.013 Yellow

The lamp on her desk is flickering when she turns it on. She taps the bulb a couple of times with her fingernail until it stops, casting a soft, yellow glow over her desk. The rest of the bullpen is empty, save for the light coming from the city editor's office, where she knows Perry White is hard at work.

Lois loves this time of the morning, before anyone else has come into work and everything is quiet and peaceful. No noise, no interruptions, just her, her computer, and the beginnings of a story. Clark teases her about being a workaholic, but he doesn't know how often she comes in early, just to be alone with her thoughts.

Besides, she needs the work right now, to keep her mind off other things. Like whether Oliver is hurt, or if he's even alive, if Clark and Hall are walking into a trap, if she's going to lose Clark after all.

She pushes that thought out of her mind, immediately. Clark, as the Blur, has shown to be practically invulnerable. She's seen it, as much as he'd let her see in the past, anyway. And she watched him heal from a nearly-fatal stab wound, earlier. Clark is going to be fine.

But, she can't push the nagging sense of unease away. She tries to focus on her story, but all she gets are a few paragraphs of gibberish before she gives up, staring at her screen in frustration.

"Writer's block, Lane?" a voice asks from over her shoulder, and she looks up to see Perry staring at her computer.

"Something like that, Chief," she replies, smirking at the irritated scowl on his face.

The older man had said how much he hated the nickname, but Lois can't resist needling him with it.

"Working on the story about that strange light?" Perry asks, and Lois knows she's got to sell her prospective story to him, if she expects any of the higher editors to buy it.

"I've got a contact at StarLabs that I've been talking to," she tells him. "He called the phenomenon an aurora."

"An aurora," Perry repeats, skeptically. "As in the Northern Lights. Which appear at the North Pole. Which we are nowhere near."

"That's what makes it so unusual," Lois lies, keeping a straight face.

She hates lying to Perry, especially after all they'd gone through chasing the story about the Red Queen, but it can't be helped. There's no way to explain the vortex without explaining about the Kandorians, and she and Clark had agreed that it was a story the public just didn't need to know about, yet.

Perry finally relents, going back to his office to let her continue working, and Lois sighs quietly in relief. Turning her attention back to the blinking cursor on her computer screen, she gets out a little bit more of her story, but it's no better than the rest. She's going to wind up scrapping practically everything she's written, so far, and she hates the thought of having wasted so much time.

But, try as she might, she just can't stop worrying. She knows it's useless, knows there's nothing that she can do for Oliver that Clark and Hall can't do, but that doesn't stop her from thinking about everything that could go wrong.

She's about to give up on her story and head back to the apartment to wait for news, when her phone rings, and she picks it up with an impatient, "Yes?"

"We've got him, Lois," Clark says, and she lets out a breath she didn't know she was holding. "Oliver's safe."