Chapter Text
“Eyes up, Smallville,” Lois was bobbing a little where she stood. She was in yoga tights and a loose cutoff tee that was apparently a souvenir from a monster truck rally called ‘MeTRUCKolis.’ Her wrapped fists were squared up in front of her. Clark loomed before her, his own legs slightly bent, wearing a beat-up white t-shirt and sweats.
Clark adjusted his glasses and took a steadying breath. “Okay,” he said, bringing his arms up.
“Ready?” she asked. He liked that little flash of fierceness in her eyes.
“Mm-hm.”
Bap. Bap. Bap. She had been talking him through proper blocking, and, from what they could observe, Kryptonian nerve endings seemed to follow a lot of the same logic as human ones, and she was always quick to correct his form or stance. Obviously she didn’t have the same hand-to-hand prowess as that skull-helmeted orange and black guy with the swords, but it was still a good opportunity to actually observe the patterns of a proper fighting style rather than be blindsided by a flurry of blows.
Bap.
Watching Lois, blocking her strikes, he could see there was clear logic to her movements: an awareness of space and a conservation of energy that seemed so far beyond him simply because he still had barely a grasp on what he was able to do to begin with. Rolling with the force of the punches was definitely instinctive for him at this point, but he was still trying to parse out how exactly his own invulnerability worked. Frankly, he didn’t really like the current approach of, “Oh, I guess that doesn’t kill me,” but it wasn’t like he was actively trying to lower whatever unconscious mental blocks he had on what probably could be hurting him a lot more if he let it. He could feel the roughness of Lois’s fist wrappings, the warmth of her skin through them, could feel his own flesh yielding, if only slightly, at the impact. He knew she actually packed a significant punch compared to the average person, but she was holding back in her own way. There was the instructive element to it, but caution, as well. After all, how hard would you want to punch someone who not only was your boyfriend, but whom you had also seen make a massive impact crater on concrete?
Bap. Bap.
Lois was a ruddy, flushed mess, but in Clark-vision she was a dewy and glowing warrior goddess, hair sleeked back with her own sweat. They had been at this for the better part of an hour—their training session interrupted only twice by Clark having to rescue several construction workers downtown when an I-Beam’s crane cables snapped loose, and later to fly a little girl and her grandfather to a hospital when the grandfather had a stroke. He had been trying to get better about letting certain things resolve themselves—Metropolis had firefighters, crisis hotlines, and paramedics, after all—but he had also gotten practiced enough with his super-hearing that he had a much stronger grasp on where the location of certain cries for help were coming from—say, if that stroke victim was also in an affordable housing unit.
Bap. Lois’s fist made contact with his left pec.
“Clark, shoulders,” she said for what was definitely more than the tenth time, “And you’re not even trying to evade.”
Clark wasn’t sure how practical evasion was when he was, in fact, significantly wider than her. Her fists were pretty centered on him as a result. He was great at evading while in flight, maybe because momentum was such a strong factor that impact could easily wrest from his control and he didn’t want to make himself into a missile by getting blasted out of the air, but here, in the laundry room basement of Lois’s apartment building, on a mat graciously lent to them by Steve Lombard, in close quarters with a much smaller (but much fiercer) opponent, there wasn’t a lot of space to evade, nor really a strong physical need to. Lois was going in for a hard left hook now.
“I don’t know if this is really working,” said Clark, finally dipping to one side with superhuman speed, sending Lois stumbling forward, but she righted her own momentum and easily pivoted into a back kick.
Careful, Clark instinctively caught her foot before it met his jaw, letting his own hand briefly follow the arc of the kick so she wouldn’t hurt herself with the sudden stop. He stood there, awkwardly holding her by the brightly-colored trainer.
“Okay, now counter,” said Lois.
“Counter?”
“You have my foot. I’m off-balance and vulnerable. Flip me, or something.”
“Lois, I’m not going to flip you.”
“We have a mat!”
“Look,” Clark let her foot go, “I know you mean well with this, but I never really thought of my powers in terms of fighting. I don’t like thinking of my powers in terms of fighting.”
“Well, don’t think about it as fighting, then,” Lois regained her stance and put her hands on her hips, “Think of it as… stopping a fight before it becomes a fight. We both saw that footage, the more you get hit…”
“The more I get hit,” Clark conceded.
“Right, you get discombobulated, and then overwhelmed. And it’s clear even if you can take those hits, that actually taking those hits uses up energy for you. There’s just a lot of surface area like this,” said Lois, splaying her fingers across Clark’s chest.
Clark gulped at the physical contact and Lois caught herself, a drop of sweat hanging on one lick of hair at her temple, and cleared her throat, putting her hands on Clark’s shoulders and guiding them so that he was standing at more of an angle. “You have to give your opponent less of a space to hit. You just keep coming at people fully sheeted forward, it’s no wonder you’re getting shot or laser-blasted in the back all the time.”
“I’d just rather the laser blasts hit me than…”
“Than the other guys shooting at you?”
Clark’s brow went between a furrow and a crinkle and he glanced off. “I mean, they’re less bulletproof.”
“Clark…” Lois started and then a sigh escaped her. It was one of her ‘I worry about you’ sighs but this one was clearly combined with the actual physical exhaustion of punching him for at least 45 minutes. “I’m gonna get some water.”
“Right…” Clark itched at the back of his neck. “How do you know Krav Maga, anyway?”
Lois gave him a kind of sad sidelong glance before taking a long gulp from her steel water bottle and Clark put 2 and 2 together.
“Oh….” he said quietly.
“One of the closest things we got to quality time, me and my dad,” she shrugged, wiping her mouth. A pause passed between the two of them, a silent, mutual acknowledgement that they didn’t have to re-open that can of worms right now. “Honestly I’m out of practice with Krav Maga specifically, though,” Lois added, “These days I just kick box down at Irons Gym twice a week.”
“I’d like to see that,” the words came out of Clark unthinkingly.
A catlike little smile spread on Lois’s lips.
“I uh—I could probably learn a lot more about proper stance and counters and, um, surface area by watching you in action,” Clark added. Were his glasses steaming up?
“Invitation’s open, Smallville,” she said, setting her water bottle down on the washing machine. She rolled her shoulders. “Okay,” she said, clapping her wrapped palms together, “Obviously this wasn’t as productive as I would have liked, but we can finish off by showing you my ultimate move.”
“Ultimate move?” Clark blinked a little helplessly.
“Did you know you like, almost never use your legs in a fight?” Lois was hopping in place a little, bouncing her weight between her feet, loosening herself up.
“Again, I don’t really think of my powers in terms of—”
“Think fast!” Lois rushed him, launched herself into the air, twisted in mid-air, and caught him around the neck in what would have been a brilliant scissor-leg takedown if… it actually took him down. Instead, he just kind of ended up rolling back to a near-limbo position to account for her momentum, then brought himself back upright. To her credit, she did keep furiously twisting and squeezing and trying to use her own center of gravity against him the entire time he was doing this, and Clark really wasn’t sure if it was the flight or the super-strength doing most of the work in making her ultimate move… not work… but once he was standing up straight again, she slackened with a frustrated groan, leaving her basically dangling off of him by one leg yoked over his neck.
“…I see what you were going for, there,” said Clark after a beat.
“It would have worked,” Lois’s voice was half a grunt from her semi-upside-down angle, “If you weren’t… y’know.”
Clark thought, Lois, you can choke me with your legs any day of the week, before blurting out, “No, I’m sure! It’s a great move!” and then quickly scooping an arm under her, “Uh—here, let me—”
Getting Lois back to an upright standing position from her current entanglement was a bit like wrestling a large fish out of water, but he managed to set her down with her looking only somewhat sulky.
“It really was a great move,” Clark tried to reassure her.
“It’s not that,” said Lois, readjusting her sports bra, (which made Clark quickly glance off, face burning), “I just… wish we had a safe environment for you to actually work on this stuff! Actually get a grasp on what you can do and how… there’s still so much we don’t understand.”
“I know,” said Clark, not wanting to say If I wasn’t what I was, we wouldn’t be spending one of our few days off like this. Even when I’m not Superman-ing everywhere, this is still eating up both our lives.
There was a familiar fanfare message chime and Clark, desperate to break that chain of thought, quickly stepped over to his duffel bag and grabbed his phone, reading the text on the screen. “Oh hey, Jimmy’s finally done with his thing.”
“His ‘thing?’”
“He wouldn’t tell me what it was,” said Clark, putting the phone back in the bag, “But he wants us both to come over and check it out.”
“Well, obviously we can’t go over there all sweaty, Smallville,” said Lois, grinning, “Looks like you’ll have to use my—-”
Clark zipped upstairs in a blur and after about 15 seconds zipped right back down, super-scrubbed clean, in a completely different outfit to account for the cold weather, and hair still slightly damp.
“…Shower,” Lois finished flatly.
“There’s still plenty of hot water left,” said Clark.
“Cool, thanks,” said Lois, not even remotely trying to hide her disappointment.
——
A shower, a change of clothes for Lois, and short tram ride later, they were at Jimmy and Clark’s apartment building.
“So, when’s Jimmy going to use his Flamebird bucks to get a penthouse?” asked Lois, as they both got in the elevator.
“You know he hasn’t really talked about the money that much,” Clark shrugged, “I dunno if he’s still trying to figure out what to do with it, or if he’s just letting the fact settle in, or what. Then five days ago he starts working on this thing and he’s just been kind of hyper-focused and really secretive about it since then.”
“Secretive, huh?” Lois brought a hand to her chin thoughtfully as the elevator dinged open, “Think he’s being mind-controlled or something?”
“Oh no, definitely not,” said Clark as they walked down the hall, “He gets exactly like this when he’s editing one of his longer video essays. I remember this one time back in college when—” Clark suddenly paused and tilted his head, squinting slightly, as he often did when his super-hearing was picking up something unusual.
“Clark?” Lois looked up at him.
“Some kind of… fizzing sound…at the docks…” Clark murmured. He stood stock-still in that hallway for about thirty seconds before straightening his head again and shrugging, continuing down the hall. “Well, it’s gone now.”
“Look at you, not flying off in a panic every time you don’t know exactly what something is,” said Lois, proudly.
“Baby steps,” said Clark, smiling.
The door to Jimmy and Clark’s apartment swung open before either of them could knock.
“Hey Ji—” Lois started.
“You’re here,” said Jimmy, breathlessly, “Come in, come on! Come in!”
Both Clark and Lois were hustled into the apartment, which was noticeably messier than usual with multiple boxes and foam packaging and those weird plastic air bags which never pop as satisfactorily as bubble wrap.
“Online shopping…?” asked Lois and Clark shrugged.
“Nothing so simple!” said Jimmy, clearly over-caffeinated and already across the apartment, forcing Lois and Clark to follow him, “I’ve finally been able to realize my vision!”
There was a mania in Jimmy’s voice that made Clark and Lois exchange glances and wonder if the whole experience with Monsieur Mallah and the Brain had rubbed off on him more than anticipated.
“What vision?” asked Clark, but they had already reached his and Jimmy’s room and Jimmy was bent over his desk.
“Lady and Gentleman,” he said deeply and dramatically, slowly pivoting around, “I give you, the one, the only,” he was holding something a little bigger than a shot put ball, covered with a dish towel, “the state-of-the-art, the one-of-a-kind, next generation in Flamebird content creation,” he whipped the dish towel away to reveal a silvery dome embraced by an incomplete disk, “Scoops!”
Clark and Lois stared at the object in Jimmy’s hand blankly. It seemingly stared back with its indifferent camera lens at the front, flanked by two triangular metal plates.
“S-Scoops…” Jimmy said, as if they should both know what he was talking about.
Clark and Lois looked up from the object to Jimmy, still clueless.
“It’s a news drone,” said Jimmy.
“Ohhhh,” Clark and Lois said at the same time.
“So it’s like… a new camera?” said Lois.
“Camera? Camera?!” Jimmy held Scoops close, aghast, “Scoops is voice-commanded with a learning AI, has a whopping six terabytes of still image, text-by-dictation, or video memory, is VPN secured and encrypted with its own personal cloud, equipped with the latest in hover-mag suspension systems, is synced with an app on my phone, and tops out at 45 miles per hour.”
“Do we also have to call it ‘Scoops’—” Clark started.
“Yes, yes, you do,” said Jimmy.
“Wait—” Lois glanced back at the boxes, “Jimmy, you put this together yourself?”
“Well, I saw the hover-mag drone frame at the AmerTek pavilion two years ago at the Metropolis Tech Trade Conference, and the processing is mostly AmazoTech AI hardware that wasn’t approved for mass-market release yet but it turns out with the company collapsing, there were a handful of people willing to look the other way and dig through lab storage for me. The lens components and digital recording are a combination of my own favorite camera companies and a handful of bits I had to 3D print myself. And I had to teach myself to solder,” Clark glanced at his hands, noting several bandages on Jimmy’s fingers and a a moleskin blister pad at his left hand’s heel. “So, I mean the components were all there (except the 3D printed ones), I just put them together.”
“But, why wouldn’t the AI tech be approved for mass market release yet?” said Clark.
“Knowing Ivo, probably branding stuff—glossy AmazoTech user interface kind of things, probably,” Jimmy was turning Scoops over in his hands, buffing away at any smudges on the chassis with his dishtowel, “But it responded just fine to my programming.”
“Can I ask how much did this cost you?” asked Lois
“Money is no object when it comes to solving mysteries and changing the face of news as we know it,” said Jimmy, smiling, which both Lois and Clark interpreted to be ‘A lot.’
“Isn’t AmerTek a weapons company—?” Clark started, adjusting his glasses.
“It’s not all weapons,” Jimmy shrugged, “Plus I figured Scoops needed a pretty hardy chassis with all the crazy stuff we get into.”
Clark and Lois still looked more concerned than convinced.
“All right, fine, I’ll give you a demo,” said Jimmy, clearing his throat, “Scoops, activate.”
The lens at the front of Scoops glowed to life and the two triangular plates flanking the lens hovered off of the drone’s spherical dome. Jimmy gently released the drone and it hovered into the air between the three of them, prompting “oohs” from both Lois and Clark.
“Oh, and Lois, can you stand right there?” said Jimmy, positioning Lois at a slightly more open area of the room.
“Me?”
“Yeah, when you hear the cue, just start acting like you’re doing a news report.”
“Oh! Um, okay,” said Lois.
Clark just kept a wary gaze fixed on the little drone now hovering over their heads. Scoops didn’t seem particularly threatening, but Clark definitely had some concerns about something made with both AmerTek and AmazoTech hardware.
“Great start, Scoops, now begin live feed on… Lois Lane,” said Jimmy, taking out his phone.
Scoops seemed to process this command for a second, then shot out the window in a tinkling explosion of glass.
There was a beat of silence. The three of them looked out the jagged hole in the window, watching as the little drone rapidly shrank into the distance through downtown Metropolis, towards the industrial district.
“It was not supposed to do that,” Jimmy said very quietly. He watched the drone zooming off into the distance for several seconds before he realized Clark and Lois were still watching him. He caught himself. “Small hiccup! Not a problem! I’ll simply recall Scoops using my phone.” He demonstratively hit a button on his phone screen, put one hand on his hip, and waited. A long, silent minute passed.
Clark was squinting out the window. “I.. um.. Jimmy, I don’t think it’s coming back.”
This was when Jimmy’s face finally dropped. “Oh come on!” He was tapping at his phone furiously, “It was doing great in the test runs!”
“Do you know where it’s going—?” Lois started.
“I’ve got both its camera feed and a GPS locator for it on my phone,” said Jimmy, “But Clark, can you—?”
“On it,” said Clark, before zipping out of the room in a blur, leaving a flutter of loose papers in his wake. A few heartbeats later and a blue-clad, red-caped figure was soaring after Scoops. Jimmy’s phone pinged. “GPS feed, let’s go!” He said, hooking his arm in Lois’s and sprinting off out of the apartment.
——-
In theory, Clark knew with enough speed he could easily overtake the drone, snatch it out of its course, and yank it back to his and Jimmy’s place, but it turned out the drone had a significant lead on him because he first got sidetracked first swooping a bike messenger out of the way of a taxi that had run a red light, then giving directions to those tourists, then taking that little old lady’s big box of dead batteries to the e-waste recycling center—okay, in retrospect she could have found a nice neighborhood boy for that last task but come on, he was right there, what was he going to do? Say no? But okay, yes, that did turn into taking the whole apartment building’s dead batteries and Lois would say, ‘Clark look at yourself, you are literally taking people’s garbage, we’ve talked about prioritizing,’ but he was already on the way and proper disposal of batteries was important too, wasn’t it? It reduced fire risk and kept toxins from leeching into the soil, so he was basically preventing future crises in Metropolis. Plus, it wasn’t like Scoops was actually in any danger, it was just… on the run, apparently. Gone rogue. The guilt did hit Clark pretty hard once he got back on task. Poor Jimmy seemed so excited about Scoops, and had obviously been working really hard on it—for all his feelings about AmazoTech, Clark wished he could have been more supportive in the moment. At least the drone’s distinctive hover-mag whir made it pretty easy for him to quickly relocate it, but something was irking at the back of his mind as soon as he got a visual bead on it once again.
The fizzing sound from earlier, he thought, watching the drone, It’s going toward where the fizzing sound was.
The drone suddenly dropped into a sharp descent and Clark shifted his position in the air to drop after it. The Metropolis docks. Scoops was now hovering around, seemingly searching among the massive shipping containers. Clark floated after the drone, feeling a bit of unease at his environment. Shipping containers could easily create close quarters, definitely weren’t fun to be slammed into, even with invulnerability, could clatter over and hurt someone if he hit them with enough force, and provided a lot of coverage for people to hide behind and within that super-senses couldn’t account for 100% of the time.
“Scoops?” Clark felt a little ridiculous calling after it, but it responded to voice commands, didn’t it? “Scoops?” He called again.
He heard a low grunt of pain on the other side of one of the shipping containers and quickly hopped over it to see two shipping yard security guards on the ground, one unconscious, the other groaning in pain. Both had steady heartbeats, but there was a faint smell of electricity in the air, and burnt hair.
“Sir?” He dropped to one knee.
The security guard grunted. “The… the bracelet…” was all he managed before passing out. Clark set his jaw before picking them both up and quickly moving them back to a safer location where hopefully their coworkers would find them, then followed the sound of Scoops’ hover-mag whirring as quietly as he could, realizing there was now a metallic resonant quality to the sound—it was coming from inside one of the shipping containers. The sound of the hover-mag had stilled to one location. He reached the source—a shipping container at the very edge of the pier, the doors were swung open. Clark leaned in to peek inside. There were a couple of crates scattered around the interior of the shipping container, of varying age and make.
Unconsciously, Clark set his feet back on the ground.
There was a woman in the shipping container, her back to him, thin hands clasped around Scoops’s chassis as the drone’s single camera eye stared down at her as if to say, ‘Now what?’ Slung across the woman’s back was a chunky chrome gun that seemed nearly as big as her whole torso, but what really caught Clark’s eye was the gleaming art deco spider bracelet on her wrist. All the guard had said to Clark was ‘the bracelet,’ which made wariness prickle on the back of his neck. Why the guard would mention the bracelet rather than the almost comically huge gun was beyond him. So… she wasn’t friendly, probably. But still, he knew he didn’t understand the situation, and just because someone had a very very big scary gun, and had probably knocked out two security guards, that didn’t mean they were incapable of reasonable discussion.
“Ma’am, I’m going to have to ask for that drone back,” he said, putting his hands on his hips, before pausing for a second, and adding, “Please.”
She turned to face him and he froze.
She was in a sleek black outfit, with a cropped black jacket, a low-cut, side-slit black dress over charcoal web-patterned leggings, and short boots. Her hair was bleached white and probably medium length, though it was hard to tell, with short blunt bangs at the front and the back swept up into two sleek, asymmetrical victory rolls. She turned around and gave him a too-familiar catlike little smile on too-red lips, the construction of her face utterly unmistakeable.
“Lois…?” The name came out of him dumbly and he immediately realized Superman always called her ‘Ms. Lane,’ always. She had Lois’s fierce pixie features, looked to be a handful of years older, but there was a sense of both sharp awareness and unfathomable exhaustion behind her eyes that filled him with dread. She had seen things—things she could never bring to share with another human being. It was an exhaustion he caught in his own face in the mirror sometimes, when he had been Superman for just a little too long that day, and the awareness that the world was just so much was weighing on him heavier and heavier.
That catlike smile turned pitying. “Very close, Boy Scout,” she said, before, with a shift of her shoulders, she slung that massive gun down to her hip and hauled it up to point at him.
“Okay,” Clark put his hands up, “Ma’am, I think you should know, you’re not the first—”
She blasted him in a blinding ray of neon coral and day-glo yellow, the force of it slamming him into the shipping container behind him, the steel buckling with a protesting shriek at his impact. Clark still wasn’t sure how his invulnerability worked, exactly, but in that moment, when that beam first hit him, full on in the torso (Surface area—again with the surface area), the image of the charred remains of a skeleton flashed to his mind and his train of thought became a throbbing panicked heartbeat of ‘This would kill a human, this would kill a human, this would kill a human.’ He wasn’t sure if it was 3 seconds or an eternity had passed before the beam ceased and he practically peeled off of the side of the shipping container to drop on the ground with a sad thud.
“The BG-80 Toastmaster,” said the woman, stepping toward him slowly, “Courtesy of Earth-Zero. With some modifications.”
Clark struggled to his elbows and knees and coughed, smoke rising off of him.
She tsk-tsked. “Oh you are squishier in this universe, aren’t you?”
“Look,” Clark’s voice was thick, and it took some effort to raise his head and one hand from the ground to try to motion at her in an ‘I mean no harm’ gesture, “I know the League of Lois Lanes doesn’t trust me, but whatever’s happening—”
“You think I’m with the League?” she said with a bitter laugh in her voice. She blasted him again. In the back.
Somewhere in the mind-numbing blaze of pain and the sensation of the concrete crumbling underneath him as he was slammed to the ground, he thought, Huh, that really is a lot of surface area. The second blow at least managed to kick better survival instincts into gear. This isn’t your Lois, he had to tell himself, She is very much an active threat. She wants to hurt you. She has hurt you, she is hurting you, so you have to get over the face and the voice and the everything else and act so she doesn’t hurt you or someone else again. The gun—just heat vision it—just concentrate, you’re close enough and it’s big enough that you don’t have to worry too much about hitting her—no, wait—what if it explodes? You don’t know what it’s made of—
There was a series of clicks and Clark looked up at her, willing the heat behind his eyes, but the muzzle of the gun was glowing red now and again, he got caught up in that exhaustion, that pity, in her face. She wasn’t with the League of Lois Lanes? Then what did she want? Why was she here? And what did Scoops of all things have to do with it all?
“Don’t worry,” she said dispassionately, “I’m not hitting you with anything you can’t take.”
“But—” Clark started. But she fired again. The blast wasn’t that overwhelming neon this time, but red, red, red. And then everything went black.