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Lois forgot to be sad when she woke up. It took her until she was midway through brushing her teeth to remember, and she chose, pointedly, to ignore it. All through her breakfast of coffee, to getting changed, to getting into the subway and then walking into the Daily Planet did she choose to pretend that she wasn't miserable.
That wasn't to say that she didn't pretend it hadn't happened. That would have been childish. People broke up all the time. Probably in any given square kilometer of Metropolis there were at least fifteen couples breaking up in an afternoon.
It just so happened that she had broken up with the Man of Steel.
First and foremost, she refused to let herself fall into some trope of the sad break-up girl by regurgitating the reasons for the breakup. One, he was almost never around--which she could hardly blame him for, but try dealing with the guilt of asking the world's strongest man to maybe be on time for dinner, even if he is lifting an oil tanker out of the ocean. Two, there was the whole journalistic bias thing, you know--covering the most famous man on the planet while simultaneously making him coffee. Three--well, this one she'd kept to herself. It was like, there was this boy scout persona, the 'aw shucks' vibe he gave off, and no matter what, no matter how honest she wanted him to be, it was like it was always there, in front of who he really was. He never quite seemed real--amplified by the fact that she never ever saw him out of costume. She never asked about his secret identity, and he never mentioned it.
The evening had been short. She'd worn a conservative gray dress and they'd met on the rooftop. Lois had planned on standing but had to sit down part of the way through. He'd just floated the whole time. To say he'd been surprised would have been an understatement, but he wasn't a dick about it. Just nodded, apologized for what he couldn't fix, and thanked her for the time they had together, then joked that now she could print what she really thought of him.
She'd seen Superman cry more than enough times--when he wasn't fast enough to save that one citizen, punched just a little too hard, or when everything, everywhere, was happening all at once and he was just one man, even if he was a man of steel. But she'd never seen him cry like that.
So yeah, Lois wasn't going to fixate on any of that. When she got in she delivered her notes on the Kahndaq agricultural crisis to Perry, said hi to Clark, and got down to work. She refused to follow any of the usual script cues after a breakup--she'd gone to bed sober, had a normal lunch. If anything, all she wanted was a green tea--it was what her dad had used to make her when she was sad as a kid (his reasoning being that green tea was gentler or something like that), and it struck her that the only other person who knew that in Metropolis was probably saving a kitten from a tree, or fighting an alien android, and also had had his heart broken by her, so he probably wasn't in the tea-making frame of mind.
Lois never ate lunch at a normal time--her mom had once said routine was 'how they got you,' though the 'they' was never exactly defined. So when she went to the breakroom at 3pm, she was surprised to see Clark there, munching on a sandwich.
She sat down next to him and missed the way he sucked in his breath at her closeness. "Hey, Smallville. How's tricks?"
Clark swallowed. "Uh, alright, how--how are you?"
At first, Lois was just going to say "Fine as always" then tease Clark about his latest blunder--this time, according to Jimmy, he'd tripped in the stairwell over his own tie, somehow--but she found herself saying "Broke things off with the man in tights last night."
Clark glanced at her and pushed his glasses even more deeply into his eyes. "Uh..oh, really? So--sorry."
"Yeah." She poked at her rice bowl. "It was amicable." That was interesting.
"Oh yeah?"
For a second, Smallville had sounded a little sarcastic, but when she glanced at him his eyes were earnest and attentive, just like they always were. They were also a little baggy and bloodshot.
"Hey, you don't look so good. Long night?"
"Er, yeah, I was thinking through some stuff, so I took a walk to clear my head."
"I probably should have taken a walk. I was an idiot. Know how I did it?" Clark shook his head. "I went to a rooftop. Like, we used to meet on rooftops." She felt a little odd, telling Clark about this, for reasons she couldn't quite pin down. "And then when he left, I was like, shit, now I have to climb down all these stairs."
"Sounds like he should have given you a lift," Clark said.
"Nah, that would have been weird. Like, hey, things aren't working, now wrap me in those big arms of yours--" Lois stopped. She'd have blushed if she were the kind of person to blush, but instead just aggressively reorganized the prepackaged contents of her rice bowl. "Anyway."
"So things weren't working?"
Lois sighed and leaned back. The odd feeling was back--not as though Clark and Superman couldn't quite co-exist, but just the opposite. For all their differences, they felt more similar than not. That 'aw shucks' quality. Sometimes they even sounded like they had the same accent. Except for Clark, that wasn't an act--no, the bumbling guy was just all heart, and all left feet. "I feel like people are gonna think I'm an idiot or something. Not that I care what they think."
"You're not an idiot. If it doesn't work it doesn't work, even if it doesn't work with a guy in red tights."
Lois snorted. "It's not like everything didn't work. We were--I mean we were compatible ."
"Uh huh," said Clark. Poor guy was blushing all through his rumpled suit. Lois frowned. In fact, it was more rumpled than normal. Not that Clark ever dressed well--nothing ever fit him, all his suits were from thrift store bins. She took in his appearance again. For a sloucher he was even more pressed into his seat, and when she'd walked in that morning he'd barely said a word when she'd said good morning.
"Hey, I'm all in my own head right now. What's up with you?" She meant to ask it more gently, a friend and coworker asking about someone's day, but it came out the way questions were like to do from a reporter--like a bullet from a gun.
"Eh. My, uh--well--" Clark hemmed and hawed and before Lois could roll her eyes, he shrugged--a feat that made his ill-sitting suit ripple like a black lake. "My--the woman I was seeing broke things off with me."
"What?" Lois' surprise wasn't that Clark had been seeing someone--okay, maybe it had, just a bit. It was that he hadn't told her. Something that was very much like jealousy fizzled uncomfortably in her stomach that she chalked up to her all-coffee breakfast. But why hadn't he told her? Who was it? That girl down in regional? She was nice enough, Lois supposed, but--where was this coming from, exactly? "Who?"
"Oh, nobody you'd know," he said.
"Jeez, must be something going around." Lois leaned back. "What happened?"
"Oh, she, uh, she said just--you know, it wasn't working out." Clark looked into space for a second, and Lois had to blink away a strange tug of protectiveness. "I don't think she was really happy with me."
"Did she say that?"
"Eh, she didn't have to." Clark looked at a limp piece of lettuce he held between forefinger and thumb.
"Well her loss." She said it so quickly that--yup, she was blushing. Well, it was. Clark--well, if he ever straightened his back and wore some clothes that fit, he could look halfway decent. But apart from that he was just a good guy. "Seriously. Who is this ridiculous woman anyway?"
"Ah, enough of that now," said Clark, and Lois was pleased to see that he was smirking gently. "I dunno. Maybe I'm not really good at relationships."
"Same. Married to my work." She shrugged. "Superman was the same way. I mean, is. Doesn't become past tense just because I stopped seeing him."
Clark picked up his sandwich and fiddled with the crust. He looked the same way Superman had when he'd flown away from the rooftop. Suddenly, Lois got the idea that Clark wanted to be alone. "Oh god," she groaned. "I forgot, I have to submit the LexCorp safety scandal notes."
"Don't leave on my account," he said.
"Nah, Smallville, don't think so much of yourself." She got up and took her lunch with her, but stopped at the doorway. "Only--do, okay?"
"Hmm?"
"Just--you're a good guy." Oh god, what was she doing ? Had breaking up made her entirely sappy? Was she a walking song lyric now? "And I don't know who you were seeing--and we'll talk about you keeping secrets from me another time--but if she was unhappy with you thats on her, okay?"
Clark ducked his head and grinned, and it was so sweet and shy and goofy that Lois resisted the urge to melt right then and there. "Sounds good. And hey--I heard Supermen are all passe now anyways."
"Clark, if you ever want my respect again, never ever use the term 'passe' in an earnest setting again."
She marched out of the breakroom and back to her desk. The chaotic hubbub of the newsroom melted into a soothing white noise that without which Lois usually went nutty. She let her fingers rest at base position on the keyboard and stared at her off-screen. Then she got to work, ignoring the red squiggly lines as they snaked through her notes. A little while later Clark shambled back to his desk and brought her a green tea without a word.
Later that night, Lois wondered how Clark could have known about the green tea.