Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

There are three things wrong with today, Lois thinks over her 5pm lunch. It is lunch, even though the time and the food itself (a danish and a coffee) wouldn’t agree. 5pm lunch is not in itself something that is wrong with the day, though it’s not unrelated to what is.

The first problem is that she’s barely seen her desk since the morning. In a perfect world, the person in the green laser robot suit that toppled an apartment block before Superman finally managed to bring him down would have been the only event of the day. She should have then had the afternoon to find the man, interview him, and get a front page article. Not that he’d bothered to stick around to be interviewed - not that he ever does. She knows she’ll snag him one of these days. But, there had been some potential structural damage to the high-rise that housed the Planet, and they’d kicked everybody out until they could make sure it was safe, and so she hadn’t even been allowed back inside to grab her laptop. 5pm and she’s no closer to seeing her wonderfully clicky mechanical keyboard, and the tap of her phone as she writes into her notes app isn’t nearly as satisfying. Clark, at least, would surely have thought to grab the laptop for her during the evacuation, but- apparently- he did not.

The second problem is that she’s barely seen him all day. Apart from a nervous “good morning,” he’s not said a word to her. In fairness, she’s hardly been around to speak to him either, but the morning (pre laser robot) had mostly consisted of him ducking behind objects or avoiding eye contact whenever she looked his way. The afternoon should have consisted of him grabbing a donut to go along with her danish and helping her spell “refraction”. Instead, he’s nowhere to be seen. And it might be her fault. 

See, the third problem is that she’s wasted a bet. Clark never loses them, because he doesn’t accept anything he doesn’t think he’ll win - or rather, he miraculously stops being so clumsy when the stakes get high. Luckily, it turns out he’s not as good at carrying seven coffee cups (four in his hands, one tucked in each elbow, and that fateful cup of extra hot double shot dirty chai on his upturned forehead) as he thinks he is. Yesterday had been almost perfect. Yesterday had seen a cinnamon-scented, coffee-drenched farm boy grovelling before her while she made him promise to be honest for a whole twenty-four hours as punishment.

So, that resulted in a whole day of not seeing Clark. Oh, she knows he’s done his usual flaky act of ducking out of the newsroom at inconvenient and inappropriate times and then pretending it didn’t happen. He just hasn’t allowed her to ask him about it, so he hasn’t had to lie about it, so she’s confident she’s right in guessing that something fishy has been up with him all along. It’s nearly the end of the day and her bet’s wasted, and she may never get another chance again because now she’s showed her hand: now he knows she’s bothered by the constant absences and evasions and half-truths, and somehow she is sure she’ll never catch him again. 

She tells herself that she’s not very bothered, of course. Clark not being around isn’t quite as bad as having to write a whole article with her phone’s autocorrect trying to change every o-f to an o-v-e. She’s sitting and eating her danish across the street from the Planet so she can go back inside as soon as it’s clear, not so that she can watch for him. Obviously. 

But, even when the contractors finally give the all clear, the day isn’t right. Grant and Lombard and most of the juniors have long since headed home, and Perry bids her a sardonic “I guess that’s me for the day then,” after he finishes chatting with the team lead. Everyone who’s still around takes one peek into the lobby, turns around and leaves. But Lois isn’t finished until her draft is sitting in Perry’s inbox, and she refuses to work on her phone when her laptop’s perfectly accessible. 

Well, assuming accessible means “11 floors up and both elevators are out of order”, which in hindsight is probably why everyone else left: unlike Lois Lane, they are all of them unmotivated cowards who hate stairs. 

When Lois makes it to the bullpen, around four minutes and a good chunk of her lung capacity later, at least her laptop is there.

Clark… is also there. The day has been gloomy and grey but it’s not yet dark: even so, a warm light shines at his desk, and there he sits. Though his back is to her, she thinks there is something tired about his shoulders.

Laptop, Clark. It is incredibly difficult to decide which to go to first, but after a moment’s thought she marches up to the front of Clark’s desk and puts her hands on her hips. His large, chunky headphones are on and he’s apparently entirely absorbed by the blinking cursor at the start of an empty document. It’s an act she’s seen through many times: the man has the ears of a bat when he wants to.

However, when she waves a hand in front of his eyes, he seems genuinely startled. He yelps and looks up at her with what could be interpreted as abject terror, quickly masked by a self-deprecating little smile as he pulls the headphones down around his neck. The smile doesn’t sit quite right on his face: the darkness around his eyes suggests he hasn’t slept in a week, or is coming down with the flu, or has lost a fight.

“Lois!” She thinks his grin seems a fraction more fragile than normal. “what’re you doing here so late?”

Lois presses her mouth into a thin line, because it’s really not that late. The sun hasn’t even set yet. “Laptop,” she says. “What are you doing here?”

“Work…?” he says. He’s trying to match her tone, but it’s so uncertain it comes out almost like a question.

“With the building closed down?”

“What?”

“The— Smallville. The evacuation? The ‘no entry’ tape and the high-vis workers? The absence of literally anyone else in the office?”

He looks flustered. “Oh- the- no, I know, I came in just a whisker before you did.”

“Through the front door? I was watching it and didn’t see any sign of you.”

She can see it, now that she knows to look for it - the flicker of calculation behind his eyes. He says, “I came in through—“

“Truth,” she reminds him. “Today you promised me the truth.”

“It’s almost like you don’t trust me,” Clark grouses.

“It’s almost like you’re a compulsive liar,” Lois says.

He looks just a little hurt by that, and something else. His facade is so flimsy today that Lois can, almost, see behind it. “I didn’t know about the evacuation,” he says after a moment. “I didn’t come in through the front, I was here already. Um. I’d been sleeping in the printing room, for… a few hours. Guess I missed it, ha.” His messy hair and aura of general malaise do, at least, seem to corroborate that. 

“How the hell did you manage to sleep through that godforsaken whoop, whoop alarm?”

“It’s not half as loud as my upstairs neighbour at 5am,” Clark says, lips quirking up when she huffs at him. “Darn it, Patricia!” 

“Smallville.”

“Ok, so I wasn’t feeling so good,” he says, grimacing. “In fact, I should probably head home, get some rest.” As if on cue, he produces a handkerchief and coughs into it, and it sounds painful and harsh in a way that shouldn’t be fakeable.

There was a point where Lois thought Clark maybe had IBS. Cancer, even. Surely, at least, hypochondria. None of those panned out, but she doesn’t think he’s lying now. He looks like a houseplant kept out of the sun for too long: wilted and wearied and grey. Though he’d seemed fine that morning (for all she’d even seen him that morning), she supposes viruses can come on pretty suddenly. 

She takes a few steps back - there is no time in her schedule for getting sick. “Yes, definitely do that,” she says.

He gathers his things into his satchel hastily and stumbles as he gets to his feet, one hand making an aborted move towards his ribs. She almost wants to offer him a hand but… it’s not worth catching the flu. Instead, she says, “can I call you a cab?”

“I’ll be fine,” he says weakly.

“Well, rest up, Smallville,” she says. “I don’t want to see you back here until you’re certain you’re well!”

“Sure thing, Metropolis.” He gives a little salute and then shuffles towards the exit. 

Lois sighs: that is one bet utterly and completely wasted, then. At least she can grab her laptop and bring it home with her. She considers enjoying the rare quiet of an empty bullpen and working at her desk, but he’s probably filled the air with his germs. Elevator too, for that matter - maybe she should take the—

“Wait!” She yells. He’s just stepping through the elevator doors. “Clark, it might not be safe, we’re not supposed to use it!” He doesn’t seem to have heard, so she sprints after him and slips through the doors just before they close.

“Elevator’s damaged,” she wheezes, her lungs still not quite recovered from the stairs in the first place. “You should get out.”

Clark stares at her with alarm. “Then why’d you come in?”

“Well, you didn’t hear— huh.” Despite everything, she feels the clunk of the mechanism as the car starts to rise. It doesn’t feel any different from normal, no slower or rougher or louder. Only, “why are we going up?”

In the last three seconds, Clark’s gone two shades paler. “Wanted to go up to the roof. To smoke,” he says.

Gotcha, she thinks. “Don’t make me laugh. Truth.”

He all but collapses against the corner. “Wanted some air.”

“There’s air on the street. Funnily enough, the street is also the easiest way back to your flat, I think.” It’s 11 floors down, and something like 25 up, which is approximately 14 extra floors too many to be stuck in an elevator with flu germs.

“5:37pm, mid-spring, sun’s not hitting the street anymore but it’ll be on the roof for at least another fifteen minutes,” Clark mumbles, like that’s information anyone just knows off the top of their head.

Lois hits the button for the lobby. “Last time I checked, the sun. Doesn’t fix. The flu,” she says, emphasising her words by hitting the button another two or three times. “But, being stuck in this elevator with you will result in both of us being sick and neither of us getting the laser robot story on front page.”

To his credit, he looks like he’s holding in a cough like his life depends on it (it does). It looks like the effort costs him, too. He manages to grit out, “not the flu. I’m not contagious.”

“Sure.”

“It’s—” he stops to clear his throat roughly. “It’s genetic.”

Lois scowls. “Do you just lie for funsies? Do you just wake up in the morning and think, ‘gee, today I’ll laugh in Lois’s face while I make up whatever I want and, since I’m at it, miss every single interview and stake out and lead where maybe, she might want my help?’ And, Kent, they’re not even good lies. When did you ever have a genetic… thing. Truth!” She punches the lobby button a couple more times for good measure, and then the elevator grinds to a halt, and the lights go out.

In the close darkness, she hears something heavy thud to the ground, and the elevator rocks just a little. Clark coughs again: a deep, wet, unhealthy sound. The dim emergency lighting flickers on and she sees him sitting on the floor, looking up at her, for some reason utterly terrified.

“It was out of order,” she says uneasily.

“Oh no,” he says. He pulls himself back to his feet using the handrails and looks ten times worse for it in the gloom. “No, no no.” He hits the ‘door open’ button a few times and nothing happens. “No.” He moves to the door and starts to feel around the gap.

“We’re fine,” she says. “It’s not going to fall or anything, you big baby. We just need to call for help and sit tight. You’re not claustrophobic, are you?”

“No.” He strains feebly at the door, but the effort only seems to cause him pain, and he stops with a whimper and a hand pressed to his side.

“You’re going to be ok, right?”

“No,” he says miserably, not looking at her.

Lois, alarmed, turns on her phone torch and balances it on the handrails so that it produces a dispersed, bland white light that bounces off metal and glass and sucks the colour out of everything - at least, she hopes that’s why Clark looks so grey.

“Ok, what can I do,” she says more gently, stepping closer to him. It might be the close air, but he seems to be radiating heat like a furnace.

He looks down at her and twists his mouth. “Help me with the door?”

“I mean medically. How do I make sure you don’t, I don’t know, drop dead in the next twenty minutes?”

“Get the lantern out of my bag and then help me with the door?” He gives an almighty heave, and something cracks, but she’s not sure if it’s the door or him. He sags against the wall and looks pale and sick, and Lois thinks she feels the floor rock under her feet.

“If you don’t have any real ideas, then please sit down,” she says. 

“I can’t be in here,” he says. 

“Maybe you should have thought of that before you went inside the broken elevator?” Lois says. She turns away from him to scan the emergency procedures, and resolves to hit the call button, for all the social credit it will cost her tomorrow.

But she still hears him say, quietly, “I can’t be in here with you.”

She sways, feeling suddenly too hot and too cold. Oh. So she’s the problem. So Clark ‘obviously has a thing for her but refuses to acknowledge or act on it’ Kent wants so badly to not be stuck in an elevator with her that he’s actively endangering both of them.

She hears the creak of him standing, and half-turns just in time to see him go for the door again. She is about to grab him and drag him off the thing when he lets out a ferocious growl, and a section of the door peels back under his hands. The movement throws him off balance and he staggers backwards drunkenly, apparently drained of energy after this superhuman display. Then he proceeds to cough up what sounds like an entire lung.

Lois looks at the door: it’s at least three inches of reinforced steel plating bent as completely, if not as easily, as tin foil. There are deep finger holds gouged into it. She looks at Clark: his entire weight is supported by the wall, and he’s breathing heavily. There is something dark at the corner of his mouth, and his eyes are blown wide behind his glasses, and look slightly manic.

“What—what—“ Lois starts to say. Clark pushes himself off the wall and pointedly does not look at her. “How—“ she tries again. She sees him close his eyes and take a deep, unsteady breath, and then he bodily shoves himself through the hole he’s made, heedless of the way the jagged edges catch and tear at his jacket, and then he’s gone.

The car lurches alarmingly, and she just stares for a moment and tries to parse what she’s seen.

Then she slaps herself. Crazy that Clark’s ‘lifting a car off your child in an adrenaline-fueled show of strength’ moment ended up being ‘escaping from an elevator where he was doomed to be trapped with his friend for all of the thirty minutes and change that it would take for emergency services to show up’. She should have figured it, though, because he’s always been a slippery motherfucker. 

Lois chews on the inside of her cheeks, and shakes her tense shoulders loose, and calls the emergency button. She explains to the understandably-frustrated woman on the other end that, yes, she had known the elevator was out of order, but her friend hadn’t, and, yes, she knows you’re not supposed to try to open the doors from inside, but her friend was a moron sometimes. All in all Lois thinks she’s doing him a massive favour by leaving his name out of the whole affair.

She has just hung up - promising to wait in place - when the elevator lurches and makes a sound elevators are not supposed to make. Then it drops about a foot, sending her stumbling against the wall. 

Suddenly, Lois finds the hole in the door very interesting - not only because she’s sure this is Clark’s fault somehow. She peers through it with her phone light and sees that the car is caught between floors, though the outer door of the floor above is similarly crushed to bits and the space beyond, which begins at about her shoulder height, is dark. 

She considers for a moment. If the elevator drops and she’s in it, that’s bad. If the elevator drops as she’s climbing out of it, she’s bisected - that’s extremely bad. If she successfully climbs out into the building proper, she can get to the fire escape and go home, and while she’s at it she can scold Clark for being a reckless idiot (he’s done it to her enough that she thinks it’s about time the tables turned) and get him some help for the fever (genetic) that’s clearly fried his brain. 

That’s a really appealing option, actually. Clark has been a reckless idiot, because who tries to climb out of an unstable elevator? The most reasonable thing she could do is follow him and tell him so. Anyway, it’s been ten seconds and the car hasn’t moved again, and she’s confident it won’t take her long to climb out. The crumpled edges of the inner and outer doors are uneven and sharp, grabbing at her clothes and skin alike, but it’s not much of a challenge. 

She is halfway out of the elevator - her elbows on the next level, her feet just touching the floor - when it makes a another bad-sounding creak and shudders a little.

“Clark!” She says with alarm. She can’t see him in the darkness. “Clark, I think it’s—“ there’s another shudder, and her feet are no longer supported by the elevator floor. It’s dropped a few inches. If it falls any further, she’s going to be torn in half. “Superman,” she tries weakly, even though she knows full well he couldn’t possibly hear her right now, let alone make it across the city in time. She tries to pull herself up onto the next floor, but her feet have nothing to push against. She scrabbles for purchase on the concrete wall and curses her traction-less pumps. In her panic, she tries to kick them off. Something creaks ominously.

And then strong hands grip her wrists and pull her up, and she falls against something soft that lets out a pitiful moan. There’s a muffled screech as the elevator finally drops several feet then seems to settle again, and the dim light it had cast across the floor disappears. Lois pushes herself onto her knees and pulls her phone from her pocket with shaking hands, sending its flashlight playing across the corridor they have found themselves in.

It looks like an empty floor, one of several scattered throughout the high-rise as more of the occupying businesses have switched to remote. The layout is fairly similar to the newspaper’s level, actually - two elevator doors side-by-side in a short hallway, with an exit sign pointing towards the fire stairs around the corner. The ceiling lights are off, and the windows in the workspace must be shuttered, because little to no light filters into the hall. She couldn’t say what level they’ve come out on, only that it’s higher than 11 and less than 35ish.

Next to her, she sees Clark lying curled against the wall, and she realises abruptly that he has saved her life. His satchel lies a short distance away like it was thrown. At some point since she saw him last, hisshoes and socks have come off, his jacket is gone, and his shirtsleeves are rolled up. She reaches out to touch his shoulder, to say thank you in a way that doesn’t require her to actually say it, and he flinches as if struck and pulls away. In the pale light, his face shines with sweat and is blotched with bruising. Without glasses to hide behind, his irises are huge pools of black. 

“Now… would be a… a really great time for you to leave,” he says between wheezes.

“Hell no.” She tries to push back his hair, to feel his forehead, but he recoils and hisses in pain.

“Go down the fire escape… call the fire brigade. Get your leg… looked at.”

Lois glances down at her leg, surprised. There’s a shallow gash down the side of her calf, dripping sluggishly. She hadn’t even felt it. “Smallville, there is not a universe where I am leaving you by yourself like this”, she says.

He makes a strange sound that could be a snort or a sob or just him choking on his own blood. “Then don’t… go far. A floor. Anywhere that’s, that’s not here.”

She grabs his hands and holds them, and though a mere moment ago he’d hauled her free of a death sentence, now he’s not even strong enough to pull away. His skin feels clammy and far too hot. “Give me one good reason. Tell me what’s going on with you. What can I do?”

“In about… thirty seconds, things will get… messy,” he says through gritted teeth. “I need you to not be here.” He tries to pull his arms back again and they twist strangely. Lois lets go of them like they’re hot coals and stares: both of his forearms are snapped clean through, the breaks thick and bruised. They are both broken in the exact same place.

“When did you…?” Did he do that to himself saving her?

He just moans and curls in on himself. “Please,” he whispers, in a voice that sounds too much like begging.

Lois tries to think of genetic disorders that make bones extremely breakable in very specific spots. And that cause respiratory distress. And extensive bruising. She comes up short. Instead she is going to do what she should have done earlier and call 911. She takes her phone, and her trembling hands set the torchlight to shaking. She is going to call, and then Clark screams.

It’s not a very loud sound, really. There is something fundamentally broken about it, about the way it slips from between tightly-clenched teeth. But then it— Lois thinks her mind must be tricking her, the echo of the empty floor and her own heartbeat thumping in her ears. It seems to dissolve, to layer over itself, becoming multi-toned and grating, and she, almost unable to stop herself, points the light towards Clark.

His head is cradled in his hands, and he’s staring sightlessly at the floor. But something’s wrong: maybe it’s that his eyes have bled to black, or his arms seem too long. Maybe it’s that, in the harsh light of her phone, Lois imagines she sees sharp things tearing through his shirt and dark blotches crawling up his neck. 

Maybe it’s that she doesn’t imagine the nightmarish image of his jaw dislocating with an audible crack, or the long, thin, recurved teeth that crowd it and seem to force it wider and wider. 

Before she can think, Lois is backed up against the wall, and her phone is somewhere on the ground, throwing both her and Clark into shadow. She can still hear him though, can still imagine it. Every snap and tear sets her to flinching, and all the while, that eerie polyphonic wail like an air raid siren fills the space between her ears. 

Lois covers her mouth with her hands and thinks she’s listening to her best friend die. 

It takes far too long for the noises to stop, for that wail to quiet to a strangely staccato whimper. When they do, Lois stands in the thick silence, breathing in the smell of copper and ozone, shaking like a live wire. Her phone is on the ground somewhere off to the right, and by its faint light she can, just, make out Clark in silhouette. 

Except, it’s definitely not Clark. It is hard to interpret the shape; it’s not moving, and the absence of life gives it a strange abstraction. Anything might be a head, a leg. Lois’s brain springs into action: Clark’s been poisoned, she thinks. Infected. A mutagen, a bioweapon. Sometime between that morning and when she found him in the office alone? Or something slower-acting? The light catches on the edges of thin, sharp spines, and something that might be eyes.

She freezes. A part of her, an echo of hunters on starlit plains, knows she’s being watched. The shape is statue-still, gives nothing away. Does it know who it was, or is it reduced to a mindless, hungry thing?

“Smallville?” She says softly, fighting to keep the tremble from her voice.

There is a sound like an ancient tree in a storm, and a very long something extends jerkily from the shape, thin and jointed and jagged in outline. It snags on Clark’s satchel and draws it back in. Something moves in the dark, something heavy clunks against the ground and rolls to a stop by Lois’s feet, and she nearly screams. 

There is a burst of static, and then a quiet voice says, “if I, um, call in the donut favour… what are the odds you can forget everything you just saw.” It’s text-to-speech, something bland and generic given life through deliberate inflection.

“Low,” Lois says faintly.

“Ok. Um. Then, could you pass me the lantern, near your- yeah.”

She lifts the heavy camping lantern without taking her eyes off the dark shape, which has gone back to relative motionlessness. “Who would I be passing it to?”

“Still, um, still Clark,” he says.

This is still Clark. This is still Clark, seeming— she doesn’t think surprised. In fact, she thinks, prepared. He carries in his satchel a speaker, or a translator, just in case he… what? Loses the ability to speak? Ergo, he was expecting this. He’s not unfamiliar with this. 

He’d said, things would get messy. He’d wanted her far away.

What the fuck. 

She runs her hands over the lantern until she finds a power button. Immediately, the corridor is filled with a warm, bright glow, as though she were carrying a small sun.

And Clark is still sitting against the opposite wall, for a given value of sitting, and for a given value of Clark. She is put in mind immediately of a giant black wasp. His limbs are tucked around him tightly, and his huge, glittering eyes are dark and empty. His dress shirt is stained with red and black and torn to shreds, probably due to all the spikes and arms and wings crumpled against the wall. 

Lois holds the lamp before her like a shield, and stares. “You're, you, are you what, a werewolf or something? Were… werebug?” Her voice feels high and strangled, like air out of a balloon pinched too tightly.

The tendrils around his neck poof out like he’s startled, then shrink down again to lie flat. “No,” he says.

“Then… what happened to you?” 

He doesn’t answer, and she notices that he is shivering almost imperceptibly, like an over-taxed muscle. She assumes he’s watching her in return, but his eyes give no indication of what he’s looking at. She can barely make herself add, “today you said you’d tell me the truth.”

He stiffens, and some kind of chitter vibrates in his chest, and then he says slowly, “umm. So, I am… I’m adopted.” 

Lois stares at him for a second, trying to force her brain to process what she’s hearing.

“Maybe from space,” he adds after a beat. 

It’s ridiculous. It’s another stupid, off-the-cuff lie. It’s… troubling convincing coming from a man-sized bug thing.  “You’re adopted from space.”

“Maybe,” he repeats without conviction. He’s huge and horrifying and spiny and tucked into the absolute smallest area physically possible, and Lois reminds herself that this is surely no worse than the times she’s interrogated CEOs and gangsters. 

She squares her shoulders and says, “what the hell is that supposed to mean? Like where, specifically, in space?”

“I don’t know— I mean I— just, the evidence suggests that it’s probably from space and not, you know, Siberia,” he says.

“That might be the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard,” Lois says, “but I can’t say your evidence isn’t compelling.”

“Mmhmm,” he says, like he hasn’t just dropped the biggest bombshell in the universe on her head. Like aliens aren’t real, maybe. Like - like her coworker, her friend, isn’t a giant bug that was also, maybe, adopted from space. Like he doesn’t know this for a fact and just keeps showing up to work every day and drinking coffee and helping her with her spelling anyway. 

“You’re adopted, from space. You are actually a giant space moth.”

“Well, not, not, not normally. Not almost ever,” he says. He shifts slightly and makes a sound like a dying cat. “But. Um. Yes. Maybe.”

“Right now,” Lois clarifies in a very normal tone of voice, “I’m looking at you, with my eyes, and you are a giant space moth.”

“Temporary,” he says.

“Great! Temporary as in, you’ll go back to normal right now?”

“Um. Not that simple,” he says, drawing his many limbs tighter. “I need sunlight. Zen. Not… panic, in the back rooms.” For a moment he just looks at her, and she shakes her head to clear it.

“How often,” she says carefully, “does this happen to you.”

“It’s been eight- no, nine months,” he says immediately. He pauses for a beat, cocks his head just slightly. “This was my best Human Clark streak yet.”

Lois frowns. That is a lot longer than she was expecting. Something occurs to her that’s startling in its mundanity. “You did not miss my 25th birthday party because you were sulking around your apartment looking like the alien out of alien.”

“Hey—um. Yes. Well, at my parents’, actually. Sorry, I didn’t want to miss it.” 

He really does sound as sorry as that fake voice will allow, which isn’t very. He’d seemed cut up about it at the time too - and looked so sick afterwards that she’d given him a pass. She swallows. “So, there are more of you here, then?”

“What, no,” he says. “Oh, you mean- Lois, I’m adopted. Ma and Pa are just people.”

She feels herself relax, just slightly. “But they do know.”

“They did physically pick me up out of a- ship. Capsule. Thing. When I was a baby.”

Lois tries to picture the Kents, who she’s met only briefly, finding a tiny alien in a spaceship in their backyard and then bringing the thing up like it’s a perfectly ordinary thing to do. “Would not have picked them for first contact,” she says. She allows herself the briefest flight of fancy, the idea that perhaps Clark Kent is really just a midwestern, farm-raised interstellar adoptee who just happens to resemble a man-sized stick insect sometimes. It could be that simple. It doesn’t have to be sinister.

Clark says “Right,” like he’s in on the ridiculousness of it all with her.

But he’s not. How can he be? She looks at him, squeezed almost into a ball. Legs like that, he’s got to be nine feet tall standing up. And, she realises, strong enough to tear open an elevator door even when he’s this close to… to whatever had happened to him today. What was she thinking, that wasn’t adrenaline. Built like a predator, a thing lurking in the dark. He has not opened his mouth this entire time but then she remembers the teeth and feels the hair stand up on the back of her neck.

“Wait, not right,” she says. She takes a breath and pushes on before she can stop herself. “What’s wrong with this picture? Your parents find a cute little baby alone in a space ship, obviously a red flag, and decide to raise this completely normal child like everything’s fine, and he grows up into a thing that is clearly meant to devour all humanity, and then he just decides to- to pursue a career in journalism?”

Clark’s expression doesn't change. It hasn’t changed this whole time, actually - it seems permanently fixed in a vaguely menacing blankness. It’s almost the least Clark-ish thing about him. Still, his wedge-shaped head sinks down to rest on his knees and the tendrils lie flat against his neck and he somehow manages to give off an aura of kicked-puppy woundedness.

“Do you really think,” he says carefully, “that I want to eat people.”

“I never said you wanted to,” Lois says. “But don’t tell me you couldn’t.”

“I don’t want— I wouldn’t. Not eating people is- is- is the most basic level of impulse control,” he says.

Lois can’t help but say, “but you could do it.”

“Anyone could eat a person. That’s what cannibals are, Lois.”

“No, I know, it’s just, you’re…” she struggles to articulate that blurry undefined unease. She thinks of the elevator door.  “You’re stronger than you let on, aren’t you. As in, cause some serious damage strong. Obviously you haven’t, and you say you wouldn’t, but you could and you have no idea where you came from or how you got here. It doesn’t paint a great picture. Doesn’t that bother you?”

Then Clark moves, slow and inexorable. He starts to get his feet under him like a he’s newborn foal who’s never seen feet before, and then he’s standing up and up and up until the tendrils behind his eyes are actually brushing the ceiling. The whole menacing effect is somewhat lessened when he trips on nothing and only manages to catch himself on the third hand he tries, but it is still plenty menacing enough for Lois to have backed up against the opposite wall without realising until she feels it behind her.

He is not people-shaped. Tall as he is, his back is hunched and his neck is a long S and each of his unsettlingly-long limbs (and Lois thinks now she can count six) has at least one more joint than it should, and every inch of him not covered by the shredded office-wear that looks extremely silly on him, honestly, is covered in some kind of spine or claw or tendril or scale. His centre of gravity is pitched forwards and counterbalanced by the massive, heavy wings that drape behind him like a cape.

Ha, Lois thinks. Clark was doing the cape thing first.

“Yes. All the time. Every day,” Clark says. Each of his words is heavy, careful, like a mantra he’s heard or said a thousand times. “But: I do not kill people. I sure don’t eat people. I’ve never… stuck an egg in anyone or put a parasite in anyone’s brain or abducted anyone onto a spaceship. I have no intentions of taking over the world, I was raised better than all that.” He sways on his feet and leans heavily against the wall for a moment, but he’s not done. “There’s not a bunch of aliens playing sleeper or anything, I’m pretty sure there’s only me - I’ve checked, and I’m absolutely not secretly controlling everyone through my powers of journalism because let’s face it, I’m not- not- not half as good as you.”

Lois can almost feel the weight of his gaze. She swallows and looks up into his huge, empty eyes, “No, that’s, sure.”

Then Clark makes a strange sound halfway between a cicada and a dying cat. “Um, I don’t, I don’t,” he says, and tumbles like a stack of cards in what seems to be a dead faint, limbs spilling in all directions.

“Uh- Clark?” She says. He doesn’t speak, and he doesn’t move. “Smallville? Hey! Say something!”

What the actual fuck.

Lois tries to think of a reason he might have keeled over - well. There are several, probably. She’d never seen him so sick before, and clearly going bug mode hasn’t fixed him. Or maybe it’s the cause; at least, she assumes that’s what his whole “ohhh, I’m sick, oh, it’s genetic,” thing was about. 

(Damn. There was a really good explanation for his whole deal after all then. She doesn’t like it. It’s good as in, yeah, this is a pretty significant reason to be shifty, not good as in she’s remotely ok with it, because a) what the fuck, her whole worldview? Shattered. People don’t just become giant bugs, b) Clark Kent is a lying liar even if it’s not the least reasonable excuse she’s encountered, c) how is she supposed to go back to work tomorrow with him at the desk across from her, knowing what she knows? Assuming there’ll be a tomorrow, assuming she’s not about to get eaten or he’s not been murdered and replaced with a pod person or god knows what else…)

Lois shuts her brain down and squares her shoulders. She sets the lantern down on the floor, snatches her phone up off it, and creeps towards the body. 

The body. 

She stares at it for 20 seconds before she can bring herself to touch it. Clark is slumped on his front, and the back of the shirt has been decimated by about a hundred bony spines as thick around as her fingers and twice as long, and at least two giant, soggy, veiny wings that glint redly in the lantern light. The shirt itself, what remains of it, is stained black on red on white. 

She clenches her jaw and nudges one spiny leg with her shoe, half expecting him to snap awake and grab her. He doesn’t, but he doesn’t wake up at all, either. Dammit, and that was her one good idea. Screwing her eyes shut for a moment, she tries to make herself think - useful, here and now thoughts. 

Her brain comes up with: Nope.

It gives her back when she’s already two levels down the fire escape, down one shoe and viciously reminded of the gash in her calf which has just reopened everything it had managed to close in the last ten minutes.

But she’s already two levels down, right? This isn’t— she’s not qualified for this. She’s not— aliens? Hulking space monsters with teeth and claws? That’s a job for bajillionaires and people who punch giant robots. She’s made of meat. She doesn’t have bite-proof body armour. She’s not even elevator proof. If Clark hadn’t—

If Clark hadn’t saved her life, she’d be in two pieces.

Fuck. Fuck.

She blots at her leg impatiently and turns to climb back up the stairs.

There is probably something genuinely wrong with Clark - besides the obvious. When he’d had readable body language, he’d been coughing a lot. Symptom of— well, surely he still has the same insides, right? On account of he’s still alive? Or, if she’s looking at a genuine extraterrestrial, does he even breathe air? Had he still been breathing, does he even need to breathe at all? For that matter, Lois doesn’t even know if he is necessarily still alive.

A stab of fear carries her back up (to level 27, by the way) - and it’s not for her own life, which is new. He’s still sprawled on the ground like an overgrown muppet; she doesn’t think he’s moved at all.

Please be alive.

Lois ignores the hot tightness in her leg when she crouches down and tries to turn him over so she can see his face, or the wedge-shaped mouth with eyes that passes for one. It’s easier said than done. He’s heavy, and floppy, and almost too hot to touch, though she has no idea if that’s normal for him or not. She’s able to get him on his side, at least. Disturbingly, his eyes are open: lidless, blank. She holds her phone light up to them and watches them glitter, sees the rough dampness of his ink-dark skin. He doesn’t have nostrils, not that she can see, but she holds her hand up to his mouth warily, remembering the long, thin needle teeth that had filled it.

He’s not breathing. She licks her finger, checks again. He’s not breathing. She steels herself and puts a finger to the side of his neck, under his jaw where the skin is soft like oiled leather and hot like an oven, and there’s no pulse - but, a thrum, a sense of energy and movement, that tells her he must be alive. Surely. 

Swallowing, she passes her light downwards, past what looks like a small speaker buckled around his neck, to his chest. There, just barely, she sees it rise and fall. A couple seconds later, it happens again. Then again. She’s furious with him, she’s terrified of him, she’s just a tiny bit relieved. But her light also catches a glitter of wetness, a spot on his shirt that’s been dipped in ink and more than just damp. It’s on his left, beneath at least two pairs of arms, and she remembers how she’d seen him favouring his side, before.

When she peels back the shirt, trying to drown out the part of her brain that stubbornly whispers alien, acid blood, there is a sodden bandage on his side, stretched and torn because it was applied when he was human-shaped. Beneath it, there is a hole. It’s not large but the small flat scales around it look strangely crumpled. Maybe it’s supposed to be there - though she can’t check for symmetry, can’t roll him onto his back with all the things poking out of it - but she doesn’t think so, on account of the bandage, and all the what probably is blood coming out of it. She brings her light closer and catches the sharp edge of something acidly green.

It could be a weird, alien bone. And it’s not as though Lois hasn’t heard “don’t remove the projectile if you don’t want to bleed to death” often enough from her dad, but he might already be bleeding to death, and she has no idea if normal rules even apply to him.

Her small portable first aid kit has forceps, and is also sitting in her messenger bag, back down on the 11th floor. She could take the fire escape down and back, certainly, but odds are in the time she’s gone, elevator repair crew will have found him, and she can’t imagine that going well. And besides, he’ll probably be dead by then, but if he isn’t then it’s a gamble between acid blood and his many, many teeth for the thing that’ll take out maybe the entire crew, and how is she supposed to go to work on tomorrow in these conditions—

Ok. Ok. None of that will happen, because she is very good at plans. Step 1, get Clark somewhere away from the elevator. Step 2, see if anything can be done about the hole. Step 3, when he wakes up, which he will, grill him for the whole story. No mercy.

If this floor is anything like the Daily Planet, there will be a tea room a short way down the hall. She makes sure to confirm it before she drags him all the way there, of course: it’s similar to their own, with a functioning ceiling light, a couple microwaves and a fridge and - in a cupboard too high up to be truly WHS friendly - a well-stocked first aid kit.

Getting him in there takes longer than she’d like to admit. He’s not heavier than Clark, because at least the law of conservation of mass still applies, but Clark wasn’t a small human being and now he’s not a small… he’s not light, is the problem. She drags him by one dangerously sharp arm/limb, and it’s undignified and leaves her chest heaving and her leg dripping, and then she has to go back for his satchel and lantern and all the random, discarded pieces of clothing she finds along the way, and to make sure there are no obvious blood pools anywhere (there are, but she deals with it, and is relieved when her handful of paper towel doesn’t start to dissolve).

The repair crew will come, and find her gone, with no sign of anyone except the giant hole in the elevator door. 

She glances into the tea room uneasily. The giant hole in the solid steel made by the thing flopped half dead on the floor. That’s fine. That’s ok. She goes inside and shuts the door behind her. 

By the light of the lantern, and her phone, and - blessedly - the bright fluorescent strip in the ceiling, Lois stares at the the splinter of green glass lodged in the side of her frie- of her favourite coworker-turned-were-space-bug. The first aid kit had gloves, so she’s wearing them. Acid blood, or contagious were-bugism, she’s not taking chances. It also had the tiniest amount of gauze, which is maybe going to be enough to pack the wound, but certainly won’t be enough to secure it. 

It had forceps, and she takes these in one hand, and spreads the skin around the wound with her other. If the rest of him had been nearly too hot to touch, here he’s no more than room temperature, which is maybe a concern. But, when she takes the splinter in a steady grip, she is relieved to feel it is free-floating and not an important part of him sticking out through a hole. It comes out in one piece, long as the first joint of her thumb and wickedly sharp. She’s quick to shove a fistful of gauze in the path of the maybe-blood that wells up behind it, and then she wraps the shard in several layers of paper towel and sticks it in the bin out in the hall, her ink-stained gloves following quickly after. She rinses the forceps in the sink and lays them out to dry, lets her own drying blood adhere a couple more paper towels to her leg, and then finally she’s able to stand back and survey her work.

It would be generous to say Clark looks less intimidating in his sleep, because unfortunately his huge dark eyes are still open, and his mouth is gaping in about three different pieces to reveal some kind of nightmare chasm that she’s intentionally not looking at. But trying to keep the guy alive has softened the raw edge of Lois’s fear just a little and so, although she doesn’t know when or if he’ll wake, she busies herself setting up for the long haul. 

The tea room has a small sofa, complete with a ratty-looking blanket, which she knows she will not be able to wrangle him up and onto. Instead she covers him with the blanket, mostly so she doesn’t have to see him when she looks at him to make sure he’s not about to eat her. As an afterthought, she lifts the blanket and sticks his lantern under there with him, wedged between a few arms.

She sets herself down on the sofa and watches him, trying to wrestle her thoughts into submission. Though she tells herself she doesn't know enough to be mad, she still is mad. She only knows three things as fact - or, at least, three things Clark told her, which may or may not be truth. He’s adopted, doesn’t know where from, maybe from space. That implies he was found young, and alone, though in what circumstances she doesn't know. He’s been hiding it, at least from Lois, which doesn’t have to be sinister but certainly could be. He looks dangerous, but isn’t necessarily: there’s something delicate about his build, and his tendency to faint due to splinters. And of course, she may be in no danger at all, because he could always still just die.

She glances sideways at his satchel, sitting sadly on the other side of the sofa. If he was carrying a translator and a very important lantern with him, then chances are high he’s got other tools in his kit for… this. She owes it to him to check, really, in case she misses the one thing that will prevent him getting poisoned by earth air, or something.

Frowning thoughtfully, she opens the satchel.

***

At some point, she wonders if he’s properly died. She’s not checking again. Her phone says it’s 11:37pm; her notebook is seven pages fuller, half of which has been crossed out and rewritten and crossed out again; the instant coffee she’d found abandoned in the back of a cupboard is actively undrinkable, and she’s had two. The repair team, she has to assume, have come and gone, not that it’s her problem anymore. The contents of Clark’s satchel is strewn on the sofa next to her: phone, water bottle, half-eaten granola bar. The battered fantasy paperback he’d been trying to explain to her the day before. Laptop and notebook and a bundle of blue fabric and… neatly stowed in their little pleather case, wire-rimmed glasses that have no prescription at all.

Her first indication that Clark is awake is the tiniest twitch of movement under the blanket, followed by a faint string of drunken cicada clicks. She squeezes the elastic blue fabric between her fingers until she’s sure she’s left stretch marks, and looks at the wall above him, trying not to shake.

He’s Clark, maybe. He’s half dead, probably. But just that morning he was able to go toe to toe with—

“Hello,” says the toneless, mild text-to-speech voice. Lois jumps. The shape on the floor starts to rise, then collapses back down again. “Sorry, I didn’t mean—“ 

Like a shield, she holds the fabric up before her and shakes it, and she sees the long, serpentine neck curve around so that if she were to look down, she’d get a head-on view of bug face. Her voice feels too tight when she says, “did you kill Superman?”

And, damn it, she knows antagonising him is the worst thing she could do. They’re alone, and no one knows where she is. But the giant, blood-soaked slash through Superman’s suit is burned into her mind’s eye. It speaks to something terrible happening to him, and she’s confirmed it, over a frantic hour of scanning social media tags. No one’s reported seeing him since that morning. 

The tendrils on Clark’s head fluff out and he says, “What, no, that—“ and then cuts himself off. 

At some point, Lois has stepped backwards until her calves bump against the sofa. She makes herself move forwards again, watches the way he shrinks back. He’s not as strong as Superman right now. She has the high ground and all the cards. “Truth. Please.” She tells herself it can’t really be Clark. Her Clark would never- 

Clark says, “that’s mine.”

Lois blinks. “What, like he gave it to you?”

“No, Ma made it for me—“

“Like a cosplay?”

“No, like, I—“

“Because you’d look ridiculous in it,” She says. “You wouldn’t- you-” she frowns, tries to picture Clark’s dumb face floating over the costume. Does she miss him? That’s a stup—

“Lois,” Clark says carefully. “Lois, I am him.”

“You—” for once, Lois is at a loss for words. She makes herself look down at him, sees him pull underneath the blanket, just slightly. She takes a breath. “You’re Superman.”

The translator voice is perfectly level when it says “tadaaa.”

Lois does not feel level. She feels a lot of things that could fit under the umbrella of ‘furious’. She tells herself she’s only furious because she should have put it together first. “And- let me make sure I have this straight- Superman is a giant bug from outer space.” 

The blanket creeps up a little further. “Maybe outer space, and only sometimes,” he says.

“Prove it,” she says recklessly.

“I wish I could, but I couldn’t lift a paperclip just now,” Clark says. Lois frowns at him, lying on the floor and almost completely covered by a blanket that’s not very large. In fact, she can see his feet now. The claws are rather long. He looks exactly the same as he did when he was unconscious, only now he’s making more noises.

“Well, you got stabbed by a tiny piece of glass and leaked all over the floor, so. I took it out. You’re welcome.”

Clark eases himself into a sitting-adjacent position, and hisses like a snake. Probably feeling the tiny stab hole. “Oh. That… makes sense. It’s a piece of a meteor - you know, from the giant glowing robot I was fighting this morning. Um. Thanks for that.”

“And that was you getting beat up,” she says slowly, her eyes narrowing.

“Green laser robot, green meteor fragment,” he says. “Suit with a big hole in it, me with a big hole in the same place. Will that do as proof.”

They’re not in the same place, but Lois is willing to admit that it’s just because one of the stab holes underwent renovations. She runs her hands through her hair and scrunches her face up. That’s the problem, right? It was so easy to trust Superman when she knew exactly what he was. And despite everything, she had trusted Clark, only now he’s apparently at least three different people, and maybe none of them are real. 

“Ok, so,” she says recklessly, “Let’s say I believe you just hop out of bed in the morning and put on your Clark skin suit. Do you keep it next to the blue one? Did you skin somebody to make it?” 

The tendrils poof again, and he says, “What- Gross. No, I grew it myself.”

Lois was half joking, but now her eyes shoot to him - and then away, because he still looks like he might eat her. “You what?”

“That makes it sound so bad. I thought I— I just— I looked human for so long, and then… the space puberty.”

Clark Kent, maybe real journalist, loves to put nouns in front of random words like it’s supposed to mean something. She never does it, herself, naturally.  It’s almost comfortingly stupid. She focuses her attention into repeating “space puberty” with as much derision as possible, instead of thinking through the implications of what he’s said.

“I don’t know what else you’d call it,” Clark is saying. “I got real sick and slept for about a week and now, I’m a horrifying space monster. Wearing a Clark suit, most of the time.”

Ah, there are the implications. “So that’s who I’m talking to right now?” She says warily. “Just… Clark?” 

The speaker sighs in a robotic sort of way, and at the same time the possibly real-life extraterrestrial emits a weird, multi-toned thrum that makes her teeth hurt. “Just Clark. Always, just Clark. Superman’s a role. This-“ one clawed hand wiggles in a tired wave “- goes away. Clark is real, I swear.” 

Lois nods numbly, and wants to believe him very badly. He makes it sound almost normal, like this is just something that happened to him, like he could still be her Clark underneath the spikes. She forces herself to take a moment, to just let herself think. He claims he’s adopted, but doesn’t know from where. He claims he grew up human. It’s a slightly comforting thought.

That would imply he’s been lying out of his ass for three years, though. Lois stamps down on fear, which is not useful here specifically and a useless emotion in general, and lets frustration take its place.

“Explain,” she says. “All of it. The truth.”

Clark makes a sound like a snort, then winces. “Sure, and should I call Ma for a supporting quote.”

Lois blinks, startled. She’s almost surprised the thought had never occurred to her. “I’m not going to write this up. I’m not a monster.” She winces. “I didn’t mean that. Ah, fuck.”

He’s watching her unerringly with huge, empty unblinking eyes. “There really isn’t anything else to explain,” he says. “Now you know. Happy.”

It’s probably supposed to be a question, but she can’t tell. There’s no emotion in his fake voice, no expression on his face. Clark Kent doesn’t even send a text without at least two emojis. This shouldn’t be allowed.

“No,” she says, “no, I’m not happy. I knew you didn’t trust me, but… not even your glasses are real! Apparently,  I don’t know you at all.”

Clark doesn't tell her she’s wrong. Instead, he says “you’re not special. No one does.”

Lois makes herself look at him, properly, like she’ll see any sign of the person she knows - no one knows - in the tangle of spiky limbs and biohazardous office-wear. “What do you mean, no one?” She says.

“Well, apart from Ma and Pa,” Clark says. “Since there’s no convenient friendship milestone for ‘by the way, I am not a human being’, and the normal response to finding out is… it’s not providing first aid.”

She stares, and chews her lip. “Do you make a habit of bleeding out in front of people?” she asks.

“No. No. Ugh,” Clark says. The ‘ugh’ is as weirdly toneless as the rest of his fake voice, but the accompanying bone-tingling thrum gets the point across. “I’m sorry. For the lying. And— you know.”

“I know what.”

Clark starts to throw what might be arms up into the air, and gives up halfway, which just ends up looking slightly pathetic. “Sorry for… getting you stuck, in an elevator,” he says. Lois tactfully does not remind him she maybe broke it first. “Um. Sorry for making you drive me to the optometrist all those times.” Lois had forgotten about that and is mad all over again. “Sorry— shut up,” he says, in the vague direction of his chest, which has started clicking again. “Sorry—“

“Ok, ok, I get it,” Lois says. She has 27 un-crossed-out questions in her notebook, so far. She rubs her temples and puts them out of her brain with some effort, and is left with a head full of nothing but headache. “I… think I need some space,” she says, pushing herself up from the sofa. 

Clark freezes, and his tendrils seem to wilt. After a long moment, he says “ok.” 

“Not- not forever,” Lois clarifies. “I just… need to think. Sleep. Go to work.” If he’s there tomorrow- well, it’s already tomorrow by this point. If he’s there at work, healthy and normal, she may commit a crime. “That is,” she says, “long as you’re not about to die again.”

He sighs/thrums. “I’ll be fine. Got my lantern.” He holds it up awkwardly with a hand that looks the wrong shape for holding things. 

Lois can’t stop herself from asking just one question. “Ok, yeah, what gives with the lantern? Like, is it a nightlight, keepsake, your vision just sucks really bad?”

“No— no. It’s full spectrum. Uh, artificial sunlight. Energy,” he says, “The sun’s already gone down but the lantern’s a so-so substitute.”

“Werewolf,” she says.

“…photosynthesis.”

Sure. Why not. It figures that Clark Kent ‘most morning person ever’ is a plant.

“So, you’ll be fine,” Lois reiterates, as much to herself as him. “You’ll, what, superspeed home and be fine. That’s a thing you do, right? Superspeed?” She edges towards the door, keeping one eye on him. “Then, I’ll come back later, and we’ll talk. Once you’ve had a chance to… put the old Clark suit back on?”

“Oh.” He makes an odd sort of trill that sounds downright friendly compared to the rest of the repertoire. “Um, maybe give it a couple days, actually.”

“I thought that’s what the lantern is for. Sunlight and zen.”

“Lois,” Clark says, “I am about as far from calm as I have ever been in my whole life.”

She pauses with her hand on the door. “I’ll tell Perry you’re off sick tomorrow.”

He gives a funny little salute and narrowly avoids poking himself in the eye, and Lois doesn't laugh, because she can’t, but she huffs out a breath anyway. 

And then she’s out of the tea room, back in reality. She sighs heavily and rubs at her leg. Her laptop is 16 flights down; her sofa, another 11 and a taxi. And Perry’s still waiting on an article. No rest for the wicked, she supposes.