FIC: Sofa, 3 a.m. (Smallville - Clark, Lois)
Set some time during Gone, minor spoilers up to 4.17. Um. Clois. Ish.


Sofa, 3 a.m.

Clark wakes to the sound of the refrigerator door opening, and his blurry mind thinks, wha? before the crick in his back and the lump under his left hip remind him, with the insistence of an elbow to the ribs, that he is on the sofa, not in his bedroom. He pushes up on one arm, his eyes squinting open, and sees light.

"Who's there? Oh. You're awake? I thought you'd be asleep. Where does your mom keep the sugar? It's not in the cupboard next to the refrigerator."

"Mnr," says Clark, and then, "I was." Three beats too slow to make any kind of dent in the exchange. Lois. He pushes himself up further, trying and failing to think why he'd been roused, what wake-worthy emergencies involve sugar and refrigerators. No matter how glassily he stares at it, the alarm clock, sharing his exile from his room, remains adamant that it's three a.m. He passes a hand over his face.

"It's okay, I found it. Under the sink. Weird. Couldn't sleep, huh?"

"No," says Clark, as pointedly as he can. Somehow, sleep-fogged, the point is lost.

"Me neither. It's the house."

She comes through from the kitchen with a glass of milk in one hand and a piece of apple pie on a plate in the other. Her pyjamas are pale blue flannel patterned with a childish design. Her hair sticks out of her ponytail like hay from a bale. She puts the milk and the pie down on the coffee table, cracking a yawn. Then she shoves his legs out of the way with the heel of her foot, and sits down on the sofa next to him.

"Don't get me wrong, you and your parents have got a great place here. I just haven't exactly spent a lot of time on farms. There's always some kind of noise on a base. The country's so . . . quiet."

"Not with you in it."

The smile appears, saying bring it on. "You already had the awkward silence thing covered."

"It's called knowing when to keep my mouth shut. You should try it some time. Like," The memory is an uncomfortably active worm in his mind; he feels it, and fights the squirm. "Yesterday. With Lana."

"Uh, around her you generally have your mouth open."

The feeling spikes. "Do you always have to be so--"

"Perceptive?"

"--completely--"

"Dead right?"

"Lana and I," he begins.

"You blew it with her, huh?"

"What makes you think--"

"Well," says Lois, "You're you."

"Lois--" he says.

"What?"

She's eating pie, her legs rucked up on the sofa. She speaks around a bite. To avoid their legs touching, he's pushed up into the opposite corner. She's taken over his bedroom and now, half of his sofa. If she were a guy, he'd know what to do: this is Lucas trying to muscle him on a basketball court ramped up to a different order of magnitude. But it's not like he can challenge Lois to a game of hoops and tell her 'Loser sleeps on the sofa'. Lois is, well, technically a girl, and that means there are at least some rules, offer his room, open the door. He feels handicapped by his own impulse to chivalry. Give Lois an inch, and she'd grab it and run with it; forget gratitude, you were lucky if you got a second glance and the words, "Keep up."

Clark is sure that surrendering his room to Lana would feel different: sweet and noble and right, and she'd say, "You don't have to do that for me, Clark," and he'd get to say, "No, I want to," and get lost in her eyes. He can't imagine Lois saying, "You don't have to do that for me, Clark." He can't imagine gazing into her eyes . . . well, he can, but not without her saying, "What are you looking at?" in the same tone Pete would have said it, in the same tone Chloe used to say, "Freakazoid," in sixth grade. It's annoying. Confusing. Annoying. Clark attempts to wrest his blanket out from under Lois's legs, and with it control of the conversation. He resorts to powers when it doesn't come on the first tug.

"Like you're the authority. Did you date or even do anything in high school?"

Chewing stops, and her eyebrows levitate.

"Uh, " says Clark, his thoughts falling on top of one another in the sudden stop. "I didn't mean."

"Have you?"

"I," says Clark, "don't know--"

"You don't know? Wow. Kinda unobservant, don't you think? Does the other person know? You could ask them."

He ploughs on. "I don't know if this is something we should be talking about in the living room. Or ever. And will you keep your voice down? My parents are right upstairs."

"Okay eagle scout, I'll take that as a no."

"Thank you," he says, in the split second before realizing how it is going to sound. Heat spreads across his cheeks; like scorched paper he wants to curl up and disappear. He'd just. . . Deep breath, in and out. It's too late to feign sleep, he reminds himself, squeezing his eyes shut briefly.

It's Lois. This feeling. She turns every second into a jostling competition and he's not even sure what he's competing for. She's not a bad person. He can't stand her. He can't turn it off or deal with it, there's no equivalent. He tries to remember Whitney's smirk the day after Whitney strung him up in Chandler's Field. Back when Whitney had full claim to Lana, before Clark had gained any kind of ground. He pushes deep, but the old feelings are faded. These new ones are primary coloured. She's bossy, arrogant, rude. Tall.

He opens one eye, then the other.

"I thought you said your parents caught you in a co-ed situation."

"That was," says Clark. "I don't want to talk about it."

"Suit yourself."

"Nothing happened. She broke into my room, and we kinda, and my dad walked in."

"Your room's not exactly private. I'm thinking of installing a lock."

Habit opens its mouth to object, then Clark stops to think. "That's actually," he says, "not a bad idea."

A few seconds of ticking silence while Lois chugs her milk. It's certainly not a victory as Clark is undeniably sitting up, blinking, awake, with no path back to sleep that he can see, no matter how much he casts about himself. He shifts against the arm of the sofa. He never thinks of the house as empty until other people are in it. Clark remembers Ryan, and the quiet that he left behind him. The space that Lois leaves behind will be the kind that he can stretch out in.

"So what happened to her?"

"Who?"

"The girl. Were you dating, or was she just killing time on her way to lift your stereo?"

The slice of apple pie is half gone. It rests wonkily on its plate on the coffee table. It's the kind that Clark's mom makes for the Talon, piling the kitchen table with peeled apples, part tradition, part making-ends-meet. It smells like it tastes, sweet and laced through with cinnamon, homey and good. Clark stares at it before he speaks.

He doesn't want to think about Alicia. He prefers meteor freaks to stay in neat boxes, and some of them do: obsessive Tina, homicidal Evan, unfortunate Sirus. Of them all, Lex is the only one who is real. Lex isn't a meteor freak. Lex is Lex, his brush with meteors barely a sidenote, so that after a while even the bald head fails to be a reminder of the extent that he is meteor-shaped.

Alicia blurred the line between the freaks and Lex, then--harder to think around--she blurred the line between the freaks and himself. She spilled out into real in the feeling Clark had walking her home, punch drunk on smiles. He hasn't talked about it. He wants to close the lid. Lois is like a crowbar, and maybe something has always been pushing from the inside.

"She's in Belle Reve. She was different. It made her . . . she had a psychotic break."

It just comes out. Unbearable Lois. He waits for the comeback, half wanting it. He looks sideways at her. Her eyes are dark.

"Trust the people in Smallville to freak out about somebody being different. It's all peachy keen as long as everyone's wearing plaid."

"No," says Clark, frowning. "It's . . . I don't mean she dyed her hair or hung out with the wrong crowd. She--"

"What was she, like, from another planet?"

"Not exactly. But--"

"Okay, I realize this is going to come as a shock," says Lois. "But just because you're uncomfortable with something, doesn't mean everyone would be."

The ungentle feeling pushes at his chest like burgeoning frustration. It isn't the yearning he feels around Lana. He doesn't want to share, but to show her, because she is so sure, when she doesn't know anything about him at all.

Unconcerned, Lois drains the last of her milk.

He unclenches his jaw long enough to say, "Have I ever told you you're like the older sister I wish I never had?"

"Yeah, I get that a lot," she says in a slightly different voice, but before he's really aware of it she adds, "I guess I got the smarts, and you got the . . . huh. What?"

"Likeability? Charm? Tact?" It's quite an opening.

"Self delusion?"

"Do you ever let up?"

"I'll say one good thing about you," says Lois. "I think you're curing my insomnia." The yawn is real. Slippers with lopsided rabbit ears hit the floor as she rises from the sofa.

"I'd say you finally got tired of the sound of your own voice."

"I'll tell you what, next time you do the talking, I'll do the thousand yard stare."

He doesn't know where the smile comes from; the limits of endurance, maybe. "That makes us, what, some kind of team?"

Her ponytail marks time from one shoulder blade to the other as she climbs the stairs. She doesn't look back.

"In your dreams, Smallville."

Upstairs, the door to her--his bedroom opens and closes. Before he can even think of stretching out, his eyes fix on the coffee table.

It's a scene of minor destruction in pie crusts and white circles of milk. Lois has left the kitchen light on, and the plate and the glass out. Wide awake, Clark surveys the damage. He supposes that he'll have to get off the sofa and clean everything up, but his mind feels like it has been transformed into crumbs and an overturned fork. He can still smell the apple pie. His stomach growls and as he runs his hand through his hair, he knows with absolute surety that Lois has taken the last piece.

.