I know the concept of a sequel is a long way off -- I'll be honest, this story is 42 chapters and an epilogue -- but I finally got back into the groove of writing the sequel, so I'm proud of myself.
All feedback is appreciated (except for passive-aggressive comments about how you like Superman/Wonder Woman more. Don't do that. I blatantly stated my preference for Clark/Lois weeks ago.)
Chapter Nine: Out Of the Blue
The moon didn't rise until half-past midnight, a hazy silver glow behind the clouds. It added only a little light to the panorama of the Hell's Gate docks and jarringly, there was tiny flakes of snow floating out of the sky.
Lois and Clark were on a stake-out.
They had piping hot thermoses of coffee and bakery cookies and passed the time with some little racing game that you could play on your phone and against the people on your contact list. It was one of those little eight-bit style games from the eighties that beeped and booped cutely and reminded Clark of some of the games in Smallville's still-functioning arcade.
This was probably the strangest thing Clark had done since he had arrived in Metropolis. Although, since he had come to the city a little less than a week ago, there wasn't much to compare it to. Nonetheless, this wasn't how he had imagined closing out his first week in the big city.
Lois had spent the entirety of Friday afternoon pulling some strings with her various connections to get information on Sofia Gigante's movements. Where Lois was even getting this information was a mystery Clark didn't want to solve, but it had led them to pier twenty-eight on the Hell's Gate Island dockyard. Gigante was supposed to use that one a lot and the word on the pipeline was that she was expecting something to arrive tonight at some time past midnight.
"Do you do this a lot, Ms. Lane?" Clark wondered, watching his tiny blue car veer off onto the grassy median after Lois sent her little red car smashing into it.
"What, kick your ass? Seems to be happening a lot right now if you ask me." Lois said, zooming her eight-bit car towards the finish line for the victory lap. "Or do you mean the stake-outs?"
"Yeah. Do you do this a lot? You seem to have a system."
Lois shrugged. "Well, I won't lie." she said. "It's usually more comfortable in the summer, though, and I'm playing Tetris, not kicking your ass. God, you suck at this."
"You keep ramming me off the road." Clark pointed out, while his little car burst into pixelated flames.
"You should see me play Mario Kart."
Clark made a mental note to avoid playing games with this woman in the future unless he felt up to the challenge. Lois seemed like the very person who could take the Rainbow Road and win that course too.
Instead of challenging him to another round of pixelated vehicular violence, Lois lowered her phone and gave him a concerned glance.
"You still okay with this, Smallville?" she wondered. "I mean, this isn't offending your sensibilities? I know we had to climb over the fence and then pick the lock on the warehouse door..."
"No, it's not offending me. My sensibilities aren't that delicate." Clark assured her. They had taken up a position on the roof of a storage warehouse that overlooked pier twenty-eight. There had been some minor breaking and entering to get this far. "I just don't want to get arrested. Not for something like this."
"Ah, you're a 'go big or go home' sort of man. I can respect that." Lois said, oblivious to his feeble sputter when he attempted to correct her. "But don't worry. Getting arrested is every reporter's rite of passage."
"Wait, I'm not supposed to worry over that?"
"Absolutely not. You wouldn't be in lock-up for more than twelve hours anyways. The police can't figure out how to enforce the trespassing laws in regards to public buildings and it's badly worded anyways. As long as you don't steal or vandalize or otherwise break in with malicious intent, they can't charge with any actual crime."
"I don't want to be arrested at all." Clark stated.
Lois grinned. "That's not what I heard from you!" she sing-songed. She patted his knee. "Y'know, I think I'm starting to get you figured out, Smallville. You like to pretend you're not adventurous or interesting, but the reality of it is that you probably have a record that's as colorful as mine."
Clark frowned. Lois had told him almost nothing about her teenage and college years, but she had implied her record was a Leonid Afremov painting for how vibrant it was. He didn't want to guess at even a quarter of the things she had gotten up to, but he knew that his record didn't come anywhere near to matching the scale.
Smallville had the footprint of a large town, but it was still very much a small town at heart. They had the coffee shop and the ice cream parlor and the one of the last operating drive-in theaters in the Midwest, but the exciting things were spaced decades apart. Smallville was low-key and slow-paced and that was the way everyone liked it.
"There wasn't much to get up to in Smallville, Ms. Lane." he said.
Lois canted an eyebrow. "Outside of meteor showers and doomsday cults, you mean."
"Those were one-offs that happened to occur at the same time. It's not like that all the time." Clark told her. "You probably would have died of boredom if you had to spend more than a week there."
"You sound so sure of that." Lois commented. But he was probably right. Small towns and open fields just weren't her jam. "No horror stories?"
"'Fraid not." Clark shook his head. "Like I said, there wasn't much me and my friends could get up to."
"I can imagine. So what are your friends doing now?" Lois asked. When Clark hesitated to answer, she added: "C'mon, throw me a bone here, hayseed. We barely know each other and we're working in the same office."
Clark was tempted to point out that she hadn't told him much about herself either, but he was starting to get Lois figured out too. She didn't volunteer personal information beyond vague comments about what she may or may not have gotten up to during her apparently wild teenage years. Aside from a military upbringing, a German background, and an army general for a father, Clark knew next to nothing significant about Lois.
"What do you want to know?" he asked.
Lois made a thoughtful hum. "Friends are always a good place to start."
"Lana Lang and Pete Ross." Clark started. "I don't actually remember meeting Pete. His mom was the judge overseeing my adoption, so I guess Pete and I just clicked as much as a pair of one-year olds could."
"Yeah, I hear diaper rash is really a thing to bond over." Lois said dryly.
Clark scowled at her. "We met Lana in first grade. We made faces at her and she threw crayons at us, so the teacher made us sit in the corner and talk to each other."
His first grade teacher had been the sort who had advocated for the children to all be friends with each other and any disagreements could be resolved if they just talked to each other for five minutes. That was a nice idea in theory, but there were just some kids that refused to get along. Fortunately, that had not been the case for Clark, Pete, and Lana.
They had stayed friends all through elementary school and middle school. Things had gotten a bit rocky when Lana had inexplicably started dating Whitney Fordman, as Pete and Clark just hadn't been able to reconcile the sweet caring guy Lana claimed him to be with the asshole who had tried to swirly them on eight separate occasions over the years.
Whitney's head had deflated but only after he and Lana had broken up in senior year and he had become a more decent person in the process. Clark was still hesitant to refer to him as a friend, but they had parted ways at graduation on amiable terms.
"Pete got into politics. I think he's serving on the county council now. Lana took a gap-year, but she was accepted into this Paris fashion school. I think she's planning to launch her own designer label."
"And then there's you. Clark Kent the reporter." Lois said in the same disparaging tone one might use to say: 'And then there's this loser'.
"I happen to be content with my job, Ms. Lane."
"Even though you have to spend your first week with me?"
"I don't think there's anyone better I could have spent it with."
Was that flirting?! Lois nearly dropped her phone in surprise and a hot blush spread all the way up her face to the roots of her hair. Is he flirting with me? Is that farm boy flirting? Is that how farm boys flirt?!
It didn't exactly sound like flirting, but how else was she was supposed to interpret a comment that clearly put her above the rest of their coworkers as the better option? More importantly, why did he think of her as the better option? She was no one's better option! She did her job like an obsessed psychopath! The things she did to get the full story would have put her in jail months ago if she had been living in any other city!
Except maybe Gotham.
Well no, in Gotham, she would probably be dead.
But the rest of her fiercely went: Well you can't blame him for thinking I'm the better option! I may even be the best option! The rest of them are idiots! Honestly, what would he learn if he was being mentored by someone like Lombarde or Osborne or Joyce, god forbid.
Not as much. Even Perry would admit that out loud if he was prompted. There were at least ten other general assignment reporters that Lois had worked with and none of them knew the city like she did. They were either native to the city or longer-term residents than her, and yet she still ran circles around them. Metropolis didn't hide many secrets from Lois Lane.
Perry knew that and perhaps that was something Clark had seen too.
Lois squirmed internally at the faint praise. She felt warm all over. It wasn't very often at all that someone decided she was not only the better option, but the one that should actually be taken. Choosing her over anyone else was just as much a compliment as a vocalized compliment.
She didn't get those very often either.
What a smooth-talking bastard.
Clark was partially aware that he had said something to agitate Lois as he heard her heartbeat quicken, and it wasn't the angry sort of agitation. To him, it was more like the squirmy, uncomfortable sort of agitation that made her grit her teeth.
But his attention refocused itself quickly when the sound of two rumbling car engines became audible and approaching the dock quickly.
"Someone's coming." he announced.
"Duck." Lois instructed.
There was no raised partition to hide behind and the air conditioning units were located too far from the edge to be made use of. They wouldn't have seen anything from there. Instead, the reporters flattened themselves to the roof of the warehouse and hoped that, if sighted, they would be mistaken for architectural malformations instead of eavesdroppers.
As the pair of SUVs pulled up to pier twenty-eight, Lois fiddled with her phone, dialing down the screen-brightness so it didn't give them away and setting it to record video through night-vision. Clark followed her lead. The speakers wouldn't be able to pick anything up from this distance, but at least they could get was visual proof of Gigante's movements and maybe Lois knew someone who could read lips.
The first SUV executed a tight turn at the end of the pier so its back-hatch was facing towards the water and the bulk of it serving as a shield for the second vehicle. Both SUVs disgorged their passengers, Sofia Gigante among them.
She was powerfully tall with crinkled brown hair and a face like a cliff-side. Her shoulders were as broad as Clark's, her hands twice as large, and she was joined by men of varying crustiness and facial hair. One stood out for not being crusty or covered in facial hair, but he had an upper body as thick as the Great Wall of China. There were two women who looked like they might be able to rip out a man's spine through the anus. All of them were packing; semi-automatic guns or knives just long enough to be a problem.
Gigante began to pace back and forth in front of her henchmen. Long angry strides like a caged tiger growing short-tempered with its enclosure. She looked alarmingly like a small landmass causing small earthquakes with her constant shifting. Even twenty or more feet away, Clark could hear her speaking; her voice deep and throaty. She waved her hands expressively, her body language communicating just as much as her words. She was unhappy, frustrated, and ready to choke bitches, and all someone had to do was give the wrong reply.
"Dammit, I think she's speaking Italian! I don't speak Italian!" Lois hissed, frustrated that the language barrier stood between her and the story.
Clark tilted his head to listen better. It had been the better part of four years since he had last spent any substantial amount of time around the language, but his memory was excellent.
"I think she's worried about the guns being found." he reported. "Something about them being too exposed? She wants them moved."
Lois looked at him sharply. "How do you know that? I can't even hear them."
"I-- I can read lips." Clark replied, hoping that would be enough of a cover. "And I can speak some Italian."
Lois looked at him in a mixture of surprise, awe, and predatory delight, but she didn't say anything as Gigante was speaking again and Clark needed to concentrate.
Gigante continued to rant in surprisingly calm tones, stomping her feet and waving a fist for emphasis every so often. Clark wasn't familiar with some of the phrasing she used. He spoke "Tourist Italian', which meant he had learned most of it from a guidebook, picked a little up off the streets, and he was far from fluent. Some of the henchmen responded with much simpler phrases, trying to reassure and placate her that the guns were safe where they were, nothing to worry about, but they would have them moved as soon as possible if she thought it was necessary.
"She's worried about the damage caused by the collapse of the drug trade." Clark reported to Lois when there was a break in the rant. "Something about... not wanting to beg for financial help, I think..."
Lois grinned savagely. "Daddy's little girl wants financial independence. Good. We might be able to help the police pin the meth on her." she said, satisfied. "Anything else you're getting from this, Smallville?"
"Hang on..." Clark peered through the phone screen at the line of henchmen who were probably likely to speak next. The two women and the four men were waiting attentively for an opening, but it was the final man with his monstrous upper torso who caught Clark's attention. For he had turned away from the group and was staring at the warehouse.
Right at them.
Clark's throat went dry. "Lois... The big guy."
Her heartbeat quickened. "Oh yeah, I see him. Clark?"
"Yeah, run."
It didn't matter about being spotted anymore because the large man was staring with an intensity that told them they had already been noticed. Lois sprang to her feet, thanking every god she never believed in that she had worn sensible running shoes instead of her usual heels, and turned tail for the roof-access stairwell.
Clark hesitated for just a second longer, just long enough to see the large man burst into the air like a harrier jet and take flight much the same way. The very air around him seemed to bend for an instant and then like it had slingshot him, the man launched forward with the speed of a cannonball.
Oh fuck me... Clark had the split-second to think, before his spine flexed like a muscle and he was in the air himself, darting across the rooftop after Lois. He grabbed the slighter woman around the waist and hurled their bodies over the side of the roof. Scaffolding broke under his back on the way down, Lois against his chest shrieking curses.
Clark heard the almighty crash as the large man slammed through the wall and part of the ceiling with the same force of a speeding car, before he hit the ground hard enough to dent the concrete. Lois jarred out of his arms at the sudden stop.
"What the fuck!? What the fuck was that?!" she demanded, trying to get her legs under her and get her bearings back after having them suddenly scrambled. They were on the ground. Why were they on the ground?
Beside her, Clark scrambled onto his feet.
"Lois, let's go!" he urged, pulling her up by her shoulders.
"Clark! You broke the scaffolding!" Lois shouted, gesturing wildly at the shattered beams.
"I'm alright. No broken bones!" Clark assured her brightly.
"Are you sure?"
"Yep! Run!"
They barely made it a few steps before the section of wall ahead of them caved outwards and the large flying man stepped through the new hole like the Terminator. He was enormously tall, towering over Clark by a good ten or twelve inches. He had bronze-colored skin and eyes that were an unfortunate yellow color. His hair had been shaved down close to his scalp and his hands must have been the size of trash can lids. Every muscle bulged and rippled across his shoulders and chest and abdomen, down his legs.
"Ooh, you're a big one." Lois commented brightly. She leaned close to Clark and hissed: "Think you could take him?"
Clark didn't even know how to respond to that.
The large man growled wordlessly and the sclera of his eyes turned bright red. Visible streams of heat cut through the cold air, sizzling the drifting snow into steam. Clark recognized that, because he could that himself.
How?!--
"Move Smallville!"
Lois pushed him out of the way.
Clark stumbled from the sudden shove, but she was already dragging him back down the road and around the next corner before he could lose his footing. The super-hot beams blew up the pavement where they had been standing. Without looking back, they ran for it.
"Did he just shoot lasers from his eyes?!" Lois demanded.
"I-I think so!" Clark nodded. "We should split up! He can only chase one of us!"
"Try and make it to the road!" Lois ordered and peeled off from him at the next junction shouting: "Hey ugly-face! How much bronzer did you use to get your skin that color?!"
She was going to make their aggressor follow her.
No way, Lois. He's as durable as me. You don't stand a chance. Clark thought, shaking his head.
He lunged for the empty oil drums lined up against a wall and hefted one up. As soon as he saw the large man appear above the rooftops of the storage warehouses, he heaved it. His aim was bad, but the drum clipped the large man on the thigh and that was enough to make him turn towards Clark with a savage rictus grimace on his features.
"That's it, follow me." the rookie reporter goaded, breaking into a run. Speed, flight, even the heat vision. Does he have super-strength too?
Something with the force of a wrecking ball crashed into his back, taking him off his feet, and more or less answered Clark's question. He was introduced face-first to the concrete side of the nearest warehouse and then right through it in the very same second. He tried to get some control over his fall, but whatever biological mechanism allowed him to do that simply flailed helplessly. He hit the floor, rolling free of the debris. His momentum was only stopped by a solid pallet stacked high with boxes. Clark's head spun dizzily and he wanted nothing more than a second to recover and get his bearings, but a hand clamped around his neck bruisingly and hauled him up.
The choke was partly reflexive, but the strength in the man's hand alone was enough to make Clark think he could actually choke to death this time. He was no dainty flower either; he was a good two hundred and twenty pounds at six-foot-three. But the man lifted him up like he weighed no more than a handful of grapes.
Up close, the large man was no more pleasant to look at. His eyes were quite distinctly urine-colored and his bronze skin had a red undertone. His teeth were more gray than white and he bared them in a snarl.
"Who are you?" he asked in baritone voice that seemed to reverberate. "Or do I just give you a name? Do you like 'dr'quat hofra'?"
"I-- I'm a reporter." Clark managed to say around the pressure on his vocal cords.
"You were snooping like a tiny little mouse." the large man accused, giving him a shake. Clark's glasses slipped down his nose. The man blinked and let out a sudden gasp, thrusting Clark away from him like he was toxic. "Jor-El?"
Clark blinked, fleeting recognition shooting through him. The name was familiar like déjà vu. He must have heard it somewhere just once before, but so vaguely that he couldn't even begin to place where he might have heard it.
"Nope." he wheezed, trying to dig his fingers under the hand that held him.
The man frowned, his thick brow furrowing. He brought Clark closer for a better look. A white film descended over his eyes, one Clark had seen on himself whenever he used his x-ray vision to look at himself through the mirror. The man scanned him up and down, but what he was looking for Clark had no idea.
"Hayl-El?" the man asked, albeit with a tad more confidence, like he was sure of the identity this time.
"Still not me." Clark informed him.
"No, you're not..." the man agreed, looking perturbed and angry in turns. "But you're Jor-El's son, there's no doubt of that. You have all the right features..." His eyes widened in horror. "No, he couldn't have! He didn't! He wouldn't have contaminated his own blood-line like this!"
The man directed this at Clark, like he expected the reporter to know the answer.
"Look, I really don't know what you're talking about." Clark said, ignoring the niggling thought that he should have. This man had the same set of powers as him and was mistaking him for other people. In twenty-three years, that had never actually happened to Clark.
"What I shame I have to kill you before I can tell you the crimes your father committed against the High Council." the man said, giving a pleased grin that made Clark's blood run cold. Like he was looking forward to the prospect.
"Hey fugly!"
Lois's voice rang out from way too close behind the man and a chunk of concrete broke over his head. The man dropped Clark and rounded on the small form of Lois with an eager grin.
"But you first." he said.
Before Clark could shout a warning, Lois jabbed something into the large man's ribs. Electricity crackled and Clark realized that Lois was carrying a taser. She ratcheted up the power and drove it deeper into the vulnerable flesh and more importantly, it had an effect. The man didn't howl, but he vibrated convulsively from the two million volts that ran through his system.
"Take it, bitch!" Lois shouted, all but shoving the man to his knees. The ampage wasn't enough to kill him, but the voltage would certainly stun him for a few minutes.
Rubbing his neck gingerly, Clark got back to his feet.
"Ms. Lane, we need to get out of here." he told her, tugging on her hand. "That's enough. I think you got him."
Lois jabbed the taser inwards one more time before she withdrew it completely. "And remember that!" she spat. "You don't get to mess with me or mine without suffering the consequences!"
They left the large man lying stunned in the warehouse, his muscles twitching intermittently, and ran their way back to the well-lit civilization outside the fence of the dockyard. They didn't stop running until they had put several blocks between the docks and themselves, when they had reached the first of the seafood restaurants and moderately-priced apartment buildings.
Then Lois let it out.
"Holy shit! What the fuck was that?! What the fuck was that?!" she demanded, throwing her hands around. "Flying and eye lasers! And-- and super-strength! I thought everyone was just joking!"
"Wait," Clark put a hand on her shoulder. "You knew about that man?"
"I thought it was a joke!" Lois repeated, her tone half-hysterical. "Some of the guys I talked to told me something about this freak of nature who worked for Gigante! He could fly and crush forklifts with his bare hands, but I thought it was an exaggeration! But it's not! That's the worst part! I mean, did you see that?"
"All of it, yeah." Clark nodded, rubbing his neck some more.
Lois frowned and stopped him under the streetlight. "Let me see that." she said, tilting his head back to get a look at his neck and the red marks left by the hand.
"It's not bad." the rookie reporter said pre-emptively. "It doesn't even feel bad."
"He had you by the neck, Clark. There are just some things you don't take chances with." Lois admonished. It didn't look bad right now, but it would be different in a few hours. "We should put some ice on that, at least. C'mon, there's this diner a few blocks up."
Clark nodded and they set off up the sidewalk. Ice it down. Better safe than sorry. That man had been too strong to be human. He wasn't human. Full stop. Clark had just met another alien and one who may very well have come from the same place as him.
He talked like he knew my birth-dad...
As if Lois had read his mind, she asked: "What was that guy saying when I got there? I heard something about your dad and the crimes he committed? What has your dad done?"
"I think he meant my biological father." Clark clarified. His adopted father had never gotten up to funny business, save perhaps for a short stint as a juvenile delinquent with a Dodge Charger and some parking tickets. "But I don't know anything about my birth-parents."
"All the more reason to find out, huh." Lois encouraged, nudging him in the side. "Crazy man decides to punish the son for the sins of the father, I think it's damn well time you figure out where you came from."
I know where I didn't come from. Clark thought, a bit ruefully.
But where did he come from?
The question had been circling his head for the past eight years, ever since Johnathan and Martha had taken him aside to tell him what they knew of the big secret. They had no answers for him and he didn't know how to start looking.
He was goddamned alien from somewhere beyond the stars. Why his birth-parents had sent him to Earth was a question he might never know the answer to and he had only partially accepted that.
And now there was this man, an enforcer of Sofia Gigante with the flight and the speed and the strength and the same durability that Clark himself sported. This man who had spoken of his father and had mistaken him for not one but two people.
Jor-El.
Hayl-El.
Who were they?
Were they family?
And what kind of names were those?
The man wouldn't give him any answers. Clark recognized the type of person who would just with-hold answers for his own amusement. And if not that, then he would probably carry through with his promise of killing Clark for the sins of his father. Going back to find that man and demand answers would certainly not end well for Clark.
Lois was right. The apparent sins of the father were bouncing back on the son and it was Clark who was going to suffer for it if he didn't buckle down and figure out where he had come from. It had never been all that important before (because where was he supposed to start? He was alien and there hadn't been an interstellar adoption agency involved and frankly, there were no clues), but now...
Now, it had just gotten extremely personal. It was his life on the line and he needed those answers like never before.
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