Archive of Our Own ^beta

When he’s fourteen years old, Clark meets Cassandra Carver. She tells him that she can see the future, and shows him a vision so terrible that he runs away and goes to bed dreaming of crooked white gravestones littering the earth around him like teeth. At fourteen, he learns that everyone around him will die and it will all be his fault somehow.

The next time he sees Cassandra, she impatiently beckons him over, and Clark wants to refuse ― he has a de-aged serial killer to catch, after all ― but he can’t, in good conscience, ignore an old lady calling to him. Her back is ramrod straight and her unseeing blue eyes are trained on his face like they see straight through to him, to his secret. Clark has no choice but to listen to her once it’s clear that she knows he’s not normal.

“You can fear the future, or you can embrace it,” Cassandra tells him. “The choice is yours.”

So he takes her hand, and this time, the images that pour into his head are mere fragments. Too jumbled, too disorienting to make out properly. He sees the gleam of a man’s dark eyes, a train barreling down the tracks, a burning building. He sees people in a crowd below, looking up at him like he’s the sun. This future is so ahead of him that he can’t even begin to understand what it’s trying to tell him.

Just as he thinks that it’s over, the vision shifts.

He’s still in the future. But now he’s standing in a large, dark room.

There’s a woman with him, and they’re dancing together, his hands around her waist, her head resting against his shoulder. Their bodies fit together like puzzle pieces, and they sway back and forth in a never-ending embrace.

Clark wants to see her face more than anything in the world.

Because for the first time in his messy, fraught, restless life ― he feels completely and utterly at peace. He feels so light, so light that he could float.

He knows that he will end up chasing that feeling for the rest of his life.

Cassandra doesn’t know who that woman is, or what she means to Clark. But he doesn’t need Cassandra to tell him that that woman is his soulmate ― no one else could have made him feel the way he did ― or will, rather. Try as he might, he can’t recall anything about that room, or what that woman looked like, and he doesn’t get a chance to ask Cassandra to see that vision again, because she is dead that same day.

It’s not the first time someone who knew his secret has died, and it won’t be the last. It’s hard for Clark not to draw conclusions from that.

A month later, he’s watching Lana from afar, and the realization strikes him in the same way the sunlight strikes her dark hair and lights it like a halo.

Of course. Lana must be his soulmate.

It all makes sense now: how his heart always flutters when she’s around, how he daydreams about their first kiss, how he’s been in love with her since he was six years old. It doesn’t get more soulmate-y than that. Now that Lana doesn’t have her meteor rock necklace anymore, he can finally be near her without slowly dying inside, and he finds her to be just as beautiful on the inside as she is on the outside. He even ignores Whitney’s existence as best as he can, because if he’s right, then Whitney will be out of the way soon.

Then Chloe comes into the picture. It hits him like a freight train because, well, it’s Chloe. 

Clark is shocked, flattered, then curious about her crush on him. She’s his best friend, and there’s a level of comfort he has with her that he doesn’t have yet with Lana. He thinks back to his vision. Maybe ― if his soulmate isn’t Lana, surely it’s Chloe, who makes him feel so safe? 

So Clark puts on a tuxedo and pins Chloe’s flower to his chest, and wants it to be true. He tells her she looks beautiful. They dance on the floor of their school gymnasium, and he waits for something to stir inside his chest.

And he waits.

“I think we should stay friends,” Chloe tells him later, and the instant relief tells Clark: she is not his soulmate. They end off on good terms and it only takes a few more years of pining on Chloe’s end for them to be back to best friends.

When he saves Lana from the twister, Clark has an errant thought in the midst of all the flying debris. Will his soulmate ever know his secret?

She must, he thinks desperately. He can’t imagine a life more lonely than loving someone who never truly knows who he is. As the car spins around and around inside the tornado, he imagines himself floating with the woman from the vision, and in his mind, his soulmate turns to him with a smile on her face, and she tells him:

I see you.

When he’s fifteen years old, Clark finds out that he is the last of his race. Krypton is gone, and with it, his only chance of ever finding someone like him in the world. He sits in the loft at night, looking up at the stars, knowing that Krypton is dead. But its light is still shining. Its light still has to travel millions of light-years to get to Earth. So when he’s looking up at the sky, he’s looking at a Krypton that still exists. A planet where his parents are still alive. 

It’s a horrible thought, but it’s almost a relief that they’re dead and can’t control his life. To think that he was sent here to conquer Earth and rule over humans! He tosses and turns at night, cursing his blood, cursing his fate, cursing the universe that separates him and everyone that he loves. He begins to doubt that he will ever tell his soulmate about his secret ― if he avoids his destiny with all his might, she will never find out.

Perhaps it’s best if she never meets him at all. It seems he can’t help but hurt the people he loves, including his mother and his unborn sibling. Clark makes a selfish decision, and blows up the lives of everyone around him.

In a way, using red Kryptonite is a welcome balm to the constant pain and misery. He spends three thrilling months in Metropolis, laughing with glee as he literally burns money, reveling in the rush whenever a foolish stranger shoves him in the club, living the life of a conqueror, as Jor-El had wished him to do.

“What’s your name,” a random girl shouts into his ear at the club, and he grins back down at her with his teeth bared.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says. It really doesn’t. 

It’s only at night that he thinks of his mother, and whether she's still waiting up for him with the lights on in the living room. It’s only at night that he wonders if his father has forgiven him. It’s only at night that he dreams of the vision, where the woman’s arms around his neck hold him close. Where she can see right through him, straight to his soul, and she loves him anyway.

He’s punished for his dreams: the more peace he finds in sleep, the harsher the reality is in the morning when he wakes. His chest aches and burns with the mark of his heritage and he hurriedly shoves the ring back on his finger, chasing the other kind of numbness ― if he’s flying so high that he can’t touch his humanity, in a way, it feels like he’s floating.

When he comes back to Smallville, Clark is left to pick up the pieces of his life. His parents forgive him, but he’s hurt Chloe and Lana, and Jonathan Kent’s heart will never beat the same way again. 

He hates it when Lana is angry at him ― her mouth trembles and her face is tight and cold. He can’t offer her an explanation for those three months, and she knows that he has one. The lack of trust between them is a chasm, one that only the revelation of his secret will be able to bridge. But Clark can’t tell her; not yet. She’s not ready to hear it and he’s not ready to say it. 

If only he could tell her! He tries to speak to the vision once. 

“Do you know my secret?” He says, but the woman either cannot hear him or refuses to answer, and Clark is left floundering in the dark once more. 

All the while, he watches as Lana drifts further and further away from him.

He crash-lands into Lois Lane’s life with literal lightning and fire, and it's only later, in front of Chloe’s grave, that they have their first moment of quiet. Clark dreads the thought of having to explain all of it to her ― his appearance in the cornfield, his nudity, his amnesia ― but Lois doesn’t care about that at all and doesn't ask. 

He’s not sure why he makes the insane decision to offer her a place to stay at the farmhouse. Lois gets a strange look on her face when he does.

“Just so you know, I don’t pay attention to curfews and I never make my bed,” she says, as if daring him to retract his offer.

Two hours later, he realizes he’s definitely made a mistake. Can he not shower in peace in his own goddamn house? 

Clark is certain of this: Lois Lane is not his soulmate. If she is, he’s going to find another spaceship and leave for Mars. In all his life, he doesn’t think he’s met a single other person who gets on his nerves as much as Lois does. He hates that she hogs all the hot water. He hates that she laughs loud, and talks fast, and plays dirty. He hates that she doesn’t seem to like him much at all.

“You are not that complicated,” she tells him.

But Lois can be funny, as long as her jokes aren’t at his expense, and he enjoys snarking back at her. She may not be his soulmate, but Clark can relax around her, knowing that she thinks of him as someone who’s about as deep and special as a puddle of water in a rainstorm. And he’s fine with that, as long as she doesn’t step all over him ― which is hard, because they’re tripping over each other every other week to investigate the latest mystery in Smallville’s never-ending freak show. 

It’s dunk tank day at Smallville High, and Lois is doing her best to drop Clark into a tank full of water. He eggs her on, watching with delight as her face screws up with annoyance. 

“Come on, Lois, didn’t the guys on the base teach you anything?” He taunts.

He loves the way her hazel eyes narrow at him. She gets under his skin, he gets under hers. It’s a fair exchange.

When she finally nails him, he falls into the tank before he can even register what happened. As he falls in the water, he’s so weightless, that for a moment, he thinks he’s back inside the vision of the future ― suspended in love, forever and ever ― floating, and free of everything that ever weighed him down. Then his head breaks through the surface of the water and he draws in a sharp breath, missing that feeling already. He laughs instead to cover up his disappointment, and Lois comes over to ruffle his hair. Hours later, his chest is still warm with the phantom touch of the woman in his arms.

After Lois leaves for Metropolis University, Clark can’t help his sigh of relief. No more doing chores at one thousandth of his normal pace. No more waking up to cold showers. No more sleeping on the couch. But if he thought he’d be free of Lois Lane in this life, Clark couldn’t have been more wrong.

“Why are you calling me?” He says warily into the receiver.

“I’m calling to check in on my favorite Kansas corn-fed farm boy,” she says crisply. He can tell she’s jogging, because her voice is slightly uneven and he can hear her sneakers hitting the ground rhythmically.

“I’m your favorite?”

“Only because you did me that favor with the Dean, getting me into college,” she says. “But this phone call makes us even.”

“How so?” He says, jamming the phone between his ear and shoulder so he can hold up the tractor in the air and fix a screw on its underbelly.

“Well, like I said, I’m checking in on you. I heard you’re in the doghouse with my ’cuz and Miss Sugar n’ Spice.”

Clark curses as he drops the screw. “How did you hear about that?”

“The aforementioned cousin, of course. I can’t believe you tried to kiss both of them. And Lana with a boyfriend and all.” Lois’s voice is amused.

“That wasn’t . . . ” Clark sighs. His brief stint in Lionel’s body, and Lionel’s brief stint in Clark’s body, had wreaked more havoc than anyone could have thought possible. Chloe’s still pissed at him, and Lana refuses to talk to him, although he barely sees her anyway since she’s always hanging out with Jason. He can't explain to them that he touched an alien rock that switched his and Lionel Luthor’s souls without sounding crazy.

“That wasn’t me,” he says at last, tiredly. He’s not even sure that he should bother explaining himself to Lois.

Lois snorts. “Of course it wasn’t. Maybe it’s a doppelgänger?”

“Lois ―” He’s not sure why he’s frustrated nonetheless. Except that ― 

“I’m serious,” she says. He hears her footsteps slowing to a light jog. “They say we all have one out there. I’d be willing to bet that people in Smallville have a quadruple-ganger.”

Clark sets down the tractor and puts the phone properly to his ear. Lois’s voice is brisk, scratchy on the line. 

“I already apologized to Chloe. And Lana. I don’t know what else to say.” He says at last.

“Tell ‘em the truth.” There’s the sound of a key turning in the lock; she must be back in her dorm. “Say you don’t know what happened.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“What?” Lois’s voice gets fainter, as if she’d shifted the phone. Then her voice comes louder, like she’s pressing it straight against her cheek. “Why not?”

He’d forgotten that there were people like Lois out there. People he hadn’t hurt yet. Who did not yet have the chance to be suspicious of him, sick of his constant lies and excuses. People who would one day understand why nobody, not even his best friend and his future soulmate, would believe him. 

“Never mind,” he says. “I’ll do my best to make it up to them.”

He changes the subject, not wanting Lois to probe further. 

“Could you imagine?” Clark says, trying to keep his tone light. “Four of me running around out there?”

There’s a pause. Lois doesn't speak for a while and Clark feels his chest squeeze.

Then she says, “Nightmare fuel, really.”

He smiles a little.

“I’ll catch ya later, Smallville. Don’t go leading my baby cousin on, or I’ll have to come back and give you a piece of my mind.”

“I won’t,” he says. “Not if it makes you come back.”

“Very funny. Bye.”

“Bye, Lois.”

The next time he sees her, she’s commandeering his barn for Chloe’s birthday party. Of course, because nothing normal can ever happen in Smallville ― and this time it’s not even his fault, because Lana was possessed by a fourteenth-century French witch ― everyone ends up with a heavy dose of magic, and the barn gets completely trashed. The next morning Lois comes to find him, and predictably does not apologize.

“Have you seen my bra?” Lois says without preamble.

Clark blushes all the way up to his ears. “That was yours? In the hay?”

“I don’t know where I left it,” she says. “Was it red?”

“Uh . . . ” Clark wishes she would have this conversation with his parents instead. “You’ll have to ask my mom. She might have donated it to Goodwill.”

“Great,” Lois says, blowing out a breath. “That was my lucky bra.”

“I don’t really want to discuss this with you,” he says, and he didn't mean it to be funny. He didn’t mean it as a joke, but Lois practically bends over backwards with how loud she laughs. Her eyes are screwed shut, her mouth open and happy, and he sees someone who is not afraid to laugh. Who moves through life with the freedom of a dream. And Clark ― 

Clark wishes he could laugh like that too.

A Luthorcorp experiment gone awry releases a deadly toxin into the air, causing everyone to hallucinate their worst fears. He listens as Chloe tells him through a shaking voice about her mother in a mental institution, and hesitates only for a second when Chloe asks him about his.

“I dreamt I was all alone,” he says, and it’s not exactly a lie.

He’d hallucinated that Lana had found out his secret, that she’d picked up a shard of Kryptonite, and killed him with it. He still remembers the phantom stab in his chest as she drove the rock into his heart.

But he also doesn’t tell Chloe about what came next; that he’d seen the woman in the barn, but this time his soulmate turned to look at him ― and her face was a blank slate, no eyes or lips or nose or anything, and as he’d drawn back in horror, she’d turned and ran from his arms. He shouted after her and tried to follow, but his body was trapped in his nightmare and he could only watch helplessly as she left his life.

So, yes, in a way, he was telling Chloe the truth.

So when Alicia Baker comes back to Smallville claiming to be cured, Clark can’t help but cling to her. At last there’s someone with whom he can have a semblance of normalcy. At last here’s someone who won’t leave him, because she’s just as terrified of dying alone as he is. He takes her ice-skating and heats her hot chocolate with his heat vision and feels so much happiness that at least he’s seen, that he’s known, that he doesn’t have to hide who he is, when he’s around her.

Alicia could never have been his soulmate, but it doesn’t mean it hurts any less when she dies. That’s another person dead who knew his secret. He sits up in his loft, staring up at the night sky, wondering how many other lives he will have ruined before he’s twenty years old. 

Alicia was also his one and only chance of loving someone who understood him. Understood what it was to be different.

He hears footsteps behind him and says, without turning around,

“I don’t want to hear it, Lois.”

She pauses. “I wasn’t going to say anything.”

Yeah, right. The day Lois stops talking is the day the Earth stops spinning. He doesn’t want empty condolences, and he definitely doesn’t want to hear her lecture on how he shouldn’t have attacked Tim. If she does, he’s afraid he’s going to tell her the truth. He’s going to tell her that it felt good to put his hands around that murderer’s neck, and how he wished for a moment that he could give into his anger. He doesn’t want to tell Lois that, because he can’t begin thinking like that. Not with his powers.

To his surprise, Lois keeps true to her word. She shuffles around a bit and then sets down something on the table behind him, and he doesn’t turn around to see what she’s doing. Her footsteps recede as she leaves without a word.

He turns around to find a plate of his mom’s famous chicken pot pie. It’s savory and warm and soothing on his tongue.

There’s a sticky note next to the plate. It reads, This doesn’t count as talking, just so you know. There’s more where that came from in the kitchen, if you want.

After Alicia’s death, he learns a lot of lessons. First, he knows now that he’s fallible to human weakness, and that he must never give into his darkness. Second, he resolves to never tell his soulmate about his secret, because anyone who ever gets close to discovering his secret ends up dead. And third, he realizes that although Lois can be a little cutthroat in her personality, she will only ever wield that blade to protect others. 

And it turns out he’s not above using violence to protect her either.

When he finds Geoff Jones, who’s taken Lois and hidden her away somewhere, it’s hard to talk through the haze of panic.

"Where is she!" He shouts as he slams Geoff into the side of the car and trembles with the effort of not leaving a dent in the metal. Every second that Geoff whines and wheedles in front of him, is another second Clark needs in order to find Lois before it’s too late ― she could be dead, or dying, and he needs to find her now.

Later he cradles her inert body in the water, feeling her warm breath against his chest, and he’s shocked at his own relief. 

Lois loves traditions. Holidays, birthdays, weird house rituals, any and all chances to engage in some acknowledged pattern of behavior, and she’ll take it. With Clark, that means weekly gaming nights. Whenever Jonathan and Martha go out running errands or late-night dates, Lois will march Clark over to the couch and shove a Playstation controller into his hands. 

“Stop whining, Smallville,” she says as she expertly maneuvers her car to slam into Clark’s, sending him wildly off course. She’s infuriatingly good at games and he has to admit, that wounds his masculine pride.

“Can’t we play something other than Mario Kart?” Clark says.

“What, like Tractor Driving Simulator?” Lois snorts and shakes with laughter at her own wit, so Clark throws a pillow in her direction. That distracts her enough to begin lobbing pillows and other projectiles at him. The Playstation is abandoned, forgotten. By the time they call a truce, she’s breathing hard and her cheeks are flushed, and Clark is grinning.

He’s never been to a sleepover, but this is what it must feel like. As the night goes on, the darkness of the room loosens his tongue and his inhibitions, and he ends up sitting on the foot of the couch with her, sharing a bowl of popcorn, talking about subjects he’s never broached with anyone before, not even his parents. Lois demands a post-mortem on the Clark-Chloe relationship, and he finally tells her that although he loves and cares for Chloe, their short-lived relationship was mostly driven by his desire not to be alone.

“That’s awful,” she says immediately. Clark glares at her, regretting his confession.

“Like you wouldn’t do the same thing if you thought . . .” he trails off.

“Thought what?”

“Nothing.”

They’re quiet for a while. Then Lois punches him on the arm, shaking out her hand afterwards as she always does, and says,

“These things take time, Smallville. Don’t worry about it.”

Her voice is brisk, sure.

Lois is the complete opposite of Lana. Where Lana is serenely beautiful, Lois is bold and brash. Where Lana is out of his orbit, Lois is always in his space. And where Lana is an open wound, Lois is an impenetrable fortress. Clark realizes after a while that he’d been thinking of Lois as somehow indestructible. That’s why, when he hears her talk about Lucy, he’s shocked to see the slight shine in her irises.

“I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” Lois says, and Clark has to agree. The only explanation he can find is that somehow, somewhere along the way, they had become friends. 

Lois is unusually quiet in the days after Lucy escapes to Europe.

She doesn’t barge into the bathroom while he’s brushing his teeth, or drive his truck somewhere without asking, or haggle with him over the last rasher of bacon at breakfast. She doesn’t even talk all that much, except Clark hears her arguing with her father as General Lane yells at her over the phone. A listless Lois means that all of her extraneous energy is transferred to Clark, who practically vibrates with nerves the entire time she’s like this. He spends half a day blipping around Europe to find Lucy, and the rest of the day leaving her coded messages to please call your sister. Lucy is either unwilling or unable to do so. 

He comes home and Lois is still too quiet, so he puts on a movie just to fill the dead air. It’s some cheesy action flick. He watches it without taking any of it in.

After a few minutes, Lois wanders over and joins him on the couch. They watch the movie in silence. Then Clark says,

“Do you want some popcorn?”

Lois nods, so he pops some corn kernels with his heat vision. She snatches the bowl away from him as soon as he returns, and he lets her, because he prefers sweet popcorn, not salty, and Lois needs the crunch of the popcorn to cover up the sound of her sniffles anyway.

His memories are stolen from him and all he knows is that his name is Clark Kent, he’s friends with Chloe, and he has meteor powers. All of this information is courtesy of the aforementioned Chloe, who warns him to "keep his super-body on the down-low." Clark doesn’t really see why he shouldn’t trust other people. Besides, how else is his soulmate going to know who he really is?

“What soulmate?” Chloe says.

“The woman I’m dancing with in the future,” he says vaguely, and when Chloe presses for a further explanation, he doesn’t have one. 

He meets a girl named Lana Lang and is immediately enthralled. He discovers that he can light things on fire with his eyes.

He meets a girl named Lois Lane and is instantly unsettled. There's something about her that nags at him, and it's not just the fact that she's annoying. 

"Have I met Lois before?" He asks Chloe.

She looks at him askance. "You've met all of us before, Clark."

Lois continues to unsettle him, even after his memory returns. They had both agreed that prom was stupid ― who wants to go anyway, and neither of them have the formalwear for it ― and Clark had tried not to think about Lana going to prom with her new boyfriend. Then Lois had come down the stairs in a pretty pink dress. Not the kind of thing she usually wore, but then again, she had been possessed at the time. That explained why she wanted to go to prom, but not why Clark agreed to go as her date.

He tells himself it's his last high school prom, he might as well, and his mom already rented him a tuxedo. It'd be a waste not to use it.

He drives Lois to prom and steps into the ballroom with his corsage on her dress, her arm in his. He even swallows his pride and asks Lois to a dance, but she shakes her head and nods at the door.

“I’m not the one you want to dance with,” Lois says, and she’s right.

Later, as he’s twirling across the floor with Lana, smiling down at her, Clark thinks to himself that he just has to be patient. One day, he and Lana will be dancing together, and he will find the peace he’s always been looking for. 

Jor-El taking his powers away gives him a new lease on life. For the first time, he’s not Kal-El, the alien sent to Earth to fulfill a destiny of being Earth’s savior. He’s just Clark Kent, a farmboy who’s in love with Lana Lang. And she finally loves him back.

Their relationship works, and Clark is filled with joy whenever he looks into her upturned smiling face and knows that she will never know his secret. Perhaps that’s the secret behind his vision of the future ― perhaps he feels so peaceful precisely because his powers are gone. He takes Lana on dates to Crater Lake, sneaks in kisses during breaks in between rebuilding the farmhouse, and revels in the feeling of being human. 

“Don’t you think your destiny is more than just living on a farm for the rest of your life?” Chloe asks him. 

It’s worth giving up his destiny, if it means he can be with Lana.

He and Lana have sex for the first time and Clark lies in the afterglow, waiting for the feeling of peace that he was promised to come settle in his bones.

It never comes.

After a while, he theorizes that it’s because he’s still too worried about his alien heritage. One day Lana may find out he’s not human, or his powers may come back. Until he lets go of these fears, he won’t find peace. He tells himself to be patient, to let go of his destiny. Lana is right in front of him, in the present, and he needs to focus on her. 

“What’s wrong?” Lana whispers while they’re kissing. 

“Nothing,” he tells her, and she trusts him now, because he has no secrets, right?

She nods, her eyes deep and fathomless. “It’s going to be okay, Clark,” she says.

What she means is We’re going to be okay.

And Clark believes her.

There’s a guy with a loose screw who wants to blow up Kansas, and when human-Clark confronts him (because he has to, it’s still his fault), he gets shot in the abdomen and dies.

Clark’s last conscious thought is tinged with frustration: he can’t believe he’s dead before he ever got to experience the future where he and his soulmate are dancing together.

He’s adrift in nothingness, in the void between life and death.

The vision comes before him again. This time, the details are more clear, as though death is taunting him with what he will never have.

The woman’s hair is dark brown ― Clark rejoices. He still can’t see her face because she’s resting her face against his chest. They’re dancing in what appears to be his barn, and there’s a disco ball hanging overhead, throwing shards of light across the room. Strangely, there’s no music playing, but they’re swaying back and forth as if there was. 

She’s so solid and real that Clark wants to come back to life just so he can experience what it feels like to love someone this much.

“I’m sorry,” he whispers into her hair. “I wanted to see you.”

Now he never will.

But he feels rather than sees her smile against his chest.

When she speaks, her voice is low and full of amusement, and it’s difficult to fully hear her.

“Don’t you give up on me just yet, Clark,” she says.

Clark comes back to life with a gasp. Jor-El has given him a second chance and his powers are back, but all Clark can feel is devastation, devastation, devastation.

That voice. He doesn’t recognize it exactly.

But it’s not Lana’s.

For a long time afterwards, Clark refuses to think about it. How would he know what Lana sounds like in the future, anyway? He misheard her, or maybe he was just confused ― he had just died, for God’s sake.

But with the return of his powers, so comes the weight of his destiny, and he is wracked with guilt over what to do about Lana. He brushes off her questions about his (nonexistent) bullet wound, tells her she was just confused when she asks him about the spaceship she saw. He avoids sex, and Lana notices.

“Is something wrong with me?” She asks, and Clark’s heart breaks all over again.

Lois’s return from Europe is a great distraction. Suddenly there’s someone in his life demanding his attention who he doesn’t have to hurt, and he takes shelter in her presence. 

Then she has to go and date Arthur Curry, and Clark is annoyed all over again.

He doesn’t see what she sees in Arthur. The man is pompous, too Abercrombie-and-Fitch handsome, and he clearly has some secrets of his own. And that means he’s dangerous and not right for Lois, who predictably wants to hear nothing bad against him.

“If I didn’t know better, I’d think you were jealous,” she tells Clark, and he’s stupefied.

Why is she so blind to who Arthur is? Clark stays up at night seething about it.

Lois invites Arthur to join their group the next time they go to Crater Lake. Clark watches as Arthur pretends to be a normal human, even though he knows Arthur could lap the perimeter of the lake in less than a second. He feels sick watching him flirt with Lois, winding a hand around her waist and leaning in to press a kiss on her cheek. He feels sicker to see Lois reciprocate, suddenly showing a different side of her. A side that is willing to engage in public displays of affection, which is just disgusting and wrong.

Even Lana picks up on it. “What do you have against him and Lois dating?” 

Clark can’t tell her Arthur is dangerous. “I just don’t think he’s right for her,” he mutters, and even he can hear how thin that excuse sounds.

He’s relieved to find out that A.C. is a good guy. He’s still not sure about him dating Lois, but he doesn’t have to worry about it for long, because A.C. leaves for Florida within the week and Lois is saddened, but not despondent. 

“I promise, someday you’ll meet someone even more special,” he tells her, and Lois doesn’t look like she believes him.

For some reason, he gets the crazy urge to tell her about his vision. See, there’s even someone for me out there, he thinks of saying to her. He quashes that insanity.

He cuts his finger on silver Kryptonite and suddenly all he sees are enemies. Enemies who know his secret, enemies who live in his home and pretend to be his family, enemies who want to capture and kill him. He goes to Lana and tries to convince her to run away with him to California. That’s the only chance they have to escape it all, and start afresh. She refuses, and he sees doubt in her eyes. Later he’ll find her kissing Lex and that doubt will turn to fear.

Clark has no choice. He doesn’t know where to run anymore. He goes to the one person who he is certain does not know his secret, because that’s the only person who won’t hurt him.

“Smallville?” Lois says. “What are you doing here?”

He pushes past her and closes the door behind him, panting slightly. The apartment above the Talon is secluded, safe. No one will know he’s here.

“Lois,” he manages to say, but his chest is closing in on him.

“Why are you all sweaty?” Lois comes up to him and tries to put a hand on his forehead, but he flinches back. “Are you having a heart attack?”

“No. I ran away.”

“From where?”

“The farm. Lana. Everyone. Everyone’s out to kill me.”

“Ooh, okay, you’re on some kind of bad trip.” Lois lowers her voice, like she’s talking to a frightened kitten. “Let’s get you some hot tea. And you should lie down.”

“Lois, you have to help me,” Clark pleads.

“Of course I will,” she says. He tries to focus on the firmness of her voice. If Lois is the most sure person he knows, and she’s sure about this, then he can be sure about it too, right?

She leads him over to the sofa and tries to get him to sit down. He stays standing, so she comes over and gently pushes down on his shoulders until he sits down.

“What did you take?” She says. Clark stays silent.

“Clark,” she says. “Why don’t you tell me what you did this morning?”

He looks up into her face. Lois’s emotions always show through her face like she's made of glass. She’s not lying to him. He can trust her. It’s okay.

He tells her about receiving a message in class saying I know how to kill you, seeing Chloe betray him with Lionel, seeing Jonathan betray him with Lionel, everyone is betraying him for Lionel, who knows his secret, and he can’t let Lana know his secret too, so he had run to Lana but she couldn’t help him either.

Lois purses her lips and says okay and tries to get him to eat something. He slaps it out of her hands and it tumbles onto the floor.

“You’re not helping,” he shouts at her. She tries to stop him from standing up but suddenly Clark is staring down at her face and she’s no longer confident, her emotions are transparent and Lois is worried. Unsure. If Lois is unsure, he has no certainty, none at all.

He suddenly remembers the one person who always makes him feel sure. Someone who protects him, who holds her arms around him and makes him feel at peace. She’s the only one he can trust.

“I have to go find her,” Clark says. “My soulmate.”

Lois wrinkles her nose. “Seriously? I know you two are serious about each other, but that’s kind of dramatic, don’t you think?”

“I’m talking about the woman in the barn,” he says.

“What woman?”

“Where is she?” Clark mutters to himself, moving towards the door. Lois follows behind him.

“In the barn, presumably,” she says, and reaches out a hand to touch his arm. “Whoa, wait, Smallville.”

“Get away from me,” he shouts, and Lois backs away with her hands up. He backs away from her and throws the door open, and disappears.

The barn is empty. He keeps an eye and ear out for his deceitful traitor parents and Chloe, but they’re in the house still, so he wanders around the loft, behind the hay bales, stands in the center of the room and looks up at the rafters. There’s no disco ball, there’s nothing here but dust and machines. She’s not here.

Where are you, he shouts, but nothing answers him but his own echo.

She wouldn’t abandon him like that, right? She loves him. So she must be in danger herself, he decides. Who’s got her? Is it Jonathan, who would sell him to a laboratory? It’s Chloe, who would sell his secrets to Lionel. It’s Lionel. It has to be Lionel. But why Lionel? It’s because he’s working with Lex. Lex, who knows he’s an alien and is going to kill him. It’s Lex. It’s Lex. It’s Lex.

Clark runs out of the barn.

At this point, his relationship with Lana is a sinking ship. They cling to life-rafts with kisses and his promises to be there for her, but all the talk in the world cannot make up for the glaring hole in the hull. Every day he watches as the light leaves her eyes, little by little, every time he deflects her questions or makes an excuse when he needs to run off to save someone. One time she breaks down in tears and storms out of the loft.

“I can’t do this anymore,” she says. “I need a break.”

It’s only a matter of time until she leaves for good. 

Clark wrestles with the idea of finally revealing his secret to her. Maybe it’s too dangerous, and maybe she won’t love him anymore. But with the way things are going, she won’t love him anyway. She’s already growing closer and closer to Lex, and he’s the one pushing her into his arms. He thinks about his soulmate, and whether she knows his secret or not, he thinks that it’s worth the risk. Doesn’t he deserve a chance with Lana, at least?

It turns out to be the worst gamble of his life. Then Clark makes a second decision, and that, too, is the worst gamble of his life. 

And the one who pays the price for it is Jonathan Kent.

In exchange for your life, someone you love will die.

Jor-El’s warning had echoed constantly in the back of his mind for months. And Clark had tried to ignore it, tried to ignore destiny, hoping that it would pass him by if he didn’t acknowledge it. And now Jonathan is dead. 

There’s a long period of time in which he doesn’t think about Lana, or his destiny, or his soulmate, at all. He buries himself in farm work, now that he’s the man of the house and he’s in charge of keeping the lights on and having food on the table and getting the bills paid. He refuses to discuss Jonathan’s death with Martha, tries to avoid Lois whenever he sees her around the house. Lois had talked to him once, at the hospital when they officially declared Jonathan dead, and she had told him that she was sorry as she hugged him. 

Lois had tears in her eyes, and Clark was reminded that she loved Jonathan too. She shouldn’t be hugging me, he thinks to himself.

It’s cold on the day of the funeral, but Clark doesn’t feel it. He wishes he did. He needs any kind of proof of his humanity, no matter how small, but as it is, he can’t even feel the warmth leaving his palm as Lana lets go of his hand and walks away. 

He starts spending more time away from Smallville, lurking in dark alleyways and listening from the rooftops. He likes it when he finds criminals, he likes it when they try to fight him, because it gives him an excuse, because it’s easier to hurl a grown man into a dumpster than it is to come home to a quiet house and eat his dinner standing over the sink. It’s easier than seeing reminders of his father ― the newborn calf from his favorite cow, the tractor he’d been in the middle of repairing, the leather jacket that still hangs from a hook in the barn . . . 

He doesn’t sleep much, and when he does, he doesn’t dream of the vision. Perhaps his soulmate has abandoned him too.

Lana is too loyal to leave him alone, and it’s not her fault, but he starts avoiding her too. It’s not her fault he loved her. He doesn’t regret saving her, he just regrets that the universe took Jonathan in her stead, instead of Clark himself.

He meets a fellow vigilante, who unleashes her rage upon criminals in the same way he does. He quickly learns that a life of vengeance can consume one’s life as quickly as grief does. As he slams a man up against the chain-link fence and squeezes his neck, he hears Jonathan’s voice in his head:

Clark.

And he stops. And he lets go.

Clark chases down Andrea Rojas before she can kill again, and as he saves Lionel from plummeting to his death, he thinks to himself that Jonathan would have wanted him to save people, even someone like Lionel Luthor, and Jonathan would have wanted him to live an honorable life, even if he’s not around to see it.

It helps to think that his father might still be proud of him.

So Clark tries his best to live up to it.

Little by little, things get better. He comes home to his mother and they watch home videos together with boxes of tissues next to them. He helps her cook and they eat together in the kitchen, but it no longer feels like there’s a ghost sitting with them. He fixes the tractor until it works like brand new.

Lana searches every pawn shop in Metropolis until she finds his father’s watch, and Clark loves her so, so much.

One day he asks Martha how their financial situation is looking, now that Jonathan is not here.

“You’ll have to ask Lois,” Martha says. “She’s been helping me handle the finances ever since your dad died.”

He doesn’t know how to approach Lois. She’d picked up extra shifts at the Talon recently, and he hadn’t even noticed. He comes in while she’s making a cappuccino. 

She looks up and sees him. “Hey, Smallville.”

He doesn’t know what to say to her. He’s never been good at this.

“Glad to see you’re out and about,” Lois says. Her tone is brisk, conversational. “How about a coffee?”

He looks at her, and smiles. It doesn’t strain his face to do so.

“Thanks, Lois.”

It’s a start.

Simone blows into town with her magic pendant and leaves a few days later with the last vestiges of Clark and Lana’s relationship. Somewhat ironically, Lana has even forgiven him this time without him having to come up with an excuse ― she says she understands, it was Simone’s magic, it wasn’t his fault. She tells him that she knows he didn’t mean it when he broke up with her.

But he did, and he does.

“I don’t love you anymore,” he lies to her.

His parents had always told him that if he loved something, to let it go. Clark takes his parents’ words to heart, and lets go of Lana in such a way that she will never, ever come back to him. He makes sure of it.

The woman in his dreams still remains, despite it all. He hugs her to his chest and wonders why he’s still dreaming of her, when Lana is gone from his life? 

He tries to move on with his life, and clearly so does Lana, because the next time he sees her, she’s kissing Lex Luthor.

His once-best-friend. Lex, who investigated him for years. Lex, who conducts secret experiments and endangers people’s lives, including Lana’s. Lex, who cares about nothing other than his own paranoia and ambition. Of all the people in the world who Lana could have fallen for, Lex is the worst possible choice. 

Clark discovers that Lana has been researching the spaceship, and she discovers that he’s been discovering her.

“I can’t believe you were going through my things,” Lana fumes. “You’re no better than what you say Lex is.”

Clark sits in his loft. It’s his birthday, and he’s miserable. Brainiac is still out there, Jonathan is still dead, and now on top of all that, Lana hates him. 

Lois comes to find him, her hands on her hips and an uncharacteristic frown in her eyes. She reads him the riot act about Lana, but softens somewhat midway through. Lois is about as romantic as an unsigned Valentines’ card, but she tries her best to convince him that there’s someone out there for him.

“Maybe you’ll find that you’ve been saving up for a Harley this whole time,” she says.

Sometimes he thinks she doesn’t know him at all, and other times he thinks she knows him better than anyone. He tells her so, somewhat grudgingly. 

She looks at him with her wolf-sharp grin. Lois has that kind of hunger inside her ― what she wants, she gets. And she knows what she wants. It’s almost like she’s challenging him: do you know what you want?

Lois leaves him with the uneaten rum cake she’d made for his birthday, and Clark can’t quite bring himself to throw it out. So he takes one small, tiny, bite of it. Predictably, it makes him gag. She must have put a whole quart of rum in there. But the bitter taste of rum washes out the bitter taste of seeing Lana with Lex, and he remembers that after all, it is his birthday. And he has a Metropolis Sharks game to catch next weekend.

He dreams that night of his soulmate. He wonders if she rides a Harley.

Zod had chosen well in inhabiting Lex’s body as his vessel. Clark pulls his punches, unable to really hurt his former friend, and is soundly beaten.

He genuinely thinks he may never come back from the Phantom Zone, with its dreary frostbitten landscapes, the constant wailing winds, and the dead-eyed look on Raya's face. He can’t imagine living there for more than a day, but Raya has persevered against all odds and against all hope, only to lose her life in trying to help Clark. 

One more death on his count. How many more?

There’s a lot to confront once he’s back on Earth ― Jor-El has gone silent, Lex hates him, and Lana is far out of his reach. That’s why he clings to the one good thing in his life ― that Martha, Chloe, and Lois are all safe. He rushes to the hospital as soon as he hears that Lois is conscious again, and finds her bright and peppy like she hadn’t just crash-landed in the Arctic. 

“Mrs K. saved my life,” she tells him, momentarily serious. Then she grins; “I told you before, Smallville ― I don’t know how you got a mom that cool.”

His heart stops for a moment when she describes the Fortress. Then, before he can convince her it was just a hallucination, she calls the Fortress something he’s never heard it described as before, never even thought himself of describing it as such.

Heaven.

The Fortress is icy and desolate, but Lois ― Lois sees the beauty in it. 

And perhaps she’s right. Perhaps it’s time Clark stopped running from who he is.

“Then I’m glad you’re okay,” he says, and reaches out to grasp her hand.

Her hand is small and warm, and he’s never noticed before just how many callouses she has on her palm. She’s so human, and so real, that having just come from the Phantom Zone, she’s the best thing he’s ever seen.

He’s glad she’s alive. He’s glad she’s here with him. He forgets himself.

Lois’s face contorts as she looks down at their intertwined fingers.

Clark hastily withdraws his hand, his good mood slightly ruined.

It would be just like Lois to make it all weird, he thinks sourly. It had just been a friendly gesture. She’d almost died! So what if he held her hand ― weren’t they friends? 

He doesn’t have time to dwell on it because he soon finds out that Zoners have escaped to Earth along with him. Chasing them down is his responsibility ― he can’t let more humans get hurt because of his mistakes (He still remembers Lana’s cutting words from a long time ago: that everyone would be better off if the meteor shower had never happened). And he has to do something about Lana and Lex’s impending relationship, because Lana could still be his soulmate (she is, she is, his mind chants) and he can’t bear to lose her to someone like Lex.

Clark has never been sick before, for obvious reasons, and it’s such a novel experience that if he weren’t working himself to the bone to recapture the Zoners, he would find it fascinating. The itch in his nose, the tickle at the back of his throat, the slight lethargy in his body. He accepts Martha’s chicken soup and vehemently opposes Lois’s cayenne-pepper-honey concoction. 

Lois is pushy about it, as she is about everything. Anytime he sits down on the couch, she throws a blanket at him. Anytime he leaves the house, she throws a scarf at him.

“Stop working so much,” she orders, once she finds him working on his tractor. “You need rest.”

He loses his temper when she suggests again that he should try her home cold remedy. “Lay off,” he snaps, and sees her face stiffen.

It’s so alien to feel so physically human. To get a cold, and have to rest, and have people care about him. He realizes after a sleepless night that because Raya was the only other Krytonian in his life, and because she is gone now, he truly is the very last of his species. He might get a cold just like any human does, but he’ll never truly belong.

He finds Lois the next day and gives her a picnic basket.

“What’s this?” She asks suspiciously.

“An apology,” he says. “And an invitation to go to Crater Lake with me and Chloe later today.”

It’s a cloudy, blustery day, but Clark makes it sunny in seconds. He floats on his back and stares up at the blue sky, listening to Chloe and Lois splash and cheer nearby.

He wonders about his soulmate. What if she’s not human? Maybe they’d understand each other better that way ― two lonely souls, trying to belong in a world that doesn’t belong to them. Something inside of him rebels at the idea. Clark wants to be human in spite of his heritage. He wants his soulmate to make him feel normal. He wants so desperately for her to ground him on Earth, even as her love makes him fly.

And if she isn’t Lana, or if she’s not human ― then maybe Clark doesn’t want to meet his soulmate after all. 

Oliver Queen enters the scene and immediately turns Clark’s world upside down. For one, he’s a full-fledged hero, with a proper disguise and everything, and he’s a cocky one to boot. Secondly, he’s disdainful of Clark and his efforts to stay in Smallville, and Clark has never felt quite so judged (except for by Jor-El) in his hero activities. And thirdly, Lois is smitten with him, and he’s smitten with her. They’re dating by the end of the week.

What is it with Lois and her propensity to date guys with hero complexes? Clark doesn’t get it. He argues with Chloe about it, but Chloe doesn’t know the Green Arrow’s identity and thinks Oliver Queen is the best (and hottest) thing since sliced bread. Frustrated, he goes to Martha, only to find that she, too, likes her billionaire supporter. And she thinks Oliver and Lois make a cute couple!

The only one who distrusts Oliver Queen seems to be Lex, but Clark doesn’t place too much weight on Lex’s opinion.

Oliver is determined to keep his hero identity a secret from Lois, and he rolls his eyes whenever Clark tries to broach the subject with him.

“Like you’re one to talk,” he’ll say.

“I won’t let you hurt Lois,” Clark says, and Oliver looks him straight in the eye.

“I won’t hurt her,” he says.

But he does. The Green Arrow throws Lois through a glass table while coked up on some newfangled drug, and Clark can barely talk through gritted teeth when he sees her on the hospital bed. But Oliver is his friend, and so Clark helps him out, even though the urge to break them up, for Lois’s sake, is stronger than ever.

When Oliver has fully recovered, he admits to Clark that he took the drugs because he wanted to be invulnerable, to be more than human. That, too, reorients Clark’s world. 

He’d always thought of his powers as a curse. That things would just be so much easier in his life if he didn’t have them. But Oliver tells him that he could do more, be more, if only he would leave Smallville. If he went to Metropolis, or some other big city, and helped more people that way. Clark’s powers are monstrous, but they are mighty. For the first time, Clark starts to consider it.

“Is that what I’m meant to be?” Clark asks as he twirls across the barn floor with the woman in his arms. “A hero to the world?”

He wakes up before he hears her answer.

In the meantime, though, he watches as Lois passes Oliver the canned cranberries at Thanksgiving, and tells himself that she’s happy, and he’ll keep an eye out for her, and he has nothing to worry about with her and Oliver, nothing at all. It becomes harder to believe it as their relationship progresses. He knows that Lois keeps a toothbrush at Oliver's place, that Oliver has paid off most of the tabloid reporters in Metropolis to keep her privacy. He knows that, of all the couples in his life right now ― Oliver and Lois, Chloe and Jimmy, Lana and Lex ― he’s the only one left alone.

Then Lois tells him she’s in love with Oliver, and Clark can only nod and be happy for her.

Oliver enlists him in a harebrained scheme to throw Lois off his trail now that she suspects that he’s the Green Arrow, and Clark stupidly agrees. So now he’s posted up in the dark wearing a ridiculous green get-up and the quiver is digging uncomfortably into his back. 

Trouble seems to follow Lois like a moth to flame, so when a couple of muggers approach her in the dark alley, Clark jumps straight into action. He throws one of them into the wall, and fumbles an arrow at another, at which point all of them run off into the night. He vaguely notices Jimmy picking up his camera off the ground, but all his attention is focused on Lois’s hand on his arm, warm and loving.

“I knew it was you,” she breathes, and she’s kissing him.

Clark’s brain shorts out. He’s kissing her back, but then she pulls back and the next thing he registers is a hard slap across his face. Oliver is standing right there, and Lois is looking at him, so Clark has no choice but to escape. His face is warm, probably from the impact of the slap, and he takes off his glasses and hood because they make it hard for him to breathe.

It takes a few minutes for him to realize that his breathlessness is not because of that.

He takes a couple of laps around Costa Rica to cool down, but he can’t, the memory of the kiss, the warmth of her lips, they’re spreading through him like fire and all of a sudden he remembers Lois’s stripper routine last summer, and Clark jumps straight into the ocean afterwards. 

A swim in the Pacific helps somewhat. Afterwards, he rationalizes with a cooler mind that she’s always been an objectively attractive woman and everyone is subject to momentary lapses in judgment. Plus, Lois is in love with Oliver, so it’ll never happen again.

It happens again when he’s infected with red Kryptonite and proceeds to make out with Lois like they’re horny teenagers. He’s not just a dorky farm boy and he’s going to prove it to her. Lois is suitably impressed by his powers and Clark leaps across the city with her in his arms, his heart flying free and wild.   

But he doesn’t have the same confidence when he confronts Lana later that same night. He can’t tell her the truth, he just can’t. Even all the red Kryptonite in the world couldn’t make him. 

“You don’t love me,” Lana says, her eyes brimming with tears. She has all the beauty of a Greek tragedy and none of the catharsis. “You just can’t stand the idea that I love someone else.”

Clark swallows down the shame. He deserves it.

He screws up with Lois later, too ― one minute he’d been joking with her, both of them relieved they hadn’t gone beyond a couple of popped shirt buttons and a gaudy temporary tattoo, and the next, he was brandishing the mix CD with its crayoned cover art at her.

Lois takes it from his hands and stares at it.

She turns the mix CD around and reads the tracklist. “Whitesnake, huh?”

She looks up at Clark, straight into his eyes.

“I must have really liked you,” she says, quietly. His smile drops.

Lois turns around and walks away without a word, and Clark gets the feeling he messed up somehow, and he doesn’t even know why.

Clark watches from afar as Lana marries Lex. He sees the tears in her eyes, the regret on her face, and he doesn’t understand, she had told him she would be with him ― with him ―  he had waited for her, in the barn ― with an engagement ring, and he’d waited until he heard the church bells ringing in the distance. 

Even after the official ceremony is over, he tries one last time to talk to Lana. He knows she loves him. He knows her. Even if she’s not his soulmate, he loves her too much to let her go. He even tries to tell her his secret, because she would never trust him if he didn’t tell her.

“There’s nothing to say,” Lana says, though her anguished eyes tell a different story. Clark finally understands what it felt like for her all those times he had lied straight to her face.

But for all that he hates what Lex has done to Lana, he can’t stand by and let Lex die in an underground tunnel. Of course, he didn’t know there was green Kryptonite in there too, so now they’re both going to die. 

Clark sits under the rubble, watching the ceilings start to cave in, waiting to die, and wonders again about his soulmate. Lex is standing above him, and Clark thinks that Lex is, in a way, like a soulmate ― they can’t seem to let go of each other, no matter how far they are driven apart, like they’re destined to be together. But they haven’t always been enemies ― he still remembers Lex as he was when they first met. He wonders if there’s still a seed of goodness inside Lex. He wants so badly to save him, to help him, and he thinks for a second that Lex feels the same.

“You’re the only friend I’ve ever had,” Lex says. And it’s the truth, for once.

But that truth never has a chance to grow into something more. As soon as they get out, Lex starts building super-powered prototypes and capturing phantoms across the globe. And Clark is once again destined to stop him.

Then Lex and Lana’s marriage blows up, and takes Lana out in the explosion.

It’s the last straw for Clark.

He doesn’t want a soulmate. He doesn’t want destiny. He’s sick of it all.

Lana may not be his soulmate. But she turns out to be alive, and now she knows Clark’s secret, and she still loves him. Who even needs a soulmate, a woman he hasn’t yet met and may never meet, when he has Lana in front of him, who loves him despite everything that he is? 

He’d never thought he could have all of this. They wake up and kiss in bed and eat breakfast together. He takes care of the farm and dreams of a future where he can live here forever and come home to her every night. They have everything Clark has ever wanted, ever since he saw the kind of relationship that his parents had.

It’s too good to last. Or maybe it was never there at all.

He finds out too late that Lana is obsessed with Lex, and that while he’s been outside trying to stop Brainiac, she’s been calcifying her resentment and her anger inside. A lightning bolt causes Lana to absorb his powers and she just ― she goes haywire. She attacks Lois and Grant, then goes after her ex-husband and unleashes all her anger and pain and vengeance onto him. Clark barely stops her from dealing the death blow.

Later he finds that she’d done the same thing to Lionel ― keeping him hostage, bound and chained, in a forest, for months. Clark can’t even look at her. Who is this person before him?

“I would do anything to protect you,” she tells him.

“You sound like Lex,” he says.

“I sound like you,” she says, and that shakes him.

This is all his fault. He’s the one who hurt Lana time and time again, through his lies and betrayals, and he’s the one who drove her into Lex’s arms until she cracked. She’s no longer the sweet, innocent girl next door that she used to be. Like a funhouse mirror, she’s become a twisted version of herself.

She asks him if he will love her no matter what.

He wants to say yes. Once upon a time, he would have. But Clark can’t love a killer. 

But it turns out Lana can.

At least, she can love Bizarro, who is everything Clark is not, and while Clark is trapped in a crystal for a month, she lives with Bizarro, wakes up and makes love and eats together with him. She tells Bizarro that she loves him, that she prefers him. Clark is sick to his stomach and Lana cries, horrified, when she finds out what has been done to her.

They have one of their worst fights. 

“You’re supposed to know me better than anyone,” he accuses.

“I don’t know how to talk to you anymore,” she throws back at him, and really, have they ever?

He begins to spend his nights roaming around Metropolis again, finding anything to do that will occupy his time and mind. Lana is still living at the farmhouse, but he doesn’t know what she does all day, since they only pass by each other in the mornings, each grabbing their own respective breakfasts like they don’t see each other. The thought of having a conversation with her makes him feel as nauseous as Kryptonite does. 

Once, he finds Lois coming out of the Daily Planet after a day at work, and having nothing better to do, offers to drive her back to her apartment. 

“Okay,” Lois says, trying to hide her surprise.

Most of the drive is quiet. Lois gets into a contemplative mood sometimes when she’s in a car. She cranks the window down and lets the wind run through her hair. Clark doesn’t turn on the radio; he keeps his eyes fixed on the horizon and tries not to think about the farmhouse and its silent rooms.

Would his soulmate have known it wasn’t him, even if it lived in his body? 

He thinks about it until he can't stand it. 

“Lois?” he says.

“Yeah?”

“What’s my favorite color?”

She thinks about it. “Red? You sure wear it enough.”

“Have I ever broken a bone?”

“I don’t remember you telling me so, and you seem like a pretty sturdy kind of guy. So I’m gonna say no,” she says.

“Do you know my favorite book?”

“What are we playing? Do I get a prize at the end of this pop quiz?”

“Just humor me,” he says.

“I don’t know. You read a whole bunch of stuff.”

“Just guess.”

“Romeo and Juliet? You like that mushy romantic stuff.”

He blows out a breath. The setting sun is directly in his eyes.

“Well?” Lois asks. “Was I right?”

“No,” he says. They’re almost at her apartment. “No, you weren’t.”

He gets out of the car and slams it shut behind him. Lois hurries out after him, her brows furrowed.

“What’s gotten into you, Smallville?”

He spins around, all of a sudden annoyed at her. He’s known Lois for years and she’s one of his best friends, for God’s sake.

“I know your favorite albums and what foods you’re allergic to and even what each of your action figures were named,” he says. “You don’t know anything about me.”

She stares at him. Her face is bathed in the golden sunlight, and there’s no anger in her expression, just puzzlement.

“But I know you,” she says. “So what if I don’t know what your favorite book is. Is it Frankenstein?”

“You don’t,” he says, so sick he doesn’t even know what he’s saying to her anymore. “You think you do.”

“I know some things,” she says. “I know that you love your parents. That you still drink straight milk, that you still haven’t packed away your Elmer Fudd nightlight. I know that you’ve been in my life for years when my own family hasn’t. Isn’t that enough?”

Clark opens his mouth. Then he closes it, defeated. “I don’t know,” he admits. Is it?

He thinks she might punch him on the shoulder, so he’s surprised when her hand on his arm is soft. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you,” she says. “But you should just come out and say what you’re thinking.”

He smiles at her. She smiles back at him, tentative. It’s the first time he’s seen Lois so unsure. “It’s a good thing you never have that problem, Lois,” he says.

This time she does punch him on the shoulder.

“I’m being serious,” Clark tells her. He wishes he had her bravery. Lois wouldn’t be skulking around outside, too afraid to go home, too afraid to walk into another dead bedroom. Lois would take a deep breath and head it face-on. 

“Well, it’s like the General always says,” Lois says, winking at him. “Every war ends in the negotiations room. Maybe you should just be honest with her.”

It’s just like Lois to want the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. It’s like her very body rejects the thought of holding in a lie. What a difference she makes to both Clark and Lana, who hold secrets strapped to their chests like dynamite, unwilling to let it out until it blows up in their faces.

Oliver comes back to town, and this time he’s going to stick around Metropolis. Clark is unsure whether he should be happy about this, because ― 

“You’re still in Smallville?” Oliver says, at once both friendly and scathing. They fall back into the same old patterns, fighting crime and investigating Lex, and having these kinds of arguments in between that leaves both of them sore and contemplative afterwards.

Clark would’ve thought Lois would be ecstatic at Oliver’s return, but instead, he comes into her apartment to find her sitting on the couch, digging into a pint of blueberry ice cream.

This time, the break-up is final, she tells him. There’s no more Oliver and Lois. Once upon a time, Clark would have been relieved, but now all he can feel is sadness. Lois deserves someone who is good and kind, and Oliver is both. What they have is rare, and worth holding onto. 

But it’s not enough.

“We’re not you and Lana, we’re not the perfect couple, we’re not destined for each other,” Lois says, and Clark wants to take her by the shoulders and shake her.

“I can’t be left behind again,” she says, and when Clark opens his arms, she walks right in, wrapping herself up in his hug. He holds her while she cries into his shoulder, then jokes, then cries a little more. It’s the first time he’s seen her shed tears like this.

So even Lois can be hurt like this. Even brave Lois, selfless Lois, Lois who is unafraid of a challenge ― she is, at her core, the daughter of a four-star general and someone who cannot bear to be left behind by another man in his line of duty.

He offers to sit with her and watch a movie together, maybe eat some ice cream out of solidarity, but she waves him off. 

“I just need to be alone for a while,” she says through a watery smile.

He goes home that night and tries to think of Lana’s sacrifices. What she’s given up for him, how she has loved him despite everything that he is. That’s why he tells himself he has to go on. He can do it for Lana, because he loves her too much to let her go. They just need to stop looking past each other, and see each other for who they really are. If they can do that, then they can find their way back to what they had before. 

That night, he dreams of the woman in his vision again. In this future, she never leaves him, despite his burden, and he never leaves her, despite his duty. They’re suspended in time forever, in love until the end of the world. She’s hugging him, and - there’s something intimately familiar about her embrace.

Every day that goes by as Lana sits in her alien coma after Brainiac’s attack, unblinking and unable to voice her pain, is another day that grates on his soul. He tries to put on a smile when he goes to visit her in the hospital, hoping that she can hear him, and can feel his hand when he holds hers. He comes home every time swallowing past the pain in his throat.

Another life ruined because of him. Will it ever stop?

That’s why, when he has a chance to go back in time to stop Brainiac from killing him as a baby on Krypton, he almost doesn’t.

Jor-El sends him into an alternate universe instead, one where Clark Kent never existed. And everything is beautiful; his friends are happy, Lana is safe, and all is right in the world. Lois falls for him, quite literally, and even that is beautiful, up until she gets arrested and everything goes downhill after that.

Clark learns his lesson: he’s been given one chance to be alive, and he needs to do it right. He grits his teeth and promises himself that if he does nothing else right, he’ll restore Lana to normal.

He’s researching the best neurologists at the Daily Planet when Lois finds him.

Seeing her sends a jolt through him.

Talk about sweeping a girl off her feet, Lois said, and her eyes sparkled as she looked up at him. Was she biting her lip? At him?

Clark smiled, not knowing why. He liked it. He liked that Lois liked him.

He shakes off the phantom memory and listens as Lois tells her that she’s sorry about Lana.

It reminds him that above all else ― Lois has always been his ally, and always will be, in whatever world he’s in.

That’s why he tells her she’s a good friend. Lois gets a funny look on her face, but before he can analyze it further, she punches him on the shoulder, rocking away from him immediately. Her punch doesn’t hurt; it never can, and it never does.

“Let me take you out for a drink,” she says. “You look like you could use one.”

Clark allows himself to be manhandled away to the nearest bar. It’s a moot point, because he can’t drink away his sorrows, but Lois wants to help him and he’s feeling grateful enough that he wants to help her help him. 

Beer tastes awful when he’s not even getting a buzz out of it. But Lois is chugging back the stuff like it’s water, so Clark obligingly keeps up. He’s content to listen to her talk. Lois is like a locomotive, perfectly capable of sustaining a running monologue. But this time, as he stays quiet, she eventually trails off.

“Are you okay?” He asks.

She shoots him a look. “I feel like I should be the one asking you that. God, Clark, I don’t know how you’re doing this.”

He’s not. Doing anything, that is. Sometimes it feels like nothing can be changed. Like there’s nothing he can do or say that will bring Lana back to him.

“Do you ever think about what the world would be like if you didn’t exist?” He asks, and immediately wants to shove the words back into his mouth at Lois’s expression.

“Clark―”

“I meant if you were never born,” he cuts her off. “Would everything still turn out the same way?”

“If I weren’t born? Obviously it’d be different,” Lois says. “I’m sure I changed the world in some way.”

He believes her. The universe wouldn’t be the same without Lois “Mad Dog” Lane, even if it just meant that Clark would be slightly less brave, kind, himself. That he would be just a little more lonely.

“How about you?” Lois says. “Would the world change?”

Clark pretends to think about it. “I don’t know.”

“I’d miss you,” she says.

Clark swallows. His stomach is warm. “You wouldn’t even know I existed,” he says.

“Still,” Lois says simply, and he looks into her flushed face and realizes she’s drunk. 

He drives her home, and this time she turns up the music, shouting the lyrics into the pitch-black of the night. He helps her up into the apartment and he thinks for a moment that she might hug him again in her drunken state, but she doesn’t. 

“Good night, Lois,” he tells her.

He thinks about her words, and thinks about what it means to miss someone when you don’t even know them. To know that there’s someone out there for you, and feel their absence like an empty space in his arms.

The next time he goes to the hospital, Lana is gone, and in her place is a video tape. He watches the video, not hearing a single word she says, and it’s just Lana’s face, her mouth moving, her eyes filled with tears. He can read her lips.

I love you.

He turns around and Lois is there, and her lips are mouthing something different. She runs to him and he hugs her, and suddenly, in the midst of all his grief, he remembers where exactly he had felt this embrace before.

A month passes. He’s not anywhere in the right mindset to think about his old life as he slugs away in a Russian labor camp, his powers taken from him yet again. He attempts multiple times to run away, and each time is beaten to a pulp. Human bodies are more resilient than he’d thought, and he rises with the sun the next morning. He doesn’t yet know what happened to Lex after their showdown at the Fortress, but one thing is clear ― he cannot run away from his destiny anymore.

Oliver breaks him out, and in turn they break out Chloe, A.C., and Dinah from the Montana Compound. Even Lois is there, because whenever there’s trouble, she comes with it like a package deal.

A mind-controlled Oliver shoots him with an arrow, and he lies there bleeding out while Chloe cradles his head in her lap and cries over him. Just when he thinks that it’s truly over, he sees the Martian Manhunter standing above him, and he’s being carried into the sky, into the sun.

It doesn’t burn at all. It’s a gentle warmth.

Like the warmth of his soulmate’s arms around him. Suddenly he’s back in the barn, a disco ball hanging above them, silver and sparkling. His cheek is pressed against the top of her head, and her hair smells wonderful, and familiar. He’s starting to put all the pieces together, and he just needs to see her face, and hear her voice again, to paint a complete picture of the woman he’s going to meet in the future.

“It’s you again,” he whispers. 

“It’s me,” she whispers into his chest.

“Am I dead?”

Her arms tighten around his shoulders. “Didn’t I tell you not to give up on me so easily?”

Even though he can’t quite recognize her voice, quiet as it is, something about the cadence of the words nags at him, like a word at the tip of his tongue, just waiting to come out.

Clark remembers an urgent question he’d been meaning to ask her.

“Do you know my secret?” He asks.

The woman hesitates. He continues, desperate. “Do I tell you? Will you leave me?”

She shakes her head, slowly. Already the dream is bleeding at the edges as he slowly gets pulled back to reality, and she’s growing fainter and fainter by the second. He clings to her and the ghost of her warmth.

“Don’t go,” he begs her, as he slips into the world of the living. 

He wakes up with a gasp. 

He can’t help but feel cheated somehow. If she knows his secret, why won’t she just tell him that she does? Why leave him in this limbo, scared of rejection, but unable to commit? Clark can’t stomach the idea of telling another person about who he is, after what happened to Lana. Yet he cannot bear the idea that he will forever have to hide this side of him.

“You don’t want to look like . . . Brawny Lumberjack,” Lois says, and that nickname, and the specific tone of disgust with which she’d said it, sticks in his head for days afterwards. That’s why he shows up to work on his second day in a pressed white dress shirt and proper suit pants, and she gives him a nod of approval. 

Clark likes the Daily Planet.

Even when he has to duck into the bathroom to stop a runaway pram, or prevent a bank robbery, or save a drunk driver, it’s always a joy to return to the bullpen. The room is always alive with activity, each employee weaving around the desks like bees in a hive, each building upon each other's work to create something beautiful and lasting. Clark starts off writing the obituaries, and even though they always come back lined in red ink, he likes seeing the frequency of that ink disappear over time. And he’d perish before he ever told her, but he does start to write down Lois Lane’s Rules of Reporting.

He likes the late nights.

He likes it when it’s just him and Lois, sitting across from each other, arguing and bantering sometimes, but generally focusing on work, at least until an announcement on the police scanner makes them leap out of their seats. He starts drinking coffee at night, not because he needs the stimulants but because Lois is liable to fall asleep at the desk if she doesn’t get caffeine after five pm. So he runs out to the local coffee shop and gets a black coffee for himself, and a coffee with four sugars and two creams for Lois. 

He likes seeing Lois in her element.

She’s still relentlessly Lois, but this time her ruthlessness is professional, not personal (although the personal comes out quite often anyway). And it’s a weird thing to notice, but he likes that she wears pencil skirts and fitted blazers to the office because he’s never seen her in much other than a tank top and jeans. He also moves beyond his jacket-and-jeans ensemble ― he hadn’t realized how tired he was of wearing the same things over and over again until he changed it up.

He comes into work once and she notices that his tie is crooked. She marches up to him and adjusts his tie without asking. Clark’s throat closes up as she tightens the noose, even though it’s not too tight at all.

He likes being in Metropolis.

After two decades of living among more cows than people, now he’s one among a million. Even for someone with super-speed, it takes some getting used to the pace of the city.  When they’re out on the streets, Lois strides forward like she dares anyone to get in her path, and Clark follows in her wake.

She has a bad habit of crossing the street before looking both ways. Many times now Clark has had to grab her arm and yank her back before she could turn herself into roadkill. One time, she steps out onto the crossing, ignoring the yellow cab barreling down the street. He reaches out and grabs her, and she trips, and his hands catch her around the waist as he pulls her into a dip.

“Be careful,” he admonishes. They’re not ballroom dancing here.

“Okay,” Lois squeaks, so out of breath from her near-death experience that she remains flushed and quiet for the next few minutes. 

Their investigations are always fun. Lois always tries to sneak into somewhere she’s not legally allowed to be in, and Clark is her unwilling or willing accomplice, depending on the situation, but they’re back to solving mysteries together like they had back in Smallville High. And at the end of the week, he’ll see an article on the D.A.'s resignation or some company’s union-busting practices, and the byline will read Written by Lois Lane. Contribution by Clark Kent.

And he likes it.

He brings her takeout. It’s late at night, and Lois is still working hard on an article at the Daily Planet. She had refused to write a hit piece on Oliver Queen’s poisoning at the charity gala, so she’s making it up to Tess by writing two other crime stories. Lois opens the takeout container and closes her eyes in bliss at the smell.

“Thanks, Smallville,” she says. “I really needed this.”

He nods. “It was hard, seeing Oliver like that,” he says quietly, wondering if Lois wants to talk about it.

He had come into the room to find Lois gripping Oliver’s hand, her face streaked with tears. Oliver was pale, his skin almost grey, and his breathing labored. Lois’s voice had cracked as she spoke to him. 

“Yeah, well,” she says. Her smile is tight. “Nothing like seeing one of your best friends almost reach the pearly gates to give you some perspective.”

“Friends,” he notes. “You’re not still . . . ?”

Lois shakes her head. “Friends. Me and Ollie, we were a good thing. And I’ll admit that for a moment I regretted my choice. I thought maybe I could be with a ― ” she catches herself, “someone who’s always so busy, you know. But I’m moving on.”

Clark nods. He almost tells her about Lana. But somehow it feels like the wrong time to bring it up. This space, the newsroom in the Daily Planet, feels sacred for some reason. He doesn’t want to talk of old loves here.

So instead he asks her if she’s coming for Christmas. It’s a week before the holidays, and he and Martha and Lois usually celebrate together.

“Oh, that’s right,” she says. “Here, I’ll give you your present early. The General’s back in town and this time he’s got Lucy with him. So we’re doing a Lane family gathering ― the first in years.” Her face is cautiously happy, her smile teetering on the edge of hopeful.

She takes a box out of her desk drawer and hands it to him. It’s a small box, gift-wrapped neatly with a bow on it, and it reads To Clark, Merry Christmas in messy handwriting.

It’s a pair of golden cufflinks. He doesn’t know how to put them on, so she shows him, taking his wrist and fiddling with his sleeve. She’s close enough that he can watch her without her noticing, can smell the perfume on her skin. Her hair has darkened to a deep brown, and it suits her, he thinks. 

On Christmas morning, he opens the door to the farmhouse to see Lois standing there, her hands in her pockets. Lucy had some last-minute trouble, and the General is off chasing her down again, she tells Clark. She smiles brightly at him.

“Turns out I gave you your present early for nothing.”

It’s a testament to how long he has known Lois that he sees through her. She’s always shown her emotions like glass, but not like this. Now he sees through to her core, and Lois is, at her core, soft and kind and good. And because the walls she builds around herself aren’t enough to protect her from a family that always lets her down, Clark takes her arm and leads her into the kitchen, where it’s warm and Martha has baked gingerbread.

He gives her a signed Whitesnake poster, and his mother a book of her favorite poems. Lois’s face lights up and she grins so wide that her eyes crinkle up.

Maxima appears one day on Earth ready to find love. Barring that, she just needs a body that can withstand the force of her lust. She tells Clark that she senses his loneliness, and maybe it’s pathetic and stupid of him to hesitate, but he hesitates, thinking about waking up alone in bed and coming home to a house with the lights off.

Maxima’s eyes soften in empathy. “Come with me, and you will never be alone again.”

Clark is, just for a millisecond, tempted. He remembers the force of their kisses in the elevator, the desperation with which they had locked their bodies together. It had felt great.

But passion isn’t peace. Passion is raw and sharp, and peace is home, peace is that floating feeling in his vision. Besides, Lois didn’t seem too happy about Maxima, and Clark doesn’t know why but he doesn’t want to disappoint her. He sends Maxima back to Almerac and mourns his choice anyway. 

Afterwards, he reads Chloe’s letter to him that she wrote to him in high school.

I’m the girl of your dreams, masquerading as your best friend.

And he wonders how he could have been so blind. He knew that she had a crush on him, but he hadn’t known it was so intense. The depth of Chloe’s feelings bleeds through every stroke of the pen on that piece of paper. 

Clark rifles through every memory of the past decade and wonders what else he had missed. What if his soulmate had been with him this whole time, for years, maybe, and he never realized it?

“What if I don’t recognize her?” He asks Lois later. What if he missed his chance forever?

Lois smiles. And maybe it’s just a trick of the light, but he thinks that her smile looks a little resigned. 

Lois’s behavior at Chloe and Jimmy’s engagement party should go under the dictionary definition of faux pas. She doesn’t realize it at the moment, though, because she’s falling over her own feet trying to walk into his car. He helps her and buckles her in, then drives her to his house, because Lois is insistent that she wants to do karaoke and he doesn’t think he can subject Chloe and Jimmy to that all night.

Once she gets home, she walks into the kitchen and Clark follows her in.

Without warning, Lois reaches to the zipper on her dress and starts tugging it down. Clark pivots hard, feeling the back of his neck heat up.

“I’ll grab you something to wear,” he says, and escapes upstairs.

Trying to get the football jersey to Lois (it’s the only thing he has right now that’s both clean enough and big enough to cover her and also if he thinks that red is her color it’s not his fault), without walking in on her stripping, is an ordeal. Clark leaves it at the bottom of the stairs for a while before he realizes that she’s not coming over to get it, then he averts his eyes and leaves it on the couch in the living room. Thankfully, Lois is too busy in the kitchen, singing Whitesnake at the top of her lungs, to come over. Clark is glad that the farmhouse is miles away from the nearest inhabitants.

She finally puts on the clothes after an hour of singing. He comes into the kitchen after being held hostage in his bedroom for that hour and tries to get her to drink water and go to bed.

“Chlo’s making a mistake,” Lois slurs, too honest for her own good.

Clark sighs. “Jimmy’s good to her. They love each other.”

“They aren’t meant to be.”

“How would you know that?” Clark says. Jimmy is his friend. 

She whirls around and jabs a finger at his chest. “You have to be able to imagine being together, like, twenty years in the future. Fifty. A hundred years.”

Clark thinks about it. When he was fourteen, he had wanted to get married as soon as he could. Now he’s older, and more scarred, and thus more scared. Could he imagine being together with someone for the rest of his life?

Well, of course he can. No one who’s felt the love of the woman in his dreams would ever think of letting her go.

“Could you imagine that?” Clark asks, curious. Lois is not as much of a romantic as he is.

Lois falls silent. She blinks at him, her large hazel eyes surprisingly focused. Her long hair tumbles free over her shoulders. She takes one step towards him, then another. Clark swallows.

When it looks like she’s about to walk right into him, she stops. She looks up at him. Clark can’t help it, he wants to hear her answer.

But all she says is, “I’m going to throw up.”

She’s drunk, so Clark doesn’t worry too much about super-speeding her to the bathroom.

He’s still thinking about her non-answer when Lois gets kidnapped and they’re both strapped down in electric chairs by a crazed jeweler.    

It’s funny that he’s being electrocuted and yet he’s relieved that he’s not the one being interrogated. A lie detector test on him, with Lois’s life on the line, is something that comes straight from his worst nightmares.

“Deep down, underneath it all, do you love this man?”

Clark urges her to tell the truth, just get it over with, he’ll figure out what he feels about her answer later, he doesn’t know why she’s hesitating but he can’t afford to get shocked again, just tell the truth, Lois ― 

And Lois tells the truth.

Clark tenses up, waiting for electricity to light up his veins, and when that doesn’t happen he looks up and stares at Lois, and she’s staring back at him, both too shocked to do anything else, except that she drops her gaze as if ashamed ― as if the truth, torn out of her, has left her bare and raw and violated. 

Clark throws Macy into a patch of electric wires for what he did to Lois. 

Lois won’t meet his eyes when he breaks her out of her manacles. He tells her it’s going to be all right now, but she won’t look at him. Clark stays behind for the police to come and arrest Macy, but Lois, who is usually eager to get quotes even after a near-death experience, tells him she’s going to go home. And she still won’t look at him. And he barely sees her around the next day at work.

The truth is not something that sets Clark free. But it does and should for Lois, but not when it’s forced out of her ― not like this. He thinks back to all the times she could have pried into his secrets, could have asked him what he was hiding, and she hadn’t. 

So he gives her an out.

“Who knew you were such a good liar, huh?” He says. 

Lois smiles at him, meeting his eyes. 

“When he was off playing game show host, I slipped the sensor off my finger. Pretty crafty, huh?”

Clark nods, and shoves down the part of him that’s just a little disappointed. It’s wishful thinking, and Clark doesn’t do wishful thinking anymore, not after what happened with Lana.

As she steps out of the elevator, Lois turns back to Clark and asks him a question that will stay on his mind for the next few days and show up in his dreams in the form of an answer ― she asks him where they’d be if he was the one forced to answer Macy’s question.

And Clark can only look at her as she walks away.

“So who’s the unlucky guy?”

Clark eyes the dress. It’s a nice enough dress, he supposes, with its deep red color and curve-hugging silhouette. But it’s way too much for a first date. That’s the kind of dress that a guy would look at and think he’s got a chance with Lois Lane.

“A new reporter at the Planet,” she says, and Clark dislikes him already. Who flirts with and asks out a colleague on the first day on the job?

It turns out that he was right to dislike the new guy, because Sebastian Kane is, in Lois’s words, a psychopath, and a would-be murderer. He also had powers, powers that would have exposed Clark’s secret had he shook his hand. Clark is glad that he’s gone, that Lois is alive, and he’s glad she called him instead of the police, even though he wonders why she did so, given she doesn’t know that he’s the Red-Blue Blur.

Which. That’s a new thing.

Initially he hadn’t liked the moniker. It seemed safer to hide in the shadows and keep his very existence a secret. It worked like that in Smallville for years, and his parents had told him it was for the best. But when he saw the animated chatter from the newsroom, the hope and excitement in Jimmy’s eyes, and even the approval from Lois ― it made him think that perhaps it was okay to let people know that he was out there. That he could protect them. He starts slowing down purposefully, so that people can see the flash of red and blue and know that they are safe now..

Clark asks Lois why she didn’t tell him she was going on a date with a superpowered convict, knowing that he could be dangerous.

“Well, I had to keep you out of danger, didn’t I?” Lois says. 

It's just like Lois to think she has to be the one to protect him. Clark smiles at her.

Lois Lane, protecting the Red-Blue Blur. But if anyone could protect a hero, it’d be her.

“Thanks for looking out for me, Lois,” he says.

“You’re welcome,” she says, and she doesn’t even know what for.

He finds Kara in the Phantom Zone. After not seeing her for years, it is a relief to find the one other living Kryptonian, his cousin and his blood family. He remembers how he treated her when she first came to Earth ― with shame and fear, because Kara was his mirror, reflecting all the alienness in him to the world outside. He hadn’t been patient nor kind with her, and now here she was, battling against wraiths in the cold and dark for years, for the sake of protecting him. For the sake of protecting humankind, a race she had once dismissed and now is risking her life for.

He needs to get her out at all costs. And he needs to get Lois out, because although Lois is larger than life, in here she’s painfully human. 

“How many innocent lives is she worth to you?” Kara says. Living a life of survival has left Kara with no softness to spare.

Clark can’t answer her, because he thinks the answer may scare both of them.

Later he thinks about it, and tells himself that he wouldn’t have sacrificed any human’s life in order to keep the rest of the human world safe, no matter who it was ― which is true, but the thought of specifically condemning Lois to a life in hell is so unthinkable that he stops thinking about it.

Lois remembers nothing about being possessed by Faora (which is a relief, because Clark doesn’t want to remember anything about how her beautiful face had twisted into an evil smile, how her normally bright eyes had darkened with hate, hate that was directed at him), but Tess does, and so Lois gets a raise, and turns down Clark’s offer to let her live at the Kent farmhouse.

He can’t help but feel that again. Disappointment.

With his father gone and his mother out in Washington or Topeka most of the time, Lois was the only one who still came by regularly. They did Guitar Hero weekends, or movie nights, or she would come over because she didn’t feel like cooking or because she wanted to do laundry instead of running everything to the dry cleaner’s. When Lois came by, Clark would make sure there was actual edible food in the fridge instead of a bunch of frozen meals in the freezer, and for that one night, the lights would stay on in the living room long past midnight. He will never admit it to her, but he likes having her around the place.

Maybe Clark is just lonely. He’s the Red-Blue Blur now, but even a faceless, nameless hero needs to go home to someone at the end of the day. 

He’s dancing with the woman in his vision in his dreams. He’d been jokingly calling her L.L. in his mind for a while now, because God knows he has so many people with those initials in his life, his soulmate has to be one of them, right? It’s starting to not feel like a joke.

“I don’t know if I’m ready for this,” he confesses to her.

Being a hero has, conversely, made him more afraid. People know he’s out there, and that means they rely on him. He can’t even rely on himself, he’s so afraid of the future, afraid of the unknown. He’s going to mess up somewhere, he can just tell.

“I don’t want to rush into anything with ― ” He breaks off when the woman starts chuckling.

“Clark Kent,” she says. “You are such an idiot.”

On that reassuring note, he wakes up.

The preparations for Chloe and Jimmy’s wedding ramps up. Clark is glad, because Chloe deserves her happy ending. She doesn’t have a single memory of Clark’s powers, and Chloe needs her rest after being a faithful sidekick for so many years. So on the day of the wedding, he hides his sadness as he dances with her, telling her that she is his best friend in the world and always will be.

“Why does it feel like you’re saying goodbye to me?” Chloe says, laughing.

“I’m not,” Clark says, and kisses her forehead.

Then Jimmy cuts in and asks if he can have his wife for a dance, and Clark steps aside.

He looks over to his right, and Lois is there.

She looks stunning in her orange-bronze dress. All morning she had been a flurry of activity, and there was only one moment in which he'd found her in quiet and stillness.

Lois came down the stairs and he looked up at the same time. They both paused, arrested in their movements, and he tried to come up with something to say. 

“Looks like you're ready,” she said at last, and smiled. 

He held out the cufflinks she gave him for Christmas and she came over to help him, her fingers gliding over his wrist, his pulse point. She was close enough that he could see the splash of freckles over her nose. He held his breath and didn't dare speak until she stepped away. 

Right now, she sees him looking, and her eyes do that thing they’ve been doing lately ― where, if they hold eye contact for more than a few seconds, her eyes will slide away from him. 

“I’m going to give these well-heeled puppies a rest,” she says, and Clark can’t let her leave, not now.

So he takes her hand.

They dance. One of her hands is on his shoulder, the other clasped in his. They sway back and forth in the dimness, and the sound of the wedding falls to near-silence around them. 

Dancing with her, here in the barn, feels familiar. It feels right. 

Lois is looking at his face, and he’s looking back at her. Her eyes are deep and dark and vulnerable. Lois Lane is made of glass; every emotion shines through.

He leans in almost imperceptibly. She moves closer.

Her hand comes to rest on his chest. It’s warm.

It’s happening.

He looks down at her face, so open and trusting, and leans down to finally close that distance.

It’s happening and Clark can’t stop it from happening.

Clark can’t stop it from happening, but Lana Lang can.

And as soon as he hears her name and rests his eyes on his former lover, every single thought in his head vanishes, except one. All he can think to himself is: Why? 

The warm hand leaves his chest. He doesn’t notice it when Lois slips away. 

Later, he sees her at the hospital. Chloe is missing, kidnapped by that eldritch monster, and Jimmy is close to death, bleeding and unable to stop bleeding. Other guests are crying and traumatized, Lana is hurt in her leg, but Lois is untouched ― physically.

“Why do these terrible things keep happening around us?” Lois says, and her voice breaks. Her beautiful orange gown looks too bright and harsh under the hospital lights.

Clark feels so much guilt on a daily basis that he’s usually numb to it by now, but looking at Lois is like feeling it for the first time.

But Lois is strong, and resilient beyond measure, and she believes in him ― not Clark Kent, but she believes in the Red-Blue Blur. If anyone can fix this mess, it’s him.

“I promise, we’re going to get Chloe back,” he says, and hugs her, hoping she finds as much comfort in his hug as he does in hers.

Lois’s voice is so small, spoken into his shoulder, that he strains to hear her, even with his super-hearing. Because he can’t quite believe he’s hearing these words come out of her mouth:

“What if we can’t?”

She pulls away, and her eyes are shiny, but she doesn’t let a single tear fall down her face. She turns away from him and walks down the hallway. As she rounds the corner ― she gives him one final look ― 

Clark is under no delusions that Lana Lang is his soulmate. She’s simply not the woman he’s dancing with in the future, she’s not the one who gives him peace. She can’t be that for him anymore, but he’s not sure he can be the man she wanted either.

What they do have is a partnership ― they know each other now. All secrets are on the table, and once Lana gets her Prometheus suit, there’s nothing left holding them back. Clark runs back into her arms and into her bed, finding comfort and familiarity. There’s no unknowns here, no uncertainties. If he can’t have his soulmate ― and at this point, he’s not sure he deserves one ― he can find love in Lana.

Unlike before, Lana is his physical equal. They work like a well-oiled machine, finding Chloe and Tess and Lex within weeks. Clark no longer worries constantly about her, no longer has to think about protecting her. Now Lana is the one insisting on patrols as soon as they wake up, and he’s the one who asks her if they can just lay in bed and talk for a while. Sometimes, when he wakes up, he feels the weight of their mission to save the world bearing down on him.  It bears down on Lana, too, but she thrives on it. 

“I have nothing left in the world,” she tells him. Lana only has Clark, and her mission. Everything else has been burned out of her.

He doesn’t dare think about the people he has left in the world, lest he do something stupid like pick up his phone, where he sees three missed calls from Star City, and call her back. His destiny is to fight evil, and he can do that best with Lana by his side.

He does call Oliver.

“How is Jimmy?” He says.

He’s surprised at the edge in Oliver’s voice. “There’s probably a better person to ask about that than me, don’t you think?”

Clark stays silent, unwilling to take the bait, until Oliver sighs. “I hear he’s stabilized. I’ll call you with updates if I hear from Lois.”

“Thanks,” Clark says. 

He goes home and finds Lana already in bed, waiting up for him. They lay on their sides facing each other, staring into each other’s eyes. And he kisses her to sleep.

Clark might never know peace, but it’s a small price to pay, all things considered. He can serve humanity best like this, and he won’t have to hurt anyone else in the process. And Lana has sacrificed so much of herself as well, lost so much of who she was, in order to achieve this with him, and he owes it to her to make sure that her efforts were not for nothing. He loves Lana, and she loves him, which means that his soulmate can find someone else to love too. Someone better, who will treat her right, and who will not leave her behind. 

So what if he can never walk past a certain empty desk in the Daily Planet’s bullpen without feeling a stab in his chest? So what if he goes to sleep dreaming of a love that can never be, or worse, stops dreaming at all? 

It’s a small price to pay.

It’s been three weeks since Chloe’s wedding, and at least he has his best friend back. She mentions she’s going to Star City to look after her husband, and Clark latches onto that.

“Can you make sure Lois is doing all right?” He says. It feels dirty. It feels like a secret.

Chloe looks at him. “Okay,” she says.

He doesn’t hear from Chloe, or Lois, in the next few days, so he can only assume and hope that they are both doing okay. Then he gets a text on his phone and his heart jumps to the stratosphere.

Jimmy n Chlo going back to Met. on Thusday. 

OK, he writes back. He thinks about asking her if she’s coming back. Can he do that?

Stay safe, he writes instead. 

His phone pings again.

You 2.

“Is that Lois?” Lana asks when she sees him texting. He nods. “Is she doing all right?”

“I don’t know,” he answers. And it’s a testament to their relationship that he’s finally telling the truth. Lana nods, and doesn’t look happy anyway.

All things told, once they find Lex, it’s over within days. Lana is hit with enough Kryptonite to irradiate the very pores of her skin, the very marrow of her bones. It brings Clark to his knees immediately.

All things told, he knew this was coming. Lana knows it too, because when he tells her that he still wants her in his life, she cries and tells him she can’t. So she leaves with a final kiss, and Clark feels his grief threatening to bury him. It piles and keeps piling on top of him. He grieves what they’ve done to each other. He grieves what they could have been. He grieves their fourteen-year-old selves, who were bright with hope and young love. 

All things told, what they had was beautiful, but it was blinding. His Kryptonian side was the only side he could have with Lana, and once that was taken away, there was nothing he could have with her anymore.

And, underneath all that grief, he finds it:

A seed of relief.

He picks her up from the airport at the right time, just as she’s rolling her suitcase out onto the pick-up area. In this timeline, he gets that right.

“Hey, Smallville,” Lois says, and it’s like they’re eighteen again and he’s seeing her for the first time. She talks the entire drive back to the Planet, as if speaking fast could outrun everything else left unsaid.

But this time, Clark knows better. He’s lived this life before.

Lois is mature and vulnerable and offers to be at the cafe later that night if he wants to talk.

“If not, I'll get the message,” she says. 

Clark can face Bizarro and Brainiac and Zoners and Zod but he can’t face the prospect of meeting Lois at the cafe. If he talks to her, he’ll either have to lie, or he’ll have to tell the truth, and neither of those things are things he can do right now without messing it all up. 

Besides, in his head, all he can see is Pete, Chloe, Alicia, Lana, everyone he knows getting hurt over and over again because they knew him and they knew his secret. And Lois had been no different when he had told her his secret.

Why should I think I’m special? She’d said. Clark, I understand.

And the crazy thing was, she did understand. He wanted to stay in that timeline, and stay in a world where Lois knew his secret. He wanted Lois as his ally, his confidante, and maybe something more. But Lois was selfless, to the point that she would have given up a life of safety in exchange for being his ― whatever she would’ve been. And she knew that Clark was selfless too, to the point that he would have given up that alternate reality for her sake and for others. And that was why she understood.

Clark can’t imagine what it would be like to have her love, if this is what it means to have her sacrifice. 

It didn't make it any easier to use the Legion Ring to turn back time, though. Because in this timeline, Lois will never know why he did not come and talk to her at the cafe.

You don’t understand, Lois, he thinks, as he types out a message to her saying that he’s stuck on an assignment. It’s because you are special. 

There’s an almost imperceptible shift in their relationship afterwards. They’re still partners at work, still the best investigative pair by far at the Daily Planet.  

But she stops coming over for movie nights. Or drinks after work. He makes a coffee run once and she tells him thanks, but she doesn’t need that fancy stuff anymore, she’ll just stick to the espresso machine in the basement. He asks her if she wants to go with him to the annual Global Investigative Journalism Conference. 2 busy, rain check? she texts. And he doesn’t know what she could be busy with, because she stops staying late at night to work on assignments. 

It’s been a couple of weeks and he has nothing better to do, and he might as well keep an eye on Metropolis, so he heads over to the Daily Planet in the evening and prepares to work on some articles overnight.

He’s surprised to see Lois with her head bent over her desk, scribbling furiously on a piece of paper. She has her all-nighter bunny slippers on.

“Lois?”

Her head snaps up. “Clark!”

“What are you doing here?”

She glances down at her notepad, which is filled with her scrawling text. “I’m working on that piece about Stagg Industries’ new CEO.”

“I thought you weren’t working late anymore,” he says.

“I thought you weren’t either.”

“That’s because I thought you weren’t.”

He realizes that’s too much; Lois bites her lip and she’s clearly at a loss for words, so Clark hurries on.

“I was just coming by to pick up my files on the mayor’s case anyway,” he says. Lois nods, and her poorly concealed relief would be insulting if it weren’t so devastating instead.

“Good luck,” she calls out as he leaves.

But really, what more could he ask for? This is exactly what he chose ― not just by turning back time with the Legion ring, but also not by knowing what he wanted at Chloe’s wedding. There are many things you can learn when you re-do a day, but he can never go back and fix what he did that time.

Lois seems genuinely touched that he framed her Rules of Reporting. And while Clark would rather burn the list than have it hung up in the office, he can’t help but feel his chest lift at the sight of her smile, pure and happy and directed at him.

Then he notices her bag, her nice shoes. “Busy night?” He asks.

He kind of wishes he didn’t hear her answer. As it was, he now knows that she’s got a date tonight with a guy who asked her out on the plane - and he shouldn’t, but Clark can’t help it - he tells himself he’s just going on patrol, it’s not like he’s going to be a creep - he throws on his red and blue outfit and speeds off into the night.

They’re at a restaurant (boring) drinking wine (pretentious) and talking about his work as an animal rights activist (seriously?). Clark concentrates on Lois, who is dressed up nice for the night and looks gorgeous as she talks animatedly with her hands. Her date orders a glass of red wine, and so does Lois, even though she never drinks reds. 

The whole thing bugs him in a way Clark can’t describe. He goes home mulling it over, wondering why it bothers him so much.

He gets his answer two weeks later, when he calls her as the Red-Blue Blur for the first time. He can hear her excitement and a softness in her voice that he hasn’t heard before. He tells her that she’s a good reporter, because she needs to hear that right now. And then, because he needs to hear it right now:

“What is it that you need?” She asks him.

And no one has ever asked him that before.

Then he finally understands why her date had bothered him so much. He knew that Lois doesn’t drink red wine, even though she’d drink anything else under the sun. She knew what the Red-Blue Blur needed, even though she’d never met him before. They know each other, and others don’t. And he doesn’t want them to.

Calling her as the Red-Blue Blur is one of the only things he has that’s his alone. Everything else ― his time, energy, courage ― they’re needed elsewhere. And he gives them freely. So he only asks of Lois one thing, and she gives it freely, because she’s Lois.

“Even the fastest man in the world can’t outrun loneliness,” she says.

Lois starts staying late at night again. Every few minutes her eyes will stray towards the phone by her desk, and her fingers will tap a complicated rhythm on the table. Clark gets the hint; he makes his excuses and leaves for the night, and a few minutes later the Red-Blue Blur gets on the line with Miss Lane.

“You’re usually relentless as a journalist, but you’re holding back on me, Miss Lane,” he notes.

“I don’t want to scare you off,” Lois says. “I’ve been known to do that. Ask some of my ex-boyfriends.”

“You won’t scare me off,” he assures her. “I can handle whatever you give me.”

“That’s just the thing. You don’t have to handle anything when you’re talking to me.”

Once, Lois gets kidnapped by some masked men after she begins investigating a local oil tycoon’s political campaign contributions, and after he whisks her out of there and delivers the men straight to the police station, he picks up the phone and calls her, his heartbeat thrumming in his chest.

As usual, she gushes about his rescue. “How do you do it? Are you meteor-powered?” She asks.

“Not quite,” he says. “I was born like this.”

“That’s amazing,” she says, and he thinks back to when she called the Fortress heaven.

It’s the first time he feels like being a hero is fun. For the first few months he revels in it. It’s a tremendous responsibility, don’t get him wrong, and every day he feels the threat of Doomsday looming over Metropolis, but it’s also a brief and only respite from the craziness of his life. And when he’s talking to her as the Red-Blue Blur, he doesn’t have to see the smiles that don’t reach her eyes, or hear the half-hearted quips she gives him when he’s Clark Kent.

When the Justice League convenes to discuss how to kill Doomsday, Clark feels like he’s shouting into the void. He will not kill. He will not murder. There’s a human being inside Doomsday and he fully intends to save Davis Bloome. He vents his frustration to Lois, and tries to thread the thin line between telling her too much and telling her enough.

“I don’t really get it, because you’re being very vague,” she says after a minute. “But I know you’ll do the right thing.”

“The wrong thing could lead to a man’s death,” he says, his voice metallic and alien through the modulator.

“I have faith in you,” she says simply.

Clark has never been angrier at Chloe. After all his warnings about Davis Bloome, she'd still chosen to leave with him under the misguided notion that she was protecting humanity. But he also can’t help but fear for her life, because she’s not only on the run with a serial killer, but she’s with a monster that could kill Clark Kent, and in fact will kill him tomorrow, according to Rokk from the future.

In his dream, he’s dancing with his soulmate. Given that he knows he is going to die tomorrow, he now understands that the vision was merely that ― a vision, not a future set in stone. In his dream, he holds her as closely as he can and whispers in her hair that he will miss her. 

“I’ll always think of you,” he tells her. She hugs him tighter.

He types up a letter to the people of Metropolis saying goodbye as the Red-Blue-Blur

He dreads seeing her, knowing that she will want answers, and that he can’t give them.

But God, he wants to see her so badly. If he’s going to die tomorrow, he wants to see her one last time.

He gets that chance when Lois walks into the Daily Planet, but she is incredulous, then furious, about why he’s not out there looking for Chloe like she is. Lois asks him what he’s been doing, and he has no answer. He can tell she’s over-caffeinated and under-rested and hanging by a thread. A thread of hope that Chloe is still alive. A thread that he will keep for her, not that she will know.

He refuses to talk to her, and the goodbye gets lodged in his throat.

“Another ricochet off the impenetrable force field that is Clark Kent,” Lois says. He can hear the hurt in her voice. He stays silent. The chasm widens once again. 

He runs away before she can say any more. He doesn’t want to die with her recriminations ringing in his ears. It seems that at every turn in his life, he’s had the choice to make the right decision, and he keeps making the wrong one. With Lana, with Davis, and now with Lois.

Even if he can’t give it to her as Clark Kent, Lois deserves at least the semblance of a goodbye from someone she cares about.

Lois’s voice changes immediately when he calls her as the Red-Blue Blur. He tells her that it’s going to be okay, that he’ll find Chloe, and she believes him instantly.

“You know about Chloe?” She asks, breathless. He stands in the phone booth, so close by that he could shout and she would hear him, and watches her face through the window panes.

“I’ve been keeping an eye on you,” he says, and he can’t help the affection that leaks from his voice. Goodbye, goodbye, goodbye.

In the end, it’s not enough. He tells Jimmy to go out and take care of Davis, and he tells Lois he will meet her at the phone booth, and when he crawls out of the rubble of the Luthorcorp facility, both of them are gone. 

So much for having faith in him.

He searches for weeks afterwards, scanning the rubble of ruined buildings, listening for her heartbeat, but he can’t find it among millions of other heartbeats. He hasn’t been listening closely enough. He scours the Internet with Chloe’s help. He searches other countries, other continents. He checks on hospitals in the area, then finally the morgues. Lois is simply gone, vanished into thin air. 

He refuses to attend Jimmy’s funeral because it feels blasphemous. He stands in the distance and sees Oliver looking at him and he looks back at Oliver and they both just know. They both failed.

Chloe begs him to stay. He tells her he must go.

“Clark Kent is dead,” he says, and he means it.

Humanity only ever meant something to him when it was worth it to be human. But to be broken so badly, and to have broken others so badly, is not worth it. He knows better now.

He wishes they hadn’t fought the last time he saw her. He wishes he had died that day after all.

Jor-El is ecstatic, as much as artificial intelligence can be ecstatic, that he is finally fully embracing his Kryptonian heritage. He trains at the Fortress from the moment the sun rises, then takes those lessons to the streets of Metropolis, burning sigils in the wake of his rescues. It’s his destiny to bring hope to the people, after all, even if he has none of his own to spare. He remembers a voice from his past, so full of admiration for the Red-Blue Blur, and vows that he will live up to it. 

He meets Oliver and Chloe once and twice, respectively. Both times he has nothing much to say to them, so he stops meeting them. It’s not fair because he should be there for them, Chloe especially, but life isn’t fair and anyway all three have some blame to share for what happened that night.

In a sick bit of irony, he feels more empathy for Lana now. This is what it feels like to have a mission without a life, a body without a soul. 

He still comes by the farmhouse to feed Shelby. But even seeing Shelby makes him ache, thinking of all the times Lois had brushed Shelby’s hair, sneezing and complaining, but doing it anyway. He drops by Lois’s apartment once, he’s not sure why, and standing in her living room and smelling the scent of her perfume in the air, already fading, and seeing all her undisturbed belongings ― a life stuck in stasis ― it reminds him why he gave up this part of his life. He stops sleeping at the farmhouse and instead goes to the Fortress every night. Sometimes he doesn’t even bother taking off his black coat.

Metropolis is a city of a million people, and each morning he stands on a tower and listens to their cries. Some of them need him more than others, but there are times in which he listens just to hear their conversations, their secrets, their hopes and their dreams. 

I love you, he hears whispered on more than one occasion. I love you, said at the end of a phone call. I love you, called across the room for everyone to hear.

The Blur, as he’s now called, grows stronger than ever. He’s able to resolve multiple incidents in the span of minutes. He’s always there, always listening. People are a little intimidated by the House of El symbol at first, but they also see it as a message that everything will be okay. He wonders briefly if Lois would like this new version, if she would be just as impressed as she was with the Red-Blue Blur.

It’s not a conscious decision to keep thinking about her.

In his dreams, he’s with the woman in the barn. He doesn’t know why he never noticed this before, but she’s actually standing on his shoes as they dance, although of course he barely feels the weight of her feet pressing into the top of his shoes. Maybe she’s bad at dancing, or maybe he is.

It strikes him as mundane and therefore human. It’s strange that he’s still having these dreams when he shouldn’t have a soulmate anymore, and doesn't deserve one.

“Is it you?” He whispers in her ear. She stays quiet most of the time, even though he knows she can talk, but her hand comes up to stroke his hair. It’s evident through her touch alone that she’s saying:

I’m here.

And in response, all he can do is go around and around in circles with her, saying is it you, is it you, is it you?

He’s done CPR to others before and he knows that it can be sudden and painful for the recipient. After all, it’s a hundred pounds of force-thumping the heart muscle back into action. He’s never had CPR performed on him before, but he can imagine how it feels when, on a random Tuesday evening, he holds up a train that has run off its tracks and sees Lois through the window.

His chest compresses and then expands. His life restarts.

She’s a little battered and bruised but very much alive. He can’t possibly begin to imagine where she was these past few weeks, and she doesn’t seem to know either, because she runs out of the hospital at the first opportunity to go to the phone booth on 4th and Main.

“Where are you?” Lois cries.

He wants nothing more than to answer her.

But believing in humanity has led him astray in the past and he can’t afford to return to it. He goes back instead to training with Jor-El, now that there’s an alien threat back on Earth ― Zod again, if you can believe it ― and he needs to make sure they don’t cause problems. He stands at the edge of a building, feeling the wind buffet his clothes and stream through his hair, and leans forward ― 

And he drops and keeps dropping. The weight pulls him down.

You are distracted, the disapproving voice of Jor-El booms in his head.

Shut up, Clark wants to say, but he knows that his father is right.

Chloe comes and finds him. Looking at her, he sees Jimmy’s bloodied body all over again, and he wants to refuse her plea to come back, except ― Lois is being pursued by a Kryptonian assassin? And Lois went to the future? And she’s back, and an assassin is trying to kill her? Clark speeds off to find her immediately.

Afterwards, he learns from Alia that he’s a ticking time bomb. In one year, he will betray the Kryptonians ― his own people ― and he will do so in a way that brings about the end of the world. He tells Chloe that he will do anything to stop the future from happening, except Chloe also asks him to stop something that happened in the past. But he can’t bring Jimmy back for her. The last time Clark tried to bring someone back from the dead, he had killed his father.

“That’s good,” Chloe says, her voice tight with tears. “It's good that you're embracing your Kryptonian side. There isn't really anything human left in you.”

Except maybe there is. 

And it’s her. 

Clark tries, he really does, but in the end it’s not enough.

“I couldn’t stay away,” he confesses to Lois through the phone. I couldn’t stay away from you.

“So come back,” she says softly, and if he closes his eyes and concentrates on her voice, he can pretend she’s saying it to Clark Kent too, and not just the Blur. 

He shouldn’t, he really shouldn’t; he owes it to his destiny, which can’t afford distractions, and he owes it to Chloe, who gave up so much in their shared mission, and he owes it to Lois, who deserves so much more than what he can give her.

But haven’t I sacrificed enough, a voice in his head cries. Can’t I have this one thing to myself?

From then on, he sneaks away during the day and night to call her, ignoring Jor-El’s warnings and avoiding Chloe’s discovery. Sometimes he updates her on what he’s been up to, and sometimes he asks her to talk about herself. Lois is noticeably more hesitant about that.

“You’re the hero of Metropolis,” she says. “I’m just the girl who writes about you.”

“You’re more than that,” he says. “To me,” he adds on, because he’s tired of pretending to be something he’s not. 

On the phone, Lois is introspective, quiet. He sees glimpses of the person she’s always been in her most vulnerable moments, which is to say he sees her at her bravest.

One time, he rescues her from an exploding oil rig and in the moment that he’s whisking her away, he holds her in his arms for just a fraction too long ― it’s only one thousandth of a millisecond, he tells himself, it can’t hurt, he can have this, he can have this for himself. 

“Thanks for the rescue,” she tells him later.

“You keep running straight into danger. Almost like I’ve emboldened you.”

“You make me braver,” she says, and his breath catches in his throat. 

It helps. It helps to soothe the ache in his chest. He tells himself he’s still doing the right thing, because what the world needs ― and what Lois needs ― is what he can give them as the Blur. A beacon of hope. A symbol. An idea. 

“You said you’ve been keeping tabs on me,” she says one night. He likes to call her when the working day is over, because Lois is usually still at her desk at the Daily Planet, and he can pretend like he's sitting across from her again.

“Yes,” he says cautiously.

“Can you help me find another one of my friends?” She says in a rush. “I know you’re busy ― and it’s really not all that urgent. I’m just worried. But it could be nothing, in fact it is nothing, and you probably don’t want to spend your time, your really important time ―”

“Who is it, Lois?”

She’s silent on the other end of the line. He can hear her breathe, the rustle of her clothes.

In his mind’s eye, she’s sitting back at her chair, looking across at an empty desk.

“Lois?” He says.

“Nothing,” she says at last. “It’s nothing. If he hasn’t said anything, I’m sure it’s for a good reason.”

He doesn’t like John Corben, the new reporter at the Daily Planet. He’s rude and uncouth and flirts incorrigibly with Lois, who shrugs it off because she doesn’t see that he’s deadly serious about it. They investigate crimes together, although Lois usually tries to go by herself and John tags along like an unwanted barnacle. Clark tags along too, but he consoles himself by telling himself at least the Blur is not unwanted, as he perches on a rooftop and watches the people down below.

Lois steps out onto oncoming traffic (why can she never cross at the crosswalk?) and John pulls her back.

“Careful, princess, you don’t want to turn into a pancake,” John says. 

Clark grits his teeth.

“Thanks, crossing guard," Lois says. "You know, I have survived twenty-three years without your assistance.”

“Just because you’ve got Metropolis’s darling boy looking out for you, doesn’t mean he’ll catch you every time.”

“Of course he will,” she says.

Of course he will.

“I don’t see what you see in the Blur,” John tells her. “He’s just some vigilante with superpowers and a superpowered ego.”

“You don’t get it,” Lois says frostily. “He saved my life multiple times.”

“Hasn’t saved mine,” John says. “Or other people’s, when they really needed him.”

And it’s true that he hasn’t and doesn’t and can’t save John when he’s hit by a truck and bleeds out into the street. Clark doesn’t even know what happened, just that there’s now a meteor-powered cyborg somewhere in the streets of Metropolis, and worse, Clark doesn’t know who he is except that he works at the Daily Planet.

Naturally, Lois is all too eager to help.

“He’s dangerous,” Clark says, but if anything that only stokes her fire. “Don’t do anything reckless. I’ll call you at our phone booth at seven.”

“You think of it as our phone booth too?” Lois says, and she’s flirting with him, oh God she’s flirting with the Blur.

“Just be there at seven,” he says, smiling, and he’s flirting back. What’s wrong with him?

Corben kidnaps Lois and the Kryptonite in his chest makes Clark nauseous and unable to fight back. But he has to, because Lois is lying right there, so he tries to reason with John, who is shaking with rage. Every breath John takes is ragged from the strain of the thing that replaced what his heart used to be.

“What gives you the right to interfere with our lives?” John cries, and Clark can hear the grief in his voice. “You stand apart from the world, while the rest of us have to live in it.”

Clark fuses his chest with iron and futilely attempts to stop him from yanking the iron-Kryptonite core out of his chest. John falls to the ground, more robot than human, his limbs creaking and his face contorted in one final look of regret. 

He rushes to Lois’s side. Her eyes are closed, a slight cut on her lip. He reaches out and touches her. Her face and her skin and her hair. His hand trembles only slightly. Then her eyes start to flutter open, and he already misses it, already misses her touch.

“Show me your face,” she says when she wakes to see him standing at the end of the room.

And Clark wants to show her more than anything. He wants her to see him. He wants to trust her. He takes a step forward and her face lights up with hope. Then he remembers that in all the times he had danced with his soulmate, they had never looked into each other’s faces. And for good reason, too ― if she knew who Clark Kent was, then she would be in danger for the rest of her life. 

He takes a step back and runs away.

The experience shakes him. His resolve to stay away is truly slipping away if he was tempted to the point of almost revealing himself. His resolve to abandon his human side becomes weaker every time he picks up his phone. Part of the reason is that he simply cannot seem to stop himself when it comes to Lois. He needs something more in his life. He can’t stay away any longer.

He tells Chloe this, and after an apology, she seems to accept his reasoning.

“Besides,” Chloe says. “Tess Mercer is surveilling our girl. It’s time for civilian you to make a comeback.”

When he comes back to the bullpen, he’s back as Clark Kent. Wearing his white dress shirt and suit pants and everything. His tie is slightly crooked. He takes a minute to watch Lois as she sits at her desk, turning his nameplate over and over in her hands. 

“I’m going to be needing that,” he says, keeping his voice steady.

Lois whips her head around. Her smile, it’s as bright as the sun.

She runs at him and straight into his arms, and although Clark could be hit with a ten-ton truck and not flinch, he almost stumbles backwards when she hugs him. 

“I was beginning to think your family lived on some distant planet,” she says, and Clark smiles into her hair. His chest is warm where her cheek is pressed up against it, and underneath, behind his ribcage, his heart beats, and beats, and proves he’s alive after all.

It’s almost too easy how fast he falls back into his routine. It’s like he never left the Daily Planet; the only difference is that Steve Lombard sometimes glares at him and two interns look disappointed at his return for some reason. In fact it’s even better than normal, because Lois has evidently forgiven him for his mistakes last year and she’s perfectly happy to stay late into the night with cheap Chinese takeout and rant about articles she’s written in his absence. Sometimes he thinks he feels her eyes lingering on him, but when he looks up, she’s looking away.

She frequently brings up the Blur. How he helped her, how she helped him, how she can’t wait to get his call again. Clark frowns and nods and tells her that the Blur might not call her again ― she’s a civilian, after all, and the Blur can’t go on involving her in whatever dangerous situation he’s up to. Look at what happened with John Corben.

“I’m no wilting flower,” Lois says, “and he’s not a worrywart like you are.”

She’s not, and he is.

“What if one day he’s too late?” Clark asks her. “What if he can’t save you every single time?”

Lois purses her lips. “I’ll still do whatever I can to break the story,” she says. “I’m a reporter. It’s in my blood.”

It’s then and there that he decides he’s never going to call her as the Blur again. That doesn’t stop her from talking about him constantly though.

“You know, this guy, he does rescue people a lot, I’ll give you that,” Clark tells her once, tired of hearing her gush. “But what about the journalists who follow up on those rescues? I mean, ordinary guys deserve their flowers too.”

“I don’t deny that what we do is important,” Lois says, and Clark likes that she said we. “But this guy can put out fires in three seconds flat, and ― ”

“Two seconds.”

“ ― he doesn't, okay, two seconds. He doesn’t even take credit for it.”

“Which is why you’re always giving him the credit in the articles you write,” Clark says.

“Yes.” Lois is quiet for a second. “Clark, I have to do everything I can to help him.”

That’s the thing about Lois; she keeps thinking that he is the one who needs to be protected. Like the time a zombie apocalypse breaks out, and they have to fight off a horde of the undead together on the staircase of the Daily Planet. Lois is an avenging angel with a fire extinguisher in hand, and tells him to get behind her. 

He’s wrapping up her leg wound from a zombie bite when he feels her eyes on him. The world outside is too quiet, a sleeping city of infected ghouls. Flashes of helicopter lights flicker through the blinds. Inside this dark room, though, they are safe, and she’s looking at him.

Like always, her gaze slides away when he looks back at her. He wonders why that is.

“Do you have any deep dark secrets, Clark?” She asks. Clark has enough secrets to fill a thousand wells and still have enough left over to scare Lois away.

Lois tells him her secret. The first part he already knows. Lois has always been too heroic for her own good, and it makes sense that she wants to help the Blur. But the second part ― he didn’t know that she ― Lois tells him that she loves him ― not Clark ― the other him.

“We all get crushes, Lois,” he says. He doesn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“You don’t understand,” she says. She stands up and looks up into his face, and this time she doesn’t look away. Clark is trapped by her gaze, unable to move, as she says, slowly, right to his face, “I don’t want to go back to the way things were.”

Her eyes search his, as if she’s willing him to understand what she’s saying. And he hears her loud and clear:

She loves the man she cannot see, not the one she can. 

It’s not fair, he thinks to himself. It’s not fair that he can see her, Lois’s bravery and selflessness and flaws and vulnerabilities, that he can see her when she’s walking into work with her high heels on, and see her in the evenings when she lets down her hair, that he has seen her at the lowest points in her life as well as at the highest. And it’s not like Lois is completely indifferent to Clark Kent, he knows there’s something between them, or at least he hopes there is ― but she doesn't love him, not like she loves the Blur.

But Clark doesn’t want to give up. Not yet. So later, at the farmhouse, he catches her fist when she moves to punch him in the shoulder and looks at her, daring her to look away first.

It’s like she said. He doesn’t want to go back to the way things were, either.

He hadn’t realized how badly Oliver was doing. He’d always thought of him as unshakeable (even to the point of murder ― but they were past that already), but Oliver has been spiraling for a long time now. His Green Arrow mask has all but crumbled and all that’s left are his haunted eyes and gaunt cheeks. He surrounds himself with hedonism and protects himself with mockery and absolutely refuses to take Clark’s help, to the point that when he steps off the trigger plate with the intent to light the bomb underneath him, it comes as a shock to both him and Clark. 

“I didn’t understand how bad things were,” Clark tells him. “I wasn’t here for you. I’m sorry.”

He’s already failed one friend. He couldn’t save Lex; he must save Oliver.

Chloe tells him not to worry too much about it ― she has a plan to help Oliver, not that she’ll tell Clark what it is. She tells him to worry about other people in his life, namely her cousin, whom Clark had stood up on a date.

It’s not like he wanted to stand her up! In that moment it was imperative that she wouldn’t follow him to the Toymaker, and that she leave the room where a bomb was about to blow up. He hadn’t realized it would hurt her that badly.

It’s not like he knew she even wanted a date! He had asked her to dinner simply out of a desire to, well, eat dinner together, and he hadn’t thought she wanted him to ask her out on a date until her inner thoughts told him she did.

And it’s not like that was a date-date he stood her up on. It was just “like a date” and therefore could be fixed by a proper date, if only she’ll agree to one. 

“I don’t even know how someone would get a proper date after messing up so badly,” Clark says, glancing at her out of the corner of his eye. If she says she doesn’t know how either, he’ll make an excuse and then launch himself out of the Daily Planet newsroom. 

“Hypothetically speaking,” Lois says, and there’s a slight smile on her face that says she already forgives him, “they might wanna wait for a slower news day.”

Clark is in the middle of waiting for that “slower news day” when she finds out about Oliver’s suicide attempt and Clark’s cover-up attempt and then it seems like the hypothetical situation may never come about at all. Lois is furious, more than furious ― she’s devastated by the news about Oliver and the fact that Clark did not tell her. Clark knew that Lois cared for Oliver still, of course he did, but he had sympathized with Oliver’s need to suffer in silence. And Lois is much too loud to ever allow that.

She stays with Oliver for his birthday and leaves straight after work everyday, all the while ignoring Clark’s texts and calls. The Blur has a miraculously productive week, as does the Green Arrow, who is finally back in action.

At the end of the week Lois comes to him.

“I’m still angry at you, but Ollie says you meant well,” she says.

And then everything is more or less back to normal. Clark will have to send Oliver a thank-you card in the mail sometime.

His second chance of reaching that hypothetical situation comes when Lois complains about job-searching. She’s auditioning for a morning show host position at Good Morning Metropolis in a week, and Clark offers to help her audition, even though the thought of speaking in front of a camera makes his skin itch. After work, he goes to a high-end tie store and stands in front of the rows of neat colorful fabrics, trying to stop himself from choosing a tie that will put off the producers and therefore cause Lois not to get the job. 

As soon as he spots it, it’s all he can see. A burnished orange tie, like the color of Lois’s dress last year at Chloe’s wedding. He buys it and escapes before the store associate can foist more ties on him.

The outcome is somehow worse than if Lois had been hired and went to work at Good Morning Metropolis; now they’re both going to work at Good Morning Metropolis. Chloe doesn’t let him use the Kandorians as an excuse, so Clark will have to power through this by himself.

The first online date goes well, he thinks, if Lois’s annoyed voice in his ear is anything to go by. 

Then he’s waiting on Lois’s date to show up, watching her on the TV monitor. She looks beautiful in blue. When they speak to each other through the headset and earpiece, it almost feels like her conversations with the Blur, but this time he knows that she knows it’s him.

“Careful my date doesn’t hear you,” she teases. “He might just have to take you down.”

Clark restrains himself from outright laughing. “I’d like to see him try.”

“You know what they say, all’s fair in love and war,” she quips back, and Clark hears himself saying, “What’s it going to be for us, Lois? Love or war?”

It’s a certifiably insane thing to say to someone he’s not even dating, but right now it’s just the two of them in this room and the cameras and microphones are gone and he’s the one sitting across the candlelit table from her, he’s the one getting her to flirt and smile like that, and he’s the one she’s going to say yes on a date to, and he’s the one ― 

And Oliver’s the one who sits down across from Lois.

Clark is going to send him a mail bomb.

There’s a part of him that empathizes with Oliver. Lois Lane is the kind of woman you’d want to chase for the rest of your life. And she clearly cares for him still, and she knows his secret, and Oliver knows how to balance his hero duties better now, he would be good to her. Besides, Oliver needs some love right now, and he ― Clark ― doesn’t. Shouldn’t. Won’t. Thinking he needed love in the first place was what got him into the business of hurting others. 

Chloe is long past listening to him re-litigate the same problems over and over again. Man up, she tells him.

It’s easier said than done. But when Clark walks into the newsroom, everything becomes clear once he sees her, sunlit and golden, pacing back and forth with a slight frown between her eyes.

“I’m sorry, I never should have tried out in the first place, or dragged you with me ―” she rants, bypassing his multiple attempts to get her attention.

“I just ―” she takes a breath to complete her sentence, and Clark decides it’s now or never.

And he will not accept never, not with Lois. 

He kisses her, and in his mind a voice is whispering it’s you, it’s you, it’s always been you.

His father, the real live flesh-and-blood Jor-El, is at once nothing and everything like Clark had imagined. He’s not the cold soulless voice in the Fortress. He’s the warm, loving father that Clark had always thought would be the kind of person who would send their only child on a spaceship, alone, to a distant planet far, far away, in the hope that someday their child would be found and loved. He’s proof that Kryptonians are just like any other race, capable of strength and love and kindness. All in all, Clark gets to speak to his biological father for one minute and twenty-three seconds.

Clark buries him in a grave near the river. Jor-El is still wearing the clothes with the mark of their House, bloodied and torn from the wounds that Zod’s soldiers had inflicted on him. They thought Jor-El was the Blur. They thought the father was the son, and had punished him accordingly.

It’s the second father he’s lost because of their sacrifice for him.

It’s been a while since he last saw the woman in his dreams. This time his hold around her waist is tighter, they spin around the room faster.

“What will you sacrifice for me?” He says to her. “Your life?”

“I would do anything for you,” she says, and that sends a chill through his blood.

“I don’t want it,” he says angrily. It feels strange to be angry at a soulmate. “I don’t want your life, I don’t want this future.”

She hugs him tighter and he is tempted, so so tempted, to be swayed by that.

He wakes up with his mind more confused than ever.

Lois doesn’t help matters. First she skips town for a week, during which Clark cleans up Mount Everest and the Ganges river and chops enough wood at the farmhouse to last several years, and now she’s back and is acting strangely around him. She stares blankly into space, blushes at random times, and starts going to strange secret meetings with a headscarf and sunglasses on. She clearly doesn’t want to talk about the kiss, so Clark tries to give her some space. If she truly doesn’t want it, he can live with that, he thinks.

He’s reminded of who she truly loves when she marches up to the microphone in front of a crowd of people who are clamoring for the Blur to reveal himself.

“I have looked into the Blur’s heart,” she says, her voice ringing clear like a bell. “and I can tell you that his intentions are good.”

She sees him, even when she doesn’t know what he looks like.

But he can’t accept her sacrifice. As Lois dangles off a hundred-foot drop on the ledge and refuses to give up his secret, Clark reaches out his hand for her and refuses to give her up. She cannot be another sacrifice, and his secret should not be her death sentence. 

I would do anything for you, his soulmate had whispered. 

It scares him, down to his core.

So he goes back to what he does best. He convinces her that he’s not the Blur. He puts on glasses and, hey presto, that’s Clark Kent for you, about as deep and mysterious as a puddle of water, would she please walk on past him and forget all about it?

But she doesn’t. “Sometimes I feel like I see a whole other side of you than other people,” she tells him. He holds his breath. “But it’s not fair. No one can be two different people.”

He allows himself this one honesty. “I wish I could,” he says softly.

Then she kisses him again. He finds that he doesn’t mind being just Clark Kent for now.

He enters Lois’s memories of the future and sees a world wherein she never returned. He sees all the mistakes he made and the friends he lost. He sees Zod. The sun is red and bleeds through the sky, washing everything in a deadly shade of vermillion.

There is hope, still. Lois is alive and in his arms, in his bed. The Legion ring is out there and they just need to get it back from Zod. Clark manages to send Lois back to the past, but not before he dies in the future. 

As he’s swimming in the haze of green Kryptonite, trying to separate dream from reality, he sees the vision once again.

The barn is clean and warm, a stark contrast to the rat-infested ruin that it had turned into under Zod’s rule. The fairy lights strung across the rafters twinkle like stars.

Clark clings to his soulmate, relieved to find her back in his arms.

“Show me your face,” he whispers. “I know who you are.”

“I can’t,” she says. “It’s not time yet.”

“Yet?” He says. “Is this future something that will happen, or just something that could?” 

She buries her face in his neck. Her hands grip his shoulders.

“Nothing is guaranteed in life, Clark,” she tells him. “Fate is something you make happen.”

“I’ll make it happen,” he promises. “I’ll make it happen.”

He can feel her heartbeat, steady and strong, against his chest. Clark breathes in the scent of her perfume and wills himself to wake up.

The next morning, Lois doesn’t mention the five dozen roses Clark sent to her hospital room except to thank him for getting her flowers, and if this was a week ago he would’ve been happy to accept that, but now he’s not. He’s seen the future and he promised her that he’d work for it.

Admittedly he doesn’t go about it in the most subtle of ways, and the word couple predictably sends Lois into a tailspin. But he persists.

“We’ll do it right,” he says. And if they do it right, he will be dancing with her one day in the barn. 

“Hmm,” is all Lois says. But there’s a lightness in her face. And she takes his hand in hers.

Being in a relationship with Lois comes with its own challenges, and patience is one of them. She’s liable to be spooked by any and all displays of affection. She forbids the terms “girlfriend” and “boyfriend”, which is fine by Clark because it’s frankly asinine to refer to his future soulmate as his “girlfriend” anyway. She shies away from holding his hand in public, or letting him open doors for her, and at the end of their first date he walks her to the door and she sticks out a hand for him to shake.

Luckily, patience is one of Clark’s strong suits. He’s perfectly content to wait; after all, Lois had waited for him to catch up all this time and she’s definitely less patient of the two of them.

Dating Lois is also the most fun he’s had in a while. Clark never knew that the World’s Biggest Ball of Yarn weighed 27,000 pounds, and now he does. He has fun, begrudgingly so, when Lois takes him to Metropolis’s Charity Costume Gala, he as the Phantom of the Opera and she as Christine, and they spend the night shadowing Stagg Industry’s CEO and his new mistress instead of dancing. He has fun with her on the couch at the farmhouse late at night, on the kitchen counter in her apartment, has fun even when she wants to take it slow. 

“You know, we don’t have to keep acting like teenagers,” Clark says to her once. “There’s nothing we can’t do tonight that we couldn’t be doing in five weeks.”

She shakes her head. “I want to get this right with you,” she says, and his heart melts so much he doesn’t even care when she slides off his lap.

He meets Dr. Fate, who tells Clark that he will usher in a silver age of heroes, and it’s eerily similar to what Cassandra Carver had told him so many years ago. 

For the first time in years, Clark can’t wait to meet his destiny.

Lois still has insecurities that live just beneath her surface. She gets it into her head that Clark will leave her because she doesn’t know how to make a home, whatever that means, and Clark promises her that they’ll be together ― forever ― before she calms down. As he hugs her to his chest, he remembers that first time they had talked, in front of Chloe’s grave, where he had offered her a place to stay at the Kent farmhouse and a strange look had passed over Lois’s face. She doesn’t get it, but to him it’s obvious ― the sound of her footsteps on the stairs, her voice on the telephone answering machine, her old pajamas still stuffed in the bottom drawer of his bedroom dresser ― Lois has long made the farmhouse a home to him. So he’s glad that he’s able to reassure her about it, even though he wouldn’t go so far as to send out engagement announcements quite so soon.

Lois is mortified when she comes back to her senses and finds out that everyone and their mother thinks they’re about to get married.

“Things are moving a little too fast for me,” she says, and Clark is happy to take the fall and he cancels their “engagement,” to which Martha calls him on the phone asking him what in the world he thought he was doing.

Lois has one final mea culpa. “If you had a secret, would you trust me with it?” She asks.

For a moment his heart stutters, but she goes on to say, “It’s just that I told the world that I was talking to the Blur, and I meant to keep that a secret.”

Clark smiles and tells her the Blur doesn’t mind.

“You’re the most trustworthy person I know,” he says, and it’s true. It’s his secret he can’t trust yet.

There’s one more aspect of his new life that he doesn’t trust himself to handle ― namely, what to do about Zod and the Kandorians.

At first, he dares to hope. At last he has a group of people he can call his own. He can learn from their culture, inherit from them his history. He shares their blood. He can lead them towards a brighter future. But because of his mistakes, Zod knows where the Fortress is, he’s regained his powers, and so have the other Kandorians. 

They’re on the brink of war. There’s no time left. But Clark has to believe in a peaceful solution ― he can’t give up on either of his worlds.

At the same time that the Kandorian stalemate is falling apart, Lois starts to doubt him too.

It starts off small, like a pebble from an impending avalanche.

They both agree that they can keep secrets from each other. Clark has no standing to protest, otherwise he’d be a hypocrite, but he wishes she would just tell him what hers are ― what sources she’s been sneaking off to late at night to interview, where she goes when she has to take a rain check on a date, why she closes certain documents on her computer screen when Clark walks by. He tells himself that Lois is not Lana, and if she’s keeping a secret it’s for a good reason, just like when he keeps a secret, it’s for her sake. 

He goes to her apartment one morning, hoping to surprise her with muffins and coffee, and Lois is dead asleep on her bed with last night’s makeup still on.

He kisses her shoulder. She cracks open an eye and smiles at him. Then he notices something.

“What happened here?” He says, grabbing her arm.

There’s a long thin scratch down her forearm. It’s the kind of injury with an innocent explanation: a bad trip and fall, a scratch from a tree branch ― but Lois cannot lie to save her life, and her rambling about trying to open a lid with a Swiss Army knife immediately sends all of his alarms in his head blaring. 

He tries to convince her to tell him, but they're interrupted by a phone call from Randall. Clark leaves the room before he can do something stupid like listen in on her conversation. 

It’s not like he can track her every movement with a GPS ― he already felt crummy asking Chloe to trace her phone signal that one time ― and he can’t very well forbid her from sneaking off. So he sits, helpless, as Lois slips away from him, somehow evading him even with his super-hearing and his super-speed, and comes back with more bruises and bumps on her skin. He’s the world’s protector and he can’t even protect Lois.

Clark tries again a week later after she shows up with scraped knuckles.

“I’m worried about you,” he says. “I wish you’d tell me if you were in danger.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Lois says, pecking him on the cheek. “The Blur’ll protect me.”

That doesn’t reassure him. 

“But you’re my girlfriend, not the Blur’s,” he says, testing out the word. Lois doesn’t even seem to notice.

“Are you jealous, Clark?” She smiles wide. “I told you, the Blur isn’t calling me anymore.”

That’s what worries Clark. If she’s not talking to the Blur, who could possibly be calling her at random hours into the night? The odds that Lois is in league with yet another hero is too much to believe. He briefly toys with the idea of calling her again with a voice modulator just to see what she says, then abandons it. It’s too risky.

Chloe doesn’t know what to make of it either. But she has faith in her cousin.

“You know Lois,” she tells him. “Trust that she’s doing this for a good reason.”

Oliver has nothing to say either. “Hey, man, she’s not calling me,” he says with his hands in the air.

One time, he’s zipping around town as the Blur and just happens to catch Lois in the alleyway behind the Daily Planet. She’s talking fast and feverish into the phone, and if he concentrates, he could listen in on her conversation. But he won’t cross that line. The truth must be given freely, or else it isn’t the truth at all. He speeds away and tries to quash the prickle of hurt in his chest.

When he finally finds out the truth, it turns into a full on ache.

Lois has been calling the Blur ― a fake Blur, someone who doesn’t care about her and sends her out into danger ― and she’s been keeping it a secret from Clark Kent.

“You told me that you stopped talking to the Blur,” he says, as the realization hits him that Lois can, in fact, lie when she needs to. She lied because she trusts the Blur, and because he had asked all those months ago to keep their relationship a secret. 

“Don’t you think sometimes you have too much blind faith?” He says desperately, knowing that her faith had been the thing that made him trust her enough to call her in the first place.

Her eyes blaze with hurt and anger and something else.

“He would never put me in danger just to get a secret off his back,” she says. “And that’s why I trust him.”

For once in his life, someone understands why he keeps the secrets he does. It brings him no relief, none at all.

Damned if he tells her, damned if he doesn’t. He’ll end up losing Lois at some point anyway. So he sends her a note telling her to go to the phone booth on 4th and Main. Their phone booth, he had once called it. He tells her it’s over, that he’ll never call her as the Blur again.

Lois doesn’t get it. “I don’t care about the risk,” she argues. “When I’m working with you, I’m doing something good, something right.”

You make the world a better place by being in it, she had told him once over the phone. Clark had kept silent then, too shy to say it back.

His throat hurts when he speaks. “There must be some other part of your life that means more to you,” he says, and he’s not expecting her to say that she has other people in her life that she cares about more, except he can’t help the tiny, masochistic part of him that hopes that she says there is.

It hurts none the less when she doesn’t.

Later that night, he sets up the rooftop with fairy lights. The table is set with a white tablecloth and wine glasses and a picnic basket with a dinner he’d planned long ago. He buys a rose and sets it in a vase and waits for Lois to show up with a pit in his stomach.

“It’s beautiful,” she says, her eyes shimmering in the light. “Thank you, Clark.”

He tells her that even if the Blur doesn’t, he still wants her in his life. He wonders how he must look in her eyes ― a pushover, pathetic, weak. Nothing like the hero of Metropolis.

Lois tells him that she has a calling. She refuses to live in a world that she can’t make better. She doesn't know, and she will never find out, that Clark Kent has another side to him, a side that shares her calling and a side that is worthy of her blind faith. That’s why he’s not surprised when he asks her a final question:

“Now that he’s gone,” he says. “Am I enough?”

And Lois’s face is answer enough.

Things are ― not tense, after that. Tense implies a fight. There’s no fight in Lois, not after her break-up with the Blur.

He tries to cheer her up and she tries to smile for him, even though he can tell she feels guilty about falling in love with the Blur. It doesn’t matter, it’s okay, he wants to say. He’s willing to take anything that she has left over that she’s willing to give him.

At the same time, Zod and the Kandorians disappear off the face of the Earth. Clark still hasn’t found the Book of Rao, the mysterious object which Jor-El had left behind for him, and every day that he doesn’t find it is another day that Zod puts his apocalyptic plan into action. Clark is just one Kryptonian now against fifty-odd fully-restored Kandorians. They’re running out of time.

He’s aware in his periphery that Lois is trying to find them a way to get their jobs back at the Daily Planet. She’s still committed to making the world a better place through her journalism, and she can’t understand why Clark doesn’t have the same drive. In her eyes, he’s backslid into the farm boy who didn’t want to leave Smallville and was content to let life pass him by.

“Lois, give me a break,” he says.

He can’t do it all. Lois, Zod, Metropolis, the Kandorians, Tess, the Daily Planet, his life. Something has to give.

Lois nods. What gives is their relationship.

Lois hates to lie, so she eventually spills to Martha and Perry White that they’ve lost their jobs, and officially breaks up with Clark at the dinner table. He pleads with her not to do this, he hadn’t realized how dire things had become, they can talk this through ― but later, as she pulls Perry up a building ledge, he sees that Lois is who she’s been all along. Someone who believes in pushing herself for the sake of others. It’s no wonder she had found Clark lacking. 

The Book of Rao is at once a blessing and a curse; it will resolve the Kandorian issue with no bloodshed, but it will take Clark along with everyone else to a new planet, never to return to Earth.

He spends sleepless nights wondering what to do. By the end of the week he has decided: he simply cannot allow himself to wage war against his own people. He cannot allow the Justice League to sacrifice its members. He cannot allow the people of this world to be hurt any worse.

Clark once thought his destiny was here on Earth. But now he sees that it was nothing but fantasy, the vision was only a dream. He will have to leave it behind, just like he will be leaving his soulmate behind.

It’s for the best, he tells himself. His soulmate will have a better life on Earth when he’s gone.

He finds Lois in the loft of his barn. He has never once, in his life, had enough time to do all the things he wanted to do. He couldn’t afford it. So when he does manage to steal away a bit of time for himself, he needs to do what is most important to him, and it is to tell Lois how much she means to him. How much she has saved him. How much he needs her, has always needed her.

And to his great surprise ― 

“I would give up Africa for you,” Lois says, like it’s obvious. 

He can’t quite believe his ears. 

Lois Lane wants him. Clark Kent. Not the hero, but the human.

She wants him in his life, despite everything he can’t give her and everything he can’t be for her. Despite the fact that, after all of this, he still cannot tell her the truth when she asks.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.

"Yes, you do," she says softly. The tears are already starting to gather in her eyes. "Come on, Clark. I need you to be honest with me."

It’s a familiar scene. How many times has someone stood in front of him in this very barn and asked and begged and pleaded for him to be honest? He thinks back to a long, long time ago, when he had told Lois that nobody, not even his closest friends, would believe the words out of his mouth, and she had asked why not. Now she probably knows why not.

He smiles and hugs her and tells her he’s not hiding anything, that she should go to Kenya, that he’s happy for her. 

There’s only one chance left to tell her the truth, and it’s not through words. He’s never been able to express himself so well in words when it comes to Lois. He puts all of his rage and heartbreak into his fist when he punches Zod, and afterwards stands in the shadow of the alley and watches her as she faces away from him, trusting and believing in him always, because the Blur has never lied to her.

He pulls her in by the hand and gives her the only goodbye he can. His kiss is an apology, it’s forgiveness, it’s hope and love and grief and salvation for both of them.

And it’s the truth.

After Zod stabs him in the chest with a Kryptonite dagger, he falls off the ledge and into the night, bathed in rain and in the light of Rao. This time, he’s truly dead ― he sees the graves littered around him, and his name is finally on a headstone. 

His father’s words ring in his head. Earth will fall to evil because of your actions.

Clark doesn’t want to believe it. He thought he was saving Earth by sacrificing himself. Send me back, please, Clark pleads. I will make the right choice.

But his father refuses. He doesn’t think Clark can do it. He doesn’t believe in him.

This time, when he’s back inside the barn, the vision blurs at the edges. The lights glitter so brightly that it hurts his eyes. He’s dancing with her, but they’re spinning around the room, frenetic and out of control.

He clings to her. “Lois!”

“Clark,” she says. And she finally, finally lifts her face to look at him.

He traces her features; her wide forehead, the sharp bridge of her nose, the slope of her jaw, the arched brows, the clear hazel eyes, a mouth that is used to laughter. She’s as beautiful as when he last saw her in the alleyway. He thought he’d never be able to see her face again.

“I’m sorry I left you,” he says.

“You’ll come back, though,” she says, always so assured and so Lois.

“I don’t know if I can,” he says. The disco ball above flickers and throws shards of glass throughout the room.

“You can. Of course you can. You’re Clark Kent,” she says. “And I believe in you.”

He catches his breath. The room slows, stops spinning.

“I will always believe in you.”

The lights die down to their warm glow. They slow down, sway in each other’s arms, a steady rhythm.

“Wait for me,” Clark says. “Wait for me and I’ll find you. I promise.”

“I know you will,” she says, and kisses him once on the lips, just a light press of her mouth against his.

The lightness in his chest expands until he feels it spread through his entire body ― and then his feet are lifting off the ground ― and he’s floating up, up in the sky, with Lois by his side, and he’s so in love ― he finds peace in her arms.

He knows she’s (quite literally) a flight risk and that if he’s patient, she will come back from Africa. She believed in him enough that he came back from the dead, so he’ll believe in her enough to wait. Just in case, though, he does print off a ticket to Cairo and keeps it in his wallet. He calls Carter for updates until Carter restricts him to one text per day. When she does come back eventually, they don’t get back together immediately, so he takes the ticket and puts it away. Years later, he will pin it onto the fridge in their apartment as a reminder to them both that distance never means much when Superman can fly to you.

For now, though, they stay in limbo. Lois still doesn’t know his secret, and he’s afraid to tell her now that the Blur is subject to national scrutiny and vicious attacks. Telling her is akin to painting a giant target on her forehead. And he’s still struggling with Jor-El’s disappearance from his life. If his own father doesn’t believe he can be Earth’s savior, how can he?

Lois insists on going to their high school homecoming to cheer him up, and naturally Brainiac shows up too.

It turns out to be the best thing that could have happened to him.

Later that night, he takes the time to decorate the barn. He hangs up string lights in the rafters. He buys a disco ball and fixes it up in the center of the room. He thinks about buying a jukebox and then decides against it.

This barn has seen so many people come and go over the years. Chloe had her wedding here. Lana left him here. His father, Jonathan, protected his secret to his last breath here. And Lois ― Lois has been here this entire time, through it all. He still remembers the first time they’d ever had a conversation in the loft. She had sat on the couch. They had known each other for barely twenty-four hours at that point and she was already interrupting him.

Do you always have to finish my sentences? He’d said.

Well, am I right? She’d demanded.

And she had been right.

He had just been blind. He never realized he carried so much guilt. The guilt of letting his father die. The guilt of letting Oliver and the other heroes down. But then he’d seen Lois in the future, and there was no guilt with Lois, only hope. And there was love ― she loved him, both the human and the hero, and he had been blind all this time, not only to the possibility of love, but to the absence of it.

Because right now, Lois doesn’t know he loves her. She’s had no visions of the future, no guarantees of a soulmate. All she knows is that she had gone to this reunion to cheer him up, then stood alone by the punch bowl because her date was off doing something without her.

And Clark will not let her be alone ever again if he can help it.

He waits for her to come to the barn and watches as her eyes light up.

“You don’t need to worry about me,” she says, selfless to the last.

“I’m not worried about you,” Clark says. There’s no point in worrying about her. However long it takes, he will reach a future where he and Lois can share a life together. “I missed you.”

“Oh!” Lois says. She’s incredulous. She doesn’t get it yet.

He draws her into his arms and they dance. It’s beautiful and perfect and everything he was ever promised. His hands around her waist, hers around his neck. Their hearts beating as one. He leans his head in and rests his forehead against hers.

“Lois,” he says. “You know, when I was fourteen, I met someone who could see the future. She told me that great things would happen to me. Amazing things.”

“Oh?” She says. “Like what?”

He smiles at her. 

“She told me that one day I would be dancing with you, like this.”

Lois laughs. He tells her he loves her, the first of many truths. She says it back, and the world turns still. They dance with their arms wrapped tight around each other, not letting go, and Clark finally understands what Cassandra Carver had shown him all those years ago, when he had been a scared fourteen year old who had a destiny too heavy for him and a crippling fear that he was going to die alone. 

He closes his eyes. Even though he can’t fly just yet, he’ll get there eventually, as long as Lois is with him. He feels light enough already.