Chapter 12
*falls over* Ugh, SLEEP.
A/N: The bad news: I will begin grad school in addition to part-time employment next week. Expect delays as I readjust to school life. Trust me, I am NOT interested in what I'm studying, and will make every effort to maintain a general "chapter-every-1.5 weeks" pace.
The good news: After several fruitless days I have revised Chapter 11 to my liking. As many chapters have undergone minor revisions (6 and 7 most notably) I have not bothered to mention it; however, this time, there should be important differences. SO, if you have the time, the interest, or even just to refresh from the long break between chapters, give that a re-read :)
A final point: I welcome criticisms of my Jimmy, as he is the character I have the most difficulty with and the least faith in. So let me know if something struck you as wrong or OOC in this chapter (it stands now as the hardest one to write so far). Conversely, also feel free to note things you think I did right with Jimmy, so I can access that train of thought again. My most sincere regards to everyone; I salute my fellow students, September here we come.
This chapter is posted at 3:15 in the morning on a Wednesday for the following, wonderful reasons: htbthomas, MoriahthePariah, Lucienne Grace, jjtheelusive, and Anonygirl
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"What difference does it make?"
Lois' leg was holding open the door; she blew smoke out towards the rain.
"She's my mother, she would prefer it if I asked her first."
Jimmy looked at Lois, her back against the wall of the small steel enclosure that shielded the stairwell and elevator shaft from the elements and bowed his head.
"Jimmy..."
"I know." He hung his head still, blushing like a little boy caught doing something wrong for the hundredth time.
"How about you start with talking to her first, then tell your mother."
They sat by the muted light of the morning sky, Jimmy on the actual top step and Lois on the floor right by the door. A summer thunderstorm was raging outside making it impossible for Lois to smoke without getting drenched, so they were commiserating by the roof door instead. Lois' bare leg was exposed, reaching out to hold the spring loaded hatch at bay, and she was smoking as if offering incense to some unseen deity.
"Okay."
"Which one is she?" A true, clarifying question.
"Lily," this did not answer her question, based on Lois' expression, "Intern Number Five."
"Oh! Black hair, green eyes?"
"Yeah."
"Intern Number Five, mmm," she took a puff, Jimmy looked down shyly.
He waited a few minutes until the moment passed. He knew Lois didn't care but he had a lot of trouble talking about girls... women. He looked back up at her, the picture of casual disregard wrapped in brilliance. Lois was like the really cool older sister he never had. Or like that hipster senior girl who takes care of a lonely, awkward freshman that doesn't know a thing about life or himself.
Lois had played a similar role in his life, taking him under her wing his first day Upstairs, fresh from the suburbs, and protecting him from the lions in the bullpen. She gave him advice, spoke for him when he could not, and on occasion lent him her particular acid wit.
Despite her guiding him all this time, Jimmy's view of Lois had shifted over the last few years. As he grew older he began to spot and understand flaws in her, her weaknesses, or the things she did that Jimmy finally started to disagree with. She had indeed helped him come into himself, form and hold his own opinions, and he had the courage to mentally question many of her actions as the haze of hero worship passed. Thoughts like this occurred to him from time to time as he watched her in conversations like these.
While he would never have the courage to question her morals and lifestyle directly, he did now have the courage to voice things unexpectedly:
"Lois?"
"Mmm?"
"When was the last time you saw him?"
She looked in from the rain and directly at him.
"What do you mean?"
Lois looked surprised by his direct question; even he was surprised at himself for asking it. Jimmy looked at her, thought she looked older than he had ever seen her; it was odd, and he was distracted by it.
"Just the other night." Her voice was hesitant.
James Olsen thought he might have the singular pleasure of being able to ask Lois Lane almost any question and get a complete answer. She did not tell him her secrets, did not offer them like she sometimes did to Clark, but answered with secrets whenever the appropriate question came her way. It made him feel special; he was proud to be in her confidence.
"In all this time?"
"One or two other times. We didn't have much to talk about."
He noticed the past tense of this statement, but didn't push her.
"You're depressed."
"It's the weather."
"Um, it's more than the weather."
Lois looked in at him from the rain again, exhaling into the stairwell.
"You wouldn't have asked for these, Lois..." Jimmy reached down and picked up the manila envelope he had taken from the supply room last Wednesday. Reinforced with two pieces of archival board, this was a photo-mailer, which now contained a selection of photographs from a larger pool waiting at home on his kitchen table.
She held out her hand for the envelope, Jimmy pulled it back towards his body.
They stared at each other. The stairwell felt cool and humid from the storm.
"Nothing in there is going to make it worse, Jimmy."
"That's not necessarily true, you've never seen these before."
That got her full attention; she sat up and away from the wall, the cigarette now almost gone. She took a nervous drag.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Jimmy looked down again, "You know how we both knew those pictures could never be printed?"
She nodded.
"These pictures could never exist, never mind be published..."
As he sat leafing through his Paige boxes in his apartment, Jimmy debated the very point that was swirling through his mind in this instant: would it harm or help Lois to see these shots? Taken at two different places on two different days, these pictures were Jimmy's best-kept secret. Seeing Lois glance furtively at the news monitors whenever Superman saved a South Asian villager or a mid-western housewife, Jimmy couldn't help the nagging guilt he felt for never having shown her these. Now, though, with Richard thirty feet away, Jimmy's casual words to Clark when he returned to the bullpen came back to him ("If you ask me, 'cause she'd never admit this, but if you ask me? She's still in love with you-know-who"). He had stared at his bedroom wall for an hour, in the midst of an ethical debate over the heart of one of his best friends, thinking of the way Lois looked at Superman and the promise she had made to Richard.
"Lois, do you remember waking up in the hospital after the building collapse on 3rd and Guilden?"
"Yeah, you and Clark were there, I couldn't remember a thing..."
Jimmy flipped open the envelope and slipped his fingers between the boards. His temporary courage was fast fading.
"This is, uh, what you missed..." he pressed his fingers to the emulsion and used the friction to pull the first photo from the collective out into the hard, fluorescent light of the stairwell. Lois was rubbing her cigarette out on the door, leaving her leg to get wet in the splish-splash of rain. He pulled the photograph out and sighed.
"I filed it under 'Agony,'" he held out the glossy paper between them, offering his work to her as a testament to a moment she never knew in consciousness.
The roof door slammed shut as Lois sat forward, aghast.
"Oh my god."
Rather than pinching the photograph in her fingers, Lois held her hands out like a monk taking an offering of food. Jimmy slid the paper into her grasp, watching indescribable emotions wash across her face. There, between them, lay Lois Lane, covered in blood from a very grievous head wound and spread across the lap of a tortured man, like the dead Christ across his mother's lap in the Pietà. Superman looked down at Lois with an expression of raw human pain; a hand in her hair, cradling her head, he was probably searching for a heartbeat in his mind. EMT workers were approaching from the other direction with an unusual amount of emotion on their faces at the scene they were witnessing, firefighters aiming jets of water in the background.
Lois let out a long breath, her eyes raking over the picture.
"He thought you were dead."
"I thought I was far enough away, Clark said the concrete that hit me seemed to aim straight at me, it was a freak incident."
"It was. I fainted."
Lois looked up and into him.
"I thought you were dead, too. He... he..." he gestured down at the picture, "He froze. He didn't move. He just fell to his knees and held you like that, I took the picture out of pure instinct, and then I fainted." He gave a small chuckle, trying to lighten the mood, the terror years behind them, the scar a small mark under her hair.
She didn't laugh. She looked back down.
"Jimmy, this is incredible. It's unreal, I can't really see that as me."
Arms at her sides, the blood literally pooled around her, dripping off his fingers and down his wrist. He looked so terrified, it hurt her to look at.
"Didn't you ask him what happened?"
"He didn't say a word," she sounded ponderous, "I mean I can see why he wouldn't..."
She looked at the picture. Jimmy looked at her.
"I was so afraid, Lois. Clark too, he was shaken up for hours. We waited for you to wake up in the hospital,” his words were echoing weirdly in the hollow stairwell, off steel and cinder blocks. He sounded scared.
"I know," she looked up and smiling at him, the surprise there replaced by affection, "I waited by your bedside a few times." She laughed, "We do a good job of staying out of trouble," she added with a dark humor.
They sat for a few moments before Lois took a deep breath and looked up and out of thought.
"What else?"
Jimmy picked up the envelope and pinched the side of another photo, pulling it loose of its comrades.
"This may seem a little repetitive but it's the first thing I saw when I came to and I was startled..."
Lois took the picture, touching only the sides of the paper. Jimmy liked that she appreciated a photographer's aversion to fingerprints.
"...I figure it was about five minutes later."
Superman stood powerless as the emergency workers attended to the grotesquely beautiful body between them; Lois was astounded to think she liked the way she looked in the shot. Her face was peaceful in near-death, the pose a testament to the rare beauty of the macabre. It spoke of some grander idea inside her, that if she was going to live a tabloid life she might as well have appropriate illustrations. She really admired Jimmy's instinct.
She found it difficult to look at the emotion on Superman's face and averted her eyes. Maybe another time.
She picked up the first picture and held it up to him, saying very seriously:
"This should be nominated for a Pulitzer."
"No, it shouldn't."
"Why not?"
"I've never seen a man so helpless, Lois. I could never show this to the world, he's my friend. And a part of me believes the press owes the good-doers of the world a favor, I figure we should protect them when we can, help them rather than expose their every fault for personal gain."
Lois looked up and into his eyes, truly interested.
"Like FDR," she said with a smile in her voice.
He laughed, "Yes, Lois, like FDR," the sarcasm dripped, he gestured down at Superman, the juxtaposition really quite funny.
"Did you take Journalism?"
"Nope!"
"Right, I didn't think so..." and she looked down at the photo.
"The next two are, uh, a bit different."
Lois handed over the photos and Jimmy switched them with another pair.
"This was about five years ago, right before he left. I came to your apartment to drop off photos you had wanted and I found the door open and you know I always just come in because you forbade me to ring your bell ever again after the time I..." he was rambling.
She nodded.
"...so I took these uh, by accident?"
The photo snapped in that way photo paper does when it's flicked in a hand. Jimmy looked away, blushing like a boy.
There were plenty of photographs in Jimmy's portfolio that featured Lois being carried away from disaster in Superman's arms, but none of her resplendent in his charm, staring into his face and bright-eyed. Here they were on her balcony, just back from flying, her hair mussed from the wind, a slight burn on her cheeks, rosy and white. He looked intense in that way that he did whenever they flew; she loved that look. He loved to fly.
Anyone would.
Pressed against each other, her arms around his neck and his hands resting on her waist, Lois saw for the first time what she looked like in Superman's arms. Certainly she had glanced their reflection in the mirrored wonder of Metropolis' modern skyscrapers, but this was a moment clear and still, an image she could truly focus on. Lois looked down their bodies and came to stare at her feet, resting on his boots and seeming so delicate compared to his larger, powerful stature. She had never seen herself look so small as she did wrapped in his arms; it sent unfamiliar desire though every synapse and blood vessel.
Lois stopped breathing as these thoughts swirled, as she thought about him this way for the first time in so long. How could she say no? If it came her way, the chance, would she say no?
"And this is about five seconds later, before I ran away," and he held about another stolen moment.
Now his eyes were heavy, their faces close. Lois' head was tilted up and towards him, she looked hesitant and open. As Lois gazed at the photograph she remembered this moment: in a few seconds from then his lips had almost touched hers, but his expression crumbled, and he buried his face in her neck to feverishly kiss the skin there instead. It was the closest he had ever come to actually kissing her. So many times they had come that close, but she knew from day one that he just would not touch her. Not really. He would hold her and look at her but never really touch her.
A longing more powerful than before rose in her; she cursed herself, cursed her actions and not being able to at least remember getting what she wanted in exchange for five years of grief.
She wanted him. Shit.
"So close, Jimmy. I was always so close," she said, full of regret, sounding miserable.
Jimmy was still looking at the concrete wall beside him, having averted his eyes in embarrassment.
"You mean he didn't kiss you?" He couldn't help it, that was surprising. He felt like a teenager with his big sister again.
He had only that time: the salty, sensitive skin below her jar, "Never."
"No way."
She raised an eyebrow at him, "Yes way? What, Jimmy?"
He must have a weird expression on his face, "That just doesn't seem likely."
"I almost think you're making fun of me."
"I'm not."
"You are. You think I'm a whore."
"What?" She had to be joking!
She laughed at him, he glared at her for fooling him again.
"As unlikely as it seems, and I know what you mean Jimmy, don't worry, it's true. Up until whatever turn of events led to..." she trailed off and looked across at him.
"Jimmy." Her voice was suddenly serious; she seemed to come to a decision in that moment. He grew concerned in a heartbeat, instinctively aware that this was important, "There's something I want to tell you, and something I need your help with."
"Ummmm..." A familiar hapless expression crossed his face.
"Jason isn't Richard's."
Jimmy blinked at her.
'Well, that doesn't make any sense.'
He continued to stare at her, and then that thought was followed by this one:
'I wonder who it could--- AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!'
"Oh no. Oh no. Oh no, Lois! Youjustsaidhe.. I mean... 'so close!'"
'Ahhhh!'
He wildly hoped his mother would never find out about this. She already didn't like Lois and didn't think such an important deception would help her image.
"I know what I said. But it doesn't change the fact that Jason is," she rolled her eyes, "Superman's."
Jimmy just stared at her, open-mouthed in shock.
"I've only known for three months."
Jimmy closed his mouth. She had anticipated his wonder. 'Okay, that's easier for me to deal with.'
"Wow."
"Yes."
"'Didn't have much to talk about?'"
"I had to do a lot of thinking."
"Right."
Beat.
"What do you need my help with?" he almost squeaked.
"I need you to know this in order to watch him in the bullpen when he comes in. I can't be there every second, and I need someone to bounce off of in the audience should he set something on fire."
Jimmy did squeak.
"He has super powers?!" It sounded like such a ridiculous question, and yet it was perfectly valid.
"We don't know. I mean, we do, but not really," she flapped her hand hopelessly and reached for another cigarette. Jimmy couldn't blame her.
"We can call him Superboy!"
He was expecting her to laugh, and instead got a cold look and a raised eyebrow; she flicked off her lighter and the warmth of her stare disappeared with the flame. The smile faded from his face as his attempt to lighten the mood hit way off target.
"Sorry."
"Humph."
Jimmy was abashed and looked away, sighing into the stairwell. She exhaled again, out into the rain, a white puff against a gray sky. Superman was dealing with a flooded river upstate, according to the news. Summer storms.
"You have a crazy life." He said it like a child wondering at a really cool thing, like an awesome video game. Regret filled his voice as he thought what a dork he was in front of her, with problems like asking his mom for permission to talk to a girl.
"Oh I know, Jimmy," she reached for the card slider and kicked open the door with a stiletto heel, a frank manner of mind and body. "It's like a sci-fi soap opera," she took a puff, "It's fucked up." Lois snapped back into 'cool big sister' mode and away from guilty secrets of forbidden affairs and unsatisfied passion. She leaned back against the wall and assumed her original posture.
"But I'm used to it. Even madness can become comfortable. It's funny, these last five normal years seem so unreal now; it was almost silly to think I could live that way..."
Jimmy had also sensed this feeling recently, but nothing on the scale of Lois' experience. He thought suddenly of her love affair with Superman, of the fact that they had a son together. It changed everything, all his ideas about Lois' recent thoughts and actions, the fact that everything was whispering of a renaissance of their tryst. It changed everything.
"Wow. No wonder you're depressed." He folded his hands and looked down, unable to look at her while he brought this up.
"I'm not depressed. Why should I be?"
"Well, um, no reason. None, nope, unless um, feeling torn between two men who love you? Could be a reason..."
"Love me?" She looked cold again, like the woman on the other side of an internationally renown keyboard.
"I, uh, think He loves you. It's the instinct," he waved his finger around his head, as if indicating some genius he could access because he was a good photographer. He was really just trying to play it off and feeling bashful because of what he wanted to said next:
"It's probably why he never kissed you, he was too shy..."
"Too shy?" her skepticism echoed around them.
"He's shy. Like me. He just can't kiss you, I understand it somehow..." his voiced trailed off, suddenly wishing he were invisible. He pointed down at the picture still resting on Lois' knee, as if Superman's face could speak of his fearful and hesitant nature in that instant. He was looking at Lois like she was the only thing he had ever seen. Jimmy suddenly wondered why he really left five years ago.
A gust of cool wind blew in off the roof; storms were influenced by the drafts in the warm city air and would often shift unexpectedly in the updrafts around the large Planet building. A cool mist blew against their faces and Lois turned her head to look outside, startled but hopeful looking.
Pity surged through him; he was aghast at the fact that Lois had looked expectantly towards a breeze thinking Superman was there, beyond the shelter.
Lois looked dazed, "Christ, never mind, I'm delusional, look at me! I'm a wreck!" She went from calm denial into temporary hysteria in the space of these words, Jimmy could recognize it now. She didn't really do anything about it, just sat there panicked but silent next to the door. He could see the strain behind her eyes, worse after this weekend. Something must have happened to push her nearer the edge of her control.
They paused.
"This is serious, isn't it, Lois?"
"Yup!" she answered quickly, taking a long drag, trying to calm down.
Jimmy felt suddenly awkward, like he was uncomfortable in his body, aware of the weight of this secret and the fact that she confided it in him.
"Who else knows?"
"Only him." Him with a capital 'H.'
He sat fiddling with the hard corner of the photo-mailer.
"And Lex Luthor."
"What? Ohmygod, Lois, what?!" Jimmy looked around quickly, as if Luthor was sneaking up the stairs behind him.
"Like I said, you get used to a certain level of--"
"Never mind!" Jimmy panicked, trying to stop more insanity from leaving her mouth, "Does He know that?" his voice shook.
"Yes," she sighed and looked out at the roof, "He does."
He was trying to think of something to think about while his mind processed the implications of a five year being the most tempting hostage on Earth for the use of infinite evil.
"Jason's half-alien!"
Obviously.
It was NUTS!
Lois raised the last bit of her cigarette at him like she was toasting a champagne glass, took a sip of smoke and threw the butt on the roof where it shattered into sparks against the wet stone.
Jimmy closed his eyes and pinched his nose.
"I hate Mondays."
She let out a sharp, singular, "Ha!" at him.
"And here I thought there was nothing more shocking in the world than you becoming a mother..." Jimmy had always wanted to tell her this. He was just feeling crazy enough to finally do it.
"Not even me getting engaged?"
"Good point. That too." Jimmy nodded at the floor, still pinching the space between his eyes.
"Does this seem relatively less shocking, that I should bear the most significant child on earth?"
"In the universe," he corrected miserably.
"In the universe? Ha!" Lois suddenly held up her middle finger to the world outside, giving reality The Finger and blowing smoke into the atmosphere, "Fuck the universe. I've had enough." Lois pulled her foot in quickly as she stood in a swift motion, the door slamming shut just as she reached her full height. She stretched her lithe body without modesty or care and turned towards the elevator with her purse slung over her shoulder.
The shift was so unexpected and the slam of the door so loud that Jimmy was rendered deaf for a few seconds, in shock and still on the floor. It was so like her just like to turn off in a millisecond, to never notice the other person in her conversations.
He tried to snap out of it and moved quickly to join her by the doors, his breath loud in the quiet left by the rain. When Lois made up her mind, she was devoted mind and soul, even if it was just to wait for the elevator. She stared at the hard steel doors, different than the antiqued brass ones on every other floor, and threatened to melt them straight through. Jimmy knew she wasn't angry with him; she was just riled about everything else. And depressed.
-----
Clark looked up into brown eyes and smiled at Lois.
"Good morning, Smallville, nice tie."
"Good morning, L--"
"Busy tonight?"
"I don't think so--"
"I'll pick you up at eight." And she slid off his desk and into Richard's office before Clark could really process her on this dreary Monday. He watched her slink between the desks towards Richard and away from him, happy to drink her in after two days without her. The blinds were open and his eyes followed her through the door without realizing it.
Therefore, he was sure to see the way Richard caught her around the waist and into him, his arms coming to rest around her and a smile on his face. While anyone in the bullpen could have seen them, no one noticed but Clark, no one appreciated the way she let herself fall into him, what it meant when she played with her men and trailed her fingertips along their arms...
She bobbed up on her toes and caught Richard's mouth in a kiss; Clark closed his eyes and held his breath, biting his lip, before anything unexpected happened. He didn't want to set anything ablaze in rage, but he was sorely tempted to. He saw her in his arms instead and swiveled back around in his chair, damning himself for having looked to begin with.
'She isn't yours.' He was staring at his monitor, trying to remind himself of this, begging his rationale to stop its dangerous, raging thoughts about Lois. This jealousy and lust, the anger in him lately, they way he caught himself looking at her...
He realized yet again that he had pulled his hearing all the way in and looked around the busy bullpen, currently in silence inside his mind. His senses washed back out into the room and he sat back, trying not to think about pressure against his lips.
-----
"Hey CK!"
It was only a second later that Jimmy noticed the pained expression across his friend's face.
"Are you okay?" he voice sounded hesitant. Today had been hard enough already.
"Um," Clark took his fingers out of his ears, "I'm fine. What's up, Jimmy?"
"I think Lois is depressed."
"She's depressed?" he snorted and blew out his mouth, the same as saying, 'sheesh!'
When Jimmy looked back at today in three weeks, he realized that Clark's snort was the most significant thing he heard all day. He nodded his head behind Jimmy and the younger man turned around, looking for whatever Clark was trying to point out.
Lois was nibbling on Richard's neck... he thought... under the guise of looking over his shoulder from behind his computer chair. It was Monday morning and the cleaning service always left the blinds open from over the weekend. Jimmy panicked and turned around back towards Clark.
"Ah!"
Jimmy stood puzzled and shocked. Clark's statement didn't make any sense. He would have expected the emphasis to be on the other word.
"Um."
Clark sighed, "She's too much for me, Jimmy, I can't stand it."
Jimmy sought out Clark's eyes and engaged him in concern; he was completely at ease with Clark, so much more so than Lois, and was sure Clark felt the same way. That's why they were best friends. Jimmy sensed something very odd in that statement, and was suddenly both worried and obvious about it, sure that Clark would elaborate.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Well. She's hard to keep up with," he sounded like a man back-peddling.
Jimmy knew Clark very well, and knew this was true but not what Clark had initially meant. He sensed that Clark was now uncomfortable with him, and really had been ever since he walked over. What was bothering him?
He thought of Lois, doing inappropriate things to Richard mere minutes after confessing her liaison with another man, and the real reason Richard thought he had a son. Richard! Jimmy felt really sorry for Richard. Could that be bothering Clark? Did he know something? Maybe Lois had told him something else, another piece of the puzzle, and it weighed on him like it did on Jimmy.
He watched Clark watch Lois furtively past him, his magnified eyes drawn to Richard's office despite himself. Whatever was bothering Clark had to do with Lois, and she already had the fate of her family and her impossible lover on the line. He hoped that whatever he was picking up from Clark wasn't too bad; Lois could only survive so long.
Jimmy could now feel tension all about him: an interplay of secrets, emotion, and desperation between his friends. Even Clark was wearing thin, but from what he didn't know. Jimmy looked around the bullpen, wishing someone else could appreciate the weather. Jimmy felt stormy today.
"You always manage."
"What?" Clark pulled his eyes away as he turned his face up towards Jimmy, confused.
"You always manage to keep up."
Clark's face darkened; he shot what Jimmy had to assume was an angry glare towards the fireball that was Lois Lane, doing lord knew what to Richard, as Jimmy refused to turn around ever again.
"Only just barely, Jimmy, even at my fastest," he stared, lost in thought, biting his lip. "Only just barely."
A/N: The bad news: I will begin grad school in addition to part-time employment next week. Expect delays as I readjust to school life. Trust me, I am NOT interested in what I'm studying, and will make every effort to maintain a general "chapter-every-1.5 weeks" pace.
The good news: After several fruitless days I have revised Chapter 11 to my liking. As many chapters have undergone minor revisions (6 and 7 most notably) I have not bothered to mention it; however, this time, there should be important differences. SO, if you have the time, the interest, or even just to refresh from the long break between chapters, give that a re-read :)
A final point: I welcome criticisms of my Jimmy, as he is the character I have the most difficulty with and the least faith in. So let me know if something struck you as wrong or OOC in this chapter (it stands now as the hardest one to write so far). Conversely, also feel free to note things you think I did right with Jimmy, so I can access that train of thought again. My most sincere regards to everyone; I salute my fellow students, September here we come.
This chapter is posted at 3:15 in the morning on a Wednesday for the following, wonderful reasons: htbthomas, MoriahthePariah, Lucienne Grace, jjtheelusive, and Anonygirl
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"What difference does it make?"
Lois' leg was holding open the door; she blew smoke out towards the rain.
"She's my mother, she would prefer it if I asked her first."
Jimmy looked at Lois, her back against the wall of the small steel enclosure that shielded the stairwell and elevator shaft from the elements and bowed his head.
"Jimmy..."
"I know." He hung his head still, blushing like a little boy caught doing something wrong for the hundredth time.
"How about you start with talking to her first, then tell your mother."
They sat by the muted light of the morning sky, Jimmy on the actual top step and Lois on the floor right by the door. A summer thunderstorm was raging outside making it impossible for Lois to smoke without getting drenched, so they were commiserating by the roof door instead. Lois' bare leg was exposed, reaching out to hold the spring loaded hatch at bay, and she was smoking as if offering incense to some unseen deity.
"Okay."
"Which one is she?" A true, clarifying question.
"Lily," this did not answer her question, based on Lois' expression, "Intern Number Five."
"Oh! Black hair, green eyes?"
"Yeah."
"Intern Number Five, mmm," she took a puff, Jimmy looked down shyly.
He waited a few minutes until the moment passed. He knew Lois didn't care but he had a lot of trouble talking about girls... women. He looked back up at her, the picture of casual disregard wrapped in brilliance. Lois was like the really cool older sister he never had. Or like that hipster senior girl who takes care of a lonely, awkward freshman that doesn't know a thing about life or himself.
Lois had played a similar role in his life, taking him under her wing his first day Upstairs, fresh from the suburbs, and protecting him from the lions in the bullpen. She gave him advice, spoke for him when he could not, and on occasion lent him her particular acid wit.
Despite her guiding him all this time, Jimmy's view of Lois had shifted over the last few years. As he grew older he began to spot and understand flaws in her, her weaknesses, or the things she did that Jimmy finally started to disagree with. She had indeed helped him come into himself, form and hold his own opinions, and he had the courage to mentally question many of her actions as the haze of hero worship passed. Thoughts like this occurred to him from time to time as he watched her in conversations like these.
While he would never have the courage to question her morals and lifestyle directly, he did now have the courage to voice things unexpectedly:
"Lois?"
"Mmm?"
"When was the last time you saw him?"
She looked in from the rain and directly at him.
"What do you mean?"
Lois looked surprised by his direct question; even he was surprised at himself for asking it. Jimmy looked at her, thought she looked older than he had ever seen her; it was odd, and he was distracted by it.
"Just the other night." Her voice was hesitant.
James Olsen thought he might have the singular pleasure of being able to ask Lois Lane almost any question and get a complete answer. She did not tell him her secrets, did not offer them like she sometimes did to Clark, but answered with secrets whenever the appropriate question came her way. It made him feel special; he was proud to be in her confidence.
"In all this time?"
"One or two other times. We didn't have much to talk about."
He noticed the past tense of this statement, but didn't push her.
"You're depressed."
"It's the weather."
"Um, it's more than the weather."
Lois looked in at him from the rain again, exhaling into the stairwell.
"You wouldn't have asked for these, Lois..." Jimmy reached down and picked up the manila envelope he had taken from the supply room last Wednesday. Reinforced with two pieces of archival board, this was a photo-mailer, which now contained a selection of photographs from a larger pool waiting at home on his kitchen table.
She held out her hand for the envelope, Jimmy pulled it back towards his body.
They stared at each other. The stairwell felt cool and humid from the storm.
"Nothing in there is going to make it worse, Jimmy."
"That's not necessarily true, you've never seen these before."
That got her full attention; she sat up and away from the wall, the cigarette now almost gone. She took a nervous drag.
"What do you mean?"
"Well," Jimmy looked down again, "You know how we both knew those pictures could never be printed?"
She nodded.
"These pictures could never exist, never mind be published..."
As he sat leafing through his Paige boxes in his apartment, Jimmy debated the very point that was swirling through his mind in this instant: would it harm or help Lois to see these shots? Taken at two different places on two different days, these pictures were Jimmy's best-kept secret. Seeing Lois glance furtively at the news monitors whenever Superman saved a South Asian villager or a mid-western housewife, Jimmy couldn't help the nagging guilt he felt for never having shown her these. Now, though, with Richard thirty feet away, Jimmy's casual words to Clark when he returned to the bullpen came back to him ("If you ask me, 'cause she'd never admit this, but if you ask me? She's still in love with you-know-who"). He had stared at his bedroom wall for an hour, in the midst of an ethical debate over the heart of one of his best friends, thinking of the way Lois looked at Superman and the promise she had made to Richard.
"Lois, do you remember waking up in the hospital after the building collapse on 3rd and Guilden?"
"Yeah, you and Clark were there, I couldn't remember a thing..."
Jimmy flipped open the envelope and slipped his fingers between the boards. His temporary courage was fast fading.
"This is, uh, what you missed..." he pressed his fingers to the emulsion and used the friction to pull the first photo from the collective out into the hard, fluorescent light of the stairwell. Lois was rubbing her cigarette out on the door, leaving her leg to get wet in the splish-splash of rain. He pulled the photograph out and sighed.
"I filed it under 'Agony,'" he held out the glossy paper between them, offering his work to her as a testament to a moment she never knew in consciousness.
The roof door slammed shut as Lois sat forward, aghast.
"Oh my god."
Rather than pinching the photograph in her fingers, Lois held her hands out like a monk taking an offering of food. Jimmy slid the paper into her grasp, watching indescribable emotions wash across her face. There, between them, lay Lois Lane, covered in blood from a very grievous head wound and spread across the lap of a tortured man, like the dead Christ across his mother's lap in the Pietà. Superman looked down at Lois with an expression of raw human pain; a hand in her hair, cradling her head, he was probably searching for a heartbeat in his mind. EMT workers were approaching from the other direction with an unusual amount of emotion on their faces at the scene they were witnessing, firefighters aiming jets of water in the background.
Lois let out a long breath, her eyes raking over the picture.
"He thought you were dead."
"I thought I was far enough away, Clark said the concrete that hit me seemed to aim straight at me, it was a freak incident."
"It was. I fainted."
Lois looked up and into him.
"I thought you were dead, too. He... he..." he gestured down at the picture, "He froze. He didn't move. He just fell to his knees and held you like that, I took the picture out of pure instinct, and then I fainted." He gave a small chuckle, trying to lighten the mood, the terror years behind them, the scar a small mark under her hair.
She didn't laugh. She looked back down.
"Jimmy, this is incredible. It's unreal, I can't really see that as me."
Arms at her sides, the blood literally pooled around her, dripping off his fingers and down his wrist. He looked so terrified, it hurt her to look at.
"Didn't you ask him what happened?"
"He didn't say a word," she sounded ponderous, "I mean I can see why he wouldn't..."
She looked at the picture. Jimmy looked at her.
"I was so afraid, Lois. Clark too, he was shaken up for hours. We waited for you to wake up in the hospital,” his words were echoing weirdly in the hollow stairwell, off steel and cinder blocks. He sounded scared.
"I know," she looked up and smiling at him, the surprise there replaced by affection, "I waited by your bedside a few times." She laughed, "We do a good job of staying out of trouble," she added with a dark humor.
They sat for a few moments before Lois took a deep breath and looked up and out of thought.
"What else?"
Jimmy picked up the envelope and pinched the side of another photo, pulling it loose of its comrades.
"This may seem a little repetitive but it's the first thing I saw when I came to and I was startled..."
Lois took the picture, touching only the sides of the paper. Jimmy liked that she appreciated a photographer's aversion to fingerprints.
"...I figure it was about five minutes later."
Superman stood powerless as the emergency workers attended to the grotesquely beautiful body between them; Lois was astounded to think she liked the way she looked in the shot. Her face was peaceful in near-death, the pose a testament to the rare beauty of the macabre. It spoke of some grander idea inside her, that if she was going to live a tabloid life she might as well have appropriate illustrations. She really admired Jimmy's instinct.
She found it difficult to look at the emotion on Superman's face and averted her eyes. Maybe another time.
She picked up the first picture and held it up to him, saying very seriously:
"This should be nominated for a Pulitzer."
"No, it shouldn't."
"Why not?"
"I've never seen a man so helpless, Lois. I could never show this to the world, he's my friend. And a part of me believes the press owes the good-doers of the world a favor, I figure we should protect them when we can, help them rather than expose their every fault for personal gain."
Lois looked up and into his eyes, truly interested.
"Like FDR," she said with a smile in her voice.
He laughed, "Yes, Lois, like FDR," the sarcasm dripped, he gestured down at Superman, the juxtaposition really quite funny.
"Did you take Journalism?"
"Nope!"
"Right, I didn't think so..." and she looked down at the photo.
"The next two are, uh, a bit different."
Lois handed over the photos and Jimmy switched them with another pair.
"This was about five years ago, right before he left. I came to your apartment to drop off photos you had wanted and I found the door open and you know I always just come in because you forbade me to ring your bell ever again after the time I..." he was rambling.
She nodded.
"...so I took these uh, by accident?"
The photo snapped in that way photo paper does when it's flicked in a hand. Jimmy looked away, blushing like a boy.
There were plenty of photographs in Jimmy's portfolio that featured Lois being carried away from disaster in Superman's arms, but none of her resplendent in his charm, staring into his face and bright-eyed. Here they were on her balcony, just back from flying, her hair mussed from the wind, a slight burn on her cheeks, rosy and white. He looked intense in that way that he did whenever they flew; she loved that look. He loved to fly.
Anyone would.
Pressed against each other, her arms around his neck and his hands resting on her waist, Lois saw for the first time what she looked like in Superman's arms. Certainly she had glanced their reflection in the mirrored wonder of Metropolis' modern skyscrapers, but this was a moment clear and still, an image she could truly focus on. Lois looked down their bodies and came to stare at her feet, resting on his boots and seeming so delicate compared to his larger, powerful stature. She had never seen herself look so small as she did wrapped in his arms; it sent unfamiliar desire though every synapse and blood vessel.
Lois stopped breathing as these thoughts swirled, as she thought about him this way for the first time in so long. How could she say no? If it came her way, the chance, would she say no?
"And this is about five seconds later, before I ran away," and he held about another stolen moment.
Now his eyes were heavy, their faces close. Lois' head was tilted up and towards him, she looked hesitant and open. As Lois gazed at the photograph she remembered this moment: in a few seconds from then his lips had almost touched hers, but his expression crumbled, and he buried his face in her neck to feverishly kiss the skin there instead. It was the closest he had ever come to actually kissing her. So many times they had come that close, but she knew from day one that he just would not touch her. Not really. He would hold her and look at her but never really touch her.
A longing more powerful than before rose in her; she cursed herself, cursed her actions and not being able to at least remember getting what she wanted in exchange for five years of grief.
She wanted him. Shit.
"So close, Jimmy. I was always so close," she said, full of regret, sounding miserable.
Jimmy was still looking at the concrete wall beside him, having averted his eyes in embarrassment.
"You mean he didn't kiss you?" He couldn't help it, that was surprising. He felt like a teenager with his big sister again.
He had only that time: the salty, sensitive skin below her jar, "Never."
"No way."
She raised an eyebrow at him, "Yes way? What, Jimmy?"
He must have a weird expression on his face, "That just doesn't seem likely."
"I almost think you're making fun of me."
"I'm not."
"You are. You think I'm a whore."
"What?" She had to be joking!
She laughed at him, he glared at her for fooling him again.
"As unlikely as it seems, and I know what you mean Jimmy, don't worry, it's true. Up until whatever turn of events led to..." she trailed off and looked across at him.
"Jimmy." Her voice was suddenly serious; she seemed to come to a decision in that moment. He grew concerned in a heartbeat, instinctively aware that this was important, "There's something I want to tell you, and something I need your help with."
"Ummmm..." A familiar hapless expression crossed his face.
"Jason isn't Richard's."
Jimmy blinked at her.
'Well, that doesn't make any sense.'
He continued to stare at her, and then that thought was followed by this one:
'I wonder who it could--- AHHHHHHHHHHHHH!'
"Oh no. Oh no. Oh no, Lois! Youjustsaidhe.. I mean... 'so close!'"
'Ahhhh!'
He wildly hoped his mother would never find out about this. She already didn't like Lois and didn't think such an important deception would help her image.
"I know what I said. But it doesn't change the fact that Jason is," she rolled her eyes, "Superman's."
Jimmy just stared at her, open-mouthed in shock.
"I've only known for three months."
Jimmy closed his mouth. She had anticipated his wonder. 'Okay, that's easier for me to deal with.'
"Wow."
"Yes."
"'Didn't have much to talk about?'"
"I had to do a lot of thinking."
"Right."
Beat.
"What do you need my help with?" he almost squeaked.
"I need you to know this in order to watch him in the bullpen when he comes in. I can't be there every second, and I need someone to bounce off of in the audience should he set something on fire."
Jimmy did squeak.
"He has super powers?!" It sounded like such a ridiculous question, and yet it was perfectly valid.
"We don't know. I mean, we do, but not really," she flapped her hand hopelessly and reached for another cigarette. Jimmy couldn't blame her.
"We can call him Superboy!"
He was expecting her to laugh, and instead got a cold look and a raised eyebrow; she flicked off her lighter and the warmth of her stare disappeared with the flame. The smile faded from his face as his attempt to lighten the mood hit way off target.
"Sorry."
"Humph."
Jimmy was abashed and looked away, sighing into the stairwell. She exhaled again, out into the rain, a white puff against a gray sky. Superman was dealing with a flooded river upstate, according to the news. Summer storms.
"You have a crazy life." He said it like a child wondering at a really cool thing, like an awesome video game. Regret filled his voice as he thought what a dork he was in front of her, with problems like asking his mom for permission to talk to a girl.
"Oh I know, Jimmy," she reached for the card slider and kicked open the door with a stiletto heel, a frank manner of mind and body. "It's like a sci-fi soap opera," she took a puff, "It's fucked up." Lois snapped back into 'cool big sister' mode and away from guilty secrets of forbidden affairs and unsatisfied passion. She leaned back against the wall and assumed her original posture.
"But I'm used to it. Even madness can become comfortable. It's funny, these last five normal years seem so unreal now; it was almost silly to think I could live that way..."
Jimmy had also sensed this feeling recently, but nothing on the scale of Lois' experience. He thought suddenly of her love affair with Superman, of the fact that they had a son together. It changed everything, all his ideas about Lois' recent thoughts and actions, the fact that everything was whispering of a renaissance of their tryst. It changed everything.
"Wow. No wonder you're depressed." He folded his hands and looked down, unable to look at her while he brought this up.
"I'm not depressed. Why should I be?"
"Well, um, no reason. None, nope, unless um, feeling torn between two men who love you? Could be a reason..."
"Love me?" She looked cold again, like the woman on the other side of an internationally renown keyboard.
"I, uh, think He loves you. It's the instinct," he waved his finger around his head, as if indicating some genius he could access because he was a good photographer. He was really just trying to play it off and feeling bashful because of what he wanted to said next:
"It's probably why he never kissed you, he was too shy..."
"Too shy?" her skepticism echoed around them.
"He's shy. Like me. He just can't kiss you, I understand it somehow..." his voiced trailed off, suddenly wishing he were invisible. He pointed down at the picture still resting on Lois' knee, as if Superman's face could speak of his fearful and hesitant nature in that instant. He was looking at Lois like she was the only thing he had ever seen. Jimmy suddenly wondered why he really left five years ago.
A gust of cool wind blew in off the roof; storms were influenced by the drafts in the warm city air and would often shift unexpectedly in the updrafts around the large Planet building. A cool mist blew against their faces and Lois turned her head to look outside, startled but hopeful looking.
Pity surged through him; he was aghast at the fact that Lois had looked expectantly towards a breeze thinking Superman was there, beyond the shelter.
Lois looked dazed, "Christ, never mind, I'm delusional, look at me! I'm a wreck!" She went from calm denial into temporary hysteria in the space of these words, Jimmy could recognize it now. She didn't really do anything about it, just sat there panicked but silent next to the door. He could see the strain behind her eyes, worse after this weekend. Something must have happened to push her nearer the edge of her control.
They paused.
"This is serious, isn't it, Lois?"
"Yup!" she answered quickly, taking a long drag, trying to calm down.
Jimmy felt suddenly awkward, like he was uncomfortable in his body, aware of the weight of this secret and the fact that she confided it in him.
"Who else knows?"
"Only him." Him with a capital 'H.'
He sat fiddling with the hard corner of the photo-mailer.
"And Lex Luthor."
"What? Ohmygod, Lois, what?!" Jimmy looked around quickly, as if Luthor was sneaking up the stairs behind him.
"Like I said, you get used to a certain level of--"
"Never mind!" Jimmy panicked, trying to stop more insanity from leaving her mouth, "Does He know that?" his voice shook.
"Yes," she sighed and looked out at the roof, "He does."
He was trying to think of something to think about while his mind processed the implications of a five year being the most tempting hostage on Earth for the use of infinite evil.
"Jason's half-alien!"
Obviously.
It was NUTS!
Lois raised the last bit of her cigarette at him like she was toasting a champagne glass, took a sip of smoke and threw the butt on the roof where it shattered into sparks against the wet stone.
Jimmy closed his eyes and pinched his nose.
"I hate Mondays."
She let out a sharp, singular, "Ha!" at him.
"And here I thought there was nothing more shocking in the world than you becoming a mother..." Jimmy had always wanted to tell her this. He was just feeling crazy enough to finally do it.
"Not even me getting engaged?"
"Good point. That too." Jimmy nodded at the floor, still pinching the space between his eyes.
"Does this seem relatively less shocking, that I should bear the most significant child on earth?"
"In the universe," he corrected miserably.
"In the universe? Ha!" Lois suddenly held up her middle finger to the world outside, giving reality The Finger and blowing smoke into the atmosphere, "Fuck the universe. I've had enough." Lois pulled her foot in quickly as she stood in a swift motion, the door slamming shut just as she reached her full height. She stretched her lithe body without modesty or care and turned towards the elevator with her purse slung over her shoulder.
The shift was so unexpected and the slam of the door so loud that Jimmy was rendered deaf for a few seconds, in shock and still on the floor. It was so like her just like to turn off in a millisecond, to never notice the other person in her conversations.
He tried to snap out of it and moved quickly to join her by the doors, his breath loud in the quiet left by the rain. When Lois made up her mind, she was devoted mind and soul, even if it was just to wait for the elevator. She stared at the hard steel doors, different than the antiqued brass ones on every other floor, and threatened to melt them straight through. Jimmy knew she wasn't angry with him; she was just riled about everything else. And depressed.
-----
Clark looked up into brown eyes and smiled at Lois.
"Good morning, Smallville, nice tie."
"Good morning, L--"
"Busy tonight?"
"I don't think so--"
"I'll pick you up at eight." And she slid off his desk and into Richard's office before Clark could really process her on this dreary Monday. He watched her slink between the desks towards Richard and away from him, happy to drink her in after two days without her. The blinds were open and his eyes followed her through the door without realizing it.
Therefore, he was sure to see the way Richard caught her around the waist and into him, his arms coming to rest around her and a smile on his face. While anyone in the bullpen could have seen them, no one noticed but Clark, no one appreciated the way she let herself fall into him, what it meant when she played with her men and trailed her fingertips along their arms...
She bobbed up on her toes and caught Richard's mouth in a kiss; Clark closed his eyes and held his breath, biting his lip, before anything unexpected happened. He didn't want to set anything ablaze in rage, but he was sorely tempted to. He saw her in his arms instead and swiveled back around in his chair, damning himself for having looked to begin with.
'She isn't yours.' He was staring at his monitor, trying to remind himself of this, begging his rationale to stop its dangerous, raging thoughts about Lois. This jealousy and lust, the anger in him lately, they way he caught himself looking at her...
He realized yet again that he had pulled his hearing all the way in and looked around the busy bullpen, currently in silence inside his mind. His senses washed back out into the room and he sat back, trying not to think about pressure against his lips.
-----
"Hey CK!"
It was only a second later that Jimmy noticed the pained expression across his friend's face.
"Are you okay?" he voice sounded hesitant. Today had been hard enough already.
"Um," Clark took his fingers out of his ears, "I'm fine. What's up, Jimmy?"
"I think Lois is depressed."
"She's depressed?" he snorted and blew out his mouth, the same as saying, 'sheesh!'
When Jimmy looked back at today in three weeks, he realized that Clark's snort was the most significant thing he heard all day. He nodded his head behind Jimmy and the younger man turned around, looking for whatever Clark was trying to point out.
Lois was nibbling on Richard's neck... he thought... under the guise of looking over his shoulder from behind his computer chair. It was Monday morning and the cleaning service always left the blinds open from over the weekend. Jimmy panicked and turned around back towards Clark.
"Ah!"
Jimmy stood puzzled and shocked. Clark's statement didn't make any sense. He would have expected the emphasis to be on the other word.
"Um."
Clark sighed, "She's too much for me, Jimmy, I can't stand it."
Jimmy sought out Clark's eyes and engaged him in concern; he was completely at ease with Clark, so much more so than Lois, and was sure Clark felt the same way. That's why they were best friends. Jimmy sensed something very odd in that statement, and was suddenly both worried and obvious about it, sure that Clark would elaborate.
"What do you mean?"
"Nothing. Well. She's hard to keep up with," he sounded like a man back-peddling.
Jimmy knew Clark very well, and knew this was true but not what Clark had initially meant. He sensed that Clark was now uncomfortable with him, and really had been ever since he walked over. What was bothering him?
He thought of Lois, doing inappropriate things to Richard mere minutes after confessing her liaison with another man, and the real reason Richard thought he had a son. Richard! Jimmy felt really sorry for Richard. Could that be bothering Clark? Did he know something? Maybe Lois had told him something else, another piece of the puzzle, and it weighed on him like it did on Jimmy.
He watched Clark watch Lois furtively past him, his magnified eyes drawn to Richard's office despite himself. Whatever was bothering Clark had to do with Lois, and she already had the fate of her family and her impossible lover on the line. He hoped that whatever he was picking up from Clark wasn't too bad; Lois could only survive so long.
Jimmy could now feel tension all about him: an interplay of secrets, emotion, and desperation between his friends. Even Clark was wearing thin, but from what he didn't know. Jimmy looked around the bullpen, wishing someone else could appreciate the weather. Jimmy felt stormy today.
"You always manage."
"What?" Clark pulled his eyes away as he turned his face up towards Jimmy, confused.
"You always manage to keep up."
Clark's face darkened; he shot what Jimmy had to assume was an angry glare towards the fireball that was Lois Lane, doing lord knew what to Richard, as Jimmy refused to turn around ever again.
"Only just barely, Jimmy, even at my fastest," he stared, lost in thought, biting his lip. "Only just barely."