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Synopsis of Chapters 1 - 8 Missing Lois - TOC ***
Where we left off in Part 5...Two hours later, Lois returned to an empty room. Clark had gone out. Was he looking for her? She hoped so, but she doubted it. He would have found her. She called Penny and checked on Lara and found out that Clark had called recently, too. Jimmy knew something was up. Why weren’t they together? She didn’t know if Clark had said something to him. She hoped Clark hadn’t told Jimmy the truth, that she had done more than kiss Superman. Their friends didn’t need to know. Lois wished she had a best friend she could turn to, but Clark was her best friend. She had no one else. The sad thing was, the next runner-up to her husband, was the other Clark.
The room had been cleaned while she was walking. Maybe that’s why Clark went out. All the throw pillows were put back in their proper places. She shrugged. Why, not? What else was she going to do this weekend? Obviously making love to Elvis music was off the agenda.
Lois found a bottle of bubble bath in the bathroom and poured the entire little bottle into the tub as the water filled it up. When the bubbles reached the top of the tub, Lois slipped in. Oooh, that felt good. All it was missing was a glass of champagne and a box of chocolates and her husband. She closed her eyes and listened to the constantly playing Elvis music wafting through the room. Lois heard a key in the lock and she sunk lower under the bubbles.
Part 6Clark walked in, carrying an ice-cream cone. He must have found the parlor, too. He looked so good in those shorts. She rarely got to see his legs because he always had to hide the Superman suit. She drifted across the tub and leaned on her arms, watching him move around the room. He set his wallet, cell phone, and keys on the dresser. He hadn’t realized, yet, that he wasn’t alone. Or had he? As Clark passed her, heading again for the balcony, she couldn’t stop herself and whistled a cat call. He froze and turned around.
“Hi, there, handsome. Want to join me?” Lois smiled seductively at him.
Clark swallowed. “Hello, Lois.”
Lois looked him up and down. “You look good in shorts. You should wear them more often.” She licked her lips.
“Lois? Are you feeling all right?”
“Um-hmmm.”
“You want me to join you in the tub?”
Lois nodded.
“You do realize that I’m still mad at you, right?” Clark asked with a raised brow.
“Um-hmmm.”
“Lois, has the music messed with your mind?”
She shook her head. “I love you. I will always love you. And I know, somewhere deep inside all that pain you’re feeling, that you still love me. So, I was thinking that we could try a different kind of anger therapy.”
“That’s not going to happen,” Clark replied, walking towards their luggage. She watched as he pulled his thick book out of his travel bag and sat down on the loveseat.
“I gave up a year of my life for you, Clark Kent. You have to give me a second chance.”
“I
have to?” he asked, cracking open his book.
“You have to, because I need you to help me get past this… to move on… to find myself again. I don’t think I can do it on my own.”
He looked back down at his book.
“Help me, Clark. Help,” she murmured, sinking into the water, her head resting on her hands. “Help me.”
Clark closed his eyes and took a deep breath, shutting his book. Kicking off his sandals, he walked over to the edge of the tub and sat down, dipping his feet into the water. “This doesn’t mean that I forgive you.”
“I know,” she whispered, standing up still entirely covered with bubbles. Lois leaned onto him, kissing him gently at first. She put her hands under his now wet t-shirt and lifted it up and over his head, before kissing him harder.
“Lois.” Clark swallowed. “I can do this faster.”
“Sshhh,” she whispered, pulling him, still partially clothed, into the bubbles and under the water.
***
Clark dangled a chocolate covered strawberry over Lois’s waiting mouth. She arched up off the bed and took a bite, licking her lips.
“Mmmm. Who knew there was something better than plain strawberries?”
He kissed her, moving closer. “Lois, I had doubts about your anger therapy theory at first, but I must tell you, I do prefer this to being mad at you.”
“Sshhh. Silence,” Lois whispered, covering his mouth with her finger.
He didn’t say another word as they made love all night long.
When Clark tried to get up in the morning to take a shower, Lois followed him and pinned him against the wall of the shower. She was insatiable. Like she had been waiting a year to make love to him again. He realized in some ways, she had.
Lois was right. She had given up a year of her life for him and their daughter. Mistakes were made along the way, lies told, hearts broken, but her love and desire for him was still unchanged. Knowing that she still loved him and desired him helped soothe this ache inside his chest, but he doubted it would go away any time soon.
As they sat, later, eating breakfast at noon at that little table by the balcony doors, Clark cleared his throat. “Okay, Lois. Break’s over. I need to know more.”
Lois shook her head. “My turn.”
Clark raised a brow and waited.
“How did you know where I was? Did your mom tell you?”
Her husband shook his head. “Only after I figured out that you were Lucy El.”
“That seems a lifetime ago.”
“What started the ball rolling was that dream Lois with the strawberries.” He smiled.
Lois picked up a strawberry and fed it to him.
“You were so real. I became preoccupied with you. My dad thought you were my subconscious desire to have children rearing its head.”
“You spoke to your dad about me?” This seemed to shock her.
“It wasn’t the kind of dream a boy shares with his mother.” Clark took hold of her hand and squeezed it. “Then you visited me again, under the guise of the other Lois. That really messed with my head, thinking I had wanted to make love to…
her.”
“I told you who I was,” she stated.
“Yes, but after you left, my mom convinced me that you really were the other Lois.
“Then I met the other Lois. And she talked about Lucy El and how much Lucy missed her husband, Kal El.” Clark closed his eyes, taking a deep breath. “And then Clark told me about his pregnant friend Lucy, for whose fiancée / husband he would do anything. And then there was the other Lois’s ‘suicide’ note.”
“You weren’t supposed to read that.”
“I gathered as much. And then Jimmy told me about this nervous breakdown you had last summer where you ended up calling my mom for help.”
Lois shrugged.
“All these things were swimming around in my head and one night in early February, I had a dream that made it all crystal clear. I woke up, realizing that Lucy El was my wife, hiding in the other dimension, because of the curse.”
Lois raised her hands in a ta-da fashion.
“I flew out to Kansas and had my mom tell me the rest. I couldn’t get to you or contact you. Then I just had to wait to hear from you or the other Clark to tell me that I was either a father or a widower or both. I’m not very good at waiting.”
“You’re getting better.” She squeezed his hand. “I wanted to save you that pain.”
“February ended and then March passed and April, I was beginning to think you two would never arrive. That it was all a figment of my imagination. That somehow Mom was wrong. That I had been wrong.”
“We couldn’t get the time machine started. I thought I was trapped forever over there. That I’d never see you again. I…” Lois shook her head as if she were about to say something more, but changed her mind. “It turns out Lois’s – the other Lois’s – genetic fingerprint changed when she became Ultra Woman so the security system stopped the time machine from working for her. Clark never went to check the machine to see if what she said was true. Don’t get me started…” She held up a hand, rolled her eyes, and took a deep breath. Slowly, she exhaled. “Finally, Mr. Wells returned.” She smiled.
“Then Lara arrived without you and I didn’t know if you were alive or dead or still a figment of my imagination, but I couldn’t ask Mom, because her memory had been erased.” Clark reached out and cupped her jaw. “Then you came back, sending me hot telepathic messages.” He kissed her.
“I still cannot believe that worked. Since finding out that Kryptonians were telepathic, you don’t know how many times I tried to send messages…” She bit off the rest of that sentence and looked away.
Her husband raised a brow, his lips pressed together. “To Clark? The
other Clark?”
Lois closed her eyes and nodded. “It never worked,” she mumbled. “Not once.”
“What kind of messages did you send him?”
“Help messages usually. When I started to disappear on our wedding day…”
“What?!” he gasped. “Back up there. Disappear?”
Lois nodded. “Remember when I told you to keep your wife safe, because she was a younger version of me?”
Clark nodded.
“Well, that was because when the Wedding Destroyer electrocuted her… me… it caused me to phase out of existence, like you did when Tempus covered the infant you with Kryptonite.”
“Oh, my God, Lois.”
“Luckily for me, I was phasing out of existence when Lex, Jr. shot me…” She pulled the right side of her robe over to reveal the bullet hole. “Otherwise this could have been worse.”
Clark ran his fingers over the small scar.
“Also, I was fortunate to have the super healing abilities that come from carrying a Kryptonian child.”
His hand slipped down to her stomach and pulled her into his lap. He rested his head against hers. “I wish I could have been there for you.”
“Me, too.”
“I hate that you had to call someone else to come help you,” Clark murmured, kissing her forehead.
“Me, too.” Lois picked up another strawberry, feeding it to him.
“The night of the dream you. Obviously the curse was gone, you could come back to our dimension. Why didn’t you stay?” he asked, chewing the berry.
“I couldn’t. There were two Lois Lanes. One clearly pregnant and one not. Clark said he wouldn’t take my younger self back to her rightful place in the timeline…” Lois took a breath. “… without her agreement.”
“Passive-aggressive, isn’t he?”
“Clark, please.” She set a hand on his arm. “He said it would be tantamount to kidnapping… to take me away from you and return me to one of the worst days of my life. She had to agree to go.”
Clark thought about this. It was the same thing his mom had told him. He would have said the same thing. “How did you…” He knew the answer right away. “Lara.”
She nodded with a smile.
“That’s why she came back before you did.”
Lois nodded, again. “I knew that once the substitute me had fallen in love with our daughter, she would do anything for her.” She sighed. “Even go back and be Wanda Detroit.”
“Why come back and visit at all, then? Just to torture me?”
She winced, moving back to her chair. No! He hadn’t meant…
“I missed you.” Lois looked at him with those big brown eyes, then looked away. “I got sick. I had to come back.”
“Sick?” Clark gulped.
“I lost my mind. Mr. Wells called it Interdimensional Time Sickness,” she whispered. Then she took another breath and plowed on. “Delusional was more like it. I attacked Ralph for saying something against Superman and got fired, naturally.”
Clark stared at her. “Huh?” That didn’t sound delusional; it sounded like the normal Lois to him. Except the part about getting fired.
“I lost my ability to tell one dimension from the other. Mr. Wells said he had experienced it before. If you stay in a time or dimension other than when or where you belong, after a while your brain starts to compensate and convinces you that you actually belong there.” She took a sip of her juice. “It got so bad while you were lost in time that I went off the deep end. Started spouting off top secret Superman information at the drop of a hat. I even visited S.T.A.R. Labs to see Dr. Klein and told him I was pregnant with Superman’s twin brother’s baby, but that wasn’t important. What I really needed was his help to find Lois Lane, who also happened to be me. In other words, I had no self control.”
Clark swallowed. When was this? Was this when she and the other Clark…?
“The only cure was to come back to my own dimension, interact with those I knew and loved. Reboot my brain, in a way,” Lois continued.
“So, when you were delusional, did you think the other Clark was me?” he asked, not really wanting to know the answer, knowing his pain must be evident in his eyes.
“Sometimes,” she said apologetically. “I thought my dreams were just dreams. Or possibly memories, but memories from that dimension… That I had gotten amnesia and was trying to sort through what was real and what was not. I was very confused.”
“And it was during this time, you and Clark…” He couldn’t say it, but he was getting angrier by the second. If that other Clark…
“No. No. No!” She held up her hands. Then her expression changed, like she was contemplating his idea. “Well…. Maybe a little bit.”
“Maybe?” her husband growled. He would rip the other Clark’s arms off.
“No,” she said decisively. He wondered if it was more for his benefit or for hers.
Clark rubbed his brow. They would revisit this time sickness period, if need be.
Maybe a little bit. He closed his eyes and asked the question that he had been wondering about since he met the other Lois. “Why did you tell him about Ultra Woman?”
Lois stiffened. “Ultra Woman?” she whispered with a gulp.
Clark leaned back and looked at her. He had hit some kind of nerve. “Yeah, Ultra Woman,” he said, his voice rougher.
“When I first arrived in that dimension, Clark and I decided to share information. I’d tell him all I knew about Superman’s abilities and all the bad guys we had come across and he’d do the same for me.”
“That’s cheating.”
She smiled indulgently at him. “We thought we could save lives. So, Ultra Woman came up when I spoke about Red Kryptonite.”
Clark waited. He knew there was more to this Ultra Woman story. Lois picked up another strawberry and took a bite. Clark continued to wait. When she started to concentrate on the food, instead of their conversation, he said, “Then how did the other Lois find out about her?”
Lois closed her eyes, stopping mid-bite. She swallowed. “She mentioned Ultra Woman to you?”
Clark nodded slowly.
Lois set down the rest of her strawberry and wiped her mouth with a napkin. “On Halloween, Mayor White had a costume party. A ‘come as your favorite superhero’ party.” Her voice started to shake. They were definitely on the right track, here. “Clark had an Ultra Woman costume made for me. I had brought some pictures of us, from our dimension, and one of them was of Superman and Ultra Woman.”
Clark nodded, urging her to continue.
“He, of course, went as Superman.” She chuckled. “To disguise himself, he wore a fake mustache. There were hundreds of Supermen at the party. Clark was finally able to go out in public and just be himself. It was hard for him always being recognized everywhere he went. He couldn’t date anyone without it becoming a tabloid headline. Any event where Superman helped to any significant degree, Clark couldn’t write an article about. He would have to pass his notes to Barry. Barry was in charge of the ‘Superman beat’.”
Ah. That explained her recommendation of Barry to Perry. She knew he could do it.
Lois wasn’t looking at him anymore. Her eyes were focused out the window. “I was only about six months along, just beginning to really show. But the belt of the costume covered my tummy bulge and the mask covered my face, so nobody knew it was me. I didn’t feel like I was my secret identity, Lucy El. I could be me, myself, Lois Lane, for once. We had fun.” She cleared her throat, but did not continue.
“What kind of…” Clark closed his eyes. “Mayor White… Perry White?”
She nodded.
“He played a lot of Elvis music, didn’t he?”
Lois pressed her lips together as she nodded. A tear dripped down her cheek. “We danced. We laughed. We ate whatever we wanted.” She smiled weakly. “I don’t know when we got spritzed with ‘
Revenge,’ but the atmosphere in the ballroom changed. We were slow dancing, cheek to cheek, to
She’s Not You. I was thinking about you and he was thinking about his Lois… he had become obsessed with her when Perry assigned him to look for her three years earlier. He had fallen in love with her.” She looked down and swallowed. “We went up to the roof for some fresh air to clear our heads, but it didn’t work. We had been fighting against the pull, the attraction for months. We kissed.”
Clark felt like he had been stabbed with a Kryptonite knife. This was it. This was that night. She was drugged on pheromones, part of him told him. This was the excuse she didn’t want to tell him about.
“No, that’s not right. We
almost kissed on the roof, but we didn’t, because we knew it was wrong. He flew off and I ran down the stairs. I was a mess, in tears, knowing he wasn’t you, but still…” Lois swallowed, looking down.
Still what? He wondered. Still wanting him? Desiring him... what? But Clark didn’t speak. He needed to know this… He needed to hear the truth.
“I ran into him at the bottom of the stairs, literally.
It’s Now or Never was playing in the ballroom and we kissed.” She sighed, like she was replaying the moment in her mind and it was a satisfying moment. That wasn’t regret on her face. She shook her head as one was trying to erase an image from an Etch-A-Sketch. “We went back to the dance floor and we danced and danced and danced.” She smiled. “I was having fun for the first time in, I don’t know how long. Clark’s one hell of a jitterbug partner.” Lois swallowed. “Then
Burning Love came on. We looked at each other and kissed and kissed and kissed. The effects of the pheromone perfume had gotten to us by that point.”
Clark looked down at his hands. He had told her he wanted to hear this… needed to hear this. But that Kryptonite knife in his heart had grown spikes and was slowly starting to turn.
“I don’t know how long we kissed,” his wife continued. “A couple of songs, at least. Because before I knew it, we were floating up in the air, above the dance floor, above the other party guests. I realized it wasn’t him who had pulled us up into the air, but me. I discovered that night that flying was another side effect of the pregnancy. As we were up there, I noticed Miranda heading for the exit. I recognized her at once. I told Clark, but he had no idea what I was talking about. So, I swooped down and captured her, turning her and her bottle of ‘
Revenge’ over to security. She called it ‘
Animal Magnetism.’ Then I flew up above the crowd and waited for him. We left the crowd to cheers, flying over the city, side by side.” She chuckled. “Oh, that little stunt as Ultra Woman cooked his goose good in the press.” Lois shook her head. “We went back to my apartment and…” She exhaled. “He left for a train derailment in India at the crack of dawn the next morning. He took my Ultra Woman suit with him. He wanted to make sure I never flew off to capture any more bad guys.”
Clark felt like tearing a mountain in two. That other Clark was lucky he didn’t have a time machine to go and visit him. He took a deep breath, trying not to raise his voice in anger. “He took advantage of you when you were under the influence of the pheromones.”
“No, he didn’t, Clark. I told you. We both had been spritzed well and good. We were both out of control.”
“Lois,” he growled. “
Revenge has no effect on me whatsoever.”
Lois smiled indulgently at him. “Of course it does. You told me you loved me for the first time after you got sprayed by Miranda’s
Revenge plane.”
“I never said it affected me, Lois. That was just your assumption. I told you I loved you, because I wanted to.” He spoke these words through clenched teeth. “If I had been affected by the perfume, believe me, I would have shown you so when you did the Dance Of The Seven Veils.”
“You weren’t? That means, he wasn’t…” Lois stood up and starting pacing. She raised a hand to her mouth. “Oh, my God.”
“It means he took advantage of you when you were not in control.”
Lois held up her hands as if stopping those words from reaching her. “No, Clark. It doesn’t.”
“That was what… a little less than three weeks before Tempus tricked me into that time window… that’s when you said you went full on delusional. Had you been feeling the effects of the time-sickness before then? Were you confusing him and me all the way back at Halloween?”
“Yes, maybe, a little bit.” She was still pacing, her hands starting to shake.
“Lois, admit it. He took advantage of you.”
“Stop saying that. He didn’t, Clark.”
Clark stared at her. “Lois, why can’t you admit that you had reduced capacity and weren’t in control? He was to blame and the next time we see him, I’ll grind him into concrete.”
“Did he remind me of you? Yes. Was I under the influence of
Revenge? Yes. Were the effects of the time sickness starting to play with my memories? Yes. Did the romance and excitement and music of the night sweep me away? Yes. Did I miss you so much that I wanted someone to hold me and touch me and make me feel like a woman again? Yes. Yes. Yes. Those are just excuses, Clark. What I did was inexcusable.”
“Lois, he took advantage of you.”
“No, Clark. He couldn’t do that anymore than you could. He is kind and sweet and gentle, just like you. He didn’t take advantage of me. I knew you wouldn’t understand.”
Something clicked in Clark’s brain and he stood up, facing her. “What wouldn’t I understand, Lois? Why don’t you think he took advantage of you? What exactly did you do that was so inexcusable?” Clark took hold of her arms, stopped her from pacing. She looked up into his eyes and he saw the tears there. Suddenly, his throat was dry and he felt like he had been dipped into a vat of liquid nitrogen. “You didn’t just have sex that night. You made love.”
Her whole face wrinkled in pain and she nodded just one barely perceptible time.
“He didn’t take advantage of you, because you wanted him before that night?”
“Yes.”
“And after that night, after…” Clark swallowed. “… after you recovered from your time sickness, you still wanted him?”
“Yes.”
“And this darkness and depression you fell into after Lara was born and after you returned home, was it because you knew you had to leave him and come back to me?”
“No!”
“Because you wanted him more than me?”
“No! Never, Clark.”
“Because you felt guilty for cheating on me by falling in love with him?”
Lois closed her eyes and whispered, “Yes.”
Clark dropped his hands from her arms and spun into his clothes. He picked up his wallet and cell phone from the dresser and the thick book on the loveseat.
“Clark, I love you. I have never stopped loving you. I will always love you. Please, understand that just as I am destined to love you, I am destined to love him, too. All those good qualities that you have, that I love in you, he has too, because he
is you. I fought it, resisted it, the entire time I was there, except for that one night. I set him up with Mayson Drake, made him date fifty women for charity, went out of my way to find his Lois for him, so he wouldn’t be alone… because I knew he wasn’t my soul mate. You are.”
Clark picked up his travel bag and dropped his book inside. He retrieved his toiletries from the bathroom and put them in his small suitcase.
“Clark?”
He zipped around the room, picking up his clothes and other items he had brought with him, filling his suitcase.
“You
wanted the truth, Clark. You
asked me to tell you the truth.” Lois rolled her eyes. “Clark said to tell you that it was his fault. He said he deserved it if you came to his dimension to kick his butt for sleeping with your wife.”
Clark grabbed his suitcase and travel bag and headed for the door.
“Please! Clark. Don’t go.” She fell on her knees. “I’m begging you, Clark. Stay. Let’s work this out.”
He didn’t turn around when he opened the door. “Goodbye, Lois.” Then he shut the door behind him.
Clark could still hear her crying twelve blocks away.
*** End of Part 6 *** Burning Love – Performed by Elvis Presley, written by Dennis Linde.
She\'s Not You Performed by Elvis Presley, written by Jerry Leiber, Mike Stoller, and Doc Pomus.
It\'s Now or Never Performed by Elvis Presley, lyrics by Aaron Schroeder and Wally Gold based on the Italian song "O Sole Mio".
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