WHO: Lois Lane WHEN: afternoon, Day 2 WHERE: Cave E WHAT: considering options WARNINGS: Hunger Games
Exploring caves wasn’t an unfamiliar experience for Lois. She’d done so numerous times over her career while following a variety of stories. The last one she had ventured into had contained a spaceship and her initial meeting with Clark Kent. It had been nothing like this one. The excitement over moving through those dark corridors and uncovering the secrets buried in the caverns was completely lost in this place. She’d even take the bitter cold of that one or the searing pain that had accompanied being shot by a robot and then Clark’s eyes as he’d worked to save her. Either would have been better than the creeping helplessness that was steadily permeating every inch of her.
Everything she had learned the last two weeks rolled around in her head, ways to utilize the materials she’d managed to grab were right there at her fingertips. She lacked the will to do so though, that urge to survive this insanity ebbing away into nothingness. Was there a point to even winning? All that meant was heading back to the Institute and facing everyone who had lost friends and loved ones. It meant having to move onto the next experiment and perhaps dying in a different scenarios in a matter of weeks, possibly months. At least one of the others would return to welcoming arms of some sort. She’d made friends, begun to know some of the others from her own world a little better, but none of that was quite enough.
She longed to feel the sun against her skin, the wind in her hair as Clark swept them through the city skyline, for his smile, the feel of his breath against her neck as they slept in their apartment. The exact shade of his eyes was fuzzy, something she hadn’t quite thought was possible. Words were her life, they were what she lived and breathed every day, and yet they failed to encapsulate all that Clark Kent had meant to her, to truly define how much she missed him.
Funny how the darkness of the cave made her think of him more than anything had in the last few months.
Knowing he wouldn’t want her to simply give up and accept defeat helped her to push on, to keep moving slowly through the cave she’d picked to try and secure shelter inside of. The minutes faded into one another though, time meaningless without the sun, and there were only so many stories she could recall upon to try and keep herself busy. Maybe she should have partnered with the other woman earlier. At least then there would have been someone to talk to during the endless expanse of nothingness that stretched out before her. There was no point in dwelling on the path not taken though.