gathering sand (also from the drabble meme) (clark/lois, pg - r)
title: gathering sand
characters: lois-centric, clark/lois
rating: pg - r
genre: drama, angst
notes: basically The Death of Superman meets Smallville
Gathering Sand
Part 1
Lois sips on a cup of coffee, checking her leads carefully when the deafening crash of an explosion rocks the building and the news comes in on the wire. She turns to the telecast and sees a blur of blue and a dark splotch as Superman and Doomsday go at it. She shivers. She’s seen him fight before, obviously, but there’s a viciousness to this one that makes her wince with every punch, every aftershock that shakes the earth.
She drags Jimmy out to go and report on the story, keeping track of the fight on her Blackberry. She’s not worried though. He fought that thing before and he beat it. She’s already inventing headlines of his victory, and they’ll laugh about it later when she finagles a direct quote from Superman himself.
---
Lois sees him fall. The entire city does and the people nearby are oddly quiet. Everyone expects Superman to just get back up because that’s what Superman does. He falls. He gets back up.
A young boy sits cowering in the building, watching the great man lie in the dirt. “Come on, Supes, get up, get up,” he cheers, waving his fist in the air.
But he doesn’t get up.
An elderly man swipes at his beard, chews on the denchers he got for free at one of those neighborhood outreach clinics, and mutters, “Come on, Superman.”
“Yeah, Big Blue - you did good!”
“We love you, Superman!”
“Wow, did you see that - he punched that thing like it was a piece of paper or something,” one man said, awed.
“Dude, why isn’t he getting up?”
“He’s probably just catching his breath or something - I haven’t ever seen shit like that! Just give him time, he’s got this.”
But he still doesn’t move.
Part 2a
It’s Lois who realizes that something’s wrong. She starts to move after standing frozen, waiting, like everyone else, for him to just get up and fly away. Running to his body, she sees his chest moving jaggedly. She trips and grazes her knee on the rubble, but she doesn’t notice.
There’s blood everywhere. His suit is shredded, dyed dull red in places, the yellow S almost obscured by the open wound seeping on his chest. She slaps him awake and his eyes open. She smiles. “Hey, champ.” He looks at her as if from a distance and says, “Is he gone?”
She’s confused. “What - who - oh, yeah - Doomsday’s gone. You did it.”
He nods and closes his eyes.
“Okay, Superman. I need you to get up.”
He doesn’t move. Something’s wrong. She shakes his shoulders and he groans, and peers at her. “Lois.”
“Nice to see you remember my name, now get up - you have to go.” He lifts his hand up to her cheek. His fingers are damp with his own blood. He looks at her, and she feels as though she’s the only thing that exists in the world. He has a way of doing that.
“I love you.”
“I love you too.”
Part 2b
When he dies, she says, “Clark!”
Part 2c
For the crowd in Metropolis it’s a hero who has died. But for her, it’s her husband. So when people start crowding around the body, snatching at the tattered remnants of his cape, or picking up a piece of rubble from the spot where Superman died, she turns to the side and is sick all over the ground. She wipes her sleeve against her mouth, tastes acrid bile on her tongue and winces. Then she looks back at the growing throng and shouts, shoos them away until men twice as big as her fall back.
He’s just lying there still.
Part 3
Lois writes the obit. Perry tries to palm it off on another reporter, Ron or Stewart but she’s adamant. “This one’s mine, Chief.”
It’s a strange process. Molding and folding grief, a collective grief, into neat little sentences that make sense, with full stops and commas in all the right places. She double-checks her spelling three times with the little thesaurus that has the words, “Not that you’ll ever use this! Love, Smallville’s five-time Spelling Bee Champ!” scrawled in neat handwriting on the back of the front cover.
She refuses to look at that page and just finds the words, everything Spellcheck-proof, since he’s not here to do it.
---
The president says a speech in front of thousands of mourners gathered at the burial site. Millions more watch on television. She stands amongst the crowd with Martha Kent at her right, holding the older woman’s arm. She’s not sure who’s holding who up at this point. Chloe's to her left, and she can hear her trying to muffle broken sobs.
Her own eyes are red-rimmed and swollen but she hasn’t yet shed a single tear. Not a single one. It’s as if all of it, pain, grief, anger, sadness are trapped in her glands. The pressure is unbelievable but she just can’t cry. She will not cry.
She has a duty to protect his identity even when he’s dead. And what would it mean for the wife of Clark Kent (who had apparently disappeared during the fight) to be seen crying uncontrollably, screaming like a wild thing, scratching at her skin, her clothes - in the middle of all these strangers - for Superman?
So she stands and does nothing.
Part 4
Lois buries herself in her work. The entire bullpen is shocked when she arrives bright and early the very next week, ready to sink her teeth into a story. She is her usual Mad-dog self. But everyone is looking at her in the way that people look at a person in mourning, as though they’re a rabid dog set in amongst the civilized, or a delicate glass cup teetering on the edge of a table, just waiting to fall and shatter on the ground in fragments.
“What are you looking at?” she snaps. She’s as acerbic and brittle as possible to keep them all away.
They seem surprised by this - her being here. That she’s not breaking down or something. She shakes her head and slams the door to their office shut, blocks away the stares.
---
They keep treating her with kid gloves. Even Cat says something compassionate at the printer, her cornflower blue eyes crumpled in sympathy. Lois just brushes it off, not unkindly, but she thanks her in a way that doesn’t invite further conversation, muttering something about being late for a meeting with a source.
She takes a sip of her coffee, it’s bitter and lukewarm. She starts dumping in sugar until Jimmy comes in with a pack of photos for her to look at and says, “Whoa, Ms. Lane, are you sure you need that much sugar?” She notices what she’s done and says with a short smile, “Need something to pick-me-up a little. I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
Jimmy nods. “I - uh - here are some pictures for you to look at.”
She takes the sheaf of paper and places them on the table. “Thanks, Jimmy.”
Finally, Perry calls her into his office and asks, “What do you think you’re doing, Lane?”
“Well, I was trying to get a hold of a source on the Cabrini article before you called me in for this meeting.”
“Don’t be smart.”
She pretends sarcasm. She hides behind it because it is her last defense now. Without the wall, without that eggshell-hard cover, she’s nothing. She clings to it with everything she has inside of her because if she doesn’t, she might fall and crack into millions of pieces. “Perry, you’re going to have to spell it out for me, then. Because I’m not really getting what your deal is.”
“Why are you here?”
“It’s my job.”
“You look like shit.”
She hadn’t slept in the past ten days, just a weird wakefulness between sleeping and dreaming, staring sightlessly at the ceiling and hearing endless voices in the quiet. “Thanks.”
“Lane, you should be-”
“It’s my job, Perry.” She looks straight at him for the first time, not some spot above his head or near his tie.
And for a second he sees it. Pain that is almost shameful to look at, it’s raw and bleeding, alive. She wipes it away and looks at him with steely determination. “I’m fine.”
He sends her a look of pity and she repeats the two words again, firmly entrenched in the idea of them.
“I’m giving you time off.”
“Thanks for the offer, Chief but-”
“I wasn’t asking, Lane. It’s an order.”
“But Chief -”
He slams his fist against the desk. “I will fire you if that’s what I have to do. You need to go home and -”
Lois swallows thickly, and folds her arms across her chest, her hands fisted tightly. “Fire me, then.”
He shakes his head sadly. “I’m going to pretend you didn’t say that, Lane. Go home.”
She rears back like she’d been slapped. She walks out without a word.
Part 5a
Lois walks in measured steps along the familiar corridor to the apartment. Her heels clip against the ground, unnaturally loud. She fumbles in her purse for her keychain, and pushes the single, gold key into the lock, turning it clockwise. She twists the knob and nudges the door inwards, stepping in after it. Without looking up, she turns to face the door, closing it with a quiet thud. Her fingers rest on the steel handle and she presses her forehead against the cool wood.
Come on, Lois, it’s just a room. It’s just our apartment.
The apartment was theirs - but it didn’t feel like it. Not anymore. It didn’t feel like home.
Her feet give out from under her and she sinks to the floor, legs bent awkwardly in her heels, her body crumpling in on itself like a sad, airless inflatable. She starts to cry.
---
She finally dragged herself to the couch where she’d slept for the past ten days. She couldn’t bring herself to sleep in their bed. She could barely stand to be in the bedroom for more than five minutes, only grabbing her clothes and running out.
She took the old pillow, the image was faded now, with only the bare, nearly colorless outline of a guitar and David Coverdale singing into a microphone. She held it under head and closed her eyes in the dark.
Part 5b
She’s lying on the couch at 1AM in the morning, and her mind is full of cotton. The apartment seems to suffocate her and the longer she’s in it, the more she can barely breathe.
Without even thinking she packs a bag, and slams out of the apartment.
She drives to the farm in a sort of stupor, blind to the landscape changing in front of her from the grayscale skyscrapers of the city to endless golden cornfields that pave the Kansas countryside. One minute she’s lying on the couch with her neck throbbing from the uncomfortably hard armrest and the next minute she’s pulling up in front of the cheerfully painted farm house, and the pressure eases around her chest, not much, but a little.
She clambers out of the car. As she walks up the wooden porch stairs, the door opens and Martha Kent stands there, aged and tired-looking, rubbing her hands absently on the apron around her waist. She doesn't seem surprised to see her, her mouth crumples like a delicate flower and tears gather slowly and spill down. Lois bites the inside of her mouth until it bleeds.
One word. “Mom.”
Part 5c
The farm is soothing and not, all at once. It’s the place where she first got to know Clark Kent, the boy who grew into the man, into Superman. It’s also the place where she holds some of her favorite memories. Late nights playing video games and slaying Clark without even trying; disastrous baking attempts that ended with her covered in flour and Clark pressing a kiss to her nose, doing a poor job at holding back his laughter; the second night after they got engaged when they sat out on the porch swing and watched the stars for hours, and Clark’s fingers made soft circles on her palm, and his mouth fluttered against her temple.
She hasn’t even gone into the barn yet.
Part 6
She’s lost Clark before. She can think about it now.
She watched him fall to what she thought was death - over forty storeys down from the top of a building. She’d been so scared, and couldn’t tell the difference between wet rain and warm, wet blood. She kept calling his name, slapping at his cheek to wake him up - nothing. She finally did pull the dagger out, and just let her head rest on his chest. Until a beat - the echo of a heartbeat - vibrated against her ear. She thought she was dreaming. Or hallucinating. But then his chest moved and moved again. He came back.
Then there was the three weeks, nearly four, just before they got married. She hadn’t been able to think straight or see straight that time - the first real time perhaps. She’d even pulled a gun on Tess. The cold, hard steel was an anchor in a world that seemed to be slipping very quickly into chaos.
She had stood alone in their first apartment - the boxes strewn all over the floor; paint swatches pinned to the fridge; walls that were as bare and empty as she felt. It had nearly driven her crazy. So she’d started unpacking, feverishly, marshalling herself with a dedication that would have made her dad proud. There was something comforting in getting her hands to do. No feelings, no thoughts - just do. Lift the box and put it on the table, pin the painting to the wall, shove the couch in a corner, make the bed, position the pillow, plug in the coffee machine.
She hadn’t been able to sleep in their bed then either. Just the thought of it had made her sick. So instead, she would lie down in the living room, sinking her face into that Whitesnake pillow, muffling her tears with it until it was wet. She’d wrap herself in his shirts, any shirt, just let his smell - him - surround her. And it was like playing a trick on yourself - like little kids who ran from their shadows. If she didn’t turn her head or look down, she might think, for a moment that he was there with her.
She didn’t call off the wedding. She didn't tell anyone. The people at the Planet figured he’d taken a leave of absence or come down with some deadly illness - she didn’t confirm anything. She told her dad that he got sent on assignment and he’d said something about how refreshing it was to see ‘the boy’ applying himself to his career for once. It had been a joke; she hadn’t been able to laugh at it. Martha knew, and she’d offered to come to Metropolis to wait with her but thankfully changed her mind. Lois wasn’t sure she’d have been able to keep the seams from tearing open if she’d shown up.
She spent nights in Watchtower. Her eyes stung from staring at the monitor so hard, her fingers turning the crystal in her hand over and over, thinking maybe she could uncover its secrets and bring him back. Tess brought her coffee laced with whiskey or something. They sat side-by-side for hours and hours, fell asleep, woke up and started all over again.
She remembers cracking once, sitting by the stained glass window in the dark at 4AM, trying hard to keep herself quiet. And Tess sinking down beside her, her arms resting on her shoulder while she cried and cried, “It’s going to be okay,” she’d said. Both were too scared to not believe it. And for her, there really wasn't any other option.
When the apartment was ready, every surface gleaming from the three times she’d cleaned and polished and washed and rinsed, she’d wandered aimlessly, in one of Clark’s shirts again, not sure what to do with herself and scared to contemplate even an hour with absolutely nothing to do. She’d startled at the sound of the key turning in the door and then him - like a dream, just standing there, his mouth turned up at the corners. He’d come back that time.
Then there was the time he was stuck in a parallel universe with Diana. The other time he was off-planet on New Krypton for months and months. The times when he was on duty at Watchtower or battling earthquakes and monsoons an ocean away. Like any good military wife, she did damn well at carving her life outside of that, at waiting. He always came back.
But she can’t even hold onto that now. Hoping for that is like trying to gather sand with her fingers - fruitless and stupid.
Part 7
She goes back to work eventually. There’s only so long she can hide away on the farm without getting antsy. And she thinks it’s better for her to do rather than sit in a place where the memories of him and her permeate every square foot. The apartment isn’t any better but at least she can stay at the Planet so late that she’s too tired to take anything in by the time she gets home at night. She can rush out in the mornings and grab breakfast at the café round the corner. And it’s fine. Everything is fine.
-
She has contemplated moving but not yet. She's not ready for it. Soon though. Maybe.
Part 8
There was a rash of fake ‘Supermans’ in the months after he died.
The first time, and only the first, she was dumb enough to let herself hope. She’d rushed to the roof of the Planet, panting and panicking, and yelled for him right then and there. She’d contemplated throwing herself over the building to catch his attention. She’d started planning the rant she was going to give him for making her worry so damn much.
But the person - the thing that came to meet her wasn’t him. Maybe from afar it could fool the masses; already the headlines were screaming “Superman is Back!” But she knew her husband better than she knew herself and this - wasn’t him. Its movements had been mechanical, stilted and studied at the same time. It knew her name. It smiled, lips stretching wide over perfect, white teeth. When it reached out to touch her face, she flinched back, shook her head slowly, and stepped away.
It was like being cut open and she'd walked away slowly so she wouldn't fall because of it.
She didn’t make that mistake again.
Part 9
So when she comes across another one of the ‘Supermen’, slammed into the ground ten feet in front of her in a black suit with the House of El crest painted over in silver - she just rolls her eyes. Apparently, the tin can idiots have turned on each other, and they’re tearing the city apart. She’d grab a quote but she’s not Superman’s Girl Friday anymore and she’s got better things to do. She turns to veer to the left of the slow-moving lump.
“Lois…”
She stops. Not because she wants to - but her legs just quit moving. Frowning, she tilts her head for a second at that voice… and then shakes it to clear it, “Don’t be ridiculous, Lois.” She starts walking again, faster this time.
“Wait - Lois,” he says again, and he’s closer to her this time, she can hear it. She swings around quickly, hand raised, “Look, buddy, leave me alone - and go harass someone else!”
He says nothing, simply looks at her as if he’s trying hard to take every detail of her in at once. His eyes, changeable green, are wet. Lois frowns. Is he crying? That’s a new one. Outwardly, she arches her left eyebrow and crosses her arms over her chest.
“It’s me, Lois - Clark.” He says it so earnestly, his voice gravelly as though he hasn’t used it in a while.
“Jeez,” she rolls her eyes, “Listen, I get that you guys are all hardwired with the same damn chip or whatever and you think my purpose in life is to write headlines about you. But please just leave me alone, okay? I don’t care. I don’t want…” She trails off in confusion when he smiles, a familiar smile like he’s remembering something she doesn’t know about.
“It is me, Lo.”
She snaps her head up at the single syllable - Lo? He can’t - that’s impossible -
He simply gazes at her steadily.
Lois studies him. His dark hair is long, unruly even; his shoulders are broad as ever; his eyes soft, new green leaves, and trained on her. She bites her lip and says, “It’s not you. It’s not. But, you know,” a sad smile touches her mouth, “Great job this time because you look damn close to the real deal.”
She makes to turn around but he stops her with a hand to her elbow. She looks at the fingers around her arm and then at him. He just keeps watching her. So still and focused. And her heart hurts because that’s how he used to look at her - like she’s the only thing that exists in the world.
She gasps. “N-no, it can’t be.”
She’s crying. How long has she been crying? She takes a step back, then two more. He follows her. “No… no, please.” He lifts a hand up to her cheek and she closes her eyes. His palm is warm and solid, callused but not overly so, gentle. “It is me.” Three words and she’s not sure whether to slap herself for paying attention to this lunatic, even a moment, or for letting herself believe for one second -
Run, Lois.
As if he can see the wheels turning into overdrive in her head, he lets out a heavy, oddly put-upon sigh (also familiar) and without warning, presses his lips to her mouth.
For a second she’s too shocked to move. Her eyes are wide open and near-popping out of their sockets. She’s staring at him, and he’s staring right back. Then his mouth slants across hers and it’s real. It’s like a dream but it’s real. As real as the hand on her arm, and the body standing in front of her, as air.
She gives herself into the kiss for a second and pushes back, her eyelids slide closed; tears seep out from under them.
Part 10
And she knows right then - no doubts. Not even one.
He’s back.