Lois & Clark Forums Forums Fan Fiction Lois & Clark Fanfic A Spark In The Dark 69/85?

Hey, so here are last parts of the file, finally done. Now Lois and Clark just need to write all of the facts into a story and boom, problem solved, right?
Thanks to Socomama and 90stvfangirl for their help with this. ❤️
And also thanks to everyone for reading, leaving a like and special thanks to everyone who left a comment ❤️

TOC

Chapter sixty-nine

Clark makes tea for us, we sit back down.

He hands me my cup. The window is still open. The city sounds distant from outside, ordinary in a way the file is not.

Then he sets his cup down.

“Come here.”

It is not meant as a question, but it is not an order either. It is an offering.

I put my tea beside his and move into him. His arms come around me immediately, one hand settling at my back, the other resting against my side. I turn my face into his neck and breathe.

I can smell soap and tea and feel the cold air from the window. Beneath all of it, he smells like Clark.

His hand moves slowly up and down my back.

“He waited,” Clark says. “Until we were eighteen. Until there was no one whose job it was to keep us safe.”

I tighten my arms around him. He doesn’t say anything more, but I can feel how hard he’s holding himself still.

“We’re going to read the rest of it,” I tell him. “Every report, every name, every lie he put in those margins. And we’re going to expose him for what he did.”

He nods.

I kiss him.

It starts slow. His hand comes up to my jaw, his thumb brushing my cheek, and the kiss deepens.

We break apart

I rest my forehead against his.

“Still two minutes?” I ask.

His mouth curves, faintly. “Maybe five.”

“Five,” I agree.

He pulls me closer again, and I let him. His hand rests over the small curve of my stomach. Neither of us says what we are both thinking.

Instead, Clark kisses my hair.

I hold him a little tighter. “We’re okay.”

After a while, he reaches for the next tab himself.


The official text is bad enough.

The margins are worse.

Trask’s handwriting crowds the page, cramped and slashing. Every rescue becomes an act of infiltration. Every unexplained event confirms what he already believes.

I shift, trying to sit in a way that doesn’t pull at my back. Clark notices and rubs my back, warming it with his heat vision.

Trask created a dehumanization protocol. The alien is referred to exclusively as IT. Emotional or anthropomorphic descriptors prohibited in all internal records.

Clark doesn’t look at me. Just at the words.

“If he had to write that into a protocol,” I say, “he was afraid someone might forget to follow it.”

Clark doesn’t move a muscle.

I lace my fingers through his, his hand tightens around mine.

“Clark.”

He looks at me.

“This isn’t on you,” I say. “You didn’t make him twist every good thing into something monstrous.”

He doesn’t answer, but gives me a slight nod.

I keep reading. An anonymous donation to an orphanage. A gas leak detected before ignition. A factory worker who survived a forty-foot fall.

Every time, Trask has the same answer.

“He couldn’t imagine anything that didn’t fit his theory,” I say. “So he made everything fit.”

Clark reads that one. “I wasn’t even close to most of those incidents.”

“He couldn’t imagine luck,” I say. “Or resilience. Or being in the right place. He had one explanation for everything and everything confirmed it.”

“And he never stopped looking for me.”

Then something catches his gaze.

Entry 1704 from October 3, 1988.

A farmer’s daughter found safe after two days missing, brought back by a kind man who gave her food.

Clark draws in a sharp breath at that one.

I look at him.

He doesn’t answer right away. His eyes stay on the page, and I can see him fighting to keep his face still.

“Clark.”

“She was eight.” His voice comes out rough. “Maybe nine. She’d been out there two days and it was already getting dark. I could hear her heartbeat before I could see her, and it was so slow, Lois. I didn’t know if I’d gotten there in time.” He blinks, and it doesn’t help. “I gave her my jacket. Gave her some water and a chocolate bar I had in my bag.”

“I carried her to an area where the search team was close. Waited with her until I heard her parents coming, and then I left before anyone saw me clearly enough to describe me. I stayed just long enough to know she wasn’t alone.”

A tear slides down before he can stop it. Then another.

“I never knew what happened to her. Whether she was okay.” He wipes his face with the back of his hand. “I couldn’t risk anyone connecting her to me.”

He looks at the annotation again.

“And now I know what he made of it.”

Feeds the young. Indoctrination begins early. Trask wrote it in the margin.

I brush the next tear from his cheek before it can fall. “You saved a little girl’s life.”

“I know that.” His hand curls into a fist on the table. “I know that’s what happened. But it doesn’t feel like it right now. Right now it feels like I handed him a weapon.”

“You didn’t hand him anything. He built the weapon out of a child getting to go home.”

I keep my hand against his cheek. After a moment, he leans into it.

He nods, but I can tell it hasn’t landed yet, not all the way. I let it sit. Some things don’t get fixed by being told twice.

There’s a map attached to the file. Each marked location corresponds to a rescue, with a separate notation for the date Trask’s people investigated it.

“He was following the rescues. But look at the dates. Most of the time, by the time his people arrived, the witnesses had already gone home. He was collecting aftermath, not catching anyone in the act.”

Clark leans closer, but the movement is cautious now. His eyes stay on the dates.

“Most of the time,” I repeat, my eyes moving to the last entries. “Not always.”

I turn the page toward him.

“They were close.” Clark swallows.

His jaw tightens. He looks back at the earlier entries. What had seemed like a series of near misses now looks like a narrowing corridor.

I read Trask’s handwriting again. Does it change shape? Does it wear a human face? My stomach tightens. “He even considered that the descriptions might not match because he was looking at the same person.”

“But he thought I was doing it deliberately.”

“He made everything fit what he already believed.” I touch the page, careful not to cover the next line. “But he wasn’t wrong about the pattern. You kept appearing at these incidents, and Bureau 39 was beginning to narrow down where you might be.”

Clark doesn’t answer. His attention has fixed on the map, on the lines connecting one rescue to the next. His breathing has gone shallow. One hand rests against the table, fingers spread, but the knuckles are beginning to pale.

I turn to the final entry. The paper is creased. “Look.”

He reads with me.

The report is dated two days after Atlanta. Bureau personnel arrived while the witnesses were still there.

“They almost had me,” Clark says.

His voice is low. His eyes move over the report, then again, faster the second time. His thumb presses into the edge of the table until the wood gives a faint creak.

“Yes.” I keep my finger on the page. “His people were almost close enough to catch you in the act.”

Clark’s expression hardens. He looks toward the door, then back to the dossier.

“People needed help, and you happened to be there. But Bureau 39 understood what was happening. They just kept arriving too late.”

His fingers curl against the edge of the table. The motion is small, controlled, but the frame beneath his hand gives a muted groan.

“How did I get away?”

“I don’t know.”

He seems to be searching his own memory and finding only blank space. His gaze loses focus. A muscle flickers beneath his cheekbone, and his hand slowly releases the table as if he has only just realized how tightly he was gripping it.

“And now I’m here.”

“In Metropolis.” I glance at the map. “You haven’t been rescuing people here, so they don’t have a local pattern to follow. Not yet.”

He looks down at the report again. His shoulders remain rigid, his eyes fixed on the faded description, as though some part of him is still standing in Atlanta, listening for footsteps behind him.

“We know how he thinks. We know what he looks for. We know where he’s overreached. That’s our opening.”

Clark looks at the map. Then at me. Then he nods.

“There’s one more entry I want to check.”

The knock at the door comes before I can turn the page.

Clark looks at the clock. Twelve forty-three.

We look at each other. Then at the file open on the table.

He closes it. I take it to the bedroom and put it in the drawer under my side of the bed.

When I come back Clark is opening the door.

Two men with a dolly. They look at the apartment, look at the space where the couch needs to go.

“Table there?” the taller one asks.

“Yes,” Clark confirms.

The taller one looks at the cracked table and shrugs.

Clark holds the door.

They start with the couch.

It’s bigger than it looked in the store. The two men work it through the door, angle, tilt, repeat.

Clark watches for a moment. Then he steps in.

“I can take that end,” he offers.

The shorter man eyes him. “It’s heavy.”

“I’ve got it.”

“Yeah, I heard that before.”

He takes the end and carries it, grunting. The slight lean, the adjusted grip, the controlled pace that says this is work. The two delivery men exchange a glance over his head.

I lean against the kitchen counter and watch him.

Clark steps back and looks at the couch.

The taller delivery man claps him on the shoulder. “Good man, thanks for the hand.”

Clark smiles. It reaches his eyes.

The table is next. The cracked one goes out and the new one comes in.

Clark runs his hand along the surface when it’s in place. Then he steps back.

The delivery men do their paperwork. I sign it and they leave.

The door closes.

We stand in the living room and look at the couch. Then at the table. Then at each other.

I cross to the couch and sit down. Properly, both feet on the floor, back against the cushions.

Clark sits beside me.

We both look straight ahead for a moment.

“This is much better.”

“Yes.” He grins.

His arm comes around me. I lean into him. The couch accommodates both of us without anyone’s elbow finding an armrest at the wrong moment.

“Ready?”

“Yes.”

We get up and I go to the bedroom to retrieve the file.

Clark disappears into the kitchen while I get the file from the drawer.

When I come back to the table he’s already sitting down, and beside my place is a small plate. Three oatmeal cookies, a handful of grapes, and hazelnuts from the bag in the cupboard.

I look at the plate. Then at him.

I sit down. Eat a grape. Then a cookie.

He watches me eat.

“Okay,” I say, when the plate is half empty.

I open the file, turn the pages and stop.

It’s a memorandum. Department of Defense letterhead, dated February 17, 1970. Official language, formal structure, the bureaucratic finality of a decision already made.


The paper is badly crumpled, as if Trask had balled it up in a fit of anger, only to smooth it out again to put it here.

Bureau 39 shall cease all active operations, effective immediately.

I read the sentence again.

Then I look at the handwriting scrawled across it. Not in the margins this time. Over the official text, as if Trask can’t even bear to let the order stand on its own.

COWARDS. THEY THINK SHUTTING US DOWN WILL MAKE THE THREAT VANISH.

I set the page down.

“They really tried to shut him down,” Clark says.

“In 1970. Four years after the Kents brought you home.” I look at the document. “Project Blue Book ended. The DoD pulled the plug on Bureau 39 as part of it.”

Clark looks at Trask’s handwriting over the official text. “But he didn’t stop.”

“No.” I find the attached pages, photocopies mostly, a memo from Lutter, but the record at the top is Trask’s own. I read it aloud.


“Hargrove and Stagg,” I say, writing down the names. “We need to establish what they gave him, and when.”

Clark looks at the page.

“And whether they knew what they were paying for.”

“Exactly.”

When I look up, he’s staring at the page.

I watch the realization settle over him. This wasn’t a government pursuing him under orders. It was one man’s certainty, sustained by private money and protected by people willing to look the other way.

No chain of command. No authority to appeal to. No one who could make him stop.

“That should make it easier. Shouldn’t it? One man is smaller than a government.”

“Is it easier?”

He thinks about it. “No. It’s worse. A government has rules, even bad ones. This had none.” He looks at the document again. “He built his own country in the margins of somebody else’s, and nobody stopped him for twenty-three years.”

I reach across the table and cover his hand with mine.

“We’re going to stop him.”

He nods, but I can see him still working through it, the specific, personal weight of learning that the thing hunting him his adult life had never been sanctioned by anyone but itself.

We look at each other across the table.

The Hargrove story. The Stagg Foundation. Prometheus Holdings. The warehouse and the people who acquired it.

It wasn’t two separate investigations.

It was never two separate investigations.

I reach for my notepad.

“Bureau 39 didn’t disappear when the DoD shut it down,” I say. “It went private. Trask kept the operation alive, and Hargrove and Stagg were among the people he trusted to fund it.”

Clark looks at the names on my page.

“The warehouse.”

“Stagg’s building. And if Bureau 39 is connected to it, that might explain why Trask’s men showed up at the Planet.”

“We need to tell Perry.”

“Yes. And we need to find out what the search warrant uncovered before they have time to cover their tracks.”

T. B. C.

Wow, I didn't expect that! Now I really want to know what's in the warehouse.