Metropolis - Blood (part 2A)
Chapter TWO: QUESTIONS
It took a moment for conscious thought to return to Lois’ mind. She couldn’t have heard what she just thought she had.
“Excuse me?” Lois managed.
“I think I’m your sister,” Lucy repeated.
“I think my father would have told me if I’d had a sister,” Lois said suspiciously as she recovered.
“Well, half-sister actually,” the girl clarified. “My mom’s name was Julie Monroe.”
That name seemed vaguely familiar to Lois and she struggled to remember where she might have heard it. Yet, distracting her from that train of thought was that she had also caught the tense in the girl’s statement.
“Was?” Lois asked.
“She… um, died,” Lucy said; doing her best, but failing miserably, to keep the emotion from her voice with a suspiciously familiar roll of her eyes.
“I’m sorry,” Lois replied. “How long…?”
“Six months,” Lucy answered.
Lois could empathize. She remembered the shape she’d been in six months after her father’s death and, if the story Lucy was weaving was true, she was doing a lot better job with her emotions than she had.
“Regardless,” Lois said, “I still think my father would have told me about you.” Her father not telling her about something that important didn’t sound at all like him. Further, unlike Elle Lane-Sullivan, the woman who was nominally her mother, Gabe Sullivan was not the type of man to walk out on his commitments and another child would certainly be such a commitment.
“Only if he knew about me,” Lucy explained with just a hint of melancholy. “Mom never told him and I didn’t even know about him at all until mom told me just before… before…” She didn’t have to finish; the eye roll said it all.
That was why she had seemed so familiar, Lois realized as she searched the girls face. She didn’t know about the mouth or the ears, but Lucy definitely had a Sullivan nose and her eyes… she had her father’s eyes.
“Why wouldn’t she have told him?” Lois asked. She still couldn’t quite believe it, but she took a step back and to the side, allowing the girl to enter through her door.
“She said she didn’t want to muck up his life,” Lucy said as she slid through the door. “He’d just gotten a big job in Smallville that was going to make a big difference for his daughter… for you… but she had a career in Metropolis that she didn’t want to give up and she didn’t want to mess things up for him by making him feel obligated to stay.”
Oh my God, Lois exclaimed to herself as she finally placed the name. Julie Monroe. It had been just before her dad had taken the job in Smallville at the LuthorCorp plant. She’d come home early from a half-day at school and walked right in on her father having sex with a blonde twenty-something coworker named Julie Monroe. She could still feel the awkwardness of that day as the image was dredged up in her mind. Her father had of course explained ‘the birds and the bees’ to her before then; albeit in the totally clueless fashion that only a single father could manage; but she’d never seen a graphic presentation before that day.
For all she knew she’d walked in on the very day that Lucy had been… Oh God, she did not want to go there.
“Do you want something to drink?” Lois asked to get her mind off the train wreck it was headed for. “I’ve got water and... Well, actually I’ve just got water,” she said as she recalled the state of her refrigerator again.
“I’m fine, thank you,” Lucy replied as she was looking around the main room of Lois’ apartment.
Lois felt a wave of self-consciousness sweep over her as she took a good look around herself at the stray pizza and fast food boxes, the piles of old books and papers, and the empty coffee mugs sitting here and there. Yet, most glaring given all the debris on the floor and furniture, was the complete absence of any decoration on the walls; no pictures or photos or other decorations; no real sign that anyone really lived here, because the truth was that she didn’t really live here. Her home was the Daily Planet, this was just where she slept.
“So… um, Lucy,” Lois began, trying out the name. “Not to sound rude, but what exactly are you doing here?” She had a sneaking suspicion.
“Well, um,” Lucy said looking at her feet. “I was kinda, sorta… hoping that I could…” Lucy took another rather distressed look around Lois’ apartment. “That I could… y’know, um… come live with you?”
Yup, that’s pretty much I thought she was going to say, Lois confirmed. “Look, kid… Lucy. My life is kinda complicated and, well, rather messy at the moment,” she said as she waved her hand at her apartment; her one bedroom apartment. “Don’t you have any other family?”
That last part was probably the wrong thing to say Lois realized as she saw Lucy’s face fall.
“Do you?”
Lois looked away. Her only living relative was her uncle, General Sam Lane, who had just two days ago come back into her life after a seven year absence that was mostly her doing. Her hand went to the metal dog tags she wore around her neck; a gift from Sam that had once belonged to her father.
Sam had called shortly after she’d gotten home the night before to tell her that unfortunately they’d have to postpone their dinner plans for next week because he’d been unexpectedly called back to Washington. Sam promised he’d make it back to Metropolis later in the month and she knew he’d try, but after seven years of inertia trying to rebuild a relationship between niece and uncle was going to take more than just vague promises.
“I don’t have anyone, Miss Lane,” Lucy said finally when Lois didn’t answer. “They put me in foster care because there was no one else who’d take me in.”
Lois dimly remembered the visits from the Department of Family Services after her mother had fled with the police on her heels. How they’d periodically turned their lives upside down while checking to make sure that her father was capable of taking care of his daughter without her mother around. More than anything she remembered the woman they’d sent; a mean old lady named Mrs. Bragah who dropped in unannounced at least once a month for the first few years and made derogatory comments about her father’s abilities as a parent and, from the point of view of a six year old, seemed genuinely disappointed that she’d never caught her dad making some kind of mistake. Intellectually she knew that the vast majority of the people involved in Family Services were probably dedicated and hard working people, but that early association tainted her emotional reaction to the whole agency.
“It took my case worker a month just to get around to tracking down my father,” Lucy explained in an annoyed tone. “I was hoping I could have gone and lived with him, but then he told me that he was dead too.”
Now it was Lois’ turn to look hurt. She knew that Lucy had never known her father, so his death was just an abstract to her, but it still hurt to have such a painful memory discussed so casually.
“As far as the case worker was concerned that was that. He’d already exhausted the possibilities on my mom’s side so… End of search. I had no family,” Lucy continued. “Stupid jerk.”
“So then how’d you find me?”
“Mom told me Gabe had another daughter,” Lucy said. “If he was gone then I figured she must be as alone as I was, so maybe…” She looked up at Lois expectantly. “It took two months just to save up enough money to get a bus ticket out to Smallville to try and find you.”
Lois’ eyes went wide at the thought. “Your foster parents let you ride on a bus by yourself?”
“Not exactly,” Lucy replied, not meeting Lois’ gaze. “I kinda… did it without asking.”
“You ran away?” Lois asked bewildered. “What were you thinking!?!”
“That if I found you I wouldn’t have to go back,” Lucy blurted out. “I’ve been in four different foster homes since… since… I just don’t want to go back.”
The girl sounded desperate. It sounded like she’d wrapped her whole life into the notion that if she somehow found some piece of real family then her life would suddenly be perfect… that it would be like having her mother back somehow. Lois could relate; she’d had a similar sentiment while hunting down everyone involved in her father’s death. She’d honestly believed that if she could only find them all and make sure they paid for their crimes her life would somehow go back to what it had been like before. Life, she had learned, didn’t work that way and if Lucy thought that Lois was in any way equipped to take in and raise an eleven year old girl she was going to be figuring that lesson out for herself very soon.
“So what happened then?” Lois coaxed. She may not be able to take the girl in, but the least she could do was listen.
“The cops picked me up and Family Services took me back before I could finish,” Lucy griped.
Lois wasn’t terribly surprised by that revelation. Eleven year olds were not exactly known for their subtlety. Odds are she’d already asked whichever foster parents she had been with at the time to take her to Smallville before she attempted to do so on her own. There was probably an APB on her before she’d even reached the county line.
“I did find out some stuff though,” Lucy added defiantly. “I, um… got to see my father’s grave and um… did you know there’s a headstone next to his with your name on it?”
Lois just nodded quietly. In the aftermath of her father’s death she’d never actually bothered to have the headstone bearing the name Chloe Sullivan removed from the cemetery. It had seemed fitting at the time.
“For a while I thought you were dead too,” Lucy said. “I went to the library and found your obituary with a picture and everything. I filled out a request with the CountyClerk to see if there was anything else on you or my father, but then the police found me. I’d just about given up when, like, a month later I got a letter from the Clerk’s office saying that your death certificate had been overturned… so I knew you were out there somewhere.”
While Lois would have been just as happy to stay legally dead at the time, practical matters had intruded. While the Kents would have been more than willing to put her up indefinitely Lois had wanted… needed… her own place; somewhere she could escape to and be alone. She had also needed to be able to get her G.E.D. and a job; both of which were difficult to accomplish while you were legally dead. Being alive also gave her access to her father’s small savings and his life insurance policy which had made all the difference in being able to afford classes at SmallvilleCommunity College.
“I started spending a lot of time on the internet trying to find ways to search for people… but I didn’t turn up much,” Lucy continued. “Later I thought of checking the Smallville newspaper for a story or something. I mean, it’s not every day that someone comes back from the dead and all.”
“You really didn’t spend much time in Smallville did you?” Lois mumbled to herself.
“Huh?”
“It’s nothing,” Lois said. “Go on.”
“Well, I looked and looked but there was nothing on you,” Lucy said. “By you I mean Chloe Sullivan,” she clarified. “I convinced Greg and Lisa, my latest foster parents, to let me spend as much time as I could at the library. Finally I found a nice lady working there, Caroline Mueller, who told me that to get a death certificate overturned there’d have to be a court record somewhere. She was helping me look for that when I found out you’d had your name changed to Lois Lane.”
And once you made that connection finding Lois Lane wasn’t especially difficult. “So am I the first or second one you tried?” Lois asked.
Lucy’s eyes went wide. “S-second,” she stammered out. “How’d you know?”
“Deductive reasoning,” Lois replied. “There aren’t any Lois Lanes in Smallville and only two in the Metropolis phone book. The other one’s a florist or something down on Des Moines Avenue. She occasionally gets some of my mail by accident.”
“Oh,” Lucy said.
“I’m also going to deduce that you didn’t exactly ask your foster parents before you came by, did you?” Lois continued.
The girl’s guilty look pretty much said it all.
“Right,” Lois said as much to herself as to Lucy. “Let’s get you home before your foster parents have a slight case of abject panic.” She grabbed her purse off the counter as she went.
“I can’t go back Miss Lane!” Lucy yelled.
“You’re going to have to,” Lois said, trying to figure out how to explain it to an eleven-year old. “I’m not your legal guardian and you are most definitely a minor. I’d get in big trouble if I didn’t take you back. One thing I know about Family Services is they’re big on rules and following them. Tell me… do you really think they’d let me be your guardian if I didn’t take you back as soon as I could?”
Again Lucy didn’t meet Lois’ gaze which answered the question as effectively as any words. “You’re my sister though,” Lucy said sullenly.
“Yeah,” Lois admitted, as much to herself as to the world at large. “But blood only goes so far in a case like this.”
As Lois put a hand on Lucy’s shoulder and guided her for the door she found herself wondering if her last comment had been about Family Services… or herself.