Work Text:
The police scanner crackled to life again and Lois swore that after everyone else went home that night, she was going to throw the stupid thing out the window.
In the past few days, she’d become attuned to it, always listening for its tell-tale low hum. It called her attention even more often than the wire report, which literally had ringing bells to announce big news. But it was the police scanner that she now always subconsciously tracked over the buzz of the bullpen.
And it had been pulling at her attention all day—in the same way it had been pulling her partner out of the newsroom entirely.
The first time it went off, she had been mildly inconvenienced, and went to refill her own coffee.
The second time, she had been slightly annoyed, but huffed and started writing up the draft of their story.
The third time, she sympathized that it seemed like Superman had a lot of work today.
The fourth time, she became irritated all over again, and fitted some of Jimmy’s research into the piece to beef up her reworked second draft.
The fifth time, her ire grew, and so she called around for a good quote to finish off the story on her own.
The sixth time, she took her partner’s name off the byline and sent it off to the city desk editor.
The seventh time, she told herself that she was entirely unbothered, since her story had been submitted already, and she could now do some work on her novel before the clock wound down to an acceptable time to leave.
And that’s exactly what she did.
In fact, she was in the midst of reworking a thorny section with her leading man when Clark reappeared.
“Sorry about that, Lois!” he said brightly, coming up to the side of her desk.
“Whatever,” she tossed back, only giving him a cursory glance. It didn’t bother her if he was too busy to make time to play ‘reporter’ today. She’d disengaged with his his disappearing act so much that she didn’t even remember what excuse he’d given her for running out the last time.
“I can take a look at that draft now,” he offered.
“Don’t bother,” she replied primly. “I already sent it to editing.”
“You did?”
She could hear a level of surprised dismay in his voice.
And she enjoyed it.
“I did,” she confirmed.
“I, uh, I didn’t get to see the final copy,” he protested gently.
That made her mad. “Final copy! You didn’t even see the first copy.”
She had half a mind to ask him where he’d been all day, but held back. He couldn’t tell her, and so she knew that she couldn’t ask. And anyway, she knew where he’d been. The televisions in the bullpen covered every single Superman rescue today; nearly every one had been preceded by the police scanner’s cracking voice and her partner bailing out on her. Not that either of them could say any of that out loud.
“Sorry about that,” he apologized again.
“It’s too late now. I sent it off to editing. Take it up with the editor if you want to change it.”
Clark looked like he was about to say something else, but just nodded and walked away.
He’d given up too easily, and even that irritated her.
She’d been watching him walk away from her most of the day.
And she was sick of it.
But she was trying a new approach, she reminded herself.
After she’d sent Clark off to the stupid Vanity Fair gala with Cat the other night, she’d taken herself home and, over a pint of Rocky Road, had given herself a very stern talking to about responsibility. Armed with a heaping spoonful of marshmallow swirl, she vowed to have more patience with her partner. After all, she wouldn’t ever dream of getting in Superman’s way during a rescue. But for some reason, when Clark was added to the mix, it just got right under her skin! That didn’t mean she could get in his way just because he was in a coat and tie instead of spandex and a cape, though. So she resolved to be more lenient and patient and just let the man go do his other job.
Her patience had lasted through five rescues.
The sixth—when he said that he had left to take his neighbor’s dog to the dentist—had undone her.
If he wanted to be Superman so badly, he should just go off and be Superman!
He didn’t need to pull her down with him, forcing her to cover for him and do the work they were both supposed to be doing just because he had decided to do something else with his time. It wasn’t up to her to make this life he’d chosen work for him—especially since he hadn’t asked her for her help. No one could hold down two full-time jobs—especially when one of them was supposed to be covert!—on their own, especially jobs as urgent and unpredictable as a reporter and a superhero.
Realizing she had skimmed several paragraphs without actually reading them, she saved and clicked out of her novel and decided to re-organize her already perfectly tidy story notes from the draft she’d just turned in.
After the whole gala-Cat-hostage debacle, she had decided to just go back to not knowing. That way she wouldn’t be tempted to interfere with Superman’s activities out of spite toward Clark. She’d thought that she could put the secret out of her mind and slap on a grit-your-teeth-smile and look the other way every time someone got themselves into enough trouble that they needed Superman to save them.
But, in spite of her best laid plans, that tactic had made her—to put it lightly—insane.
Because looking away from the real reason Clark was leaving required her to focus on the excuses he was giving her instead—and most of them were so absolutely half-baked and lame that they insulted her intelligence and obliterated the trust she’d thought they shared between them.
She just couldn’t make sense of it.
Wouldn’t just telling her be better than this? Better than lying—badly!—and making her furious and creating an argument and delaying him to the point where he potentially missed out on saving someone before coming back and being on the receiving end of a Lois-Lane-scolding? Was telling her really so much worse than enacting that cycle again and again and again?
Why couldn’t he just tell her?
Had she been that wrong about their friendship?
“Uh, Lois?”
The dismay in Clark’s voice had turned from surprise to resignation while he’d been at his own desk and she’d been stewing over him at hers.
She turned to see him holding a print-out.
“Did you perhaps overlook something when you drafted this?” he asked, handing her the page.
It was the article she’d just submitted.
She gave it a cursory glance.
“Nope,” she said with confidence.
“You didn’t maybe forget something?”
“Don’t think so,” she said firmly, handing the page back.
He didn’t take it.
“Did you forget to add my name to the byline?
“Nope,” she said, pointedly dropping the page to her floor as if ending the conversation.
His jaw clenched.
“Lois, that’s hardly fair—“
“I think fair went out the door when you did,” she bit out, standing and crossing her arms over her chest.
“C’mon! This is my story just as much as yours,” he argued.
“Yours!? You didn’t write a word of it!” she sniped back.
“I did all the research!”
“Since when do we give researchers bylines?!” she guffawed.
“I interviewed him just as much as you did!”
“You didn’t get him to admit that he did it!”
“No, I got him to give up his partner!”
She scoffed, twisting his words back on him. “Well, I know how that feels!”
Clark crossed his arms, but didn’t take her bait. “Finding his partner is how we broke this story!”
“Uh, hey, guys—“
Neither of them had seen their favorite office gopher approaching.
“Not now, Jimmy,” she warned, as he walked up to her desk, leaning over it.
“I, uh, I was just looking for that red folder I dropped off earlier,” Jimmy said, sifting through the tallest stack of paperwork. “You guys just… go ahead.”
“Are we done here?” she asked Clark, full of the presumption that they were.
“No, we’re not done, Lois. You know full well that I deserve that byline.”
“Next time, if you want a byline, maybe you should write an article.”
“You submitted it before I had a chance!”
“You had a chance this morning when you ran off, and I drafted it. And over lunch when you ran off and I found supporting quotes. And this afternoon when you ran off and—do you see a pattern here?”
“Uh, Lois, maybe—“
“Not now, Jimmy,” she threw at the gopher, who gave her a cautioning look in return.
Turning back to Clark, she erupted defiantly, “You had all day to work on the article, but you didn’t. You just left it to me to do it. So I did. I wrote the whole thing. And I took the byline.”
The police scanner lightly went off in the background.
Clark’s head snapped toward it.
And all three of them froze for a heartbeat.
Then Jimmy and Lois shared a meaningful glance, both immediately trying to look like they were doing anything but watching Clark listen to a police scanner too far away for them to hear and assess if it said something bad enough that he needed to make yet another pizza run.
Which would be the eighth in one day, she tracked.
When Clark turned back to them, he was fidgeting with his tie.
She flicked another quick glance at Jimmy, who was already looking at her warily.
They both knew that Clark fiddling with his tie meant that Superman was about to make an appearance.
“Lois, um, I have to, um—“ Clark stuttered, right on cue.
Something inside of her cracked. She couldn’t hear him lie to her one more time today.
And he was going to have to. Right now. Or else risk someone’s life. She wasn’t going to potentially get someone killed again just because she was peeved at her partner.
“Just get out of my sight,” she bit out caustically, blinking back tears even as she gifted him an excuse to leave so that he wouldn’t have to come up with one.
The look he gave her in return had lost all the heat of their argument, but had doubled in intensity.
For a second she thought he was going to reply to her—to apologize, to argue, to do anything but tell her—but then he seemed to realize that she’d just given him the out he was looking for.
To her surprise, she felt a pang as he resignedly turned away, doing exactly as she’d told him to do.
She slumped heavily into her chair and tried to control her breathing so that she didn’t break down in the middle of the newsroom.
“How long are you gonna leave CK in the doghouse?” came a cautious voice from the other side of her desk.
All her focus on Clark, she’d nearly forgotten that Jimmy was there.
“Until I’m not mad anymore,” she said tiredly, trying not to redirect her anger to the closest moving target.
“Lois, why don’t you just tell him that you know?” Jimmy asked earnestly.
“Because I want him to tell me.”
He looked at her incredulously. “How do you tell somebody something like that?”
She’d actually had a long time to ponder that question.
“You probably start off by telling them that you hate lying to them, and you trust them, and you rely on their friendship and know that you’re their best friend and that means a certain amount of loyalty and because of all of that, you know that they’d do absolutely anything to keep you safe when you tell them that you’re, you know, who you are.”
She dropped her eyes back to her keyboard, feeling like she’s exposed a little too much.
“Is that what you’re going to say to him when you tell him that you’ve known these past couple of weeks?”
“What?” she asked, earnestly not following him.
“All that stuff you said. You’ve been lying to Clark about knowing he’s, you know, who he is, that he, er— delivers pizzas in his spare time. When you tell him you’ve been keeping it from him, are you going to tell him that you trust him and he’s your best friend and all that?”
She was stunned for a second, but then her brows furrowed.
“No,” she said crossly. “That’s what he should be saying to me.”
Jimmy seemed to mull that over.
“He can’t apologize if you don’t give him the chance,” he considered, shrugging.
“If he’d just tell me, he’d have a chance,” she pointed out angrily.
“If you’d tell him, you’d give him one,” Jimmy said back.
She shook her head stubbornly.
“He’s the one who started this. If he doesn’t want to tell me, that’s his decision. But I don’t have to be happy about it.”
“I bet he’d be happy to know you knew.”
Her eyes slid back to his hesitantly. “What makes you say that?”
Jimmy shrugged again. “Then he wouldn’t have to tell you,” he chuckled.
She glowered at him, and he put his hands up in surrender.
“Okay, okay, I just— I miss seeing you guys the way you usually are.”
“The way we usually are?” she echoed.
“Yeah, you know, Lois and Clark, like Woodward and Bernstein but, you know, more—“ He stumbled, looking for the right word, and then held his hands up instead, interlocking his fingers. “More like you guys.”
Her eyebrows furrowed deeper in response to that. She opened her mouth to reply, but he cut her off.
“I know, I know. ‘Jimmy, get back to research,’” he said, lightly mimicking her.
And with that, he picked up the file folder he’d originally come over for and made his way back to his own desk.
He never turned back to see the contemplative expression on Lois’ face.
She quietly pulled her article from the editor’s queue and opened it again in her word processor.
The point was to torture her partner a little, as payback for torturing her, not to break him.
She added his name back to the byline, fingers pressing softly on the keys that spelled out this name.
Lane and Kent.
Her eyes lingered over their names for a moment.
Then she briskly saved the file and submitted it back into her editor’s queue.
Her latest solution to Clark’s betrayal over this secret they shared, even if Clark didn’t know they shared it, wasn’t working. Lois just wasn’t the patient type.
She needed a new plan.
*****