Chapter Text
Winter was not Clark Kent’s favorite season in the calendar year.
Actually, it was his least favorite.
Actually-actually, Clark was as close to hating wintertime as he was to hating anything, but he tried not to be too obvious about it.
Different strokes for different folks and all! He prided himself on being a tolerant dude and totally respectful of the fact that some people were genuinely fond of cold weather. Like folks who were really into ice skating and skiing and were perfectly fine with the fact that whole weeks could go by without the sun peeking out from behind the fortress of grey in the sky! There were definitely real people going about their business in the world who didn’t mind going to work in the dark and coming home in the dark. Who were totally cool with sitting in the fluorescent light of their apartment which, honestly, wouldn’t be so bad if they allowed dogs, but as it was the landlord only permitted residents to have cats and, y’know, nothing against cats, but they tended not to be as cuddly as dogs.
There were people, (seriously, Clark had heard tell of these mysterious, mythical beings) who, faced with a dogless, cold, dark existence between November and February did not succumb to bouts of insomnia, lying in bed, or flopped on the couch, staring at the ceiling, feeling completely alone in the universe. Who weren’t actively hoping for a natural or man-made disaster to befall anyone, but wouldn’t mind dealing with an extremely minor, non-life-threatening emergency to get them out of bed or to encourage them to stop doomscrolling or just plain spiraling. Questioning every life circumstance and choice that led them to this horrible lonely existence in a one-bedroom apartment in Metropolis, unable to feel physically cold, but still managing to be totally and utterly bereft -
Uh. Yeah, Clark didn’t do great in the winter. And he wasn’t as good at hiding it as he wanted to be. At least, not if Cat’s occasional email links to sunlight alarm clocks, Ma texting him that she made too much dinner on random Wednesdays to lure him out to the farm mid-week, and Lana straight-up calling him when they year turned over to ask him if he had a mental health wellness plan in place, were anything to go by.
Now, Clark was going on twenty-seven years Earthside and he didn't get that far without having some copes in his back pocket. It was way easier getting by during the ten darkest weeks of the year (the WORST weeks of the year) when he was back home in Smallville. While the dog to person ratio was off (Pa said Otis counted for two and they weren’t getting another one), there were still four living creatures no more than a room away to lean on when the sads started creeping in. And if Clark wasn’t having an episode of the Sunday Scaries, but felt antsy and boxed in by the relentless grey of the sky, he had friends nearby to run the loneliness off.
Pete was up for anything and the extended Ross clan didn’t care if he showed up unannounced for board games and cocoa. Lana’s Aunt Ruth always needed something patched up or fixed around the church hall. Most days Brian was working at the bar and was happy to shoot the shit with for an hour, or one of his other friends, Miguel, Evan, Kelsey, whoever, would be down to do something to break up the days, even if it was as simple as going for a drive.
Metropolis was different. To call the city unfriendly was harsh, but it was definitely impersonal. You could go to the same coffee shop four days a week for weeks on end and the baristas still wouldn’t know your name or your order (ask him how he knew). And it wasn’t like Clark wasn’t making an effort get get out of his unit, he definitely maximized his library card, not only taking out materials, but attending programs and joining book clubs or six-week adult DnD campaigns. The issue was, nearly all the library programs met via Zoom in the winter, which was convenient, but didn’t quite scratch the loneliness itch in the same way being around people did.
“Lois is people,” Lana pointed out accurately during her ‘Let’s make a plan to deal with your seasonal depression,’ call. “Go over to her place when you want some facetime. Or sit-on-your-face time, whatever floats your boat.”
While that idea sounded absolutely delightful to Clark, he knew Lois wouldn’t be up for it. Um. She wouldn’t be up for half of that plan, anyway, specifically the part when Clark randomly showed up at her apartment when he was feeling down.
Although their relationship status had evolved over the past year or so from Hopeless Pining (on his part) and Active Suspicion (on her part), to Friends, to Friends Who Kiss, to Not Friends (thankfully that only lasted one excruciating weekend), to Friends Again, back to Friends Who Kiss, and was now firmly entrenched in Friends Who Mostly Kiss, But Sometimes Do Other Stuff Too, they stuck to a strict hangout schedule.
All that was to say, while it was true that their level of physical proximity during hangout time changed, the time they spent together outside of work hadn’t budged much. Lois came over to Clark’s place most Thursdays for dinner and while they’d make plans together on the occasional Saturday or Sunday (never both back-to-back), that was about all the togetherness Lois could handle.
Unlike Clark, she cherished her solo-Lois time (so-Lois time?). She needed it to recharge her batteries so she could be the most revved up version of her incredible self. To put the ‘Freaking’ in Lois Freaking Lane.
0/10 unrelatable content for someone like Clark. As far as he was concerned, being physically alone was one in the same as being lonely and Clark hated loneliness even more than he hated wintertime.
But, as he proudly told Lana, he had a plan! Work he’d done on a story back in the fall put him in touch with the folks who ran the MetroVeg CSA. Obviously it was too early to prep the beds for spring, but the organization received a grant to install winter greenhouses, which would be maintained by a team of CSA coordinators and volunteers to supply a number of local food pantries and soup kitchens with fresh veg.
Signing up felt like a no-brainer - his parents maintained a year-round greenhouse on the property and he’d been helping them out since he was old enough to drag a watering can around. Volunteering with the CSA would get him out of his apartment and into an environment that was warm, bright, and alive. This might be his best cope yet!
Lana did not share his optimism.
“Bestie, that sounds like a lot,” she cautioned him. “I don’t see how you’ll have time, with Lois and work and home and…y’know. Other stuff.”
By ‘other stuff,’ Clark knew Lana meant, ‘being Superman,’ (aka Whoosh) which, yes, took up time, but…not in the right way. Like, not in the human contact way. Which was hard to explain, so Clark didn’t try (especially not to Lana who was extremely skeptical of the Superman enterprise overall). What it boiled down to was this: on those occasions when he was out being Superman, while he was definitely around people, he wasn’t…with people. If that made sense.
Not so very long ago, Lois thought Superman was an android and a lot of the internet agreed with her. It hadn’t been Clark’s intention at the beginning to make Superman robotic, but he also very much did not want to put too much of himself into the…uh…character.
Which was for the best! (No matter what his mom thought about it.) Seriously, who wanted some anxiety-riddled nerd showing up during a time of life-or-death crisis? Nobody, probably! So Clark straightened up his normally shitty posture, avoided eye contact (which was easy to do when he stood up straight since he was stupid tall), and smoothed all the regionalisms out of his voice when he spoke to people.
Not that Superman carried on long conversations, which was also by design. Clark did stage crew in high school, he wasn’t an actor and he worried that if he carried on too long, too much of Clark would bleed into Superman and it wouldn’t take more than a minute for whoever he was trying to help to realize that, rather than being rescued by someone who totally had their shit together, their lives were in the hands of a rando who was basically winging it.
So, yeah, okay, maybe the Paladin he played over Zoom had more of an actual personality than Superman, but so what? That was fine. Ideal, actually! Superman wasn’t part of a narrative or sprawling arc; he was a useful costume for Clark to put on when the world seemed to need a general helping hand. A tool. Only that.
“I think it’ll be fun,” Clark insisted in the face of Lana’s pessimism. “An easy lift - they already got the structures built, the equipment installed, the crops planted, all that. It’s just maintenance at this point, you know, soil health, vents, checking for disease. It’s only two days a week with some nice city hippies, it’ll be a chill time.”
“There are no hippies in Metropolis,” Lana told him flatly. “There’s nepo babies who refuse to wear deodorant, it’s not the same. Five bucks says all their experience in urban ag begins and ends with not killing their bathroom succulents.”
Clark owed Lana five bucks. While Corinne, the coordinator of the greenhouses and lead grant writer did wear deodorant, she did not know very much about planting for cold-weather indoor conditions. Clark realized he’d lost the bet as soon as he arrived at the greenhouses, which was hugely disappointing. They were downright majestic, huge geodesic structures and it was clear no expense had been spared as far as operations went. It was also extremely obvious that they hadn’t been positioned to optimize sun exposure. Like. At all. For a minimum of 3 hours a day the greenhouses were completely shaded by the high-rises on their Eastern side.
That was yikes number one. Yikes number two were the varieties selected for planting. They seemed to have been chosen based on what Corinne personally liked to eat, rather than suitability for the environment. Eggplant. Tomatoes. Peppers.
And, hey, only slight shade, Clark got it, they were objectively delicious! They were also some of the first things to come up when one Googled ‘what not to plant in a winter greenhouse.’ They’d be lucky to harvest enough for a single chopped salad, never mind supplying food for multiple soup kitchens to fulfill the terms of the grant.
When Clark raised these incredibly valid concerns, Corinne listened (well, she nodded with her eyes closed, which looked like listening). Then she smiled up at him and shrugged. Her reply was yikes number three: “I look at this more as an opportunity to explore and learn. We can always shop at Clean Green to fulfill that whole...food part of the grant requirements, if we have to.”
The only silver lining in all of this was that Lois thought Clark’s frustrated MetroVeg rants were lowkey hilarious and he always considered it a win whenever he made her laugh.
“I’ve never heard you bitch this much about anything,” Lois exclaimed gleefully during one of their Thursday get-togethers. “It’s delicious, please keep going. Or, you know, don’t because MetroVeg sounds like a sinking ship and I think you should absolutely let go, Jack.”
“MetroVeg is fine,” Clark insisted, putting the dishes in the sink. “MetroVeg is great! It’s this particular grant-funded initiative which…is also great. Like, in principle, getting a buttload of money to build and maintain winter greenhouses to supply the city’s food pantries and soup kitchens is awesome - ”
“Oh, don’t worry!” Lois interrupted him, closing her eyes and nodding her head, steepling her fingers together in a pseudo-zen way. “If we don’t actually grow anything in our expensive-ass greenhouses, we’ll just go to the supermarket. I’ll bet the poor, unfortunate souls who run the food pantry have never tried that before!”
“The worst part is LordTech owns that chain,” Clark reminded Lois, plopping down on the couch with more force than was strictly necessary. Clark sank down in his seat, leaning his head against the back of the couch and addressing the rest of his rant to the ceiling. “It completely misses the point of urban agriculture! And when I try to explain why what they’re doing is a fucking disaster - okay, I haven’t said 'fucking disaster,' but I have told them they planted crops side by side that are basically sworn enemies - they don’t want to change anything! It’s like, ‘We’ll buy an HID light,’ or, ‘We’ll get more planters!’ Like the fungus they’re dealing with’ll just…keep its path of destruction to one tomato plant and not spread. Because of...manners? I guess?”
“They’re rich kids,” Lois pointed out, in a manner not entirely dissimilar to Lana. “Their mommies and daddies are all boss babes and tech bros, throwing money at a problem is their solution to everything. I don’t know why this is shocking to you, but like I said, I love to see it! It was not on my BINGO card for this year that you’d get an arch nemesis named Corinne, but I’m not mad about it.”
“It’s not about Corinne,” Clark insisted. “It’s not about me either. I don’t know what their problem is, but they got that money to help people. Real people, grocery prices are going up, the soup kitchens are underfunded and overwhelmed as it is, it’s irresponsible of them to…to waste an opportunity like this.”
“Did you call in the big guns?” Lois asked, coming up close to him and leaning her cheek against his arm. Clark tucked her against his side and sighed because that was a whole other sore spot that he didn’t much feel like prodding.
Jonathan Kent, avowed pacifist, wouldn’t love being referred to as a ‘big gun,’ but Clark did ask him to Facetime with Corinne and some of the other coordinators to offer advice. Clark thought maybe part of his communication difficulties stemmed from the fact that, while he had a lot of ag experience, he was still a professional journalist by trade. They could be forgiven for not taking him seriously. As a fifth-generation grain farmer, Clark’s Pa had the kind of credentials you couldn’t shake a stick at.
Or so he thought. The call wound up being a huge waste of time, to the point where Clark apologized to his dad after. The MetroVeg coordinators couldn’t wrap their heads around the difference between a small holdings farm that people made a living on and a hobby farm. Corinne specifically kept complimenting Pa about getting ‘away from it all,’ and ‘living off the grid.’
“I did,” Clark admitted. “Didn’t help.”
Pa, true to his good nature, took everything in stride.
“Didn’t have the heart to tell ‘em we could use more grid out here - ‘least you could, for, uh, raiding, right, Chicken?” he teased Clark over the phone later. “You coming down this weekend? Mama’s fixing to get that baby room painted down the Kearns’s and she told me you and Evan were gonna tag team the walls for her.”
Clark confirmed that he was blowing off MetroVeg to help prep Baby Kearns’s nursery for her arrival. Ma offered them a mural as a baby shower gift, which Evan and Kelsey enthusiastically agreed to. The theme was ‘Teddy Bear Picnic,’ which was so ridiculously precious Clark could scream (he would not scream on the day, he would prime the walls, then vacate the premises so his mom could work her magic).
“Mmm.”
Lois got up and repositioned herself so she was sitting in his lap, facing him. Clark lifted his head slightly so that she could twine her arms around his neck. She pressed her body against his chest and arched her back up to whisper in his ear, “Not everyone wants your help, my guy.”
Ouch. Maybe the sexiness of the pose was meant to take some of the sting out of her words, but it was less effective than Lois hoped.
Evan wants my help, Clark thought petulantly, but kept that line of argument trapped firmly behind his teeth. There were about a million differences between overhauling MetroVeg’s greenhouses and helping a buddy paint a room. More than a buddy; Clark had been Evan’s best man when he married Kelsey.
Their families had been friends forever, but the first time Clark and Evan really clicked was on the first day of Kindergarten, when Evan came back to their lunch table from the bathroom, a tooth clutched in his fist and blood smearing his lips.
“I ripped it out myself,” he declared proudly. “I got tired of waiting and Mama said the tooth fairy’d give me a two-dollar bill for it!”
Little Clark was particularly squeamish at that age and promptly threw up his cheese sandwich all over the cafeteria table; he and Evan bonded in the nurse’s office and had been bros ever since.
“I think it’d be easier if I…I mean, they’re not bad people, the MetroVeg folks, their hearts’re basically in the right place,” Clark told her, resting his right hand on the small of Lois’s back, rubbing light circles with his thumb. “Only…I don’t know, I’m just not…”
“Vibing?” she supplied when Clark trailed off.
Making friends, was what he wanted to say, but Clark cut himself off because it sounded more than a little bit pathetic.
“I don’t know how to talk to rich people,” he concluded. “I guess, unless you’ve got...student loans, we speak different languages.”
Lois frowned up at him. “I don’t have student loans. Do we speak different languages?”
Sometimes, Clark thought, but didn’t say because it would be mean. And as much fun as Lois was having being the audience to his one-man drama llama show, it was actively un-fun for Clark to be this stressed about a project he took on to alleviate his stress. Not getting along with the people who ran the greenhouses sucked. In addition to winter and loneliness, Clark also hated not getting along with people.
“That’s different,” Clark replied instead. And it was! Lois didn’t have loans because her dad was military, not because she was sitting atop a giant trust fund, like a dragon with its horde. “Sorry, I’ve been on this tear for, like, an hour, I’ll stop.”
“Oh, no, don’t,” Lois said, straining up so that they were more or less on a level. “Tear on, MacDuff. Tell me more about the sick tomatoes.”
He didn’t, but not because Clark didn’t have a lot more to say about the tomatoes; Lois kissed him and all the noise and negativity flew out of his head.
“Mmm,” she hummed against his lips, pulling back to give him a devious grin. “I like Grumpy Clark. A furrowed brow looks good on you.”
“Oh yeah?” Clark asked, trailing a hand lower, under her ass so he could pick her up to take her to the bedroom. “How good?”
“Real good,” Lois said, giving a little yip of surprise as he stood. She wrapped her legs around his waist and continued, between kisses, “Corinne might be your arch nemesis, but she’s my new best friend. She pisses you off and you come to me all hot and bothered. An L for you, but a win for me!”
Heh. In that case, Clark would gladly take the L.
“Well, that’s just fine,” Clark smiled, depositing Lois on the pillows. “Anything for you, darlin’.”
Time was, Clark thought the smallest glimmer of anything resembling anger out of him would send Lois running for the hills. After she found out about Whoosh and all he was capable of, Clark was worried Lois would take the tiniest glimmer of temper from him as a clear and present danger. It wouldn’t have occurred to him in a million years that she’d think he was hot when he was pissed.
Clark might have to figure out another place to find fodder to maintain a level of grumpy that would keep Lois satisfied. Something else happened during that Facetime call with Pa that he hadn’t mentioned to Lois, but bothered him tremendously at the time. Would bother him in a few hours, when Lois was gone and he got in his head again.
Ma heard his voice on the phone and figured he called to chat, so she popped up over his dad’s shoulder, exclaiming, “IS THAT MY BABY BOY - OH SHIT!” before she realized, yes, that was, in fact, her baby boy on the phone…in addition to half a dozen strangers. In an effort to salvage the situation, she dove completely out of the frame and, if Clark knew his mom, probably dropped to the ground and army-crawled out of the kitchen.
That one sentence prompted a lot of commentary once the call was over, all the greatest hits from Clark’s first month or so of employment at the Planet: really tired attempts at comedy based on jokes about gourmet road kill and kissing cousins. That was all annoying, but didn’t cross the line into making him mad until some of them started up with frankly insulting imitations of his mom’s accent. Even that he’d be able to get over eventually, mostly because he knew Ma would be tickled pink to know that one of the other CSA coordinators described her as sounding like, ‘Dolly Parton’s dykey sister.’
It was something Corinne said that got to him in the end. He’d heard variations on the sentiment maybe a hundred times before and it didn’t take him too long to get over it. Not this time though; maybe if it was high summer and she laughingly remarked, “So, wait, if that’s your dad and that was your mom, where the hell did you come from?” Clark would have been able to shrug it off.
Right now? He couldn't. No fucking way. Because it was the goddamned dead of winter, Clark had about as much as he could take of the nepo babies and their chain grocery store back-up plans, and he was sorely tempted to permanently re-neg on his two-day a week commitment to MetroVeg. The greenhouses were half-dead anyway.
That was the crux of it, right? The question that got under his skin in a way bullets couldn’t and wove a thread of anxiety through every thought when he found himself alone in the dark: Where the hell did you come from?
Was his (self-diagnosed) Seasonal Affective Disorder regular winter blues? Or was it all part of his dad’s sunshine theory - that Clark’s abilities were charged up by the sun, like he was a human-shaped, extra-large solar battery of doom? Was he a human being with some strange add-ons? Or was he…something else?
Those were contemplations for later. Three a.m. or thereabouts, when the night was way too quiet and Clark felt a kind of loneliness so deep it made his bones ache and he pulled the blankets over his head like a little kid, praying for morning to come faster. Hiding from a monster under the bed. Hiding from himself.
With Lois in his arms, he felt as close to totally human as he could. On days like this - in seasons like this - it was a feeling he chased. Like the last rays of sunshine on a clear January day.
“Stay,” Clark murmured into Lois’s hair, a quiet plea. “Please?”
No way she’d say yes. She still had time to catch the last bus back to her neighborhood, she didn’t like the six a.m. scramble which was the inevitable result of spending the night at his place on a work night. Flying her home would save time, but Clark didn't dare float the idea. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
As it was, Lois could talk about his abilities no problem. She could tolerate minimal displays without batting an eye these days. But flying? That was an absolute no-go. After the first (and last and to date only) time he flew with her, Clark didn’t blame her in the slightest for not wanting to repeat the experience.
“Mmm…’kay,” she replied sleepily, to Clark’s astonishment. “Just have a coffee waiting for me tomorrow at work. Hot.”
Clark kissed her gratefully on the back of the head, holding her close, but not tight. Leaving her plenty of space to get away if she wanted. “You got it, girlie. Thanks.”
Lois turned around in his arms, but she wasn’t trying to wiggle out of his embrace. She got closer, tucking her head under his chin, rubbing a hand over his chest like she was trying to gentle a horse. Then she poked him in the belly and gave his side a squeeze.
“You don’t have to thank me - you’re cute when you beg,” she informed him with the sweetest little smile on her face, a contrast to her almost sultry tone and heavy-lidded eyes. "Anyway, I like your squish, it's cozy. If I stay here, I don't have to crank my heat."
God, Clark loved this girl. How had he gone a quarter-century in this life without her? She fit so perfectly, in his arms, with his friends, with his family. Like she’d always been there. Or like he’d been waiting for her. And he couldn’t question his choices or judge himself too badly when every decision he’d made so far led him to her.
Lois nodded off quickly and Clark was soon to follow, enjoying a deep, dreamless sleep that was only broken when the pink of the dawn began to illuminate his bedroom window. Time for the six a.m. scramble.
One night down. Only…seventy-ish more days to go ‘til spring. Clark’d make it. He always had. Winter sucked, but it stood to reason that this year wouldn’t be any worse than years past. He had his coping mechanisms. And he had Lois - with that girl around, he figured he could get through just about any trouble that came his way.