From Part Two...Finally he opened his eyes, looked right back at her, and smiled. "Goodnight, Lois... my love." That last murmured questioningly, like he was too mired in rejection to ever dream he was allowed to call her that.
She drew him into a tight hug. "Goodnight, Clark."
She'd see him tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and she would never hide from him again.
PART THREE~*One week later*~
"I think I need you to explain this to me again. We're crawling around a cemetery in the dead of night, dodging ghosts, ghouls and guards -"
"You're slipping, Kent, ghosts and ghouls are the same thing -"
"No they're not, ghouls are scarier."
She snorted elaborately, enjoying the verbal battle.
"Anyway, we're crawling around a *cemetery* in the dead of night... because *Mrs Cox*, of all people, phoned you up from prison and told you -"
"- that if I wanted to find out what happened to Lex Luthor, I'd better come here, yes."
His arms came around her from behind, pulling her back against his chest. She nestled her head on his shoulder and shivered as his voice whispered playfully into her ear.
"I'll tell you what happened to Lex Luthor if you like, Lois. It'll take me all of three seconds, listen: he died and went to h -"
"- shh!" She dug an elbow into his ribs and pointed at a thin beam of light piercing its way across the graveyard. Seizing his hand, she dragged him down, behind a large gravestone.
"Guard coming," she murmured into his ear, and was relieved when he nodded imperceptibly.
She turned her face into his neck - awkward as they were in their crouched position - and shut her eyes, knowing he was doing the same - knowing that the glare of a flashlight reflecting against their eyes could give them away in an instant. She felt his fingers tighten against her own, and his forehead drooped to rest against her shoulder.
She smiled against his skin, reliving every minute of the past week they'd spent together in her mind. The way he smiled at her, in that hesitant way, as if he couldn't quite believe she was with him. The way he took her hand while they walked, played with her fingers when they sat. The unequivocal love in his eyes when he looked at her, and the sense of fear, lurking somewhere in the back - fear that maybe this was all a dream and they'd wake up and be back where they started, fear that one day he'd look around and she'd be gone.
She knew. She could read him so easily. She'd felt every single emotion she saw playing across his face on a daily basis.
And the past week - the best of her life? Probably. The way he moved, the way he touched her becoming imprinted on her mind so that when she closed her eyes he was there. And more than that, so much more than that - the time used, the time spent with him. Learning him by heart.
She was spun out of her happy reverie by the movement of his head, jerking up and away from her. She watched him curiously, and was about to whisper something inquisitive when a low moan reached her ears.
"Oh my, my... woe is me..."
For a second a shiver ran down her spine as she imagined the ghouls of their earlier teasing, rattling their chains in a way that would have done Dickens proud. What the...?
"And now the end is near... I face the final curtain..."
Clearly their friendly neighbourhood ghost was a fan of Frank Sinatra.
Clark was shifting away from her, she realised belatedly - probably seeking the source of the sound. She crawled after him, looking along the line of his vision, and located it - a small, plump, bandy-legged man was standing in front of a tombstone with a bunch of flowers and... and...
<Oh, for Pete's sake!>
The night was too dark, and she couldn't make out what Tubby Guy held in his other hand.
"Well, Mama, I guess you were right about me all along. Everything I touch turns to cow patties..."
Clark was moving, she realised, as gracefully and silently as a panther. Puzzled, she followed for a moment, and then stopped. She looked from him to Tubby Guy and back again, and snorted.
<Please tell me you're kidding. Clark, you idiot, you're not Superman. Leave it alone...>
"So being's as how I'm just about as worthless as a one-legged bird dog..."
Clark clapped the stranger on the shoulder, and she winced on reflex.
"You're not going to do what I think you're going to do, are you?" Good-naturedly, light-heartedly. One man to another. Sympathetic, but emphatic. How did he *do* that?
A flash of lightning illuminated the entire area, and Lois's eyes fell to the man's left.
Every single drop of blood in her body turned to ice.
A gun. That was what was clasped so tightly in the little man's left hand.
A gun.
The gambling den. Red and white and black. His black hair tumbled against the white of his face, serene and pale in death. Her screams bouncing red off the four walls, her screams the colour of pain, blood red with the taste of her agony.
And Clark was still talking. Talking easily and calmly, his arm all the time reaching downwards, slowly, slowly.
Clark. And a gun. Clark and a gun. Near each other.
In that second, she was aware of exactly two things; Clark's fingers - the man she loved, the fingers of the man she loved - closing around the weapon, that instrument of death, and Tubby Guy's eyes narrowing dangerously.
Without a single thought, a single word or a single breath, she launched herself straight at the two of them. Her frozen fingers clenched around the cold steel of the firearm, a giant crack sounded somewhere in the region of her right eardrum, and then she knew no more.
~&~
"Lois? Lois??"
Calling to her, the woman he loved, frantically feeling for a pulse, putting his fingers and then his sleeve to the wound on the side of her head, touching her face, cold and pale as marble against the wet clay of the graveyard, the woman he loved...
"Lois? Come on, wake up, come *on*!"
Catching her shoulders, dragging her up, her head flopping back, terrifyingly still, she'd only hit her head, why was this happening? Why was she like this, so cold and motionless, so pale, deathly pale... she'd only hit her head and life couldn't be extinguished that easily, surely it couldn't, the strength of his love would stop her from leaving him...
His trembling fingers finally located a pulse, a thready beat in her graceful neck, and he nearly sobbed in relief.
"Lois... Lois..."
He laid her back against his bent knees, sitting in the mud and holding her close, willing consciousness to flow back into her. Somehow he was aware of the stranger he'd just stopped from committing suicide muttering disgustingly about jerks who couldn't mind their own business and moving away.
His stuttering eyes fixed upon her. Alive, she was alive, but if she didn't regain consciousness soon...
//Please let her wake up, please, tell me she'll wake up... she's all I've got.//
So much left to tell her. So much he'd wanted to say. So much he'd been waiting to say all week.
So much he'd been putting off, so much he'd been afraid to reveal to her because it might mean the loss of her love... so much guilt. So much he'd have to live with, every day for the rest of his life... all the things he'd never told her, all she'd suffered because of them... and what excuse would he have, what excuse had he ever had... if she died without knowing...
She coughed, and her eyes fluttered open. He choked in gratitude, aware that his arms were tightening around her, unable and unwilling to stop his grasp from becoming unyielding.
"Lois... are you all right? Please tell me you're all right..."
"Clark..." Faintly. Her voice faint but very definite, even above the howling wind and rain. The storm... he should get her out of the storm...
"You're okay... you're okay..." His breath bursting out of his lungs, his arm supporting her as his fingers fisted in her hair, kissing her temple and her closed eyelids and her cheek and her mouth, his beautiful Lois, his beautiful girl, *woman*, the woman he loved...
"What happened?"
He shook his head, tears of shock blurring his vision and mingling with the rain.
"I don't know... I don’t know... you grabbed the gun just as I wrenched it away from that guy... just as I did, and then there was this huge flash of lightning, and you fell and hit your head - really hard - on that headstone there... the gun, oh god, Lois, I thought for a second..."
Her lips twisted and she raised her hand, staring at her fingers - grasping the gun she'd failed to drop when she'd fainted.
"Guns," she said slowly, dangerously, "should be outlawed."
And she threw it from her with a tired flick of her wrist.
The two of them watched in open-mouthed silence as it rocketed away, bounced off a headstone, broke a granite angel's head in half and ricocheted high into the atmosphere.
What...?
He was the only one able to do that. Wasn't he?
He... the... but...
No.
No. Not happening. Please not happening.
He looked down at her, his eyes wide, struggling for words.
Impossible. Please. It had to be.
Her mouth was working silently. "What's happening to me?" she gasped, finally.
Not. Possible. Please.
"I... don't know... what's... I don't know how..." Stuttering. Stumbling. His stubborn mouth refusing to say what needed to be said.
She was moving, bending, gathering her legs under herself to stand shakily in the slippery clay... pulling him up with her, grabbing his arms with fingers that trembled and shook, and oh the look on her face. Like she was willing him to make it better.
"Lois." So afraid, so deathly afraid, looking at her beautiful face for maybe the last time. "I don't know how... but I have to tell you something - please, please don't hate me - I'm..."
And then the word died in his throat, there was no need for him to say it after all. An equation learned in college years ago - white shirt + water =
"Superman..." Her lips parted and the word came sighing out - like she'd always known but refused to believe until this second.
She smoothed his shirt against his chest with a quivering hand. She smoothed his shirt turned transparent with rain against the bold primary colours of the suit underneath.
Suddenly her fingers clenched closed around the sodden material, and she pushed him with all her strength. And the slender, petite, saturated form of the woman he loved became a blur of colour as she turned around and ran for her life.
~&~
She was walking, stumbling, hacking through the dense undergrowth and smothering night, the tears on her cheeks refusing to evaporate into the humid air. She whirled around, once, twice, desperately trying to spot a landmark, a bush, a rock with which she was familiar. Her foot caught in the root of a tree snaking its way across her path and she fell heavily.
Wincing... expecting to taste blood where she'd bitten her lip and where a deadly-looking briar had slashed across her face, expecting the short stabbing breathlessness of unexpected pain to invade her body, and yet... nothing.
Nothing... how... what? She'd... fallen, really heavily onto the packed earth of... wherever she was, and... nothing?
She climbed unsteadily to her feet, noting the distinct lack of ache in her ankle.
<Nothing... no pain... there's no pain when you're superhuman... none.>
She wasn't even *bruised*!
She threw her head back and uttered a guttural scream of grief and rage to the steaming moon, then buried her face in her hands and sobbed her heart out.
Nothing, it had all been for *nothing*, every thread of rending anguish her heart had rippled with, every thought and every word and every breath she'd taken since he'd died, all of it for nothing. Tears shed for a man who didn't deserve them, a man who bound her in blindfolds of secrets and betrayal.
<...this is what you wanted, this is what you asked for...>
And the crushing love that wrapped her heart in aching tenderness at the sight of him - all of it a lie.
"Lois?"
A hesitant voice whispering in the sweltering night, a voice somehow sodden with guilt and horror.
"Get... away from m-me." She aimed her words at him, levelled them as bullets against his spandex-covered chest, but the clogging revelations crowding her throat made it impossible for them to fly straight.
His hand touched her shoulder, and she felt her stomach lurch. Without even thinking about it, she swung around and punched him, throwing her full weight behind her fist.
He yelped, staggered backwards and his hand went up to clasp his nose.
"You... that..."
"Hurt?" she bit viciously, watching him recoil. He blinked, once, twice, three times - obviously trying to banish the sheen of water that had come to his eyes.
"Lois, please -"
"I don't want anything to do with you," she hissed, tears scorched by the heat of her fury. She turned and walked away, in her shoes caked with mud, three inches shorter than they'd been before she'd dug them in the earth to stop her forward momentum.
He trotted after her. "But if you'd just let me -"
"Explain? How exactly do you intend to explain this, Clark?"
He exhaled, long and slow. And she hated that she could ache at the tremor of sadness and deep regret, hated that his emotions could echo within her and make her think that maybe he hadn't wanted this either.
She marched determinedly away from him, reached a clearing in the middle of... wherever they were. Looking up at the glossy stars just visible in the leaf-fringed sky, she sucked in a deep breath, and strained for the heavens.
She felt a gust of wind curve around her face and half-opened her eyes, amazed that it could be so easy... to find herself exactly where she'd been five seconds ago, with Clark levitating in front of her.
Ignoring the blatant display of his treachery, she turned her back on him and once again attempted to fly. Irritated at the lack of movement, she gave a half-jump, cursing under her breath when her body lurched determinedly back towards earth.
"Lois... please let me help you."
She disregarded the timid request and surveyed her surroundings, looking for... she didn't know. Maybe a tree to climb up and jump off...
The moonlight fell across a large pair of yellow eyes, and she jumped.
"It's just a pygmy owl," came his voice - his voice weighed down with the extent of his regret. "But there are more dangerous animals lurking around, please, just let me..."
"Where the hell are we?" she blurted angrily.
She could hear him swallowing. "Uh... right now? I think we're in one of the less dense sections of the Brazilian rainforest."
Against her better judgement, she wheeled around to face him. "*Brazil*?" she asked incredulously. "How did we wind up in Brazil, of all places?"
He offered her a weak smile. "That's the trouble with these powers... hard to control when you're angry."
Pushing him away in the cemetery, turning blindly, running as fast as her legs would carry her...
"Lois, I need you to let me help you fly." His quiet voice driving at her with building intensity. "I promise I'll go away once you're safe, but I can't leave you out here."
"Can't you just lie to me again? It's what you do best. Maybe then I'll be able to run myself back to Metropolis." He winced at her sarcasm, and she found the sharp words a balm to her jagged soul - relieved that maybe she was hurting him as much as he'd hurt her.
"It doesn't work that way, Lois. You'll probably wind up in Timbuktu, and I can't guarantee I'll be able to keep track of where you are so I can bring you back."
"Works for me," she bit. Watched him swallow again - swallow words? Swallow lies? Swallow his guilt?
"Please." A quiet request in that gentle voice she lo... loathed so much. He extended a hand to her, and she flinched.
"I'm not going to touch you unless you want me to." Sadness in his voice, the sound of her heart splintering.
She barely grasped the ends of his long fingers. Refused to entwine her hand with his, refused to make a mockery of that which they'd done so often over the past week.
"It's simple, really." His voice in flickers and jolts. "All you have to do is think... up."
Their feet left the ground. As soon as she spied the soaring skyscrapers of Metropolis, she let go of his hand and veered alone towards her apartment.
~&~
tbc...
