From the previous chapter:

Lois sat in silence for a moment, and then smiled as she changed the subject. "Since I know Superman, maybe I can ask his mother questions about his childhood."

Clark groaned.

His father looked on in amusement as Martha started. "Oh, he was such a sweet little baby when he came to us in that spaceship…"

"Are you done quizzing my mother about every single embarrassing moment of my life?" Clark asked with a smile. Their dinner was over. It had been homey, and wonderful for Clark – having those he loved best share a meal with him. They had talked for a long time over after-dinner coffee.

His parents had eaten some tiramisu, but Lois had postponed her dessert, pleading a full stomach. Martha had had Jonathan pack away the leftovers in Lois's refrigerator, and they had gotten up to go.

"Take my Jeep, Martha," Lois had said.

"What?" Clark gasped. Lois never let anyone drive her Jeep. Well, he had, once or twice, but it was a rare thing.

"I don't want you walking back to Clark's apartment in the dark." Lois was adamant.

"I could drive them," Clark offered.

"No," Lois said. "You're staying right here. Perry said I'm your keeper till you're healed. Are you healed yet?"

"Yes," Clark said automatically. At Lois's raised eyebrow he looked down and admitted, "No." She knew him well, he thought. He still didn't have all his abilities back.

"Here are the keys." Lois got up and handed her Jeep keys to Martha.

"Well, thank you, Lois," Martha said, casting a knowing eye at her son and his partner. "Thank you for a wonderful dinner." She hugged Lois. "And thank you for everything." Her gesture encompassed what words could not say.

Jonathan came over and hugged Lois too, and then his parents embraced Clark. "You can come over for the Jeep tomorrow," his father said. "Your mother and I are going to get a good night's sleep, now that we know you're OK."

Clark walked them to the door and down the stairs. He took Moose with him. "Good night, Mom, Dad," he said, hugging them once more. Twilight had fallen, and the red wisps of sunset in the west were especially beautiful tonight.

As they drove away, Clark could hear his father over the engine noise. The hearing was back! "Shouldn't Clark come home with us?"

"Oh, don't be foolish, Jonathan," his mother replied. "Those two need to talk. Lois…" Clark belatedly stopped listening as the Jeep drove away.

Pensive, Clark walked Moose around the block. Moose lifted his leg on several fire hydrants and sniffed every tree in the area. They came back to Lois's building and Clark walked back up the five flights of stairs. He felt a little uneasy. He and Lois did need to talk, and so far their record in that department hadn't been entirely good.

He knocked on her door, and she opened it and gestured him inside silently. Clark removed Moose's collar and leash and walked back to the kitchen. "Wine?" he asked. He was nervous. His parents had been a buffer. Now he was alone with Lois. The last forty-eight hours had been… interesting, to say the least, and Clark wasn't exactly sure where he stood with her. Finding that out had become of the utmost importance.

"No thanks," Lois replied. "Clark, I'm serious here. Do you have all your powers back?" She seemed stiff and uncomfortable with him.

He answered her just as seriously. "I still can't fly. Almost everything else is back."

"Then you need more sun." She took his arm and led him into her bedroom. Bemused, he followed her without protest. Lois pointed to the weak pool of evening sun that still bathed half her bed. "Lie down there."

Self-consciously, Clark did so. The sun felt nice. It wasn't as strengthening as being ten thousand feet above Metropolis at noon. But it was nice.

Lois shut the door, keeping Moose from following them. "You stay out there," she told the dog. She took a seat on a chair and addressed Clark. "You can take off your shirt if you want," Lois said, not looking at him. "That'll help you recover faster, won't it? If you get more sun exposure?"

Clark froze for just a second. The bedroom, the bed, taking off his shirt – what did Lois intend? Whatever it was, it sounded promising. "Yes," he answered cautiously. "I'll recover faster." He sat up and pulled off his shirt. Lois, he saw, was peeking at him out of the corners of her downcast eyes. Her pulse rate went up a little. He lay back down, feeling very self-conscious.

"I have some questions for you," Lois announced abruptly, still not looking at him directly.

"I'm ready to answer them."

"Truthfully?"

Clark smiled. "I believe the phrase is, 'Clark Kent will be truthful one hundred percent.'"

Lois relaxed a bit. "You know, when you told me that, today in the hospital, I could have done without hearing the entire Dr. Seuss bibliography recited to me in chronological order. Book by book. Who knew that Dr. Seuss wrote so many books?" She cast a short glance at Clark. "And who knew that you had read every… single… one of them?"

"Hey, Dr. Seuss is a great author," Clark defended himself. "He's definitely underrated."

"Right. I kind of liked The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins – "

"It's better if you can see the illustrations and watch how the hats get bigger," Clark murmured.

"But I really didn't need to hear the entire Thidwick The Big-Hearted Moose."

"I have to admit that Thidwick is a lesser work in the Seuss oeuvre," Clark conceded. Lois's pulse rate had gone down, he noted. She drew a deep breath and it went right back up.

"Clark, Henderson said something about a kryptonite cage." She wasn't looking at him again, he saw. She stared over the bed, out the window.

The kryptonite cage – Clark hated to remember that. He hated remembering the physical agony of being so close to the poison and lying there overnight on the cold, hard floor. What had been a hundred times worse had been knowing that Lois was soon to marry Lex Luthor, the cold calculating villain who would break her vibrant personality and turn her into his puppet.

"Lex Luthor managed to trap me," Clark said. He'd never been able to tell Lois this before, because it had happened to Superman, not Clark. Telling her now was a curiously cathartic experience. "He told Clark that you were in danger, and that he had to talk to Superman about you. So I came."

Lois looked sick.

"Somehow Lex had learned about kryptonite. He got me down to his wine cellar and a cage with steel bars fell from the ceiling around me. He'd worked out some electrical thing where he could channel the kryptonite radiation into the cage bars. He turned it up to "high" and left me there." Clark still had nightmares.

"When?" Lois asked. She was very tense now, Clark saw, legs together and shoulders hunched, perched on the edge of her chair.

"The day before you were supposed to be married to him."

She swallowed. "How did you get out?"

"Lex had left the key in my view but out of my reach, just to taunt me." Lois gasped and Clark smiled grimly. "That's the kind of man he was. Anyway, I was able to use freezing breath on a piece of fabric and turn it into enough of a hook to grab the key. I crawled out of the cage and hid behind the wine racks."

"So all the time I was getting ready, and putting on my dress…"

"Yes." Clark said nothing about those minutes spent in a fever delirium, hiding, frightened beyond words that Luthor or one of his minions might find him and return him to the cage. "Henderson came to arrest Luthor and in all the confusion, I made my way back up from the cellar."

"So that's why Superman didn't save Lex," Lois said dully. "If you can't fly after you've been exposed to kryptonite…" She seemed even more miserable.

Clark nodded. "I didn't have my powers for days afterwards."

Lois hunched in even further. "Clark, am I galactically stupid?"

"What?"

"I misjudged Lex, I misjudged you… that's the reason I was so mad at you, really. I was mad at myself and I lashed out at you. It was easier to be mad at you than to face the fact that I've been a fool." She sniffled. "Henderson noticed it. He figured you out." A tear ran down her cheek. "You're my partner and my best friend and you have this whole other side to you that I never noticed." More tears came. So quietly that even Clark could barely hear it, Lois added, "I mess up everything that's important."

He felt a surge of affection and sympathy for her. This was Insecure Lois. Insecure Lois never showed herself in the newsroom – no, at the Planet everyone saw confident, bold Mad Dog Lois. But underneath, she had a soft center.

Clark got up quietly. He came around the bed to Lois, who now had her head in her hands as she tried to hold back her tears. He put his hand on her shoulder. "Lois." She didn't flinch away. "Lois." Wrapping his arm around her, he helped her stand. He stood behind her, holding her closely.

"You're not galactically stupid, Lois, not in the least." Her slight form felt wonderful against his bare chest. "I worked hard at making you think I was two different people. I deceived you, really." Her heartbeat slowed a little. "Luthor… well, I think he worked hard at deceiving you too."

"I said no, you know," Lois murmured.

"What?"

"When I was at the altar with Lex. I couldn't go through with it. I said 'no' at the last minute."

"I… hadn't known that."

"Nobody heard it but Lex and the Archbishop. I said it just when Henderson came in." She leaned back, relaxing a little in his grasp. "I couldn't marry Lex... because I was thinking about you."

Clark was flabbergasted. "Really?"

"Really." He could hear the sincerity in Lois's voice. "Now I'm going to be truthful one hundred percent." She stepped out of his grasp and turned to face him. "Will you go and lie down again? I don't know if I can look at you and say all this."

Clark nodded obediently and went back around the bed. He laid down in the sunbeam. Lois sat on the bed and then stretched herself out next to him. They lay shoulder to shoulder. She took his hand but didn't look at him.

"When we had dinner together Saturday night," she began, "I fell asleep at your apartment. You took me home – I found your note about that later. I woke up in the middle of the night and did a lot of thinking."

Clark had often had nights like that. He said nothing and let Lois continue.

"I was mad at you, really mad. But… but then I started thinking about things, and how I've probably done plenty of things that really hurt you."

Unbidden, a particular evening and a particular conversation came to Clark's mind: Lois, wanting to meet with Superman the evening of the day that she'd rejected Clark's declaration of love. She'd spoken to Superman and told him, I'd love you if you were an ordinary man, without any superpowers. She didn't know that she had just turned down that ordinary man. He wondered if Lois was remembering that moment right now.

"And I thought about how you're my best friend, and how you're… you, if you know what I mean." Lois squeezed his hand slightly.

He nodded.

"What I realized, Clark, was that even though you made me mad, I still wanted you in my life. I couldn't imagine not having you in it." Her voice turned a little cooler. "I decided that weeks ago, the first time you got 'shot'. Although it turned out that was a fake."

"I'm sorry about that," Clark said. He figured that if he apologized two or three times daily, he could get a thousand apologies in within the next year.

Lois ignored his apology. "So I walked over to your place on Sunday morning. I was going to tell you that I was mad but I decided to forgive you. And that I was ready to go on to the next step." Now she turned and looked at him. "I walked into Nigel and Jason Mazik kidnapping your parents. Nigel shot at me, and suddenly you were there. You're always there." Her voice trembled. "You saved my life. I don't know how many times you've saved me and in how many ways. A lot, I'm sure."

"I never counted," Clark said honestly. "You've saved me a bunch of times too."

"I have?" Lois asked, curious.

"Let's just say that even though you didn't know he was me, Superman couldn't have been Superman without you."

"All right. I'll take your word for it. You have to tell me later," Lois teased. Then, more seriously, she added, "You got shot. I thought it was like the time in the nightclub, and you were OK, but you were really hurt."

"Yeah." He didn't want to think about it.

"Never do that again, Clark! Never get shot right when I'm about to tell you how much I love you!"

"You love me?" Clark asked incredulously, rolling on his side to face her.

Lois snuggled up to him. "Of course I do, you big lunkhead."

"Really?" Clark still couldn't believe it – all his dreams coming true, right at this moment.

"One hundred percent," Lois confirmed, smiling.

"You'll forgive me for lying to you all this time? Having two identities and deliberately deceiving you?" Clark knew he shouldn't bring up sore points but he couldn't help it.

"If you'll forgive me for saying such mean things about you when I thought you were just the Hack from Nowheresville, and the whole Lex thing, and, uh, everything…" Lois trailed off.

He looked deep into her eyes. "Of course I will. I already have."

"And you won't keep secrets anymore?"

Clark knew the thin edge of a wedge when he heard one. "And you won't keep secrets either? Because we're going to talk to each other, right, Lois? We'll actually have conversations about what's bothering us, instead of you storming off and me coming to visit you as Superman because you don't want to talk to Clark?"

Lois had a momentary expression like she'd bitten a lemon. She put on her game face, though, and then she smiled at him. "All right. We'll talk to each other."

"The truth?"

"The truth. One hundred percent, Clark?"

"One hundred percent." He stared into her eyes, and he had the impression that their relationship had just undergone some momentous change. Already he felt free. He didn't have to lie to Lois anymore. He didn't have to come up with some lame excuse as to why he was running off and leaving her in the lurch. He hoped that Lois heard the sincerity in his voice. "Clark Kent will be truthful one hundred percent."

He leaned forward, just a bit, giving her plenty of time to back away. Slowly, he pressed a kiss to her lips. She met him enthusiastically and what Clark had intended as a timid exploratory measure turned into a long, satisfying osculation.

They broke the kiss and Clark took a deep breath. "In the interests of one hundred percent truth-telling," he began. He knew his eyes had grown dark with desire, and what was better, so had Lois's.

"Yes?" Lois asked interestedly.

"You're beautiful, you know. I could spend hours watching you." Lois rewarded him with a small smile. "When I first met you in Perry's office, I was knocked flat. I fell in love with you right there."

"You did?"

"One hundred percent," Clark affirmed.

"It took me a lot longer," Lois said shyly. "I couldn't see beneath the surface. It took me a long time to realize that you're the best and truest friend I've ever had." Mischievously, she added, "The fact that you've got a great body is only icing on the cake."

"Um," Clark said incoherently. Lois had begun running her finger up and down his chest and his brain had short-circuited.

"I think we should kiss again, don't you?" she asked.

Clark didn't answer. He just took her into his arms.

The loud buzzing of Lois's doorbell startled them from their pleasant occupation. Clark heard Moose jump off the couch, race to the door, and begin barking loudly.

"Who is it?" Lois asked irritably. "Who would stop by this late?"

Clark tried to activate his deep vision but failed. It wasn't back online yet. "I don't know." He sighed and got up. "Do you want me to answer the door?" he asked as he put on his shirt.

He saw calculations pass through Lois's eyes. "I don't think so. You look too healthy for someone who just got shot." She got up too, and readjusted her clothing. She strode out to the living room.

"Just a minute!" she yelled at whoever was at the door. Then she groaned, and Clark automatically sped to her.

"Look at what that dog did!" Lois exclaimed.

Torn-up carryout boxes, fruit peels, and vegetable fragments littered the kitchen floor. The refrigerator door hung open. After a minute's thought, Clark deduced that his father hadn't closed the fridge door firmly when he'd put away the leftovers. Moose had come nosing around the kitchen, discovered the open refrigerator, and had taken advantage. And…

"That dog ate your tiramisu again," Clark said through clenched teeth. He was bitter. In view of the recent warming of relations between himself and Lois… well, he'd had plans for that dessert.

The doorbell rang again, jolting Clark out of his canine revenge fantasies. Clark sprang into action, cleaning up the mess at super-speed. Amidst his rush he realized that he was levitating slightly. Flying was back!

He finished the clean-up. Lois's kitchen sparkled. Clark retreated to where he could see the front door but where he was out of view.

Lois opened the door. Moose went into a frenzy of barking. The dog jumped up and down frantically.

"Now, Moose, calm down," the visitor said. Her voice stopped Moose's barking.

"Eleanor!" Lois said. It was Lois's neighbor, Moose's owner.

"Hello, Lois. This is my son, Tom," Eleanor said, indicating her companion.

"Pleased to meet you," Lois said, shaking Tom's hand. "How is your father doing?"

"Very well, thank you," Tom replied. "He's recovering nicely from his heart surgery. They expect he'll be out of the hospital within the next two days." He spoke firmly to the dog. "Moose, sit."

Moose sat. Clark raised an eyebrow in respect. Tom seemed to have the command voice that worked on Moose. Clark certainly didn't – and he'd tried both the Clark voice and the Superman voice.

"I'm glad to hear that," Lois said.

"We've come to get Moose, Lois," Eleanor put in. "I can't thank you enough for keeping him all this time. I know he can be a handful. Did he give you any trouble?"

Clark laughed silently. The events of the past few days tumbled through his mind. It was as if he sensed Lois's thoughts too. The expense and inconvenience of the Double Fudge Crunch Bar episode, the fact that the dog had eaten Clark's special dessert for Lois not once, not twice, but three times…. But, on the other side, the fact that Moose had saved all their lives when he'd knocked down Nigel St. John. Maybe it was inadvertent, maybe it was only because Moose was chasing a thrown object, but all the same, he'd saved them.

"No. No, Moose was a good dog," Lois said, with a little catch in her voice. Clark noticed that she didn't say that she would be happy to take care of Moose again.

Lois found Moose's leash on the table by the door and handed it to Tom, who managed to corral the excited Labrador and attach the leash to the dog's collar.

"Thanks again, Lois," Eleanor said.

"He already had dinner," Lois said. Clark wondered if he should warn Eleanor about the Italian feast that Moose had just pirated from Lois's refrigerator. He shrugged. So far the only time that Moose had had any intestinal upset was when the emergency doctor had deliberately made him vomit. The dog seemed to have a cast-iron stomach. It was probably a good thing, considering Moose's omnivorous and indiscriminate eating habits.

"Thank you," Eleanor repeated. "We'll see you around, Lois." She smiled at Lois, Tom waved, and they went down the hall to Eleanor's apartment, Moose happily trailing them.

Lois closed and locked the door.

Clark came up and hugged her. "Thank God."

"What?"

"Now that Moose is gone, I might be able to buy you a dessert that you might actually get to eat." Clark sighed. "Do you realize that every time I tried to feed you tiramisu, Moose ate it first?"

Lois laughed. "I hate to tell you this, Clark, but I really don't like tiramisu all that much. I'm more into chocolate."

"Really? All this time I've been worrying about the tiramisu and I was wrong all along?" Clark felt stupid. He thought he knew Lois… and as in so many other respects, he had been proved wrong. She would always be a mystery to him. There always would be something new to learn about her.

"Well, tiramisu is OK, I mean I don't hate it… but chocolate is a lot better."

That sounded like a hint to Clark. He spun into the Suit. Lois's eyes widened. Clark remembered she'd seen that only once before, and she'd been half drunk at the time. "Shall I go get you the finest Swiss chocolates?"

"No."

"No?"

"Well, not right now," Lois admitted. "Would you mind putting on your Clark clothes again?"

Deflated, Clark spun back into his regular clothing.

Lois leaned up against him and brought her hands around his neck. She pulled his head down and kissed him.

Sensation rushed through Clark and he groaned.

Lois released him. With a twinkle in her eye, she said, "I don't want chocolate right now, because right now, you're my dessert." She kissed him again. "You're better than chocolate."

"Uh, you are too," Clark managed to choke out.

She took his hand and led him back into the bedroom. "Let's finish our dessert."

THE END

This fic was written for Bobbart for the 2011 Ficathon.

His requests were as follows:

Three things I want in my story:
1. Clark and Lois
2. A breakthrough in their relationship. (falling in love is nice.)
3. Chocolate

Three things I don't want in my story:
1. A bad or negative ending
2. see (1)
3. see (2)

Preferred Season:
1, 2 or alt-verse.