Lois Lane, Superman, Metallo, Batman, the Fortress of Solitude, the Daily Planet and Metropolis are all fictional properties which belong to DC Comics. This is a work of fan fiction. This story is based on recent development within the continuity of the DC Universe (specifically DC Rebirth) as well as being inspired by this blog.
-
Lois stood looking at the gravestones around her. She was carrying her high heels in one of her hands as the ground was soft from the rain and the pointed heels had already made her sink in more than once. She wasn't sure why but it always seemed to rain on the rare occasions when she made her way to this field of the dead. She could reason to herself that it was because it was closer to the bay and that the the winds blew in cold moist air from the ocean which easily turned into rain over the warmer ground, but reason did not always stand when one was concerned with death. Instead a different set of forces always seemed to be at play, and the rain seemed to be governed by them more than by a natural phenomenon.
As the rain started to fall harder she was a bizarre sight to behold. She stood holding an umbrella to protect her head from the falling rain, while her feet were soaked, her black pantyhose having soaked through easily as she had walked through the puddles where the ground had not been able to soak up the water as quickly as it had fallen. It was a summer day but it did not mean that it was it was not getting chilly, especially as the cool breeze from the ocean which had precipitated the rain meant that. Of course she did not really know what it meant to be chilly, at least not compared to a regular human. It was a bit amusing to her, that she had stood in the front of Superman's Fortress of Solitude, wearing little more than she wore now, and Superman had never thought to think why a woman wearing a light jacket and a power suit mini-skirt wouldn't be bothered by termperatures easily reaching lower than minus forty. There had been much about Superman which no one thought to explain, and his relationship with Lois was one which many people seemed to gloss over, or at least never inspect too closely.
She stopped walking at a large puddle which had formed on the grass, and debated whether she should walk through it or around. In the middle of her consideration of her path forward she stopped to look at one of the grave markers. "Mr. and Mrs. Mark and Mary Henry" it read. The two had died in the 1950s, a few years apart, and their story was likely mostly forgotten except to the heavens. On days like this Lois would stop and examine some of the names here, trying to think about what might have made these people who they were. Mark Henry had died in the 1950s at age seventy, maybe he had served in the First World War? Maybe some of the boys that Mary gave birth to might have served in the Second World War? If Lois had unlimited time she might have been inclined to find some of these answers, but living a life next to one of the most powerful beings in the universe meant that her time, effort and focus was often driven towards more prosaic matters and not towards concepts like romance.
She turned her head and looked onwards, the plot that she was heading to was not far, and while the water was now pouring from the sky, she was undeterred. She had come here for many reasons, but because of one specific cause, the death of Superman, or at least the death of the Superman that she knew. The world which she lived in and even helped to influence partially through her actions was one which meant that a Superman could die and be replaced almost instantly by another Superman from an alternate dimension. It was a set of conditions which she was used to, as her life had been torn in many ways by the man that she had loved.
There had been Diana, and that was even recent, but it was not love in the same sense. Diana and Clark were beings of immense power, and drawn towards each other because of it, although at heart they had very little in common otherwise. Lois knew the ways of love as well as any other, and she was not foolish to think that people did not mistake physical attraction for love, or that physical attraction was a form of love, but she had always known that Superman dating Wonder Woman was more of a matter of convenience than a true love.
She stopped at another gravestone, this one saying only Stanley Ryan, with only a time of birth and a time of death. Whoever he had been, he had lived a life of little renown, presumably even not enough to earn himself a wife or someone else to lay next to for eternity. Lois thought to herself that it would not be for Superman. Though another had already arisen to take his place, they would certainly build monuments and memorials for the one which she had known most recently, for the one that she had loved, and the one which had fallen. Lois knew well about certain conditions of love, and more specifically with Stockholm Syndrome, wherein captives fell in love with their captors, and this was perhaps the easiest way to explain how she felt for Superman. She had not chosen him, rather he had been chosen for her, while following her assignment, she had fallen in love with him, and much as love worked, it was beyond her control.
She looked to her left through the falling drops of water. She could see the small mound where she was invariably drawn to. She walked the last few feet and stood in front of the grave. The name on the gravestone read, "Jean Aline Sloon". It was not a normal sounding name, but people didn't often stop to think about the names of the dead. It was inauspicious sounding, but someone like Batman would look right through it, for it was not only a name, but an anagram, and if rearranged the letters would spell out another name "Lois Joanne Lane." She stood there looking for a moment, from one Lois to another, and from the one who had stolen the identity of the human woman who had fallen literally in front of her and where she now lay.
"I needed to visit," she said, "I have some bad news for you, and there is no easy way to say it, but he is dead."
She paused as always as if for an answer, knowing that none would come, but at least granting the dead the opportunity to speak if they chose to do so.
"It is the same business as always though," Lois said, "another has taken his place, and this time it is a new Superman. No one can figure how that is possible, but I suppose that my mission has not changed."
It was common enough for Lois to come here and commune with the dead. The original Lois had fallen long ago at the hands of Metallo. It was foolish to consider that a human woman could really stand up to the threats which the invulnerable Kryptonian faced, and really it was surprising that others in Superman's closest circle were never killed, but really Lois had been special. More so than Perry or Jimmy, she was a way to get to Superman, and she knew it because she had lived it after she had watched the original fall. Her task had been to get close to Superman and to monitor him, but she had not thought that she might have gotten such a good opportunity, even if it was at the expense of the death of a great woman. She had been an intern at the Daily Planet by the name of Sally Smith, but when she had seen Lois fall she had taken her place. It was after all what made her such a strong reporter, not to mention an unknown secret agent. She was able to transorm and take the shape of any humanoid, an ability which had let her infiltrate crime gangs and terrorist organization with great ease. She was able to modify her body to differing climates with great ease, even Superman had never realized that she could breathe underwater if need be, and she could make herself completely untraceable and untrackable, an ability which she didn't fully understand. Even a great tracker like Batman couldn't find her if he wanted to, unless she wanted to be found, in which case she could leave as much of a trail as she wanted. She knew that Superman was a bit harder to hide from though, and so even now, at her most vulnerable to her lies, she had already taken the precaution of changing her heart beat and pulse to seem like any other human, not the woman that Superman cared so much for and who he could find at a moment's notice after focusing on her vital signs that he had memorized.
"I am not really sure what to do," Lois said to her dead counterpart, "I was wrong to have revealed the previous Superman's identity. I thought that it had finally needed to be done as a check on his powers, but now he is gone, and I suppose that it is done now, but I am lost not having any further direction from the original mission."
She had known her boss only as the Celestial Witness. She had been taken from her own family well before she could have remembered who they were. She was not even sure if she was a superpowered version of her own species or if all the members of her own species could do what she could do. In fact for that matter she was not even really sure if she was a female, or if such distinctions existed for whatever she had been born as as. Whatever she had been, she was as close to a human woman as anything else now, and she was essentially Lois Lane, such a perfect copy that her DNA matched her human counterpart on the microscopic level. She had even wondered herself if she had a child if it would be born as a normal human or as another like herself, as genetically speaking, she was Lois.
She had only ever come across the Celestial Witness twice before, both on cases where Superman had taken her along on a journey to outer space. He was as hard to recognize for what he was as Lois now was, but both times he had briefly told her to continue as she was doing, that she was doing well in her mission and that she shouldn't worry about how to proceed, because whatever she was doing, that she was doing it right.
It was his words that rang through her head now. Whatever it was that she had been doing it had been right, and so if she had intervened in Superman's life in such a way then the Celestial Witness accepted it. After all it was not her place to only observe, but also to interact with the Man of Steel, and if that meant that to have done what she did, then he was fine with it, and if her mission had been to observe Superman, then that meant that she would need to continue with the new Superman as well. As usual she had found the words that she needed to hear at this grave site, having both come from herself and from another. She leaned over closer to the tombstone, placed her hand on the top, and then leaned over to kiss it, leaving a smudge of red lipstick which would soon be washed away by the rain.
"Mom and Dad still love you," she said, "more than you ever knew, and I will be back to see you again soon." Lois turned and walked up to the asphalt pathway which wound through the cemetery. She slipped her high heeled shoes back onto her feet, and walked towards the car which she had parked nearby.
"On to a new mission," she thought to herself, "or rather a new Superman and an old mission."
Log in to comment