Work Text:
There were few sights like Metropolis in the evening. Lois struggled to decide what about it she liked: maybe it was the low hum of the rush hour traffic as the almost endless rows of cars crowded the streets, accompanied by the barely audible bustle of people walking home after a long day at work, their laughs and murmurs rising up out of the din. Or maybe it was the occasional flights of pigeons that passed by her apartment window, the brief flashes of their warblings peppering the mostly quiet close of the day. Or maybe, most of all, it was the sunset; from the view of the harbor that her apartment window gave her, the setting ball of yellow light lit up the surrounding bay and the sea beyond, making them run from buttery gold to a cool syrupy shade of orange in the span of only a few hours. If you’d asked if she thought the horizon could look delicious before she’d started at the Planet, she’d call you crazy. But now?
Well, now she’d just consider it a fact. And like any reporter worth their press pass, there was nothing she loved more.
Speaking of facts, the ones laid out haphazardly across her desk were doing a really good job of keeping her up at night. It’d already been well over three hours since the rest of her fellow journalists had turned in for the night, leaving the once-busy offices of the Daily Planet quiet as a graveyard, the thick blanket of silence now only being broken by the small bursts of computer keys clacking under Lois’ callused fingers, the rich purple paint on her fingernails chipped and flaking off from lack of attention, and at least one or two split knuckles from a tight spot she’d managed to wriggle out from. Most would look at them and think she’d not been taking care of herself, but she chose to see it as putting her attention where it was needed most.
The subject of tonight’s latest full-nighter was the trial of one Joe Gatson, leader of Metropolis’ most prolific armed hold-up crew. Between him and his five lackeys, they’d managed to knock over half the credit unions in the city, and at least three of the major branches in New Troy before Superman caught them trying to make a getaway upstate. The explosive end to the gang’s spree, combined with Gatson’s lackluster courtroom etiquette, at least gave Lois a lot of material to work with. Now she just had the problem of putting it all down in a way that wouldn’t bore readers to tears.
She growled, slamming down the backspace key for what was probably the fourth time that night, staring at the rapidly disappearing paragraph, and at the faint reflection of her tired and unhappy face revealed in its absence on the computer screen. She kept tripping over when it came to explaining just how much Gatson had managed to piss off the judge since he’d arrived at the city jail. It was rapidly approaching the point that she was considering how she’d justify dumping her current draft in Perry’s submissions box. “So what if they can’t understand words like ‘jurisprudence’? They can Google them!”
“You put a space in ‘larceny’.” Lois almost jumped out of her seat from hearing the voice off to her right. She whirled around, ready to put her dad’s painful karate lessons to use. But as it turned out, she wouldn’t need them tonight.
“ Holy shit! ” She swore at seeing Clark’s figure looming over her in the dark. If she hadn’t known him to be such a teddy bear, she’d have already crushed his big toe under her heel. “Jesus, Smallville! Are you trying to give me a heart attack?!”
Clark, to his credit, seemed to immediately realize how his sudden appearance might not be warmly received, backing up with his hands raised in some strange effort to communicate his lack of bad intentions. Lois blinked at the idea of Clark Kent of all people having bad intentions. It was like water being on fire. “Ope, sorry! I, uh, um… coffee?” He pointed behind himself with his thumb, making her aware of the still-steaming jug on the table behind him.
With the brief pause came quiet, and the liquid panic that had invaded Lois’ mind began to drain away, the familiar uneasy tiredness creeping back in. “Oh… right. T-thanks, Clark. I’ll get one in a minute.” Coffee was good, but it could wait. She needed to get this paragraph finished, even if she found it comparable to pulling teeth at this point.
There was a quiet clunk on her desk, and a glance revealed a scratched work mug, filled with a respectable amount of black coffee. Trust Clark to give a helping hand, even when no-one asked for one. She couldn’t decide if it was his most endearing or his most irritating quality.
Still, it probably wasn’t polite to say nothing. “Thanks, I…” Lois had never been a glowing conversationalist, or at least on matters not relevant to her current assignment, but he’d appreciate the effort, right? “So… you're working on a story too?”
“Just finished.” His voice was always light and hearty, like the kind you’d hear in a commercial selling breakfast cereal to kids. “It’s nothing too glamorous, but I’m proud of it.” Clark’s attitude towards his work had been nothing short of mystifying when he’d first joined the Planet’s staff. The idea of being happy with some dinky little puff piece about the city’s park life just seemed wrong to Lois. Especially with the climate they worked under, with corporate scandals and supervillain attacks coming at them left, right and center. In the city where a man routinely flew at breakneck speeds and tore through walls with his bare hands, there stood Clark Kent, writing about ducks in a pond.
One day, she’d visit this ‘Smallville’, even if it was just to see what kind of place made a man like Clark.
At some point during her inner monologue, Clark had pulled up a swivel chair, sitting himself down next to her. “The Gatson trial, huh? That’s gotta be a tough one.”
“Like you wouldn’t believe.” A sigh, and Lois continued to fight the ever-growing weight that bloomed under her eyelids. If she really pressed on, she could probably get it ready for editing just in time to pass out at her desk. “I’m trying to figure out how the hell I’m supposed to write this last part, plus dyslexia has been kicking my ass all day.”
Sometimes, she was glad that Clark was the only other one here. Had it been anyone else, she didn’t doubt that their ‘suggestions’, in all their backhanded glory, would’ve only added to her frustration. But with Clark, she knew that it never came from a place of malice, lording it over her how much better his brain worked, but rather a genuine desire to help, even if it was a little bit tone-deaf at times (she smiled thinking about the first time he’d pointed out an error in her work, as well as the look on his face after she’d thrown her glass of water on him).
But even with everything that had been going wrong with her today, it didn’t seem as bad with Clark sitting next to her. His presence alone (and maybe a few pieces of advice that definitely didn’t earn him a place on the byline) helped her speed through the last couple of paragraphs in a fraction of the time it would’ve taken had he not been there. By the time she finally tore her gaze away from the wall of text to look at the clock, it’d been less than an hour than when she’d started. Clark seemed to have an infectious kind of inspiration, one she’d definitely caught.
And given the world they lived in, she was at least a little bit inclined to mean that in the literal sense.
“Okay,” She yawned, rubbing at her eyelids in a futile effort to stave off the drowsiness that a day with her nose at the grindstone had brought on. “Just need to proofread and then I can turn in for the night.”
Clark, however, had a different idea. “Maybe I should handle that part.” Oh no he didn’t. Lois knew this old trick from her days as an intern. One minute, Steve was just being ‘a helpful coworker’, the next he had wormed his way to a credit on the byline. And she’d be damned if she was going to fall for it a second time. “You look like you’re about to pass out, Lois.”
Okay, maybe he had a point. Three all-nighters with little food between each one wasn’t exactly a recipe for high-quality spell-checking. But that wasn’t going to change her mind. “No need to worry your lovely little spit-curled head, Smallville. This shouldn’t take more than…” She couldn’t help the yawn that broke up her objection; at this point, she was on the very last dregs of energy that she’d been slowly whittling away at over the past four days. It was actually a miracle she hadn't slumped over into her keyboard already. “Shouldn’t be more than five minutes.”
“Respectfully, Lois,” Clark’s eyes glittered in the soft blue light, the deep brown sparkling with the tiniest gold flecks. “You won’t last three. Plus… I don’t wanna sound mean when I say this, but you’ve never been the best with typos.” Even with how out of it she was, Lois could tell what he meant. In any other circumstances, she’d probably be arguing her head off, maybe calling him a jerk for bringing up her dyslexia like that, even if he was right to. But there was little fight left in her, and so she nodded, albeit giving him her best frown. She scooted her seat over, letting him get in front of the screen to look at her rough draft.
“Don’t expect a spot in the byline, Smallville.” Despite the firmness of her words, the first place that Lois’ tired head thought to lay against was Clark’s surprisingly soft shoulder. He shifted a little bit at the contact, but it didn’t seem to bother him so much, given how he almost immediately got back to editing.
He hummed at her jab. “I wouldn’t worry. No-one except you will know I was ever here.” It was such a small thing, and coming from anyone else she probably would’ve called it ‘the bare minimum’, but with Clark… it just seemed like so much more, even if he didn’t say anything to that effect.
She’d never tell him, and definitely never to his face, but if Lois had to lean on someone like this, she’d want no-one else but Clark. With him, there wasn’t any presumption or expectation of failure, no assumption that she was lacking at her job simply from looking at her. He’d never built up this idea of the legendary Lois Lane in his head, imagining some pretty white lady who’d go all mushy over him, only to disappoint himself when he met the real her.
She’d gotten used to it by the time he’d started. Despite fighting like hell from pretty much the moment she could walk to get from under her dad’s bullshit, struggling through a double major in English and Journalism, even winning a fucking Pulitzer Prize for her work, people still gave her ‘compliments’ about how well she spoke, as if the way she looked automatically meant that she couldn’t. She saw the quiet disdain in some people’s eyes when they saw her hair, as though she looked less of a professional because it wasn’t straightened to their liking. Most of all, she’d had to sit and bear their disappointment at actually meeting her. A few times, she’d even been accused of impersonating the real one, because how on God’s earth could such a respected name belong to a face like hers?
Lois blinked. There wasn’t much point in going over her woes now. Besides, it wasn’t like she could just dump them on Clark either. He was a great guy, but what would he know about not fitting in?
Her thoughts got less collected and coherent the more she began to drift off, softly sung to sleep by Clark’s gentle typing and clicking, the low noise of his slow, deep breaths gently rocking her like a babe in the crib. Before she fully slipped into the quiet shroud of slumber, however, she did have the energy for one last thought.
Huh. He really is a teddy bear…
When she finally awoke the next morning, slumped over her desk with an awful crick in her neck, she couldn’t be happier.
Clark must’ve moved to give her some support, judging from the couch cushion placed under her head. The mug of coffee next to her head was cold. Probably the same one from last night. She shifted, attempting to press her whole face into the patterned fabric, at which point she became aware of the sticky note stuck to her forehead.
The message on the stained yellow paper was simple enough: ‘PER RY S AYS YO UHAV E THE DA YOFF :D’. Thankfully, Clark was never one for writing long messages. Another thing she was grateful about.
Lois shrugged, leading her to also become aware of the blazer draped over her shoulders. She couldn’t really help the small giggle that left her at seeing it. The dope.
Still, it would be nice to get some personal time. For one, her nails needed a different color on them. Maybe blue? She’d think about when she got home and really slept.
But then again, maybe that could wait…