A/N: I wanted to explore the Lois-Clark relationship unfolding in…well, essentially, a world under siege. Dark (never hopeless!) AU, with only a few points of contact with the movie series. T now, M later. Bear with me through the first page or so of exposition. Comments on how well the first page holds attention would be great.

For anyone following Getting Eaten Alive, I want and plan to come back, but this one's fighting to get out.

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold…"

-- William Butler Yeats, The Second Coming

The first time I met the Man of Steel, it didn't start well.

Which was a shame, but not a surprise. His feelings about the press were common knowledge. Though, to be fair, he'd never spoken of them once.

Jimmy and I were standing in the press crowd that warm night, outside the quiet condo complex that had just housed the latest tragedy. Superman was still inside looking for survivors. And our twenty-something new journalistic hire was up ahead of us, elbowing her way to the front.

Jimmy and I exchanged rueful glances, thinking of how recent our own elbowing days had been.

"But Lois," he assured me, as if I'd spoken aloud, "she's much calmer when the Assistant Editor's not looking over her shoulder."

That problem had dogged me since Perry promoted me to that fearsome station, three years before, at the age of twenty-seven. "You're saying, I'm still scary?"

He grinned at me, somehow a man of twenty-two already, looking just like the sweet, gawky teen he'd been half a decade before. "You definitely still scare me."

Then we both grew solemn again the same moment. We knew we shouldn't be standing out there making unfunny jokes, when we both knew what had happened inside. Not that it was wrong to think of jokes; I have too much respect for them as a coping mechanism. But to joke aloud there, laughing, maybe making some stranger think we did it all without respect for the dead.

And if I hadn't felt that moment of guilt, I think I would have handled everything afterwards differently.

As it was, when Superman stepped through the concrete wall of the complex with a child in his arms, into a night bright with flash bulbs turning like insectile eyes, the contempt on his face chilled me. I knew from video it was the same grim way he always changed, whenever he saw us clustered round his rescue scenes.

He turned her little body in his arms and pulled his cape over her head, the way he always did to hide victims' faces, and began to walk her through the press gauntlet lining his path, to the ambulance behind us. None of it new. But this time, it cut me to the core.

I had thought about his total disenchantment with the media many times before. I had realized long ago, with some sadness, that things might have been different. If we in the media had been free to be different. If the glorious thing that had been investigative journalism hadn't been squeezed to a husk by a decade of censorship law. If we hadn't been left with nothing to do but pick the tired carcass of the same tragedy as it happened over and again .

If, that is, it weren't for the same thing that had brought us here tonight, that had been happening all over the world, unpredictable, unstoppable, for the last fifteen years. The shatterfalls.

As he passed our spot in the lineup, my next reaction was irritation. Why would he judge us so superficially, for being here? It wasn't shock journalism. It was the only touchstone with reality left to Metropolis. It was all we could do to keep people informed, in a world where these shatterfall zones could open anywhere, any moment, in which molecules cracked their bonds at random and all things slid apart, and most flesh within the radius died.

As bad as knowing of the latest shatterfall was, not knowing was worse. People needed knowledge, or what they'd imagine and whisper would be more horrible still. And I felt, somehow, that Superman ought to know that, and it was a cheap shot to take at us. We weren't the enemy.

And then I looked again at the size of the little head under his heavy cape, and it was suddenly clear to me that it wasn't the stories that disgusted him. It was the photographs.

And he was right.

There was another way, I realized, that things might have been different. If there had been any rhyme or reason to it we could uncover, or even any rescues that didn't end predictably, with ten times as many dead as wounded. If there had been, that is, news to tell in any meaningful sense, instead of the same gory images time and again. It wasn't our fault.

But it wasn't – these pictures weren't – news.

His eyes swept the crowd – looking for what, I don't know – and met mine for a moment as they passed. I was included without distinction in that sweep of contempt. And as bitter as that moment was, it ocurred to me that five years ago I would have taken it far more personally.

He passed us. And I turned to Jimmy and said evenly, letting my voice carry, "Jimmy. Jimmy, stop rolling."

Jimmy turned his head from the eyepiece to look at me. He looked puzzled for a moment, but then I think he understood. He gave me a sad little smile and lowered the video camera from his shoulder, without taking his eyes from mine.

The other press around us turned to my voice, and then that forest of mechanical eyes and speakers was on me. My colleagues were no fools, and they sensed the potential for this to be something different. Maybe something a little less monotonously grim.

"The Daily Planet," I continued, looking straight at Jimmy, "can cover this public tragedy without video of private tragedy. And its readers don't need this film to help them grieve for their city, when the last one is still burned into their minds."

I hesitated. But I didn't want to leave it there, like I thought I was the lone voice of enlightenment suddenly holier than all my peers. "I suspect," I said more softly, "that the same might also be true of the Gazette. And the Post. And the Star."

My colleagues were mostly silent when I finished. It wasn't a hostile silence. Nor was it exactly repentant. They knew, like I did, that none of us had really chosen this. It was a listening, uncertain, weary silence.

And there in our struggling city, among a press crew that would always come after the fact to report the same disaster yet again, never knowing why it struck, I knew I was weary too. In fact, I had been weary for years. That was part of the problem.

How long had it been since I'd had the energy to treat this like news? Maybe to run correlations on the shatterfall location patterns? Six months?

I smiled wryly and looked around at the cameras, the little red-blinking single eyes in the twilight. "Maybe," I said dryly, "the Planet will even try some new pattern regressions. Just to pad out its article." I chuckled, hoping they would take it the way I meant it, like a tension breaker. Like an invitation.

Back in the crowd, one of my old Capitol beat buddies groaned. "God, Lane," he said darkly, "Not again."

I smiled. "It's been six months since we last tried. You never know."

I stepped back toward Jimmy and turned my back on the space that had opened around me. He caught my eye and we traded half-smiles, and as the babble started up around us, we reached down wordlessly to pack up our equipment. The ambulance had pulled away.

Superman was gone. No doubt he had missed it all.

"Yep," Jimmy said under his breath. "Still scare me."

I knew what he was feeling; it was the same way I felt. Not good, exactly, on a night like this. But as if we suddenly had breathing room. Or a bit of self-respect.

Neither of us was going to say aloud that Superman's disappearance meant that the other residents were dead already. The shatterfall radius must have taken in most of the building. The physical structure might be compromised or, like the aftermath of a neutron bomb, it might be untouched. Flesh always gets the worst of it.

My cell phone rang on the way home. Big technology attracts shatterfalls, for some reason – momentous, world-changing technology, or power-intensive technology. Space-capable vehicles, nuclear plants, car factories, and for some reason, in-vitro fertilization draw them. Individual cell phones, thank God, don't seem to yet.

It was Perry. "Quite a decision the Planet just made, Assistant Editor Lane," he said blandly, without a hello. "Changed your views on self-censorship?"

But weary as I was, I could hear that he wasn't angry at all, and that thought warmed me for the first real time all day. "Come on, Perry," I answered, balancing the phone between my cheek and shoulder as I drove. "It wasn't self-censorship, because it wasn't news. I'll give you a litmus test. Would what I did annoy the government? If it would, it's not the big self-C."

He sighed. "Five years ago, you would have lit into me for trying something like that, Lane."

He was right, and I was tempted to fire back with some of our old banter that had started in those days. I would have, to cheer us both up, if he hadn't sounded so tired himself. So instead I said, softly, "Do you disagree with what I did, Perry?"

There was a moment's silence. "Of course not," he said simply, after a moment. "Five years ago, I wouldn't have made you Assistant Editor." I smiled a little, turning the corner into my complex driveway, turning off the headlights. After a moment he added, "Do those regression analyses. You won't find anything. But you'll preserve our honor by trying."

"Consider it done."

"And Lane, are you married yet?"

I rolled my eyes, slamming the car door behind me and starting up the steps of my walkup. He had started that up in the past year, just when my mother had started to finally simmer down about it. "Three times last week alone. Why do you ask?"

"It's going to get worse, honey," he said simply. "I'm not going to keep you awake now and make you dig your heels in more again. But Richard still wants a second date some time, if you ever want to go that way. Just saying. Two are better than one."

I let myself in, dropped my bag and flicked the lights on. "Good night, Perry. Remember to shut down your reactor core."

He chuckled. "I think I left the space shuttle running, too. Good night." It wasn't funny, but it was our favorite joke regardless.

I started up the stove. Life had been easier when microwaves were safe.

It was a curious thing, the way Perry had started up with the marriage business after I had finally put it to rest.

My teen years before the shatterfalls were as full of fantasies of true love as most girls'. And Perry had watched me through my twenties, as one man after another fell short of my fairytale standards in some way and I decided it was time to get jaded. It's funny how eager I was to become cynical, as if it were a mark of wisdom.

It was, strangely enough, the collapse of Perry's marriage that had taught me some real sense on the subject. I watched it unravel as he tried to be at once a good man, a good husband, and a good leader of the free press, while our meaning and value were being rocked to the core. When our government was growing ever more secretive and militaristic under the onslaught of the shatterfalls, and none of us in the press knew how much of a gadfly we should bePerry was the best man I knew, and he couldn't do it all.

And somewhere in there, while the fibers of his life pulled apart, while it killed me to watch it killing him, I realized it wasn't the fault of the male sex if there wasn't a magic love that could fix everything. It wasn't anyone's fault. Not even mine.

I had Jimmy, and Perry, and Lucy and mom, and the memories of my dad. I was luckier than most of Metropolis. That was enough. If I had stayed cynical and angry about it, I think Perry would have tried to push me out of it, to keep my hopes tied to a romantic future. He would have thought I needed it to keep me human. As it was, instead, he just made me Assistant Editor.

Meanwhile the GDP kept plummeting, since you couldn't pay anyone enough to take a high-tech jobs. The after-looting of shatterfall sites got increasingly violent, till it was almost a relief when the Mob took over and organized it. And somewhere in there, Perry had decided the apocalypse was coming in our lifetime. And that I was going to need a healthy, battleworthy young man in my life, for purely practical purposes.

It was touching that he backed his nephew. Who, like the others, I liked, but never enough.

Superman was all that was holding Metropolis together. Otherwise we would have spiraled down into Perry's chaos years ago. Pity, I thought wryly as I stirred my soup, that he hates me now. That can't bode well for my place on his rescue list.

Would I even make the rescue list?

And then he knocked on my balcony door.

I passed an instant of terror, as I first made out a human form. My heart tightened; I was halfway out of the chair, jumping back, before I realized it was him.

He stood outside the porch door, arms folded across his chest, grave and enormous and utterly still. The blue and red and gold of his uniform drew a wild brilliance from my little porchlight. And I, standing there, gaping at him, starting to shake with the adrenaline kick, wondered whether I should even be relieved or not.

Ridiculous, Lois, I talked myself down, not moving.

And it was. Whatever he thought of the press, he wasn't a bully. I had followed his public actions for years, in my own increasing discomfort with power and authority. He had sometimes taken stands I disagreed with. A few times I had seen him use his sway in matters where he shouldn't have had any. But his devotion to our city and our world were so heart-stoppingly real, they still moved me like nothing else did. And I had never, ever seen him stoop to intimidation.

And so it should have been easier for me to cross the room and open the balcony door.

His mass and strength filled up the space all around us; he, and the air itself, were perfectly still.

I looked up at his face, at the jet-black hair and the dark eyes in shadow beneath it.

At least he doesn't, I thought, look angry just now.

And then what possible reason could he have to come? It was almost unthinkable that after all this time, he'd suddenly want to talk to the press. I didn't even blame him for that any more.

Or – my heart thudded up again – could it possibly be we had a shatterfall coming here?

The Man of Steel's greatest gift to us, in this war of attrition, isn't his strength or speed. It's the way he can hear a shatterfall coming, a high whine just barely audible even to him, as much as twenty minutes before it hits. It's enough, usually, to evacuate the area. But his range is only about three thousand miles, covering maybe a quarter of the earth's surface. It's while he evacuates one pre-fall in Shanghai that people die in Metropolis.

But there was none of that urgency, that stirring of unfathomed power I've seen in him on film in the face of disaster, in his eyes at that moment.

"I'm Lois Lane," I said, and held out my hand.

Completely unnecessary, since he came here. And now maybe he'll introduce himself in return.

His grip was huge, hot, flesh over steel, precisely not a hair too tight. Then he let me go.

And he said, softly, in his deep and near-human voice, "I'm sorry for coming uninvited, Miss Lane. Your address is public record."

I blinked. It seemed somehow ludicrous to imagine him using the phone to call ahead instead.

But for the first thing he'd ever said to me, it was more courteous than I'd expected. I shook my head. "Not at all."

His eyes are hard for humans to meet. They always seem to know a bit too much. But I met them, and tried to hold them. I owed it to him to be courteous as well.

Actually, irrelevantly, it occurred to me this might be the first time in years I had been truly safe from a shatterfall.

"I feel privileged, to finally get to meet you," I said after a moment. "But I don't think you came for the privilege of meeting me. Is there something I can do for you? I'd be glad to, if I could."

His lips twitched briefly. Not a smile, but not a gesture of rejection either. "May I speak with you, for a few moments?"

"Of course."

I looked at us, facing each other over my threshold, and hesitated. There was little point pretending the balcony was meaningfully more public, that it would change the dynamic between us in any real way. And, for the love of God, this was Superman.

So I added, "You're welcome, if you want to, to come in." Feeling the ridiculousness of it keenly, I was adding before I could catch myself, "That's a special exception. Most strangers don't get it."

He did almost smile that time, but then shook his head slightly. "Thank you. I can hear better out here."

That brought the almost unreal mood of the past few moments crashing back down. How much did being inside affect his radius? How much did the ever-present need to listen control his life?

I nodded, feeling somehow vaguely embarrassed, as if I should have thought of it. He stepped back, politely, to let me out. I came out to the rail and gestured for him to make himself at home on my balcony.

He came up beside me and we looked out over the pitch blackness of the back woods. A few years ago, the sky behind them was still lit up at night, by the industrial quarter off in the distance.

And a few years ago, I would have been trembling with excitement at meeting such a celebrity. But the memory of the look in his eyes earlier sobered me. If he wasn't coming to rage at me, and stir up an answering anger that could meet him, maybe he was there to reproach me quietly. And I dreaded that somehow more.

"I wanted to thank you, for what you did tonight," he said finally. "It was a brave thing, in a way. I should have known better than to…expect so little all the time."

I blinked, in surprise, in relief. I felt something unclench a bit inside me, and realized I'd been even tenser than I'd known.

All the time. That made me sad all over again, wondering if he had any idea what a force for good my profession had been in American history.

"Investigative journalism," I said finally, pensively, wondering whether I was more addressing him or me, "has a long tradition of selective self-restraint, on matters genuinely unfit for print…matters that add nothing to the public understanding. One that has nothing to do with self-censorship at all."

"I know," he answered softly.

I looked at him sharply, surprised again. He was looking back at me, his eyes almost invisible in the dark. Almost soothingly, he repeated, "I know." He looked back out at the woods. "I know I was ungracious earlier tonight," he said finally. "I'm sorry."

I blinked. His one furious gaze was the only statement he'd made. It was the only statement he'd ever made. But apparently, he knew as well as we did how it carried.

After a long moment, half-against my better judgement, I said what it felt I'd been waiting to say for a long time. "You're not a big fan of the press, Superman."

Five years ago, it would have been caustic. Or light, almost teasing, a thrust for him to parry. Now I just wanted to say it, and see what he'd say in return.

He turned to face me, arms still folded over his massive chest. "I'm an equal 'fan', Miss Lane," he said with similar simplicity, "of every item on your Bill of Rights. The first included." He paused, looking at me, with that barely-perceptible softening of his public sternness that he uses in private conversation. "But not because they aren't all dangerous beyond words."

I smiled at him, a real smile for the first time that night. Not just because I agree entirely – those rights are not cheery pastel glows of enlightenment. They can be used to do devastating harm. No one knows that better than the press, except maybe the government. I worry that people who are sentimental about the good days before the censorship laws are missing the point.

I smiled to hear that he, who spent so much time chasing down armed looters and being trailed by the half-free press, who knew the costs of our remaining freedoms so well, in some way still believed in them.

"Yes," I said softly.

He ran one hand through his hair. I turned back to the woods. I didn't want, just then, to pepper him with questions, to push him to define his views. I wanted to hear what he had to say. I wanted to know, for my own thinking, for my and Perry's wrestling with the question of what our profession could do for our people.

"Miss Lane," he said after a moment. "I do know that you still have to sell papers tomorrow."

I looked back up at him, surprised yet again. He swallowed, like a man taking a particularly nasty medicine, and said more softly still, "I wondered if you wanted an interview."

I almost fell over the railing. It was an event in itself. It was unthinkable, delicious, astonishing. It would be the media coup of the decade. His beliefs, his friends, his hopes, his vision for our future. It was a princely gift.

And I couldn't take it. Because it would look like a bone thrown to me, for holding back in our coverage. An incentive to hold back the next time, for the next bone.

I closed my eyes, hating myself for choosing this night to regain some self-respect.

Aloud, I said, "I desperately want an interview. " And then I sighed and turned to face him. "But I'm not sure I like the precedent." I rubbed the back of my neck, hoping I didn't sound ungrateful; I wasn't. "The Capitol beat boys tell me the White House does the same thing to them all the time."

Superman glanced over at me. "With disturbing effectiveness," he agreed.

I blinked. He nodded slowly, looking out into the wood beside me. I watched him from the corner of my eye. "I won't insult you," he added after a moment, "by pretending not to follow. I'm not sure you're not making the right decision." He hesitated. "Though the White House seems to prefer positive coverage."

"Where you prefer none, yes," I agreed wryly.

He looked over at me with a dry twinkle in his eye. After a moment he said, "But I hope you'll believe, at least, that my primary motive was gratitude. Sincerely."

I did. And meeting his eyes, about to start thanking him anyway, as I let the opportunity of the decade slip away, I felt better than I should have. Better than I'd felt in a long time.

"If it helps," he added after a moment, with the corners of his lips just barely quirking up, "you should know I have no intention of ever giving you another exclusive. Whether you muzzle yourself for me in future or not."

It was like taking a pin to the gathering tension of that night, of that week, of the last years. There on my balcony with Kal-El, the Lord of the Skies, I laughed aloud. He looked back at me, with that dry gleam in his eye that would have been at least a chuckle from another man.

We stood that way for a long moment, as I weighed it. I wanted it badly. And I wanted suddenly, crazily, to talk with him more. To learn how not to be opponents when we both wanted the best for Metropolis, me and this son of a world that had destroyed itself. To see if he would ever, ever listen to me about the downstream effects of his occasional heavy hand on the justice system.

But I was responsible for not just the reality of being bought, but the appearance of it. The other papers follow the Planet.

Finally, softly, I said, "Could I take a rain check?"

He barely lifted his eyebrows.

"I need a little time," I added. And then I heard myself continuing - "We can be independent without being predatory. It doesn't have to be like this."

I don't know which of us was more surprised. But something did soften in his eyes that moment, as he searched my face. He looked up at the black sky for a moment, then back down at me. "Call for me," he said finally. "When you're ready. When you want your interview."

I held out my hand to him again. He reached out and shook it - that massed power, that perfect control.

And then he stepped back; standing straight, without a muscle twitching, he shot up into the sky, and the air around me rushed into his vacuum.

This originally read "fourth". Turns out I was confusing the Fourth Estate (the press) with the Fourth Amendment. Sigh. The intended reference here is of course to freedom of speech, and to freedom of the press specifically. Sorry.