Archive of Our Own ^beta

They have these moments, her and Clark. They are fleeting and sparse wherein he looks at her for a beat too long, with this small little smile before looking away completely. They have these moments, and after each on,e she starts to think maybe, just maybe, he feels for her just a fraction of what she feels for him. That she isn’t completely alone in this.

They have these moments and sometimes Lois will smile and ask, “What?” with faux innocence and a small amount of hope and Clark will sputter and flush red and look away.

“Nothing,” he’ll insist, shaking his head. “Nothing, I just….” He will trail off and avert eye contact for a second before glancing at her head-on, smiling blindly. “It’s nothing.”

Lois doesn’t think too much about them. Doesn’t carry them with her like she used to. She learned her lesson years ago at Chloe’s wedding when they had something lingering between them, the subtle hint of almost that she clung to so hard her fingertips turned white, only for it to be all but taken away in the same moment.

They have these moments, and Lois feels something for him, sure, but she has learned her lesson and knows better now.

She’s not one of those girls, and she knows that pinning her hopes and dreams on a guy who barely acknowledges she exists in that way will get her nowhere fast.

So Lois does what Lois does best and shoves it down, way down, and tries to forget it was ever even there.

__

“Tell me something, Smallville,” Lois starts one morning as she drops his proofread article onto his desk. The vast amount of red is seeping into the white paper, and she laughs at the look on his face when he catches sight of it. Perching herself on the edge of his desk, Lois crosses her arms over her chest in annoyance. “Did you go to college?”

Clark rolls his eyes and pushes himself backwards, his chair rolling away from his desk. His fingers curl around the edges of his armrests, bracing himself, she figures. He’s used to this by now.

“You know I did.”

She raises an eyebrow. “And you’re telling me that somehow, in four years, they didn’t teach you the difference between their and there?”

There is this thing Clark does, where he narrows his eyes and looks confused and dumbstruck, and Lois has to muster every single ounce of willpower not to roll her eyes at the sight of it (and most times, she fails miserably). She used to think it was all an act – the dumb, flannel-wearing farm boy persona – but now, sadly, she knows better. Clark lacks some crucial aspects of common sense, and despite her greatest efforts, she likes that about him. Likes that there is this part of him, this tiny untouchable, untainted part of him, that somehow manages to balance out the cynicism that drips off of every word that comes out of her mouth.

“You misused them six times. Six,” she stresses, and he reaches for the article. “Just what, may I ask, are you going to do when I’m not around to clean up after you?”

There is a moment where he looks at her for a beat too long, and she thinks, just maybe, he’s angry. But then he smiles and laughs, and she slides off his desk and makes her way to her own.

“Hopefully, I will never have to find out.”

__

Some days Lois realizes that she can fit the people she cares about, really cares about, into the palm of her hand.

Can count them on her fingers and doesn’t even need her toes.

There is her father, sure. Lucy some days (the weekends, usually. Fridays or Saturdays when Lucy is drunk and calls, voice thick with vodka when she says, I miss you, Lo like it still means something), but they are so far removed from her life today that the bitter part of her admits what she feels for them is more out of necessity and less of her choosing.

What is that saying? You can choose your friends, but you can’t choose your family?

Well, Lois could write an entire book on the levels of truth behind that statement.

“Hello,” Chloe says, dragging out the word and Lois looks up, finally, and realizes Chole had been talking.

“What?”

“Have you listened to a word I just said?”

“Of course,” she replies and busies herself by looking for a pencil. Chloe gives her a look. Lois rolls her eyes. They do this a lot. “Okay, no.”

“You are so selfish,” Chloe sighs, but there is a chuckle soon after, followed by that trademark Sullivan grin, and Lois breathes out a simple sigh of relief.

Lois just laughs and laughs and muses, quietly, that at least she has this, right here – Chloe and the camaraderie she’s never been able to replicate with anyone else. Lois is thankful for her cousin in a way she can’t really explain. Thinks back over the years to skinned knees and broken hearts, and maybe they bonded early on over absent mothers and fathers who tried their hardest, but in the end, none of that really even matters. Chloe is her first phone call, her first line of defense and has been since, well, forever. She has been the only constant in Lois’s life full of shifting, and it’s nice, more than nice actually, to have somebody there to hold you up when you don’t quite know how to do it for yourself.

(At this moment, this rare, peaceful moment in Lois’s life filled to the brim with stories and drama and the would-bes, could-bes of a relationship that probably will never reach actualization, Loisdoes not think about how while Chloe is her first phone call, Clark is her second and has been, for, well, almost longer than she could count on her fingers.)

In her head, Lois makes a mental note to buy Chloe something nice for her birthday, but it’s a fruitless effort. Lois will just forget, and Chloe doesn’t really care either way, so she’ll just give her a card and a nice IOU and buy her a drink over dinner.

It’s kind of a routine they have.

__

After particularly long days when they are the last ones in the office, Clark will toss his pencil onto his desk somewhere near midnight, the want to go get a drink? sliding out of his mouth easily. Of course, Lois says yes, and this, surprisingly, has nothing to do with Clark and everything to do with the fact that after pounding the pavement all day in search of the perfect story, she just likes to sit back with a cold drink and relax.

They’ll sit at some unnamed bar and order their beers and talk about nothing at all. She’ll make lists in the back of her head about headlines and ideas, certain points she needs to strengthen in her articles before she sends them off to the press.

One night, she looks up and finds him gazing off towards the crowd, and she follows his line of sight and sighs when she sees what he’s looking at. There is a girl – tiny, but also somewhat tall, with brown hair and doe eyes hanging all over some random guy. This moment hurts in a way Lois can’t really explain because she remembers, vaguely, being back in Smallville in the early days, when the heartbreak was still fresh for Chloe and the blonde saying, nobody can live up to that, and I pity anyone who tries.

The memory tastes bitter and she takes a swig of her beer to swallow it down.

“Do you miss her?” She asks before she can stop herself, and watches as his eyes slide back to hers, slightly widened.

“Who?”

“Lana,” she says simply.

The name sounds bitter even to her own ears. It’s not that she hated the girl. She didn’t. Not essentially, anyway. Lois doesn’t really hate anybody. She dislikes people, maybe, but she’s a writer, and there’s a connotation so negative behind the word hate that she tries to use it sparingly. So, no, she never really hated Lana Lang. She just distrusted her in a way that nobody else did.

The thing about Lois that everyone always forgets is that she is a ridiculously good judge of character. And even in the beginning, when she knew nothing about these people and was just trying to find her cousin, she knew Lana would never live up to the legend everyone had built up around her.

Who really could?

“I don’t know,” Clark sighs, heavy and weighted, and she watches as he plays with the bottle in his hands. “Maybe, I guess. In that sort of way everyone misses their first loves.”

She nods, impressed. “Well,” she deadpans. “That’s rather… poetic.”

He smiles, and it is blinding even in the dim light of the bar. “I’m learning.”

__

Clark drives her home after the bar that night. There is mostly silence until she reaches forward and fiddles with the radio, turning it on with a flick of her wrist. He complains about the station she chooses, and she relents after a minute of heated debate and name-calling, tuning the station to something she knows he likes.

“What about you?” he asks after the longest time as he puts the blinker on and turns onto her street.

“What?”

He smiles and rolls his eyes. “What about your first love?”

It’s an intimate question, and the way it just sort of falls off of his tongue is foreign to her ears. Lois always pushes and pushes, doesn’t stop to spare feelings, and never cares if she’s stepping over some boundary. It is who she is, a part of her charm Perry always says. But Clark, well, he never got personal, and she supposes it has something to do with all the secrets he buries away just as much as it has to do with the fact that he has that thing called tact that Lois knows hardly anything about.

“Smallville,” she sighs. “What are you talking about?”

“Do you ever think about him?”

She’s not exactly sure what to say to that, so for the longest tim,e she says nothing. Doesn’t quite know how to tell him that she isn’t exactly sure what love really even is and, furthermore, if she’s even experienced it. There had been Oliver, of course, but some days Lois wasn’t convinced that she loved the idea of him more than she actually loved him.

“Well,” she starts after a moment, drawing out the word. “His name was Jason Lewis. We were five, and he used to give me his oatmeal cream pies at lunch.” Clark is smiling and rolling his eyes as she speaks. “I don’t think about him all that much, but I do miss those oatmeal cakes.”

The car pulls up to her apartment complex a second later and she couldn’t be more thankful. Talking about herself, jokingly or not, is not one of her favorite pastimes. The car transitions into park, and she unbuckles her seatbelt. When she looks up, Clark’s looking at her in the most peculiar way.

“Do you know how to be serious for five seconds?” he asks.

He’s smiling, but there is an edge to his tone that she isn’t entirely familiar with.

On her way out of the car, she throws a grin over her shoulder. “It’s what people love about me, Clark. The comic relief.”

His soft laughter follows her all the way to her front door.

(The next morning, when she goes into work, Clark is already there – a pleasant surprise – and there is a box of oatmeal cream pies sitting front and center on her desk.

When she looks at him, smile firmly in place, he merely shrugs.)

__

Ollie calls her sometimes.

Every few months or so. He will call at least two times in a row, and she never picks up the first time around, but by the second, her will fades almost completely, and she flips her cell phone open on the last ring.

“Hey,” she says, acting all nonchalant as she mutes the eleven o’clock news.

“Hi,” he breathes quietly.

If Lois closes her eyes, she can imagine him sitting there, at some desk, in some office so far away from her, feet propped up in front of him. If she closes her eyes, she can remember what it was like to be a part of a whole, to not feel so lonely day in and day out. If only her mind reels, and she allows herself a few seconds of an adjustment period where she closes her eyes and just breathes.

When she opens them again Lois sighs and asks, “How are you?” in lieu of an olive branch as she draws her legs up to her chest.

“I’m good,” Ollie replies after a long pause and then pauses again. She knows him, remembers all the things she tries so hard to forget, and she hears the opening and closing of his mouth. She knows he’s trying to choose his words carefully and she feels sad, kind of, that they’ve come to this. This awkwardness. He used to be the only person in the world besides Chloe that she felt completely and utterly at home with.

It hurts her heart a little bit, but Lois does what she does best and ignores it.

“Look,” he begins, clearing his throat. “I’m in Metropolis. Have dinner with me.”

Lois breathes and thinks okay and says it, too. They’re friends, sort of, and there’s no harm to old friends having dinner. So two nights later, she wears brand new heels and a pretty red dress, and he picks her up on time, always reliable. There are about five seconds of awkwardness where they lean in and fumble for a hug and a kiss to the cheek, but when she pulls away, he smile,s and so does she, and everything clicks into place.

He surprises her by taking her to her favorite pizza place on 32nd, and they sit in their formalwear and eat greasy pizza and drink diet cokes and laugh like they’ve been doing this every day for their entire lives.

It feels nice, she thinks, somewhere during the desert, to be able to have this with him. They’re friends, she muses, and yes, okay, he hurt her before, but there is that part of her, deep down inside, that admits that it was better then than now.

They never would have made it too far, anyway, and Lois thinks he has always known it, too.

“You look good,” he says quietly. He is looking at her wistfully as he says it, lips curling. “Happy. I’m glad for you, Lo.”

She smiles widely. “I am, too.”

That night, he walks her to her door, and they do the awkward goodnight thing, all shuffling feet and eyes on the floor and she kisses him, just once, soft and fleeting to the corner of his mouth. He is surprised and backs away, guard already firmly in place and it's okay, really, because the butterflies and rapid heartbeat she was half expecting aren’t there.

“Goodnight, Ollie,” she says softly, the corner of her mouth twitching upwards. “Don’t be a stranger anymore, okay?”

__

Clark does this thing when he is thinking too hard about things that he shouldn’t where he chews on the inside of his cheek and opens and closes his mouth every five seconds, like he is ready to say something but ultimately chooses not to. He’s doing it now, with his hands curled into fists at his side, head resting against the back of his seat as he does everything but look at her. Lois sighs and shifts her feet to rest on the dashboard of Clark’s beat-up truck and does her best not to count the beats between his breaths, to ignore the way he huffs just slightly as he closes his mouth to keep from saying whatever is on his mind.

They’ve been here for half the day already – staked outside of some burger joint on the west side because Lois got a tip three days ago pertaining to the fact that it may just be the home base of the biggest drug operation this side of Metropolis has ever seen. She’s been ready to call it quit since hour six because it’s mid-August, a million degrees outside, and Clark hasn’t said more than two words to her since this morning. She has nothing but the heat and the gentle hum of Metropolis to keep her company, and it is slowly weakening her reserves.

“Mind if I turn on the music?”

“What? Oh,” Clark reaches up and rubs the back of his neck and avoids eye contact. “Yeah, sure.”

Rolling her eyes, Lois reaches forwards and turns the radio on, sighing when the sound finally fills the space around her. Clark shifts in his seat, the rustling of fabric mixing with the music on the radio, and Lois drums her nails against the handrest and tries to ignore him. It doesn’t go so well.

“Okay,” she breathes out, turning to face him. “What is wrong with you?”

“What?” Clark’s eyes widen and face flushes, and Lois tries – and fails – not to roll her eyes. “Nothing. I’m fine.”

“You’ve been huffing and puffing over there all day. It’s obnoxious. You want to talk about it or not, Smallville? Because if not, knock it off. It’s annoying as hell.”

He does that thing with the opening and closing of his mouth, and Lois raises an eyebrow and waits as patiently as possible. She thinks, just for a moment, that he’s actually going to say something, but instead, he just shakes his head.

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Just forget it.”

Turning back in her seat, she reaches forward and turns the volume up. “If you’d stop being all huffy over there, I could.”

He says nothing further, and neither does she, and there is this five, maybe ten minute span of time where there is nothing but the music and the sounds of cars passing them by ringing in her ears. It should say something that she is not even all that surprised that at minute eleven, Clark turns his head sharply towards her.

“What?” She asks tiredly as she pinches the bridge of her nose.

“I ran into Oliver the other day,” Clark finally says and she has to strain to hear him over the music and hum of the city.

“Oh?”

“He said you guys went to dinner.”

Lois nods. “We did.”

“So are you guys…” he trails off and does a very good job at trying not to look at her. He’s flushing all kinds of red she can’t help but admit it’s rather adorable.

“Are we what?”

“You know…”

“I really don’t.”

“Back together?”

She smirks. “No. Why?” Lois arches her eyebrow. “Do you care?”

“No. No. I just, you know, if you guys were… I mean, really, I was just wondering if I should clear out my spare bedroom in case you show up drunk at one AM again and need a place to crash.”

Immediately Lois reaches for the closest thing and tosses it in his direction. “Stop acting like that is a reoccurring thing. It happened one time. ONE TIME!”

Clark holds his hands up in defense. “I’m just pointing out the obvious facts, Lois.”

“Yeah, Okay. Whatever. And you know what? I don’t even know why you care. It’s Oliver. We’re friends. We’re allowed to go out and have dinner.”

“I know. I know that. I just thought that after last time…”

“Are you jealous?” She asks, cutting him off, and she is half-astounded, her skin prickling with the tiniest amount of satisfaction at the mere thought.

“Psh,” Clark continues, not looking at her, and she can’t help but laugh. The idea of him being jealous of something ridiculous as her and Oliver’s now non-existent relationship is as amusing as it is satisfying. “No. No. I just was wondering, as a friend, what was going on.”

“Yeah, OK, buddy,” Lois says, but the smile on her face is blinding.

“I’m not jealous!” He busts out and reaches forward to turn the music up, his way of ending the conversation.

Lois just laughs.

__

One time, Lois told Chloe that she was in love with Clark.

Years ago, when she was a different person and thought, you know, maybe. It was a Sunday, it was raining, and Lois had just shown up at Chloe and Jimmy’s apartment, let herself in, and collapsed onto the couch and without any preamble, announced for anyone to hear, “I think I’m in love with him.”

And Chloe had laughed and laughed and smiled in that knowing way of hers, and she’d seen Jimmy peek his head out of the kitchen and smile too. Lois had rolled her eyes in response, throwing an arm over her face and felt a little like throwing up.

“I think I’m going to puke.”

“Because you’re in love with Clark?”

“No. Yes,” she groaned and tried to make sense of it all. “I don’t know.”

“Lois—”

“—I don’t understand how this could have happened. I just don’t get it. He’s Clark Kent. He wears flannel, for Christ’s sake. How the hell does this happen? How could you let this happen?”

Chloe had sighed and Lois heard the smile without even looking. “I gave you the handbook. I warned you. Sometimes these things just have a mind of their own, Lo.”

In the beginning, there were these feelings, like there almost always are, and it was okay like that. It was nice, even, having this fantasy with this vague possibility of coming true. But then somewhere along the way, it turned into something else, something more. She’d look at him more. Think about him more. Get lost in the way he smiled and overthink every comment and glance her way until one day she was walking to get coffee and it just hit her out of nowhere. Right in the middle of her Caramel Macchiato.

“What are you going to do?”

“What am I going to do? What do you mean what am I going to do?” Finally, Lois had sat up straight and laughed something maniacal as she rested her head on the back of the couch. “I’m going to make it go away. What the hell else do you think I’m going to do?”

“I don’t really think you can make these sorts of things just magically disappear, Lois,” Jimmy had called from the kitchen, and Chloe had chuckled and did her half-shrug of agreement.

“Well, you know what, Jimmy?” Lois called back. “I’m Lois-fuckin’-Lane. If anyone can do it, I can, okay?”

Chloe had just smiled.

And Lois really should have known better.

__

They all have dinner together on Sunday nights.

Chloe cooks, and Lois brings wine or sometimes beer, depending.

(There is wine, usually a red when it’s been a slow news week. Beer when they’ve been chasing a story for a series of days that have managed to string themselves together.

Clark and her alternate weeks, and in the beginning, he would call and make sure which type he was supposed to bring, but now he just knows.

Lois thinks of all the things that implies and chooses, most days, to ignore the fact that it is more surely a learned habit.)

The evenings go like this: Chloe and Lois are in the kitchen, chatting, reminiscing, laughing. They are best friends, sisters in all the ways that matter, and this is their version of a family dinner. It’s her favorite part of her week, and come Monday morning, she’s already asking Chloe what’s on the menu for Sunday. The boys stay in the living room doing whatever it is boys do (SportsCenter, football, Lois knows enough about the species of male to know they all pretty much work the same). Then, later, there is dinner with Chloe and Jimmy on one side, and Clark and Lois on the other.

The routine is nice and stable, and nothing Lois has ever really known before. With the General, it was dinner on whatever base they called home at that particular point in time, and it was with other families, but it was never an intimate affair. In Smallville, living with the Kents, they had something similar, but with the fields and open skies, Lois never felt one hundred percent at home and didn’t really appreciate what she had until it was halfway to being gone.

Like clockwork, during dessert, Jimmy jokes, “When are you going to cook for us, Lois?”

Chloe returns, “Never. Unless you have a death wish,” and Lois chuckles for a second or two, then pauses with her shoulders shaking from bridled laughter, waiting for the sound of Clark’s own laugh from beside her. Waiting for the way he always shifts and kicks her leg in the process, entirely on purpose, and she kicks him back.

It is then that Clark smiles at her, and she always finds herself waiting for that too, and when he does, finally, Lois lets out a breath she didn’t realize she was holding in as she smiles in return.

Sundays are the best part of her week.

__

As a rule, Lois doesn’t really enjoy the holidays.

It’s hard when you don’t have a fully functioning family. When you have a sister that forgets she has your number and never calls. When the Sunday morning phone calls with your father keep getting shorter and shorter. It is hard for Lois, always a battle, really, because she has Chloe and she appreciates Chloe, but now Chloe is part of Chloe and Jimmy, and it’s just different. She doesn’t begrudge her cousin the happiness she’s been lucky enough to find, and she isn’t exactly jealous, but adjusting is hard, and it isn’t exactly getting any easier as the years pass.

It is early December, a Monday (which isn’t that much of a surprise because Lois has always loathed Mondays), and Chloe has just called to confirm their pending plans for Christmas. Usually, Lois goes with them wherever they go; most of the time they end up at the Olsen’s or some aunt or uncle that she remembers vaguely from their disastrous wedding. No matter what the destination, it is always uncomfortable and boring, and Lois almost always gets a little too drunk and spends the night drowning in a vat of self-pity.

Not exactly her idea of a good time.

She has just lost a story to some jerk from The Inquisitor, and Perry is none too happy with her (Lane, he had yelled across the bullpen, what the hell am I paying you for if you aren’t going to do your job? And she had sunk so far low in her chair that she almost fell off) and spending the holidays with people she didn’t know sounded like the most unappealing thing in the world.

“Look,” Clark sighs and pushes his glasses up his nose. “My mother is coming home. I know she would love to have you. Why don’t you just come back with me?”

Lois narrows her eyes and made a show out of doing something incredibly important on the computer.

“I’m not some charity case, Smallville.”

“Shut up, will you? I know you don’t want to go and hang out with Jimmy’s Aunt Millie, and I don’t want to have to think about you being miserable during my two-day vacation, so just stop it and agree.” He pauses for a second, then adds, “my mother would love to see you.”

She pulls up minesweeper on the computer and dies within the first thirty seconds. She thinks of how much she really doesn’t want to go to the Olsen’s and how the only other alternative she has includes a Christmas filled with a TV dinner, cheap wine and A Christmas Story.

“So really,” she starts, and wonders when she became this pathetic. “I’d be doing you a favor?”

Clark laughs, and it washes over her, sinks into her skin. “Yeah, sure, Lois.”

___

When Lois is in a mood to be completely honest with herself, she admits that she loves Smallville for reasons she can’t really explain. At first, even with the open fields and blue, cloudless skies, she had felt suffocated, uncomfortable in her own skin. Now ti is a breath of fresh air. It’s an acclamation of sorts, always is, and it takes a few hours to get used to the quiet again, but the way Mrs. Kent hugs her, tight and warm with that simple Mom smell, it feels something akin to home and Lois well —Lois never wants to let it go.

A year ago, maybe even two, now (time just seems to blend together these days, her life a blur of stories and work and her lonely apartment), she had taken an early vacation and went to see her father. It was nice at first, the way he smiled at her, something reminiscent of I’m proud of you, when she had told him about her job and her life, finally proving to him that she wasn’t the irrevocable screw up he always thought her to be.

She had stayed three days, and it was nice to be with him, to hug him and have him close, but she didn’t exactly feel in place. She never really did with him, not since her mom went and died, and it hurts her heart in a visceral sort of way that always steals the breath right from her lungs.

“I’m so glad you could make it,” Mrs. Kent sighs into her ear, still hugging her close, and Lois just kind of closes her eyes and makes a memory. Tries not to think about how she could have had this if things had worked out in her favor all those years ago and her mother hadn’t gotten sick and left her behind.

It’s a selfish thought, and Lois knows it, but she still cannot help it.

“I am, too,” she smiles, pulling away and looks at Clark briefly, standing off to the side, looking as awkward as always with a small smile on his face. “Thanks for having me. I don’t know if I could have handled another awkward holiday with the Olsens. They’re just… so happy.”

Mrs. Kent laughs and links an arm through hers. They start moving towards the kitchen. “You can help me bake. I’m making those double chocolate chip brownies you like.”

Lois’s mouth is already watering. “That sounds like the best idea I’ve ever heard.”

__

“So, how are you really?”

She and Mrs. Kent are doing the dishes. Lois is washing, and Mrs. Kent is drying because the Kents are the only people who haven’t discovered the perks of having a dishwasher. The moment holds an air of domesticity that Lois may just get used to if she isn’t too careful. She’s always regarded Mrs. Kent in the way she assumes she would have regarded her own mother if she were still alive, and Lois will admit that she loves her in a way somewhat reminiscent of what she supposes a mother-daughter relationship is similar to. It’s always been there, with the hugs and gentle smiles, emails she sends Lois’s way just to say how are you?

Lois smiles broadly, but it doesn’t reach her eyes. “I’m —”

“—Fine,” the older woman answers for her, a knowing smile on her lips. “I know. You are a terrible liar, Lois.”

There’s silence, and Lois just continues washing the dishes and placing them to the side, wondering if she really is all that transparent. It’s not that she isn’t happy. She is. Things are good. Better than they have been in years. She has a job, an apartment, friends, and a life that is stable and secure. When was the last time she was able to say that out loud and mean it?

“I’m not, you know. I’m a fantastic liar.”

“I’m a mother,” Mrs. Kent says. “I’m impervious.”

Lois laughs, but it falls short. The dishes are done now, and she clicks off the water and grabs a towel to dry her hands. She looks at her phone, off to the side on the kitchen table, and tries not to think about how it hasn’t rung all day. Convinced herself that her father and Lucy were just busy and reminds herself that the time difference has always been difficult.

“You know,” Lois begins, resting her back against the counter top. “I am good. I am happy. It’s just some days are harder than others and I don’t really even know why.”

“Well,” Mrs. Kent starts, moving so she’s standing right next to her. “Life hasn’t always been kind to you—”

Snorting, Lois rolls her eyes. “It hasn’t exactly been kind to any of us.”

“This is true. But just remember that you’re not alone. I know sometimes it feels like that, but you just have to remember you aren’t.”

There’s a moment where Lois leans on Mrs. Kent’s shoulder, just for a second, and it’s nice to share the weight on her burdens with somebody else. Even nicer that she has somebody to let her do it. It makes something get stuck in her throat, and for some inexplicable reason, Lois suddenly feels like crying.

She blames it entirely on the holidays. They always, without fail, bring out the worst in her.

“And Clark, you know, he’ll come around eventually,” Mrs. Kent says after a moment, so quietly that Lois has to strain to hear her. “He just has to do things in his own time, always has.”

Lois sputters, eyes wide. Mrs. Kent just smiles fondly in her direction and Lois’s face has to be pale-white because she just sort of starts to panic. Has she become one of those women? Those clingy, annoying Type-A types who make the men who don’t have feelings for them their whole life? Sure, the maybe (okay, most definitely) having feelings for Clark factor wore her thin some days, but it isn’t that transparent, is it?

“He’s, well… Mrs. Kent,” she tries, and busies herself with wiping off the counter top. “He’s insufferable. I know he’s your son and all, but he’s just so annoying. He’s Clark. Let’s just say I know better, okay?”

And she did. Chloe had written the handbook on loving Clark Kent, and Lois had taken quite a few notes from it over the years and the number one rule she had learned? The cost of friendship isn’t worth the looming idea of maybe. It’s what she tells herself day in and day out. Clark, well— he was more family to her than her actual family. She wasn’t ready to jeopardize that. She didn’t really know if she ever would be.

It is why it has been years of tiptoeing and dancing and they’re still rooted at square one.

Mrs. Kent just throws her head back and laughs. “Honey, that is the exact same thing I said about Jonathon when I first met him. It’s how the good ones always start.”

Flushing bright red, Lois is about to say something smart in return just as Clark sticks his head in the doorway. He looks odd, with a curious looking smirk on his face as he asks, “Funny or Dramatic?” holding up two movies.

They all vote for funny.

It’s Christmas Vacation, and she and Clark look over at each other half-way through the movie and share the tiniest smile when they realize they’ve been laughing at all the same parts.

__

It’s always an adjustment, the first night in a different place, and even though she had lived here for years, Lois can’t sleep without the buzz of Metropolis’s traffic in the background, so she spends most of the night tossing and turning. She takes turns alternating between staring at her clock and her phone, waiting for dawn and phone calls that would never come, and by two, she decides she can’t take it anymore and grabs her pack of cigarettes (the ones she keeps in her purse just in case ) and heads downstairs to the porch, skipping over the steps that creak out of habit.

She lights a cigarette within five seconds and pulls her jacket tighter around her as she blows out a puff of smoke. It feels good, the nicotine, and she sighs something heavy and tries not to think about how it’s been a little over six months since she indulged in this particular habit.

“Penny for your thoughts?”

Lois nearly jumps out of her skin at the sound of Clark’s voice and whips her head around so fast her neck cracks. “Wow, Smallville, you have that lurking thing down to an art,” she breathes, and scoots over, just a little bit, as an invitation to sit down. He takes it.

“Sorry.” He smiles in a way that says he isn’t sorry at all. She smirks back. “I heard you come down. Thought I’d make sure everything was alright.”

Taking another drag of her cigarette, Lois leans back on the railing next to her and half-shrugs. “Couldn’t sleep.”

“Want to talk about it?”

“Not really.”

“I’m a good listener.”

“Sometimes I’m not really convinced you’re listening when I’m talking, Clark. Sometimes I think you just act like it.”

It’s bitter, the way that statement falls off her tongue, but she doesn’t mean it to be. There’s a look on Clark’s face that says he caught it and understood, and she feels badly for a second, but it is momentarily and passes fairly quickly.

“Well,” he drawls, and bumps his shoulder with hers. She takes another puff of her cigarette and tries not to think of the close proximity. The way her skin prickles with anticipation for something she knows will never arrive. “Sometimes you talk about boring things because you haven’t been able to chat with Chloe yet. What do you expect me to do? I’m a guy, I don’t have opinions on shoes and clothing.”

“You are awful cutesy for two-thirty in the morning, Kent.”

Clark shrugs, all boyish charm and half smiles, and she forces herself not to look at it for more than five seconds. “If I promise to listen, will you talk?”

“It’s nothing, really,” she says softly because she’s too tired to argue with him and telling the truth is a bit easier to do at two in the morning. “Just the holidays.”

Pressing his lips into a thin line, Clark nods like he understands, and Lois supposes he does. Sometimes in the midst of her own pity it’s hard to see somebody else’s pain, and she misses Jonathan Kent in the same way she misses her mother.

“Maybe they’ll call tomorrow morning. They probably just don’t want to wake you.”

Nodding, Lois takes the last drag of her cigarette and throws it to the ground, stubbing it out with the toe of her slipper. A minuscule amount of false hope rises in her, but then she remembers the phone sitting on the night stand and the reoccurring disappointment and knows better.

“Sure, yeah. But really, Clark, how the hell do you manage to forget your daughter on Christmas Eve? I mean, I know if I ever have kids, chances are I won’t be the most excellent mother in the universe, but I can’t imagine a world where I’d forget to call my daughter on Christmas.”

When she realizes she is pretty damn near close to tears, she reaches for another cigarette. Surprisingly, Clark lets her and says nothing. Doesn’t try to placate her, doesn’t say anything to try to smooth over the hurt, and she’s glad, almost, because it’s two AM and she is worn so thin she doesn’t think she can handle it.

“I just,” she starts, and pauses to light her cigarette. “It’s just… it wasn’t always like this, you know? When my Mom was still alive, it’s not like he was winning father of the year awards, but he was there. And even for a while after she died, it was okay, but now I just don’t know. I just don’t understand how I’ve become so insignificant.”

“Lois,” Clark says, drawing on her name in that sad sort of way somebody does when they’re feeling sorry for you, and she takes another long drag of her cigarette to keep herself from thinking about how pathetic she sounds.

“It’s okay. Really. I’m just tired. I’ll be fine. You can go back to bed,” she tries to smile, but the edges of her mouth hurt.

Out of the corner of the eye, she sees him smile, just for a second. “I’m good here,” he says softly, and reaches for her hand and pulls the cigarette out from between her fingers. She’s too tired to object and watches wistfully as he tosses it to the side. “You really should quit, you know.”

Lois sighs and closes her eyes. “I’m trying.”

She leans her head on his shoulder, just barely, and he lets her. He lets her, and she sighs again, something heavy, and like in the kitchen before with Mrs. Kent he carries some of her weight, and it’s nice, she thinks, as she closes her eyes and just breathes.

__

The car ride back to Metropolis is long and mostly silent. Lois spends the time watching the vast, open fields pass her by, thinking about her father, about Lucy, about Clark even. She thinks about how she’s known him since she was eighteen and has loved him in some vague, fleeting way for just as long. It’s masochistic, she knows, because he is, most probably, still in love with Lana Lang and maybe always will be.

Glancing at him, out of the corner of her eye, she remembers her earliest memory of him. It’s caught somewhere in those years before Kansas with Chloe’s tears over the line, her sobs heartbreaking from miles away. Lois thinks that should have been enough to warn her away, that it should have served as a permanent road block with boldly printed letters proclaiming do not venture here.

Reaching for number six on the radio, she presses it and waits for the music to click on and thinks of him and this morning on the porch, with her head on his shoulder and how nice it was to have him offer support in a way she didn’t realize she needed. She thinks about how he is always just there, whether he means to be or not, and how much she’s come to depend on that as much as she depends on Chloe and their friendship.

“Clark?” He turns to her for a second, a simple humming sound passing his lips in lieu of a response. “What’s my favorite color?”

He laughs, and it is a ridiculous question, and completely out of nowhere, but when he notices that she’s dead-on serious, he sobers immediately. “Blue,” he says after a thoughtful pause.

There’s this tightening in her chest she always associates with him. The way it’ll grip and take hold when he smiles or stands too close, or even when he lets her down in some inexplicable way. It’s the latter, and it hurts, a little, this moment, and she lists off his favorite color, favorite food, favorite shirt in her head before settling on the single monetary thought that should have hit her ages ago.

Clark is never going to feel that way about her.

And it’s okay, she thinks, because at the end of the day, the ones that stick by you are the ones that matter, and he’s been there, always, and maybe that’s enough. Maybe that’s all she can ever hope to ask for.

“It is blue right?” he asks again, eyebrow raised.

“No,” Lois sighs. “It’s not.”

Leaning her head back against the seat, she closes her eyes and thinks that she is ready to let go.

__

The Monday after Christmas, Lois gets to work well before eight AM and already has two new articles outlined, proof read Clark’s and has ideas for a dozen more. The phones are ringing off the hook – another meteor freak has caused some sort of contained chaos downtime, and Clark strolls in fifteen minutes late.

Lois barely looks up when he sets a coffee cup next to her keyboard.

“What’s this?”

“I got tired of you drinking mine,” Clark says, and she’s not looking (she’s actually making a point out of not looking and focusing on the computer in front of her), but she can almost hear the affection in his voice.

The lid is already off before she even mutters her thanks. It’s warm and filled to the brim with caffeine and exactly what she needed.

It also has one cream and two sugars – exactly how she likes it.

All Lois can do is smile.