Archive of Our Own ^beta

Six feet from the ledge and falling fast, Lois takes a moment to consider that she might have made a mistake.

"Absolutely not," Lois says.

Perry clips the end off his cigar, shoves it in the corner of his mouth. "Don't think I was offering you a choice."

"You have literally dozens of other journalists who could write a—a puff piece like this," she scoffs, flipping a hand dismissively. "Five paragraphs of rumour and nostalgia, shove a snazzy headline on it, boom, done."

"I wanted a puff piece, I'd've asked Gil." Perry opens the nearest drawer in his desk, rifles through it distractedly. "If anyone can write a killer Why the World Needs Superman story, it's you."

"I have other stories—real stories," Lois insists.

"Like what," Perry says. It's a dismissal, not a question. He starts searching the other drawer now. "Where are my damn matches? Olsen! OLSEN!"

Jimmy sticks his head around the door. "Yes, Chief? Hey, Ms. Lane."

"Jim," Lois says, and it comes out like that, truncated, Clark's Jim, not her own Jimmy. She almost adds the belated syllable, but he's already gawping at her a little, face too comical for the sombreness of his dark bow-tie.

Before the moment can draw out to full on awkward, Perry bellows, "Find me some matches. And don't call me Chief!"

"Yes, Chief," Jimmy says automatically and starts to close the door before leaning in again. "Only we're a no-smoking building? Mister White, the other Mister White, Richard, he said, because of insurance and health—"

"MATCHES!" Perry yells at him, and Jimmy vanishes out of the office so fast the door vibrates, banging shut and popping right back open again.

Lois shakes this off. "The train derailment."

"Ten dead, more than a hundred injured," Perry says, not missing a beat. "It's been covered. You covered it. You tried to spell bludgeon with three oh's and a jay. Great piece, already done."

"It's still—"

"Lois." Perry sighs.

He takes the cigar from his mouth, taps it on the desk, and glances out of the window. Lois does too, at a flicker of red and blue that resolves itself into the tail of a flag before her heart can properly skip a beat.

Perry says, "Write what you want. You always do." She knows better than to thank him, and he proves her immediately right. "But you write the Superman thing too. Before we go to press."

It's a dismissal, and Lois takes it for one, rising smoothly from her chair.

"Comes to something when a man can't smoke in his own damn office," Perry grumbles.

Lois thinks about reaching for her own lighter. Then she closes the door.

The long haul passenger train from Dover had rounded the last major curve, the one with the great view of Delaware Bay, and accelerated towards Metropolis Central Station at exactly eleven thirty seven. It had been edging up on one-fifty miles per hour, trying to make up for earlier delays with loading, and the doppler wail of its horn had been clearly recorded in the background of the broadcast from a local WDDE affiliate. According to the only surviving member of the engine crew, they had started braking eight minutes later, aiming for a more respectable sixty five as they hit the suburbs. Instead, according to the train event recorder, they were still accelerating when they hit a misaligned railroad switch, travelled almost twenty miles down a disused spur, and explosively derailed. In many ways, that there were so few fatalities was something of a miracle.

Which is why she is suspicious, of course. Lois has no faith in miracles.

Why The World Needs Superman, she types, stabs the return key twice, and stares at the blinking cursor, fingers poised above the keys. The cursor blinks off. Blinks on. Off. On.

Perry once told her, "A reporter lives by three rules. Believe none of what you hear. Half of what you see. And everything you write." Lois has always tried to live by that, always tried to verify sources, always tried to ask the questions nobody else was or would, always tried to find the story behind the story. But what's the story behind Superman? It's been five years and she barely knows more than that first "A Night With..." interview. Doomed planet, desperate scientists, last hope. And then one day out of the blue he takes off, without even a goodbye. Just her life, crashing off the tracks.

Lois switches tabs.

The Federal Railroad Administration's Accident Analysis Branch, and that needs a better name because Lois is never going to type FRAAAB without internally giggling in a way unfitting for a military brat, has deemed the accident an accident. A number of small technological malfunctions, each with known fault tolerance, had combined in exactly the right way at exactly the wrong time. It was deeply unfortunate, they say, but it happens. And maybe this is why Lois has no faith in miracles, because aren't bad unlikely events that happen just as "miraculous" as good unlikely events?

Calls are, if not actually interesting, at least a way to dot the t's and cross the i's. Lois starts at the top, getting the official statement reread, and works her way down the first responders, the fire chief, police captains, hospital admins. Then she goes back and finds the actual people on the ground, comparing their stories to the official report and to each other. Lois is writing up a chat with an EMT who has lots to say about funding and the insurance industry but little about the actual crash, when Jimmy pops up at her shoulder.

"You want some lunch, Ms. Lane?" He's almost bouncing, eager to please as a puppy dog. "Mister White, Richard, he wrote your name on some salads in the fridge but I think Ms. Grant's been eating them. What are you working on? Is that about Superman? Did I ever tell you about the time—"

There are dozens, hundreds, thousands of these stories. Jimmy's "Superman's Pal" as much as she had been "Superman's Girl Friend", except, really, wasn't it more so? Jimmy's stories, one bizarre scrape after another, at least demonstrated friendliness on the Big Blue's part. And what did Lois have? All her stories were Daily Planet bylines. A different sort of personal.

"Let's go," she says across whatever Jimmy is recounting,

"For lunch?" Jimmy says, already grabbing his coat and his camera without waiting for an answer. "We could go to the Ace o' Clubs."

"Sure," Lois says vaguely and spends the elevator ride down tuning out Jimmy's surprising familiarity with, and unsurprising recounting of, their lunchtime menu.

As they step out onto the street, Jimmy automatically looks up, compulsively squeezes the extra button on his watch. The face is dull, the digital time panel a flat grey, the strap scratched, the glass cracked and haphazardly rejoined with what Lois thinks is probably superglue.

"Maybe you should get a new one," Lois says. Jimmy drags his eyes away from the sky to give her a questioning look, and she clarifies, "You need a new watch, Jimmy."

Jimmy lifts his wrist, frowns a little at it, like he's confused by what he sees, surprised and saddened and just a little bit angry.

"Guess the battery ran out," he says.

Lois hails a cab.

Say what you will about Smallville, but he'd had a fine eye for details that Lois almost misses. Jimmy's been following her along the edge of the elevated train track for a good chattering five minutes before he even seems to notice they're not going to the bar. Not that Clark hadn't had his own bumbling, affable ramble from time to time, but he'd also been a good one for spotting an odd glint of metal, a sparkle of glass, a stray thread of rope, a spent shell in a far corner no-one else would have looked twice in.

Startled pigeons escape from under a bridge and Jimmy snaps a shot of them against the sky without pause.

"—investigating the crash, shouldn't we be down the other end? Where the crash was?"

"The switch was set the wrong way," Lois explains. "I want to take a closer look at it."

"What?" Jimmy asks, still looking up.

Focus that only lasts as long as the camera's click. Maybe that's why Perry will never make Jimmy a full reporter. "I want to take a closer look at the mechanism that moves the rails, see maybe why it was pointing down a track the railroad doesn't use."

"Why not?" Jimmy asks.

"Cities change. It doesn't go anywhere these days," Lois says, but actually it's a fair question. There are uses for roads that go nowhere, after all. They give you somewhere to stop, to wait, to turn around. A pause in the tumult of the world. She feels the edge of an idea but it slips through her fingers like a soft cape. "Come on."

The rails gleam even now, re-oiled by every passing train. The track is open again. Lois has checked the schedule. If they're still here in twenty minutes, they'll get to watch a train go past close up. Jimmy can get some pictures, if she can just get him to look somewhere between the sky and his feet, if his hands are steady. No. It's a petty thought, and she feels bad for having thought it. Jimmy is her colleague. Jimmy is her friend, maybe. Lois wonders what he thinks of her, and then stops and looks instead at the tracks in front of them, at where the spur merges in from the side.

"There." She points. It's... A switch. It looks like every other switch, so far as Lois can tell from her research. Which was mostly Google images but still: research.

"You want me to take pictures, Ms. Lane?" Jimmy asks, and Lois assumes the question is rhetorical, because he already is. "Wasn't this already in the report?"

"Yeah." Lois kneels to examine the mechanism. When she touches the electric motor, her fingers come away black, leave a shiny, still grimy but cleaner imprint behind. Jimmy takes a photo of that, too. She resists the urge to wipe her fingers on her jacket. The operating rods look old, but not worn. There's gravel between the crossties, but nothing on them, and nothing between the main line and the rail. That twenty, no, ten minute train now, less even, has smooth railing all the way to Central. And what does she have?

God, she misses Clark. What has she come to that she misses Clark? She was a great reporter before he even came to the Daily Planet. She's still a great reporter. She doesn't need Clark. She's Lois Lane, and Lois Lane can stumble over a missing screw or bump into an unexpected radio transceiver with the best of them. Except she doesn't. Except she can't. Except she's still thinking about Clark with his glasses and Superman with his perfect vision and about how annoying the click of Jimmy's camera over the distant blare of a train horn is and how it's distracting her and she's looking and she's looking and she's looking, she's always looking, and there's always just nothing—!

"Miss Lane!" Jimmy yells, his hand on her arm, tugging her hard.

Lois stumbles a couple of steps and, in the time it takes her to raise her head to ask him what the hell he thinks he is doing, a locomotive blasts straight through the points. Jimmy whistles as carriage after carriage blasts pass them, takes a photograph. The silence once it's passed is almost as deafening as its presence.

Faster than a speeding bullet, Lois thinks bitterly. More powerful than a locomotive.

"The switch works now, then," Jimmy says.

"Or they wouldn't be allowing trains," Lois hears herself agree.

They're both just standing there. Staring at nothing. The big old void where something huge blew into their lives and out again without a by-your-leave and goddamn it, Lane, not everything is a metaphor.

"I don't know, Ms. Lane," Jimmy says awkwardly. "It just looks normal to me."

He's right, Lois realizes. Of course he is. She's been staring at the answer to her question, seeing only what she expected to see, not putting the two together. Of course it looks normal.

"You're right, Jimmy. There isn't anything wrong with it. But there's nothing new with it, either, nothing added or fixed. The switch is working just fine. It has been this whole time."

And here is where Clark would have chimed in, but Jimmy just looks at her expectantly and it weirdly makes her think of Jason, patiently waiting for her to set out his medications.

"Which means," Lois concludes, "that someone changed the train's direction on purpose."

The second round of calls takes much longer than the first and goes less well. Lois uses up an evening, letting Richard run interference on the Superman piece, and only agreeing to finally break for food and sleep when she realises that Jason, waiting for her, has fallen asleep beside her desk. He doesn't stir at all when she carries him to bed, a satisfyingly heavy, solid weight in her arms. She pulls his covers up close around him, because he gets cold at night, brushes his hair back from his face and touches the gentlest of kisses to his skin. Richard makes soppy faces at her from the doorway and then resolutely pretends he hadn't when she calls him on it.

Still, morning comes quickly and with it the bustle of the Daily Planet offices, because why wait for the city to wake up when you have coffee and a mystery to badger people about? So Lois calls and calls and calls and, yes, sir, she is aware of the law regarding disclosure, but also do you really want to be mentioned in an article on a conspiracy to derail a passenger train in the most read newspaper in the state, no, thank you, thank you, sir, you've been a great help.

"You got something, Ms. Lane?" Jimmy asks.

"Trains aren't planes," Lois says.

"They... don't have wings?" Jimmy offers.

Lois ignores this. "They have less security. Less tracking. Once you're past the reserved seats, anyone could be getting on and off. If they paid cash, you wouldn't know they were there. You wouldn't know to look for them."

Jimmy spins slowly in his chair, taking this in. "You think someone was on the train that shouldn't have been? A saboteur or something? Wouldn't they have been killed in the crash?"

"All the dead have been identified." Lois drums her fingers on her desk. "You took photos of the scene here." She doesn't wait for Jimmy's nod. "But we ran a photo of the Dover station too, in the insert. Where did we get that? From Stock?"

"Security footage," Jimmy corrects. "They sent us everything from the train coming in up to it leaving Dover station for here. I grabbed a frame that showed the engine and cleaned it up in—"

"Where is that? The footage. And your photos of the injured and anyone else at the scene of the crash." Lois turns back to her own computer, accessing the shared servers, so intent on finding the files that she almost shrieks when Perry appears at her shoulder and bellows.

"Where's Superman?" Off their startled looks, he grumbles and clarifies, "Your piece on Superman."

"I'm working on it right now," Lois lies, like her screen isn't full of train station security videos. Go big or go home, right? Perry just looks at her. "Right after lunch?"

"Clock's ticking, Lane," Perry starts, only to get distracted by Cat Grant swanning past. He swoops off after her to attempt to yell through a cloud of perfume and mint chocolate lattes. Cat winks at Lois before vanishing into an office with Perry still on her heels.

"We'll go through the footage and through your photos, try to find anyone on one list and not the other," Lois says to Jimmy.

Jimmy's lips silently form the syllable 'su' before he clearly thinks better of it and says, instead, "Okay, but we should get lunch while we're doing it. Ace O'Clubs?"

"You like their sandwiches that much?"

"Beer, bacon and fries are brain food," Jimmy shrugs, turning back to his desk.

Lois scoffs, but copies the files to her laptop. At least if she's working outside the office, Perry can't bug her again. "Fine. You're buying."

Jimmy doesn't argue and Lois makes a mental note to make sure she pays her share before he can. He makes eighty-five cents on the dollar compared to her, maybe less now he hasn't sold a good shot around for a while. Twelve cents less than Gil, but that's a rant for another time. Gil probably has his uses, right? Whatever they are. And Clark had made less than her, of course, but she'd had seniority so that was fair—and he would have argued about paying, but also then tried to pay for her anyway. Richard makes more than her, but he's an editor and has basically saved the International section of the paper, so she lets that go. Between the two of them, they have a nice house and they can put their kid in a good school that properly accommodates Jason's medical needs. So. So Lois can afford to not let Jimmy waste his money on her lunch, is the point. And why the hell is she thinking about this so much?

"What are you going to write?" Jimmy asks when she catches up to him at the elevator.

"It depends on what we find in the photos," Lois says, though she knows what he means. It doesn't deter him.

"Superman was a real nice guy. You should write about that," Jimmy says. "He wasn't just a hero all the time. He was friendly too."

Lois doesn't want to discuss this but she can't help asking, "Heroes aren't friendly?"

Jimmy shakes his head. "They don't have to be. Superman was. He remembered people, their names and things, and asked about them if they met again. Not enough people do that. We kind of just bustle through our days. Superman flew above us all but he still managed to keep his eye on the little things."

The elevator doors finally trundle open and they step in. Jimmy reaches out to press the button for the first floor. He's still wearing the broken watch. Lois thinks about saying something, thinks about the lighter in her pocket, the cigarettes in her bag, and doesn't.

They work through lunch. Jimmy has a photographer's eye, even now, and Lois has prided herself on the ability to spot her mark in a crowd, but it's still hard going. There are a lot of people and sometimes even going frame by frame isn't enough to get a definitive answer. Still, by the time Lois realises she's supposed to be doing the school run today, they've eliminated more than half of the people and are at least pretty sure nobody gets on the train for a while and then gets off again before it departs. It's a good start.

Leaving Jimmy behind, she drives to the school to pick Jason up and then turns the car around, asking him about his day. He's done some counting and written his letters and they read a story about goats and got to feed lettuce to the class bunny and learned about triangles and it's been a billion years since his afternoon snack and he's so hungry and, "Can we have burritos, mom? Pleeeeease?"

"Did you drink your shake at lunch?"

Jason pulls a comical disgusted face, but nods emphatically. "Alllll up."

Lois, who agrees with the face because the macrobiotic shakes are very healthy but also weirdly textured green sludge, declares him a brave boy and stops on the way home for Mexican drive-through. It's questionably authentic but Jason insists it tastes better if you get it from a window.

"Just remember, this is your dinner, okay?" Lois says, while Jason carefully holds the bag. "No snacks after this."

Jason nods seriously, though Lois suspects by bedtime he will have conveniently forgotten this conversation. She takes him back to the Daily Planet with her, on the principle that she can use him to distract Perry if he comes for her again. Jimmy isn't back at his desk, so Lois lets Jason sit there. He quietly eats while she works, and suffers her wiping his face clean afterwards without verbal complaint, then climbs up next to her to ask her what she's doing.

"I'm trying to find the picture in this set that is the person on that video," she says, moving them round for him to see.

"Like a matching game?" Jason asks, already stealing the mouse from her so he can click at things. "Are they bad guys?"

Lois shakes her head. "But if we match them, it might help find some bad guys."

Jason proves excellent at finding identical faces, which Lois isn't too surprised at. He's great at jigsaw puzzles too, spotting things that fit and things that are new and out of place. Once she's sure he's writing the matches down in a way she can check later, she leaves him to it. Sure, his spelling needs some work, but who doesn't? And his big loopy writing is probably more readable than her own instantly recognisable chicken scratch.

It's starting to get dark out when Lois next takes a break, stretching hard and wincing at the clicks. She rubs at her eyes, and then looks over at Jason, who hasn't said anything in a while and is currently biting his lip in frustration. On the left hand of his screen is an older man, perhaps in his fifties or sixties, with glasses, a balding head and a greying beard. She can see he's carrying a metal briefcase of some kind, stamped with a stylised W and some writing too small to make out. He looks vaguely familiar, but then she's been looking at this footage for hours, so that doesn't actually tell her anything. He's not in her own list of matches.

"Can't find him?" she asks Jason and he makes an irritated huff and slumps back in Jimmy's seat, folding his arms over his chest. "It's okay. Just try—"

"Daddy!" Jason says, sliding out of the chair—Lois automatically puts a hand out between his head and the desk, though he comes nowhere close—and practically bounding up to Richard, who promptly picks him up.

"Hello, you. Are you helping mommy?"

"We're finding not bad guys," Jason explains. He tilts back in Richard's arms to look up at him. "Do you want to help?"

"Well, I'd like to, but I think it's home time now."

"Oh," Lois says, startled. "I have to—I haven't even started on the thing for Perry and have all this still. But, no, I can. I can—" She waves vaguely at them, meaning, do the family thing, the person thing.

"Finish what you're doing," Richard says without rancour. "I'll take the kid home." He leans over to kiss her cheek and to let Jason hug her neck, before swinging the boy back up again, making Jason giggle.

"We already had burritos. Don't let him convince you to get anything on the way home." She looks at her work, then back at him. "I won't be long."

"I know."

"I won't," she insists, and he smiles at her as they leave like she's... Lois doesn't know. Like she's the sun rising. Or some deep mystery. Both, maybe.

The actual sun has definitely set by the time she next looks up. The familiar W had been less useful than she'd expected. Too many companies under the same umbrella shared it, and the similarity of their logos might be good branding but it made it difficult to tell one from another when the width of a dozen pixels. On the principle that people involved in one extraordinary incident were often involved in others, Lois had tried searching back issues of the Daily Planet, then AP and Reuters for both Dover and Metropolis. When that failed, she'd started on the smaller science press and now, a frankly ridiculous number of dead ends later, she had her man.

"Doctor Emil Hamilton," Lois reads. "S.T.A.R. Labs, Wayne Technologies, joint research initiative, cybernetics, alternative energy... What are you building? Laser guns? Robot suits? Robot suits with laser guns? That you can fit in a briefcase."

That's less impossible than it should be. Superman had foes that could shrink things or build amazing gadgets. The Toy-Man had been able to build an amazing amount of technology into toy planes and train sets. He had come out on a rampage, six, maybe eight months after Superman's disappearance. Unfortunately for him, Metropolis's police department were rather more gung ho when it came to the use of lethal force than Superman had ever been. All that super-strength and he'd rarely done more than bruise standard human opponents. Even Zod, Ursa and Non—

"No," Lois said, out loud, interrupting her own thoughts. "Briefcase. What's in the briefcase?"

She tries STAR Labs, who tells her to call the publicity office, who doesn't answer the phone. She calls the lab back, this time trying a contact from an old story she and Clark had worked on years before, but her source can't tell her anything more than she already knows. She tries Wayne Technologies and the receptionist says he cannot direct the call, is there anything else he can help with, and hangs up without waiting for an answer. A bit of digging gets her a directory list for the building and Lois just goes down the list, getting mostly no answers, one irate researcher who hangs up on her immediately, a very confused janitor who is happy to tell her he's seen the name on a desk plaque but otherwise knows absolutely nothing, and somehow the receptionist again, who replies so exactly as before that Lois is half convinced he is the laser robot she is looking for.

"Go home," she tells herself. "Jason and Richard are waiting for you. Go home." Keep an eye on the little things, like Jimmy says. Be the hero your family needs.

Lois has a sudden, almost overwhelming urge to go up to the roof for a cigarette.

Instead, she closes down her computers, tidies up her desk, and sets out. Metropolis is a blaze of twinkling lights outside the window, a universe of stars settled on the ground. She mumbles a good night to the few other staffers she passes on the way out, a little ashamed that she's not sure she could name even one of them. Clark would have. Richard definitely would have. She thinks for a moment about calling Jimmy as she gets in her car and finds herself instead taking the wrong turn and driving towards the Wayne Technologies building.

It's a stately modern building, black and glass and full of light. The janitor had managed to give her a floor number, so Lois brazenly ignores the reception desk in favour of walking to the glass elevator like she's perfectly allowed to do so. She presses the button for the right floor and the elevator dings pleasantly and rises, giving her a view of each floor on the way. Judging by the slots she can see by every internal door, getting any distance into the building will require a keycard of some kind, but the elevator itself seems public, even with the security camera pointed at her, which means there's likely a public area on the floor too, and if she can get that far...

The doors slide open on a young man in a very expensive suit who does not look even slightly surprised to see her, though there is a very calculated pause before he asks, "Is there something I can help you with, Ms. Lane?"

"I'm here to see Emil Hamilton," she says without hesitation.

The man considers her for that same pause. He carries himself in a way that makes Lois mentally revise her age estimate upwards, though he could be anything from late teens to a baby-faced thirty year old. Black hair, blue eyed, square jawed; there's definite muscle under that Burberry classic.

"Doctor Hamilton is unavailable, I'm afraid." He sounds almost apologetic, but he also steps into the elevator with her, letting the doors close behind him as he presses the button for reception. "And Wayne Technologies is closed to visitors for the evening."

"What if I said he was present at the Dover train crash?"

That same damn pause. Not quite long enough to be offensive, not quite short enough to be natural. Just long enough and consistent enough that she can't tell which response is genuine and which not.

"I would still say he is unavailable. Why?" he asks, and the calm facade doesn't change but there's a hint of humor behind it. Is he mocking her? No. Something else. He's enjoying himself. "Does that seem like a thing you might say?"

The elevator comes to a halt. The doors open, and he steps smoothly to one side to let her out.

"I think he might even have caused it," Lois says, though, no, she doesn't, not really, not yet. That doesn't feel right to her at all.

Pause. No humor now. "If a Wayne Technologies employee were involved in some kind of criminal enterprise, voluntarily or not, I am sure Mister Wayne would do everything in his power to help the authorities investigate."

Voluntarily or not? "You didn't tell me your name."

He does smile now. It's a playboy smile. A Bruce Wayne smile. It's just as calculated as everything else. Lois no longer needs an answer to her question, not when she can so clearly see his legal guardian in him, nor does he give her one, just says, "Have a good evening, Ms. Lane," and lets the doors close between them.

Jason mumbles a little, but doesn't wake, when Lois presses a kiss to his forehead and pulls the covers up around him. He has his inhaler loosely clutched in one hand like a teddy bear. Lois takes it and puts it on the side table. As she stands, she comes face to face with a framed drawing of his, done all by himself with wax crayons, his name writ so large that it occupies almost the top third, the rest a fat plane in a yellow sky, a blue messy trail of exhaust falling behind it as it soars. It looks more like a pooping whale than an airplane, to be honest, but Lois loves it. She leaves the door open a little when she leaves, so the light can still get in.

Richard is making popcorn when she comes down to the kitchen. Lois kisses his cheek before pouring herself a glass of wine from the already open bottle. "Did Jason go down okay?"

"Out like a light the moment his head touched the pillow." Richard shakes his head when she offers the wine bottle. "How's your piece going?"

"Superman?"

"The train thing," Richard corrects, smiling. "Jason liked the matching game."

"I have a working railway switch and one possibly missing guy who may or may not have been carrying company secrets," Lois admits. "It's not exactly broken wide open."

"If your instincts say there is something there, I believe there's something there. And the Superman thing?" Richard lifts his hands in surrender at her scowl. "You brought it up, not me."

"I'm... Mulling it over. Trying to find an angle."

"Pillar of justice, beacon of hope. Puncher of bank robbers," Richard offers with a grin. "I think it's a bit late in the day for hefty questions. There's a Hammer Horror revival on. Come watch old, terrible movies with me." She hesitates and he laughs. "A break will do you good! I've got popcorn!"

"Let me change and I'll join you," Lois says, relenting, earning herself a happy smile and a kiss before Richard departs for the lounge. She tops her wine glass up, then goes back upstairs to swap her suit for something more casual and comfortable. Jason is still peacefully sleeping. He's never lived in a world with Superman in it. Is it easier if you don't know what you're missing?

There's already a movie on when Lois comes back down. Nothing she recognises. Some kind of murky green swamp creature is terrifying and/or helping a camp of very old looking teenagers. Possibly there are two swamp creatures, one good, one bad, but judging by the way the scenes are cut, they only had the budget for one costume.

"I can see the zipper on that one," Lois complains as she sits. Richard just laughs, flicking popcorn at her. She steals the bowl and he makes no effort to stop her. "This is corny."

"That's why I like it," he says. He's smiling, she can see him out of the corner of her eye, watching her, not the movie. "Real life monsters are the more boring sort of evil. Faithless politicians and faceless boards, picking bottom lines over people. This is easier. Big and loud."

Was that what the world needed Superman for, Lois wondered. To be big and loud, to make people look up into the sky, feel like there was good in the world that actually achieved something? Did Superman's costume have a zipper too? And she'd meant that metaphorically but now she was thinking about a literal zipper, because, come on, that thing was skin tight. How did he get it on and off? Did he have to grease himself up first? Now there was a thought!

She realised Richard was saying her name and tried to focus. "I'm sorry, what?"

"You zoned out on me completely there." He sounded more amused than annoyed, at least. "Still thinking about your train story?" Lois made a noncommittal noise that Richard clearly took as an affirmative. "You're working too hard. When you're done with this, we should take the weekend off."

"I, yeah. Maybe." She distracts herself with popcorn. "Sure. That would be nice. When I'm done with this."

He nods, eyes straying back to the movie, and Lois shifts around so she can comfortably lean against his shoulder. When she's done with all this, a break might be nice. Maybe Richard can take Jason and her up in a plane again.

Lois likes it when Richard takes her flying. She doesn't think too much about why.

Clark sends her a postcard. The picture says Ecuador, the stamp says Peru, the postmark says Martha has forwarded it from Smallville, the writing says Bolivia and everything and nothing. Lois pins it to the board with the others and then settles down at the kitchen bar with her laptop while Jason eats breakfast. She wonders if Clark remembered to eat breakfast in whatever rainforest he's presently in, then tabs over to the Superman document. It's as empty of anything except the title as it was before.

She tries starting where everything always starts. Basic facts. Height. Weight. Powers. Origin. Endeavors. The making of a hero. His values. His villains. Who they were, how they reacted to him, what the consequences of those reactions were for other people. For a moment she thinks she can smell something burning, hear the crash of falling telegraph poles, hear the rumble of an earthquake splitting the ground right behind her as her car refuses to start. Jason's spoon tinks loudly and Lois realises she's written six paragraphs about Lex Luthor and deletes the whole page.

By the time Richard has gotten Jason ready and they've both left for Jason's school, there are exactly three more characters on the page and all of them are question marks.

"Why the World Needs Superman"? Why does the world need Superman? Why does she?

"Because I liked him and I miss him." Lois sighs. "And now I'm talking to myself again."

She gives in, digs out a cigarette, and goes outside to smoke it, down to the water where the breeze will carry away any lingering smell long before Richard or Jason return. Richard's seaplane is parked out in the bay. Had he already been working up to asking her to take the weekend off? Had he anticipated what she'd want to do? Or was the plane always exactly where it was and she'd just got so used to it that she didn't even notice it was there anymore? The breeze puts her lighter out before she can touch flame to cigarette and she says something she's glad Jason isn't around to hear.

The world needs Superman because. Because he's a hero, whatever that means. Because, because, because. Because he might have stopped that train crash, Lois thinks with a sudden anger she knows is probably unfair and feels all the same. He might have but he didn't, because he wasn't there. And he isn't here. But she is. She is.

Shoving lighter and cigarette back in her pocket, Lois storms back inside, deletes the Superman document entirely, and switches back to the train files. To hell with heroes. Today, she is going to find Doctor Emil Hamilton and find out just what the hell was worth derailing a train to steal or retrieve.

Jimmy is happy to run around doing research with her but everything they try comes up blank. Wayne Technologies does not discuss their research projects and the good doctor does not appear to have many friends and quite possibly sleeps in his lab for all that his neighbors remember him.

"Someone must have known he was going to be on that train," Lois says, staring at the loop of Hamilton boarding the train through the steam of her third coffee of the morning. "You don't derail a train if you're not sure your target is on board."

"I mean, you might?" Jimmy says. "If you were a super-villain."

"If anyone starts twirling a moustache, I'll be sure..." Lois trails off. There's something about the loop. She realises they've only been paying attention to the people who get on the train. But they're not the only people in the scene. There's a big, stubble-jawed man in the back, leaning casually against a pillar but watching everything with a studious glare. A man who is there until Hamilton boards the train, and who then immediately heads off in the direction of the station payphones. "I know that guy. Where do I know that guy from?"

"Thugs-r-us?" Jimmy offers with a hopeful grin.

"You're more right than you think," Lois tells him, and re-opens her searches of articles about Wayne Technologies she found while looking for the doctor the first time. "There. He's one of Mannheim's flunkies. He tried to rip off the Wayne Expo a couple of years back, denied all affiliations when caught. But I know Intergang when I see it."

"Why's he not in prison?" Jimmy asks.

It's a good question. Lois skims the article and then the follow-ups she hadn't bothered with before. "Intergang dropped in a big-shot lawyer who argued it was a spur of the moment thing, that he wasn't trying to steal and he was mounting a political protest against robots stealing our jobs. They only got him for criminal damage in the end."

Which people blamed on the defense lawyer finding loopholes but which Lois personally blamed on a poor police investigation and a hack-handed prosecution.

"I'm going to see if I can't talk to Captain Sawyer," she decides. "She might know more about the case, or have some idea where this—" She checks the screen. "—this Joe Danton hangs out."

"You want me to keep looking at the doctor?" Jimmy asks, and Lois nods, already dialling the number of the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit.

Maggie Sawyer very much does not want to talk to Lois Lane, intrepid reporter, and flat out refuses to come to the phone. Not one to be perturbed by such behavior, Lois leaves Jimmy behind at the office and starts driving over instead. She's barely halfway there when Jimmy calls her.

"I wondered if maybe he travelled by train a lot," he says. "I called around a bit. Did you know there's a card you can get that you can use on all sorts of public transport?"

Lois did know that and also how hard it should be to get any information on when and where such a card was used without a warrant and a police presence behind her, except it turns out that Jimmy knows a girl, and someone has been using the doctor's card to regularly travel between the center and out by the port. Lois considers for all of second and then turns the car towards the latter.

It goes wrong almost immediately.

In retrospect, driving around the buildings that surrounded the end of the bus line while staring out of her window probably wasn't the most inconspicuous of behaviours. And, yes, wondering why what appeared to be an abandoned building on the outside had so much power going in to it was not perhaps the best reason to park her car and find a way in. But she'd done both of those things and so here Lois is, six floors up what looks like it used to be a MetroCo textile factory and which is presently five empty floors and a makeshift laboratory. Whatever the doctor is working on looks something somehow both spare part junk heap and super sci-fi machinery, filled with sickly pulsing green lights. Thick tendrils wind their way from the central pile across the floor and up the wall. Lois follows them up an emergency ladder to the roof door.

Doctor Hamilton, rather disheveled and bruised and cuffed by one wrist to a long chain, looks up from the giant cannon he is constructing, eyes widening in horror. Lois immediately spins but the door she just came through is already being slammed shut and she sees the dark mouth of the revolver before the man behind it.

"Mannheim sent me," Lois tries. "Wants to know what's taking so long." The man with the gun calls her something quite rude indeed, in a very disbelieving tone. She arches an eyebrow dismissively. "Why don't you call him and ask him yourself?"

To her annoyance, the man doesn't even hesitate, just waves Lois towards the doctor while taking a phone out of his pocket and flipping it open. Now she's not so focused on the gun in her face, she recognises his patchy-stubble attempt at a beard. She's found Joe Danton. She'd complement herself, but she's pretty sure he's the one still using the travel pass. Not the brightest spark. Immediately looks to authority in any situation.

"You shouldn't have come here," Hamilton mumbles at her.

"Because Intergang caused a train to derail in order to kidnap you on the way back to Metropolis so they could use you to build a giant weapon as part of their ongoing organized crime efforts?" Lois asks absently, keeping her face towards Joe, her hands and her purse behind her back as she hunts for her phone. Hamilton just gapes at her. "Lois Lane, Daily Planet. Can I get a quote?"

"They're going to shoot you!" Hamilton says, really rather too loud for her, and she shushes him.

"I'm guessing it's some kind of laser weapon?"

"What?" He blinks at her owlishly from behind his cracked glasses, before looking at his work and then back to Lois again. "Oh. Directed energy plasma cannon."

"That's a thing Wayne Tech is working on?"

"Of course not," he complains, straightening up for the first time since she's seen him. "We're working on high capacity solar collectors, self-charging batteries and efficient long distance power transfer. It will revolutionise the clean energy industry if—"

"Shut it," Joe says, waving his gun at the both of them. "Boss is on his way. Wants to talk to you."

"I want to talk to him," Lois says. She's managed to get her phone out, speaks louder to cover the beep of it turning on. "Wait till he hears how you've treated me. You think that's going to go well for you?" Without being able to look, she hits the first speed dial and hopes.

"Shut it," Joe repeats. He's brandishing the gun so pointedly there's a good chance he's going to shoot her by accident, so she does. Joe retreats to the door, and it's a good thing he does because she hears a tinny tiny Jimmy voice saying, "uh, Mister Clark's phone?" before she manages to turn the volume on her phone down.

"They must have had someone in the office," Hamilton mutters. "I can't see how else they knew about my research."

"Is your receptionist a robot?" Lois asks and then, off his bemused look, adds, "Never mind that." She raises her voice as much as she dares. "How long have you been in the abandoned MetroCo building at the port, Doctor Hamilton?"

"No talking!" Joe yells at them, and this time he does fire, though the bullet goes harmlessly up. "Next one's in your leg! And you, Doc, get back to work."

Lois sighs and settles herself in to wait.

"You're in a lot of trouble, Miss Lane."

"I'm breathing," Lois quips. "The two go hand in hand."

She was right and she was wrong. This is an Intergang operation, but it's not a Mannheim one. The boss, when he finally arrives, is a Frankenstein monster in an Italian suit. His face is a patchwork of scars and transplanted flesh, one eye white blind, the other focusing on her with sadistic intensity. His name when he worked with Tobias Whale and the 100 was Johnny Denetto and they cut it out of him along with half his organs when he betrayed them. These days, patched back together somehow by Intergang, he goes by the rather more apt moniker Stitches. He's insane, and he's brought a couple of extra men with him.

"Cute," he says, waving the men forward. "Now, see, what's gonna happen here is, you's gonna to tell us what you know and who you've told."

"I know everything and I have told everyone," Lois says. Behind them, she thinks she sees the roof door crack open, a flash of auburn hair. One of the men with guns also starts to look, so she yells, "You're never going to get away with this."

Stitches laughs. "Classic. Didja hear that boys? The dame thinks her flying boyfriend is still around."

"Superman wasn't my boyfriend," Lois says as calmly as she can. The huge cables attached to the cannon and passing through the skylight to the power source below are shaking. She really hopes nobody is trying to climb them. Or, well, no, she hopes they are, but still. Not a good plan. Not that hers was a good plan. Oh, god, she really needs to focus. "And I'm telling you, I know you derailed a train to kidnap a man, I've been to the railway switch, I've been to Wayne Technologies, I already called Captain Sawyer. I know who you have in Hamilton's office—"

Stitches laughs again at that. "We don't have anybody in the office. Doc, here, you know what he likes to do? Work in diners and bars and talk about his stuff with the waitresses."

"Not Debora?!" Hamilton gasps. Lois tries not to facepalm.

"And if you'd called Special Crimes, there would be an assault team on us right now," Stitches concludes. "It's a bluff. Shoot her."

"Wait, wait, wait," Lois says, raising her hands into the air. "You forgot one thing, okay?"

Stitches makes a little "go on" twitch of his gun.

"SUPERMAN!" Lois screams, looking up.

There's a startled moment and then everyone else, as if they can't help themselves, look up as well. Lois immediately leaps forward, shoulder into Stitches, hands on his arm and leg planted and pull and twist and over he goes. In the same moment, Richard crashes out onto the roof through the door and into a gunman, Jimmy pops up through the skylight to grab another and Hamilton throws a spanner at Joe—though this last seems more because he was surprised than out of any genuine desire to help.

Lois stomps on Stitches before he can get back up, twisting his arm hard until he screams and drops his gun. She snatches it up, whacks him with it, and then throws it at the man trying to strangle Jimmy. It hits dead center in his forehead, and she's going to claim intentionality later. A coughing Jimmy struggles free and immediately leaps on the back of the second man duking it out with Richard, distracting him in time to receive a punishing haymaker. That's three. Which just leaves—She turns too slow and her kick goes wild as Joe crashes into her, the both of them hitting the edge of the roof. Lois screams, tearing at Joe's hands, brick scraping her legs and then suddenly nothing. She sees Richard lunge for her, his hands and eyes and mouth wide. Lois finds herself suddenly remembering accusing Clark of being Superman, Clark, for pete's sake!

And then she falls.

Not a mistake, Lois thinks. My job.

The sudden impact drives all the breath from her body. Someone says "I've got you," in her ear, calm, authoritative.

You've got me? she thinks, she remembers, Who's got you?

"Super—" Lois starts, but the voice is too young, the arm around her too thin, the uniform too solid, too dully coloured.

They slow, the straight fall down becomes something more of a pendulum swing, and then Lois is being unceremoniously tossed through an open window. She lands awkwardly in the dust, twists to see a figure flip gracefully over her head and land in the shadows beyond. Floppy dark hair brushes a domino mask that renders his eyes as white slits. There's a red crescent on his right breast, might be a moon, might be a stylised D or an R.

"Who— How— What—" she manages and then pulls herself together because she is Lois goddamn Lane. "You can fly? You can fly. What else can you do?"

"I don't have any powers," he says and, damn, she thinks, he's a kid. He's just a kid. "It was nice meeting you again, Ms. Lane."

"Wait," she calls. "You just saved my life. You're a superhero—don't you want to tell me your name?"

"I'm not a superhero," he says, and the smile is all in his voice, not on his face. "I just have a mission. I try to make the world better."

"That sounds like a hero to me," Lois says.

"Then you're a hero too," he says and lifts a gloved hand. The grapple gun isn't off-the-shelf but she's covered enough Tech Expos to recognise Wayne Industries in the shaped steel grip and kevlar line. It's almost silent when it fires, and he goes up into the darkness like a ghost.

"Hey," she yells after him, "what do you mean, it's nice to meet me again?!"

Light fills the room, revealing it empty, as Jimmy and Richard come crashing in, both calling her name.

"Are you all right?" Richard asks.

"No," Lois says. "Get me a keyboard, I need to write."

"Good work, Lane," Perry says some hours later, putting her report on the whole affair down. Before she can even acknowledge that, he continues, "Doesn't get you out of that other piece. On my desk, first thing, or—"

"You'll fire me?" Lois scoffs.

"You'd like that. No, I'll put you on the fashion circuit," he threatens.

For a moment, Lois actually considers this. There's probably something there to sink her teeth into. Children's clothes being made by actual children in illegal sweatshops. Catwalk models being abused and degraded and plied with narcotics. She can always find an angle—Perry raps on the desk to get her attention.

"Just the clothes side," he adds. "None of the fun stuff. Go on, get out of here. Write me something I can use."

So here she is again. Why the World Needs Superman.

But she's stuck on a different question. What is a hero? What makes a hero a hero? Is it the powers or the values? The intents, or the actions? She doesn't think herself a hero, for all that masked vigilante had said. She likes Truth, but truth is not always the same as justice. She's told the truth today about Emil Hamilton and about Intergang, and that's not nothing, but is it heroic? And if not, what is? Was jumping at Stitches heroic or desperation? Is it Jimmy and Richard, calling the police but coming for her themselves anyway, risking their own lives because she blundered into a crime scene, not for the first time and probably not for the last? That had definitely felt heroic to her, but was that only because they won?

Maybe all being a hero comes down to in the end is that, in the moment you have to make a choice, you make it. And if that is the Truth she has found, if that is all it takes, what is she supposed to do with it?

A reporter lives by three rules. Believe none of what you hear. Half of what you see. And everything you write. She thinks about Richard and his horror movies. She thinks about Jason and his inhaler. She thinks about Jimmy and his camera and his shaking hands and broken watch and a beer or three at lunchtime. She thinks about ascension motors and kevlar wires and kids in body armour and fearless drive. She thinks about the cigarettes and lighter in her bag. She thinks about falling. She thinks about flying.

Moving the cursor between "World" and "Needs", she adds in "Doesn't", hits page down, and starts to write.

"It's great," Richard says. "Really. I think it might be one of the best things you've written."

"Just as long as Perry takes it," Lois says, but his words warm her.

"He will. Just one thing—there's a typo in the title," Richard says, kissing her cheek. "It should be 'doesn't need', not 'doesn't needs'. I'll get Jason ready for bed."

"Yeah, thanks."

She looks back at her screen, absently scrolling through her own writing, trying to see if there is anything else she wants to change. From the other room, over Richard's quieter rumbling, she hears Jason giggle and then call for her.

"Mommy's coming, honey," Lois calls, moving the cursor to the title, to the end of needs.

Without looking back, as she stands, she deletes the s.