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Lois Lane trusted facts. Black and white were her two favorite colors, though she was also partial to shades of gray in the correct circumstances. Black and white were comforting no matter the circumstances, because they didn’t change. Facts were facts. Evidence was evidence. Proof was proof.
Which was how she had ended up here, with five pregnancy tests lined up on her bathroom counter.
Test one: positive.
Test two: positive.
Test three: positive.
Test four: positive.
Test five: still had a minute left on its timer, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out which way it was going to go.
The facts were pointing to a very obvious conclusion Lois had to work backwards from. Obviously, her birth control had failed. Considering she was on the pill and she and Clark had used condoms, it had failed rather spectacularly. And, continuing the investigation, there was one very obvious reason for the spectacular failure:
Fucking super sperm.
She definitely should have considered that angle. Her whole job was considering angles! Not that she would’ve known much what to do with it anyways — she had a degree in journalism, not fucking xenobiology.
Lois’s stomach churned. She took a deep breath in through her nose, fighting down the rising nausea. The timing of this couldn’t have been more inconvenient, with their fight last night that may or may not have been a breakup, her angling for a promotion at the Daily Planet, and the increasing public scrutiny on Superman. They had too much to figure out without bringing a kid into this mix.
She leaned against the counter, griping the edge of the faux-marble until her knuckles turned white. She wasn’t sure if she was going to cry or vomit or both so she simply stood, eyes closed, sucking in breaths until the feeling passed. Her hair spilled over her shoulders, blotting out some of the weak fluorescent light of the single bulb in the bathroom.
When she opened her eyes again, she stared down at the row of tests.
Test five: positive.
This was a fact: she was pregnant.
This was also a fact: She needed to tell Clark.
---
As it turned out, telling your maybe-ex-boyfriend you were pregnant with his child became exponentially harder after every major news network in the nation ran a story about him creating a harem of Earth women to continue his superior bloodline.
Clark looked absolutely distraught in the neon pink half-light, his lower lip trembling, and Lois didn’t want to give him another reason to hate himself. She wasn’t a part of his harem, and he sure as hell hadn’t impregnated her on purpose, but neither of those facts would matter if he couldn’t look at them objectively. That was one of the difficult, beautiful things about Clark — he didn’t see things in the shades of gray she did. Everything was smudged with color, his feelings running through the facts like watercolor through wet ink.
She had probably known it before he said it, given her reaction was fuck! and not fuck?. She had known Clark loved her, but she hadn’t wanted to admit it.
Lois wasn’t good at relationships. That was a fact. If she messed this one up, she didn’t know how she would recover from it, and not just because of the cluster of cells currently taken up residence in her uterus. She wouldn’t recover from it because it was Clark, and before he was her boyfriend he was her co-worker who challenged her every idea and her acquaintance who made her laugh and her friend who wore his heart on his sleeve.
She was good at running away when things got too close, though she wasn’t sure she could outrun Superman.
Imagine Lois’s immense surprise when Clark was the one who was running away. It was probably unfair of her to think of it like that, since he was doing something stupid but well-intentioned, as was typical of him.
She opened her mouth, half-intending on blurting out the truth as if it would somehow make him stay. And maybe it was because it would make him stay that she slammed her jaw shut and let him fly away.
Clark loved her, and Lois hadn’t wanted to admit it.
She wanted even less to admit she loved him, too. And part of loving Clark Kent was loving Superman, who would always try to save the day. Even if it hurt.
---
Lois’s stomach hurt.
It could’ve been morning sickness, but she was leaning more towards constant, low-level anxiety over everything. It had been easy not to worry about Clark when he had been the invincible Superman, but now that he had met his match it was markedly more difficult not to worry. She knew why he had gone to Luthor, but her facts and feelings were getting all mixed up now, just like Clark’s always did.
The coffee-soaked sugar she was sipping at probably wasn’t helping.
Daddy’s going to be fine, Lois thought when her stomach rolled again.
Jesus. What was she doing? Her unsettled stomach wasn’t the baby moving, because at this point the baby wasn’t big enough to move. Thinking of it as a baby was already terrifying enough without considering that one day it would be able to move, and think, and… Lois took another sip of coffee, then exhaled through her nose. It helped with the nausea, kind of.
What Lois needed more than coffee was a plan. Clark could be noble and self-sacrificing, but he wasn’t going to be noble and self-sacrificing without her.
---
“So I know I just said I don’t really get into people’s feelings,” Mr. Terrific said as the T-Ship eased out of Metropolis air space, “but do you really think you should be doing this?”
“Huh?” Lois asked. He had agreed to go on this mission (albeit in his own supergenius way) and specifically to go on the mission with her. If he had wanted to leave her behind, he could’ve just waited for her to depart the Hall of Justice then set out for Clark on his own.
“You’ve got two heartbeats,” Mr. Terrific said. “You don’t need to be the third-smartest person in the world to figure out what that means.”
“Shit.” She hadn’t realized the T-Spheres had scanned her, but since Mr. Terrific had apparently been able to inject nanotrackers into all of his friends without them noticing, she should have anticipated he would’ve been capable of a clandestine full-body scan. Lois wondered if this was what people called pregnancy brain, that she had made such an obvious mistake.
“You didn’t know?” Mr. Terrific asked.
“I — I knew,” Lois managed to spit out, overwhelmed by the change in calculation he’d thrust upon her. “I didn’t know it had a heartbeat yet.” She had only noticed the missed period a few days ago, which would have put the baby at four weeks old, but heartbeats started at six. That meant she had been pregnant for longer than she thought.
Again: fucking super sperm.
“And Superman?”
“Does he know?” Lois asked. For someone who claimed not to care about other people’s feelings, Terrific sure was doing a lot of emotional prodding. “No. Clark doesn’t know.” She sighed. “There’s been a lot going on.” The pregnancy coinciding with the whole Boravia situation, then this whole thing with Krypton, couldn’t have been less convenient.
Mr. Terrific seemed content to let the conversation end there, his curiosity satisfied.
“Will it be dangerous? For the baby?” She’d vaguely considered dimensional rifts and pocket universes sounded like perils pregnant women should avoid, but finding Clark had been the more pressing concern.
“I’m no obstetrician,” Terrific began, “but I can’t see how it would be any more dangerous for it than you or me.” He paused. “That’s pretty dangerous.”
Lois scoffed out a laugh. “Yeah, I figured.” Clark and the Justice Gang were used to running head-first into danger — and so was she, just in a different way.
“You can’t do it alone?” she asked after a minute of silence. It was the only way she could assemble the facts for his concern to make sense. Most superheroes, at least the good ones, didn’t invite civilian interference, even less so when they had suspicions that civilian was vulnerable in some way.
“Probably not,” he agreed. Lois didn’t know what skills she could possibly possess that he would need, but she wasn’t the genius here, and it wasn’t like she was going to protest helping to save Clark.
“Okay,” Lois said, settling back into her seat. “Then let’s go.”
---
Lois had never understood the whole “pregnancy hormone” thing until the moment she saw Clark with a baby tucked in the crook of his elbow and her immediate response was to almost start crying.
The baby was obviously not Clark’s baby, given it was a sickly green color and an alien man immediately took him from Clark’s arms. Despite that, Lois couldn’t help but think how natural the baby had looked there, and how small. She’d never imagined Clark holding a baby before (why would she? They’d only been dating three months) but in her mind’s eye it wasn’t difficult to replace the alien baby with a human one. A human baby with dark hair and blue eyes and round cheeks, one who Clark would rock when it cried.
Lois blinked, hard and fast, to clear the blurriness in her vision. Clark was hurt, and she needed to drive the T-Ship.
Maybe this was the conclusion Mr. Terrific had foreseen that had persuaded him to allow her to come along. He didn’t have precognition, but precognition and a exacting command of probability were indistinguishable at a certain point. Clark being hurt was a predictable consequence of his standoff with Lex, and between that and the threat of the dimensional rift, being able to separate was for the better.
They limped off to the T-Ship together, his arm slung around her shoulder. Lois knew it was bad when Clark actually allowed her to take some of his weight; he had always been careful with her, and everyone else, since his super strength could make even the most casual touch lethal if he wasn't careful.
She buckled him into the back seat, hating how she couldn’t linger in the moment to offer him some comfort. He didn't look good, with deep purple bruises under his eyes and sickly green running through his veins, but that didn't change that they didn't have the time for her to linger. She kissed his forehead, just as much a promise to herself as to him that she would take care of him.
Lois made her way to the cockpit, taking a bracing breath as she sat and input their destination into the GPS. Mr. Terrific had said to take Clark someplace safe, and there was no place safer for him than home.
---
Lois felt like an intruder, standing in the corner of Clark’s childhood bedroom while his parents fussed over him. It wasn’t the Kents’ fault — they were obviously concerned about Clark, and they were right to be, between the kidnapping and the Kryptonite poisoning and the everything else.
She busied herself looking anywhere but at the Kents, her lips quirking into a smile when she spotted the Mighty Crabjoys poster on the wall. She knew he’d been too defensive about them being punk rock, and she couldn’t wait to tease him about it when this was all over.
She couldn't justify looking at the walls any longer, and Lois's heart lodged in her throat when she turned back to find Pa Kent petting Clark's hair, murmuring sweet nothings to his half-awake son. Would Clark be like that with their child? Would she be like Ma Kent?
It hadn't escaped Lois's notice that she had no trouble seeing Clark as a father, but an abundance of trouble seeing herself as a mother. Her relationship with her own parents was nothing like the one Clark had with his. If she showed up on their doorstep in the middle of the night, even half-dead, she couldn't be certain they'd take her in. They definitely would've had questions, and if they found out she was on the run from the government... The nausea she thought she'd gotten rid of when they'd rescued Clark stirred again, and Lois leaned back against the wall in the vain hope it would soothe her stomach.
After a few deep breaths she felt more in control of herself, and watching the Kent family calmed her further. Maybe she didn't have the best examples of parental love, but she could learn.
---
Clark looked both impossibly big and impossibly small on his childhood bed. The bed wasn't wide or long enough to hold his adult frame, his ankles and most of one shoulder dangling off the edge even with him half-curled in on himself. Even as big as he was, though, he still seemed small with the gauntness in his cheeks and the faint rasp in his breath. That would be gone in the morning when the yellow sun appeared, but first Clark had to make it through the night.
Lois didn't doubt he would, but she still wished she could be there to see it. She had taken up Ma Kent's place in a chair at Clark's bedside when Ma had gone to bed, and spent longer than she would admit studying Clark's face in the weak moonlight trickling in through the window. She should've left as soon as she hung up on the call from Jimmy, but she couldn't leave without saying goodbye, even if Clark couldn't hear it.
“Don't do anything stupid while I'm gone,” she whispered, pushing his sweat-drenched hair back from his forehead. She wanted to say something, anything, about the baby, but couldn't bring herself to. Instead she leaned forward and pressed a careful kiss to Clark's cheek. They'd talk more when the world was saved.
---
The nausea had returned with a vengeance while Clark was fighting Ultraman, but the moment Lois stepped off the T-Ship and saw him mostly-uninjured, it evaporated.
It took all of her considerable self-control not to fling herself at him like they were in a romcom. That would not be very punk rock of her, which was the thought Lois needed to both loosen the tension in her shoulders and slow down enough to not seem overeager to see Clark.
“Superman,” she said, and he turned to look at her. She couldn't believe it had taken so long for her to realize Clark was Superman; even with the suit and the cape, when he looked at her all she could see was Clark's eyes staring back at her. She fumbled through asking him for an interview, unsure how obvious it was to everyone else that this was more than just professional curiosity.
Then they were alone together, and Lois finally, finally exhaled. Sunlight streamed in through the glass ceiling, catching on Clark's hair, his eyelashes, his suit, until he was haloed in gold.
She wanted to tell him about the baby, but there was something more important for her to tell him first:
“I love you too, Clark.”
She was flying, literally flying, and Lois wasn't sure if she'd ever come back down.
This was a fact: she loved Clark Kent.
This was also a fact: she still hadn't managed to tell him she was pregnant.
---
“Okay,” Lois said, settling onto her armchair with her recorder balanced on her knee. “Superman interview, take two. We're going on the record.”
“Are we going to kiss during this one?” Clark asked, coming in from the kitchen with a glass of water for both of them. He set Lois's cup on the ground and his own on the coffee table before sprawling out on the couch, limbs akimbo. On the ground it would be hard to tell he was coordinated enough to fly at supersonic speeds. “I thought kissing made the last interview a lot better. A lot more thorough.”
“Clark, I literally just said we're on the record, why would you bring up kissing?” He was a reporter, he knew what on the record meant — and she'd explained it to him last time!
“Is the world not allowed to know Lois Lane is dating Superman?” Clark said, turning his face towards her and quirking an eyebrow.
“It would be compromising my journalistic integrity if I was having a sexual relationship with a source, so no, the world cannot know Lois Lane is dating Superman,” Lois said. It would be only slightly better than Clark interviewing himself, and even then only because she still wouldn't give him the interview questions beforehand, no matter how good of a lay he was. “Not to mention one day I would like for the world to know Lois Lane is dating Clark Kent, which is kind of difficult to do if they think I'm dating Superman.” They hadn’t talked through that particular snag yet, but Lois was trying to handle the life-changing conversations one at a time.
“Maybe Clark Kent is a part of Superman's harem with you.”
“Great segue,” Lois said, determined to get her interview back on track. “Superman, what comments do you have about the message sent with you to Earth? We understand Lex Luthor had ulterior motives in releasing that information, but the message was authenticated.”
“The message was real,” Clark agreed. That was good; denying something obviously true would call the credibility for the rest of his statements into account. “I only saw the first half. The rest was damaged on the journey from Krypton to Earth.” Clark turned his face to the ceiling for the next part, and Lois's heart tugged. She had already heard the story, off the record, but she hated how much recounting it hurt Clark.
“Lex Luthor is a much smarter man than I am, and he was able to recover the full message even though I had tried and failed.” Clark's throat bobbed when he swallowed. “I spent my whole life believing I was sent to Earth to help the people here, and even though I know now that wasn't what my parents intended for me, it's still what I intend for me. I hope my actions in the past week have shown I care deeply about the people of Earth, and that Lex Luthor's suggestions I was grooming the populace with my good deeds were a projection of his own malintent.”
Clark couldn’t have given a better answer if he had been coached (and if it weren’t a breach of ethics, Lois might have considered it, given how high the stakes were). His response hit on all the counterarguments people could make, from why he hadn't tried sooner to view the whole message to the concern his goodness could be a cover for something else more malicious. It had Clark’s typical emotional underpinning, too, though Lois didn’t think she’d be anything near masterful at capturing the sadness in his voice in her eventual article.
“So you have no intentions of creating a harem on Earth, or impregnating as many women as possible?” Lois asked. They were leading questions, but she could forgive herself for them, given she didn't intend to publish this part of the interview.
“No harem,” Clark said firmly, turning his head back to her. Lois wondered, briefly, if he thought she was asking out of some misplaced jealousy. She would have had to believe it to be jealous about it, but maybe Clark thought she would appreciate the reassurance. “No impregnation.”
“What if I told you I had a woman willing to go on the record as saying you are the father of her child?”
Clark's whole demeanor changed, his muscles tensing and face falling. “What?”
“I have a source who claims Superman is the father of her unborn child,” Lois repeated.
“And you believed her?” Clark asked, once again transforming as he looked at her like a wounded dog. “Lois, you know I —”
“It's me, Clark,” she interrupted before he could get too worked up. That hadn’t been her intention. “I'm the source.”
“After all that crap you gave me about how me interviewing Superman — wait.” Clark's brain seemed to catch up with his mouth. “You would go on the record saying you're pregnant with my child?”
“Yes, I would.”
Lois waited for Clark to process the declaration, and could see the moment it clicked. Lois wouldn’t go on the record with something knowingly untrue, which meant:
“You're pregnant,” Clark said, staring at her with a look Lois had never seen on his face before. She couldn’t even guess at its meaning because it was so utterly foreign to her. Her stomach squirmed, but she couldn't make herself look away.
“I am.”
“Holy…” Clark breathed. “How?”
“You grew up on a farm, Clark, I think you know how babies are made.”
“I know the mechanics, yes,” he said. “But we —?”
“So far, my assumption has been super sperm,” Lois said. “So thanks for that.”
Clark looked up at her with baleful eyes, then rolled off the couch. He caught himself before he hit the floor, then straightened. It felt like she was watching him move in slow motion, though whether that was because he had actually slowed down or because the fear was getting the better of her, Lois didn't know.
When Clark settled again, it was at the foot of her armchair. He was right to get closer; this wasn't the sort of conversation that should be had with a room of space between them. It also wasn't the sort of conversation to be had with her staring down at him, so Lois slid off the armchair, wedging herself in the space between the chair and Clark's crossed legs. Lois folded her own legs so she and Clark were sitting knee-to-knee, her back against the armchair and his against the coffee table.
“Can you tell me something?”
Lois nodded.
“When you said you loved me —?”
“No,” Lois interrupted. She really should stop interrupting him, especially since they were still on the record. Without thinking she reached down and flipped off her recorder. She wanted the rest of the conversation to be just for them. “No, that had nothing to do with this.”
“Okay.” Clark blew out a breath. “And you know — you know you're not a part of my harem?”
“I know.” Lois swallowed around the lump in her throat. She knew she would have to tell him eventually how long she’d waited to tell him about the baby, but she still wasn’t entirely prepared for his reaction. “I found out about the baby before the harem.”
Clark processed that information with a tilt of his head and a few rapid blinks. It was better than the anger she had feared, because of course it was. He was Clark. “How long?”
“Since the morning after we had that fight.” Lois swallowed again, but the lump didn't disappear. “Then you had to save the world, and...” Fuck, why was she tearing up? It was like she could feel the hormones coursing through her body, which was objectively stupid but also the only way she could make this reaction make any sense.
“I'm not mad at you,” Clark said, voice impossibly gentle. “Please don't cry.”
“I'm not going to cry,” Lois snapped. “I just — I wanted to tell you sooner, and I'm sorry that I couldn't, and I know this is a lot all at once because your parents aren't what you thought and I'm not what you thought and — do you ever just wonder what the fuck we're doing?” The whole ordeal had been hard on her, but she could only imagine it had been harder on him.
Clark pulled her into his lap rather than answer her, folding his arms around her and tucking her head into the space between his neck and shoulder. Lois shuddered out an exhale, pressing her nose into his neck and inhaling. He'd taken a shower in her tiny cubicle of a bathroom but he still smelled mildly like asphalt and drywall dust, which was oddly more comforting than the scent of his body wash. Even Clark Kent couldn't erase the past week with a shower and nothing more.
“What are we doing, Clark?” Lois asked, voice muffled into his skin.
“Kind of sounds like you're going to have a baby,” Clark said, voice matter of fact, “and I'm going to be there when you do.”
Lois liked facts. Trusted facts.
This was a fact: she was pregnant.
This was also a fact: she told Clark.
And, a final fact: they were going to be okay.