Chapter Text

Pets Negotiable

Clark was holding two halves of a reading lamp when Kara came in from her run.

"He heard a siren," she said. "Four blocks east. He takes sirens personally."

"The lamp was on the windowsill."

"The window was shut. That slowed him down."

Clark set the halves on the counter, next to the salad bowl Krypto had emptied earlier in the week and what remained of a sofa cushion. Krypto lay in the middle of the living room with his tail going, a big white shaggy heap of good conscience, and the wreckage around him was somehow more than one dog of his size should have managed. It usually was.

Clark looked at the lamp, then at her. "Kara. Have you thought about a place of your own?"

She put her keys down slower than she needed to. "You want me out."

"I want you here. I want you on Earth. I want you in Metropolis." He said it before she could build anything on the first thought. "Don't you want something of your own? A door you can lock. Furniture you've chosen. A landlord who isn't also your cousin."

"You're not my landlord. You don't charge me."

"That's my point."

She looked around the apartment. Clark's books, Clark's photographs, Clark's spare blanket folded on the end of the sofa she slept on. She had a shelf. The shelf had been offered warmly and she was grateful for it, and it was still one shelf in another man's home.

"Yes," she said. "I want it."

Krypto rolled onto his back among the cushion stuffing, all four paws in the air, and sneezed.

"He wants it too," Clark said.

＊＊＊

The last box was books, which was why it was last: the shelves had needed to stand first, and the shelves had needed wall anchors, and the wall anchors had needed a drill Lena now owned.

She flattened the box and added it to the stack by the door. Two bookcases, one for each degree. A kitchen table that would spend most of its life as a desk. In the corner, on a table of its own, the workstation stood with all its side panels off, half its organs laid out on an antistatic mat, a soldering iron and a tray of electronic components beside them. She'd bought it flagged as dead, cheap, from a liquidator clearing a corporate fleet. Turning it into a home lab was her evening project. On the windowsill, the plant she'd bought the week she signed the lease. She watered it and turned it a quarter toward the light.

Everything in the apartment had a receipt with her name on it.

She had chosen the apartment for the empty second bedroom. The trust would carry the place alone, but barely, with nothing left at the end of a month; with a roommate it carried the rent, the utilities, and a margin. She had worked it out before the first viewing.

She opened the laptop and wrote the advertisement.

The first draft said: Looking for a friendly roommate to share a lovely two-bedroom near campus! She deleted the exclamation mark first, then lovely, then friendly, and then the rest, since a household of one shouldn't make promises on behalf of two.

The second draft said No pets, and she looked at that for a while. She had never lived with an animal. She had no data. She changed it to Pets negotiable, weighed the wording once more, and submitted it to the Daily Planet classifieds:

ROOM AVAILABLE. Two-bedroom apartment near the university. Quiet household. Non-smoker. No parties. Pets negotiable. Rent plus utilities, details on request. Call Lena.

Then she went back to the computer in the corner, where the graphics cards were waiting to be seated. The second bedroom was empty. Now it was advertised.

＊＊＊

The apartments with park views did not write back. Neither did the ones with balconies, or dishwashers, or the phrase young professionals preferred. Kara learned within days that the good listings answered only people with paperwork, and that for people without paperwork there existed a second market, run by landlords who asked fewer questions because they preferred not to answer any either.

The first of those had a room whose single window faced the gap between two buildings. "Quiet view," the landlord said, and slid a form across the table, tapping the third line. Proof of income.

"I can pay."

"That's what the form is for."

"The form asks where it comes from. I'm telling you it comes."

He took the form back.

The second apartment was above a laundromat, and the landlord praised the fresh paint, though it covered only one wall; the whole room smelled faintly of wet laundry no fan could clear. Six months in advance, he said. Cash was fine. Cash was, in fact, preferred.

Kara could have paid it. The valuable metals and stones her father had packed into the pod would cover six months many times over. Her father had packed that pod once, and nobody was ever going to pack it again, and none of it was going to a man who wanted half a year of it as proof that her word was worth nothing.

"I can pay," she said. "Monthly."

"Then we're done."

"Yes," Kara said, and stood, and was on the street before he'd finished explaining what an opportunity she was missing.

The third was a shared apartment, two students and a fern, and it went well for twenty minutes. They liked her. She liked the fern. Then one of them asked whether she had a cat or anything, and Kara said, "A dog," and honesty made her add, "a big one," and the viewing was over in the polite way, which took another ten minutes and changed nothing.

She had crossed between star systems alone with that dog. Metropolis would not rent her a bedroom.

Clark offered to help. She let him rewrite the reference twice until it said only what she wanted it to say.

"You can vouch for me," she said. "Name, employer, signature. That's all I need."

"I could also—"

"That's all I need."

He wrote the final version out on Daily Planet notepaper. She folded it into her jacket. By then, three failed viewings in, she already knew the questions before they were asked.

＊＊＊

Kara had chosen the coffee shop by the only criterion that mattered: it was the first one that had looked at Krypto and not begun the sentence with "unfortunately". Now he lay under her table with his chin on her boot, positioned so that the blueberry bagel had nowhere to go without his knowledge, and conducted the siege at close range.

A latte, and the Daily Planet. Above the counter a muted television replayed footage of Superman doing something about a bridge. Nobody in the café looked up.

She went straight to the classifieds — apartments, sublets, a wall of cheerful small print, every entry promising light, charm, and easy-going households — and caught Clark's byline under a city-hall story on page four only on her way past it.

One wasn't promising anything.

ROOM AVAILABLE. Two-bedroom apartment near the university. Quiet household. Non-smoker. No parties. Pets negotiable. Rent plus utilities, details on request. Call Lena.

Kara read it twice, and the second time was for the two words she hadn't found anywhere else in the column: pets negotiable.

She gave Krypto the last of the bagel, which ended the siege with honor on both sides, and called from the table.

"Lena."

Just the name, and a voice younger than the advertisement read.

"Hi. I'm calling about the room. I'd like to see it."

"All right." A pause with paper in it, a pen. "Do you work?"

"No."

"Study?"

"No."

The line stayed open. Kara could hear her deciding whether to ask the third question now or in person.

"Tomorrow, four o'clock," Lena said instead, and gave the address. "And your name?"

"Kara." A beat. "I have a dog."

"Bring him."

Nothing else. No follow-up question, no hesitation Kara could hear. Lena hung up first, and Kara looked at the phone, then down at Krypto.

"We have a viewing. You're going to behave like you've never broken anything in your life."

Krypto looked back up at her with the clear conscience of a dog who genuinely believed that.

＊＊＊

The doorbell rang at four o'clock. Not around four: at it.

Lena checked through the peephole out of habit and revised her expectations before the door was open. The voice on the phone had been young; she had assumed the voice was misleading, since callers about the room so far had been grad students pushing thirty or people whose circumstances they preferred to explain in person. The woman on the landing was mid-twenties at most, blonde, one hand resting on Krypto's head, the other winding loops into his leash, then letting them go. She had said a dog. She had not said this much dog.

Beside her, sitting on the landing, a big white shaggy dog held so still he might have been briefed.

Lena opened the door. "Kara?"

"Yes." A beat. "You're Lena?"

"I am."

"You're really young."

"So are you."

Lena stepped back. "Come in."

"He's Krypto," Kara said, still in the doorway. "He's part of it. If he's a no, tell me now and I'll save you the tour."

It wasn't a negotiating position; nothing in it invited any answer but the true one. Lena looked at Krypto. Krypto sat on the doormat and studied a fixed point on the wall.

"Pets negotiable means I want to meet the pet," Lena said. "I'm meeting him. Come in."

The tour was short because the apartment was honest about itself. The free room: a bed frame, a window on the street side. "It was mine at MIT," Lena said, before the question could fully form. "I kept it because it still works. I found a better deal on a new one for myself, so this one's spare. If you have one, we'll figure out what happens to this — sell it, take it apart, store it somewhere. Your call." "The fire escape runs past the window," she added, in the tone of someone disclosing a defect. Kara glanced out and said, "That's fine." The bathroom: tub with a shower attachment on the wall, two shelves, the lower one empty. The kitchen, where the table carried a laptop, a notebook and pen, and a mug on an actual coaster. The main room: a small sofa against the far wall with a low table in front of it, stacked with printouts, and beyond that, bookshelves running the length of the room, textbooks sorted into two blocks that had nothing to do with each other, as though two different students lived here and were both her.

And in the corner, on a desk of its own, the computer stood with all its side panels off. Three fans, cabling laid with a neatness that hadn't come from a store.

Kara stopped in front of it longer than she'd stopped in front of the room she might live in. "You're building that."

"Yes."

"From parts you bought?"

"Mostly." Lena watched her look at it. Applicants usually complimented the light. She nodded at a row of ICs and memory modules lined up on the mat. "Some of those I improved first."

Kara nodded slowly, as though this was the first reasonable thing anyone in Metropolis had said to her.

They sat at the kitchen table. Krypto arranged himself beside Kara's chair, tail curled around his paws, a model of citizenship. He took a brief interest in the plant on the windowsill; Lena slid it to the far end, out of reach, and he accepted the ruling without appeal.

"Some questions," Lena said, and opened the notebook to a fresh page. "What do you do for work?"

"Nothing at the moment."

"Income?"

"I can pay."

"How, if you don't work?"

"Not through a job."

Lena waited. Nothing followed.

"Credit history?"

"No."

"None, or bad?"

"None."

"Previous landlords?"

"No."

"References?"

"One." Kara took a folded sheet from her jacket and put it on the table. Daily Planet letterhead, a name, a signature. "Clark Kent. He'll confirm anything you ask."

Lena read the name twice. "The Clark Kent who writes for the Planet."

"My cousin."

Lena set the sheet down where the pen could guard it — a name she could look up. Across the viewings so far she had been offered two invented jobs, one aunt who would "transfer the deposit tonight", and a smoker who had described herself as a non-smoker in the process of becoming one. This applicant had answered every question with the worst available truth and produced a verifiable byline as a reference.

"The rent is six hundred and seventy-two a month," she said. "Plus forty-eight percent of the utilities."

"Not seven hundred and not fifty percent?"

"Your room is smaller than mine. I worked the split out by floor area, and rounded it."

"Okay," Kara said, with no negotiation in it at all.

"Why did the others turn you down?" she asked. "You've clearly done this before. The paper was ready."

"Everything you just heard," Kara said. "No job, no history, nothing to check." She paused. "And Krypto."

At his name, Krypto's tail gave one thump of civic pride, and the thump caught the leg of the low table. The stack of printouts on it went over the edge in a single motion, unhurried as a glacier, and fanned out across the floor with the fullest coverage physically available to forty pages.

Silence. Krypto sat facing the wall.

"He's behaving really well today," Kara said.

Lena laughed. It got out before she could stop it, her actual laugh, not the one for company, and Kara watched it happen, and let herself relax for the first time all afternoon.

They picked up the pages together. Krypto helped by holding one down with his paw until Lena took it, damp at the corner but essentially rescued, and she said "thank you" to a dog and heard herself do it.

At the door, with the folded letterhead in her hand, Lena said, "I'll call you."

Kara's shoulders did something slight and resigned. "That means no."

"It means I'll call you."

"Everyone says that."

"Then everyone you've met is apparently bad at using words correctly."

Kara looked at her, and this time the look lasted, as though Lena had been reclassified mid-sentence into something worth another read. "Okay," she said. "Then I'll hear from you."

She left with the dog at her heel. Lena closed the door, went back to the kitchen table, and reviewed her notes: no job, no income she could verify, no history, a journalist as a reference, a big white dog with a documented record of collateral damage.

She put the pen down on top of the letterhead and admitted to the empty apartment that it was the best application she'd received.

＊＊＊

By evening Krypto had found Clark's oven mitt and was carrying it around the apartment, not chewing it, holding it, the way an heir holds a title.

The phone rang. An unknown Metropolis number.

"Hello?"

"It's Lena Luthor."

Kara waited for the rest of the sentence. The line stayed quiet a beat longer than made sense, as though she had missed a cue in a play everyone else had rehearsed. She knew the name Luthor the way she knew most things about this planet, from the outside: a Metropolis family, money, a brother who was in the news for reasons she hadn't kept track of.

"Okay," Kara said.

Another beat. Then, briskly: "The room is yours, if you still want it."

Kara looked across the apartment. The reading lamp's two halves were still on the counter, awaiting a repair neither of them believed in. Krypto stood in the hallway with the oven mitt, tail beginning to move, and behind him the sofa wore its drop cloth like a patient awaiting the next operation.

"I still want it."

"Saturday works for the keys."

"We'll be there at ten."

"We," Lena said, dry as the classifieds. "Yes. Tell him the low table is being moved."

She hung up. Kara stood with the phone in her hand, and Clark leaned out of the kitchen with a dish towel over his shoulder.

"Good news?"

Kara looked at the lamp, the sofa, the dog, the mitt.

"For your furniture," she said, "yes."