Chapter Text
It’s been longer than she cares to admit since Lois woke up in a place that wasn’t her own bed, and it leaves her disoriented. Her head is stuffy but doesn’t hurt much worse than it normally does pre-coffee, which is nice, but she’s not immediately sure where she is. She does know what she is: warm (good), still in work clothes (bad), and suffering the mother of all cricks in her neck (ow)- ah, yeah. Clark’s sofa. That’s not a bad thing, per se, but on the heels of that knowledge comes aliens are real by the way and that’s… complicated.
She pulls something warm and soft off her face and stares wildly around the room: morning sun is blazing through the open bay window and sending rainbows across the walls. The lack of leftovers on the coffee table suggests someone has cleaned them away. The Netflix logo on the screen suggests she succumbed to not having slept for a whole night, and conked out on Clark’s sofa unintentionally, and didn’t even make it through one episode of so-bad-it’s-good tv. The Clark Kent of said sofa-owning is not there, but the shower is running, which suggests that even space aliens need to shower. It’s good he’s not, you know, allergic to water or something.
Lois sits up and shakes her head to clear it, then regrets it immediately as her brain rattles almost audibly between her ears. She digs her phone out of her pocket to check the time, and the movement reminds her that the armrest of a sofa is not a good place to sleep and now her shoulders and back hurt a lot. Lucy has messaged her, which is annoying but not unexpected, and more importantly it’s already 9:24am: not especially late for Lois on a Saturday morning, but certainly not too early to work on a promising new investigation. Excellent.
Coffee first, though. With Clark gatekeeping the single, small ensuite bathroom in his apartment, Lois extricates herself groggily from beneath the fluffy throw and goes for the kitchen sink so she can splash water on her face and make a passing gesture at personal hygiene. The kitchen is also very small, but in Lois’s experience Clark is rather good at cooking and takes full advantage of every inch of bench space. He’s got a nice set of knives, and more pans than will fit in his cupboards, but somehow he owns neither a kettle nor a French press nor a coffee machine.
It only takes three minutes for the sound of the shower to stop, and then after she has steeled herself to greet him cheerfully and normally, another two for him to appear in the kitchen doorway, hair wet and glasses firmly on his nose. He has hair, and a nose, and a normal number of arms. Lois lets go of the mug of water she was using to rinse her mouth out, and at almost the same moment there’s a blur and a rush of air and then Clark’s still standing in the same place, only now he’s holding the mug. “Er, morning,” he says uneasily, his eyes large and his face slightly pink.
God, she’s missed his stupid face, even if it’s combined with what is undoubtedly a display of superhuman abilities that has not, of course, unnerved her in the slightest.
“Morning,” she says.
Clark steps back from the doorway. “Sorry about the, you know, the…” he says, “I just… like this mug a lot.” His face scrunches up in a grimace. God, she’s missed his stupid voice. “That sounds really silly when I say it out loud. It’s just a mug. Sorry—”
Lois crosses the space between them and tries, from her low vantage point, to examine his face from every angle. As far as she can tell, it looks extremely normal. There’s no secretly from space, maybe tell, except that he has the sort of face where you might say ‘did anyone ever tell you you look kinda like Superman,’ assuming Superman was sick with the flu and hadn’t combed his hair back or eaten in a couple days.
All to say, Clark doesn’t look well exactly, and his eyebrows are furrowed slightly, but he looks like Clark, so that’s. That’s good.
“Sunlight and zen worked, then,” she says.
“What?” He looks confused for a moment. “Oh- yeah. I feel… sort of fine, actually.”
“You’ve looked worse,” she agrees. “Ah, shit, I mean— I’m caffeine-deprived. Don’t listen to anything I say right now.”
“No, no, you’re right.” He rubs the back of his neck, and holds the mug back out to her. She takes it, and tips the gross mouth-water down the sink, and sets it on the bench. It’s old, and clearly well-loved, and is one of the only ones from his cupboard without a Superman logo on it. He says, “I know it’s not coffee but, if I offered you black tea…?”
“Nope,” she says.
“I thought not. I might have some instant—”
“Hell no.”
He hesitates, holds his arms up like he’s calming a horse or preparing for a blow. “I could, um, pop to the street cart on 42nd, the one with the blend you like? I can go, you know, pretty fast.” He seems to regret the words as soon as they’re out of his mouth, but it’s not like Lois isn’t perfectly aware of the whole ‘faster than a speeding bullet’ thing, seeing as she’d been the one to write that article.
“Maybe just chill,” she says, not quite ready to deal with an anxiety-spiralling Clark at 9:30 in the morning. It’s an unkind thought, but everything is annoying right now and he isn’t exempt. “I’m not gonna publish your life story just because you prefer your weird fancy teas.”
She watches him dither in the doorway, a tiny line between his eyebrows. His body language is the same, she thinks - the way he hunches in on himself and shifts slightly from foot to foot. Superman is always solid and still; she wonders how much effort it takes to suppress his fidgeting, or if it’s the fidgeting that’s the lie. She doesn’t think it is, but it does remind her he can act.
Still, he’d told her Clark was real, and it hadn’t felt like a lie, and Lois prides herself on being able to read people, and maybe aliens, passingly well.
“I know, but you…” his mouth presses into a line. “You look like you just spent the night on a sofa, so at least let me offer you the shower. A change of clothes.” He turns to the side and presses himself against the wall so that, if she wanted, she might squeeze past him into the hall. It doesn’t help much, because Clark might not be as tall as he was last night, but he’s also not mostly stilt-like legs (like he was last night), and he is still a large h- a large person. He looks like someone who could lift heavy things, is what Lois means, which is not the impression you normally get when he’s swimming in poorly-fitting work jackets, but it’s quite obvious now when he’s dressed down in a t-shirt and jeans with the cuffs rolled up.
She’s been aware of this fact for some time, and had pegged it as ‘you can take the boy out of the farm but you can’t take the farm out of the boy’ even though he didn’t seem to eat nearly enough protein to justify the gains. Now she’s not sure whether it’s a case of he likes to look good in the tight-fitting blue spandex that only someone with his taste in clothes would think was a good idea to wear, or being obliged to stuff a whole lot of alien into a skin suit and it had to fit somewhere.
She knows it’s not actually a skin suit, but even so she finds herself checking again: there are no lumps or bumps or things that shouldn’t be there. The muscles in his forearms twitch exactly like forearm muscles are supposed to when he taps out a nervous tattoo on his thigh. It’s flawless, and she should not feel dumb for not realising he was from space, because who could have guessed?
In any case, “thanks, but I’d sooner have my own shower and clothes,” she says, a shade more snappishly than she’d intended. Then, because she knows he’ll take it as the snub it’s not meant to be and she’s being extra nice this weekend, she adds “so… come with? No offence, but you look like you could use some photosynthesising, and we could stop for coffee on the way, and make a start on The Investigation.”
“Sure,” he says quickly. And there it is, exactly the thing she’s been looking for: the slight shuttering of his expression, stiffening of his posture. He’s not all in, yet, even though all this is entirely for his benefit. “And I’m not a plant,” he adds as an afterthought.
“Photovoltaising, then.”
“Not a real word.”
“Fuck you, it is.”
When they make it out onto the street, it’s painfully obvious how much Clark is thriving in the clear morning sun, enough that she could almost believe the dark circles under his eyes are fainter than before due to, you know, photosynthesis. God, what a weirdo. She doesn’t get morning people. She is not thriving, and if his glasses had been transition lenses instead of plain old glass, she’d have stolen them from him as the finishing touch on her hungover/walk of shame cosplay. As it is, she positions herself in his generous shadow and makes a point of grumbling about it.
Clark lives on the morning-person side of town, and it shows. The sunshine is annoying. The cool breeze is annoying, the cheerful chatter of all the people in yoga pants who look like they’ve already done the yoga part and are up to the smoothies part is annoying, and the way Clark keeps commenting on how nice the weather is or pointing out every single dog they pass, then looking at her expectantly, is especially annoying. His energy is just a little too high, and he keeps shifting his satchel from shoulder to shoulder like it’s a hot potato.
When he actual for real says “wow, beets are half off,” as they pass by a horde of awake-looking people swarming around stalls selling things like ‘home made jewellery’ and ‘kombucha’ in a small patch of green space, she forgets about aliens for a whole twenty seconds and is ready to physically drag him away if he tries to stop and browse. Luckily, it turns out it was just the opening line to a two-minute ramble about buying vegetables in season.
She tunes it out almost immediately, because it’s suddenly occurred to her that she’s physically dragged him around, like, a lot, in her time. It’s not like she hadn’t always known he had a head on her in height and was probably just humouring her about it, but the whole thing takes on a different flavour when it sinks in that she couldn’t physically budge him if she tried and every single time she pulled him after her, it had been because he allowed it.
It’s not a flavour she likes.
Fortunately, Lois lives on the normal-person side of town, which means a significant decrease in dog-walkers but a lot more grumpy people nursing coffees. Her sleep-rumpled clothes and messy hair fit in better, here, and the popularity of her favourite street cart (and Clark was right, the one on 42nd does have the best blend) is proof that she’s back amongst her people. Even though the wait in line feels interminable, especially when Clark starts chatting amicably with the barista, gulping down the first half of her large long black is sufficient to take the edge off her temper and put it back on her instincts where it belongs.
She sidles up to Clark, who is still waiting for his egg roll and staring at nothing while he sips his matcha-something frappe. “So, we have leads to follow. Mysteries to crack,” she says.
Clark makes an aborted gesture like he’s getting ready to flee, the coward, but then he shakes his head and looks down at her. “What?” he says.
“Don’t tell me you didn’t hear me the first time,” she says. “I’m not believing that one ever again.”
On the other side of the street, there’s a small commotion: a pedestrian yelping as she trips on something, laughing as her friend catches her halfway to the ground. They both stop so she can re-tie her shoelace; Lois wouldn’t have even noticed if it wasn’t for the way Clark’s shoulders tense and then relax in tandem with the fall. He’s normally more subtle than this, but it’s not the first time she’s seen the same pattern. The spacing out, the tension, occasionally the sudden exclamation that he’d forgotten something at home, or needed the bathroom. It’s satisfying to have a cause now, actually; proof that she’d always seen something real.
“It- I was- sorry.” He glances over his shoulder one more time. “You were saying.”
Lois frowns at him for a couple seconds before continuing, just so he doesn’t think she’s letting him off scott free for listening to shoelaces instead of her story. “Here’s what I got: my dad went to Kansas once. Like, Wichita or something.”
“Okay?” He doesn’t sound impressed. Yet.
“It was a work trip, and I was only, what, two at the time? But I remember him telling me about it later, because he thought Kansas sucked.”
“I remember,” Clark says suddenly, though she doesn't recall telling him. “He said it was all hicks and hoodlums.” Ah, that’s right; she’d once told him she was surprised he wasn’t a hick, and he’d told her he definitely was one and she’d just have to live with it.
“And crack-heads,” Lois adds bluntly. “More to the point, it was a work trip, and he was special forces at the time, and- Clark- the timing adds up. Officially, they were assessing crop damage after a meteor shower, but that wouldn’t explain dad being there. Unofficially, I bet they were looking for—” she hesitates. They’re not the only ones waiting for their orders, and no one seems to be eavesdropping, but she opts to raise her eyebrows and stare at him meaningfully instead of finishing the sentence.
Clark’s eyes go so wide that Lois half expects to see tendrils going poof as well. “What?!”
In hindsight, she might have realised this was not a comforting thing to imply. Clark is so alarmed that he doesn't hear his name being called for the egg roll until the third time, and even then he looks a little sick and barely nibbles at the thing as they continue on to Lois’s building. She ushers him towards the sunny side of the street in case this is the sort of situation that could trigger Bug Day 2, though in second hindsight she doesn’t know what did trigger it the first time besides minor injury. She says, “you’re not going to, you know…?” And mimes antennae, hoping he gets the gist.
“No, that’s not how it—look, you…” he leans down and lowers his voice. “You reckon they know about me?”
Lois shakes her head. “I don’t think so. Like, they never found you, and dad wouldn’t have been so grumpy about the whole trip if it’d been a success. But I think they found something.” There had been some mention of actual normal meteors in the declassified document Lois had scrounged up, but it hadn’t been what she was looking for, and it wasn’t the only thing she’d found. “I’m thinking: the Clark manual.”
His eyes widen behind his glasses, and he all but hisses “you reckon they know what I am??”
“Probably not,” says Lois, who thinks they’d have made a much bigger deal of it all if they’d actually found anything useful. “But it’s a starting place, right?”
“Yeah, that’s… yeah!” He straightens and offers her an uncomfortable smile. “Thanks, Lo. I do appreciate you looking into it.”
***
Lois showers and changes at record pace one she’s back in her apartment. She’d bidden Clark to wait for her by a bench on the street: mostly because he’s still eating and should stay in the sun as much as possible in case of recurring symptoms, slightly because she normally cleans up before inviting him over and she very definitely has not done so this time. The remains of her… is it too soon to call it a meltdown? The remains of the previous morning are still present in the form of unwashed dishes, clothes strewn across the back of the sofa, and the open first aid kit on the kitchen counter.
All in all, she’s back on the street in under fifteen minutes. The sun is still shining, the odd pedestrian still looks like they’d rather be asleep, and Clark’s egg roll is still sitting on the bench where she’d left him, which is all sorts of unhygienic, assuming that’s something he even has to worry about. He isn’t there, though.
Dammit. Her first thought is that he’s chickened out of the story, but it’s more likely he wanted to find a sunnier bit of sun, or needed to use a bathroom, or - did he do that? Use a bathroom? He pulled that excuse a lot but Lois is starting to think it’s mostly a cover for his… extracurricular activities. In fact, it’s not out of the question that he’s trying to rescue a cat out of a tree right now. Not out of the question, but she grabs his cold roll and busies herself poking her head into some of the wider alleys along on her street in case he’s taking a nap or had a relapse anyway.
When he finally shows up seven minutes later, looking windswept and exhausted and with his shirt no longer tucked in, Lois asks him where he’s been. His first instinct is to stammer up an excuse about needing to return a passing jogger’s phone. She knows this is a lie because the only people out jogging on her street are the ones who are late for the bus, and it’s not due for half an hour yet.
“I thought we were doing truth now,” she says calmly, because she’s being extra nice to him this weekend.
Clark looks uncharacteristically harried, she thinks. “A jogger on the other side of town,” he says. “And then a pileup on the interstate, if you must know.”
She passes him the cold egg roll for his good behaviour, even though it will be gross now. “So, you were—”
“Don’t say it out loud!” He hisses, which is confirmation enough.
She wonders if his dark circles are maybe slightly darker. “Is that smart, when you’re still… recovering?”
“Recovered, past tense,” he says. “And it’s fine.”
“Even with the big hole in your suit?” She eyes his satchel curiously.
“I have a back-up. It’s fine.” He takes a bite of his egg roll, then gags, which is unfortunately very funny, except that once he’s swallowed it down with obvious effort (and Lois has stopped laughing), his expression turns serious. He looks at the egg roll, then at her, then at the empty street. “For the sake of breakfast, and, um… truth,” he says, “if I do something really weird for a second, do you promise not to freak out?”
“Of course,” Lois says, steeling herself for him to, like, unhinge his jaw or something.
Instead, he stares at the roll, and his eyes burn blue-hot, and it starts to steam.
“What the fuck,” Lois says with feeling, stepping back so she can look for the mirror or the portable microwave he must be hiding in his pocket.
“You promised,” he says nervously.
She leans in close again. “Did you just microwave your roll with your eyes?”
“A little bit, yeah.”
“How did you—? You said you were solar powered but, did you just sun-plus-magnifying glass reheat your breakfast?”
“And what if I did,” Clark says, taking another bite out of the roll. He winces; heat has clearly not fixed the textural problem.
“Oh my god,” Lois says. “I’ve never seen you do that before.”
“It’s really weird,” he says again.
“Really weird would be you swallowing it whole, like a snake. Microwave-eyes is kind of awesome.”
“It’s not something people are supposed to be able to do,” Clark says, looking uncomfortable.
Lois frowns. Superman is strong, but Clark had claimed he could flatten downtown in a handful of minutes. Superman is fast, but she’s seen Clark move so quickly he looked like he hadn’t moved at all. She is sensing a pattern. “What else can you do, that other people can’t do,” she says.
“Maybe let’s not do this out in the open?” He tries, which is just as good as admitting there is more.
“There’s no one around,” Lois pushes, though she lowers her voice. “Can you teleport?”
“Uh, no.”
“Read minds?”
“Definitely no.” He shudders, though privately Lois thinks it would probably be a useful skill for a journalist. She’d pick it any day.
She remembers, then, about the wings. “What about—”
Clark is rescued by the bell. Well, the ringtone. Lois is in the habit of saving any number she comes across in her professional life to her contacts, giving her semi-free reign to ignore anything else - anonymous tips ought to come through her work phone, anyway, or at minimum leave a message. So when her mobile lights up with “Prof Pam Salisbury, Met U”, a person she’s never had a conversation with before, she knows it’s important.
“Hi, Lois Lane,” she says into the phone, at the same time making squinty eyes at Clark so he knows she’s not finished with him.
“Lois!” Says a slightly raspy voice with a midwestern accent on the other end. “Glad you’re up. This is Pam. Got your email yesterday. Sorry, it’s been a hectic week. When isn’t it a hectic week? Well, I’m catching up on my admin, and you sound more interesting than any of it, so I was wondering if you wanted to do lunch?”
“Er, this week?” Lois says, slightly wrong-footed by this avalanche of words. She sees Clark raising his eyebrows at her and mouthing something like date? The phone isn’t on speaker, but then privacy’s probably just a suggestion to him. She shakes her head; definitely not.
Prof Salisbury chuckles. “Well, sure Lois, but today would be even better. Not so many students underfoot. If you’re one of those types who has a life on the weekend, I might fit you in through the week. Won’t have as much time, is all.”
“Today it is then,” Lois says. “Do you mind if I bring a colleague?”
“Sure,” she says cheerfully. “Whatever floats your boat. Let’s say 12:30? The barbecue place on campus, you know it?”
Lois assures her that she does, and that they’ll both be there, and then she hangs up and grins at Clark. He looks mystified.
“A college friend?” He says.
“Better,” Lois says. “A lead.”
She explains her reasoning as they make for the closest bus stop one block over. Prof Salisbury heads the materials science and engineering department at Met U, but twenty-something years ago she’d postdocced in a lab at Kansas State. Lois has evidence to suggest that some kind of mysterious object had passed across her desk shortly after the military’s investigation into the meteor shower, and had sent an enquiry the previous afternoon.
“It wasn’t even that difficult,” she tells Clark as they walk. “If you’d ever bothered to look, you’d have found it in a week or two even if you didn’t know my dad. Not that I’d encourage you to know him, if you have the choice.”
Clark is walking a couple of paces behind her, and hasn’t said much. He threw his egg roll into a trash can they’d passed earlier, and she thinks he’s still mourning it. But when she turns back to look at him, he’s frowning.
“You contacted her yesterday afternoon?” He says.
“I said that, didn’t I? Do try to keep up.”
“No, I mean…” he stops walking, and so she’s forced to stop as well, even though they’re only running seven minutes early for the bus. “You hadn’t talked to me yet, when you emailed her?”
“I wanted to give you something to start with,” Lois says.
“You didn’t know I’d even be ok with looking yet.”
“I didn’t realise I needed your permission to send an email,” she says shortly, and she can see the way his frown smooths out, his expression turning pleasantly neutral. It is, she thinks, a Superman expression, not a Clark expression, and it doesn’t suit him.
“You’re right. It’s fine.”
“I mean, if you don’t want to go—”
“Lois, it’s fine.” He smiles brightly at her and starts to walk again, slightly faster than before.
Lois knows she hasn’t done anything wrong, but something about his quick agreement doesn’t sit right anyway. It occurs to her, then, that she maybe doesn’t like the way he’s always permitted her to drag him around, doesn't like the way it feels condescending somehow. This, though, this hollow, yes-man, doormat version of Clark? This, she hates.
***
Lois has been on plenty of bus trips with Clark, so it doesn’t surprise her when he almost immediately gives up his seat for a man who is maybe sixty years old. It surprises her a little bit that he hadn’t just decided to superspeed to Met U though, since the bus takes a roundabout route and stops every other minute. Maybe it’s because of her, she thinks. As in, if he took her with him, she’d get whiplash or something. She tries to ask him about this by wiggling her eyebrows at him over the middle-aged man’s head, but clearly mind-reading is not one of his talents, because he just looks confused.
Anyway, she gets to enjoy a window-seat tour of the exact same bus route she’d taken for four years as an undergrad. He gets to enjoy pretending to be buffeted around by inertia as the bus stops and starts, at least until he’s forced to admit that he’s blocking the whole aisle by standing in it and goes to take a seat near the front. Lois spends the next ten minutes wondering if he actually is buffeted around by inertia, or if his clumsy routine is just another act. Like, she can imagine that stuffing a whole alien into a skin suit maybe doesn’t lead to the best hand-eye coordination, but it’s not a problem Superman ever had, and in general it’s also only a problem Clark has if he isn’t involved in a high-stakes bet. Ergo, another lie.
The Metropolis University campus is eerily quiet on a Saturday morning, so that Lois understands why Prof Salisbury uses the time to check all her emails. They arrive a quarter hour early, and she considers giving Clark a whirlwind tour of all the best hangout spots, but that might involve taking his arm and dragging him around the place.
She hasn’t dragged him around, hasn’t hardly touched him, since she’d dragged his unconscious (nine-foot, razor-bladed) body down a hall. She walks slightly too close to him and bumps her shoulder against his arm accidentally-on-purpose just so he doesn’t think she has a problem with him. He looks at her with some surprise, but doesn’t say anything.
He’s been unusually silent as well; still mad with her for some reason, probably. He’ll see, though. Having the Clark manual, or any information about himself, will be a net positive.
They reach the barbecue place at 12:18pm, which means they’ve ordered and found a seat by the time a small, middle-aged woman with dark hair and dark eyes enters the room, looking around curiously. Lois recognises her from the university website and stands to wave her over, and she hears Clark getting up from his seat behind her.
“Lois, so good to see you,” Prof Salisbury grins, taking her hand in a firm grip. “And this is…?”
“Clark Kent, ma’am- uh- Professor. Daily Planet. How are you?” Clark says, an odd twang in his voice.
“God, call me Pam, ma’am was my father,” Pam says, shaking his hand energetically. “I’m good, I’m good. I’m keen to chat with the two of you.” She pulls up a chair at their table, still talking. “You wanted to know about a bit of my work from the nineties? Back at Kansas State? LuthorCorp is coming out with a new sort of hydrogen cell, did you hear? Of course you did, I read the story. But it was odd they never consulted me. We’d already cracked it back when, and if the funding—”
She continues this way for some time, and Lois can feel Clark’s raised eyebrows burning into the side of her head. It’s possible he’s actively trying to microwave her brain. Ok, so she hadn’t exactly said ‘could you tell me about that thing with the military and the space ship’ in her email, because she’d actually wanted a response. These things took a delicate touch.
She lets Pam go on a little longer, nodding and exclaiming in all the right places: funding is tight, and getting tighter, unless you have private backing, and so forth. Then she says, “I thought the military had an active investment in materials science?”
Pam blinks at her. “Sure,” she says.
“Did you ever do work with them, in the nineties?” Lois knows immediately this is too much, too fast; Pam’s open expression is replaced by a faint frown.
“Why exactly do you want to know?”
Lois wants to kick herself for jumping the gun. Clark, who has been more or less silent for the last few minutes, leans forward. There’s a crooked little grin on his face, and he chuckles in a pleased sort of way. “I’ve got it. You’re from the Missouri side, right?” He says, drawing his words out just a little.
This doesn’t mean anything to Lois, but gets a surprised smile from Pam. “Got ‘em,” she says. “You’re Kansas?”
“Smallville.”
“Never heard of it,” Pam says.
“We’re the sorghum capital of the United States,” Clark says with mock offence. Pam snorts, but she’s leaning back in her chair now, relaxed. A waiter shows up with a plate of crusty bread for the table, and Pam orders lunch for herself. Lois had been half convinced she’d been about to leave, before Clark started talking like he really was a hick, stupid midwestern accent and all.
The thing is, it doesn’t feel like a lie. Clark’s lies are of omission, transparent and obvious once you know what to look for. Now he starts a conversation about which side of the Kansas river has cheaper gas that draws Pam in completely, and Lois might have believed he was genuinely invested if she hadn’t known he could just run everywhere faster, and for free.
She chimes in when she can, but is quickly forced to admit that she doesn’t know enough about NFL, which is the only thing Missouri and Kansas apparently agree on. Her father had always enjoyed it, which meant by definition she was more into basketball.
When the mains come out, Pam finally schools her face back into something serious, and looks between Lois and Clark. “What was it you two were wanting to ask about then,” she says.
Lois glances sidelong at Clark. It’s his story after all, his effortless rapport, his sudden need to talk like his nose is blocked.
And he turns embarrassed. He smiles at his plate of smoked mushroom tacos and looks up shyly, an impressive feat given his stature. When he says “it’s for me, actually. Not a story,” Lois is half convinced he’s about to spill the beans to a stranger, he sounds that genuine. “There was this huge meteor shower when I was a toddler, Ma and Pa used to talk about it all the time. I always thought it was the darnedest thing- there was a crater up the way everyone always said was from a shooting star, and I—” he turns his best self-deprecating grin on Pam. “I never had the head for chemistry, but I’ve always sort of wanted to know if they were right, and then there was the fuel cell article, and Lo here turned up your name-” Lois had not been involved in that article, but what did that matter at this point “-and I know it’s not hydrogen fuel but, I thought, maybe you’d have known something about it?”
To Lois’s annoyance, Pam starts nodding at this. She finishes stripping the meat off a chicken wing and leans in close, like she’s about to share a secret with the two of them. “Off the record,” she says, “I think I know the exact meteor shower you’re talking about.” She glances around the room surreptitiously. “Don’t know if your crater was real, but I know something made it down. They asked us to look at it. Said it was from a weather balloon, which we thought was code for Russian drone. God, it was annoying to think their alloys were so far ahead of ours.”
“So, what was it?” Lois says through a mouthful of brisket, leaning in as well.
“Not a damn clue,” Pam says. “It was a couple pieces of something, flight system maybe. I remember it had a complex sort of internal structure. Like they’d embedded the circuitry into the casing itself.” Lois feels Clark freeze more than she sees it, but Pam doesn’t seem to notice. She continues, “wouldn’t respond to anything though, so at the end of the day it was just a couple fancy chunks of boron, carbon and iron.”
Clark only sounds disappointed when he says “you don’t have it, then?”
She snorts. “God no. The second we told them it was useless, they took it all back. It’s how these things go. Betcha there was money in it, if it had been interesting.”
They. Always they. Lois would bet her hat that They were the United States Military, but also that Pam would clam up again if she asked outright.
Clark sighs heavily, and pokes at the remains of his tacos (which he’d inhaled like it was going out of style) with a mournful air. Lois wipes barbecue sauce off her hand and puts it (hand, not sauce) on his shoulder. “Aww, we’ll find you a real space rock some day, Smallville,” she says, to which he nods sadly.
Pam says, “look.” She frowns, pressing her mouth into a line like she’s going to reconsider, but Clark has already cracked her fair and square. “You didn’t hear it from me. But I’m pretty sure Bob kept a piece as a paperweight. I could always check. Been meaning to shoot the old man a message anyway.”
Clark does the whole routine, then: the ‘you don’t have too’s and the ‘wow, that is so kind of you’s. Lois finishes her brisket sandwich and watches him work. He always was in his element talking to people, but this unreserved, effusive Clark isn’t any more real than the one in the cape.
They finish lunch with a cheerful promise to message later from Pam, who farewells Clark just a little more warmly than she does Lois, which is fine. Once the professor is out of sight, Lois takes Clark by the arm and leads him out of the restaurant and around the corner, where it’s quieter. They only make it a couple paces around the side of the building before Clark stops short, and she finds she’s tugging on a brick wall.
“Where are we going,” he says with his normal voice, frowning.
“That was it, wasn’t it,” she said. “A part of your ship.”
“Maybe. Maybe it was just a drone.”
“Come off it,” Lois says. “Only pieces, but I’m sure there must be more - the military must still have them - anyway, what was that in there?”
“What?” He says.
“That whole ohh, football, ohhhhh, shooting stars thing?”
Clark has the audacity to look affronted. “That was building a rapport with the subject,” he says. “You know, our job?”
“I’m pretty sure we’re not supposed to lie,” Lois says, stepping towards him. “I’m surprised she didn’t see right through you. When did you ever care about the NFL? And what was with the accent?”
“That’s my accent! I’m from Kansas!”
Lois is almost going to say something she regrets, something like ‘no the fuck you’re not’ only ten times worse, but she sees it again: Clark gathering himself back in, smoothing out his frown. Why does he keep doing that? They’ve yelled at each other over less. “I’m trying to help,” he says, quieter. “I thought you—” he cocks his head, and his eyes go distant. “Oh, shoot. Be right back, promise.”
There’s a gust of air, and Clark is gone.
***
He isn’t. Right back, that is. Lois has time to explore several of her old university haunts: the dorms where she got drunk for the first time and then made out with Marcy Green in a closet. The tree under which she wasn’t drunk but kissed Marcy anyway (those were the only two times; after that Lois’s roommate’s boyfriend had cheated with her and Lois had made sure the whole college knew about it, and so they hadn’t spoken anymore either). The lecture hall where her favourite persuasive writing teacher had told her she had what it took, and she’d told him, duh.
She’s a better writer than Clark. She can sniff out a juicier scoop, spin a more compelling story, and she has the bylines to prove it. But hell if she isn’t envious of his ability to become exactly the person needed to connect with a subject. In the context of his everything else, it’s… well, it’s not damning, but it’s certainly telling. At least, she knows, she can still see right through him.
Clark, in the end, shows up more than two hours later. This isn’t unexpected, because Lois had eventually given in and checked Twitter, so she knows he’d been using that time to get people off a tour boat that had capsized in the bay.
She’d nearly called it quits and just gone home but, fuck it, the weather was nice, and the drinks was cheap, and she’d almost managed to enjoy herself sitting in a quiet spot behind an old fountain where she used to study. She’d even texted Lucy back very graciously, since Pam hadn’t messaged her yet and she didn't have her dad’s password saved on her mobile, so there wasn’t a lot else to do. She’d let Clark know where she was, too; better to think he found her because she wanted him to, rather than that he tracked her down via heartbeat or something.
She spots him wandering around the fountain, and her first thought is so how bad’s the other guy? Because Clark looks bad. She calls out, “that definitely wasn’t smart.”
“Four kids would disagree,” he says once he’s close enough, and she supposes the math maths; she’d seen that a gaggle of teens trapped in the boat’s bathrooms owed their lives to Superman’s ability to Lift Heavy Thing.
“Are you hurt?” She says.
“I don’t get hurt by most things.”
“Then are you…” she mimes antennae again.
“No- No. It’s just like… the day after a cold. I have to manage myself, is all.”
“Which is why,” she says in a low voice she knows he’ll hear anyway, “you stopped on the way back to catch a mugger. And get a kid’s kite out of a tree. And carry someone’s car to the mechanic.”
“You sound like my Ma,” Clark says, sitting heavily on the rim of the fountain next to her. She shuffles over to give him room.
“Your Ma also say bag like it’s bayg?”
“You’ve met her, remember? She’s from Dallas. So she says wash like it’s warsh.”
“Oh, right,” Lois says. She pushes the straw around her half-finished smoothie (it had chocolate in it; it wasn’t like a post-yoga smoothie or anything) and tries to scrounge up the right words to say what she needs to say.
“Ok, listen,” she says at length. “I don’t want to, like, drag you into a story against your will, especially when it’s personal. So if you don’t want to help, you can tell me.”
“Thanks,” Clark says. He sounds mildly surprised, which is annoying.
That’s maybe why she continues, “like, instead of running off to rescue puppies, or talking about football or just-” she passes a hand over her face “-blanking out and doing the whole ‘yes Lois, no Lois, how high Lois’ thing, maybe just say no?”
Clark sputters, “what do you mean, how high- when did I—?”
“The whole entire day! I thought you were going to start being real with me, but instead you’re turning the farm boy act up to 11 for Pam, and then just shutting down on me every time I feel like we’re actually getting somewhere - you’re doing it right now.”
“What,” Clark says very carefully, his face expressionless.
“Say what you actually want to say,” Lois says. “I can take it.”
She doesn’t miss Bug Day, but she misses how bad Clark had been at hiding his feelings. She sees him breathing carefully and evenly now, sees him lean back and look at the sky like he’s asking it for advice. He hesitates, mouth half open. Finally, he says, “if I did say no, would you stop looking?”
“Wait, really? I thought we went over this yesterday!”
“I’m not actually saying no,” he says quickly. “I’m just saying, hypothetically, if I did, would you stop?”
“No,” says Lois, perplexed. “I said you didn’t have to help me, but why would I stop? I’m doing this for you, remember?”
“I think… I think maybe you’re doing this because you can’t resist a fun little mystery.”
“What’s that supposed to mean - it’s not about ‘fun little mysteries’, this is my job.”
“This is my past, Lois!”
“And you don’t even seem to care about it,” she says hotly, “which is why I have to.”
“Of course I care about it! Only, whatever you find at the end, you’ll get to go ‘wow! What a silly old world’ and move on with your life - I’ll have to live with it!”
Lois is ready to snap back - he’s sticking his head in the sand, he’s a coward - but… his face is a little pink, and his nose is scrunched up. There’s an edge in his voice. His hands look like they’re gripping the fountain tightly, but they couldn’t be, really; it’s still in one piece. Even in frustration, he’s not quite real, but maybe it matters that he’s trying.
The thing is, she doesn’t intend to make him live with it by himself. It’s very simple, she thinks. He’s a person, so therefore his people are… well, they’re people, so therefore the worst thing they could turn up might be a case of child abandonment. Given his ship apparently had pieces falling off it, probably accidental child abandonment. Maybe they’ll succeed in waking the ship and his space family will show up and offer to take him away with them. Obviously, he’ll say no, but it will be a nice bit of closure for all involved.
She swallows her retort and decides to reward his honesty with a compromise, seeing as she is being extra nice this weekend. “What if I hold off on emailing anyone else for a couple more days, until you feel better,” she says. She doesn’t say ‘hold off digging,’ because what does he really expect, but she’s gotta give him something.
“I’m fine,” he says automatically, though Lois knows that his skin is paler than it was before, and his dark circles are stark against it. The sun is low in the sky; she wonders how he normally copes with doing saves at night. “I would appreciate that, though. Thank you. And…” he runs both hands through his hair and looks away from her. “I didn’t mean to yell. Sorry.”
Lois frowns. He’d hardly even raised his voice. “When have I ever minded that before.”
“Well, you never knew before. That I could— you know.”
There is a case to be made for ‘weapon’. It’s not a non-zero chance, she admits; her experience with science fiction might be limited to high-school English, but even she knows heat rays are a little sus. If that was the intention of the people who left Clark here, though, they messed up big time: he just uses the heat rays to cook his breakfast, and they make the texture worse. He’s, like, the least most likely person to take over the world.
“You let me yell at you all the time, even though Perry likes me better, and if I told him to fire you he probably would,” she says.
“Really?”
“You’re always tardy.”
Clark looks glum at that, but really, she thinks, he’d decided on his priorities the moment he put on the cape. Those priorities just happen to be rescuing every single cat.
Lois looks up at the sky, where the stars will be coming out in an hour or two. She shifts sideways to lean against Clark, just so he knows she doesn't have a problem with him. She might pause her emailing, but she can’t stop herself from thinking and no one could expect her to. She thinks about stars, and wonders which one of them is his, and who sent him and why, and what the answers to those questions might cost.
