Penultimate chapter. It's been a ride, folks. Thank you for all the support; whether you reviewed, favorite'd, followed, or just read all the way from beginning to end. It means a lot.
Chapter 42 and the epilogue will be posted on Feb 8th.
Chapter Forty-One: The Day After
With the threat neutralized, the remaining bombs disarmed, and at least one of the perpetrators safely in custody, the police had been sent out to encourage people to return to their homes and their lives. The heavy equipment had been put out to clear the roads of scattered cars and debris. The streets were cleared by the following morning, but road travel was restricted to emergency vehicles for the time being. Nonetheless, the trains were running and people like shop owners came in to sweep up the broken glass and take stock of the damage.
It all could have been a lot worse than it actually was.
The day after events like a big snowstorm or a near-miss with an alien super-virus was always a strange day, as far as Maggie Sawyer was concerned. It was like they were still caught between the frightening strangeness of yesterday and the predictable normalcy of tomorrow.
But everywhere she looked, normal was taking over again. The Daily Planet had still put out a morning edition (hours ahead of any of the other newspapers), with a by-the-numbers article that catologued full extent of structural damage and injuries and they had all been very pleased to relay the fact that the death toll was incredibly low for what had happened. The cafes were still serving breakfast. The post office was still running. Anyone who still had to work today was heading in.
The city couldn't just shut down when disaster hadn't even struck.
It was quite a different story inside law enforcement. Code Veitch had been called in with regards to whatever the fuck had gone down over at the crater that was now the SCU building. As it turned out, someone enterprising and glued to their phone had managed to get a few decent shots of the 'roided devil dog and they had swarmed the internet within an hour of the situation being resolved. Damage control was to be performed before the panic got out of hand and people started screaming about Hell's Gate a second time, but with no answers, no way of lying, and no actual office to work out of, Maggie had no idea what the commissioner expected her and the team to do.
The rest of of the Met P.D. had a slightly easier task: find out who had made the ultimatum video. Though Sofia Gigante had gleefully claimed responsibility for the whole shebang, she claimed to have no knowledge of who the others were. That they were hired goons, recommended to her through a third party.
The hospital had kept Turpin overnight for observation of the second-degree burn he had sustained yesterday and a sprained ankle he hadn't been aware of, what with all the adrenaline going around. He had been released not fifteen minutes ago with a clean bill of health and some heavy-duty painkillers. For obvious reasons, the doctor didn't want him driving around. With no cabs available, the nearest train station four blocks away, and his own car still parked beside the SCU crater, Maggie had decided to come pick him up herself.
The crisis averted and with a moment to breathe, it was time for them to talk.
Turpin was waiting just outside the hospital doors in half the clothes he had been wearing yesterday, but a different shirt. Maggie pulled up close to the curb and undid her seat belt to get out and help him, but Turpin heaved himself up off the bench to his feet and half-limped, half-staggered over to the car. He let himself in and all but fell into the passenger's seat.
"I was going to help." Maggie said.
"I had it." Turpin said shortly, arranging his legs in the footwell. He pulled the door shut. "Can you drop me off at my apartment? I'll change clothes and man the phones."
"There are no phones to man and you need to rest." Maggie told him sharply. "Your shoulder got pan-seared yesterday and you refused medical treatment for more than two hours."
"I don't see you resting." the detective pointed out, although quite aware that he hadn't gone to a paramedic until about three or four o'clock, when the burn had actually started to hurt. "Some serious shit went down yesterday, I want to be on top of it."
"You can be on top of it from your couch. We'll keep you in the loop, but I want you to stay home."
"Is that an order, Lieutenant?"
He sneered it. He goddamn sneered her rank. A burst of anger hit Maggie like a firework and her fingernails dug into the steering wheel. She forced herself to take a breath and then another. Turpin was building up resentment like a head of steam. He was still mad at her and maybe he had a right to be, but this had gone on long enough. They were never going to talk about it unless she forced the matter.
"I wasn't required to tell you!" she shouted angrily, glaring at her second-in-command. "There is no rule enforcing the idea that I had to tell you my sexual orientation! There's no reason to get mad at me for being a lesbian! I didn't get mad at you for being straight, did I?"
Turpin flinched and to Maggie's relief, the strange expression of sneering resentment vanished from his face, replaced by a kind of chastisement. He looked away, biting his lip.
The source of the recent strife had sprung from a misunderstanding and a miscommunication. Maggie knew that she was an attractive woman. Enough people had told her as much over the years and she wasn't so low on self-esteem that she couldn't admire herself in the mirror from time to time. Turpin had nursed an attraction to her for several months, asking her out on dates that weren't really dates; runs for coffee, dinners at two in the morning, that sort of thing. The problem was that while Turpin had considered them of a romantic courting nature, Maggie had not interpreted the "dates" that way. She had believed they were just doing the sorts of things that friends did. Co-workers who saw more of each other than anyone else, so they might as well learn to get along. Superior officer and second-in-command learning how to cooperate together so as to lead an effective team.
Maggie didn't advertise the fact she was a lesbian - a result of pretending otherwise for fifteen years. Struggling to deny it as a means of fitting into the slot that her family had carved out for her. She had pulled herself out of that box only a few years ago and was still feeling her way around.
"Sorry." Maggie said softly, loosening her grip on the steering wheel. "I'm sorry, I spent years closeted. I was that good little Catholic girl who was expected to make a good little Catholic marriage. Repress every thought of sinning and the devil and let me tell you, my parents had some funny ideas about how good little Catholic girls were supposed to live their lives.
"It was one of those things where I figured it out in high school, but I hit denial running because Catholic girls like me with the hardcore Catholic parents weren't supposed to have thoughts like that. So I grew up, pretended men were attractive, and practically married the first guy to look twice at me."
She heard the seat creak as Turpin shifted, which meant he was listening, and felt emboldened enough to go on.
"Captain James Cassidy, Star City P.D., my superior and Catholic boy extraordinaire. My parents loved him. He was everything they wanted for me and I swore up and down that I loved him. We dated for two years, then got married and started fighting all the time. I can't even remember why; I think we just rubbed each other the wrong way. I wasn't much of an active sex partner either."
"Can't imagine why." Turpin muttered, barely audible.
Maggie smirked a little. "Admitting it to myself was hard enough. I lived in this fussy little neighborhood where 'gay' is a swear word and there was no way I could find a support group for coming out of the closet without someone finding out. I had to come out to my entire family and James's just to explain why I wanted to seek an anullment. Imagine telling your dirtiest little secret to the people who have spent their entire lives putting it through your head that your dirty little secret will not just get you disowned, but you'll be regarded as something less than a human being, oh, and you'll custody of your child too."
Turpin looked at her in alarm. "You have a kid?!"
"Sex happens." The lieutenant nodded, taking out her phone automatically to find some pictures. "Jamie. She's six going on seven. When she was born, I thought it would turn the marriage around, but you know what they say. Don't expect a baby to fix the marriage. James and I just kept fighting. Jamie just became my excuse to avoid him." she explained. "When I finally went for an anullment, James found I swear the most homophobic judge I've ever met to oversee the custody arrangement. I'm still fighting for visitation rights. Here."
She selected the most recent picture of Jamie (courtesy of her brother) and showed it to Turpin. Her bulldog of a second-in-command softened visibly and made a cooing noise. Maggie smirked. Her daughter was one of those cute little buttons, having gotten the best from both parents. Strawberry blonde hair, a snub nose, big brown eyes, and a never-ending "boys are icky" stage. Todd had reported back that Jamie found the idea of compulsive heterosexuality to be very limiting, making her one of the more worldly six-year olds that Maggie had the pleasure of knowing.
It was the other reason that Maggie had kept the custody battle going over the last three years. If her husband's filial love was overcome by his own prejudices, then Jamie wasn't stuck in a house with a man who thought other men who smiled at each other were hella gay.
"Then, if you can believe it, James went off and remarried about a year and a half ago, which has basically killed my chances of any form of long-term custody, for the moment I'm hoping... But a mommy and a daddy somehow creates a more stable home-life than two mommies.
"To be fair, there's no guarantee that my relationship with Lori is going to last long-term, but that only suggests a single mother can't possibly raise a child to be well-adjusted, which is another one of those guns that James sticks to."
"What an asshole." Turpin grumbled, sounding quite angry on her behalf.
Maggie nodded in agreement. "Insidious homophobia, that's my excuse. What's yours?"
"Situational blindness." Turpin grunted. He threw up the only arm that could rise above his head in a gesture of exasperation. "I'm a detective, Maggie, and a damn good one. Three years we've known each other and you think I would have picked up on it a lot sooner that you're gay! Do you know how pissed I am at myself?!"
Half a snort escaped up Maggie's throat and she pressed her lips shut before it could turn into a honking laugh, but there was no hiding her amused smile. She knew Turpin had been angry upon discovering that she was not, in fact, heterosexual, but she had figured that the anger was been directed at her, like usual.
But nah, he was angry at himself because he was supposed to be more observant and discerning.
"You know how many red flags I didn't see? You flirt with Kanigher all the time and I know she's bisexual! For crying out loud, you live on St. Martin's Island! St. Martin's! The biggest queer community in the entire city and you live right in the middle of it!" Turpin pinched the bridge of his nose. "Oy vey iz mir... You're a lesbian... How did I miss that until it was right in front of me?..."
"Because it didn't occur to you to look. I spent half my life pretending to be straight." Maggie pointed out, still trying not to laugh. "Girlfriend or not, I'm still only just this side of comfortable of saying it out loud."
She wanted to be braver about it, now that society wasn't piling on the stigma as sharply as it used to. People in higher places than her were slowly admitting to being gay or bi or trans or anything else, meaning it was starting to look okay and acceptable. Meredith Furie, the CEO of Atlas Industries, had used her first ever interview to step right out of the closet with nary a second of hesitation, though people veered between praising her forwardness and dissing her for the same reason.
Colletta didn't seem entirely aware that there was any closet at all. She had been a beautiful bisexual butterfly from day one.
Turpin huffed out a heavy sigh. "Sorry. For putting it on you like that. Or making it seem like I was putting it on you." he half-corrected. He glanced at her almost shyly. "You've got every right to be angry at me."
"No, no, I'm swimming in heteronormativity as it is." Maggie pointed out. She could walk into a very gay bar and still get asked what a straight girl like her was doing there. "I'm not mad at you, Dan. I think you were disappointed with yourself for long enough. I'm not going to throw away the three years we've been good friends just because you had a crush on me. Now I might rub it in a little... Fair warning."
"I deserve every second of it for being a presumptuous gremlin." Turpin declared gruffly. Then he smiled, one corner of his mouth turning out. "You can toilet paper my house."
Maggie found herself sniggering as the tension dissolved, knowing that things were back to normal between them. Well, almost normal, but it was a change she could live with.
On average, Lois never got quite enough sleep. Or at least it felt like she never got enough sleep. There was always writing to be done. Whether it was thieves stealing copper wire or man-hole covers, or drunk idiots playing chicken with speedboats in Hob's Bay, there was always a story to cover and Lois considered herself the woman for the job. She could operate on five hours and a cup of coffee, even if those five hours were spread out over the course of forty-eight. Her lack of sleep was mostly self-inflicted, she would admit that much.
And then there were the times that Perry called Lois in before she had gotten an adequate amount of sleep, and the day after the Near-Apocalypse of '06 was one of them (that's what people would start calling it in the future, when they learned just how far-reaching the consequences would have been).
Perry had been grasping at a thin straw on Tuesday morning when he'd called Lois's building supervisor and asked the man to check on her. As only one body had been recovered from the scene of the helicopter crash and Superman had indeed been sighted in the area, he'd known all along that there was a slim chance that Lois had somehow lived through yesterday's clusterfuck. He'd been pleased as fuck to discover she had made it out alive after all. Then it was all 'get your butt downtown, there's work to be done'.
Even though the trains were running, Lois didn't have a rail card anymore. Well, not at the moment. The Metro-Metro issued a new rail card to subscribers on the first of every month, so she would get the new card in just two days.
So she pulled her bike out of winter storage and fished an old drawstring bag out of the back of her coat closet to carry her things in. It wasn't the best weather to be biking in, but she also didn't start the day with the means to buy a rail pass. There was just no point in general since the new card would come in the mail by Friday morning.
The trains were indeed running, but in lite mode, meaning they weren't hitting every stop and people were waiting longer than usual to catch a ride into New Troy. Even with the two detours that Lois had made to the bank and the DMV, her 9:30 arrival at the Daily Planet passed largely unnoticed due to the fact that everyone else was just getting in too.
She left her bike in the designated racks at the back of the lobby and rode the elevator up to the food court and detoured for a cup of coffee, and then resumed her trip to the fifty-seventh floor. The newsroom hummed even more loudly than normal with the reporters gleefully exchanging their own stories about what had happened to them yesterday. She avoided her desk for the moment and made straight for Perry's office.
"Knock-knock, chief!" Lois called out, rapping lightly on the door-frame. "Rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated!"
Perry jumped a little and then turned away from the window where he must have been ruminating. He stared at her like he was still trying to figure out if she was actually there. After a moment, his face relaxed into a rare smile.
"Glad they're exaggerated." he said, beckoning for her to come in. "Wouldn't want to lose my ace reporter before her career takes off."
"Death and me don't see eye-to-eye." Lois commented, closing the door behind her. "Don't ask me how I survived, seriously." she added, seeing the question forming on the editor's lips. "Did you get my email?"
"The one you sent me at five this morning? Thought I was getting an email from a ghost 'til I saw the attachment." Perry said, coming around from the other side of the desk. "I'd ask how you'd stayed on top of the story in the middle of all that, if it wasn't something you did all the time."
Lois grinned. "Talent and skill, chief. And lethal amounts of dumb luck." she replied. She had spent the rest of the afternoon and half the night typing out yesterday's events while they were all still fresh in her mind, everything from the discovery of Dr. Essex's alien super-virus right up to Superman disappearing into the atmosphere with fire-breathing devil dogs. "Is it a shoe-in for the front page?"
"Does the pope shit in the woods?"
Lois had a sudden mental image of a big grizzly bear in papal robes.
"Blasphemy, chief."
"That means 'yes', Lois." Perry assured her. "Mr. Edge wants it on the front page so bad that if I didn't run it on the front page, he'd probably fire me."
"Good to know I have job security." Lois nodded. She settled herself into one of the chairs. "So. What now?"
"We get the story." the editor replied confidently. "World's talking, Lois. Hundreds of questions, no answers. I want you to find them for me."
"You mean Superman." Lois realized.
"Exactly!" Perry slapped his desk with an open palm. "I feel like we have a claim to the Superman story. That's not arrogance or supposition. It was our city, our people, you, where Superman first came to the rescue! We're the ones who gave him the name that everyone knows. The world wouldn't know Superman without us."
It sounds like arrogance. Lois thought blandly.
"Therefore," Perry went on. "It falls to us here at the Daily Planet to keep delivering the story that we started. We began this and we will finish it. We need to dig deep and find out where he's gotten off to."
"Last I saw him, he was heading up into orbit." Lois said, pointing in the direction of the sky. "Chief, I'd hate to be the bearer of bad news, but I don't think he's coming back."
Perry blinked. "What do you mean?"
"Well..." Lois shrugged, trying to find the words for why she thought that way. "He flew an explosive monster dog out into orbit. He said he was going to get it high enough so the vaporized virus would have no chance of dispersing through the atmosphere, so we're probably talking all the way out into the exosphere which is anywhere between four hundred and eight hundred miles up, and there isn't exactly much breathable air out that far--"
"Lois--" Perry interjected.
"And then he didn't come back-- Seriously, I waited for nearly two hours and I didn't see so much as a goddamn shooting star--"
"Clouds, Lois. The clouds--"
"I know!" Lois thumped her fists on the arms of the chair and recoiled her left hand instantly. "Ow. But he's not coming back from this one. It wasn't gonna go the way we all thought it would. No new age of superheroes in our lifetime."
"We don't know that." Perry said patiently. He had some faith, at least. Clearly someone needed to. "Not yet, so finding out for certain is imperative and that's what I want you to do. Kent's already on it-- Don't groan, Lois. You don't hate him."
"I don't." Lois agreed, rubbing her forehead. "But that doesn't mean it's the other way around."
She wasn't actually certain that Clark hated her, but she hadn't given him much of a reason to like her back. Not after the way she'd thrown her insecurities in his face, ultimately refused to tell him anything regarding her personal life, and accused him of being ignorant of said personal life.
They might have gotten off to an okay start at the beginning of October, but things had fallen apart.
They always did, for Lois.
"That box of chocolates on your desk suggests otherwise." Perry said. "Look, I normally try not to get involved in the interpersonal affairs of my staff, but you two have good chemistry and you make excellent partners. I don't want to lose that just because you two are experiencing petty relationship drama that can be resolved with a simple conversation."
Lois shrugged. "If you say so."
"I do." The editor nodded. "I think you two just need to clear the air. You'd be amazed at the kind of results you'd get just by opening a dialogue."
His ace reporter made a disbelieving noise that didn't quite match the expression on her face. Lois tapped her fingers on the arm of the chair in a manner that was almost impatient, as though she was waiting for her head to catch up with her heart. Clark was a good guy. He really did not deserve to be shouted at for being a good guy. That was like demanding that the lake to be something other than wet (or frozen).
"There's really a box of chocolates on my desk?" she asked.
Perry nodded. "With your name on it."
Lois heaved out a sigh. Clark wanted to apologize for the things he had said to her on Thanksgiving and he was following all the advice Colletta had given him. He had waited the requisite twenty-four hours until Lois didn't feel quite so murderous and she would bet it was caramel chocolate that he had picked up.
It was another way of saying that he wanted to talk.
If had gone through the trouble getting chocolate for her, the least she could do was hear him out.
Then maybe she could swallow her pride, apologize to Clark, and pray to god that he took it.
"I'll get back to you on that Superman business, chief." Lois said, standing up.
"Don't get back to me until you've sorted things with Kent." Perry corrected, as he sat down. "I won't assign you two as partners anymore if you really can't get along, but you do want my honest opinion, Lois?"
"Hit me."
"You're just being stubborn because you like him."
Lois felt like she should argue that point, because if that wasn't the most middle school logic she had ever heard... It was such a simple summation of a situation that she was probably making too much out of and it was painfully true. She wasn't used to liking people because it seemed like they always turned out to be assholes and Clark was so far from an asshole it was actually a little uncomfortable to dislike him.
There was a guy she could easily imagine being friends with for the rest of her life. She could totally get behind platonic intimacy with him.
Perry saw it all over her face and smiled smugly, going as far as to lean back in his chair and lace his fingers together like everything was going according to plan.
"Keep your ears open for the fall-out." Lois warned, still half-convinced the ensuing encounter would end poorly.
"Happily." the editor said.
Lois made her way back across the newsroom, cutting around the outskirts by the windows so she didn't have to run into too many people on the way to her desk. Enough people as it was performed double-takes at her after a casual glance and she smirked at everyone who gaped in confusion as to why she was walking around.
"Lookin' good, Lois!" Lombarde bellowed from his corner of the newsroom, without any trace of sarcasm or sexual innuendo for once.
She grinned a little wider. Day's startin' to look up already.
And it even got a little better when she arrived at her desk, for there was indeed a box of chocolates there along with another bouquet of a dozen yellow roses. The box was from Fudge Yourself up in Hamstead so it had to be caramel chocolates
The other thing was that Clark did not look up to getting into any sort of fight whatsoever. He was sprawled across his desk and his chair in the best visual representation of "bleh" she had ever seen. Legs thrown up over the top of the desk, arms dangling over the sides of the chair, the chair itself tilted as far back as it would go even though he was slouched so far down he was practically falling off the seat.
His state of dress left a great deal to be desired too. The tie was only halfway around his neck, like he had done the knot and then given up on the whole thing as a bad job. His suit jacket needed ironing and his dress shirt appeared to be on inside out. Hair uncombed, a bit of stubble decorating his chin, and dark circles under his eyes like he had gotten even less sleep than Lois. Most tellingly, however, was the splint that covered one wrist and part of his hand, and the bandages peeking out from beneath the other sleeve.
He honestly looked like someone might have tried to mug with him with their car.
"Jeezus Smalllville, what the hell happened to you?" Lois wondered, dropping her bag on the chair.
Clark brought his head forward, blinking wearily in partial confusion as though he wasn't quite sure how he had gotten all the way from his apartment to work.
"The better question is what didn't happen." he mumbled in reply. He had been electrocuted, suffocated, set on fire, plummeted to earth, and had somehow survived body-smacking into the water somewhere in the south Atlantic. If Dr. Sullivan hadn't turned up to help him limp home, he wasn't sure which continent he might have washed up on.
Of course, he couldn't be that specific in front of Lois.
"Did you get into a fight?" the dark-haired woman asked, putting her hands on her hips. "Did you lose?"
"Nope." Clark mustered up a weary grin. "You should see the other guy."
He wasn't sure when all the soreness and the weird rashes would clear up or when his wrist would stop hurting (once they had lost the gravity, the devil dog had tried very hard to wrench itself free and he must have pulled something trying to keep a grip on it), but the important thing was that he was alive.
"Well, for winning, you look like the pancaked remains of that chopper crash I was nearly in." Lois commented, starting to take off her coat. "You should go home, really. Just because I come in with a broken wrist--"
"Sprained."
"Sprained wrist doesn't mean you have to."
"Apology accepted, Ms. Lane."
Lois jumped, dropping her coat.
"Wha-- No, I didn't say anything! You didn't let me say anything to that effect!" she complained.
"You didn't have to." Clark said, shrugging. If she really had still been angry at him, she wouldn't have inquired after his well-being, in her own way.
"No, you have to let me do it properly!" Lois snapped, shaking a finger at him. "I owe you an explanation! The last four days have been incredibly sucky, yesterday notwithstanding, and everyone's looking at us!"
Indeed, everyone was. Some were pretending to be pre-occupied with their business, but others weren't nearly so subtle. Clark scowled internally. He understood that they were all reporters here, but honestly, couldn't they at least have the decency to ignore someone's personal problems?
"Maybe they'll see something different this time." Clark offered. Because maybe it was high time they all had the chance to see who Lois Lane really was.
Lois seemed to have entirely different thoughts on the matter. She gave her fellow reporter an aggrieved look like he had just robbed her of the chance to request that they go find a more private corner. She huffed out a sigh, but decided that it would be better to rip it off like a band-aid and get it over with.
"I don't like my dad." she started. "Well, we don't get along and Mom always said was it because we were too much alike. Sometimes I think it's because I'm actually too much like Mom's side of the family. The Sullivans and the Lanes are incompatible and we only ever met on the holidays and we were too proud to be the first to leave, so I had some pretty shitty family get-togethers.
"Anyways, Dad doesn't communicate like the rest of us humans and I can't talk to him without feeling pissed off and seeing all that Christmas card yuletide log bullshit going on over Thanksgiving kind of... I'm sorry. You didn't know the situation and you didn't deserve to have me scream at you for your own ignorance."
"And?" Clark prompted. He was sure there was something else.
Lois sighed. "I'm a disaster of a human being."
"No, you're not." Clark corrected, shaking his head. "Despite the environment you grew up in, I think you're still a good person deep down--"
"Oh!-- No, no, you're wrong there. I am not a good person." Lois asserted, moving like she was about to snap a Z. "I steal everyone's staplers and stomp all over Metropolis's trespassing laws-- And honestly, they're really badly worded anyways - and you don't want to know the number of people I've pissed off over the last few years, not to mention the people I'm blackmailing--"
"Everyone has their faults." Clark interrupted, trying to shut down her self-deprecating rant.
"Have you noticed how many of my faults are worse than other people's? Apparently your fault is being too nice for your own good--"
"You're intelligent, driven, independent, and fearless. How is that a bad thing?"
Lois had no reply to that question and her jaw clacked shut. She had grown up halfway in a world where people kept telling her that women weren't supposed to be intelligent or driven or fearless. That she would only be valued for her looks or her eligibility as a wife and mother; people had been shoving that in her face the last few days. And she was self-aware enough to admit that she responded to such commentary by being even louder and more obnoxious than usual.
"It's not a bad thing." Clark told her. "I've always thought they were good qualities for a woman to have. Especially for a reporter. Didn't you tell me that a reporter had to be tough and fearless or no one would take them seriously?"
"You're doing it again." Lois said flatly.
"Doing what?"
"Throwing my own words back at me."
Clark shrugged. "Well, they're good words, Ms. Lane."
Lois's smile was slow to come on, but it was genuine. "Wow. You really are a rare gentleman, Smallville."
"And you're blackmailing people?" Clark asked, not about to let that one slip by without comment.
Lois's smile turned downright Grinchy, that curling smile that seemed to go right up to her eyes and put a twinkle in them that didn't seem entirely sane.
"For information on committing white-collar crime and what Luthor gets up to in a week. Rumors in the LexCorp pipeline. I'm holding their dirty little secrets over their heads so they keep me in the loop." she explained.
Lois, you are brutal. Clark thought, discomforted by the idea that his fellow reporter actually resorted to blackmail. He was a bit alarmed to find himself wondering who these people were and what she had on them.
"I'm starting to understand better why people are scared of you." he commented.
"Hey, sometimes respect through fear is the only way a girl can get on in the world." Lois pointed out, shrugging. She reached out to slap his arm companionably, but stopped when she took stock of his pathetic condition again, so she merely patted his bicep gently. Then she said: "I'm not a people person, you know."
Clark nodded. "I did figure that out."
"And I haven't used the word 'friend' since middle school and I don't know how you managed to wiggle past all of my defenses anyways." Lois added, her face crinkling suspiciously. "For serious, Smallville. You're the first person since Colletta that I've let in this far."
"Ah, I think I've got a ways to go before I get as far as Colletta." Clark pointed out. And he sincerely doubted that he would really get that far considering what bits of him didn't work the way you'd expect. "Still, if it's all the same to you, I'd like to use the word 'friend'."
The smile that lit up Lois's face was brilliant, bold, beautiful, and exactly everything Clark had come to like about her. This was the start of something great, something that would define a generation. Clark didn't know yet what he and Lois might become, but he was very much looking forward to finding out.
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