Chapter Text
“Who are you?”
It’s probably her tone (she’s been told she’s sharper than a mandoline sometimes), but the giant suit completely blocking the coffee station whips around in surprise to look at her. In the process, he bumps the table. An arm flails out to steady rocking items and the clumsiest hands she’s ever seen manage to knock over her precious sugar dispenser. She watches in horror as the container tips over and cracks open.
White crystals spill everywhere.
“Oh geez. Shoot, I am so sorry, let me just …”
He starts looking around desperately for napkins or a towel.
Her eye twitches.
Perry, you have got to be kidding me with these new hires.
“Are you an intern, or guest pass, or …?” she says impatiently.
“Uh, no, not an intern, but it is my first day. Clearly,” he prattles with a deprecatory gesture to the mess. Grabbing a handful of paper napkins, he tries to hold onto a file tucked under his arm. He defaults to holding his free hand out to her. “Kent. Clark Kent, I just started this morning. Regional, Special Features.”
She glances at his hand and raises a brow. She’s not indifferent enough to miss the fact that it practically swallows her own when she shakes it.
“Lois Lane. Breaking and International.”
“Yeah, I uh, I know.”
He lets go of her hand quickly to get back to cleaning up the sugar. He looks around for a trash can and stoops comically to grab the tiny basket from under the counter.
“Where are you from?” she starts in, wasting no time.
“Smallville.”
“Smallville,” she repeats. She turns over her mental rolodex and shakes her head. “Never heard of that paper.”
“Not a paper,” he says, finally looking right at her. “It’s a town. In Kansas.”
“So you worked for the Smallville paper?” she presses, testy, her eyes narrowing.
“Take it easy, LL,” Steve practically bellows as he walks by them. “Don’t scare this one off on his first day.”
“Go sniff your glove, Steve,” she shoots back.
Clark glances between the two of them and scrapes the last of the sugar into the trash can before setting it back on the ground
“So, I’m from Smallville,” he tries again, pouring a fresh cup of coffee and handing it to Lois. “KSU – journalism, minor in economics. Topeka Herald for the last four years.”
Lois takes the cup from him and assaults it with the nearly unpalatable vanilla coffee creamer. She grabs a stirring stick and swipes it through the sludge before popping the stick between her teeth. Her taste buds scream for refined sucrose.
“I hope your copies are a little snappier than that truncated CV,” she says around the stick, lifting the mug. “Thanks for the coffee. Welcome to the team, Smallville. Don’t fuck it up.”
Curiosity that refuses to be satiated makes her search Smallville on her computer. She comes up with multiple pictures of the same frozen-in-time main street, and dozens of fields. Corn, wheat, grass. Green below and blue above as far as the eye could see.
“Jesus Christ,” she mutters to herself.
She’d go insane there.
She doesn’t talk to him much. He gets stuck at the short-straw desk right next to the pillar that no one else wants; but it’s right behind her and she catches him listening to her rattling ideas off to Jimmy more than once. She’s not used to having someone there, encroaching on the one corner of her workspace that was devoid of people. And he’s so … cumbersome. It’s hard to ignore his presence. Not to mention he drops shit constantly. The man can’t work a staple remover to save his life. She’s treated to a lot of “Gosh darn this thing” and “Oh for Pete’s sake.”
Thank God his writing is halfway decent otherwise she would have thought Perry had lost his marbles.
He’s perpetually late. Which is how he ends up assigned with her after only a few weeks.
“Okay, Grant, you’ve got the fashion show at the convention center, Olsen you’re on camera duty at the protests at the new building site, and Kent!” Perry shouts as the object of his ire tries to walk into the newsroom unobserved. “You’ve missed all the good stuff! You’re assisting Lane today on the Eastside robberies court verdict.”
The group breaks up from the budget meeting and heads out to their assignments. Lois stands still, arms crossed, in absolutely no mood to be a babysitter to the new guy. Clark looks like he’s trying to shrink himself down even more than usual.
“Don’t bother putting your stuff down,” she instructs, walking past him to her desk to gather up her things.
“No, I wasn’t going … right, no,” he agrees, double checking that he has what he needs for the day.
“You better keep up,” she warns him, clipping her press pass to her bag and slinging it over her shoulder. “I usually skip lunch, I can go hours without needing a break, and I don’t stop until I have what I need. Do not get in my way.”
“Can do, Lois,” he nods.
She rolls her eyes, expecting the worst. But he keeps his word. He keeps up, he doesn’t complain, and he’s actually helpful most of the day. Still clumsy as all get out – his linebacker hands can’t seem to handle more than a pencil and notepad at one time and he’s shit with electronic equipment, but he gets the job done. He’s nice, to everyone. People gravitate to nice. It’s like he can’t not lend a hand wherever it’s needed, even if it inconveniences him. Whether it’s holding doors open for people or letting an elderly person cut in line at the coffee shop or making sure he’s walking on the outside of the sidewalk as they make their way down the street, he puts others first (that last one she chalks up to Midwestern manners and tries not to let it get under her hyper-independent skin).
They get the information they need. More importantly, they get their copy in before midnight and it’s Perry approved.
“Not bad today, Smallville,” she says as she catches him getting ready to leave out of the corner of her eye.
“Thanks.”
The smile he gives her, proud and genuine, does something stupid inside of her that she immediately rebels against. He nods once and turns to leave the nearly empty newsroom.
Cat is perched on her desk seconds later.
“How’d that go?” she asks conspiratorially.
“Fine,” Lois says flatly, opening a new tab in her browser to start background research on her next story. “Happy to report he’s not a total hayseed.”
“He’s cute,” Cat confides, grinning.
Lois huffs.
“If you say so.”
“Tall, clean cut, and there is certainly a body under that clearance rack suit,” Cat continues unprompted. “You get him some contacts and he’s got real possibilities.”
“You want him, you can have him,” Lois mutters, trying to focus on her screen.
Cat yammers on for a few more minutes before deciding it’s nearly time for late night happy hour. Lois waits until she’s long gone before she picks up her phone and dials a familiar number.
“Well if it isn’t Lois Lane. Burning the midnight oil as usual?”
“Hey, Ryan … wanna grab a drink tonight?”
She doesn’t stay the night. Almost never does. She likes her clawfoot tub, she likes her fine-tuned French press, she likes the comfort of getting dressed in her own apartment, and she needs an hour to check the news in peace and quiet before rolling in to work in the morning, preferably without anyone hovering.
None of which is symbiotic with long term cohabitation. Shocking, she’s aware.
They’re total opposites. Like, way, way opposite. That much she learns very quickly as they start running local beats together nearly every week.
A childhood spent being roused by roosters crowing at the break of dawn makes him an early riser, which is hysterical to her because he’s always late for work.
She’d sleep until ten, given the chance, and often does on the rare day off.
He likes banana cream pie with extra whipped cream and chocolate Jimmies.
She puts red hots on her French vanilla ice cream.
He has saccharine dimples and she has a black rose tattooed on her hip.
Cowboy boots and Doc Martens.
Flannel. They have a lot of flannel in common from their youth. Granted, he wore his on the farm to move cattle and toss hay bales, and she wore hers around her waist while she danced and screamed for bands in dirty clubs that broke fire codes.
The other thing they have in common, she comes to learn, is a sense of justice and morality that makes them borderline obnoxious to most people around them. Maybe that’s why Perry teams them up originally. They were the only ones who could stand each other’s views of right and wrong when looking at a story. For the most part.
It works for a couple of months, until one day when Clark lets a source give them the slip on a really, really important political piece, and Lois flips her shit.
“You were supposed to stay with him until I got here!” she snaps.
“I did, but he was getting nervous,” he argues. “I’m not going to force him to stay if he doesn’t want to.”
“So you offer to buy him coffee, you walk him around the block a few times, you stall for time,” she verbally throttles him. “Because of you, we probably lost all credibility for this story.”
“Because of -” He cuts himself off, looking like he’s fighting the urge to use his height to his advantage for once. “You were late, Lois. I hate to point fingers, but darn it, there’s only so much I can do.”
“Oh that’s rich, coming from you.”
“I’m on time when it matters,” he declares firmly.
For some reason, he seems unusually offended by her accusation, but she doesn’t let it derail her.
“On time, but ineffective,” she says, stepping close to him. She jabs a finger into his chest and he winces. “Listen, Kent, if you want to survive in this business, at the Planet, you need to learn how to work with uncooperative sources. And sometimes that means doing things that might be against your Boy Scout moral code. Learn to accept that.”
He frowns at her. Then he turns and starts to walk away.
“Hey!” she cries, throwing her arms out in bafflement.
“See you tomorrow, Lois.”
He hardly talks to her for two days. Not really. He shoots the shit with Jimmy and takes Steve’s ribbing with good natured self-deprecation and tells Cat about the new burrito place he likes. But when she wheels her chair by him and toes the back of his seat with a “Hey, you good, Kent?” his smile dims a bit.
“A-okay, Lois.”
By Monday morning it’s like it never happened. He’s bringing her sugar with coffee, in that order, and sharing ideas on how to get the exclusive on the local sanitation workers union pending strike.
And the next time they need info from a source, Clark makes sure they don’t lose the lead.
Boy howdy, it’s a doozy of a lead.
Because the next source he manages to wrangle a statement from is none other than Metropolis’ most elusive and sought after Metahuman.
The man in blue and red has been spotted for close to a year, swooping in to save the day at various emergencies and crimes in progress. It started small – rushing to save people trapped in a care after a crash, plucking a dangling window cleaner from a fifty-story building after his rigging came loose, etc, etc. It was all very impressive. But then one day, an out-of-service metro train starts barreling out of control down the tracks on its way to the railyard, headed straight for another train full of five o’clock commuters. First, he gets the conductor out and to safety. Then, to the utter shock of everyone watching the would-be tragedy unfold, this man stands in the middle of the tracks, braces himself, and lets the train smash into him. It crumples and twists around him like aluminum foil. He emerges disheveled but smiling.
No one was able to get more than a few words out of him, and he’s off into the sky before people can get a good look or grab a decent video. Amateur photos are everywhere on socials and they’re all mid-level at best.
Everyone is obsessed. The news is desperate, panting, frothing at the mouth to get ahold of him.
A few months later, there’s an emergency that keeps him around longer than usual.
A high-rise residential building suffers a gas explosion, trapping multiple people on the top floors as flames roar from windows and black, choking smoke billows upwards. Firefighters are doing their best to knock down the flames on the floors they can reach, pulling out every person they can get to. The Planet crew is on scene fast, capturing every detail. And just when it’s looking gut wrenchingly grim for those above the fire line, a streak of color shoots across the sky and into the fire, literally.
People are rescued, three, four at a time, delivered directly to waiting paramedics. He extinguishes growing flames with freezing wind from his lungs. He gets everyone out.
Every. Single. Soul.
Even a goddamn calico furball, its little paws clinging to him like a child.
Lois doesn’t let him leave her sight for a second, and when it’s announced that the building has been cleared of victims, she’s slipping from behind the press barricade and moving fast to the last place she saw him. She’s not even sure if Jimmy is with her at that point.
He’s placing a reassuring hand on the shoulder of an older woman being loaded into an ambulance. She swears she catches his eye as she starts bolting down the sidewalk, jumping over fallen debris and skirting puddles of hydrant water. He turns, his cape billowing behind him as he starts to move away.
“Hey!” she shouts. “Wait a second!”
He turns the corner with a flash of red and she feels her heart sink.
“No, no, no,” she repeats under her breath as she finally reaches the corner. The sidewalk empties out onto a barren block. She punches the air in front of her. “Shit!”
The walk back to the press zone is bleak. She takes her time. When she gets within sight of Jimmy, she sees Clark standing next to him, and she’s ragingly confused about why they look so excited.
“Lois!” Jimmy grabs her by the shoulders. “He got it! He freakin’ got it, Lois!”
“Got what?”
“A quote!”
Lois looks at Clark. He looks at the ground sheepishly, a notepad clutched in his hand. She grabs his wrist and pulls his arm up so she can read it. It’s a vanilla quote about doing the right thing, doing what needed to be done. Nothing about who he is, where he came from, why he’s here.
“You talked to him?” she questions.
“Caught him behind that building,” Clark explains, pointing in the opposite direction of where Lois had been. “Just before he took off.”
“Did you get him on tape?” she demands.
“I … no,” he says, his smile dropping as he blinks at her. “You have the recorder.”
“Clark,” she groans, running her hands over her face. “How can we prove this is from him, then? Anyone could make this up!”
“Why would I make this up?” he asks defensively.
“To get credit for the story of the year? To get the front page? There’s a million reasons and people will ask.”
“I would never do that,” he insists emphatically, his tone pitching higher. “I was trying to help.”
His earnestness is almost debilitating. Jimmy takes a subtle step back from them, pretending to fiddle with his camera. She takes a deep breath and looks at Clark.
“I know that,” she reassures him. “But not everyone does.”
She sees the glimmer of defiance in his eyes that she’s come to associate with him doing exactly as he intends regardless of her advice and she knows he’s going to run with this story. And Perry will let the triumph for the biggest scoop of the year override his better judgement. He’s arrow straight, but he has his limits, and they all know Kent is as honest as the corn fields he hails from. He’s incapable of lying.
She’s in Perry’s office late that night negotiating the layout and in the end she wins.
She gets the featured headline.
Clark gets an insert byline with the superior content.
“I’m here to help.” Metropolis Meta Hero saves lives.
She listens to “Sabotage” on repeat on her Skullcandy the entire subway ride back to her apartment, knowing she should be happy they got the exclusive. But she’s just not.