Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic Downs, Domes and Seagulls - Location Challenge

Chapter 1

Starts off at opening of Barbarians of the Planet and goes happily AU from there.

Lex Luthor’s private jet, above the English Channel

“Oh Lex, what am going to do with you?”

“Spend the rest of your life with me, I hope.”

Lois giggled; Lex said such crazy things sometimes: the haze of a magical evening in Milan, champagne bubbles, and high altitude must be making him as giddy as her. The last few weeks had been a fantasy whirlwind of being wined and dined in the most lavish of places, Milan the most impossible destination yet, Lex’s private plane a step so far removed from her could-be-cancelled-at-any-time-rented-apartment life she wondered if she had dreamed it. Who gets serenaded by a violin at thirty-thousand feet? She had lost herself in the fun of it all, let herself get swept up in the moment, not giving any thought to where it might take her.

“Lex,” she scoffed softly.

“I’m serious.”

The haze evaporated into sharp focus. The roar of the engines, in a low hum in the background before, fought with the lilting strains of the violin.

“Lois Lane.” Lex opened a jewellery box, revealing a ring with an unfeasibly enormous diamond. Her smile fell as she stared into his confident, hopeful eyes, an irresistible charming smile tugging at his lips, one that said he always got what he wanted and even with all the luxuries in the world, what he wanted more than anything was her. “Will you marry me?”

The words crashed through her, a physical jolt like she had actually been hit. The plane itself seemed to judder and shake. A million thoughts ran through her mind at once. Lex was asking her to marry him. They had only been dating a few weeks.

This couldn’t really be happening, could it? He was just playing a joke. Or she was dreaming; they weren’t really on a private jet being serenaded by a violinist after eating at Lex’s favourite restaurant in Milan. Her future split suddenly: a luxurious life with Lex of unlimited wealth and opportunity, or the rewarding and stimulating life she has at the Planet. A tenuous third option as thin as gossamer thread its way in: a romantic life she could have with Clark.

Her ears thundered.

Black spots appeared in her vision; oh, God, she might pass out from shock, what would Lex think then? He might have wanted to surprise her, rock her world, but he can’t have been expecting her to faint like some corseted damsel of old. Lex would hate that. Hell, she would hate that.
She tried to claw her way back to sanity by searching for Lex’s unwavering gaze. It was like trying to focus through a long lens on a moving target. But instead of the yearning eyes of a lovesick puppy, she was met by a terrified stare, his brown eyes almost black with fear and his mouth dropped open.

The violin strings screeched, turning into an almighty wail.

The plane shook violently, and rolled to one side, as if a toy plucked out of the air by a toddler. Lex pulled Lois to him as they were thrown across the plane, glass smashing all around them. She buried her head into his chest, clung to him for dear life, his arms wrapped around her tightly, shielding her. They rolled as one under a seat, trapped as the small plane lurched drunkenly from side to side. Debris flew past them as the front nose-dived; screams from the crew punctuated the deafening desperate whirr of the engines; wind whooshed through the cabin as doors were ripped from their hinges.

As the roar crescendoed Lois only had one thought in her head: “I love you, Clark.”



Herbert Wells rubbed the back of his head and readjusted his cracked glasses.

“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.” Leaning over the back seat, he surveyed the smoke billowing from the back of his beloved time machine. The old thing was as worn and knackered as he was. He waved the smoke away: the damage wasn’t as bad as the smoke suggested. Incredibly, he and it had survived what was meant to be their final journey mostly intact. Something had thrown him off course.

Coughing, he slumped back into his seat and through his dusty lenses, checked the date stamp. 1822.

He patted the console. “Not an ideal time. Now I know when I am, but where I am? I mean, where am I? I wasn’t expecting a second journey, so, old friend, we need to ascertain what damage our misadventure may have caused and gather some gold.”

He wiped his brow and sighed before he, with creaking knees, clambered up onto the seat and shielded his eyes from the sun. “Sorry for putting my shoes on the leather but you understand.”

The first thing he saw was lush green grass rolling down to trees in the distance. Veins of white cut through the grass. An imposing barricade of hills rose up before him into a cloudless blue sky, their peaks no higher than him. Slowly, he revolved and found himself confronted with an expanse of sparkling aquamarine sea stretching as far as the eye could see. Chalk cliffs, cut as cleanly as icebergs, bent along the coastline. His rickety heart dropped to his feet. Vertigo hit him; he grabbed the seat rest to steady himself. Oh so carefully, he peered over the side of the machine. Beneath him was a coast of yellow shingle lining a wall of white: the time machine teetered on the sheer drop of a cliff.

“White cliffs,” he whispered in awe. “It can only be my England. I’m home.” He was struck by the crispness of four colours: blue sea, green grass, white cliffs, yellow coast. As his tumultuous life hung quite literally on a cliff edge, he thought for all that he had nudged the webs of time this way and that, maybe Nature had it all in hand and knew what she was doing with her broad brushstrokes of harmonious colours.

Barely daring to breathe, he shakily sat back down and turned the machine into standard drive mode—alterations with future technology had their advantages—and edged the machine away from the cliff edge.

It was early evening when Wells made it to civilisation. He followed the cliff line westward and parked the time machine at the top of the closest hill. As he looked down at the streets below, his heart fluttered with nostalgia at the sight, familiar even over a century earlier. The caw from opportunistic greedy seagulls drifted up, the caustic sound mixing with the stinging scent of salt, seaweed and vinegar. He had visited countless seaside towns in his lifetime, but he instantly recognised the outline of the resort of Brighton beneath him, a triangle with its widest base by the coastline, buildings and streets crawling up a hill to the top point of a triangle, an arrow pointing the way to what he had once referred to in his writings as ‘the drowsy old Downs’. He recognised the ‘graceful skyline’ of the Downs, the rolling hills of his Sussex childhood, like an old friend.

For all its familiarity, the town wasn’t the same as he remembered: this was before Brighton had spread along the coast, before rows of white stucco-fronted terraces proudly lined the front. The timber houses were low storey and huddled close together in cobbled streets; it was darker, eerie, hiding as if ashamed between the sea and the Downs. There were no bright, brash gaudy lights to illuminate the horse-drawn stagecoaches who instead were lit only by the setting sun as they trotted along the promenade.

As well as no gas-lit lampposts, which to Wells were synonymous with Brighton’s seafront, there was, oddly, no pier. He remembered, for he had a good head for dates, that the Royal Suspension Chain Pier was built in 1823. He squinted through the twilight for any signs of construction; he found none. In his lifetime, he had witnessed its destruction by storms in 1896, and the opening of its replacement, Brighton Palace Pier, in 1899. A second pier—the elegant West Pier—had been added to the coastline the year of his birth, 1866. They became a integral part of the town’s identity. His mother had taken him to many a concert at the Grand concert hall there, the orchestral music that much more ephemeral above the waves. Brighton seemed incomplete without the two piers stretching out into the sea linked along the coast by a chain of wrought iron street lampposts.

He had visited the place umpteen times in the years he had grown up in Sussex, albeit forty-plus years in the future. He slapped his forehead. 1822 was slap-bang in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, he realised. The industrial innovations that had inspired imagery in his science-fiction novels such as The War of the Worlds were nowhere to be seen. This was Regency Brighton before the railways connected it with London, exclusive to royalty before it became a spa town for the masses.

The change that was coming would be rapid and expansive. For now, it was on the cusp of being lit up but as well as no pier and no streetlights, there was not yet, he lamented, a Volks Electric Railway, no Daddy longlegs on iron girders transporting passengers along the coast, to ease the ache in his aging legs as he diligently followed the cliff-line downward towards the setting sun.

The crash had taken it out of him; travelling across time and dimensions was a young man’s game, he thought sourly. By the seafront, he found a tavern, secured a room (he had learned long ago to keep a variety of currencies in his machine), ordered a beer and a pie, and helped himself to a pamphlet from a pile on the bar. Tucked into a corner of the tavern he lazily watched the scene before him.

He was almost eighty years old and the cultural changes of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had been impossible to imagine when he was a child. Even with the imagination that had spurred him to build a time machine, and the millennia he had crossed on his travels, the difference between 1946 when his home was recovering from a second devasting global war and this scene forty years before his birth took his breath away.

The tavern was filled with mostly men, well-to-do men, talking earnestly in small groups. They were dressed to be seen. Dandies, he marvelled. The few women wore heavy dresses with lavishly layered skirts all frills and tucks, an explosion of lace, net and gauze. Ruffs adorned the necklines and long-length sleeves puffed at the shoulder. The men meanwhile were dressed in either pantaloons or knee breaches and black or cream dress coats in contrast to the red and yellows of the women. Wells crouched into himself, hoping that his unobtrusive black suit wouldn’t draw any attention. The Dandies didn’t look at him twice. It’s not my clothes that are invisible, it’s my age.

He was relieved that everything looked as it should; his crash hadn’t caused any major time distortions, he concluded. He had made his peace with his life, a life that had lasted longer than his lifespan of 1866-1946 (the census records didn’t include the days, weeks, and months traversing time and space). He had played God enough times; the future was secure, this dimension, his dimension, the one he was born in, was destined for Utopia. Thanks to him, Lois Lane and Clark Kent had overcome their soulmates curse, and Tempus was no longer a threat to Utopia. He had played fast and loose with fate, but now at last, he was at peace with a life uniquely lived, entwining the past, present, future and imagination like no one else, and could leave it with the certainty of the future he had secured. He couldn’t change everything, of course. He scratched a damp wrinkle by his eye as he thought of the telegrams informing his neighbours of their deceased sons and fathers, lost to a fascist tyrant’s war. There would be many more battles on the road to Utopia but at least in the end the good guys would win out.

This crash was just a blip, not even the strength of a butterfly’s wing, he told himself. An epilogue. This could be fun, he thought. A final chance to see Brighton in its Regency hey-day when the scandalous Prince Regent, before he became King in 1820 after the death of his mad father, King George III, made the town a place of frivolity and a centre for the arts, a town full of planning and building for a future, buoyed with the sense of Britain’s global influence growing and growing. Well, we know how that turned out, he thought. If he had learned anything on his travels, it was that civilisations ebb and flow, they grow, mushroom and crumble, fading into the history books.

All his life he had been serious, concerned with the fate of the world. He had done all he could. Now, he could have one little irreverent adventure, an unknown nomad wandering invisible through this tiny pinprick of the universe.

His beer and pie arrived, the smell of hops with beef and onion comforting in that Proustian way, throwing him back to his childhood in Bromley, south-east London. His tired brain fuzzy with memory, he refocused on the table and reached for the pamphlet—newspapers too were several decades away—and tankard at the same time. As the beer touched his lips, he read the front page. Beer sprayed everywhere as he spluttered.



Below it was a drawing of the unmistakeable figures of Lex Luthor and Lois Lane sitting side by side on thrones.

“Oh dear. Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear.”

A/N: thank you for reading and if you feel inclined, here is the link for feedback Comments