter and this one were written late last year so yeah. If I get my essay done this week then I'll update this again and my other fic as well. Enjoy! (Oh and her name isn't really that important … I was just struggling with names)

CHAPTER TWO

He was going to kill her. At first he thought she was running late, as per usual, but after the usual amount of time had passed, when she'd normally appear, apologetic but not guilty, he was beginning to worry. He worried a lot about her and she enjoyed it. She kept getting herself into trouble. Not big trouble, little trouble. In school she made it her mission to bring down the school bully. Wanting to catch him in action, on camera before presenting the evidence to the reigning school authorities. This resulted in many sticky situations… not for her but for the bully and with that the bully swearing vengeance towards her. She had laughed it off but he had remembered and then worried accordingly. He'd often complain about her constantly getting into trouble. But his dad would just laugh… finding it extremely funny that he was with someone that was so much like his mother. And then his mother would make a joke about him suffering from some Oedipal complex. The girl drove him crazy. But he wouldn't have it any other way. Sometimes it was really annoying to be in love with her but some things were worth it.

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She felt like she was five years old being interrogated like this but in the nicest way possible so they didn't offend her. She couldn't believe it. Lois Lane and Clark Kent were sitting right in front of her, around the same age as she was, having no idea who they were going to turn out to be. She wondered how much she could tell them. 'Zero,' she thought to herself. There was a future at stake. 'No pressure,' she told herself. She wondered the outcome of this… the consequences. Her father always warned her about time travel. But still he built the damn machine. Just in case, he said. All she had to do was hide out somewhere until they find her. They'd fix the time machine… a necessary fatality, then come and get her and pretend like the whole thing never happened. Although, had she not gone through there was the possibility of something worse happening. She sighed and appeased herself with that thought amidst the penetrating stares of the pair in front of her.

"Do you do this to every stranger who comes to town?" she asked. "Can't you just let it go, or must you be suspicious of everyone?"

The pair exchanged glances.

"You show up in the caves … na… na…." Clark stumbled on the words, bringing a wry grin to Lois's face.

"The word is naked, Kent. Why you still get embarrassed by it is beyond me... I've seen you naked, you've seen Lana naked … well, Lana's never seen me naked … at least not to my knowledge," Lois quipped.

Clark rolled his eyes at her. This was a serious situation and she was making light of it.

"You've seen Clark naked?" the girl asked. Not that this was a surprise considering the future but in her research she hadn't come across that, at least not this early in their relationship. "How did that happen?"

"We don't need to get into that right now…" Clark started, trying to cover his discomfort over the choice of topic.

Lois on the other hand was ready and willing to answer the question. "I was driving along the long and winding roads of this fair town when there's this flash of lightning and I swerve right into a cornfield. When I got out of the car I saw Mr Terminator over here lying stark naked on the ground. And then he stood up… and that's when Clark Jr and I first met," she recited with a smile on her face before adding, "Not that Clark Jr and I will ever meet again."

This made Clark's face turn a deeper shade of red and the girl just sat there bewildered. 'Well, that's something I didn't know. I wonder if he knew how they first met?'

Clark cleared his throat in attempt to draw attention back to the problem at hand.

"Did you want a cough drop, Smallville?" Lois inquired.

Clark ignored this and turned to the girl. "Back to what I was saying … you show up in the caves … naked … you won't tell us your name but you know mine and just then you decided to hop, jump and skip it out of town."

"Right. And you just couldn't let it go," the girl commented. 'Always the boy scout,' she thought in her head.

"Look, things that happen in those caves aren't normal," he said slowly.

"And Smallville over here likes to take an interest in those caves for some reason," Lois added. "So, it's no surprise he's a tad intrigued by you."

"So, I'm Clark Kent, this is Lois Lane and you are…"

The girl squirmed in her seat. She couldn't give her real name... lots of things would be messed up. Maybe she could. Maybe when they're supposed to meet her in the future they'll realise to keep their traps shut so that things would go the right way… unless she had altered things already. 'Damn, time travel sucks,' she thought to herself. 'Think of a name… any name… any name that is so not close… not remotely close to your own name… think…' she thought.

"Clark, I think she's trying to lie to us," Lois observed, noting the look of deep concentration on the girl's face.

She sighed. "Look, my name isn't important right now. You could call me Teapot, that's how not important it is."

"Well, Teapot it is," Lois declared. "I guess since we named her we have to keep her now."

"This isn't like Shelby… she's not a stray," Clark argued. "You're not are you?"

"Actually, Shelby wasn't a stray he was a lab dog. So, technically he belonged to someone, kinda, so discounting him from the stray category."

Clark was about to respond to Lois but then it realised it wasn't Lois who answered. Both Lois and Clark turned to the girl, who had her hand clasped over her mouth, eyes closed, and Clark could hear her muttering.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid," she muttered, what she thought was inaudibly, then she gasped looked up at Clark and became silent.

"How did you…?" Lois began to ask. "We didn't even tell Chloe about our adventure over super dog."

"Like I said to Clark, I'm not from around here."

"Well, T.P., why don't you tell us where you're from," Lois said.

'T.P.' cringed at her new moniker but she would only have to live with it temporarily.

"I know you get a lot of strange stuff happening in Smallville. Meteor freaks and … meteor freaks. But I don't think you've had a time traveller come through yet," she said cautiously, her eyes focused on their faces, trying to gauge their reactions.

"And what, you're this time traveller?" Clark asked.

"Chloe's going to have a field day with this," Lois stated, believing her instantly.

"You believe her?"

"She's got an honest face. So, yeah I believe her," Lois replied confidently.

She smirked, 'Well, isn't this ironic.' She had definitely had plenty to tell him when she got home.

"How did you get here then?" Clark asked.

"A time machine, obviously," she stated.

Lois let out a small giggle while Clark did not look amused.

"I had access to a time machine. I wasn't supposed to go through but there were some… extenuating circumstances and I kinda went through. I could have come out anywhere, I suppose but I came out of the caves. My dad said something about the machine recognising an internal inclination that would take you where you want to go… if things went wrong…" she trailed off.

"Did things go wrong?" Clark asked softly, seeing the girl slumped over half defeated and half defiant.

"I kinda broke it. Before I got in," she said. "Some bad people were going to use it and I was right near it. I knew they would have killed me or something equally horrible if I destroyed it and then had nowhere to run. So, I took my chances. I'd rather me go through rather than them."

"Even if you had no way to return?" Lois asked.

The girl smiled sadly. "Some things are worth it."