Chapter Text
“Holy shit,” Lois said quietly on a long exhale, glowing phone stuck right up in her face. “He’s Superman.”
Lois had been working on figuring out Superman’s secondary identity for the better part of a year; she’d bet anything that he had one, and breaking the story of that identity would be huge. She’d already figured out which area of Metropolis he lived in and which he worked in as his other identity, based on both his response times and from which direction he flew onto the scene during the daytime and nighttime hours. She’d gone to those neighborhoods to talk to folks that lived and worked there and poke around for clues. And she’d grilled Clark on what he knew about Superman’s other identity, since the guy always seemed to get interviews with the meta human, but he’d given her nothing of any substance.
Now she knew why—Clark himself was Superman.
She couldn’t tear her eyes from the photo on her phone screen. It was a selfie of her and Cat she’d taken at the bar that night, where a bunch of people from the Planet had gone after work. But what she was staring at was Clark’s face in the background. Because it didn’t look like Clark’s face at all. It was Superman’s face, without a doubt, but pasted onto Clark’s body with Clark’s hair on top and Clark’s glasses in front. She had no idea how that was possible, but the photo was undeniable.
Clark had never liked having his photo taken, she’d noticed long before. He’d weasel his way out of it whenever possible, and if he did end up in a photo, he was always ducking his head or putting a hand on his forehead or cheek to partially cover his face or moving at the last second so his features ended up blurry. She’d always thought it was just because he was kind of shy and clumsy, but apparently it was to stop anyone from seeing that he looked identical to Superman in photos.
Tonight, he hadn’t known Lois was taking this photo with him visible in the background. His face was directly facing the camera, grinning at someone. He had dimples! Since when did Clark have dimples? Superman had them, not Clark.
She went poring through her phone, through Cat and Jimmy’s Instagrams, anywhere she could find more photos of Clark Kent. She could only ever see a bit of his face, but now that she was looking for it, she could see that it was Superman in every single one. He must have some superpower to change his face that only worked live and didn’t translate to photos.
It was the middle of the night, but Lois grabbed her laptop to start typing up an exposé on Superman’s secret identity. She got only one line in before she stopped.
Clark was keeping this secret for a reason. She didn’t know what that reason was, but it must be important to him, which meant he was going to be upset if Lois exposed him. Did she really want to do that to Clark? They weren’t friends, exactly, but they were friendly, they were colleagues, they’d known each other for almost three years. Yeah, she gave him a hard time a lot, criticized him, but she’d eaten lunch with him, pulled all-nighters with him at the office, he’d been her Secret Santa one year at the Planet holiday party.
Could she really expose Clark like this? But also, could she sit on the biggest story of the year?
If she knew what his reason was for the secret, maybe she could decide whether it was worth keeping.
“Hey Clark.” He turned to peer through his glasses at Lois as she rolled her chair toward him, raising his eyebrows expectantly. “Remember how I was asking you if you knew anything about Superman’s other life, his regular life when he’s not being Superman?”
Shoot. This was not what he expected her to ask about. He really didn’t like it when she asked him about his alter-ego, having to lie to her so directly.
“Yeah—like I said, I’m not so sure he has a regular life, Lois,” he replied in his deeper voice that he put on whenever he was Fake Clark. That was what he called it in his head, Fake Clark, this persona he adopted living here in Metropolis. It was mostly real, but not quite the same as the full him that he was with his parents. “I mean, it would be pretty hard to hide that you’re Superman, don’t you think?”
“Superman’s good at doing hard things.” There seemed to be a bit of a challenge in the way she said it, her eyes sharp.
Clark ducked his head. He really wanted to get her off of this topic. “I guess so. But like I told you before, I don’t know anything about it, sorry.”
Her eyes narrowed slightly. “Fine, you don’t know. But just go with me on this, Clark—let’s say he really does have another identity, a regular person identity that lives a regular life when he’s not being Superman. Why do you think he’d want to do that?”
Clark had to suppress a sigh. He should have known better than to think he could get Lois to drop a topic she was interested in. He would have to tell her something or she’d never stop grilling him. “Maybe…maybe he likes, you know, doing regular life stuff where no one is trying to shoot him or blow him up or whatever.” That was definitely part of his reason. Another big part was the isolation and loneliness he’d feel if he was Superman 100% of the time—it was already lonely enough as it was, this way—but that felt too close to his heart to even hint at.
Lois’s gaze softened a bit, and she was quiet for a few seconds before responding. “Okay yeah, I get that. But then why doesn’t he just do regular stuff as Superman? Or at least acknowledge that his regular life persona and Superman are the same. Like how Guy Gardner is openly Green Lantern. Why would Superman keep his a secret?”
He answered automatically. “I haven’t heard of Guy having any family. Maybe Superman has a family he needs to protect.”
Lois leveled him with a thoughtful look, twisting her pen in her fingers absently, silent again. “Yeah,” she finally said. “You’re probably right.”
She swiveled her chair away from him, sliding herself back over to her desk.
He frowned at the back of her head. That had been too easy. “Why did you want to know?” he called to her.
She shrugged, not bothering to look back at him, her attention already on her computer monitor again. “No reason. Just curious.”
She was lying. Even if he couldn’t hear the slight uptick in her heart rate and respiration that indicated it, he knew Lois was never just curious about things for no reason. Her doggedness in learning the full story was one of the qualities he most liked about her. But right now, it made him nervous.
Lois had decided to shelve the story. She would help Clark keep his big secret.
When he’d told her Superman wanted to protect his family, she could see over his shoulder his “Call Ma” post-it tacked on his corkboard. He did call his parents a lot, and smiled a lot when he was on the phone with them. Visited them a lot too, which used to make her wonder how he found the time to do it on so many weekends when they lived so far away, but now she knew he could just fly himself there. And he always talked about them so fondly, like when he brought in a loaf of sourdough bread for the first time and said he made it from his Ma’s starter but that his bread would never be as good as hers was.
Superman had only one known weakness, Kryptonite. She was sure criminals were clamoring to discover another vulnerability to exploit, and if they knew how much Superman loved his parents, and that those parents were Jonathan and Martha Kent, they’d have it.
She didn’t really want to be the one to give it to them.
That didn’t mean this was case-closed, though. Her curiosity demanded she find out more about how Clark managed to be two people at once, if only for her own sake.
How he changed his face was the top thing driving her crazy. She got the idea that it might be related to his glasses somehow when he came in from the rain one day right around the same time Cat did, and both of them had water droplets all over their glasses’ lenses. Cat immediately took hers off to dry them with a tissue, and then offered a tissue to Clark. But instead of taking it, he went to the bathroom to dry his glasses in there.
Lois realized she’d never seen him take off his glasses once. She immediately set about trying to get him to do it, but nothing would convince him to, and he seemed awfully nervous about the very suggestion. Said he got migraines without them. But Lois was now certain they were the key. How they changed his face, she still had no idea, but at least she knew what was responsible.
Now that she knew Clark was Superman, his behavior at the office made it seem so obvious. She watched him closely now, and he was constantly running out “for a story,” which, fair enough, so was she, but the times he did it almost always coincided with Superman appearing on a live news broadcast a minute later.
One time, when a hurricane demolished southern Mississippi, Clark was “out sick” for three days straight. Meanwhile Superman was down there rescuing people from floods and shoring up broken infrastructure and flying shipping containers full of food and water on his back to get to the people who were stuck.
Having paid such close attention to Superman for the last year when she was trying to learn who he was, Lois had already developed a healthy appreciation for his many attractions—not just how he looked, though she definitely liked that, but how he acted, what he believed and stood for. His selfless kindness in helping out all these ordinary people in the Mississippi hurricane was yet another example for her to admire—it wasn’t all just battling giant aliens and thwarting evil despots for him. No job was beneath him. He wasn’t doing it for glory. He was doing it for humanity.
When Clark got back, she brought up the hurricane, and he immediately started telling her all these stories that he’d “seen on the news” about the survivors doing the most heartwarming and heroic stuff for each other. It was incredible that after all the awful things he must have witnessed over the last few days, these were the things that stood out to him.
“Gosh, it’s wonderful seeing how people help each other when times are tough, you know?” he finally said.
“People take advantage of each other when times are tough, too,” Lois pointed out. “All the looting, didn’t you see that on the news? And I’ve already heard talk that these rich white guys who own the cheap housing that got destroyed are going to replace it with condos and gentrified yuppie shit so they can quadruple the rent they collect and drive out all the poor folks—they’re bragging about it on TV, calling it ‘a great opportunity for neighborhood revitalization’ and bullshit like that.”
Clark looked sad at that. What he said, though, was hopeful: “I bet those communities will rally together and stop that from happening.”
It was stupid for anyone to be this optimistic and idealistic, especially a journalist. But against her better judgment, Lois found it kind of charming, too. She had to respect his refusal to ever give up on anyone or any possibility of a good outcome. It was like the bizarro version of her own stubborn tenacity.
Paying such close attention to Clark made her feel bad for him, though, too. She hadn’t really given much thought to the fact that he didn’t go out after work with the rest of them very often—he almost always said he was tired or busy with “other plans,” and she had taken that at face value. But she now knew “other plans” meant Superman stuff, and noticed that he looked a little sad about declining the invitation so often. It must be lonely, patrolling alone through the sky most nights instead of hanging out with friends like a normal single 30-year-old. But he did it anyway.
She’d always known Clark was a nice guy. Turns out he was a good guy too.
“This was your ‘important plans’ last night?” Lois asked as she tore off a chunk of the sourdough loaf Clark had brought in instead of bothering to slice it. “You couldn’t go out with all of us because you needed to bake bread?”
“Don’t give him crap for it, Lois,” Jimmy mumbled through a mouth full of bread. “We’re all benefiting from it.”
“It’s not the only thing I did last night, but yeah,” he shrugged, “I made bread too. It relaxes me.” He'd found it to be a helpful way to clear and settle his mind after he’d gotten in from Superman patrol, falling into the repetitive motion of kneading the dough, training his focus on making sure he didn’t do it too hard so he couldn’t think about anything else.
“Ooh, were you doing something strenuous that you needed to relax from afterwards?” Jimmy asked suggestively.
Lois pulled a disgusted face. “There’s nothing I want to hear about less than what Clark does in his free time.” That stung a bit.
“Then why’d you ask me about it?” Clark challenged.
“When?” she scoffed.
“Just now, you asked what my important plans were last night.”
“No, I asked you if baking bread was the plans, not what they were otherwise.”
“I still want to know the plans,” Jimmy piped up.
Last night, Clark had gotten shot at four times, been engulfed in flames once, and flew to Antarctica and back to check on his robots. “I doubt it was anything as exciting as whatever you got up to,” he said. “Have you finally asked one of those interns out?”
Jimmy’s nervous gaze shot over to the pair of conventionally hot young girls by the mail cart in the corner, smirking and fluttering their eyelashes at him. He sunk down lower in his seat.
“If you’re scared of getting in trouble for dating a subordinate,” Lois told Jimmy, “Clark and I won’t tell anyone. I bet Clark’s great at keeping secrets. Right, Clark?” She ripped off another bite of bread with her teeth and pinned him with her stare as she chewed.
“Sure,” Clark answered, the word coming out in a higher pitch than he intended. “Of course.”
Lois gave her focus back to Jimmy. “See? You’re safe. Kent would never let anything bad happen to you.”
He was pleased at her saying so, though she could have no idea just how true that was, of course. Protecting all humans was exactly why his Kryptonian parents had sent him to earth, and he took that mandate doubly to heart for his friends and family. It would destroy him if one of them got hurt under his watch. Just the other week, Lois had given him a terrible scare by showing up at an apartment building where there had been a gas leak explosion he was helping address, and starting to give a hand to the fleeing residents herself, even though the building could have come down on her head at any moment. It didn’t, but just the thought that it could have made him feel queasy.
She was so darn reckless. But brave and strong and sharp as a tack, as Ma would say. And Lois was good. How many people would just jump in and help like she had?
Geez, he really liked her. He always had, honestly, or at least had always been fascinated with her. But lately his feelings had gotten even stronger, because she was talking to him more. She still criticized him a lot—“Your writing’s got no teeth, Kent.”—“What kind of a lede is this, Clark?”—but she asked him more questions about himself now, and occasionally seemed to actually enjoy talking to him.
Coincidentally, she’d been giving him more attention as Superman too, showing up on site more often, and there, she came off as openly friendly, maybe even admiring, the couple times he spoke to her in the crowd afterwards. He’d developed a suspicion that she might have a bit of a thing for Superman but was embarrassed about it, and that’s why she’d grilled him for information on his alter-ego a while ago but lied about why she was asking.
He tried not to get too excited by the thought of Lois actually liking him back.
Gosh, he wished he could just ask her out! It was getting more and more tempting. But if he asked her out as Clark, she probably wouldn’t say yes, and even if she did, she might freak out later to find out he’d been an alien all along. And if he asked her out as Superman to make sure she wasn’t freaked out by the whole surprise alien thing, and she said yes, she would probably feel betrayed to later find out he was Clark too, a guy she didn’t like much, like he’d tricked her into being with someone else.
“Thanks for the bread, Clark,” she told him as she brushed off her hands. “It’s good.”
It wasn’t often that she praised him, so when she did, it felt amazing. “Glad you liked it,” he smiled.
He really needed to figure out a way to ask her out.