Archive of Our Own ^beta

When she was ten Lois made a promise to herself. Sworn on the half risen moon and the stars she couldn’t see but her teacher promised where there. She makes the promise while looking out her bedroom window. Perched uncomfortably on the windowsill because Lucy is asleep in her bed, teartracks drying on her cheeks and Lois’ pillow.

It was the first time in hours she’d been quiet, and Lois is pretty sure she doesn’t really understand what’s going on. Just knows that her sister is sad and their dad hasn’t uttered a word and that their mom didn’t come home from the hospital with them this time.

She’d cried when they’d had to leave the room, and Lois had been the one to take her perpetually sticky hand in hers and drag her away, while their dad had just stood there.

At the end of the bed.

Unmoving.

Not even Lucy’s cries seemed to reach him, so Lois knew hers never would.

He hadn’t said anything on the drive home either. Had just kept both hands on the wheel and his eyes on the road and ignored every question Lucy had asked, leaving her to try her best to answer them in the only way her ten year old self knew how. It had taken multiple stories and badly sung songs and thirty straight minutes of stroking her hair before she finally wore herself out enough to fall asleep.

Lois had taken extra care when extracting herself from her bed, and for a moment she’d just stood in the middle of her dark room, staring at nothing and everything. She had been so excited to swear her new green sweater this morning, had picked it out with her mom because it matched the soft green hat she had taken to wearing all winter. There’s dried tears on the shoulder and a hot chocolate stain on the cuff of her right sleeve now, and she picks at a loose thread as she looks out into the backyard.

She almost doesn’t notice her dad, standing in the shadows by the flowers they’d planted that summer along the border of the fence. They’d each picked something out from the store on a rare afternoon when they’d all been together and Lois can almost picture the way the sun had been bright and their laughter had been loud and the feeling of dirt under her nails. She doesn’t know how long she sits there in her window, watching as her dad destroys the flowers her mom had taken such care of, even in the middle of winter, even when she could barely walk. But she can’t look away.

When he finally turns around he glances up at her window, eyes locking for a single heartbeat with his daughter before he’s looking away and Lois hears the backdoor slam shut. Lucy turns over in her sleep, mumbling something that only makes sense to four year olds, before settling again. She waits, hoping maybe, that he’ll come into her room now. That he’ll hug her, hold her close as she cries until it’s her turn to fall asleep.

But she never hears his steps on the stairs, and after a while Lois finally moves, changes into pajamas and crawls into bed behind her baby sister, pulling her close and trying not to cry.

And she promises, in that moment, that she’s never going to fall in love.

She has her first kiss when she’s fourteen and snuck out of her bedroom window when the moon is high in the sky.

He’s a little older and has his licences and they drive away from the base in Bakerline her dad is currently stationed at. Long gone is the house with the bedroom she’d helped paint and the glow in the dark stars on the ceiling and the pretty flowers along the fence.

They drive until the base is a distant memory and there’s nothing but open space around them. Lois pulls a half empty bottle of vodka from her bag and they pass it back and forth between them as they sit in the back of his car. There’s laughter and too wide smiles and hands fumbling over clothes and buttons. When she presses her lips against his he tastes of cheap alcohol and toothpaste, there’s too much teeth and spit and her hand is going numb from where it’s stuck between their thighs.

When they pull apart there’s a flush in both their cheeks and he’s leaning forward again before she can fully catch her breath. There’s still too much spit and her fingers are tingling even as she threads them through his hair. She jumps, pushing him back when a light is suddenly shining through the window, making stars dance in front of her eyes and sending her heart speeding.

“Out. Now,” a voice says, and Lois feels the blood drain from her face in recognition.

“Shit,” she mutters, detangling herself from her first kiss to get out of the car. She doesn’t wobble as she stands up, but her head does feel like it’s spinning as she raises her hand to shield her eyes from the light of her dads flashlight, still shining directly at her. “Hi dad.”

He’s still in his uniform, minus the coat and with the top buttons undone, but there’s no mistaking him for being a general. She knows because she can hear her date swearing under his breath behind her, and she does her best not to roll her eyes, he knew exactly who she was, he can’t be surprised about this turn of events. She hears him moving around, a door opening and shutting, and she thinks he’s getting out of the car to stand next to her, to face her dads wrath together.

Instead the sound of an engine roaring to life breaks the tense silence, and it’s only her stepping backwards in surprise that saves her from being clipped by the wingmirror as he takes off with speed.

“Coward!” she shouts, taking a half step forwards like she can chase him down. A hand wrapping tightly around her wrist is the only thing that stops her, and she turns her glare up to her dad, who just glares right back.

“Car. Now.” And he starts pulling her towards the vehicle without letting her speak.

“Seatbelt.”

She’s used to the one word sentences, it's the main way they communicate whenever Lucy isn’t around, but she still hesitates for a second to follow his order. There’s still enough alcohol in her system to make her want to push back about manners and ‘please’s’ and ‘thank yous’. But she’s also not drunk enough to know that’s not a good idea, plus, she knows he’d probably make her walk back to base.

They don’t talk on the drive back and Lois knows there’ll be shouting once they’re behind closed doors. About being a disappointment and being let down and needing to grow up. It’s a conversation — shouting match — they’ve had before. Many times.

With her head against the window, she lets the vibrations of the car lull her into a false sense of comfort like it had when she was a kid, watching rain drops race down glass as her parents talked quietly in the front about dinner plans. Maybe in another life she never felt the need to sneak out her room in the dead of night with a boy she barely liked to feel something, where she didn’t play music so loud the windows rattled and she couldn’t hear people yelling her name, where she didn’t pick fights at school for a chance of her dad showing up.

Maybe in that life there'd be music quietly playing right now and they’d be talking about mindless things as they went to see the stars.

From the corner of her eye she looks at her dad, hands tight on the wheel and eyes straight ahead, the only time he acknowledges someone is when he nods at the guard on duty at the gate. Lois pretends to be asleep to not see the pitying or questioning looks.

The shouting doesn’t start straight away when they get in the house, he waits until the front door is shut and she’s halfway between it and the kitchen. So at least she’s a step closer to a glass of water for her pounding head. She barely listens to him, already knowing what he’s going to say, and knowing when she’s meant to chime in with rebuttals and snark. There’s a glass of water in her hands by the time he’s sighing, shaking his head in disappointment. It's a look she knows well.

“I’m just glad your mother isn’t here to see the way you’re acting. Go to bed, Lois.”

It stings, the way it always does whenever he mentions her mom. But she doesn’t flinch anymore, doesn’t try to argue back, just nods and walks past him towards the stairs. If she looked down between the spindles she knew she’d see him still standing on cracked linoleum, head hung and hands fisted at his sides.

Maybe, if she was a better person, a better daughter, she’d turn back to hug him, to apologise, to try and fix the relationship between them. But even at fourteen she knows some things are beyond fixing, and some things weren’t supposed to be her responsibility.

She walks up the stairs, pausing outside Lucy’s doors and listening until she hears the tell-tale sound of her snores before moving to her own room, already knowing she’s not about to wipe eyeliner or mascara off tonight.

She’s fourteen and her dad hates her and she had her first kiss with a boy who wouldn’t stick around, and she doesn’t cry, but as she lies in her bed she wonders if maybe she’s the problem.

On her twenty-first birthday Lois Lane decides maybe she’s ready to try dating, properly. She’s three shots of tequila and four vodka-cokes into the night when she decides this, looking across the bar at a girl with the prettiest shade of blonde hair that’s curling over her shoulders and with lips painted a strawberry red that keep smiling at her. She really wants to know if they taste like strawberries too.

“God, just go talk to her already!” her friend Abby shouts, nudging her arm until she’s no longer leaning against the bar and pushing a new drink into her hand.

With a slight stumble, Lois starts walking, pushing past people until she’s on the other side of the bar and the blonde is in front of her. Somehow she seems even prettier up close in her strappy silky top and highwaisted shorts that show an obscene amount of tanned thighs, and Lois is suddenly a little self-conscious of the cut up band t-shirt and jeans that she’s wearing. But then she’s smiling at her, pushing curls over her shoulder and making room for her to stand at the bar too.

“Hi, I’m Lois,” she says, moving easily to fill the space and feeling proud of how little her words slur.

“Maggie,” she says back, leaning over until their shoulders brush, just a little.

At some point between ordering more shots and forcing everyone in their vicinity to sing happy birthday to her, they end up outside. The front of the bar is less crowded and noisy, and the glow from the streetlights makes the glitter of Maggie’s eyeshadow sparkle like how she’s always pictured stars. They’re giggling, fingers linked as they sway to distant music and car horns. The smile on her face feels wider than it has in months, and she’s not thinking about essay deadlines or internship interviews or if Lucy will pass drivers ed.

She pulls lightly on Maggie’s hands until there’s little space left between them, eyes darting to lips and before Lois can make the first move she’s being kissed. Quickly and messy and her back is against something metal, but she doesn’t mind, the cold bite helping to ground her to the moment even as hands slip into hair and along hips searching for skin.

Lois doesn’t know how long they stand there making out for, but she does know exactly when it ends.

“What the hell Maggie!?” A voice cuts through the bubble they’d been in, literally when a hand reaches out to grab the arm trying to work its way down the back of Lois’ jeans.

“Gina! Babe, what are you doing here?” Maggie asks, and it's the pet name coupled with the way one of her arms is still wrapped around her waist in a mildly possessive manner that lets Lois know she’s been used for something she wants no part of it.

Stepping back she holds a hand up, using the other to readjust her t-shirt, “Sorry I didn’t—” is all she gets out before they’re both ignoring her by shouting at each other.

As she walks away, heart beating too fast and cheeks too hot and head spinning, she hears something about being on a break and pay back, before the shouting fades into the sound of heavy guitars and bass trying to shake the floor. She finds Abby in line for the bathroom, swiping the half drank blue drink from her with ease and finishing it in one. For her part Abby just blinks at her, eyes a little hazy and reactions a little slow.

“What happened to the pretty blonde?”

Lois shakes her head with a small sneer, “People in relationships are the worst.”

The thing that makes it worse, she thinks, is that her parents had been happy, before. She can remember laughter in the kitchen and singing at Christmas and her dad twirling her round the living room to opera.

She remembers them fighting too, remembers whispering stories to a toddler Lucy to distract her from slamming doors and screamed words she was too young to understand. There had always been flowers on the kitchen table in the morning and dads favourite meal for dinner. Lois had known they weren’t exactly perfect, but they’d been happy, had been in love, and her dad used to smile.

The day her mom died seemed to break him, and Lois knew she never wanted to feel like that.

She’s too much like him — people would tell her so all the time when she was younger, thinking it was a compliment, to be like the man who rose up the ranks and protected his country and seemed to have everything perfectly managed. They never knew about the way he stopped talking to her, how he only seemed to care about Lucy, about his job.

They didn’t know that turning out like Samuel Lane was maybe her worst nightmare.

Because her dad had been happy once, and now they barely talked.

She meets Jackson six months after she starts working at the Daily Planet, while she's out chasing a story that leads her somewhere she really shouldn’t be. He’s working part-time as security for a lab that Lois knows is dumping its hazardous waste in a local river and poisoning wildlife and human life alike.

He hauls her out of the building and onto the street and she’s careful to not let him see the manila folder stuffed badly into her bag, and he waits until she’s already walking back to her car before calling about a break in, which she thinks is nice of him. And then she never thinks of him again.

It’s two months later when the story is published and she has her first official by-line at the Planet under her belt that she sees him again. Waiting in the lobby with a take out cup in hand, leaning against the front desk and getting in the way of people trying to leave for the night. Cat makes a low whistle of appreciation as she sees him, all broad shoulders and bright eyes and sunglasses hiding in dirty blonde hair — maybe, looking back, that should have been her first sign, it wasn’t even sunny outside, too much cloud cover and intermittent rain — making to move towards her. There’s a nudge to her side that sends her stumbling forwards a step, and all she gets chance to do is glare at Cat as she winks back before he’s in front of her with a blinding smile.

“Lois, right?” he asks and she nods in response, crossing her arms over her chest.

“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch your name before you threw me out of that building,” she replies with a slightly sardonic smile and head tilt.

“It’s Jackson,” he says easily, like the vague insult doesn’t bother him, or he just didn’t catch it. “I read your article, I’m glad I forgot to search you properly before you left. Guess I was just too distracted by how pretty you are.”

“Oh,” she blinks, thrown for a moment by the turn in conversation. “Thank you?”

It comes out more like a question than she intends, and she's not even sure if she’s thanking him for the compliment on her looks, the article, or him being apparently shit at his job.

“Did you fancy getting dinner with me sometime?” he asks, and she watches the way his fingers flex on his cup and his feet shuffle ever so slightly, her eyes narrowing as she thinks about it. It’s been a while since she went on a date, what’s the worst that could happen?

“Okay, sure,” she agrees, and the smile on his face makes her feel like she’s made the right choice.

“Great! Saturday night? There’s a great Italian place a couple of blocks away, meet here at 7?”

For some reason she can’t quite explain, Lois finds herself agreeing to a second date before the first is even over. They have fun. She laughs at his stories about friends and places she doesn't know. They talk about childhoods tinged with death and complicated families and what they want to do with their lives.

He kisses her at the end of that first date, lingering at the entrance of the subway even as she can distantly hear wheels on tracks. She has to lean up a little to wrap her arms around his neck, and then he’s walking her backwards until her back meets brick and they keep kissing.

Lois misses her train, but can’t really complain when it means they get to make out for an extra half hour.

Two dates turns into three into five into them dating — officially, exclusively — for six months. He introduces her to his friends and she does the same. Puts up with teasing questions at work from Jimmy and Cat, avoids facetime calls with Lucy and doesn’t mention how he seems to change his job every month. They don’t celebrate their anniversary, but Jackson books them a weekend away for her twenty-eighth birthday, and she plasters on a bright smile when her dad and Lucy show up with a cake.

It’s nice. There’s no fighting and she only works for a couple of hours in the morning before everyone else wakes up. It’s probably the nicest weekend that the Lanes have spent together in years.

So of course it all has to come crashing down when they get back to Metropolis.

“I think I’m going to join the army,” Jackson says as he watches her carry her bag down the hallway to her bedroom, knocking into walls as she goes. God, she really needs to get a bag with wheels. She almost misses what he says, so busy thinking about suitcases and the relaxing bath she’s going to take as soon as she’s dumped all her clothes in a pile for future her to deal with.

“What?” she asks when his words finally register, turning to stare at him.

And then he starts talking, about needing a purpose and wanting to help and how her dad had mentioned he had ‘connections’ in recruiting and how he was ‘strong and a good worker, he’d move through basic in no time’. She just nods, focusing on the slight ache she’s started to feel in her shoulder from where she’s still holding her bag.

“Okay.” she says and turns around.

They fight that night, loudly enough to cause one of her neighbours to knock on the door with concerns, Lois sends them away with a fake smile and even faker reassurances. Because all of a sudden Lois can see exactly how this relationship will play out. He’ll join the army and his priorities will change and the things he wants in life will change and he’ll realise what he wants, she can’t be. She’s known enough men and women in uniforms to know how it works, and she knows Jackson well enough by now to know that he’ll want that picture perfect life with a wife who’ll follow him across the country, the world.

She knows herself well enough to know that will never be her.

He crouches in front of where she’s sitting on the coffee table, holding her hands tightly in both of his and looking at her with something she thinks could almost be love. Somehow that scares her more.

“I’m always going to want you babe, just as you are. A job won't change that. I love you.”

And for a moment, just one shining heartbeat, she believes him.

Ten months later Lois is sitting on her coffee table again, only Jackson is standing in the doorway now, talking at her about something. But she has a deadline and two more paragraphs she needs to edit before they can go to dinner. She’d told him so, told him 8 o’clock, specifically, because she knew it would give her plenty of time to finish and get ready.

It wasn’t her fault he’d shown up at 6 with expectations.

“God fucking damn it Lois, are you even listening to me!?” He demands, suddenly in front of her and snatching the laptop off her knee and holding it above her. “Oh course not. Why would you listen to anything your boyfriend has to says when you could be writing about the fucking infrastructure of care homes,” he sneers the last couple of words, looking down at her with raised brows.

“Hey!” She shouts, standing up and trying to reach for her laptop back, but he just holds it higher up and stepping back. “I told you I just needed to finish it and then we could go! It’s not my fault you apparently can’t tell the time.”

He slams the lid closed and Lois has to stifle a gasp, images of cracked screens and lost work flashing through her mind.

“I’m not the one who’s always blowing dates off because she thinks her words are going to change the world,” he says with an eyeroll that has her taking a step back like he’d hit her.

Maybe she’d missed a couple of dates in the sixteen months they’d been dating, but she’d always texted him first, always made sure he knew. And it’s not like he also hadn’t blown dates off with the excuse of work. The difference was she actually meant work, he meant drinking with his new buddies. It’s the end of his sentence though, that really causes her to move, eyes narrowed as she crosses her arms over her chest and stands up straight.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“I mean come on Lois, do you really think your little articles are ever going to make a difference? No one even reads the news anymore, or cares about which millionaire is fucking up this week. At least I’m trying to make a real difference, I’m going out there, risking my life,” he shrugs, looking down at her with what he probably thinks is a reassuring smile, “It’s a cute hobby to have, the writing, but do you really think it’ll do anything long term?”

It almost makes her want to laugh, almost as much as it makes her want to cry. She’d known this would happen, she just hadn’t expected it to go like this.

“Maybe they don’t make a difference to you, but they make a difference to the people in this city. They deserve to know the truth about the people and things that go on, and I’ll always be willing to tell them that. I think you should leave,” she says, proud of how steady her voice sounds.

“Lois,” he starts, lowering his arms and she takes the opportunity to grab her laptop back, hugging it close to her chest.

“Just go.”

For a moment she thinks maybe he’ll argue, that he’ll fight her on it. Then he shakes his head and heaves a sigh, “Fine, whatever.”

But he still doesn’t move, just looks down at her with a furrowed brow and lips pulled tight into a line, “We could have been really happy together y’know? I could have made you happy. But you make it really hard to like you sometimes, let alone love you, did you know that?”

She doesn’t respond, hands growing numb from how tightly she’s gripping her laptop and eyes staring at the bookcase over his shoulder, trying not to cry.

“Goodbye Lois.” He says when it becomes clear she’s not going to respond.

She waits until she hears the door shut, and then waits a little longer after that too, his words playing on a loop in her head as she sways slightly in place.

Hard to love.

Hard to like.

Hard to love.

Hard to like.

A shaky breath forces its way past her lips as she lets her knees give out and take her to the floor. Her laptop is still hugged tight to her chest, like a lifeline as she starts to float away from herself. The words are still replaying in her head as she lets herself cry.

“Oh gosh I’m so sorry! I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

Are the first words Lois hears as she steps off the elevator on a Tuesday morning into the sun lit floor of the Daily Planet. There’s people loitering around the reception desk, waiting for Clara, who is incredibly sweet but amazing at small talk, to be done on the phone, who are all momentarily distracted by a guy accidentally knocking into one of the interns whose arms were full of files.

Said files now spread across the floor of the bullpen, loose pages floating across the hardwood. She rolls her eyes as she walks towards her desk, stopping to pick up a couple of pieces of paper that had blown her way before they could make an escape through the elevator doors.

“Here,” she says as she walks past the intern — she’s pretty sure his name is Paul. Or maybe Patrick? They go through so many interns she’s guilty of not remembering all their names until they make it to the four month mark. Glancing at the new one, still crouched on the floor collecting files, she doesn’t think she’ll be needing to remember his name anytime soon.

“Thanks Lois!” P-name — Peter? — says with a smile.

“No problem,” she nods with a small smile and is just about to walk away, to reach her desk so she can start writing up the quotes she’d gotten from the witness’ about their cities most recent metahuman hero, when a different voice catches her off guard.

“You’re Lois Lane.” It’s not quite a question, but something in the tone of his voice has her stopping and looking back at the intern on the floor, only he’s no longer on the floor. He’s standing up, messenger bag swinging wildly on his shoulder and glasses sitting crookedly on his face. He’s tall, a lot taller than she’d thought from her quick glance before, with an ill-fitting suit and hair that looks like he’d been nervously running his hands through and a bright smile that he’s directingly straight at her. Cute, in a nerdy kind of way.

“I am. And you are?” she asks, trying not to tap her foot impatiently, settling instead for clenching and unclenching her fingers on the strap of her bag. She swears she sees his eyes flicker down to the movement but it’s too quick for her to be sure, her own eyes watching as he stretches out a hand towards her.

“I’m Cla—”

He’s cut off before he can finish introducing himself by Perry shouting from his office.

“Lane! Kent! My office, now!”

She’d forgotten Perry said the new guy would be starting today and she furrows her brow, looking around for who it could possibly be before she focuses back on Cla— as he hands the files he’d picked up over to P-name. And then he’s smiling at her again, gesturing for her to lead the way.

“You’re Clark Kent?” she hisses before they reach the office door.

“Yeah, it’s really—”

Idlely, as they enter Perry’s office and he starts talking at them, she wonders if she’ll ever get to hear Clark Kent finish a sentence.

“Good, you’ve both already met. Saves me making the introductions,” Perry starts, already sitting back behind his desk littered with old mugs, “Kent’s going to be shadowing you for the week. Show him around the office, tell him where we hide the good pens, send him out for coffee, make him do your busy work. I don’t care what, just show him the ropes around here.”

“What?” she demands, looking between Perry, who’s already turned back to his computer, and Clark, who’s shuffling his feet and hunching into his too big suit jacket with a slight flush in his cheeks. “I don’t have the time to show a rookie around Perry! I’ve deadlines and sources to tack down and research to do, get someone else to do it.”

“I’m—” Clark starts, pausing a little at her glare but swallowing and going on, “I’m pretty good at research.”

Oh she really liked it better when he didn’t finish a sentence.

“Perfect. Lane, put hom to work. Kent, we'll get you started on some fluff pieces once all the paper works signed off. Now get out of my office.” Perry says, glancing up at them and back down, a clear dismissal that makes her grit her teeth.

“Fine,” she bites out, not waiting to see if Clark will follow when she turns on her heel to leave, restraining herself from stomping or slamming the door.

For his part, Clark doesn’t say anything as he follows her out of Perry’s office and over to her desk, not even when she throws her bag on to her desk chair and turns her glare up at him. She kind of hates that she has to crane her neck to see him properly, even if he is hunched down. One of his hands is wrapped around the strap of his bag, the other tapping restlessly at his thigh.

“I really am pretty good at doing research,” he offers and Lois can feel her shoulders dropping, just a fraction. It’s probably a little unfair of her to take her bad morning out on him.

“I need information about the hiring practices of these three banks for a piece about fraud,” she says, scribbling some names on a post-it note and holding it out to him.

He squints at her messy writing, but nods, dimples in his cheeks as he smiles. She’ll deny it forever, but it’s the dimples that break her last ditch of annoyance and make her heave out a sigh.

“I’m not a tour giver, but Jimmy here,” she starts, stepping around him — and she’s only slightly fascinated by the way he easily follows her movements — and grabbing the back of Jimmy’s chair to spin it around, his smiling face giving away that he’d been listening all along, “He’ll be happy to show you around and tell you all the office gossip you might need.”

“Jimmy Olson, the Planet's best photographer,” he says with a grin and gets up from his chair to shake Clark's already outstretched hand.

“Clark Kent. Did you take those photos at the warehouse fire last month?” he asks and Lois takes it as her cue to finally retreat to her desk. Jimmy will be a much better welcoming committee than her, and it’ll give her a chance to get some work done before she inevitably needs to babysit him during research. She has very high standards for information.

For a couple of hours Lois forgets all about new reporters and annoying bosses and eating, focused entirely on the story she’s working on about the mystery superman who keeps flying in and saving the day. He’d been spotted four times in the last two weeks, once at a house fire, two would be kaiju attacks and once to help a school bus get to school on time. There were mixed reactions on that one, a lot of the kids had been pissed they didn’t get to miss gym.

No one had been able to catch him for a couple of questions, like what he was doing, or what the hell his name was. All she was working with was a couple of blurry photos, action shots that made it hard to tell anything about him other than his love of primary colours, and eye witness reports, she’s worked with less, but it was still frustrating

At some point a coffee appears next to her keyboard, and half a sandwich shows up at what must be lunch time, and she when finally does glance up from her screen she catches Cat’s eyes who raises her hand with a wink.

“Thank you,” she mouths and gets back to work, swapping instead to the article about corruption and fraud in the Metropolis' banks.

When she manages to resurface from her work again the bullpen is quite, desks around her empty and shadows replacing the streaming sunlight, but it’s the stack of files being carefully placed on her desk by a very large hand that her eyes trace up a long arm and broad shoulder to the face of Clark Kent, who’s smiling at her shyly.

“Here’s the information on the first bank Loi- Miss L- Lois,” he says, stumbling over her name in a way that shouldn’t be as endearing as it is. “I’ll work on the other two tomorrow. Unless you need them tonight?”

“If I said yes would you offer to stay all night to gather it?” she asks, using the opportunity to turn in her chair to look at him better and stretch out the sore muscles of her back.

He pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and gives a small shrug, “Yes.”

Lois blinks at him, caught off guard by the simple answer and by how much she believes him, despite this literally being their third conversation. Ever.

“Do you? Need it tonight I mean?”

For a fraction of a second she considers saying yes, just to see if he really means it. Then the moment passes and Lois shakes her head at him, pulling the stack of files closer so she can start looking through them.

“You’re all good, it can wait ‘til tomorrow rookie,” she gives him a tight smile and hopes he gets the hint.

He takes a step away before he looks back at her, tilting his head a little as he says, “I’m not actually a rookie journalist, by the way. I mean, this is my first job at a paper this big, but it’s not my first job.”

“I know,” she says, and lets out a small laugh at the confusion on his face, “Perry let me skim through your file and work samples after he said he was hiring you. You’re not bad. Not great, but,” she shrugs.

“That… feels mildly illegal somehow,” he mutters, a light blush in his cheeks but he’s smiling too.

“Probably. But what can I say, I’m incredibly persuasive when I want to be.”

“That I can believe.”

She almost thinks she miss hears him, but the red in his cheeks deepens and he’s suddenly rubbing at the back of his neck and turning away, bumping into the side her desk as he does and apologising as he moves across to his own desk — the one at the side of hers, and diagonal from Jimmy’s, she notes.

“Hey Kent,” she calls out after she’s watched him gather his things and start to leave, the way he pauses midstep to look at her almost makes her want to laugh again, instead she says, “Sorry I was kind of a bitch this morning. Just, a lot going on at the moment.” She gestures vaguely at the chaos of her work around her.

Clark frowns, shaking his head as he moves his bag higher up his shoulder, “I didn’t think you were — I —” he starts, letting out a sigh before continuing, “You’re a busy person and I’m happy to be bossed around in any way that can help. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

He’s gone before she can come up with a response and Lois is left blinking in confusion over what had just happened. Jimmy pulls her out of it by rolling his chair into hers, joining her in staring at the closed elevator doors.

“So, what do you think of the new guy?

She shrugs, “I don’t know. Ask me again in four months if he’s still here.”

“Marking it in my calendar!” Jimmy shouts.

She first meets Superman a month after he’s first spotted in the city and three weeks after she’s published her first article about him. It had been a puff piece that did nothing but recount what he’d done and asked a bunch of questions no one had the answers to and gave him a name that had apparently caught on. She’d put all her effort into it, because she was Lois Lane and she never half-assed her work, but it was subpar at best, even by her standards.

If she could just have the chance to interview him, ask him a couple of questions, get some kind of read on who he was. But so far he’d managed to avoid every reporter from every newspaper, which honestly, made her feel a little better.

The fact Jimmy was the first person to get a clear photo of him helped a little too, and the fact he was actually answering to the name Superman, the name she’d given him, helped more.

The irony is, that she’s not even looking for an interview when she meets him, officially. She’s just trying to get home after a long day from an even longer week. Her car has been stuck at the mechanic since Wednesday which means she’s stuck taking the bus. They’ve only made it seven stops when something hits them, or they hit something, sending the bus spinning across the road and into a building.

Her head ricochets off the window and a body falls into her from behind and the side. There’s a ringing in her ears and it takes her a moment to understand what’s happening, blinking at the haze of smoke around her. She can see steel beams out of the cracked window, the inside of an office, which makes no sense, because wasn’t she on the bus?

All at once everything comes back into focus when rubble starts to fall outside.

People are screaming and crying around her, someone is calling out a name over and over again. She shakes her head, wincing at a pain in her neck and something wet that slides down her cheek, and when she goes to wipe it away her fingers come back red, leaving her frowning in confusion. Movement next to her draws her attention away from it and to the woman in the seat next to her who’s cradling her arm close to her chest and crying.

It becomes easy after that to not think about her own injuries and to help the people around her instead. All the years of spontaneous first aid lessons from years of too many mosh pits suddenly coming in handy. She’s just helping a teenager apply pressure to a cut on his leg when the back doors are ripped open and bright fluorescent light floods through, for a moment illuminating Superman in shadows before he’s moving, helping people that can walk get out and assessing those that can’t.

Lois lets out a breath she hadn’t realised she’d been holding, tension leaving her shoulders as she sags forwards against the side of the seat where she’s kneeling on the floor, suddenly aware of something sharp digging into her knees and the pounding in her temple. She has her eyes closed when a hand on her shoulder, large and warm and comforting, brings her back to the present. To the sight of Superman’s bright blue eyes looking down at her with concern, lingering on the side of her face and she catches an aborted hand movement, like he was going to reach out.

“Can you walk, Miss Lane?” He asks, concern coating his words.

She blinks up at him, taking a moment to let his words register, and then she’s nodding her head, flinching at the pain it causes and closing her eyes tight. “Yeah, yeah I can walk.”

He helps her stand up, and it’s only as she’s insisting she needs to get her bag that she realises they’re the last ones on the bus. She must have really hit her head if she didn’t notice the chaos of everyone else being evacuated. She manages to walk off the bus without his help, and there’s a paramedic already waiting for her, ushering her over to a stretcher so they can check her injuries.

She draws the line at having to go to the hospital, already knowing how long it will take and that they’ll insist on her staying and she just doesn’t have time for it. They grumble and advise against it, but give her some butterfly stitches and insist on her calling someone to pick her up and stay with her to watch for signs of a concussion.

It’s how Superman finds her when the chaos has died down some and she’s waiting on her stretcher for Cat to arrive. He’s still holding her bag, she notes, looped over his shoulder like he’d forgotten it was there, with smudges of dirt on his face and suit, but his hair still seems to be perfectly styled, single curl brushing his forehead in a way that makes her unreasonably annoyed.

“Your bag,” he says, carefully taking it off his shoulder and placing it next to her knee, eyeing the rips in her trousers and the faint traces of blood as he rests his hands on the metal railing.

“I’m fine. Mostly. A possible concussion, but I’ve had worse,” she says with a shrug that she pretends doesn’t send sparks of pain down her spine. From the way his eyes narrow she thinks he still notices and looks like he’s about to try and convince her to go to the hospital. So she does the thing she knows best, and starts asking questions.

“Where are you from? Originally, I mean. We’ve been calling you a metahuman, but are you? Normally there’s some kind of trace of a metahuman we can find, and with all those powers you have, there should be something, but there’s…nothing. I’ve looked, everyone’s looked.”

He blinks at her and maybe it’s the concussion talking but she swears she sees his lips twitch in an almost smile.

“I should be going,” is all he says and Lois acts on instinct when she reaches out to grab his hand before he can move away and he freezes, eyes looking from their hands to her face.

“Please,” she implores, “You have to answer something. It’s been a month! The people of this city, th-the world, deserve to know what you want? Why are you doing all of this?”

For a moment she thinks he won't answer, that he’ll just fly away and avoid all questions once again. Instead he surprises her by slowly extracting his hand from hers and gesturing to her bag, “May I?”

She nods slowly, brows pulled together in confusion as she watches him look through the pocket on the outside until he pulls out her tape recorder with a satisfied sound.

“Ask me again. That last question,” he says, handing her the recorder.

So she does, pressing record and holding it in the air between them and looking at his face, his eyes, as he replies.

“I don’t want anything from anyone. I just want to help whoever I can. No expectations Miss Lane.”

When it becomes clear that that’s all he’s going to say she goes to turn the recorder off, but her finger hovers over the button as she tilts her head to look at him with a sudden realisation.

“How do you know my name?”

For a second his eyes widen and the tips of his ears grow red and then he’s shrugging with that wide charming smile that everyone keeps talking about.

“Seemed rude to not know the name of the talented writer who gave me my name,” he says, already starting to float in the air. “I particularly enjoyed that piece you did about the union busting at the docks.”

And then he’s gone, flying off to save someone else probably, and leaving her gaping at the sky with the after images of his smile in her mind.

“Was that Superman? Giving you an interview!?” Cat demands, suddenly at her side and trying to look at her recorder.

“I—” she starts, shaking her head to try and clear it as she looks over at her friend. “Sort of?”

Two days later she publishes the first official quotes from Superman in the paper, but a week and a half after the bus crash Clark Kent of all people walks into the bullpen with half an article written from him interviewing Superman. Her bumbling co-worker who’s been working at the Planet for all for 5 weeks, who she saw apologise to the printer just last week, somehow managed to be the first person in the world to get the whole life story of the apparent alien.

They know that about him now, because of Clark.

She spends the rest of the week alternating between glaring at him and tearing his article apart in a bid to feel less annoyed.

It helps, a little.

The coffee he buys her every morning for the rest of the week helps more.

The day before her thirtieth birthday Lois thinks she’s gotten away without having to plan anything to celebrate. Cat has been out all week and Jimmy’s never been one to organise something and Lucy is out of the country and she’s pretty sure Clark doesn’t even know.

It’s not that she doesn’t want to celebrate her birthday, it’s just that she’s been busy, and everyone in her life has been busy and she just doesn’t get the appeal of celebrating turning a new age. It’s not like turning thirty is going to suddenly negate all the things she fucked up when she was twenty-nine or twenty-eight or twenty-seven, sure it’s a big number, but it’s still just a number.

She’s not interested in going out for some fancy meal where they all pretend to be more sophisticated than they are, or going out clubbing until dawn in a last ditch attempt to hold on to a youth she’d said goodbye to at twenty-five. What she really wants to do is get through the work day with minimal crises and then go home for her favourite take out and a bath. She might even break out of the fancy bath bombs she’d been saving.

All her plans come crashing down at 5:48pm when Cat appears next to her desk, short skirt and tight top and a bag in hand that Lois knows from experience is full of makeup.

“No,” she says, eyes wide as she looks at the blonde before turning back to her screen and hoping she gets the hint. Lois clearly used up all her luck for the day when she got the last cinnamon roll in the breakroom this morning.

“Come on Lane! It’s your thirtieth! We have to do something to celebrate!” she says.

“My birthday’s actually tomorrow so…” she trails off hoping maybe she can push it off and then escape before Cat shows up.

“You and I both know you’ll find a way out of it if I give you 24 hours notice. Just a couple of drinks, no food, no presents, no karaoke,” Cat says and hurries to tag on when Lois raises an eyebrow, “Promise.”

“Do I have much choice?” she sighs, finally looking away from her screen and turning her chair.

“Four drinks and then you can go home, I pinky swear,” Cat holds up her little fingers, eyes wide behind glasses.

“Two drinks. And we don’t go to the place with the dart boards this time.” They both spare a glance at Jimmy who’s loitering by the printer; her favourite going out bag was still covered in puncture marks from his terrible aim.

“Agreed!” Cat explains, jumping on the spot and pushing her bag into Lois’ face, “Take what you need, we’re leaving at 6 sharp!”

And then she’s gone, surprisingly fast in her heels, leaving Lois to roll her eyes with a sigh. She probably could have said no, could have found an excuse about work or being tired, and Cat would have pouted but not pushed. Much. Checking the time Lois guesses she has maybe 15 minutes before Cat forces her to leave, which gives her a good 10 for more work.

“Jimmy! We’re heading out!” Is the only warning she gets that Cat is coming back, which works out fine for her as she’s just zipping closed her bag of makeup after only using the cherry flavoured chapstick that she’s pretty sure is just in there for her.

“I’ll meet you there!” He shouts back, still at the printer, only now he’s talking to one of the girls from layout and Lois rolls her eyes, already knowing who he’ll be arriving with.

She glances around the bullpen as they leave, most people having already left for the day, and Steve chases after them, already blabbering about their location options, like either of them has any say in it. Her eyes linger on Clark’s desk, empty since lunch time, and feels a little disappointed that he won't be joining them, but she shrugs the feeling off as the elevator doors shut.

The bar that Cat’s picked is somewhere new, with dim lighting from exposed bulbs and too many neon signs of random words. There’s booths along the back wall and high top tables randomly spaced out along the edges of the dance floor. It’s still fairly quiet, only a couple of people at the bar and a group in the back corner arguing about the rules of pool, so the three of them grab a booth, sending Steve to the bar for the first round.

“How’d you hear about this place?” she asks, sliding across the leather seat until she’s somewhat in the middle.

“It’s one of the places I checked out a couple of months ago for that piece on the death of nightclubs. Thought it would be perfect for your birthday because it stays pretty chill even when it’s busy,” she says with a shrug and Lois is saved from finding a response to the strangely sweet gesture by the return of Steve with drinks in hand.

The place has filled up a little more by the time Jimmy arrives, but the redhead from the office isn’t with him, Clark is. And she chooses to ignore the way her heart speeds up a little at the sight of him, the way it makes her want to smile. It’s a perfectly normal reaction to seeing a friend you hadn’t seen since lunch.

“Hey! Sorry we’re late, there was this whole thing with the toner and paper was everywhere, but we’re here now! What does the birthday girl want to drink?” Jimmy asks all in a rush and flailing arms, Clark has to step back to avoid being hit in the shoulder.

“Ameretto sour for me,” she says, tapping the rim of her nearly empty glass with a nail.

“Surprise me,” Cat says with a wide smile that on anyone else she’d think was flirting

“Didn’t know it was your birthday too,” he replies, and Lois picks to tune their bickering out as Cat slides out of the booth to follow him to the bar. The chances of them coming back with shots doubles when she notices Steve join them.

“If I escape out the back door when they come back with shots you’ll cover me, right?” she asks Clark as he joins her on her side of the booth, somehow managing to keep a distance between them despite his size, something she was always surprised by.

“Do you think they’ll believe kidnapping or alien abduction more?” he jokes, tilting his head with an exaggerated furrow on his brow.

“Oh kidnapping for sure. Do you know how many people I’ve pissed off?” she laughs and is rewarded by Clark shaking his head with a huff. He was always strangely troubled about her ability to anger the wrong people. It would be sweet if it wasn’t annoying. She decides to take pity on him by changing the subject.

“So, where you been all afternoon? Chasing Superman down at the bridge collapse?”

For the most part Lois has gotten over her annoyance at Clark seemingly being the only person who can get the flying primary coloured man to stay still long enough to answer any questions, even if those questions are open ended and vague. She was choosing to believe that he just felt sorry for Clark and wanted to give him a boost, ego or morale, she didn’t care to think about.

“I uh —” he starts, pushing his glasses up his nose as he shifts in his seat, “I was doing some research on that new flea market that’s been popping up by the overpass and just happened to be in the area when the bridge collapsed.”

“You’re good at that. Being in the right place at the right time,” she muses, tracing the rim of her glass with one finger. She can feel him looking at her, and wonders what he sees.

“Is that a bad thing?” he asks and she turns her head to look at him, thinking of all the times he just so happened to be around the corner or in the next room when she needed something, and shakes her head.

“No, not a bad thing.”

She smiles at him and blows out a breath when he smiles back, the one that puts his dimples on full display and makes her feel warm down to her toes.

“I hope it’s okay that I’m here by the way. Jimmy told me to come, and I know we’re not exactly out of work friends, but he said it would be fine and I got you this,” he says quickly, reaching into his jacket pocket and pulling out a badly wrapped box in brown paper. “It’s nothing exciting, but Ma would be disappointed if I’d shown up empty handed.”

He slides the box across the table to her, and Lois isn’t sure where to start with what he’s said. He doesn’t think they’re friends? Sure, she’d been a bit standoffish at the start, and maybe she teased him about his writing and refusal to swear, but surely he knew she was just joking? Looking at him, all earnest eyes and fidgeting fingers and unruly curls, she wonders if maybe she’s not made it clear. Carefully, she pulls the gift closer to her, letting her fingers trace along the seams in the paper and too much cellotape.

“Clark, we’re friends,” she says slowly, “The teasing and sarcastic comments is how I show affection.”

“Oh,” is all he says and she watches, mildly fascinated, as a blush spreads from his neck up to cheeks and to his ears.

“Unless you don't want to be friends, then I mean we can—” she’s quick to say, but he cuts her off before she can finish, talking over her just as quickly.

“No, no, I want to be friends.”

The smile he gives her now is brighter than the lights above them, and it makes her smile in return feel brighter too.

It’s not until she finally makes it home, after more than two drinks and a round of shots, too much laughter and finding out Jimmy is just as bad at pool as darts, after Clark has insisted on escorting everyone to their respective modes of transport, that she remembers her gift from Clark.

It falls out of her bag after she throws it on the kitchen counter, shoes already abandoned in the hall, coat by the door. There’s a slight tear in the wrapping as she picks it up, from his bad wrapping skills or her careless handling of it, she can’t say. With the nail of her finger she widens the tear until it was easy to pull the pale purple box free. There’s nothing marking it on the outside and a light shake results in something rustling inside. Curious, she pulls the lid free and can’t help but laugh at the silver tissue paper and individually wrapped hard candies nestled inside. Pulling one out she unwraps it with one hand while reaching for her phone with the other, popping it into her mouth around a smile.

Caramel, her favourite.

Snapping a photo of the open box on her kitchen counter, she finds Clark in her recent texts and sends it to him with a simple thanks. His response is almost instant and she laughs, shaking her head in amusement at the amount of emojis he uses. Apparently he’d been holding back while he thought they weren’t friends, she had no idea what she’d been missing.

The last time Lois had been sick, couldn’t get out of bed, food wouldn’t stay down, sweating through everything she owned, sick, there had been no one to look after her.

Jackson had been busy and Lucy was on a different continent and she hadn’t wanted to bother any of the people she worked with, and if they’d asked, she’d told them she was fine. She was an adult, she was more than capable of looking after herself.

She’s on day three of her self assigned bed rest, out of tissues and down to her last Advil and anything to eat that involved more than 2 minutes in the microwave. For the first day she’d managed to do some work, half hearted edits and outlines that she’d sent to Perry, whose only reply had been for to get some damn rest. It was only when the words started going out of focus and her fingers began to ache that she’d given in, closing her laptop and abandoning it to her living room sofa before retreating to her bed. And not really leaving it since.

Which had been mostly fine until she’d started running out of things.

“Fuck sake,” she croaks to no one, breaking off on each word as a cough tears through her chest and leaves her body sore. For a heartbeat when she’d woken up that morning, she’d felt better. Had hoped the end of her seclusion was in sight, and then she’d sat up and her head had spun and the shivers had started and she’d had to stumble to the bathroom to dry heave.

Without sitting up now — the cause of her last bout of dizziness she was sure — she searches along the empty side of the bed for her phone, finally pulling it out from under a pillow and squinting at the screen, the bright 2:28 glaring back at her. That was earlier than she’d thought, and meant that all the people she could possibly call would still be busy at work.

Which would be fine. She could last a couple more hours and then ask for someone to drop off some meds, maybe some food. She checks the time again, blinking at the 2:34 before throwing it back into her bed.

She’s just contemplating if she should just go back to sleep or try finding something to eat — surely there’s some stale half eaten bag of chips in the back of a cupboard? — when there’s a knock on her front door. Lois half sits up, thinking maybe she’d imagined it, she’d had a fever in the night, she vaguely remembers, when the knock comes again, this time accompanied by a voice faintly calling her name. With a groan she pushes herself up, dragging the blanket from her bed with her as she stumbles down the hallway to her front door. She struggles with the lock for a minute, not quite able to get her fingers to cooperate with her brain.

The sight of Clark standing on the other side should confuse her, she thinks, but in that moment all it does it make sense. Of course Clark would be on the other side of her door. There’s a bag in his hand, messenger bag slung over his shoulder, suit jacket draped over the arm he still has half raised in the air to knock again.

“Clark?” she rasps, slumping against the door frame and blinking at him slowly.

“Hey Lois, figured you might need some restocking on essentials,” he says quietly, lowering one arm and raising the one with the reusable bag. “Can I…?” he trails off, gesturing behind her, and it takes her sluggish mind a second too long to understand, and then she’s nodding, wrapping her blanket tighter around her shoulders and staggering towards her living room. Vaguely, she hears the front door shut and footsteps following her, but she doesn’t turn around, Clark knows his way around her kitchen just fine.

She collapses on her sofa, sitting and then falling to the side, the short walk having left her exhausted and somehow colder. God, she hated being sick.

“Okay come on, lets get you sat up for a second,” Clark’s voice floats back to her and suddenly there’s warm hands on her back and side, helping her to get sat up, mostly propped up by Clark's arm around her back. He passes her two pills and a glass of water, and it just goes to show how much she trusts him that she accepts them without a thought. That, or she really is still feverish.

“Poison?” she asks after she’s swallowed them down and he’s taken the glass back.

“‘Fraid so. Thought this would be my best chance of getting rid of my competition for being Perry’s favourite," he says solemnly and it makes her laugh, which turns into a cough that leaves her eyes watering and her gasping for breath.

“God I hate being sick,” she whines when she can speak again, collapsing back against Clark, her head resting on his chest, his arm wrapping around her back a little tighter and rubbing soothing strokes on her arm. He’s so warm, she kind of hopes he doesn’t move anytime soon.

He hums in response and she feels the sound more than hears it, letting out a sigh when she feels his hand on her forehead, eyes drifting shut.

“When’d you last eat anything?” he whispers, like he knows her head can’t take anything louder.

“Maybe yesterday? I don’t know, cooking is hard,” she says, letting her body fully relax against his. She’d never admit it without lowered inhibitions or cold drugs in her system, but there’s something about Clark that makes her feel safe. And right now, warm.

“I need to get up for a minute, okay?” Clark says, carefully pulling himself free of her grip. She hadn’t even realised she’d wrapped her hands around his arm, holding him close.

“Warm,” she mumbles, trying and failing to cling to him.

“I’ll be right back, I promise.”

She makes a sound of protest but lets him get up, lets him carefully reposition her until her head is on a cushion and her blanket is tucked around her legs. She expects him go, to drop off her supplies and get out while he has a chance. No one wanted a clingy sick co-worker sleeping on them. When she’s no longer feeling like actual death, Lois is sure she’ll feel embarrassed about all this, but right now she’s sick and cold and a little lonely and would like her friend to come back to keep her company.

An indeterminable amount of time passes with her drifting in and out of sleep, sometimes when she wakes she swears she can hear someone talking in the kitchen, the next time it was the washing machine running. When she does finally wake up again it’s to Clark gently calling her name and something that smells delicious, even to her messed up senses.

“I made you some soup,” he says, once again helping her sit up, this time with a pillow at her back and another on her lap where he carefully places a bowl of still steaming soup, it smells like chicken and her stomach rumbles.

“Careful, it’s hot,” he adds unnecessarily as he hands her a spoon which she accepts on instinct.

“You made soup? How long was I out?” she asks, stirring it carefully, raising a spoonful and blowing.

“Well I mean technically my Ma made the soup, I just reheated it and added the chicken as per her instructions,” he’s watching her carefully from where he’s perched on her coffee table, and it takes her a moment to realise it’s because he’s waiting for her reaction to the food. If she was feeling better she’d make some teasing sarcastic comment, as it is, all she has in her is the energy to raise the spoon to her lips and swallow. The first thing she notices is that it seems to help soothe her raw throat, the second is that she can actually taste it and that it’s delicious.

“As soon as I can hold a pen without my fingers hurting I’m sending your mom a thank you card,” she mutters between her next spoonful and catches sight of the pleased smile that stretches across his face. A beeping interprets whatever he might be about to say and Clark jumps up.

“What’s that?” she frowns.

“Washing’s done, I’ll move it to the dryer.”

Lois blinks, spoon half way to her mouth as she tries to understand what he might mean. Before she can ask him however, he’s gone, and she decides to let it go for now. Maybe he’d set a timer for soaking the pot he’d made the soup in, that seemed like something Clark would do. By the time he comes back into the room she’s finished her soup and is rearranging the cushions around her to find the most comfortable way to lie, the idea of going back to her bedroom feeling like too big a task for her current state. The food had helped, but she’s pretty sure it’s whatever pills he gave her that’s helping the most. She still feels shivery, and her head still feels like it’s stuffed with wool, but at least she’s less dizzy and her limbs don’t ache.

“How are you feeling?” Clark asks, a small frown of concern on his face as he looks at her. He’d taken off his tie at some point, she notices, top button undone and sleeves rolled up his forearms.

She almost feels like pouting, realising for the first time how disgusting she must look right now, with hair tied carelessly on top of her head that she hasn’t washed in nearly a week and pajamas that she hasn’t changed out of since she was first sent home sick.

At least she’d brushed her teeth this morning.

After she’d thrown up.

“Lois?’ he asks, stepping closer to press a hand to her forehead again and she realises she didn’t respond to him, just stared.

“Better. Thank you. For all of this, you didn’t have to come look after me,” she sighs, eyes sliding shut as he takes his hand away.

“Don’t need to thank me, honestly. You’re my friends, I want to make sure you’re okay.”

Opening her eyes she finds him looking down at her softly in a way that makes her feel like he’s seeing things about herself even she doesn’t know. She wonders if what he sees is good, or if he’ll soon see what everyone else in her life seems to notice. That she’s a mess with a loud mouth who’s too hard to care about.

What she means to say is thank you and goodbye. What she means to do is absolve him of any lingering sense of responsibility to her. What she says instead is:

“Will you stay? A little longer. I’ll even let you pick the film this time.”

“Of course,” he says easily with a smile that she returns, relieved.

Clark picks something to watch, a documentary about sealife or something, she doesn’t know, doesn’t really care, because after he’s pressed play he sits next to her on the sofa, moving her cushions around to get comfortable and Lois waits until he seems to be settled before she takes a risk and puts one of his discarded cushions on his lap and lays her head down, curling her legs up and pulling her blanket up to her chin. She feels him freeze under her, and for a second she thinks she’s made a mistake, but then he relaxes, one of his hands playing with her hair in a way he can’t know makes her eyes fall shut with a sigh and a smile.

At some point she must fall asleep because she wakes up when Clark is carrying her back to her bed.

“Wha-?” she tries, eyes barely open but she can see his neck, the collar of his shirt, his jaw.

“Shh, it’s okay. Go back to sleep,” he whispers, looking down at her gently, and Lois does.

When she wakes up again it’s the morning, and she’s alone. She’d almost think she’d imagined the whole thing if not for the fact her bed sheets are new and there’s a glass of water and a bottle of advil on her night stand with a note;

Lois,

I Hope you sleep okay.

There’s more soup in the fridge with heating instructions, plus some other things you were out of.

Call if you need anything!

Clark

Her lips twitch a little at the way he’s underlined anything twice. He knows her way too well.

In hindsight, as she sits with her hands tired behind her back and her ankles to metal chair legs and a blindfold over her eyes, in what she assumes is a dark room in the basement of an undisclosed location, Lois thinks maybe she should have told someone other than Clark what she was planning to do. He was a lot of things, but able to break her out of some dodgy military facility that was clearly only following their own rules. Not even he could use his manners and charms to get in here and help her.

Blowing out a breath she tries again to find any weak points in the rope or the knots holding her in place, but if anything her struggling seems to have made them tighter. She’s pretty sure her fingers have gone numb, which is never a good sign.

“Hello? Anyone there? Can we get this interrogation slash torture thing going?” she shouts, straining her ears for any sounds that might help her work out if she’s alone. For a moment she doesn’t hear anything, just her own breathing and beating heart and static, like a radio trying to find the right station.

Then she hears a gun shot that makes her jump, rope rubbing against raw wrists. Another shot followed by shouting she can’t make out and a crashing sound she can’t understand until there’s suddenly another crashing sound and a breeze on her left side.

“Lois” a voice whispers, and she swears it’s Clark.

But that makes no sense. Maybe they’d drugged her and now she’s hallucinating her favourite per- co-worker coming to rescue her. At least if she dies down here she’ll have to face the fact she’s apparently crushing on Clark Kent.

“Miss Lane,” a different voice says, louder and deeper and she’d recognise Superman’s voice anywhere too. Her heart, which had sped up at the thought of Clark coming to save her, steadies out knowing it’s Superman instead.

She jumps at the feeling of his fingers brushing against her skin as he snaps the rope around her wrists and legs, and then she’s reaching up to push the blindfold away, blinking into the dimly lit room. At least she’d been right about that, and judging by the hole in the wall that Superman had created, they were underground.

“Are you okay?” he asks, eyes roaming over her, looking for any sign of injury she might have, and when looking apparently doesn’t satisfy him, he picks up her hand, carefully turning her wrist to inspect the way she’s rubbed her skin away, only the faintest trickle of blood.

“I’m fine. Thank you for the help. Can you see my phone anywhere?” she asks, pulling her hand free of his and turning to look around the room. Nothing but a single metal chair in the middle and a table pushed against the wall, a single door. Not even a fake window.

“Your—” he starts, and Lois turns back to look at him when he sounds annoyed. “I just saved you from potential torture and you’re worried about your phone?”

She’s never heard Superman sound anything but pleasant and kind and sympathetic before, and if the circumstances were different she might have found it funny, been a little proud of herself for being the one to crack his facade.

“It’s got evidence on it about all the illegal experiments they’ve been doing here. It’s important, and I need it.”

“Gosh darn it— Wait here.” he grumbles, and before Lois can work out what he means he’s gone, a breeze blowing her hair into her face. She’s only just managed to get it back under control when he arrives back in the room with another wild wind holding her phone and a ringbinder file in hand.

“Here,” he mutters, pushing both into her hands and then he’s lifting her up, with one arm under her knees and the other supporting her head and neck. Before she has a chance to react he’s flying them up and out of the room, the building, the densely forested area they’d taken her too. She had absolutely no idea where she was, or where she’d left her car.

Which turns out to be fine because Superman takes her to the roof of the Daily Planet. Her legs are a little wobbly when he sets her down, hands hovering until he’s sure she’s steady, and then he steps back, folding his arms over his chest and looking— disappointed. Lois frowns, folding her own arms the best she can while still holding the folder tightly. She might not know what’s in it right now, but if he’d grabbed it for her she can only assume it’s important.

“Are you mad at me or something?” she demands.

“I’m not not mad,” he says and she rolls her eyes at him. “You can’t just run off alone into dangerous buildings and not tell anyone.”

“I told Clark,” she defends, “Who clearly told you so it’s fine. If you hadn’t shown up I would have figured something out.” For a couple of years in her teens her dad had done a lot of fake kidnapping scenarios and how to escape, she would have been fine. Probably.

“Just,” he starts with a sigh, the fight draining out of him, “Start turning on your location tracking or something. At least make it a little easier if you don’t respond to anyone for 3 hours and might need some help.”

All she can do is nod, and he blows out a breath, his arms uncrossing as he looks up at the darkening sky before back at her, blue eyes full of concern and acceptance and something she thinks could be amusement.

“I have to go. Good luck with your expose, I can’t wait to read it,” he says, already starting to float, but there’s something in his face, in the way he’s looking at her in that moment that reminds her of—

“Wait!” she shouts, raising a hand and he does, half a foot in the air above her and raising an eyebrow. “I— thank you. For saving me.”

He smiles, tilting his head slightly, “Anytime, Miss Lane.”

When she makes it back down to the bullpen the floor is mostly empty, but Clark is at his desk, oversized suit and messy hair and glasses just a little crooked. He smiles when he spots her, relieved and dimpled, already asking her how it went. She shakes away the sudden thought she’d had on the roof. Clark Kent was a lot of things but Superman wasn’t one of them.

Lois had been working with Clark for three years, on joint pieces, on research, on stake outs, on the same team for quiz night every Thursday in the month of November. She knows him pretty well, she thinks, knows about his parents and where he grew up and childhood crushes. He knows about her strained family dynamics and the time she broke her arm and exactly how she likes her coffee.

So she’s pretty sure there’s nothing he could do that would surprise her.

“Hey Lois I was uh I was wondering if maybe you would like to get dinner. With me. This weekend. Like a date.”

She blinks down at him, the early morning light and faint blue glow from his computer screen casting strange shadows over his face. They’re the only two in the bullpen right then, a strange turn of events no one would ever believe given Clark is never actually on time for work, let alone early. So maybe it’s a sign.

“I—” she starts, hand frozen in the air with his mug of coffee as she lets his words process.

“Sorry! You can forget I said anything. It was silly to ask, just ignore me and pret—”

“Yes,” she says, cutting his rambling off and putting the mug down. If she’s surprised by her answer it’s nothing to the surprise that takes over his face, followed by a smile that seems to make the air around him glow.

“Yes?” he repeats, like he wants to be sure, or like he’s giving her a chance to change her mind. It makes her feel a little better about her answer.

“Yes.”

“I can— I’ll pick you up at 6? There’s this Thai place I know that you’ll like. Nothing fancy but it’s nice,” he rambles and Lois has to hide a smile behind her mug.

“Saturday at 6 sounds perfect,” she agrees and retreats back to her desk when she hears the elevator ding, but not before she sees the wide smile on Clark’s face.

It’s not until the afternoon that she starts to second guess herself. The last time she went on a proper date was two years ago and there hadn’t been a second. One night stands and tinder hook ups were the thing she was good at, and Clark wasn’t a short fling kind of guy. He was a long term committed relationship guy, and she was — well she wasn’t.

Her longest relationship had lasted two years and ended when Jackson realised she wasn’t good at it. Being with someone, letting them in, putting them before her work. Clark was probably the best person she knew, she didn’t want to do anything to hurt him, to ruin their friendship.

She has her phone out, ready to text him and cancel when a mug of coffee appears next to her and she looks up to see Clark walking away at the same time her phone vibrates in her hand with a text from him. Her frown turns into a soft smile when she opens the message, clicking the link that leads her to the menu of the Thai place, so she can pick out what she wants ahead of time. Because he knows her.

By the time Saturday comes around she’s still not entirely sure what to do, and it’s frustrating. Lois knows she’s a lot of things, but indecisive is never a label she’d give herself, especially not about a boy.

She avoids thinking about it at all until 4 o’clock when she jumps in the shower to wash her hair, and on a whim, shaves her legs, and then hesitates in front of the mirror when she gets out. She can admit, in this moment, that she likes Clark, has liked him for a while probably if she really thought about it. He made her smile, seemed to know what she needed before even she did, they worked well together.

And she knows that he’d had a crush on her at the start, there’s been moments, looks over the years, but was it really work ruining their friendship? Their working relationship?

“Fuck,” she groans, wipping a hand down her face and counting to five in her head. She really doesn’t want to fuck this up, if there was ever a relationship to get right, it would be this, and she doesn’t know how to do it.

Her phone starts ringing from the bedroom, and she doesn’t know if she’s hoping for it to be Clark cancelling or something else. Seeing Lucy’s face on her screen doesn’t help her much. With a sigh she swipes across the screen, her sisters face filling it up, hair curled perfectly and smile bright.

“Lo! Oh my god I didn’t think you’d actually pick up!” she says, voice loud and echoey and Lois rolls her eyes, you miss a couple of calls one time.

“Everything okay?” she asks, knowing it’s always the best place to start with her, and maybe hoping for a real excuse for cancelling the date.

“Yeah, yeah things are fine, I just have a like 6 hour layover and I’m bored,” Lucy says with a sigh, tilting her phone around so she can see the airport lounge that she’s sat in, people walking in the background, "Entertain me?”

She blows out a laugh, sitting down on her bed, careful to avoid the multiple outfit choice she has laid out.

“Afraid I can only help for like an hour,” she replies, laying back and trying not to think about her wet hair and how she’ll have to dry it.

“Oh? Big plans?” Lucy teases.

Lois hums in response, eyes on her ceiling.

“Date?” she asks, and when she looks back at her phone she can see that her sister doesn’t think the answer will be yes, and something about that makes Lois a little sad.

“Yes, a date.”

“What? Wait! Really? Oh my god Lo! This is exciting! Who’s it with? How’d you meet them? Did you do the asking?” She rattles all the questions off in one long breath and it makes her smile.

“Yes really,” she says, sitting up, adjusting the towel around her and repositioning her phone so she can’t accidentally flash her sister or the people in the background. “You don’t know them, he did the asking and we met through… work.” Not a lie, but not the whole truth, luckily Lucy is easily sidetracked when she lowers her phone and she spots the outfits she’d been picking between.

“Absolutely not the green top, you look like you're trying to lead a revolution. Where’s that red dress you wore last Christmas?” she lifts her head, like she can see into the wardrobe from the airport.

Getting up from her bed, Lois moves towards her wardrobe, flipping the camera around so she can see the options, “The red dress is a little much, it’s not an overly fancy place.”

“Hmm…”

She looks at her sister on her screen, eyes narrowed as she tries to work out what she has that’s date appropriate. “That black skirt with the small slit in the side,” Lucy says, pointing at nothing, but Lois manages to find it anyway, laying it out on her bed.

They spend the next couple of minutes arguing about what top goes best and what counts as casual in terms of how much boob she can show and if it’s cold enough that she might need tights.

“You like this guy a lot, huh?” Lucy asks when she’s searching through her make up, and Lois frowns at her, confused.

“What makes you say that?”

“I’ve never seen you so nervous about— well anything honestly, nevermind a date.”

That makes her pause, pulling a rarely used brush free and frowning at her sister, “I get nervous about a lot of things.”

“Maybe,” she shrugs, “But never about a guy.”

She doesn’t respond right away, looks at her — probably expired — eyeshadow selection and thinks about Lucy’s words. She’s right, is the thing. Lois has never been nervous about a date, not with Jackson, not in college, not even her first ever date back in high school. But none of those dates had been with Clark, none had felt like a moment that might change her life.

“I just don’t want to mess this up. He’s—” she shrugs, picking the same shade of light shimmering gold that she always uses, “he’s one of the best people I know, and after writing the best thing I’m good at is fucking up relationships.”

“You’re not bad at them, you’ve just not found the right person who can appreciate all your amazingness," Lucy says automatically, eyes wide like it will make her believe her more.

“I can think of several people who would disagree with that.”

“Well send me their names and I’ll fight them,” Lucy says easily and Lois laughs.

“I’m saying this as your sister, but also just as someone who knows you,” Lucy starts, and she sounds so serious that Lois looks at her properly, “You deserve to be happy. And if being nervous for this date means anything, maybe it’s that you know who could, and that scares you.”

“God, you take one psych class in college,” Lois mutters, looking away and brushing gold on her eyelids, but there’s a smile on her lips, “Thank you, for the pep talk.”

“What are little sisters for? Don’t answer that, you’ll just ruin the moment,” she adds, eyes narrowed and Lois laughs again.

“Well now I’m not going to say the very nice things I was thinking,” she says, sticking her tongue out at the camera and wrinkling her nose, Lucy’s answering laughter mixing with hers.

She finishes applying her makeup — nothing fancy, a little more eyeliner than she’d normally do and a lipstick that she has no memory of buying — and stands in front of the full length mirror on the back of her wardrobe door with her phone, letting Lucy judge and make final outfit adjustments.

“Are you wearing heels? How tall is he?” she asks and Lois pulls on one boot and tugs at the zipper, something that’s a little awkward to do one handed.

“He’s…” she starts, biting her bottom lip as she tries not to think about how tall Clark is, how for most of their conversations over the last three years she’s either been looking up at him or he’s been looking down at her, how it’s never felt awkward. “Tall enough.” she settles on, pulling on her second boot and standing up, the heels give her a little extra height, but not much.

“Okay, he’ll be here in five minutes so give me your final opinions,” she says, turning back to the mirror so they can both check her outfit. Her skirt stops just above her knee with a small slit on the left hand side, she’d decided to forgo the tights and was just going to hope it didn’t rain, after all their debating they’d settled on a deep purple top with three quarter sleeves that she’d pulled off her shoulders on Lucy’s insistence, even though it would never last.

“Hot,” is all Lucy says with a nod, lips pursed and eyes so serious Lois almost laughs again.

“Thanks,” she chuckles, flipping the camera around as she moves around her room, halfheartedly tidying up before she hears a knock at her front door.

“Oh someone's eager,” Lucy muses.

“Okay, I’m going now. Have a safe flight, let me know when you land. Love you, bye!”

She barely lets Lucy get in her own farewells before she’s ending the call and stuffing her phone into her bag, taking one last look at herself in the mirror, tucking her hair behind her ear before pulling it back and glaring at herself, “Pull yourself to together Lane. It’s just Clark.”

When she opens the door all she can do for a heartbeat is stare at him, hands hanging at his sides and feet shuffling on the floor, nervous energy radiating off him.

“Hi,” she breathes out, eyes taking in his dark jeans and dark blue button down, the black carhartt jacket with a patch on the sleeve, she wonders if he’d sown it on himself. His eyes are wide behind his glasses, lips parted slightly as he looks back at her, gaze lingering on her legs, and Lois is very glad she’d vetoed the tights.

“Hey I— you look amazing,” he manages to get out, clearing his throat and cheeks turning red as he looks back up at her face.

“Thanks,” she murmurs, trying to ignore the way her own cheeks heat too as she steps around the door and joins him in the hallway, moving with her easily, “You don’t look too bad yourself. I didn’t know you even owned a jacket that fit right.”

Teasing is good, she thinks, teasing is normal for them, the way she tugs lightly on the open edge of his jacket feels right. His answering huff of laughter feels right too, and by the time they’re walking down the street like it’s any other time they’ve walked together it feels right. Normal. Easy.

The restaurant he leads them to is small, with more fairy lights than overhead lighting and tables with mismatched chairs and music playing so low she almost doesn’t notice it until their server is leaving them with menus.

“How’d you find this place?” she asks, peering at Clark over the top of her menu, biting back a smile at the sight of his giant frame in the small space.

“My cousin actually. She’s obsessed with trying to find the place with the best spring rolls for some reason, and dragged me here,” he shrugs, giving her a smile.

“And how’d she rate them?”

“A solid 6 out of 10, according to her. I’d have given them an 8, but what do I know,” he says with a shrug and self-deprecating chuckle.

“Huh,” she mutters, looking back down at her menu even though she already knows what she’s getting, but she just needs a moment of not looking at his eyes. He’s mentioned his cousin before, in passing and complaints and always with a sense of fondness. It’s sweet, even if she does sound like a flight risk most of the time.

They order — something with noodles for her, a curry for him, spring rolls to share — and Lois thinks they’ll lapse into awkward silence and avoiding eye contact like all the other first dates she’s had. Instead they start talking, about anything and everything. He tells her more about his cousin and she tells him about the way her sister keeps getting stuck in airports. He makes her laugh, head thrown back and forgetting where they are laugh, and she makes it her personal mission of the night to see how many times she can get his dimples on display. She’s at 4 by the time their food arrives, and she gets it to 6 after her first bite.

“Okay, I might not be a spring roll connoisseur like your cousin, but I’m with you. 8 out of 10,” she says around a bite, flakes of party falling to her plate and she looks up to see him grinning at her, stray blob of sauce on his cheek, “You’ve got—” she says gesturing at her own cheek and shakes her head when he misses it with his napkin. She doesn’t really think about it as she leans over the table to wipe it away with her own napkin, fingers lingering just a little too long before she pulls back with a sharp inhale.

“Thank you.”

She shrugs, going back to her food with a strained smile.

“I’m glad we’re doing this,” he says after a while, not looking at her except at the end, before he looks away again quickly.

“I—” she starts, chewing on her lip as she looks at him, thinks about their evening so far and the fun she’s been having, and settles on saying, “Me too, Clark. I’m glad you asked me.”

“Really?” he raises an eyebrow at her, “Because I was pretty sure you were going to cancel at least 5 times yesterday before lunch.”

He doesn’t say it like a bad thing, more teasing and amused and she opens her mouth to respond, only to close it again when she realises he’s right.

“I’m not very good at relationships. At…being in a relationship,” she says, putting her fork down only to pick it again for something to do with her hands. She sighs as she looks at him, with his honest and open eyes, encouraging smile and tilted head. “Look okay, the chances of this working out are low, but I — I think I'd like to try. With you.”

For a moment he doesn’t say anything, just looks back at her, searching, and Lois has to try and not squirm, all her instincts telling her to grab her bag and run. And then a smile spreads across his face, slow and soft, as one of his hands reaches across the table to touch hers, carefully getting her to drop the fork she’d been gripping too tightly, replacing it with his fingers, thumb stroking over her knuckles.

“Hard as it might be to believe, I’m not exactly great at relationships either. But I’d like to try. With you. Aswell,” he says softly and it’s Lois’ turn to search his face. The soft smile and kind eyes and hair she’s always secretly wanted to run her fingers through.

“Glad we’re on the same page then,” she says eventually, squeezing his hand smiling.

By the time they’re asking for the check she’s managed to get his dimples on display a grand total of 11 times, once even as they argue over who’s paying.

“It’s 2025 Kent, we can split it,” she insists, trying to pull the slips of paper from his hands, but he’s kind of deceptively strong.

“We could” he nods, “But I asked you out, which means I get to pay. I’m pretty sure it’s like a law or something.”

“A law?” she repeats, brows raised skeptically.

“Yup. If you want to make it fair I guess you’ll just have to ask me out on a second date and pay,” he says easily with that wide smile of his, getting up to pay before she has a chance to form a reply.

She’s still thinking about his words when they’re walking back to her apartment later, hands brushing until she gathers her courage and just grabs his hand, linking their fingers. He looks down and back up to her face, slow smile spreading as he squeezes carefully before continuing with his story about something Jimmy had done last week when she’d been out.

Her building looms ahead and their footsteps start to slow, trying to prolong the moment and she wonders if maybe she should ask him to come up.

“Do you—”

“I had a really—”

They start at the same time and Lois laughs, gesturing for him to go first while he does the same with a sheepish smile, and it’s the smile that makes her mind up for her.

“Do you want to get dinner on Tuesday? As a date,” she says, there’s no need to rush things by asking him up. Even if he has been in her apartment more times than she can count.

“I’d love to,” he accepts easily, pulling them to a stop outside her apartment and looking up at the door.

“I had a really nice time tonight Clark,” she says, finishing his earlier sentence, swinging their still joined hands idly between them.

“Me too,” he smiles, leaning down a little, and for a heartbeat she thinks he’s going to kiss her. And then he turns his head, lips pressing softly against her cheek. When he pulls away he’s still smiling, crooked and a little cheeky and Lois lets out a deep breath, shaking her head at him fondly. If only to stop herself from doing something stupid, like trying to make out with him against the wall of her building.

“Good night, Lois. I’ll see you Monday?”

“Monday,” she nods, slowly trying to let go of his hand, “Let me know when you get home safe, okay?”

“Of course.”

He waits until she’s inside, waving full palmed at her before walking away, and Lois waits until she’s back inside the safety of her apartment to let the large smile she’d been biting back, and she’ll deny it, but she might even squeal a little bit in excitement. She gets a text from him half an hour later as she’s taking her make-up off in the bathroom and she smiles at the string of messages he sends.

Maybe they won’t work out, but for now she’s happy to see where it goes. Especially if it means she gets to go to bed with a smile on her face and wake up to texts from him in the morning.

It’s not really a conscious decision, or even something they discuss, but they don’t tell anyone about that first date. Or the second or the third. She doesn’t want the added pressure of other people knowing, and he just seems happy to follow her lead. And she knows they should talk about it at some point, but right now, as they’re once again walking back to her apartment after their fourth date, there’s something much more pressing on her mind.

She pulls them to a stop outside her building by the hand she has wrapped in his and he stumbles a little, not quite expecting it. He looks down at her quizzically, her furrowed brow and pursed lips.

“Is everything okay?” he asks concerned, but Lois just narrows her eyes in determination.

Taking a step to the side and pulling Clark with her, she walks up one step and considers him for a moment before going up the next one too and looking at him, all confused eyes and frowning lips. They’re still not quite eye level, but at least this way she won't have to reach as high.

“Wha—” he starts, but she shakes her head at him with a half smile, tugging on his hand until he sways forwards into her space and she can wrap her other arm around his neck. Slowly, she leans forwards, eyes darting from his lips to his eyes before she closes the distance between them, her eyes sliding shut as she finally kisses him.

It feels like an end and a beginning and everything in between.

She plans to keep it chaste, just a quick kiss goodnight, but then he’s wrapping an arm around her waist, pulling their bodies flush and opening his mouth beneath hers. She has her fingers in his hair and his are tracing the skin of her side where her top has risen up, a soft sigh leaving her lips as they break apart for air.

“Do you want to come up stairs?” she whispers, his breath ghosting over her lips as he presses small kisses at the corner of her mouth, her jaw, below her ear. It takes all her strength to open her eyes and look at him, they’re so close she can see all the shades of blue in his eyes.

“I really, really do,” he says, but there’s a flash of something in his gaze, just for a moment. “but there’s something I need to tell you.”

She looks at him, leaning back a little without leaving the circle of his arms, searching his face, “A bad something?” she asks.

He licks his lips and she follows the movement without conscious thought, having to drag her eyes back up to his as he answers, “Not… bad exactly. Just— there’s something you should know. About me.”

She keeps looking at him, trying to think of anything that Clark could tell her that would make her change her mind about him and draws a blank. She knows him, she trusts him.

“Okay,” she says with a nod, turning in his arms and finding his hand to lead him up the stairs and to the door.

Her hands are buried in the soapy water, fingers clenched around a sponge and her shoulders tense as she senses him standing in the doorway looking at her. She expects him to argue, to say something else. She doesn’t expect him to actually leave.

But the sound of the front door shutting echoes through her empty apartment and she flinches.

The sponge slips from her fingers and she folds forwards, water soaking the front of her shirt but she can’t find it in herself to care.

Because he’d left.

A part of her, deep down, had thought it really would be different this time. That he’d stay.

She finishes washing the dishes in the sink on autopilot, leaving them to air dry and bypassing the living room to go collapse on her bed.

Maybe it was self-sabotage, she thinks as she stares up at her ceiling, replying to the interview in her mind.

She’d pushed his buttons, tried to make him angry, wanted to know if he really was that god damn good. Her phone chimes from somewhere in the apartment but she ignores it, staring blankly up and trying to ignore the way her heart is aching.

The news coverage of the kaiju attack and Superman’s reaction to his parents' message has been playing on repeat on every news channel since noon. Her first instinct had been to look over at Clark’s desk, like he’d magically appear like he had so many times before with a quip about what Superman himself had said.

But he hadn’t been there all morning, despite the text he’d sent her last night promising they would talk today.

At least he has a valid reason for ghosting her, she thinks.

She doesn’t mean to ignore Cat as she sits on her desk talking, but she can’t pull her attention away from the screen above her desk. She keeps watching the way his face freezes as the message plays, the confusion in his eyes, the betrayal. She wonders how no one else seems to see it.

Superman’s Secret Harem?

Perry wanted her to start working on the story right away, wanted the Planet to be the first to get the inside scoop. So she’d tried. Had opened up a blank document and typed a working title and nothing else.

Because every time she tried all she could picture was Clark's face as that message was broadcast for the world to see.

He hadn’t known, she knows that as sure as she knows her own name.

And even if he had known about the message, she muses, eyes still on the TV screen as people discuss this new information, she thinks about the man who had been nervous to ask her out, who had been late for job interview because he kept holding the door open for everyone behind him, who hadn’t wanted to kiss her until he’d told her the truth about being Superman. If he had a secret harem there wasn’t anyone in it. Except maybe her.

She’d tried calling him, but it had just kept going to voicemail and by all accounts no one had seen him since he’d flown off hours earlier, which left her with one other option. Shutting off her computer, she grabs her bag and phone and turns to leave with a purpose.

“Lane! Where you going?” Perry shouts and she doesn’t stop or turn around until she’s at the elevators and stepping through the doors.

“To get some answers.”

“I love you Lois.”

His words keep replaying in her head as she stands in his childhood bedroom, surrounded by all the things and people that made him him. She stands against the back wall, watching as his parents fuss over him, reassurances and easy comfort as he whispers his fears and worries. She feels like she’s intruding on a moment, like she shouldn't be here, like she might ruin it, but everytime she tries to leave something stops her.

The Mighty Crabjoys posters, the collection of participation trophies on his bookcase, they way his parents ask her to stay while they see if they have anything that might help.

She pulls his desk chair up to the side of his bed and hesitates before reaching for his hand, so much bigger than hers, yet somehow his fingers fit perfectly between hers.

“I love you Lois. I probably should have told you that a long time ago.”

She closes her eyes at the words replaying, remembering the feeling of his arms holding her up, how his breath had ghosted against her skin and moved her hair, how he hadn’t expected her to say anything back. How she hadn’t known until right now.

“You’re still here?” he wheezes and she opens her eyes to see him looking at her hazily, head turned on the pillow, dark veins stark against his strangely pale skin. The way he says it reminds her of getting him out of the pocket dimension, the way he had been surprised then that she’d come to find him. That anyone had.

“Yeah,” she says softly, squeezing his hand gently with a shaky smile.

“I don’t know who I am Lois,” he whispers, turning his head away and squeezing his eyes shut against some pain she can’t imagine, and she feels her heart breaking for him.

“You’re Clark Kent, you’re a good person, the best person I know, you help people,” she says, and knows it’s not enough, but doesn’t know how to help him. Words are meant to be the thing she’s good at but right now they’re failing her.

He shakes his head against the pillow, mumbling something she can’t make out as a tear slips free and down his cheek as unconsciousness seems to drag him under again. The sun raising will help, she thinks, hopes. He’ll be better in the morning sun. God, she hopes he’s better in the morning light.

When her phone vibrates later with a text from Jimmy she takes it as a sign. Looking back at Clark, still sleeping on his childhood bed, feet and legs hanging off the end, at his parents sitting vigil, she knows there’s nothing she can do to help here, there’s nothing she can do to fix this. But maybe she can fix the Lex Luthor problem.

She presses a kiss to his feverish forehead and explains as briefly as she can to his parents why she has to go, who just smile at her gently, with understanding. It makes her pause for a heartbeat, struck by how similar they look to Clark in that moment.

“I love you too,” she says, and the smile he gives her is enough to rival even the sun that's shining around them.

She’s been up for a couple of hours already when Clark starts to stir next to her. A nightmare about the earth splitting and no one hearing her screams had woken her up in a cold sweat and she hadn’t tried to sleep again.

Instead, she’d decided to use the time to just look at the person in the bed next to her.

The way he had one hand tucked under a pillow and the other stretched out across the mattress, fingertips always brushing against her skin, like he was worried she might disappear. His face is relaxed, so different from how he’d looked a day ago at his parents house in a bed too small for him. He was still in a bed a little too small, she muses, leaning up to see the way his feet are hanging over the edge of her bed, but he didn’t seem to mind.

He really must have been exhausted, she knows, otherwise he would have woken up when she had. It fills her with a strange sense of pride seeing how safe he feels here, with her.

She gently traces a finger up his jaw, along his eyebrow and down the bridge of his nose, the faint indent from where he wore his glasses missing after so many days of just being Superman. His nose wrinkles and the breath he blows out tickles her wrist.

“Good morning,” he mumbles, voice rough with sleep as he blinks his eyes open to look at her.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean to wake you,” she says, pulling her hand back just enough to rest it on the skin of his chest, feeling his heart beating slow and steady and sure.

“S’kay,” he smiles at her, eyes crinkling at the corners. She’d left her curtains open last night so that the morning sun would heal him, wake him, make him shine. It was like he glowed from the inside out sometimes, when it was still too early in the morning for even the birds to be awake, like the sun was lighting him up and radiating out and she alone got to bask in the glow.

“How long have you been awake?” he asks and she laughs lightly as he tries to hide a yawn in his arm.

She shrugs awkwardly, tapping her fingers along with the beat of his heart, “Not that long. How are you feeling?”

He’d gone back to the fortress after their ‘interview’ — and boy was she going to have to bullshit something for that — for a full dose of yellow sun healing, before showing back up at her apartment where they’d both crashed after not much more than a couple of kisses. Saving the world was exhausting work, and all she’d done was write a couple of words.

“Better. Waking up to you definitely helped,” he says and she tries not to roll her eyes at him, which just seems to make him smile more.

“You’re such a cliche,” she laughs, and he doesn’t deny it, just nods his head and trying to awkwardly kiss her hand on his chest without much success.

“How are you feeling?” he asks.

“I’m fine. I barely did anything,” she says with a one shouldered shrug.

“Pulling me out of a pocket dimension and getting me to my parents and uncovering Lex’s plan is hardly ‘nothing’,” he says with that look in his eyes that normally proceeds him being annoyingly sincere, “Between Eve’s photos and your words, you basically helped save the world Lois.”

“I think you did most of the work. And Mr Terrific,” she adds, just in case he has some way of hearing this conversation. That’s a metahuman she wants to stay on the right side of.

“Do you know why I wanted to get into journalism?” he asks suddenly, and Lois is so thrown by the question that all she can do is shake her head as he looks up at her ceiling in thought. “There were a couple of reasons really. I figured it would give me a good excuse for being close to some disasters, maybe some connections to people in the know. But mostly it was because I know there’s some problems not even Superman can help fix. I can catch a falling plane or keep an interdimensional imp at bay, but I can’t stop a landlord in Midtown who’s refusing to fix a gas leak that’s hurting his tenants. But do you know who can? Who has?”

She shakes her head, eyes wide as he looks back at her with a soft smile, leaning over to press a quick kiss to her nose before saying, “You.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but nothing comes out, not that he seems to mind as he moves too quickly for her to track until he’s hovering over her, his legs between her thighs and one of his elbows helping to prop him up, her hands automatically go to his chest, one curling around his neck and playing with the curls at his nape. He looks down at her with an adoration that once made her shy away.

“I can fight every bad guy in the world, but you and your words are what expose them to the world,” he says after staring at her for a prolonged moment.

Then he kisses her forehead, voice soft like he knows she doesn’t quite believe him, “You saved the world with that article Lois.”

A kiss to her cheek, “You saved me from that pocket dimension.”

A kiss to the edge of her jaw, and just because he can, “I love you.”

She moves a hand to his cheek, stopping him before he can kiss her lips like she can see him planning to do, smiling at the way he frowns down at her before she says, “And I love you.”

The kiss he presses to her lips is all smiles and teeth and gasped breaths, and in that moment it’s perfect.

There’s other things they need to talk about, things they need to explain and decisions they need to make. But all of that can wait, she thinks, as he trails kisses down her jaw, her neck, her collar bone, it can wait until later, or maybe tomorrow. For now all she wants to do is bask in the sun shining through her windows as Clark basks in her.