TOC ~
Part 7
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Alt-Metropolis – September 1982
“Friends”
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Lois sped around the corner of her hallway dorm room at top speed. She threw the door open and tossed her bag onto her own bed as she slid to a stop next to Star’s bed. Lois had felt Star’s fear spike and a searing pain earlier while she’d been with her Chemistry tutor. Lois had feigned a headache to end her ‘class’ early and then had sprinted across the base to their shared dorm room.
Lois sat next to her friend and placed a hand on Star’s back while she sobbed violently. Lois was hit with an image of Mensa’s menacing face as he’d turned up the voltage and shocked Star again. Lois grimaced and leaned over to gingerly pick up Star’s hand. Noting the red mark where the equipment had been strapped, Lois stood up and crossed the room to their shared bathroom to get some burn cream and a bandage. Lois knew that Star’s cries weren’t about the burn, but administering to her physically was something she could do for her friend.
Star’s weeping quieted as Lois took care of her burn and wrapped her hand. When she was done, Lois stroked her hair until Star quieted to a shuddering breath and a last hiccup.
“Bad?” Lois asked.
Star nodded and then scrunched her eyes closed against new tears. “I hate him, Lois. He’s the vilest person I’ve ever met. What gives him the right to treat us like this?”
Lois stroked her hair again. “I don’t know, Star. I tell you what, though. I’m not going to let him do this to you. Tomorrow I’m going to find out what we can do to end this. Tonight, though, it’s my job to figure out a way to cheer you up.”
Star gave her a disdainful look and Lois laughed. “Come on. I have an idea where to start.”
Lois led Star first to her father’s office, where she broke in and stole a six-pack of beer and some cash. After placing a phone call, they snuck into one of the barrack rec rooms and gathered a variety of items out of a closet. By the time they picked up their delivered pizza beyond the gatehouse, Lois had a stack of cards and games secreted away under her dorm room bed.
It was after midnight when Lois tried to reach below Star’s leg to reach a green circle. Overbalanced, Lois lost her balance and both girls collapsed into a drunken heap on the twister mat. They lay there, giggling uncontrollably, until Star had turned her head to look at Lois.
“Thanks, Lois.”
Lois smiled back. “You’re welcome.” She noted the glassy look to Star’s eyes and shook her head. “We are going to be hung over tomorrow.”
Star giggled. “Yeah. Do you think I can call in sick for school and testing tomorrow?”
“Absolutely! But only if you can barf all over my dad’s dress shoes.”
Star dissolved into another fit of drunken giggles as Lois staggered to her feet. Lois offered her hand to Star and she helped her into bed before shutting off the light and passing out on her own.
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Alt-Metropolis – July 5, 1997
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Lois set a bowl of freshly popped popcorn on the coffee table next to a stack of card and board games. That first night Clark had come to her apartment had gone better than she could have hoped for given the rough beginning they had had. Now, Clark was coming over tonight to work on the murder investigation by fleshing out their backstory. They had agreed to share more information about themselves, both to make their cover believable and also in an effort to get to know one another.
Lois knew they both had traumatic events in their respective pasts and conversations could get heavy, so she had devised a plan to lighten the evening by playing games. Winner would get to ask the question and the loser would have to answer with the unvarnished truth.
It had been a couple of days since Lois and Clark had gone back to the Planet after the disastrous press conference to tell Cat Grant that they would like to be partners after all. Since Cat already knew about her serial murder investigation, Cat’s only response to Lois’s recital of their meeting with Perry, Sorenson, and Henderson had been to silently raise an eyebrow and tilt her head to look at Clark until he cleared his throat.
“I’m in, Chief.”
“How? What’s your role, Clark?”
“I’ll be Lois’s fiancé.”
Cat’s look of disbelief would have been comical if things hadn’t been so tense between them. Eventually, though, Cat had squinted her eyes and pointed a pencil in their direction. “I have my concerns, but I’m going to play along. I’ll give you joint assignments as part of your cover, but I’ll only do this on two conditions: your individual investigations don’t suffer and no one gets hurt.”
Lois had glanced at Clark only to see that he had done the same with her. They both looked away quickly. It was clear that Cat’s conditions were multi-layered, but they agreed to them anyway. Lois only hoped that she could deliver on the promise.
Lois turned to go back into her kitchen to grab a cream soda when a knock directly behind her on her third-story, living room window caused her to shriek and jump in fright. She turned, a hand over her chest, to see Clark hovering just outside the glass in full Superman glory, a smirk of amusement on his face.
Lois bent down to unlock the window and then lifted the pane up. Her intended scolding froze in her throat as she got a close-up look at Clark in his Superman outfit. Lois swallowed to try to moisten her suddenly dry mouth as her gaze drifted down Clark’s body suspended a few feet away. He had the most amazing physique and the spandex showed off every muscled contour to perfection. When she just continued to stare at him, Clark cleared his throat.
“May I come in?”
Blushing to the tips of her ears at getting caught gawking at him, Lois stepped back to let him into the room. He stepped down through her window and slid it closed before turning around again. Lois’s eyes snapped back up to his face from where they had been ogling one of his finer physical attributes and walked directly to the kitchen to open the fridge door.
“Can I get you a … drink?” Lois’s voice trailed off as she saw Clark spin, turning from a bright vortex to a dark one as he changed into his regular clothes, which today consisted of a black t-shirt and jeans. Her awe at his spin-change was lost as her eyes started to make the same meandering trip they’d just taken when he was in the Superman suit. Okay, so maybe the Superman suit wasn’t the most enticing outfit he owned. Lois licked her lips as her eyes got stuck on his biceps as he slipped his glasses onto his face.
When Clark looked at her, Lois immediately turned back to the fridge and grabbed a couple of cream sodas. Lois pressed one against her cheek and sucked in a breath as the bottle touched her heated skin.
'Get a grip, Lane!' she scolded herself, but she knew it wouldn’t work. She was already having racy dreams of Clark and tonight her infatuated brain had two more images to add into the mix. Lois took a deep breath and then tried to walk nonchalantly into the living room.
Clark took the soda that Lois offered and then gestured to the stack of games. “What’s all this?”
Lois shrugged. “Incentive. I’ve always felt that games are great for get-to-know-you gatherings. I thought it might take the heat off a little. A little competition doesn’t hurt, either. How about winner gets to ask the questions, loser has to answer. No hedging, only truth.”
“Interesting. Feeling like losing a few games to a master, huh?”
“Pff! As if!” Lois bumped his arm with her shoulder. “You never said that super-slamming was one of your powers. You have no idea who you’re talking to here.”
“Lois, I grew up in Kansas. Card games were our version of clubbing.”
Lois picked up a deck of cards and slid them from the box. She cut the deck with one hand and then bridge shuffled them. “Let’s start with a game of Speed. No superpowers!”
Lois set up the deck and they started. The longer they played, the more they laughed. Lois’s giggles became more frequent the more she fell behind. When Clark played his last card, Lois groaned.
“Yes!” Clark crowed. “I get the first question. Let’s see. Based on my research, I suspect that you speak several languages. How many do you know? And how did you learn them?”
“I’ll answer both if you answer both.”
“Deal.”
“I can speak about ten languages. I can hold a conversation in a few others. My mom always said I had an unusual aptitude for languages. I could read by age three and had read through the dictionary by age four. How about you?”
“I can order dinner in more than three hundred languages, but I’m only fluent in about a hundred of them.”
Astonished, Lois closed her mouth with an audible click. “Get out of here! How?”
“Eidetic memory. I didn’t need to study. Also, once I learned the grammar patterns for the first dozen or so, it was easy to pick up the rest.”
“Wow!”
Clark picked up the deck of cards. “Want to try your hand at Blackjack?”
“Hit me, baby. Best two out of three gets the next question.”
Clark removed the Jokers, shuffled, and then dealt. It wasn’t long before Clark was gloating again about his victory when Lois asked for one card too many and went over.
“Alright, Lois. As soon as we announce this ‘engagement’, details about your life that even you didn’t know will be news. My first question is … how many serious relationships have you had?”
“Serious, you mean like when I agreed to meet Joe Bob’s parents before he gave me a hickey in the vacant lot behind the Dairy Freeze? That kind of serious relationship?”
Clark rubbed the back of his neck, a little embarrassed at asking a ‘kissing’ question right off the bat. “Not exactly. The tabloids are going to be brutal and the other media isn’t going to go lightly, either. I want to hear the true stories from you before they start asking me about it.”
Lois snickered and gave his arm a nudge. “It’s a good question. Well, where should I start? First of all, you know I didn’t attend a normal high school – that was in your research – so there wasn’t much opportunity for dating back then. I did try once with a soldier on base, but he was more interested in my body than me, so we didn't even finish our first date. Once I was in college and started my internship at the Daily Planet, I didn’t have a lot of time, but there were a couple of crushes. One was a guy in my advanced writing class. Nathan had a silver tongue and the soul of a poet. We dated casually a couple of times, but I caught him betting a friend how quickly he could bed me and that was the end of that. The other crush, Paul, was the editor of the school paper. In the end, he was more interested in my stories than in me so that didn’t go anywhere either.”
“What about after college?”
“Well, you’ve probably heard the rumors about Claude. He was a foreign correspondent at the Planet. He was French and had this accent. Mmm! Anyway, he kind of took me under his wing and started to mentor me. I loved the attention and I learned some things from him, but it ended the night he tried to seduce me for my story notes.” Lois chuckled morosely. “I probably should have let him have them. They were my notes on the Congolese gunrunning story.”
When Lois paused, Clark leaned forward a little, rotating his hand to ask for more. “That’s it? I thought you had to give the unvarnished truth!”
“That is the truth.”
“So you’ve never had a long-term relationship?”
“Clark Kent! Are you trying to ask me how many men I’ve slept with?”
“No! I mean, maybe. It’s just that … the tabloids are going to print all kinds of things …”
Lois laughed nervously and then blushed and ducking her head, tucked her hair behind her ear. “Whew! Unvarnished. Okay, so that intimacy threshold, the big threshold, I haven’t actually crossed it. I got close with Paul and with Claude, but I backed out.”
“Wow. So you’re a v … very patient woman.”
“I guess you could say that. It’s just that I take sex seriously and the first time… when I do cross the intimacy threshold, I don’t want to just do it, I want to make love.”
“That’s beautiful, Lois. Just so you know, I wanted to be sure, too. I waited for a long time, but …”
“Lana.”
When Clark didn’t respond, Lois cleared her throat and grabbed the cards. She knew her face was red, but she didn't want Clark to know how much more of that was due to jealousy than to embarrassment. She started shuffling the deck again. “How about some poker. Five Card Stud or Texas Hold’em? The stakes can be how many questions the winner gets to ask.”
Not waiting for his answer, Lois slid down to the floor and pulled the popcorn with her. She avoided Clark’s gaze and started dealing until he lifted the coffee table and moved it aside. He sat down across from her and picked up his cards. She looked up at Clark to see a small pinch between his eyebrows. She watched as his eyes darted to her and then he requested two cards. Lois looked at hers as well and almost smiled. This was going to be her game.
Lois dealt Clark the new cards and then took one herself. She looked again at Clark and wondered at this new aspect to his personality. She knew she was high strung and competitive, but she was a little surprised at how competitive Clark was given that he spent his spare time as a Mr.-Goody-Two-Shoes Superman. He’d been almost lording his wins over Lois and now she was really motivated. She watched the corners of his mouth droop ever so slightly.
Lois was pretty sure she had Clark figured out. She narrowed her eyes at him. His eyes flickered to her again and he tried to arrange his face into a bland, unemotional mask, but even without her ability, his tells were plain to anyone observant to see and she thought she could use that information to win.
“The bet is at one question. I’ll raise it to two,” Clark said.
“I’ll see your bet,” Lois said. She glanced at her cards again; two pair. Lois knew that Clark probably had a better hand, so she smiled and then smothered it. She watched his eyes flick toward her and then his mouth dropped open ever so slightly.
“Tick tock, Clark.”
“Give me a second. Sheesh!”
The line reappeared between Clark’s eyebrows and she knew she had him. “So what’s it going to be, Clark? Are you going to raise, check, or fold? The stake is two questions.”
After looking at him again and lifting an eyebrow, Clark sighed and tossed his cards down. “Fold.”
Lois squealed. “Ha! I knew it.”
“How did you know?”
Lois grinned. “I told you, Clark. I’m psychic.”
“And I have x-ray vision; trust has to start somewhere, Lois. I don’t think you cheated. Tell me, how did you know?”
“No way am I going to give away your tells! It took me three games to learn them.”
“I have tells?”
“Yes, now don’t distract me.” Lois started scooping up the cards. “Okay, Clark. My first question for you is … have you ever lived with someone, full-time?
“Full-time as in cohabitate? No, not full time. The whole truth is not ever.”
“Not even with Lana?”
Clark chuckled. “No. Lana was very specific about how our relationship should be and cohabitating before we got married was not in her plan.”
“You don’t sound particularly upset by it.”
“I’m not. It was actually nice to have a place of retreat when I was engaged to Lana. Growing up, not all of my foster families had enough space to give me a whole bedroom to myself, so I learned to be creative. At one place, I used to sit on the roof to be alone. Once I graduated from high school, I cherished having a place of my own.”
Clark seemed very factual about his answer, but Lois could feel his vulnerability at sharing such a private detail. “I know what you mean. After my mom died and I went to live with my dad, I had a space, but no privacy. When I moved out and got my own place, I loved living alone.”
“So you’ve never lived with someone full-time?”
Lois’s eye twinkled. “It’s still my turn, but yes, I have, actually. I had a roommate in college. It was a really busy time; I was studying at Met U., interning at the Daily Planet, and I was on staff with the university paper. It was nice to have a friend at home. She and I would play games sometimes, watch movies, or just go out for ice cream.”
“That was Star, right?”
“Yeah. She followed me into the news business, but didn’t really like investigative reporting.” Lois eyed Clark’s biceps again as he picked up the cards and started to shuffle them. “Okay, Clark. My second question is… do you work out?”
“No. I’ve never needed a ‘go-to-the-gym’ kind of work out. By junior high I was pressing farm combines and racing trains and after high school, not at all. About the same time, I realized that I didn’t really need to eat and I only need a few hours of sleep. I suspect that I only need that because it gets dark at night.” Clark chuckled at Lois’s confused expression. “I think my super energy comes from the sun.”
“That is both cool and so unfair.”
Clark smiled smugly and started to deal. “How about Crazy Eights?”
“Bring it on.”
It wasn’t long before Clark discarded his last card and smiled triumphantly. “My turn to ask. Alright, Lois. What is the most dangerous situation you’ve been in and how did you get away.”
“That’s two questions,” Lois accused. “No cheating.”
“Fine. How did you get out of the most dangerous situation you’ve ever encountered?”
“Clark, me trying to pick just one dangerous situation would be like you picking just one rescue.”
“Alright, I’ll pick one. How did you escape during the Luthor gunrunning story?”
Lois’s smile melted away and she instantly closed off, her memories of that time still so painful that it was hard to think of it. Clark held up his hands in apology when he saw the change in her demeanor.
“I’m sorry, Lois. I didn’t mean to bring up a sensitive subject. Forget it.”
“No, it’s okay, Clark. You won and I owe you the unvarnished truth, right?”
“You don’t owe me anything, Lois.”
Lois smiled at him. “Thanks, but I can do this. Just give me a minute. The truth is … that I had help, and I didn’t really get away, did I?”
“Lois…”
Lois ignored Clark’s effort to let her off the hook. She needed to tell him. “I was so confident. Everything was going to plan. I had tracked the gunrunners to a dockside warehouse in Brazzaville. I had already cased the building, I knew where the guards were, the cameras, and alarms. I jimmied the lock and broke into the office without incident. Finding the evidence was easy and quick; I had copies of everything that I needed – shipping manifests, invoices, memos – that showed that Luthor was “The Boss” and that he was orchestrating everything from Metropolis. I made my way out of the building already writing the story in my head.”
“What happened?”
“I didn’t account for the dogs. I was just about to slip through the gap I’d made in the chain-link fence when a mastiff darted out of the shadows and grabbed my pant leg, pulling me down. The other dog joined him not long after barking up a storm that brought the human guards. They knocked me unconscious and tossed me into a dirty, basement storage room that I think doubled as a bomb shelter below a manor house. I was there for about a week, no windows, no facilities, only enough bread and water to keep me from starving…”
Lois stopped to swallow and Clark reached across to touch her hand. Lois turned her hand over and grabbed his hand tightly. She appreciated his offer of support as she remembered how she had desperately tried to connect with Clark over and over. Finally, she had given up, admitting what she’d known from the beginning, that there was a substance in the building that blocked their psychic connection. She had been completely alone.
“How did you get out?” Clark asked.
“I listened and tried to get inside my captor’s heads. The guards rotated frequently, but there was one man, Joseph Nagi, who ended up guarding me several days in a row. He was an older man who had already lost his wife and children to the civil war. He was angry and I was a good listener. He … he said that I reminded him of his daughter. It was due to him that I wasn’t tortured, beaten, or molested. One night, he started reminiscing, telling me of happier times before the war. He wept bitterly when he told me how he’d lost his family. He wanted those responsible to pay for what they’d done and I … I promised him that I would bring them to justice. In the end, he decided to help me, even though he knew it would cost him his life. He let me out, gave me my things, and showed me the way to get out of the compound.”
“Lois?”
Tears had found their way down Lois’s cheeks as she had recited her story. She wiped them away fiercely. She felt Clark’s thumb rubbing circles on the back of her hand and it encouraged her to continue. “Joseph told me his life was over if he helped me and I let him, Clark! I was scared and I wanted to escape so badly that I let him.”
Clark scooted closer to her and wrapped his arm around her shoulders. She fell into them willingly and had to struggle to keep her grief in check. “I only made it as far as the airport before a security detail detained the ‘thief’ that Luthor had paid them to catch. They took me to a small shack on the edge of the jungle where Luthor was waiting. Luthor … he took great pleasure in telling me that he had personally tortured and killed Joseph and that killing me would give him almost as much pleasure.”
“I’m sorry, Lois.”
“I’ve never met a more despicable person than Lex Luthor. I made a vow that Joseph’s life wouldn’t be spent in vain.”
“It wasn’t. You did it, Lois. You brought Luthor to justice. Joseph didn’t die in vain.”
Lois lifted her head and smiled at Clark to thank him for his support. “No, he didn’t.”
They sat together in silence for a moment until Lois left his embrace to get a tissue from the coffee table. When she turned back toward Clark, he held up another game. “Gin Rummi?”
Lois hiccupped a laugh.
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TBC
