A/N: This one is long! I'm taking a step or too back, this chapter begins where Chapter 2 left off and joins up with where 3 left off toward the end. Got to explain what Lois did the day she went to get her car!! Feedback is always appreciated!

Multiverse

5: Lois.

Lois didn't say much as Chloe drove her home from the hospital. She was too busy thinking. She knew she had hit something. She was grateful that the cops and doctors didn't think she hit the kid, but she knew deep down differently. It wasn't her fault, either. The kid had darted out in front of her, not the other way around. She was sober and alert, well mostly alert, and she had stopped to render aid. She knew blaming herself wasn't going to do anyone any good.

But even, with that small bit of guilt aside, she wasn't thinking about how she had hit the kid because she was worried or had some sort of complex over it. It was because the doctors said she didn't hit him.

She couldn't sleep all night. How could she have not hit him? No, she knew she did, just somehow the kid wasn't injured by her car. She supposed it might have been like when you hear about drunks getting into car wrecks but not being injured because their bodies were so relaxed by the alcohol that they crumpled like rag dolls instead of tensing up and putting their arms in front of them. Maybe the kid was so worn out by whatever fight he had gotten into that he was punch-drunk?

There was something else, however. The kid looked a lot like Clark. Like a brother, or something. What were the odds that she'd hit someone who looked just like someone she knew? Someone that she knew didn't have a brother that he knew about? Someone that she had met in a cornfield driving late at night in the first place.

At least the kid had on more clothes than Clark had.

Maybe Clark did have a younger brother that he didn't know about. He was adopted, after all, and he didn't know very much about his biological parents except that they were dead. He'd been adopted when he was a toddler, so maybe his bio-parents had another kid, died, put the two of them up for adoption and they got separated. That kind of thing happened all the time.

Lois' imagination got the better of her as she tried to sleep that night, and by the time she woke up in the morning, she'd concocted a whole back story for the kid: that he'd been adopted by some bad family or put into foster care and bumped from family to family. That at some point, he'd been placed with a particularly bad or abusive family. That he'd found he had an older brother living in Kansas and, after a particularly bad beating, decided to run away and find said brother. One could never say Lois' imagination was lacking.

The next morning, she awoke to only a mild headache and her cousin Chloe asleep on the couch.

Chloe kept giving Lois worried looks as they got ready to retrieve Lois' car. "Lois, are you alright? You're being uncharacteristically quiet…"

"Do you think Clark could have a biological little brother out there somewhere?" Lois looked up from tying her shoe.

Chloe had gotten that look on her face when she knew more than she was saying. "Er… well, no." Lois gave her a cutting look to call her bluff, "No, I mean it. He's… uhm… he's found some of his biological parents things and they never mentioned him having any siblings or other family alive."

Lois knew Chloe knew more than that. Chloe and Clark had been friends since elementary school. She had to know more. Lois mentally ticked this conversation into the list she kept of mysteries surrounding the Kents. "Alright… Don't tell me what you know then. Let's just go get a coffee and a danish and go find my car."

Together they headed down into the Talon. After the ordeal the night before, Lois and Chloe had slept in a little, so the morning pre-school rush was already long gone. As they stood at the counter waiting for their coffees, a gust of wintry December wind drew their attention to the coffee shop door.

Lana Lang had just stepped in. Lois frowned slightly. She didn't exactly like Lana for several reasons: first, she was dating Lex Luthor, which meant she either had no taste or was an idiot. Second, she gave off a complete 'drama queen' vibe. So what if Smallville kept some secrets from her; Lois seriously doubted that the secret was that Clark was cheating on Lana or anything like that. Some secrets were worth keeping. If they were married, then yeah, maybe Lois could see getting upset, but they were just dating. Besides, the worst possible secret that Lois could imagine Clark keeping was that he had cheated on a 6th grade algebra exam or he was a closet Enya fan. Lamentable, yes, but forgivable.

Lastly, Lana was constantly dumping on, and in turn worrying and depressing Chloe. From what Lois had seen over the past two and a half years, Lana used Chloe as an unloading zone for all her teenage angst (which she apparently had in spades) but wasn't so keen on reciprocating. Lois might be able to deal with Lana's prima donna nature or her bad choice in current boyfriends, but certainly not Chloe-Abuse.

Lois put on her best 'no, I really am happy to see you' face as Lana approached the counter.

"Lana!" Chloe smiled, "I haven't heard from you in a while.. Not since that whole… mess week before last." It was amazing to Lois how a story about the abduction of a billionaire into an alternate frequency that sounded as if it came strait out of a bad science fiction fanzine could be boiled down to a 'mess'. "How is everything?"

"Oh…Everything's fine…" Lana nodded and smiled like she didn't really mean it, "What are you doing in Smallville? Shouldn't you be at work?"

"Chlo' is just helping me out with some car troubles," Lois said before Chloe had a chance to respond.

"Are you sure everything's ok?" Chloe asked again. Lois quirked her mouth some, I Lana blew you off when you asked the first time, Chloe /I

"Yeah… Lex and I have been taking some time to rebuild things between us." Lana actually looked happy there, her hand reaching up to fondle a chain around her neck.

"He knows now, right?" Chloe had lowered her voice.

"Yes, he does. He's happy. We both are." Lana smiled again. Lois fought the urge to gag. How anyone could be happy with that slimy snake Lex Luthor, she had no idea. Lois turned to grab her and Chloe's now ready drinks and caught a glint of something sparkly on the chain around Lana's neck.

A ring. A diamond ring. A diamond ring with a rock the size of Gibraltar. Luthor had proposed? And Lana had accepted? She really I did /I have no sense. Lois threw her cousin a look and saw that Chloe had spotted the ring too. Was Lana deliberately telegraphing the ring's presence or was she just that obvious? Chloe opened her mouth to say something, but Lois interrupted her. If Lana wanted the attention, there was no way in hell Lois was going to give it to her.

"Well, here are our coffee's. We best be on our way, I don't want my car to disappear. Come on, Chloe." Lois juggled the hot drinks expertly and grabbed her cousin's wrist, dragging her toward the door. "It was nice to see you, Lana. We should totally get together and go have pedicures done or something. Soon! Bye!"

Once they were outside, Chloe pulled her arm free and turned angrily on Lois, "That was so unbelievably rude, Lois!"

"Get over it, like she's never blown you off before. Did you see the size of that rock? Either Luthor proposed to her or she's devised a way to grow her own diamonds." Lois got into Chloe's warm car. "She didn't come right out and say it which meant she was fishing for a compliment, and I was not about to give her the satisfaction."

"Lana is my friend, Chloe. Maybe she didn't say anything because she wants to keep it a secret." Chloe turned on the car, still giving Lois cross looks.

"I doubt it. If she wanted it to be a secret she wouldn't have been playing with the ring the whole time we were talking to her. She wanted you to ask her about it so she could feel special and important." Lois sipped her coffee, ignoring the look Chloe was giving her, "Let's just go get my car, ok?"

Chloe took the trip out to the wreck site a little faster than normal. Lois could deal with a huffy Chloe, only because Lois knew she was right, and that Chloe probably knew it too. However, any animosity was forgotten once they got to Lois car.

Lois had still been a while outside of Smallville when the wreck happened, so by the time they reached the car, the cops had already been over the scene, evidence of their investigation still littered the road, but they were long gone. Lois' car was still parked in the same ditch she had left it in. Lois made a beeline for the front end of the vehicle. This was what she'd been wanting to see all night. If she had hit the kid, there would be a dent or a scuff or something.

Not that she felt guilty if she had hit him.

"Chloe…. Please tell me I'm not seeing what I'm seeing…" On the hood of Lois' car, just above the passenger side headlight was a handprint. Lois tentatively set her hand down on the print. It was more than just a handprint, it was an impression. Her hand sunk into the dent. The hand was larger than her own and the impression was about an inch deep.

"Oh my god… How?" Chloe asked. She moved her hand under the hood and popped the latch, lifting the metal up. They could clearly see the hand print from the inside, the metal and fiberglass bent in perfectly outlining it.

"If the kid caused that… I would have shattered every bone in his hand and arm." Lois wasn't panicking. Lois wasn't panicking. Lois wasn't panicking.

"But the doctors said he didn't have any broken bones…" Chloe said, and Lois could see the gears turning in her head. "Look… why don't we head over to the Kent's place… let Mrs Kent know you're doing ok and see if maybe they've heard anything else about the boy."

Lois wasn't an idiot. She knew what Chloe really meant was that she wanted to ask Clark his opinion on the hand print. Chloe was always asking Clark his opinion when the really weird things happened, which was odd, because it was Chloe who had the massive Wall-O-Weird, not Clark. Lois let it slide, though. One mystery at a time.

Lois followed Chloe to the Kent farm. Together they headed inside through the kitchen door, as was their custom, to find a very relieved looking Martha Kent and a somewhat befuddled (His usual expression, Lois though) and serious looking Clark.

"Hello," Chloe began, "Have you heard anything else about the boy?"

Martha and Clark exchanged significant looks before Martha spoke, "He disappeared last night. The duty nurse said she heard a shout and went to check on him, but the window was busted open and the boy was nowhere to be found."

"What, you mean he jumped? Committed suicide?! After all the hassle I went through to save him?" Lois exclaimed, and this time it was Clark and Chloe with the significant looks.

"There wasn't a body… no trace of him…" Clark said.

Lois thought about that for a second, "You don't think that he's one of those meteor freaks, do you? I mean it wouldn't be the first time someone in Smallville has had the ability to vanish or jump off buildings and live. Not to mention the handprint on my car."

"Hand print?" Martha asked.

Chloe nodded, "There's an inch deep dent in the hood of Lois' car in the shape of a hand… Like it was memory foam and not fiberglass."

There was a sudden thump at the foot of the stairs. Lois and the others turned to look at the source of the noise, only to find the kid of all people picking himself up from a stumble. He was dressed in what looked like Clark's clothing, though it was a little big for him.

"Hey, what's up? Where's Cassie? Did everyone make it out of the fight? Did Nightwing? Cause it was pretty hairy there and he's pretty bad-ass but he doesn't have superpowers…" He trailed off as he saw the group. He looked about as confused as Lois felt, and maybe a little more so. What the heck kind of a name was 'Nightwing'?

"Uhm… Don't think I'm in Kansas anymore…" the boy slumped to the ground in a dead faint.

The room was quiet for a second, and it was Lois that broke the tension, "What in the world?" She moved over to the boy, surprised to find a firm hand holding her back. She looked from Clark's hand on her shoulder up to his worried face. "What?"

"He could be dangerous…" Clark said a bit lamely, though in his eyes he looked like he thought it was true.

"Please…" Lois brushed Clark's hand away, "He's unconscious. I'm just going to move him." She walked over and hoisted the boy up. He seemed heavier today then he did last night. Lois supposed it was the lack of adrenaline. "A little help?"

Clark walked over and helped Lois move the kid onto the couch.

"Look… His face is completely healed." Lois said, "He's defiantly not normal. I wonder what he's doing here…" An entirely new mystery, damn it.

"Chloe, Lois… why don't you head outside…" Clark began.

Lois ignored him and gently started smacking the boy's face in an attempt to wake him. "Common, Kid. Snap out of it."

The kid stirred, "Been a long time since anyone's called me Kid…" He opened one blue green eye and looked up at Lois. My, but he was cute…

He suddenly snapped to alertness, pulling away. "Oh no…"

"Hey, calm down there, Kid…" Lois said, putting a hand firmly on the boy's shoulder. "No one is going to hurt you, we just want to know what you're doing here."

He looked wildly around the room for a second, Lois could see his lips moving soundlessly, listing off 'Lois, Clark, Aunt Martha… Minus fifteen…'. Suddenly, Lois hand flew back off the kid, "I gotta get out of here… Time's messed up or something…" He stood faster than Lois thought anyone could, and the movement made her fall gracelessly back onto the ground. Suddenly, he was gone.

"I'll go find him." Clark said, and before Lois could even look back at him, he was out the door in a blue plaid blur.

Lois fish mouthed and turned to look at Chloe and Martha, "What in the blue blazes was that about?!"