Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic An Extraordinary Man II: Trials And Triumphs (16/?)

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"Too risky," interrupted Lois.

"What?"

She looked at him again, and again there was that glint in her eyes that made him feel decidedly uneasy. "I said that's too risky." Then, reacting to his open-mouthed disbelief, she said, "Oh, I know we'll have to go through all the proper channels eventually. I'm just saying that it's time consuming to do that, and it involves too many people. The risk of Luthor getting wind of what we're up to, and of someone cleaning house before the police get there – always assuming that the police are straight – is too great. I want to take a look around before that happens."

Warily, he asked, "So what *do* you have in mind?"

"Tell me, CJ," she said sweetly, "what would you say to a spot of breaking and entering?"

NOW READ ON...


CHAPTER SIXTEEN


"For a moment there, I thought you said something about breaking and entering," said CJ. "I must have heard you wrong."

"No, you didn't," said Lois, grinning mischievously and highly entertained by his reaction to her suggestion. "Besides, how could you not hear me? You've got the best ears in the world, remember?"

CJ either chose to ignore her teasing or he failed to notice it altogether; Lois wasn't quite sure which. "Tell me you weren't being serious," he begged. "Please tell me that you aren't honestly considering—"

"Of course I am, CJ," she said lightly, and she laughed again, delighted to have managed to shock him so profoundly.

"It's not funny!" CJ's emphatic response finally registered, and Lois realised that, while she might find her suggestion amusing, CJ was about as far from being amused as it was possible to be. In fact, if she had to choose a word to describe him, it would have to have been "appalled". "How can you even talk about committing a crime so... so cavalierly!" he demanded, his arms akimbo.

"I'm not being cavalier," replied Lois, a hint of steel colouring her words. "I'm being practical!"

"'Practical?!' You're talking about wanton disregard for the rule of law!" Lois noticed the way CJ's voice rose in line with his indignation. He got to his feet. "Lois, we have rules for a reason; without law we have anarchy! How can you even think about—" He was almost shouting now.

Lois could feel her anger rise, like bile in her throat, to match his, and she, too, stood up. She crossed her arms, scowled, and snapped, "Get off your moral high-horse right know, CJ Kent! We've had this argument once before. I won it then, and I'll be damned if I'm going to lose it on the rematch!"

"When have we ever discussed breaking and entering?" he demanded.

"You think this is only about breaking and entering? No, this is about your black-and-white view of the world!"

"Just because I try to live my life according to a set of ideals that—"

Lois was surprised to notice that the worst of her ire had begun to dissipate, leaving behind it a desperate earnestness. Usually when she disagreed with somebody, she had enough confidence – or was it callousness? – in herself to not care about the fact that her opponent's opinions conflicted with hers. All that mattered was that she get her own way.

This time was different. She wanted desperately to reach an understanding with CJ, even if they couldn't actually agree with one another. That realisation pushed her towards a more conciliatory stance.

Still, her desire for conciliation didn't mean that she was going to give in. "Ideals are all very well, CJ, but they don't always result in justice. You, of all people, should have learned that by now. Remember Allen? Remember the jury? Can't you see that getting the mistrial was the just thing to do, even if it did compromise those precious ideals of yours?"

CJ opened his mouth, but no words came out. Then he sat down heavily, as though his legs could no longer support his weight. He planted his elbows on the table and rested his head in his hands. To Lois, he looked completely deflated. Defeated.

She had reduced him to this, and instead of feeling victorious at having vanquished him, she felt a kind of hollow nausea clawing at her stomach. She'd taken the values he lived by, ripped them to shreds, and thrown them back in his face, more or less telling him that they were worthless.

That had to hurt, she thought miserably. Winning an argument – any argument – could never be worth the pain she'd just inflicted on him.

And the worst of it was that the ideals that he tried to live by were ones she could sympathise with. In fact, they were ideals she also wanted to live by. They weren't unreasonable, just impractical in a city where right and wrong had been twisted into unrecognisable shapes by Lex Luthor.

They were ideals worth fighting for, she thought, even if they had to get their hands a little dirty in the process, and that, in turn, brought her back to the start of the argument – the same argument that she had just won.

If she was so sure that she was in the right, then why did it feel so horribly wrong?

With a jolt she saw that it was because she hated being in conflict with CJ. She cared too much about him to want to raise her voice and hurl her opinions at him. She wanted to find more peaceful ways to resolve their differences. She'd never felt that way with anyone else and she wondered precisely what it meant.

Lois tentatively took the few steps required to bring her alongside his chair. Then she laid her right hand lightly on his hunched back. He flinched at her touch as if it burned. "CJ?" she asked quietly, uncertainly. "Are you okay?"

He must have found something reassuring in either the question or the tone of her voice, because he uncurled and twisted his head in her direction. He still wasn't looking at her face, though. Rather, his eyes seemed to have settled somewhere around her navel.

Lois pulled out the chair next to his and perched on its edge. Her hand drifted from his back to his upper arm. "CJ?" she said again.

"I... I'm sorry," he said. "I didn't mean to shout at you."

"That's okay. I didn't mean to shout at you, either. Well, actually I did, but that's only because that's what I usually do when I get upset or when I want to win an argument."

"And now?"

"I still think I'm right." Great, she thought sarcastically. Those weren't quite the words she'd needed to make her peace, were they? However, to her surprise, her admission provoked a dismal chuckle from somewhere deep within his throat. At least he'd found some humour, rather than anger, in them. "I am genuinely sorry that I upset you, though," she added. Yes, she thought. That was better, closer to what she wanted to say.

He nodded fractionally, acknowledging her apology. Then softly, almost brokenly, he said, "It's not that I think you're wrong. Not exactly."

"But you wish that I was. And in the kind of world we both want, I would be."

"Yes!" Now she had his full attention. His stare, as he turned to look straight into her eyes, was intense as he grabbed on to her understanding of the situation. "That's exactly it!" He took a deep breath and then continued in a rush, almost as if he was unburdening himself of some terrible, dark secret. "After we had out last... discussion about my..."

"Moral superiority?" suggested Lois quietly, the earlier teasing note edging back into her voice.

He nodded again. "Well, after that, I spent a lot of time thinking about what you'd said, and I realised that most of it made sense. But, the question I was left with – the question I couldn't answer – was how far can you push the envelope before you cross the line of acceptable behaviour?"

"The envelope?" frowned Lois. "What are you talking about?"

"I could live with the fact that you'd hacked in to the computers to get the information we needed, but I couldn't kill Luthor."

"What? You actually thought about killing—" Lois was shocked. In fact, she suspected that her reaction was twin to the one CJ had displayed at her suggestion about breaking and entering. "CJ! You couldn't!"

"No. Of course I couldn't. But, at the same time, it would be so easy for me. I mean, I have these amazing powers, and..." He sighed. "I'd be a liar if I said I wasn't tempted. So, anyway, I spent a long time thinking about where the line lay between what I was prepared to do and what I wasn't. How far I would go. What activities were so bad that I couldn't go through with them?"

"And what did you decide?"

"I didn't. I kind of... shelved the issue. And that probably accounts for my behaviour just now."

Lois thought about that for a moment, then said tentatively, "So, what you're saying is that hacking is okay, but snooping around someone else's office would take you across that line of yours?"

CJ shook his head. "No. I think what I'm saying is that you touched a nerve, that I know now more or less where that line is. I'm just not sure which side of it breaking and entering falls on."

"Are you saying that you don't want to get involved?"

CJ sighed. "Whether I like it or not, I am involved, now that you've told me what you've got in mind. I'm just not sure that I want to have any part in it. I guess I'll have to think about that one."

Lois patted his arm lightly. "I think I can live with that. Meanwhile, I want to tell you what I was up to last night, and then there's someone I'd like you to meet."

*****

When Lois, so soon after suggesting that they break into Barbara Benton's office, said that she wanted him to meet someone, CJ had supposed that she'd had in mind a source or a consultant cat burglar. It hadn't occurred to him that she might want him to meet Perry White, editor-in-chief of the Daily Planet, and Lois's immediate boss.

Perry, she told him, was one of the good guys, anti-Luthor to the bone and completely trustworthy. More importantly, he had power over the allocation of assignments at the paper, and, if Lois was going to be a full partner in CJ's efforts to bring down Luthor, she would need to have her employer on side. She would need him to give her permission to pursue stories complementary to their investigative activities. As she and CJ had gone, in the space of just a couple of days from having no leads worth mentioning to having too many to keep track of, she hoped it would be easy enough to win Perry over. In fact, if she could present a strong enough case, maybe he'd even allocate someone to help them.

For some reason, Lois seemed to think that CJ's presence would be helpful. He wasn't quite so sure.

Although he was a regular reader, CJ's history with the Daily Planet was not a particularly happy one. Four years ago, he'd written a stiff letter in response some particularly libellous comments that had found their way into print; he would have been well within his rights to sue. He had long since forgiven Lois for writing the article, of course, but the memory of that particularly public mauling was still surprisingly raw. It was, therefore, with a certain amount of trepidation that CJ accompanied her to her place of work.

*****

CJ had known that Lois was good at her job, but he hadn't fully appreciated the implications of that. He hadn't expected the man on the coffee stall outside the Daily Planet building to greet her with almost an ingratiating politeness that Lois accepted as her due. Nor had he ever seen someone behind a confectionery concession, like the one in the Planet's lobby, go quite that extra mile to make one of his customers happy. The people waiting for the elevator stood back to allow her to pass ahead of them into the car, and the hubbub in the news room stilled for thirty seconds when she arrived.

Lois Lane was, in short, a star.

CJ tried to take everything in as he trailed after her, the tail to her comet.

The news room, he saw, was split into two levels. It seemed a rather impractical arrangement to him, with the lift on the upper level, and a ramp leading down to a sunken pit. Each of the desks there was half-hidden behind a screen and had its own computer. He wondered vaguely which, if any, was Lois's.

He noticed a small group of people – reporters, he assumed – clustered around a counter on the upper level, and when one of them moved away, he realised that they had been gathered around a pair of elderly coffee machines.

Most of all, however, he was struck by the noise, a chaotic chorus of overlapping conversations, underlain by the tapping of nibble fingers dancing across keyboards and the clatter of printers off in one corner.

CJ's attention was distracted by Lois calling, "Jimmy!" across the news room at a colleague. "Is Perry in?"

"Uh, huh," answered Jimmy, waving a stack of printout at her in greeting. "Jack's with him. Great piece on the fish, by the way. Perry's ecstatic."

"Thanks."

Then they were outside an office. Lois knocked and, without waiting for a reply, she opened the door and strode confidently inside. CJ caught the door as it began to swing closed behind her, and he found himself holding on to it, hovering on the threshold, unsure whether he should follow her or wait to be invited in.

There were two people inside. One was middle-aged. He was sitting behind a desk and haranguing a second, younger, man, who was standing up and looking a little bored and a lot put-upon.

"—and I don't want any of that diet stuff, either," the older man was saying in a noticeable southern accent. So that, CJ thought, was the famous Perry White. "You remember that, y'hear, Jack?"

The young man – Jack – nonchalantly chewed on some gum and replied, "Sure, Chief. Frosted doughnut and real Coke, complete with caffeine and sugar. Got it." His accent placed him as a Metropolitan, born and bred. He'd probably never strayed beyond the city limits.

"You'd better," Perry warned him. Then he acknowledged Lois's arrival. "Well, well, if it isn't the fish woman, in the flesh."

"Hi, Perry," she said, with a smile. "Jimmy said you were pleased with the piece."

"Sure, honey. I'm just wondering what you've got in mind for an encore."

"Well..." She glanced back at CJ and beckoned him towards her. "That's what I –we – wanted to talk to you about."

CJ wondered how often Perry White was struck dumb. From the smirk on Lois's face, he suspected it didn't happen a lot. Perry's mouth flapped open once or twice.

"Hey," said Jack, "aren't you...?" He pointed at CJ.

"Aren't I what?" asked CJ. He looked at Jack, at the pieced ear, the frayed clothes and the intelligent eyes, and he knew that while this young man dressed and acted like a street punk, he was nobody's fool. Then he remembered that Lois had said that someone called Jack had done the actual hacking into the jurors' bank accounts. Nobody's fool, indeed, he thought.

"That lawyer guy. Kent," said Jack, popping his gum.

"Yeah. Assistant District Attorney CJ Kent." CJ held out his hand. Jack didn't take it. Instead he inclined his head, looked CJ up and down, chewed some more and then looked away, his judgement temporarily suspended.

Perry appeared to have recovered from his initial shock. "Great shades of Elvis!" he exclaimed. CJ had never realised that people really said things like that. "How many miracles can this city take in one week? I mean, we've had a flying man, almost-justice in the Allen trial, and now you two come in here talking to each other as pleasantly as you please?"

"Uh, actually, Perry, that's what I wanted to see you about. CJ and I have been doing more than just talking together."

"Really," said Jack, managing to imbue the two syllables with speculation and innuendo, and displaying far too much interest in any extra-curricular activities that he might be engaged in for CJ's taste. Then he realised that Jack probably didn't care two cents about him; probably all that speculation was for Lois's benefit. "You and the lawyer have been out playing tonsil hockey, eh, Lois?"

"That's not what I meant," snapped Lois. "I was referring—"

"You mean, you're not playing tonsil—"

"Jack!" The name was fired at its owner from two directions simultaneously, as both Perry and Lois tried to make him shut up.

Their efforts didn't appear to have any noticeable effect because Jack continued, "You know, you're going a spectacular shade of red for someone who isn't up to anything, and your pal here..." Jack waggled his eyebrows.

CJ knew that he was blushing without Jack needing to point it out – he could feel his neck, cheeks and ears burning with embarrassment – and he was relieved when Jack didn't complete the sentence. With a huge effort, he managed to squeeze a question out of his suddenly constricted throat. "Is he always like this, Lois?" he asked.

"Pretty much, yeah," she admitted resignedly.

"Lois, honey," said Perry, "perhaps if you just told us what you and Kent here have been doing together...?"

Jack spluttered with barely controllable laughter. "Just what I was trying to find out, Chief!"

"Jack... What are you still doing here? Why aren't you getting me my doughnut?"

"Uh..."

"Git!"

Jack got.

Perry glared at his departing back and the door that slammed shut behind him, then huffed. "Lois, let me rephrase that. Just tell me, what the heck is CJ Kent doing in my office?"

*****

It took a lot of explaining, convincing and wheedling, but three-quarters of an hour later, Lois, with CJ and her task-force of one (Jack), was installed in the smallest of the Planet's conference rooms. In reality, this was little more than an office with a defunct overhead projector in one corner. It did, however, have two telephone jacks and a network connection and, in a building where open-planning was the norm, a modicum of much-valued privacy.

They got to work immediately, Lois giving Jack the tasks of finding an address for Bibbo's and, much to his disgust, pulling files out of storage deep in the basement. ("Do you know what's down there, Lois? Have you ever been in that basement? Dust and filth and rats, that's what's down there – or would be if the place wasn't full of rat-traps the exterminators left when they visited last week. Hey, Kent, that reminds me: why have scientists begun to use lawyers instead of lab rats in their research? Because there are some things a rat won't do!")

It was almost peaceful... at least when Jack was out of the room. When he was in the room, he plagued CJ with a steady stream of lawyer jokes, each one as uncomplimentary to the profession as the last. ("What do you call five thousand lawyers at the bottom of the ocean? A good start." "Did you hear that the Post Office had to recall its series of stamps depicting famous lawyers? People were confused about which side to spit on.")

Lois kept finding new excuses to send him back down to the rat-infested basement. CJ thought it couldn't happen to a nicer guy, and decided that he would be eternally grateful to her. He wished he could show her how grateful he was.

Lunch, which they ate in the conference room, took the form of hours old coffee, drained from one of the communal coffee-pots CJ had spotted earlier in the news room, and leathery sandwiches bought from a vending machine.

Lois looked remarkably relaxed as she leaned back in her chair and put her feet up, ankles crossed, on her desk. They were very shapely ankles, CJ thought to himself, with a private smile.

Lois made a few pithy comments about the food, but ate it anyway. CJ was more circumspect, peeling back the slices of bread so that he could inspect the cheese and salad between. Only after satisfying himself that the cucumber and tomato were merely a little shrivelled and the cheddar was free of mould, and picking out a flaccid brown lettuce leaf, did CJ follow Lois's example.

"Is Jack always so..." He struggled to find a word.

"Unbearable?" Lois asked.

"Intense," corrected CJ.

"Pretty much." She shrugged. "I didn't know he knew so many lawyer jokes, though. Heck, I didn't know there were that many lawyer jokes!"

CJ sighed. "Oh, they're the tip of the ice-berg, believe me. And I've heard 'em all before."

"Poor you," said Lois almost sympathetically. She slid her feet onto the floor, leaned forward and eyed him in a decidedly calculating manner. CJ wondered fleetingly whether or not he should be alarmed. "How can I make you feel better."

She stood up and glided over to his side, then slid onto his lap, wrapping her arms around his neck. Then she pecked him on the lips. "How are you feeling now?"

He looked up at her, smiled, and said, "Oh, very miserable."

She leaned in again, lingering over his mouth a little longer this time. "And now?" she asked, as she pulled back.

He tried to make puppy-eyes at her, and hoped that he looked pathetically endearing rather than simply pathetic. "A little better. But I might feel a lot better if..."

She grinned.

If CJ had been capable of coherent thought over the next few minutes, he would probably have reflected on the fact that dessert was much more pleasant than the main-course had been. Lois tasted much better than stale bread and cheese, and she felt warm and pliant in his arms.

They were still exploring each other's mouths when the door to the conference crashed open.

Lois and CJ broke apart abruptly, and the newcomers –both of them – earned a stern glare from Lois. "Don't you guys ever knock?"

Jack shook his head, grinning at the same time.

Jimmy merely settled for saying something incoherent, in which the phrase "I see it, but I still don't believe it!" could just about be discerned.

Jack held out his hand in Jimmy's direction and fluttered his fingers. "Told you, didn't I? That's five bucks you owe me."

Lois stared at them. "You had a bet on us?"

"Well, yeah," admitted Jimmy, a little bleakly, CJ noticed, something he put down to the fact that he'd obviously lost the wager. "I mean, you and CJ Kent working together is unbelievable enough, but... doing that... together—"

"Kissing, you mean?" said Lois, eyes narrowed, daring him to continue.

"Yeah," said Jimmy heedlessly. "I mean, how far-fetched is that?"

"I don't see why," she said icily.

"Oh, come on, Lois! This is you, unapproachable Mad Dog Lane. Men are terrified of you!"

"Men are not terrified of me," she said.

"Yes, they are," corrected Jimmy. "Ever since you did that thing with the duct tape when Ralph hit on you, no-one around here will even offer to buy you coffee, let alone invite you out on a date."

"I sure am terrified of you," said Jack. CJ raised his eyebrows. If Jack was terrified of her, he thought, he did a remarkably good job of hiding it. In fact, of all the people he'd encountered at the Planet, Jack was probably the person who was least in awe of Lois's star status, and that included Perry White.

Lois rolled her eyes.

"You kissing is bad enough, Lois, but with CJ Kent?! Aren't you the person who once described him as 'fly-dirt on the face of humanity'?" said Jimmy.

CJ felt his eyes widening, and he looked at Lois in astonishment. "You didn't, did you?" he asked quietly. The insult was colourful enough to be almost poetic, he thought. Not that that meant he actually appreciated the sentiment, though.

Lois's face abruptly acquired a distinctly rosy hue. Thanks to his heightened senses, he could feel her blush like a warm sun against his skin. CJ assumed from her guilty countenance that she really had called him that, although she didn't actually come straight out and admit it. His eyebrows rose some more. He'd known that, for a long time, she hadn't liked him very much, but until that moment he hadn't fully appreciated how deep that dislike had run.

It made the fact that she was with him now that much more remarkable.

"And, let's see if I can get this right," Jack was saying, "a 'bottom-feeding toady'?"

"No," Jimmy corrected him. "I think Lois was referring to lawyers as a species, when she said that."

"No I wasn't," said Lois automatically. "That was about one of the management's lackeys from upstairs."

"Oh, right," said Jimmy. He turned towards Jack. "What was it she said about lawyers generally, then?"

"Something about pocket lint?"

"No, that was me. Oh, now I remember: 'tape worms in the belly of humanity' and 'the kind of slime that makes dog mess smell good'."

"I never said that last one!" snapped Lois. "I'd never say anything so... so..."

"Crude?" asked Jack. "Crass? Vulgar?"

"Yes, all those things."

"Okay, okay," said Jimmy. "I confess; I just made that one up, myself. And you're right, it's not as good as some of yours, Lois. I've got to admit it; you have a real way with words. No wonder you've won all those Kerth awards."

Lois had had enough. "Jack, unless you've got something useful to give us, get out of here. You, too, Jimmy."

Jack dug into his pocket, drew out a scrumpled piece of paper, and said, "The address you wanted, Lois."

"What?" she asked blankly.

"Bibbo's?" he reminded her. "It's down on the waterfront. Real attractive neighbourhood."

"Oh, right. Thanks," she muttered with bad grace. "Now go!"

"We're going," Jimmy and Jack chorused.

Just before the door clicked closed after them, CJ heard Jimmy say, "Hey, what's the difference between a lawyer and a catfish?" He tuned them out so that he couldn't hear any more. In any case, he'd heard that particular joke before.

CJ and Lois looked at each other for a few moments in the sudden peace. Then Lois said softly, "I'm sorry about that."

"Doesn't matter," said CJ, equally softly.

A few more seconds passed, then CJ said, "Did you really say that lawyers were 'tape worms in the belly of humanity'?"

She nodded guiltily.

"I'm impressed," he said, and to her amazement, she realised that he was laughing.

"Really?" she said tentatively.

"Really. It's not often that a lawyer gets to hear a truly original insult."


TBC