Work Text:
Lois Lane is twenty two years old. She finished college three months ago with a degree in journalism that so far isn’t worth the paper it was printed on. She has a shitty waitressing gig that brings in just enough to cover her rent and a shitty retail job that barely covers her groceries and bills. Neither of them bring in enough to cover hormones, of course, and seeing as her dad disowned her in all but the legalities as soon as she came out to him, there’s not really much she can do about that. Her dreams of getting away from the garbage of before and building a new life are disintegrating like tissues in a bucket of water.
That's fine. It's fine. It's all fine. Life is great, because she's back at her tiny apartment and she can take her shoes off and have a smoke and then lay around and feel bad for herself. It's probably the highlight of her day.
God, this is depressing.
Lois opens the window as soon as she’s finished shucking her work clothes and getting into one of her too-big t-shirts, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes crushed together in her free hand. As she leans over the sill - one of the first things she did when she moved into her apartment was designate a smoking window and take the screen out - she tries to figure out how this scene would go in the biopic of her life. Is this the scene where she formulates a new Plan, one that takes her to her goals and beyond? Is this the scene where she happens to catch some cute window-washer’s eye and they have a torrid love affair that eventually ends in bittersweet heartbreak?
Lois glances down. Is this the scene where she breaks her fucking neck because she leaned too far out the window being a dramatic fuck?
She takes a drag on her cigarette, and blows the smoke onto a green ring that decidedly wasn’t hovering there a moment earlier.
“Lois Lane of Earth,” the ring… not quite says, it’s not a sound, but it’s more audible and heavy and present than an intrusive thought. “You have great courage in your heart.”
Lois stares at the ring.
Lois takes a long pull on her cigarette. So long that it winds up ashing down to the filter. Lois scrunches her nose at the acrid taste and grinds the sad remains of the butt into the window sill.
The ring is still there.
She waves her hand above, below, around the ring, waiting for it to jump or move or something when she finds the wire holding it up. There’s no wire. The ring doesn’t move. It just… waits.
“I’m not putting you on,” she tells the ring, because all this is already so bizarre she might as well talk directly to the floaty magic ring. “Just so we’re clear.” That’s obviously what’s supposed to happen - insofar as anything involving a talking bit of flying jewelry can be deemed ‘obvious’. The ring is here, it’s pointed towards her invitingly, it addressed her directly. She’s supposed to put it on.
The ring does nothing.
“But thanks for using my name, at least,” she tells it. She’s only had a couple people use her name in her life. She can’t use it at work, can’t use it in her apartment building, can’t use it… hardly at all, with anyone anymore. There were a few college friends, but they’ve moved on to different things and Lois is just stuck.
Stuck with a floating ring that knows her name and says she has courage in her heart, whatever that means. Does she have courage in other organs too, or is it strictly located in her heart? What if this is some kind of… heart-harvesting ring? It doesn’t look very harvesty, but that’s how they get you.
Lois squints at the ring without being sure what she’s looking for. Tiny needles that’ll inject her with something to dissolve everything but her heart? A little asterisk with a customer advisory that says ‘The Magic Surgeon General has issued a statement that says this ring will eat your heart’?
Whatever Lois is looking for, it isn’t there. The ring looks totally harmless and normal aside from hovering in midair.
“Oh, fuck it,” she says, and grabs the ring. It settles in her hand like an ordinary, non-levitating piece of jewelry and doesn’t try to grow into her skin or electrocute her. It’s kind of warm, but that’s it. She still doesn’t put it on. She’s not going to be the white girl in the horror movie.
She sets the ring on her nightstand and watches it for a while.
“Are you going to say anything else, or are you strictly a one-speech kind of ring?” she asks.
The ring does nothing.
“You’re gonna just sit there and drive me crazy doing nothing until I put you on, aren’t you?” Lois says.
The ring does nothing, which just confirms her theory.
This is like the time she tried to convince the family dog that she could be trusted with the secret that it could talk all over again. Lois stares at the ring and considers her options.
She doesn’t put the ring on, it disappears, she wonders for the rest of her life what would have happened. She doesn’t put the ring on, it stays, someday in the future someone not her puts the ring on and gets to find out what happens. She puts the ring on, it kills her horribly. She puts the ring on, it doesn’t kill her and she gets to find out what happens instead.
Both of the don’t-put-the-ring-on scenarios are terrible and unacceptable. The jury is out on how many of the put-the-ring-on scenarios are.
Lois stalls. She checks her e-mail. She checks her IMs. She plays a few different Flash games, all of which involve stick figures inflicting violence on each other. Then she goes back to her nightstand and stares at the ring again.
“I’m totally the white girl in the horror movie,” Lois says, and puts it on.
Everything shines.
bright bright beautiful open limitless bright BRIGHT-
And then it’s just a soft, gentle green glow and Lois tries to shake the cosmos loose from her head and figure out whether the ring ate her heart or not.
It did not eat her heart.
It did change her clothes.
Substantially.
She doesn’t know if the ring vaporized her clothes or is projecting an illusion around them or what, but Lois is wearing a bodysuit that somehow doesn’t look outrageously awful. It looks… pretty good, actually. Kind of plain. But it doesn’t make her look like someone tried to shrink wrap a roll of uncooked dough. She turns, examines herself from different angles and okay she might be checking herself out but she looks good.
“This may be worth my heart,” she tells the ring.
-query-
It’s not like when the ring spoke her name. It’s like… a feeling that distinctly comes from someone not herself, a being apart and yet still in her head, close in a way that she’s never felt. The ring’s not-voice feels like a cold windowpane in the dead of winter, soil between her fingers, and green.
-query-
Lois blinks. The room is dimmer than before. She checks the time. It’s later than she thinks it should be, and she feels… scattered. Not entirely together. Like she’s having trouble figuring out the boundaries of her own mind, trying to distinguish herself from the ring.
The ring feels… expectant, so Lois tries to respond, if only to forestall another ‘query’ and the zoning out that follows.
“It was a weird thought I had,” she says aloud, because she’s not entirely sure how to think at the ring the way it’s thinking at her.
-confirmed-
This doesn’t scatter her as much as ‘query’ did, but it still feels… strange. A weight on her tongue and an under-the-surface roundness in her mind. There aren’t words for this.
-travel training schedule routine required-
“What?” she says, disoriented and spinning in the aftermath of the series of concept/word/feelings, and the ring pulses images through her mind.
Small blue vaguely human-looking people, an endless stream of beings all dressed in bodysuits with the same pattern as hers, fantastical creations with the same green glow as her ring, a city, a planet, a path through the winding beyond-black of outer space.
It takes her even longer to pull herself back together after this. She can’t figure out where she is in her head, who she is, how to form coherent thoughts. The sun has almost set by the time Lois is combobulated enough to put words together.
“I can’t breathe in space,” she says, because that’s the first thing that she can think of to say.
The ring responds immediately - thankfully, not in full images.
-safe-
Lois is somewhat skeptical. Why should she trust a ring to know how to keep a human from exploding or freezing or suffocating in space? Then again, if she had to pick a type of ring that was most likely to know how to keep all manner of horrible space-death from happening to her, she would probably pick a magic flying telepathic ring.
“How does this work, exactly?” she asks. “Do I have to go steal a spaceship, or -”
Her feet leave the floor.
Lois yelps.
Her feet go back on the floor.
“No, wait. Give me warning. I’ve gotta pack… stuff,” she says. There’s not much in her apartment that she’s personally attached to, but she paid money for all of it, and money is in short supply.
How long is she going to be gone? Is she going to break her lease? What if there’s a terrible accident and the building burns down and she comes back and all she has is a pile of ash? She’s totally going to be fired from her jobs, she can’t just leave.
Except.
She can. She can just leave. She can go to outer space. She can be something, be someone she never dreamed. She’s not entirely sure what the whole deal is, with the people the ring showed her, but it’s not retail and it’s not waitressing and it’s not spending every day answering to a name that’s not hers and it’s not this. It’s her getaway. It’s her chance to build something new. And if she doesn’t like it, well, she’s got a ring that can make her fly and theoretically let her breathe in space, and she can find something else to do.
“How long will I be gone?” she asks.
-query-
“No, I queried first. How much time, in Earth time, will I be gone? A year, a decade?”
-growing things interruption fracture-
“What.”
Images again, but these ones are much more familiar. Things from her life and things she’s seen in movies. Leaving campus and hauling her suitcase to the car over melting snow. Volleyballs. Hiding in her room. Water guns. Getting back to campus to find the formerly naked trees crowned in new leaves.
“What the fuck,” she snarls when she’s able to speak, eyes stinging. “Don’t touch my memories. You don’t fucking know me.” She yanks at the ring and it catches on her first knuckle before sliding off her finger. The bodysuit vanishes. Lois almost throws the ring across the room but stops herself before she can let go.
She sits down on the bed instead, secondhand springs squeaking beneath her weight. She sets the ring back on the nightstand.
She leaves it there while she intermittently cries and lapses into numb silence for an hour, and then she makes herself a crummy little dinner and goes to sleep.
~x~
She goes back to the ring eventually, after two days of pretending it doesn’t exist and going to her jobs and dealing with the wearing mundanities of life. It’s still there, exactly where she put it. “Don’t do that,” she says. “Don’t you fucking make me relive that shit.”
Ther ring says nothing. Lois picks it up, lifts it to eye level.
“What was even the point?” she asks it.
The ring does nothing. So that’s a big help.
She asked about the time she’d be gone and the ring gave her… Lois grits her teeth, tries to think about the images out of context, without all the associated emotions.
“Spring break?” she tries. “A couple of weeks?”
The ring says nothing. Does nothing. Sits inert in her palm.
“Fuck, okay,” Lois says. She lets out a ragged exhale. “Don’t do that to me again, or I’ll…”
… how do you threaten a ring?
She doesn’t even really want to threaten the ring, she’s just. Defaulting to it. Because threats are what you do when you’re angry, except they’re not what Lois is going to do and she’s not even sure she’s angry. She’s shocked and upset and feeling a little violated, if she’s honest with herself. She’s going to be aware of her feelings. She’s not just going to turn everything into rage and take it out on the nearest target. She’s not going to be her father.
Lois needs to think about this. Be mindful. It’s a magic space ring and it knows her real name and it can talk to her in her head, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it understands her, understands her hurts or what’s going on in her head. It could be like a kid sounding out words it doesn’t know.
Or it could be a jerk.
Who knows.
But she is going to be the person who gives the things she doesn’t understand a chance.
Lois puts the ring back on, and it shines brighter this time, but she doesn’t get the feeling of falling through space. Instead she gets
-regret sorrow-
It’s much softer and gentler than before. Doesn’t send her thoughts tumbling down like a poorly stacked set of wooden blocks. Is that her getting used to the ring, or is that the ring getting used to her? Both, maybe?
It’s apologized, at least. That’s a whole hell of a lot more than a lot of people have ever done for greater and lesser offenses alike.
“We’re gonna have to have a long talk about boundaries,” she tells the ring. She tries to center herself, do the breathing exercises she learned from the Internet. “But I think I get what you were trying to tell me. I’m just going to be gone a couple of weeks, right?”
-confirmed-
Lois bites her lower lip. She’ll be back before the rent is due, but her jobs will be toast, so she won’t have the money to pay it anyway. She wonders if there’s a salary for whatever organization slash club slash cult the ring is taking her to join. She wonders if she really cares, because the two days of trying to live her life under the hanging knowledge that she could just leave if she wanted to have been awful. It somehow made all the garbage harder to deal with when she finally had another option.
-query-
“Query for which part?” Lois asks, and pulls her smaller suitcase out of her closet. Fuck it. She’s doing this. She’ll need… how do you pack for space? Clothes, maybe? The ring did something to give her the bodysuit - and left the clothes under it intact, - but she’s not enamored of the idea of completely trusting the process and going commando. Clothes it is.
-query worry concepts-
Lois mulls that over as she stuffs the suitcase. Worry concepts? “The… the money thing?”
-confirmed query ‘money thing’-
She thinks she might be getting better at understanding the ring, which is good, because now she’s got to try to explain capitalism to magic space jewelry and how the hell is she gonna do that?
“If I just disappear, I’ll probably get kicked out of where I’m living, and then I won’t have anywhere to go,” she says, because going into the whole explanation of money and the cost of living and why it’s so damn hard for her to get a job would be best done when she’s a little more emotionally stable and a lot less sober.
-confirmed assistance request-
-request processing-
-confirmed assistance provision-
“Okay,” Lois says, because from the moment she decided to grab the magic floaty ring she’s known that the rest of her decisions were going to be totally unreasonable, illogical, and probably inadvisable. “Confirmed assistance provision, we’re all set then.”
Usually when people go on long training missions or into space or something like that in the movies, they take family photographs with them. Lois doesn’t.
As she and her suitcase lift off the floor, she thinks that this might be the most free she’s ever felt.