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Clark had never taken Jimmy too seriously.
In retrospect, that probably wasn’t quite fair. Sure, Jimmy tended to have some outlandish ideas about psychic starfish or hyper-intelligent gorillas, but out of all the rabbit holes he tumbled down, he’d gotten at least one right on the money.
Aliens were real.
Clark should know, he’s one of them - though, to his knowledge, he is also the only one. He’d certainly never been sought after by whatever… species? … he was, despite having lived on Earth for as long as he could remember.
So, whenever Jimmy would start talking about whatever creature of the week was building a secret moonbase or mining the Martian planetary core, he’d tended to dismiss him, content to write his behaviour off as his most loveable eccentricity.
Jimmy hadn’t ever caught on to the fact that he was an alien, after all, and they’d been living together for what seemed like forever. All the crushed alarm clocks, broken faucets and torn shoes in the world hadn’t seemed to clue him in to the fact that the world’s biggest secret was sharing a bathroom with him.
And so, when Jimmy drops a mountain of files onto Lois’s desk, each one the size of his bicep and stamped with the symbol that had been emblazoned on his chest by his ghost dad only days prior, Clark immediately shoots out of his chair in alarm.
The chair’s wheels let out an ear shattering squeal in protest, but they hold. This time.
“What’s all this?” Clark asks, his voice sounding totally normal and not at all high pitched. He has no reason to be nervous about some random files, after all. He is an entirely normal guy who had absolutely no connection to Superman or aliens or ghost fathers hidden in a secret lair beneath his parents’ farm.
Nope. Totally normal. Boringly normal, even.
Jimmy doesn’t even seem to notice – not that there’s anything to notice! His eyes light up at Clark’s words, and as he protectively pats the stack of files, he proudly proclaims, “This, Kansas, is my life’s work – but more importantly for us, it’s what’s going to break the Superman case wide open!”
His grin stretches out across his face, bright enough to illuminate the room, and Clark feels his stomach drop.
“All right, Jimmy! That’s what I love to hear!” Lois squeals in delight, practically vibrating in anticipation. She rockets out of her chair at his words and wastes absolutely no time before tearing at the files, devouring them with the fervour of a starving man. “Is this a picture of a spaceship? Jimmy, this is absolutely incredible! And you’ve just been sitting on this?”
“I mean, I tried to tell people – that’s the whole point of Flamebird!” Jimmy protests, not bothering to hide the smugness in his voice. “It’s just hard to get people to listen! Or at least, it was until now!”
“I’m never doubting you again,” she swears sombrely before turning back to her treasured files. “Perry wouldn’t dare take this scoop from us!”
“Are we sure this is a good idea?” Clark voices out. Immediately, he can feel some of the excitement in the room peter out as his friends turn to him. He manages to avoid chickening out under the pressure, but only barely. “I mean… where’s all this stuff from? How can we prove to people that it’s real? No offense, Jimmy.”
“CK, please, have a little faith in me!” Jimmy tells him, playing off his concerns, though Clark swears he can see a flash of hurt in his eyes. He tries to keep the guilt from bubbling up inside him too much as Jimmy announces, “I’ve been tracking this down since forever – I know my stuff! I’ve got photos, testimonies from former air force members – this one pilot, Hal, he’s one of the best pilots they’ve ever had, and he swears he saw a ship crashing on one of his test flights-“
“Isn’t that the guy you were saying vanished off the face of the earth a while back?” Clark asks, a distant memory mercifully springing to the forefront of his mind.
“That just proves my point!” Jimmy protests, a familiar fire entering his voice as he holds himself up straighter, eternally undeterred. “A guy tries to blow the lid on a huge government conspiracy, and then a few weeks later he just up and vanishes! Tell me that doesn’t strike you as suspicious?”
“…It strikes me as unverifiable,” Clark offers instead. He struggles to not hate himself in that moment. Glancing towards the once-daunting stack of horror, he hazards out, “Do you have anything you can independently verify?”
Jimmy grimaces, and Clark, encouraged, reaches out towards one of the files.
He flips through it, glancing through pages upon pages of words, littered intermittently with pictures and sticky notes and permanent marker. It’s very thorough research, if nothing else.
Most of it is entirely meaningless; dates way before his time, places he’d never visited, indistinct blurs dancing across the night sky.
And then he reads the word Krypton and audibly swallows, forgetting all his pretences.
He knows that word. His ghost dad is fond of saying it, never missing an opportunity to sombrely announce it. Whatever it means, it’s important somehow.
“I mean, maybe not to Perry’s standards…” Jimmy trails off, his face scrunched up in a grimace that looks just awful on him, and despite his apparent victory, Clark doesn’t feel particularly good about having put it there.
“Jimmy…” Lois trails off, her own face marred in disappointment, and oh, that? That hurts.
And then, as though someone has flipped a switch, Lois’s face breaks into a bright smile, her muscles filling themselves with her omnipresent uncontrollable energy, and if she wasn’t just so fascinating, her personality so enthralling, Clark might’ve had the presence of mind to be worried about that.
Given her current obsession, it could never have boded well for him.
And, sure enough, the next words out of her mouth may as well have spelled out his demise. “Well, then,” she says, cracking her knuckles together. “We’re just going to have to verify it ourselves!”
“You think we can?” Jimmy asks, his fire reigniting as a hopeful smile spreads across his face. “I’ve been trying – all my life, I’ve been trying, but I haven’t managed…”
“You weren’t working with a team before,” she offers, her own grin turning into something more encouraging. “Come on, we broke the Superman story – no matter whose names are on the by-line,” she adds, rolling her eyes in irritation. “If we can do that, we can get to the bottom of this, no problem. It’ll be the biggest scoop of the century! Even bigger than our last! First, we’ve shown the world that a man can fly – next, we prove we’re not alone in the universe!”
She pumps her hand in the air, and her energy is so infectious that in that moment, even Clark can’t help but want her to succeed.
“Yes!” Jimmy cheers, pumping his own hand up in turn. Clark can’t quite remember the last time he’d seen him so elated. Then, with his hand still hanging halfway in the air, Jimmy pauses, and cautiously asks, “How do we do that?”
Lois blinks. “I haven’t actually thought that far ahead,” she admits before adding, “Maybe we can start with Superman? If we can get that interview with him, he can just confirm this stuff for us!”
“Why would he do that?” Clark asks, once again bursting their bubble. As they turn to him, he sheepishly rubs the back of his neck. “I mean, the guy doesn’t strike me as someone who likes attention-“
“He’s wearing a bright blue skintight suit,” Jimmy objects incredulously. “It’s got a cape -- and underwear on the outside.”
Clark flushes as he bites down the instinctive urge to defend his mother’s work. “Still. What happens if Superman doesn’t fill us in? What if he’s got nothing to do with any of this?”
“His symbol is plastered all over these pictures, Smallville,” Lois explains, tilting her slightly head at him. “He doesn’t particularly strike me as a liar, regardless.”
At that, Clark grimaces, his own words condemning Lois’s own lies only a few days prior seemingly rising up to haunt him of their own accord. “Who knows, Lois? He could be just as clueless as we are. Some of these pictures must be, what, thirty-five years old?”
Definitely thirty-ish. Not twenty-ish. Pay no attention to their similarities in age.
“Well then, we'll just make a plan B! If he doesn’t end up giving us the answers we want, we’ll just find out on our own!” Lois announces, glancing back towards the file she’d been reading earlier. “Can either of you guys afford a trip to New Mexico?”
“What?” Clark blinks, taken aback by the non-sequitur.
In lieu of explaining, she hands him the file in question – one which proudly displays a supposed wreckage, half-buried in the desert sands.
His impulse is to dismiss it – but then he looks closer.
If the alien metal, so similar to that of his own buried space ship, hadn’t already caught his interest, the engraved shape on its hull would’ve been hard to ignore.
His symbol. The one his space dad had given him; one whose meaning is both undoubtedly significant and entirely lost upon him.
He swallows.
His ship was safe in Kansas. This was something else.
…Were there others like him out there?
“CK?”
“What?” Clark asks, slamming the file shut as his head shoots up in attention.
“New Mexico?” Jimmy echoes Lois’s words, crossing his arms across his chest. “You in?”
He should say no.
If he values his secrecy at all, he’d claim to be entirely unable to afford it. It’s not even a particularly big lie – it is a big dent in his savings, if not exactly unaffordable.
But… it’s also possibly his only chance to find some real answers, unless he somehow manages to learn how to translate an entirely unknown alien language.
Besides, maybe if he’s there, he might be able to protect his secret better.
“I’m in,” Clark affirms, and this time he doesn’t even need to fib – he does feel sick, and not just at the prospect of confining himself to a plane for a few hours.
His friends cheer, excited at the prospect, and he raises his hand in response to Lois’s offered high-five with an eagerness he could never feel. Dread pools in his stomach as he starts to wonder what he’s gotten himself into.
He supposes it’s his own fault. If he’d looked into his origins sooner, perhaps he wouldn’t be in this situation at all.
If nothing else, at least he now knows better than to underestimate Jimmy Olsen.