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Superman landed at the gate of the barbed wire fence surrounding the warehouse, next to Lois Lane. The woman stood with her arms crossed, staring in smug satisfaction at her handiwork as flames consumed the building.
“Lois… what did you DO?” Superman asked, scanning the building with his X-ray vision to make sure no one was in danger inside.
She didn’t even look over at him, she just continued to watch the fire as it spread. Sirens were still several city blocks away, and who knows how long it would take them in traffic. “Lex said I couldn’t prove he was moving meta-incapacitating chemicals. He was right. I couldn’t do it fast enough to save lives. So I did the next best thing.”
“Get yourself arrested for arson?” He asked skeptically. He knew he’d have to put the fire out soon. But he was too curious to just get straight to it. “How did you know the chemicals wouldn’t explode or create toxic fumes?”
She glanced up at him finally. “The individual components are inert. Organic in a Whole Foods kind of way, not a “cyanide is perfectly natural” kind of way.”
He needed to hear the rest of this, but the building was being consumed. He put up a finger. “Hold that thought.” With a deftness attributed to the many years he’d been on the job, he zipped around and then through the structure, using his icy breath to freeze things over and kill the flames.
When he landed beside her, she seemed annoyed.
“Well, out with it.”
Lois’s eyes narrowed. “You could have let it burn down to the ground, until there was nothing left.”
“I could have,” he agreed. “But I didn’t. Property damage being what it is and all.”
She waved a hand as the first police car pulled up. “Lex owns the warehouse through a shell company. It won’t do anything to his bottom line, but it’d be terribly satisfying.”
“In that case…” Superman’s eyes started glowing red.
“Really?” Lois asked in anticipation.
The red light dimmed and his blue eyes were visible once again. “No.”
She toed at the gravel with her boot. “You’re no fun.”
He grinned as the officer walked over. “You didn’t say that last night.”
She kicked his ankle. Not hard enough to hurt herself. Just hard enough that he knew she meant business.
Superman schooled his face in an attempt to look as serious for the cop that had just approached. “Evening, Officer…” he looked at the man’s nameplate. “Greenwald.”
The man tipped his hat just a bit. “Superman. Can you tell me what happened here?” Behind him the first two fire engines pulled in, cutting their sirens.
Superman stepped aside and gestured to Lois. “Miss Lane will know better than me, I’m afraid. I just put out the flames a minute or so ago.”
The police officer put his hands on his belt. “Miss Lane. From the paper?”
With a half-salute, Superman levitated a few inches off the ground. “I trust you two can take it from here?” Without waiting for an answer, he waved to the other first responders and took off as fast as he could without looking like he was taking off as fast as he could.
***
Clark, sitting at the dining room table, closed his laptop when he heard Lois come through the door. “Fun night?” he asked as she sighed and tossed her keys on the side table near the door.
“Yeah, thanks for that,” she said, visibly exhausted as she came into the room. She saw the laptop in front of him and her eyes narrowed. “Did you file a story about the warehouse fire?”
He pushed the laptop away from him. “Well, you were busy.”
She stuck out her tongue. Superman giving a statement instead of her could have really saved everyone a lot of time and effort. “You had three and a half facts. How did you string together a story?”
Sitting back he crossed his ankles under the table and folded his arms in front of him. “Officer Greenwald was super happy to give me a quote.”
“Did he give a quote to you, or to Superman?” she asked as she shed her jacket, the smell of smoke emanating from it as she tossed it over a chair.
“I will never tell,” he said solemnly.
Leaning against the chair, she rolled her eyes. “Clark Kent, if you didn’t cheat at journalism, you’d have absolutely no career.”
“Probably,” he told her in mild honesty. “But we beat the Daily Star in getting a story on the web first.”
“And that’s all that really matters,” she conceded.
“Anyways, I know you’ll write the follow up where you actually expose what Lex was doing and give a first-hand account of what lead you to torching a two acre complex. You’ll win an award and then try to make me feel bad about it, and all will be well in the world.”
She stood up straight and grinned. “As long as we’re clear on how this is going to go down.” Holding out a hand, she gestured for the laptop. “Let me see what you wrote.”
He picked it up, but hesitated in handing it over. “I saw the split infinitive AFTER it was published. But it’s completely legal AP style. So I don’t want to hear you say a word about it.”
Lois grinned devilishly. “Hand it over, Smallville. I want to see this for myself. And see how much clarification and retraction I need to do in my longform article.” Grabbing the laptop, she headed to the living room sofa and cracked it open. “You ended a sentence with a preposition too.”
“You’re allowed to do that!” he said loudly from the other room.
Curling up around his laptop, she gave it a speed read. “It’s tacky!” she called back.
“Don’t talk to me, talk to the AP style guide!” he said, coming into the living room with two bowls of ice cream.
Finishing the story (that wasn’t very long), she looked up at him. “Ok. It’s sparse, but you got all the facts right.” She reached up for the bowl.
He gave it to her then invested himself in his own bowl, licking the back of his spoon. “I’m glad it meets your standards.”
“It’s fine.”
“Wow. High praise.”
“What really matters is that no one is going to remember this after they read my amazing longform journalism on the fire,” she said with a chuckle.
“All it takes is Perry giving you 10,000 words on a Sunday and suddenly I’m chopped liver.”
She crinkled her nose. “Don’t flatter yourself, Smallville. You’re always chopped liver.”
He laughed and walked back into the kitchen. “See if I put out your fire out next time, then.”
“Oh don’t be like that!” Lois called after him.
“I’ll visit you when you’re in prison for arson!” he promised as he walked in while squirting chocolate syrup on what was left of his ice cream.
She pointed her spoon at him. “It’s got chocolate chips! It doesn’t need syrup! And if you do that, I’ll tell Perry that you don’t actually have ADHD and that’s why you can’t hit a deadline to save your life, that you’re just always screwing off at work!”
“You’re mean.” Pushing the spout back down on the bottle, he licked the top to get the last bit of syrup off.
“I am mean. And you’re gross. Just wipe it with a napkin or something.”
He looked her dead in the eye and licked the spout again.
“Ok, ok. I won’t, I won’t. Just don’t act like a savage with the chocolate syrup.”
Eating the rest of his ice cream in two large bites, he sat down on the sofa and wrapped an arm. “Ok, now tell me from the beginning what started this whole thing…”
She put her head on his shoulder. “Ok. So, Lex recently bought a string of avocado farms in Mexico…” she started in on her convoluted tale.
Clark sighed contentedly while she walked him through everything that had led her to burning the warehouse down. They really did have the best life.