Chapter Four: More Than You Bargained For
Title: L'esprit de l'escalier
Note: The rest of the series can be found here.
Author: taro_twist (aka Tairona)
Timeline/Fandom: post-Superman Returns
Pairing: Lois/Clark
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: DC and the WB own everything! I'm just temporarily messing with their creations ...
Spoilers: Superman Returns, Superman II, and I guess Superman: The Movie, to be on the safe side
Word Count: 2,147
Chapter Four: More Than You Bargained For
Lois stared at Clark for a long moment. She had a feeling that her mouth was hanging open. After he had asked his question, her first instinct had been to pick up the soda can she had dropped, lob at his head, and to demand, Why should I have waited? But she restrained herself; he couldn’t have been expected to know that his question would strike a nerve, and she wasn’t sure that she could explain to him why it had.
How could I ever explain not remembering an entire relationship? Lois wondered. Trauma-induced amnesia? Claim that I was drunk the entire time? Announce that, à la Men in Black, the CIA now has mind-erasing gizmos? She nearly laughed at the thought, the tension within her slowly dissipating.
Clark, however, seemed to have caught a glimpse of the anger that had initially flashed through her eyes, and was now furiously back-pedaling, trying to soften the impact of what he had just said.
“N-not that I think … I’m not saying that you should have waited, especially not for-not for five years,” he was saying, echoing Lois’s own thoughts. “As you … I mean, as you said, he l-left you … and-and you haven’t even told me what else he d-did, or didn’t do, or did but sh-shouldn’t have done and … I’m not making any sense, am I?”
“Clark-“
“Lois, I just meant … if someone I loved disappeared suddenly, my initial reaction wouldn’t be … anger. I think-I think I would be worried that something had-had happened to them-“
“I never said that I wasn’t worried,” Lois protested. “And who said anything about being angry?”
Although, as she spat out that question, she realized that even though she hadn’t explicitly said that she was angry, a two year old could have figured out that she was. It was in her tone, the way she set her jaw, the way she was sitting now-on the edge of the chair, gripping the arm rests with both hands as though she was about to tear them off.
“I-never mind,” Clark was shaking his head. “I-I shouldn’t have asked. You had every reason to … no, I just … I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t even know what I was trying to say.”
“No, tell me, Clark,” Lois insisted, forcing herself to sit back and relax. “What are you trying to say? Don’t worry about offending me. I won’t bite your head off. Promise.”
Clark gave her a wary look, as if she was the Big Bad Wolf inviting Little Red Riding Hood to come share a bed. And there was something else in his expression besides reluctance, but she couldn’t quite make out what it was. Inexplicably, it made her think of a … jam … she had gotten into several years back. She had been working on a piece concerning the triad syndicates in Metropolis's Chinatown, and as her luck would have it, she had ended up being held hostage in the back room of a fish market, along with the owner of the store, a young married couple, and a handful of tourists. At one point, the young husband had decided to play hero, and had failed. As punishment, one of their captors had tried to force the man to shoot his own wife. The look on his face as the gun was placed in his hand … Clark’s expression reminded her of that.
Of course, Superman had swept in seconds later and diffused the mafia-fish market situation. And at the moment, Clark was looking as though he’d like someone to sweep in and save him, but from what, Lois couldn’t have begun to guess.
“You said you were in love with … Charlie,” Clark finally said. “And yet, you moved on to Richard so fast that you thought that Jason was his son. It just … I’m not … I’m not saying that you weren’t justified in doing that, but it’s kind of … strange. Like maybe … you didn’t t-trust Charlie all that much? Or maybe … you weren’t … really … in l-love with him?”
Clark was frowning now, as though he had just confused the hell out of himself. He shook his head again.
“I’m sorry, Lois. I-I don’t know what I’m … saying. And this-this isn’t even what you w-wanted to talk about,” Clark laughed nervously, running a hand through his messy black hair. “So, um, what … what happened once you found out who-who Jason’s father really was?”
“No, I trusted him,” Lois said instead, ignoring her partner’s attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “And I did love him-more than he’ll ever know. But I was never really sure that he loved me.”
“What?” Clark asked after an unusually long pause. He was giving her a look that was not so much deer-caught-in-the-headlights, but more deer-caught-in-the-headlights-of-a-tractor-trailer-carrying-flammable-cargo-and-going-ninety-miles-an-hour-on-a-cliff-side-hairpin-mountain-road. Something in his eyes and in the tone of his voice made Lois feel that he had gotten a little too immersed in her story about Superman … er, Charlie. Well, he’s probably the type who lives vicariously through others, Lois decided, shrugging it off. Or something like that.
“Clark, have you ever …” Lois started up again, but stopped just as quickly. She had been about to ask Clark whether he had ever been infatuated with someone who was unattainable, but immediately thought better of it. Although she knew he would never say it if it was true (and maybe she was just being arrogant to even think this), she was afraid that she might have been his unattainable someone at one point. And we don’t want to go there …
“Charlie and I weren’t exactly a conventional couple,” Lois finally said, getting straight to the point. “We didn’t have a title or an official ‘status.’ We didn’t spend time together the way normal people do-“
At least, I don’t remember it if we did.
“He helped me a lot-“
Saved my life a few dozen times.
“Sometimes we’d go out-“
Flying, that is.
“But mostly, we were sort of … reciprocal contacts. He gave me exclusive-“
Interviews. Leads on stories. And more interviews.
“-information on certain, um, government issues. And I let him know about-“
The underbelly of Metropolis. Where his help was needed.
“-other stuff. Really, it was mostly a working relationship, and I don’t think I would be able to tell you what else we were if I tried. Usually, we barely even touched, or kissed-“
And I can only assume that we kissed, considering I can’t even recall a peck on the cheek. That little moment on the rooftop aside, for all I know, Superman might not even be the kissing type. A guy who’s used to doing things at super speed might skip foreplay altogether …
“Half the time I was around him, I felt like a little girl with a crush, like the connection we had was just a product of my overactive imagination. I could barely believe that it was real. And when he disappeared-yes, I was worried. I was worried sick. I stretched my sources to their limits, trying to find out what had be-become of … h-him …”
Lois came to a halt and took a deep breath to steady her shaking voice. Glancing up at Clark, she found that he had averted his eyes in the way you might turn away from the sight of an open wound, and was now gazing down the hallway towards the vending machines.
She realized that this was the first time she had ever really talked to anyone about Superman’s departure. Of course, she had talked to people about his disappearance before-that had been inevitable, since for a few weeks, it had been the only thing on anyone’s mind or tongue. She had never told anyone how it had affected her, though, or how she had dealt with it. And in finally opening up about it, five years after the fact, she was surprised to find that she was awakening all of the emotions that she had felt then; she might have buried them, but they had stayed as fresh as they were on the day when she’d realized he might never be coming back-and they were overwhelming her all over again.
“As for anger-I wasn’t angry at first,” Lois continued once she felt that she could do so without breaking down. Even with the rumors that he had gone in search of Krypton, I still didn’t believe that he’d left without saying a word. “Really, I wasn’t angry until he came back, because it wasn’t until then that I realized he had run off to begin with. But I did feel foolish, like I had been living in a dream world, and his disappearance was like a slap in the face, telling me to wake up. Honestly-and pardon the cliché-but if I had followed my heart, I might have waited forever. But you know me …“
“Nothing if not logical,” Clark filled in the blank for her, smiling weakly.
“Yes,” Lois nodded. “And in spite of what I wanted to do, I couldn’t ignore my mind telling me that I’d never had anything with him in the first place. Whenever I’d start wishing he was around, this little voice in my head would ask me how I could delude myself into think that a man who-well, he was a really … popular guy, to say the least-and I couldn’t stop wondering how I had managed to convince myself that he loved me above anyone else. Before he left, I was so caught up in his presence-his aura-that I had never stopped to think about it. But once he was gone …
“Clark, I had already waited so long for something solid to come out of this … promise of a fantasy. I felt ridiculous. Listen to me! Even now, if I just talk about him I start sounding like an insecure high school freshman, pining after the captain of the football team. And that’s not me. I felt so weak. Every part of my brain was telling me that I was an idiot, that he’d never cared for me, except as a friend. So to make up for that, I started working overtime to convince myself that I didn’t need him-“
Hence the editorial. That wasn’t anger. Just me trying to win an argument with my less rational side.
“And then when Richard came along … yes, part of me turned to him because he reminded me of Charlie, but most of me turned to him because I needed to … get my feet back on the ground. I needed to prove to myself that I was a mature adult who could be in a real relationship, and that I wasn’t some flake who was going to waste her life chasing after a fictional romance.”
Lois exhaled and leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees and her chin resting in the cup of her hands. She wondered whether Clark had even heard the last bit of her rant-he was staring straight ahead at the wall in front of him in a way that would have given the most catatonic of schizophrenics a run for their money. His expression had gone way beyond deer-caught-in-the-headlights-of-anything, and could probably now be described as deer-that-has-gotten-run-over-and-turned-into-roadkill. After a long moment, though, he blinked, and broke the silence.
“Gosh … I never would have thought ... that ...” he murmured in the general direction of his shoes.
“That was a little more than you bargained for, huh?” Lois forced a laugh, and after missing a beat, Clark joined in, although his laugh sounded a touch more hysterical than fake.
“But to make a long story short, in the end, it was almost better that I didn’t wait,” Lois pressed on, speaking fast, just trying to wrap up what she had started now. “As you know already, it was his choice to leave, and on top of that, I just found out that he had … tried breaking up with me before he left-”
If going all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on me can be equated with “breaking up.”
“-I just hadn’t known about it. So I don’t regret it that I moved on so quickly,” Lois concluded. “Maybe it wasn’t the greatest choice at the time, but given everything I know now, there wasn’t any other choice I could have made.”
And don’t even get me started on how confused I would have been about my pregnancy had I actually waited, Lois wanted to say, but she decided to leave that particular detail out.
Note: The rest of the series can be found here.
Author: taro_twist (aka Tairona)
Timeline/Fandom: post-Superman Returns
Pairing: Lois/Clark
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: DC and the WB own everything! I'm just temporarily messing with their creations ...
Spoilers: Superman Returns, Superman II, and I guess Superman: The Movie, to be on the safe side
Word Count: 2,147
Chapter Four: More Than You Bargained For
Lois stared at Clark for a long moment. She had a feeling that her mouth was hanging open. After he had asked his question, her first instinct had been to pick up the soda can she had dropped, lob at his head, and to demand, Why should I have waited? But she restrained herself; he couldn’t have been expected to know that his question would strike a nerve, and she wasn’t sure that she could explain to him why it had.
How could I ever explain not remembering an entire relationship? Lois wondered. Trauma-induced amnesia? Claim that I was drunk the entire time? Announce that, à la Men in Black, the CIA now has mind-erasing gizmos? She nearly laughed at the thought, the tension within her slowly dissipating.
Clark, however, seemed to have caught a glimpse of the anger that had initially flashed through her eyes, and was now furiously back-pedaling, trying to soften the impact of what he had just said.
“N-not that I think … I’m not saying that you should have waited, especially not for-not for five years,” he was saying, echoing Lois’s own thoughts. “As you … I mean, as you said, he l-left you … and-and you haven’t even told me what else he d-did, or didn’t do, or did but sh-shouldn’t have done and … I’m not making any sense, am I?”
“Clark-“
“Lois, I just meant … if someone I loved disappeared suddenly, my initial reaction wouldn’t be … anger. I think-I think I would be worried that something had-had happened to them-“
“I never said that I wasn’t worried,” Lois protested. “And who said anything about being angry?”
Although, as she spat out that question, she realized that even though she hadn’t explicitly said that she was angry, a two year old could have figured out that she was. It was in her tone, the way she set her jaw, the way she was sitting now-on the edge of the chair, gripping the arm rests with both hands as though she was about to tear them off.
“I-never mind,” Clark was shaking his head. “I-I shouldn’t have asked. You had every reason to … no, I just … I shouldn’t have asked. I don’t even know what I was trying to say.”
“No, tell me, Clark,” Lois insisted, forcing herself to sit back and relax. “What are you trying to say? Don’t worry about offending me. I won’t bite your head off. Promise.”
Clark gave her a wary look, as if she was the Big Bad Wolf inviting Little Red Riding Hood to come share a bed. And there was something else in his expression besides reluctance, but she couldn’t quite make out what it was. Inexplicably, it made her think of a … jam … she had gotten into several years back. She had been working on a piece concerning the triad syndicates in Metropolis's Chinatown, and as her luck would have it, she had ended up being held hostage in the back room of a fish market, along with the owner of the store, a young married couple, and a handful of tourists. At one point, the young husband had decided to play hero, and had failed. As punishment, one of their captors had tried to force the man to shoot his own wife. The look on his face as the gun was placed in his hand … Clark’s expression reminded her of that.
Of course, Superman had swept in seconds later and diffused the mafia-fish market situation. And at the moment, Clark was looking as though he’d like someone to sweep in and save him, but from what, Lois couldn’t have begun to guess.
“You said you were in love with … Charlie,” Clark finally said. “And yet, you moved on to Richard so fast that you thought that Jason was his son. It just … I’m not … I’m not saying that you weren’t justified in doing that, but it’s kind of … strange. Like maybe … you didn’t t-trust Charlie all that much? Or maybe … you weren’t … really … in l-love with him?”
Clark was frowning now, as though he had just confused the hell out of himself. He shook his head again.
“I’m sorry, Lois. I-I don’t know what I’m … saying. And this-this isn’t even what you w-wanted to talk about,” Clark laughed nervously, running a hand through his messy black hair. “So, um, what … what happened once you found out who-who Jason’s father really was?”
“No, I trusted him,” Lois said instead, ignoring her partner’s attempt to change the direction of the conversation. “And I did love him-more than he’ll ever know. But I was never really sure that he loved me.”
“What?” Clark asked after an unusually long pause. He was giving her a look that was not so much deer-caught-in-the-headlights, but more deer-caught-in-the-headlights-of-a-tractor-trailer-carrying-flammable-cargo-and-going-ninety-miles-an-hour-on-a-cliff-side-hairpin-mountain-road. Something in his eyes and in the tone of his voice made Lois feel that he had gotten a little too immersed in her story about Superman … er, Charlie. Well, he’s probably the type who lives vicariously through others, Lois decided, shrugging it off. Or something like that.
“Clark, have you ever …” Lois started up again, but stopped just as quickly. She had been about to ask Clark whether he had ever been infatuated with someone who was unattainable, but immediately thought better of it. Although she knew he would never say it if it was true (and maybe she was just being arrogant to even think this), she was afraid that she might have been his unattainable someone at one point. And we don’t want to go there …
“Charlie and I weren’t exactly a conventional couple,” Lois finally said, getting straight to the point. “We didn’t have a title or an official ‘status.’ We didn’t spend time together the way normal people do-“
At least, I don’t remember it if we did.
“He helped me a lot-“
Saved my life a few dozen times.
“Sometimes we’d go out-“
Flying, that is.
“But mostly, we were sort of … reciprocal contacts. He gave me exclusive-“
Interviews. Leads on stories. And more interviews.
“-information on certain, um, government issues. And I let him know about-“
The underbelly of Metropolis. Where his help was needed.
“-other stuff. Really, it was mostly a working relationship, and I don’t think I would be able to tell you what else we were if I tried. Usually, we barely even touched, or kissed-“
And I can only assume that we kissed, considering I can’t even recall a peck on the cheek. That little moment on the rooftop aside, for all I know, Superman might not even be the kissing type. A guy who’s used to doing things at super speed might skip foreplay altogether …
“Half the time I was around him, I felt like a little girl with a crush, like the connection we had was just a product of my overactive imagination. I could barely believe that it was real. And when he disappeared-yes, I was worried. I was worried sick. I stretched my sources to their limits, trying to find out what had be-become of … h-him …”
Lois came to a halt and took a deep breath to steady her shaking voice. Glancing up at Clark, she found that he had averted his eyes in the way you might turn away from the sight of an open wound, and was now gazing down the hallway towards the vending machines.
She realized that this was the first time she had ever really talked to anyone about Superman’s departure. Of course, she had talked to people about his disappearance before-that had been inevitable, since for a few weeks, it had been the only thing on anyone’s mind or tongue. She had never told anyone how it had affected her, though, or how she had dealt with it. And in finally opening up about it, five years after the fact, she was surprised to find that she was awakening all of the emotions that she had felt then; she might have buried them, but they had stayed as fresh as they were on the day when she’d realized he might never be coming back-and they were overwhelming her all over again.
“As for anger-I wasn’t angry at first,” Lois continued once she felt that she could do so without breaking down. Even with the rumors that he had gone in search of Krypton, I still didn’t believe that he’d left without saying a word. “Really, I wasn’t angry until he came back, because it wasn’t until then that I realized he had run off to begin with. But I did feel foolish, like I had been living in a dream world, and his disappearance was like a slap in the face, telling me to wake up. Honestly-and pardon the cliché-but if I had followed my heart, I might have waited forever. But you know me …“
“Nothing if not logical,” Clark filled in the blank for her, smiling weakly.
“Yes,” Lois nodded. “And in spite of what I wanted to do, I couldn’t ignore my mind telling me that I’d never had anything with him in the first place. Whenever I’d start wishing he was around, this little voice in my head would ask me how I could delude myself into think that a man who-well, he was a really … popular guy, to say the least-and I couldn’t stop wondering how I had managed to convince myself that he loved me above anyone else. Before he left, I was so caught up in his presence-his aura-that I had never stopped to think about it. But once he was gone …
“Clark, I had already waited so long for something solid to come out of this … promise of a fantasy. I felt ridiculous. Listen to me! Even now, if I just talk about him I start sounding like an insecure high school freshman, pining after the captain of the football team. And that’s not me. I felt so weak. Every part of my brain was telling me that I was an idiot, that he’d never cared for me, except as a friend. So to make up for that, I started working overtime to convince myself that I didn’t need him-“
Hence the editorial. That wasn’t anger. Just me trying to win an argument with my less rational side.
“And then when Richard came along … yes, part of me turned to him because he reminded me of Charlie, but most of me turned to him because I needed to … get my feet back on the ground. I needed to prove to myself that I was a mature adult who could be in a real relationship, and that I wasn’t some flake who was going to waste her life chasing after a fictional romance.”
Lois exhaled and leaned forward, her elbows resting on her knees and her chin resting in the cup of her hands. She wondered whether Clark had even heard the last bit of her rant-he was staring straight ahead at the wall in front of him in a way that would have given the most catatonic of schizophrenics a run for their money. His expression had gone way beyond deer-caught-in-the-headlights-of-anything, and could probably now be described as deer-that-has-gotten-run-over-and-turned-into-roadkill. After a long moment, though, he blinked, and broke the silence.
“Gosh … I never would have thought ... that ...” he murmured in the general direction of his shoes.
“That was a little more than you bargained for, huh?” Lois forced a laugh, and after missing a beat, Clark joined in, although his laugh sounded a touch more hysterical than fake.
“But to make a long story short, in the end, it was almost better that I didn’t wait,” Lois pressed on, speaking fast, just trying to wrap up what she had started now. “As you know already, it was his choice to leave, and on top of that, I just found out that he had … tried breaking up with me before he left-”
If going all Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind on me can be equated with “breaking up.”
“-I just hadn’t known about it. So I don’t regret it that I moved on so quickly,” Lois concluded. “Maybe it wasn’t the greatest choice at the time, but given everything I know now, there wasn’t any other choice I could have made.”
And don’t even get me started on how confused I would have been about my pregnancy had I actually waited, Lois wanted to say, but she decided to leave that particular detail out.