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gretchensinister · 6 years ago

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Operation Welcome Mat (preview)

I usually like to post a fic for my birthday, and well, this is a few days belated, but sometimes that’s how it goes. This is a preview of something I’m working on, now, and it’s a branching out of my usual fandom territory! I hope you’re curious, and I hope you enjoy!

It all stems from the question: Why does so much stuff that only Superman can deal with happen on the planet that Superman is on? That’s not the question that Lois Lane asks, but it’s the one she’s going to find an answer for.

Lois Lane always checks her spam folder. In fact, she always opens each individual message in there. Ninety-nine point nine nine nine percent of the time, what’s in there is garbage, but garbage is not synonymous with useless. Consider the journalists in Portland who went through the District Attorney’s garbage to make a point about privacy. Her daily ritual isn’t on that level of significance, but she feels the point still stands.

Today, she opens an email that isn’t promising free trials of herbal supplements, contact info for hot singles in her area, or insurance policies that will cover damages caused by any and all anomalous events for as little as $10 a month. (These last annoyed her enough to ask Louise in Business to do a small expose on such companies—turns out, the fine print stated that given the regularity of attacks on Metropolis by aliens, robots, metahumans, etc., etc., these events could not be considered anomalous. Fucking scammers. She’s pretty sure they’re involved in a class-action lawsuit right now.)

Instead, it reads thus:

I am sending this to you because I think you are the only person in the world who might have adequate protection after I tell you this. It is for my safety and yours that I have not used your name or described what that protection might be.

I ask you to use any and all resources you have at your disposal to investigate Operation Welcome Mat. I cannot tell you much more without compromising the slight chance this communication has of reaching you. However, I do not exaggerate when I say that the revealing—anything more I dare not hope for—of this operation will affect every human life on Earth.

Sincerely,

One who works in the organization that knows you always check your spam folder

The remaining message is a long and rambling series of testimonials for anti-aging and potency supplements, but Lois sees no reason to consider these as marks against the authenticity of the original message. Camouflage is important. As is covering one’s tracks. She opens her desk drawer and retrieves a high-quality digital camera that’s nevertheless old enough that it needs an actual physical cord to transfer the pictures on it to any computer. Lois has kept it in excellent condition, save for, oh, the pesky matter of the fact that the delete function doesn’t work on the camera itself, and that she just can never find the right kind of removable memory cards. Darn, what a problem! Fortunately the camera contains a 5000-image capacity non-removable internal memory. She takes a picture of the relevant portion of the email—well, ten pictures—and then sets about blocking every IP address that’s sent her something that ended up in her spam folder today and deleting every email indiscriminately. She’d like to perform a more thorough delete, but she never does that with any of her spam, and she’s got a feeling that now would not be a good day to start.

Amateurs might worry about how she deleted the original email, but Lois knows that if she finds anything, she won’t need that email, and for another thing, the writer of that email most certainly doesn’t want anyone to be able to analyze their word choices and phrasing.

She rests her arms on her desk and starts letting her mind work through everything the email told her. So, she’s the only person who “might have adequate protection” after learning about Operation Welcome Mat? The only unique protection she’s had under any circumstances is Superman. In a few well-known incidents, he’d appeared to give preference to getting her to safety before others. Lois isn’t one hundred percent sure that’s true, as she knows very well that she might’ve been the person in the greatest danger during each incident. Over her career, she’s tended to disregard danger for the sake of the story. And she can argue persuasively that in order to be a successful female journalist, she has to be prepared to face a certain amount of danger; she can argue that her years of experience have given her the ability to accurately evaluate the potential danger of a situation. These arguments have been, and are, vital to her public persona.

But under a few layers of “I have to do this” is the chewy center of “I want to do this.” It’s true! Believe it or not, Lois Lane, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist, is a bit of a thrill-seeker!

Good thing that might be exactly what her email contact needs.

So. Back to the email. Back to Superman. She knows well enough that she doesn’t have a raven-haired alien angel at her beck and call, but, based on what the public has seen, is it more likely that she does than any other investigative journalist? Yes. So, if only Superman can offer her adequate protection, then—

“Hi Lois,” Clark says, setting a paper cup on her desk. “Two sugars, no milk—” He breaks off into an almost cartoonishly exaggerated yawn that Lois nevertheless is familiar enough with to know is genuine.

“You ought to buy some coffee for yourself,” Lois says, digging a few dollars out of her wallet and tossing them at him, which he barely catches. “I mean, if you’re going to volunteer to walk down to Reeve’s every day, anyway. And didn’t you grow up waking up at 4am to milk cows or whatever?”

Clark smiles shyly. Like he always does. It’s a good smile, and on a kid who’s six foot three and probably better built than any of the barns he ever helped raise, it could very well explain why he always seems so exhausted in the morning. Though if Lois’ theory is true, she hasn’t seen or heard any other evidence of it. A gentleman never tells, Lois thinks idly.

“I can and have milked cows in my sleep,” he says. “I can’t do anything in my sleep, here.” He looks down. “Uh, the truth is that I haven’t been sleeping well since the—what did they call it? The Chirauga Incident?”

Lois grimaces. Yeah, Clark and half of Metropolis. Including her. When an army of aliens that big showed up all at once, there was no way to avoid some level of freaking out, special protection from Superman or not. “Yeah, the Chirauga Incident. Ugly sons of bitches, in my opinion. I killed one personally, you know.”

Clark’s eyes widen in shock, and Lois grins. “What? I verified they weren’t bulletproof before going out to start, you know, researching my story.” But, because she is committed to the truth, even though Clark seems like he’ll believe anything she says, she has to add, “Well, okay. I’m pretty sure I mortally wounded it. Superman took care of it before I could find out for sure.” It had been clean. Heat vision through the Chirauga equivalent of the spinal cord. And Superman had turned to her with that red glow still shimmering in the back of his eyes. “Are you all right?” he’d asked, hovering a foot above the ground like it was nothing, looking at her like she was something. And she’d looked into the terrible weapon of his gaze and been stunned by the perfect surety that he’d never use it on a human being.

And for all that, she’d never seen him look so alien.

“Weren’t you watching? I had this one handled,” she’d said, with a rasp in her voice she hoped he’d attribute to the heavy dust and smoke in the air.

“Well, in that case, I guess all I can do now is tell you to be careful out there,” he’d said.

It would be nice if there was a discreet little jump cut in her memory right after that, but, unfortunately, Lois remembers with perfect clarity that she’d responded, “Sure thing, spaceboy,” like a complete and utter dumbass. But then Superman hadn’t laughed at her, no, he’d given her the smile and wink of an old-fashioned movie star before flying away to continue saving the world. She, on the other hand, had staggered off, feeling as emotionally churned-up as a teenager.

The worst part about it, in her opinion, is that she knows very well that Superman has this effect on almost everyone who encounters him.

“Ah, Superman,” Clark says, drawing her back to the present. His shocked expression has been replaced by the little smile she’s often seen him wear when talk of Superman comes up. She’s always thought there was something secretive about that smile, something notably different from the rest of his farm-boy guilelessness. (Though, she doesn’t quite believe he’s as transparent as he otherwise appears. And she doesn’t think that’s just her natural suspicion kicking in. For one thing, the Daily Planet is big, but not big enough that someone who was hired as a journalist could fall through the cracks and become nothing but a friendly coffee boy. She’s read some of his articles, the neighborhood news stuff he generally covers, and the writing is as solid as he is, with words chosen with care and sensitivity. There’s more to him than meets the eye, and if he ever decides to get ambitious, Lifestyle is in for a big surprise. For another thing, he’d moved to Metropolis during a metahuman surge, and that, frankly, was not what normies did, no matter how clueless they were.)

The running undercurrent of what she knows about Clark and the smile that’s the one noticeable discordant note in the melody of the person she works with suddenly gel into a possible conclusion, one that Lois could’ve kicked herself for not even considering earlier.

Talented kid moves from small-town Kansas, where he could’ve been a big fish in a tiny pond. And he doesn’t even move to a city in the same state or region, where he could have been a big fish in a medium-sized pond. Instead, he moves to Metropolis, where he won’t be a big fish at all, but where it’ll be a big project for anyone who knew him in Smallville to ever visit, or know anything about him he doesn’t want them to know. Metropolis, which, despite its dangers, still lives in the cultural mind as a place where the good kind of anything can happen. (Where Superman is often seen.) And when he’s here, he never, ever says anything about even going on a date with anyone, and mentions of Superman bring out that secretive smile. And he started off writing his articles with a clear awareness of issues that Lois has seen other straight white male coworkers fail to grok even after clear, baby-step-style explanations. And he’s never, ever tried to turn getting her coffee into something uncomfortable.

So, possible conclusion: Clark is some flavor of queer, and still closeted/uncomfortable about it. But he can’t completely hide his crush on Superman because, well. Superman. And the kid has an honest face.

Just goes to show, she thinks, how slow and unreliable gaydar can be, even if you are bi.

But this does give her an idea on where to send him as she starts her initial investigation of this Project Welcome Mat. If it is big, bad business like it seems, Clark doesn’t need to get mixed up in it, even to the point of overhearing a phone call. And besides, it might help him accept himself, if he needs that.

“You know what, Clark?” Lois says. “You need something to take your mind off shit like alien invasions.”

Clark grimaces. “I don’t know if anything can.”

“Yeah, it’s a toughie, but you’re a Metropolitan now,” Lois says, with more bravado than she feels. Some things you don’t get used to. But some of those things you have to at least pretend to get used to. “Get outside. Write your cat-up-a-tree article tomorrow. Do something completely out of the ordinary.” And then, as if she’s just thought of it, “Powtown Pride is going on today. Powtown’s a neighborhood. Pride’s something to write about. You could go there and see what you can see.”

“Powtown?” Clark says, raising his eyebrows. “That’s the metahuman neighborhood. That’s…a bit more interesting than where Rowlands usually sends me.”

Lois waves her hand. “Rita is seventy-eight and still thinks anything involving a metahuman is a front-pager. Perry can tell her otherwise when you bring back something nice.”

“Well,” Clark says, warming to the idea, “there are a lot of misconceptions about Powtown that ought to be worn away by a reliable source like the Planet. I mean—there probably are. I don’t know, personally. But if everything written about Powtown was true, no one could live there. It’d be a smoking crater in the ground.”

“So you see? Needs you,” Lois says. She smirks. “Be careful, though. They’ve got twinks down there that could rip you in half.”

“Says someone who just told me about personally shooting a Chirauga,” Clark says. “No, no, I know—you had it handled. Anyway. Yeah, I will go.” He looks towards the windows and sighs. “After all, it’s a beautiful day to be outside.”

Lois waves at him as he leaves, then glances towards the windows herself. It really is a beautiful June day, not too hot, vivid blue sky, puffy clouds slowly drifting by. Does Superman prefer days like this for flying? She wonders. Or would it not affect him at all? What would it be like to fly with Superman on a day like today—Lois sticks her tongue out in an exaggerated expression of disgust. She’s better than that! She has to be!

Anyway, she’s got something new to investigate. Before Clark interrupted, she was thinking of what things out in the world only Superman could be adequate protection from. Well, aside from horrible things from space, that leaves a very short list that prominently features a house of a certain color and a building of a certain shape. And the name—Operation Welcome Mat—it has a very particular ring to it.

But she’s still going to look into the rest of that short list. A direct assault isn’t the correct approach here, and besides, there might be connections, even if the person she’s going to call is officially blacklisted from government contracts.

She scrolls to the contact in her phone for “Louis L’Amour,” and reaches out to someone who definitely isn’t a dead writer of Westerns.

Notes: I’ve decided to have Superman’s code against killing be specifically about humans/earthlings because for one thing, I don’t have to answer to Standards and Practices, and for another, I don’t feel like having every alien army be robots (which with sufficiently advanced AI doesn’t help anyway), and what do you want me to do, have Superman knock all the aliens out? If they’re going down long enough to be essentially counted out of the fight, they’re getting life-threatening brain injuries anyway.

#superman #lois lane #fic #operation welcome mat #my knowledge of superman comes from the DCAU but this is kind of my own 'verse

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