Table of Contents
From Part 14:“Clark!” she yelled. “Clark! Are you okay? Hurry up!” As she spoke, she began to spray foam into the office, directing it straight at him.
She was *worried* about him? Unbidden, his heart leapt. Did that mean she cared? Maybe that kiss had meant more to her than he’d been assuming.
He could hope...
One quick movement and he was back outside the door. Pulling it closed behind him, he caught Lois’s arm. “Come on - we’d better get out of here. I don’t suppose you want to explain to the police or fire department what we’re doing here?”
“Of course not!” She joined him, hurrying out of the building and across the courtyard, making their escape through the gate just as fire sirens could be heard in the distance.
*******
Now read on...They’d just made it. Lois hit the accelerator with Clark barely inside the car, and as she screeched away with a squeal of tyres she saw fire-trucks in her rear mirror. Their fingerprints were no doubt everywhere, but that was okay; by the time anyone actually got around to taking prints, they’d have the story written and the police briefed.
She still had no idea how they’d managed to get out of that shed alive. They’d clearly done it by the skin of their teeth - or rather, Clark had done it. Lois herself had had nothing to do with it.
And that was twice this evening that he’d saved her life, she thought. It hadn’t been at all clear to her whether Lex Luthor would have killed her with his bare hands when he’d been choking her, but at the time she’d been afraid for her life. She hadn’t expected any kind of help to come from Clark; not because she thought he wouldn’t care, but because it just hadn’t made sense for him to reveal his presence as well when at least one of them could have got away and told the story. Besides, there really hadn’t been a lot he could have done.
And yet he’d tried. With the odds stacked heavily against him, he’d risked his own life to try to save hers. That had either been very foolish or incredibly brave. Something about Clark Kent was encouraging her to believe that it was the latter.
No, she *knew* that it was the latter. After all, he could easily have made a break for safety himself when Luthor and Baines had been taking them to the shed. The only weapon had been trained on her. And Clark was an athletic-looking guy, pretty strong too from what she’d seen. He could easily have made a run for it, using the buildings and the semi-darkness as cover. She might have died, but he could have reasoned that she was going to die anyway.
He’d risked his own life for the faint chance that he might be able to save hers.
Yes, Clark Kent was definitely one of that very rare breed: a decent man with principles, who could be relied upon. And *that* was something Lois needed to take away and think about.
He also seemed to have something of a charmed life - or at least luck had been on his side tonight. When she’d returned to Baines’ office with the fire-extinguisher, the flames had been pretty intense and she’d been sure that he had to be in danger of getting badly burned. And yet he’d come out carrying the file under his jacket, looking perfectly okay. All right, his clothes were a little scorched and she thought she could smell singeing, but he was clearly completely unhurt. He wasn’t even coughing!
But she didn’t have time now to ponder on the enigma that Clark Kent seemed to pose. In just over ten minutes they’d be back at the Daily Planet, armed with one of the biggest stories Lois had ever encountered. It was going to be a frantic few hours, and she needed to consider just what her first move was going to be. Clearly Perry would have to be called, and she also had photographs to develop and a tape to take care of. The police would have to be informed, and the Planet’s lawyers would have to be consulted as well. She couldn’t see either of them - Clark or herself - getting any sleep that night.
Not that it mattered. If she didn’t win at least a Kerth for this, she’d eat that darned bust-binder she was wearing!
*********
Five hours later, Clark finally unwound himself from his chair, which had been pulled up next to Lois’s desk since shortly after they’d arrived back at the newsroom. The delayed last morning edition had just gone to press, and at last he and Lois could go home, with Perry’s permission not to return until afternoon.
Perry had been extremely excited, but at the same time cautious, and every single word had been scrutinised over and over by the lawyers. The police team, led by an Inspector Henderson, had also insisted on seeing every scrap of evidence Lois and Clark had, and Lois had resisted every step of the way, arguing that she had every right to hold onto it until she’d written her story.
“I’m not withholding anything,” she’d insisted in response to Henderson’s blunt statement. “Don’t forget, you guys wouldn’t know anything about this if it wasn’t for Clark and me. So you owe me!”
If Lois had had her way, four pages or more of the day’s edition would have been taken up with the Luthor-EPRAD-Messenger scoop. However, the police had been insistent, and had been supported by the paper’s lawyers in their position that neither Luthor nor Baines be named at that point, and that evidence which would be crucial to a trial not be explained in detail. Anything which would be deemed to be prejudicial to a fair trial, or which would give Luthor’s legal team an opportunity to retaliate first, was not to be published. Lois had only been partly mollified by the promise of full exclusives every step of the way, from the arrests to, as everyone hoped, the convictions.
Henderson had despatched teams of officers, armed with warrants, to EPRAD, Lex Luthor’s various properties and Dr Baines’ home within minutes of being summoned to the Planet newsroom. Clark knew that Lois had been hoping for news of arrests to come in before their final deadline, and he’d seen her chagrin when the police had nothing to report. Dr Baines wasn’t at her home, and her car
was missing; an APB had so far failed to turn up any trace of her. Lex Luthor’s staff were doing an excellent job of denying knowledge of his whereabouts, and additional squad cars had been sent to the private airfield where his helicopter and Lear jet fleets were kept.
Nevertheless, the story of how the Messenger really had been sabotaged, with callous disregard for the lives of all of its crew and the grief of their families, made it to print, along with some of the evidence which had been uncovered to prove it. While the identities of those who’d planned the sabotage were withheld, the story made it perfectly clear that the absence of names was ‘for legal reasons only’; in other words, the Daily Planet knew exactly who had done it, but it was now a matter for the police and the courts.
Other column inches were taken up with news of the mysterious explosion and fires in two separate parts of the EPRAD complex, with the story behind the first one summarised without the kind of detail which would give Henderson nightmares, and some speculative conclusions were hinted at in relation to the second fire, all the time making clear that no forensic investigation had yet taken place and no cause could be stated.
They were great articles, Clark thought with some pride. And he and Lois had worked on them together. That had been one of the most surprising things about the past five hours. As soon as they’d got back to the newsroom, Lois’s first action had been to call Perry, instructing Clark in the meantime to boot up her computer. Then she’d told him to pull a chair up to her desk. At his puzzled look, she’d said, only sounding mildly irritated, “Well, how do you expect this to work if you’re sitting over there?”
They’d discussed together the presentation of their stories; they’d argued as one with the police, lawyers and Perry, even though Clark believed that in some areas at least Lois was in the wrong; they’d worked together on assembling the material they were left with into reasonable order and writing the different stories and sidebars. Sometimes he’d been at the keyboard and sometimes she had, but regardless of who had been typing, they’d both had input into the finished work.
And the biggest surprise of all had been after Clark had got back from the conference room, where he’d been giving his own statement to the officer who had been given the job of interviewing Lois and himself. Lois, just about to go to give her own statement, had shown him the final version of their work to check through before it was sent to the duty sub and then Perry. Below the space she’d left at the top for headlines to be inserted were the words ‘By Lois Lane and Clark Kent’. On *every* article.
He’d been delighted. He was still stunned.
Lois Lane, who’d insisted throughout that this was *her* story and that he was only there on sufferance because she’d needed backup, was crediting him with equal authorship, and thus ownership, of the work. And that meant, he realised as he moved over to Lois’s desk to bid her goodnight - for what was left of the night - that if she did get nominated for awards for the story, any nominations would also be his. She would have to *share* them with him. Clearly she was aware of that, and yet she’d given him full credit anyway.
She’d have been perfectly within her rights to claim full authorship herself and simply accord him a credit for assistance; or, as appeared on some stories, a note under the main story saying ‘Additional reporting by Clark Kent’. As someone who was still very much a new boy at the Planet, and certainly junior to the renowned Lois Lane, that had been about as much as he could have expected. For probably the third time that day, Lois had completely gone against his expectations of her.
“Lois, I’m heading home,” he said quietly. She was gathering together her own things, but she turned to look at him as he spoke, and Clark was filled with admiration for her once again. It was almost four in the morning. She’d had almost no sleep the night before, and she’d been working flat out all day and then again from nine that evening. Yet she didn’t look remotely tired. He could understand that she’d been running on adrenalin since they’d got back to the Planet; her excitement had been palpable and completely understandable. Yet even now, when she should have been flagging at the very least, if not asleep on her feet, there was still a febrile light of exhilaration in her eyes.
She straightened. “Want a ride?” The offer was casual, but friendly. “It’s not much out of my way,” she added.
He’d been planning on flying, but the thought of spending a further twenty minutes in Lois’s company was too tempting. “Sure! Thanks.”
“Thanks for the byline, by the way,” he said, as they walked over to the elevator, trying to sound casual although he was aware that he was failing miserably.
Lois shrugged. “It’s as much your story as it is mine now. I can’t deny that, and even if I tried to Perry wouldn’t let me.”
Her casual act didn’t fool Clark, and it made him feel a little better about his own lack of ‘cool’. Clearly Lois wasn’t used to sharing bylines, and just as obviously she’d felt that she owed it to him after the night they’d had. They really had worked as a team on the investigation, and not just when they’d been in the EPRAD complex. The hours they’d just spent in the newsroom had been pure teamwork from start to finish.
And it had felt great.
“I owed you, anyway,” Lois added, and this time the appearance of casualness in her voice was even less convincing. “I’d be dead if it wasn’t for you. So thank you again.”
Clark wanted to make a big deal of it even less than Lois obviously did. “You’re welcome. But it was nothing.”
“Still. Thank you,” she said quietly.
They travelled in silence in the elevator down to the parking garage, and conversation in the Jeep quickly turned to the likelihood of Lex Luthor being arrested.
“People like him always land on their feet,” Lois said cynically. “He’s probably halfway to some Pacific haven by now.”
“You may be right, but I hope not,” Clark replied. “He and Baines need to be brought to justice for what they did - and for what they’re planning to do. It’s simply not fair that people like them get away with murder.”
Lois shook her head. “You’re still too soft for your own good, Kent. You need to wake up and learn that life’s not fair. It’s not what you’ve done or how nice a person you are that matters; it’s how much money and influence you have. Nice guys just don’t get anywhere in this world,” she added with even more cynicism.
“I’m not going to give up hope that they’ll be arrested,” Clark said, refusing to continue the generalisation that she’d started. He knew that his principles and beliefs were pretty rare in today’s world, especially in the big cities, but he still preferred to be an optimist rather than a cynic. But he still wondered what had happened to Lois to turn her into such a pessimist, so unwilling to believe in the innate good in most people.
For a while, earlier that night, he might even have had a chance to find out. She’d confessed to him things he was sure that she’d never before told anyone. Fears, insecurities, the belief that she wasn’t even liked, let alone loved. And, of course, the fact that she was attracted to him...
In the mood she’d been in, she would have told him why she was so cynical about life. Instead, she’d come apart in his arms, kissing him in a way which had made him feel as if he’d died and gone to heaven. And, as he sat next to her in the confined space of the Jeep, all thoughts of getting to the bottom of Lois’s cynicism disappeared as he was filled with the longing to reach for her and pull her back into his arms and cover her lips with his once again.
Not that he could. Although Lois hadn’t once returned to her previous attitude towards him after their escape, neither had she given any indication that she so much as remembered their kiss, let alone had liked it or wanted to repeat it.
The silence in the car shook him out of his reverie, and he realised that they were parked outside the Apollo Hotel and Lois was giving him a quizzical look. “Earth to Clark!” she said as he blinked and looked at her. “Falling asleep?”
“Uh... no,” he admitted. “I was just distracted for a minute. Sorry.”
“Good,” she said decisively. “We need to talk, and I think we’d better do it now.”
Startled, Clark stared at her. Had he been wrong? Did she want to discuss their kiss after all? Or... was it just that she was regretting her near-deathbed confidences and wanted to make sure that he’d never breathe a word of any of it?
“You don’t have to worry, Lois. I won’t say a thing...” he began.
But she cut across him, her words striking fear into his heart.
“You did some pretty amazing things tonight. You thought I didn’t notice, but I did. Just who - or what - are you, Clark Kent?”
********
...tbc
