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Act III: About a Boy
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[CHAPTER 18]
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And above all things, never think that you're not good enough yourself. A man should never think that. My belief is that in life people will take you at your own reckoning. -- Anthony Trollope
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Friday, two months later…
“Lane!”
Lois jumped as the sudden voice of her editor caused her to suck in a bigger sip of her newly refreshed coffee than she had planned. The hot liquid scalded her tongue and she opened her mouth to let it dribble back into the mug.
“Thit,” she muttered around her smarting tongue, placing the mug on her desk and standing.
Attempting to blow cool air through her mouth, she entered Perry’s office. “I can’t be entirely sure, but I got the feeling that you wanted to see me…”
“Door.”
Lois frowned at the curt reply but turned and pulled the door shut without question.
“Sit,” Perry commanded tersely when she had complied with his first instruction.
Lois lowered into one of the visitor’s chairs with a questioning tilt to her head. “What did I do this time?”
The editor sighed heavily. “Did I assign you a story on Lex Luthor?”
Lois’s eyebrows rose in surprise. “Uh…”
“Because I don’t recall assigning you a story on Lex Luthor, and yet I’m getting rumblings that my top *investigative* reporter is doing a lot of digging on the city’s greatest benefactor. Care to explain?”
“It’s just general background stuff,” she returned lightly.
“Just general background stuff,” he repeated sourly. “Why?”
Lois pursed her lips together. “He’s dirty, Chief. I know it.”
Perry leaned forward. “Do you have proof?”
“Of course I don’t,” she answered, exasperatedly. If she had proof, she wouldn’t need to investigate.
“Then until you have reasonable cause, you need to keep a lower profile.”
“Perry!”
“I’m not saying that you’re wrong, Lois,” he cautioned, lifting a hand to ward off her defense. “The man is far too slick for my liking. What I *am* saying is that you don’t want to go to battle with him until you have your ducks in a row. Hear me?”
Lois met his eyes for a while and then nodded. “I hear you.”
“Good. Now what about the story I *did* assign you? Where is that partner of yours?”
“Doctor’s appointment, remember?”
“Oh, that’s right. How’s the little guy doing?” Perry asked; his voice much gentler with the change of topic.
“About the same,” Lois reported. “The doctors are still looking for a way to, uh, stop the ear aches.”
“Have they looked at tubes? My son Jerry needed tubes when he was a baby. He used to cry all night long.”
“You know, I’ll ask Clark about that when I see him,” she answered evasively.
“You do that. Now go on and get back to work. You’re already spending enough of my hours on your own agenda,” he drawled.
Lois smiled at his gruffness, knowing that he wasn’t as upset as he was acting. Perry knew better than anyone that Lois worked longer hours than usual to get a complete story. If anything, she wasn’t paid enough. When she opened the door to the office to leave, Perry called her name.
“Profile,” he said, giving her a serious look and moving his hand from chin to chest level. “When you do get the story, I want you to still be around to tell it.”
“Scout’s honor,” she promised, winking at her boss and ducking out of the office.
Lois released a sigh as she returned to her desk. As much as she didn’t want to admit it, Perry was right about the whole Lex thing. She didn’t have a story – rather, she didn’t have anything she could print. Luthor had been especially careful in the past few months, and if she hadn’t had the inside knowledge about his ulterior motives, she would have been fooled into believing he was Metropolis’s Boy Wonder along with everyone else in the world.
Lex Luthor knew someone was at the mountain hideout, he knew that someone took his chopper. As much as Lois was looking for Lex to slip up and show his true colors to the world, Lex was looking for the people who knew his secrets to reveal themselves.
The fact that Perry was getting some feedback from her case was enough to scare her into hiding. Normally, she wouldn’t back down from a mild threat like this, but in this situation, the stakes were too high. Her profile needed to be lower than low. It needed to be nonexistent.
It had been almost two months since she and Clark had made their escape from the sinister talons of Lana Lang. Lois had flown them to Vegas in Lex’s chopper where they had landed just outside the city and had abandoned the craft after giving it a thorough wipedown. The last thing they wanted to do was give Lex any indication that they were the ones who had stolen his helicopter.
After that, they had walked the rest of the way to the city and Lois had used a pay phone to call for help. A former boyfriend with whom she had retained a friendship with had provided them a ride back to Metropolis on his private plane. Lois had wanted to be certain that they left no traces of having ever been in Nevada that weekend.
When they returned to New Troy, dawn was just appearing over the horizon. Lois had wanted nothing more than to crawl into her bed and sleep the horrors of the day away. It had been an emotional day and for all of her bravado, there had been numerous occasions when she didn’t think that they would get out. By the time she and Clark had walked up the stairs to his apartment so she could retrieve her keys, all of her hope had dwindled.
When Martha Kent had opened the door to let them in, the way Jory had rushed through the door to wrap his little arms tightly around her neck had been all that was needed to restore her soul.
After a week had passed and Clark’s powers hadn’t returned, they had put their heads together in an attempt to explain Superman’s absence to the Metropolis skyline. After the second week, they had arranged for Superman to grant a private conference with a select group of people: a detective from the MPD, the chief of the fire department, and a reporter from the Daily Planet. In the meeting, Superman informed them that he needed to travel to his home planet for personal reasons and that he would return to earth as soon as possible.
Again, hoping to avert any possible connection Lex might make between Superman, Lois, and the Nevada laboratory, Lois wasn’t the Daily Planet representative on the story of Superman’s departure. Instead, Lois had remained in the shadows outside of the room, ready to help Clark slip into a janitor’s closet so he could change out of the suit while Superman disappeared.
Superman’s unplanned vacation had been taken care of so now the focus needed to be on getting Jory healthy.
And with that, Lois resolved to put the Luthor investigation aside. She would keep her ears and eyes open for any transgressions, but she would no longer actively seek them out.
That story was for another time.
“Lois.”
The voice of her editor pulled Lois out of her introspection and she sat forward in her chair with a start. “I’m working!” she offered, quickly grabbing for the nearest folder.
“Well, I’d sure hope so,” Perry drawled, “but I didn’t come here to hound you.”
From Perry’s delivery, Lois could tell that he had something important to say. She swiveled around in her chair and looked up, matching his serious expression.
“I’ve got something you should hear.”
~.~
Clark ushered Jory through the front door of his apartment and closed it firmly before jogging down the steps to the ringing phone. “Hello?”
“Hey, it’s Lois. I’ve been trying to reach you guys for hours.”
“Oh, yeah… I, uh, didn’t turn my cell phone back on. We just walked in.” He felt a tugging on his pant leg and looked down. “Jory says hello.”
Lois laughed. “Tell him I said hi. So how was the appointment?“
“It was…”
Jory pulled on his leg again, holding his arm up. <Tell mommy pain my arm> he signed.
Clark rolled his eyes. The little boy had to be the most stubborn child in the world. The more he had tried to get him to understand that Lois was not his mother, the more the child was convinced otherwise. Apparently, Jory was under the impression that children were given parents… not the other way around.
<Not pretty.> Jory gave him an impatient look. <Tell!>
His silence prompted Lois to call out. “Clark?”
“Sorry, Jory has more to tell you. Dr. Klein took more blood today and didn’t have any more of the fun band-aids on hand.”
“Uh-oh.”
“Yeah.” Clark turned to Jory and signed that Lois was sorry. The little boy nodded, apparently satisfied with the acknowledgement of his concerns, and walked away. “But other than that, things weren’t too bad.”
“Did Uncle Bernie have the test results?”
The close call with almost having spent the rest of his life in a cage had made Clark extremely wary about subjecting himself to poking and prodding. Still, when he moved to Metropolis, he’d known that to some extent, this was the path he had embarked upon. Following Lois’s recommendation, he’d allowed Bernard Klein in on the secret, and for months, the man had been doing every test possible to try to figure out what exactly was going on with Jory’s system.
“He compared the cultures he’d taken from both of us, but since I’m still recovering from the Kryptonite poisoning, he said that he’s not really sure what to use as a baseline for Jory’s sample.”
It was ironic in a way. Lana Lang had spent years studying his biology. Right now, they needed an expert, and Lana would have been just that.
“What about the PDA?” Lois asked.
One of Dr. Klein’s close associates at S.T.A.R. Labs had been working on trying to recover data from Lana’s damaged PDA. The turning over of the handheld had been yet another way his world was slowly spiraling out of control. He was powerless, he had been violated and copied, and slowly but surely, his secrets were being shared with more and more people.
The tight circle that he and his parents had formed had been the basis of his identity for so long… that it was disconcerting to have it unravel.
“Not yet. The good news is that Doctor Klein didn’t see any evidence of additional cell degeneration in the last two tests. It seems that he’s stabilizing for the most part.”
“Clark, that *is* good news! Stabilizing… is he sure?”
“For now,” Clark answered. Dr. Klein had warned against letting their guards down. “It at least buys the doctors some time – Lana was crazy, but what she discovered could have revolutionized the biogenetics field.”
“Don’t do that, Clark.”
Lois didn’t need to say more for him to understand her meaning. The increased familiarity that time and interaction produced told him that she knew he was hovering around another guilt-trip and that she was telling him to back away from it.
“So the main issue at hand now is his ears, right?” she asked, neatly diverting the subject away from Lana.
Clark sucked in a breath and allowed his mind to follow her segue. “Uh, yes. I asked that we go ahead with the implant.”
The line went quiet for a moment. The cochlear implant discussion had come up before, and there had never been a true consensus on the issue. Dr. Klein’s working theory was that whatever biological function that made Clark’s body heal itself was what was causing Jory’s problems with his ears. Dr. Klein compared the process to the hypothetical advancement of nanocites – the futuristic biological machines that would allow surgeons to perform corrections at the cellular level.
It turned out that there was a deformation in the child’s inner ear canal that had become the focus of attention for the regenerative organisms and these were the actions that caused Jory’s seizures. The nanocites couldn’t permanently fix his ears for some reason, but the occasions when they made headway brought an onslaught of unfamiliar sounds that Jory’s brain didn’t know how to process… But every time the sounds broke through, the deformation reverted itself, and the process would begin all over again.
There was no guarantee that an implant would be successful and the investigation into evaluating Jory’s auditory response to electric stimulation would be invasive, but in his mind, it was the only thing to do. Unfortunately, even his parents weren’t as quick to agree as he would like.
Clark silently waited to see if this was going to turn into another rehash of that conversation.
He heard Lois sigh. “Well, I’ve got news too,” she said, finally breaking the stalemate. Apparently, she didn’t want to bring up old arguments. “We got the Pulitzer. Perry told me today.”
“The Pulizter? We won?” he repeated in a daze. It was amazing how life was a mixed deck. It dealt good cards and it dealt bad cards, but most of all, it just kept dealing.
“Yeah, can you believe it? They are awarding it at a ceremony in D.C. in two weeks.”
“I need to call my parents,” Clark said, still reeling from the news. With his first contact with Wallace Kwolek all those months ago – he’d never imagined a Pulitzer was possible.
He had been a freelance advocacy journalist, traveling the world like a nomad and reporting on events as he went. Then Jory’s existence had led to his parents calling him home. His life had changed then, and it was changing again in this moment. Without question, the Pulitzer win would never have occurred if Lois hadn’t barged into Perry White’s office that day.
He didn’t know what to do with that knowledge.
“Well, I’ll let you go so you can call them,” Lois said, breaking into his thoughts. “I just wanted to make sure you didn’t forget about the barbeque tomorrow.”
Clark smiled in amusement. “You’ve been reminding every day for the past week.”
“Hey, don’t shoot the middle man,” she returned lightly. “If you didn’t dodge every invite my mother sent your way, I wouldn’t have to play bounty hunter… So, I’ll come by tomorrow around one, okay?”
“We’ll be ready.”
~.~
tbc
