Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Homecoming 16

Although Lois’s stomach tightened as she pulled up on the street outside her house, she was glad to see that the lights were off. She couldn’t face her father after the thoughts she’d been having about the boy sitting in the seat next to her.

Clark had been quiet on the trip from the library, staring out the window and humming. Lois thought she could make out the tune; “I had a dream,” from Les Miserables. Why he’d be humming Fantine’s song about the unfairness of her life Lois didn’t know, unless it was just catchy. She resolved to play him more of the cassette if they had time.

Lois parked her car and turned off the ignition. Switching the lights off, she hesitated for a moment. Did Clark expect something from her? Did he expect more than she was willing to give? Although she was coming to trust him, what did she really know about him personally?

He looked at her and asked, “Is everything all right?”

Lois nodded, and said, “I’m just thinking about what we’ll need to get this written up.” The lie rolled easily off her lips and she forced herself to smile.

Clark smiled and said, “I’m kind of excited to see your computer. I’ve never seen one before.”

“I was the first one of my friends to get one. It helps to be the daughter of a renowned sports surgeon.”

“My parents were farmers,” Clark said. “Metropolis will probably have flying cars before Smallville gets computers.”

Lois frowned. Smallville? His records had talked about him being from Wichita Kansas. Of course, she’d only skimmed through them and might have missed a few details. People did move.

“Let’s get this done,” she said. She grabbed her backpack and purse and opened her door, careful not to step into traffic.

A moment later she was up the steps to her front door. She set her bag and purse down and she fumbled with the keys. She was intensely aware of Clark behind her.

A moment later she’d managed to get the door open and she was through, pulling her purse and backpack with her. Clark held the door open for her and then followed. She waited for her to pass by her, overly conscious of how close they had to get to each other before she locked the door behind her.

This was Metropolis, and the one lesson she’d had drilled into her as a child was that you always locked the doors behind you.

Of course, this meant she was locked in with this boy that she was growing to like all too well. In a way, he was more dangerous to her if he was everything he seemed to be. If he was secretly an ass, she’d dump him faster than she’d dumped Joe Malone.

But if he was actually kind and smart and good…Lois had never understood her classmates who put a boy over their self- interest. A friend’s older sister had given up a scholarship to a good college in order to go to a community college in order to be closer to the boy she’d liked. They’d broken up halfway through her first semester and the scholarship was long gone.

The fact that she’d even fleetingly thought about dropping the story to protect Clark shocked and worried her. If anyone could protect himself it was Clark. It wasn’t like he had a reputation or friends to lose at school. He seemed to have a vibrant life outside of school, but saw school as a means to an end.

Losing the internship, or even worse, the exchange program to Ireland would change the course of Lois’s entire life. She couldn’t afford to lose focus.

She switched the lights on and winced. Her father had left the evidence of his poker game everywhere to see. Lois was grateful that Clark had been in the house before, so he could see that this wasn’t how it usually was.

“My room is upstairs,” Lois said. She hoped it didn’t sound like some kind of come on; she wasn’t in the habit of inviting boys to her room.

She made her ways up the stairs without looking back at him. She reached her door and she hesitated before opening it. She was thankful that she’d thought ahead and cleaned it carefully, but still, a person’s room gave all sorts of details about them.

Opening the door, she switched on the light.

Her father had tried to get her to decorate everything in pink; some of her friends had rooms that looked like Pepto-Bismol had exploded and covered every surface. Her room, by contrast was done in white and red, with red walls and white furniture, including a large canopy bed with a red comforter and covered in throw pillows.

She’d thrown all her stuffed animals deep in the closet, concerned that they would make her look too much like a little girl.

What worried her more were the posters on her wall; Harrison Ford from Star Wars, Billie Joel, Rick Springfield. Compared to what her friends had on their walls these were conservative. The Close Encounters and E.T. posters didn’t help matters any. At least he couldn’t fault her Einstein poster, or her Life Magazine poster with Neil Armstrong on the moon.

Against her far wall, her computer sat on a small table facing a large window that looked out on the setting sun. She had her curtains pulled open, and her room looked out over their postage stamp of a yard. Lois was proud of that yard, although her father groused that it was more trouble than it was worth. It wasn’t as though he was going to allow them a dog anytime soon, even if her schedule would allow it.

Lois glanced at Clark, wondering how he was going to comment on her room.

He didn’t. He simply looked at everything once, and said, “Where can we get set up?”

Lois headed for her desk. She noticed that Clark left the door behind him open and she felt a little better.

“This is it,” Lois said.

There were two cork boards on the wall, one on each side of the window. The left had the usual pictures of her and her friends and notes tacked to it. The other side was conspicuously empty. She’d been keeping her notes on the high school football scandal there, but she’d pulled them down when she was cleaning her room. There wasn’t any point in letting Clark know anything that was going to end up hurting him.
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Somehow, he seemed oblivious to every trick in Lois’s book. She’d laughed at everything funny he’d said, flipped her hair, even touched his hand a time or two and leaned close to him as he was typing on her computer.

He was fascinated by her computer. Although loading required several floppy discs and almost ten minutes, he had numerous questions about the computer and what it could do.

Although he admitted to never having used a typewriter before, he watched Lois intently and before long insisted on taking his part of the writing process.

Learning to type had taken Lois six months in the seventh grade. Clark took to it seemingly within minutes. Lois wasn’t sure whether he was lying about never having typed before, but it was soon clear that he was faster at typing than she was, even if he did still have to look at the letters.

Still, he loved being able to correct his mistakes. At first they were frequent, but he always corrected them before Lois could say anything. As time went on, though, they became less and less frequent. It was almost frightening to see how quickly he learned.

It was confusing. He didn’t reject her or pull away, but he also didn’t respond at all. Yet despite this, Lois realized that she was having fun just working with him.

The project seemed to flash by; they’d already done the research and all that was left was putting it together. Lois tended to want to focus on the facts, while Clark wanted to focus on the human aspect of things. Together, Lois could see that what they were writing was better than what either one of them could have accomplished on their own.

He was utterly focused, and Lois wasn’t sure whether she was relieved or disappointed. What she did know was that she enjoyed just working with him. Was this what working with an equal always like?

Finally, they finished, and Lois began the laborious process of printing what they had. She’d had to open six files, as none of them could be larger than three pages, and printing was a somewhat tricky process. If the printer was off by even a little she’d have to reprint it again, and Lois sometimes thought she could type as fast as the printer printed.

“Well, that’s it then,” Lois said. “There’s no way Mr. Johnson can be disappointed with this.”

Clark shrugged. “In my experience, people can be disappointed no matter how well you do.”

He’d acted out after his parents had died, from what Lois remembered in his file, and he’d been sent from foster home to foster home. It was hard for Lois to even imagine what that must have been like; life with two parents was hard enough in her experience. Life with multiple sets, having to get to know new sets of rules every few months had to have been hard.

“I’m glad we got partnered together,” Lois said. “Could you imagine having to work with Tom Church, or Joe Malloy? Even half the cheerleaders would have had either one of us doing all the work.”

Clark grimaced.

The printer clattered on and they were both silent for a while. Finally Clark spoke. “You get to see the sunset from your window?”

“Every day,” Lois said. “Other than being away from my mother it’s the one thing I like living here.”

Of course, there were buildings in the way, but the sky was still outlined in pinks and reds. It startled Lois to realize that writing the entire paper had taken them less than two hours. Clark had to be a faster typist than she’d realized.

“You get a better view standing up,” she said.

She stood up, and he slowly followed. What she’d said was true; from a standing position the horizon was visible, even if it was covered in buildings.

Lois realized that she was standing a little closer to Clark than she’d meant to. She looked up at him and smiled nervously. She stepped back a little and then stepped forward again nervously.

“You’ve been really good to me,” she said. She reached up and pushed her hair away from her face. “Better than could be expected.”

He looked down at her and smiled. “You deserve better than you’re getting .”

Lois felt a sudden stab of guilt. She didn’t really. From one point of view, she was about to be stabbing all of her friends in the back for her own self interests. The fact that she was uncovering wrongdoing and serving the common good would be lost on most of them.

“Clark,” she said, and she put her hand on his chest.

He froze, looking down at her hand. “Uh….” He looked around the room quickly, almost as though he was looking for a way out. He finally settled on her posters. “I liked E.T.”

Notably, he didn’t step away, but Lois could see that he was visibly uncomfortable. Although she wasn’t an expert, it looked like he was as torn as she was.

Maybe he wasn’t ready; Lois certainly wasn’t sure she was ready and she didn’t plan on pushing him into something he didn’t want.

The look in his eyes though said something different than the nervousness in his voice.

Lois stepped away carefully, taking her hand from his chest. She frowned suddenly. “I thought you didn’t have time for television. You have time for movies?”

She found herself suddenly grateful to him for having deflected the conversation. If they’d had to talk out whatever reasons he had for not acting like a normal teenage boy, she’d have felt mortified.

Of course, part of the reason she liked him was because he wasn’t like a teenage boy.

“There’s a dollar theater down on Fifth Street,” Clark said. “You may have to wait a few months, but you can get all the movies everybody else watches.”

The theater Lois and her friends went to cost almost five dollars; of course, Metropolis prices were higher than those in the rest of the country, but still.

“You had time to go to the movies?”

“I get some free time Saturday afternoons,” Clark said. “I had a lot more time last year. I particularly liked ET.”

“The flying,” Lois said. “I loved the flying.”

“It was the first movie I’d ever seen where the aliens weren’t out to enslave everyone, or abduct them,” Clark said. “If a species is advanced enough to come all the way here, surely they’d be…better than mindless monsters.”

“It’d be nice to think that,” Lois said. “But I don’t see why aliens would be any better than people. There would probably be good ones and bad ones and there would probably be politics. Considering how people are…”

Now Clark did step back from her. “I think you’re selling people short. There’s a lot of good in people. You just have to give them a chance to show it.”

“I’ve lived in Metropolis my entire life,” Lois said. “Maybe you’ve seen the good in people, but what I see is people hurting each other. Part of the reason I want to become a journalist is to keep that from happening.”

Clark looked at her and said, “I can see how you’d see things that way, and I’m sorry about that.”

Lois forced herself to smile. This wasn’t about her parents, even if it somehow felt like it was. “I’d love to see the world like you do. I just don’t understand how you can.”

“I listen,” Clark said. “Sure, I hear all sorts of terrible things happening, but I see acts of kindness every day. I see people do things that are beautiful; they just don’t talk about it.”

There was a simple, honest sincerity in his expression that touched Lois. It pierced right through her wall of cynicism. Her smile now was unforced as she recalled the smiles of the men at Brother Wayman’s. Obviously Clark was able to bring something out in people.

Although his view of the world seemed too bright and simplistic, it appealed to her. She’d love to be able to let go of the dark cynicism that seemed to color everything she did.

“Maybe you can show me sometime,” Lois said. Her voice had grown husky, and she stepped toward him.

For the first time he stepped toward her. “Lois,” he began.

A moment later he stopped, his head snapping around. “Someone just pulled up around the back.”

He grabbed his backpack and said, “I’ll sign it before class on Monday.”

A moment later he was gone, presumably to pull his bike from the back of her car. Lois felt flushed and wondered if he had simply run away because he was afraid.

It wasn’t all that likely he’d had a girlfriend; when had he had the time? He rode a bicycle, which wasn’t the best way to take a girl on a date. By his own admission he’d been home schooled last year and swamped at work this year.

It confused Lois; he seemed so knowledgeable and worldly about everything else; it seemed weird that he’d be so inexperienced in this one area of his life.

The sounds of movement from below startled her; moving to the top of her stairs she saw her father coming in with his floozie of the week.

She closed her door tightly behind her and turned her music up.

A single thought occurred to her. Just how good WAS Clark’s hearing?