Archive of Our Own ^beta

Lois has a particular fondness for the copy room of The Daily Planet at night. The nightshift is the skeleton crew, mainly working crime, and underneath their grizzled exteriors are a bunch of kids who look up to her in an endearing way. And Carlos Narvaez, the overnight copy editor, makes everything he edits sing, and brews a mean cup of coffee to boot.

But what she really likes is the quiet. The fervor of the day dims, and she can stand at one of the floor-to-ceiling windows and watch the city glitter around her, while she thinks through her current projects. Plots angles, analyzes elements, begins to figure out how to turn mountains of interviews and legwork into something sleek and perfect.

In the dark glass of the window, she studies her reflection— at twenty-six, she still looks young, even when she puts her hair up, even with the Pulitzer. The only real mark of the years is the scar on her check, usually concealed with careful foundation. Not really for vanity; she actually thinks it looks badass. But it’s hard, sometimes, to look at it and not fall back into the chasm of memories from that night, the sound of gunfire and Batman— Bruce— taking a hit that had been meant for her.

His scars are much worse. These days, he wears gloves to every public function, and can conceal a black eye with only a couple of deft strokes.

Her phone buzzes, and she pulls it out. Speak of the devil. Free? he texts.

She might have blown off a gala with the shareholders of The Planet because she wanted to work on this article, but the shareholders aren’t Bruce, aren’t her best friend.

(She’s trying it on, calling him that. It’s been four years, and it feels right and also not. Like trying to touch the art in a museum, like she might fuck it up if she gets too close.)

Yeah, what’s up? she replies.

Typing, bubbles blooming only to disappear and then reappear. While she waits, she runs her fingers along the sheen of the scar, shuffles the paragraphs in her mind. Maybe open with the Marcello case, and then get into the others?

Want to get shit-faced? Bruce asks. Despite herself, and the impending deadline, a vicious smile curves across her face.

Of course, she replies, and then races back to her desk, marks down a couple of quick revisions to the piece that’s due tomorrow, and then heads out to the parking garage, the cool night air of Metropolis like a cloak. They tend to text in a complex series of code phrases— Bruce is paranoid, and Lois always loved those spy novels. And shit-faced happens to be their code for working on Batman business.

Lois starts the car, pulls out onto the highway to Gotham. She knows, on some level, that she should be working on her stories— her investigation into the Marcello case will probably win her another Pulitzer, if she pulls it off right— but Batman cases and Gotham is a siren song she’s not strong enough to resist yet. Maybe in another couple of years, when she’s thirty and can’t go days without sleep.

But it’s the World’s Greatest Detective, needing her help, because she’s Lois Fucking Lane and sees things that other people don’t. It’s Batman, all terror and vengeance, reaching out to her.

It’s her best friend.

Alone on the highway, with only the wind as a witness, she says the words out loud for the first time, just to see how they sit.

They don’t sound too bad.

____________________

At the beginning, she was nothing but nothing but ache and edge and hunger, and he was already tabloid fodder; the paparazzi who waited outside their classes blinded her with their camera flashes. Her classmates flirted with him; she was just trying to get to her doubles on time.  If he didn’t give them the time of day, their attention soured to hatred.

They might not have been dripping money like Bruce, but they weren’t having to choose between sleeping and being able to afford food sometimes like Lois was. Love— and hate— were commodities she couldn’t afford. Even when he didn’t turn in his part of the group project and she had to sacrifice a shift’s worth of income to cover for him; even when he showed up to a seminar drunk and vomited on the floor halfway through, she simply couldn’t scrape together the energy for him. 

He was just a chess piece, worth no more or less than everyone else. Everything he did was just another note in the mental files she developed on everyone around her, as she took them apart, riddled their complexities down to the bone and ferreted out their secrets. She’d learned a long time ago that if she wanted people to take her seriously, give her space to take up, she’d have to make them, and with no money and no fame, all she had was her mind. Was the cracks they all eventually showed, the places where she could reach in and cleave them apart.

She hadn’t expected much from Bruce. Depression, self-medication. Maybe a hard drug addiction. But the pieces that she gleaned from him, the moments where he let his cover slip and she caught glimpse of the truth—

Every room he walked into, he checked the exits. Noted the angles, the doorways. Even when he was “drunk.” Once, the fire alarm went off in the middle of class and he snapped to attention, on his feet and ready for a fight before anyone else had gotten over their surprise. And the himbo act was fake too—  he obviously did the readings. There were flashed of unparalleled intelligence occasionally, before he stuffed it down. 

And despite the playboy image, he was deeply uncomfortable with being touched. Even when people got too close to him, he tensed. Once, when they’d broken up into discussion groups during seminar, Mandy Hendrix— illegitimate daughter of oil executive, dates older men to feel powerful, will never be satisfied, easy to manipulate with money, keeps lots of secrets for people— put her hand on his shoulder, and he flinched violently away from it. 

Lois noted it all, with a fascination that unnerved her. Bruce wasn’t her type— too brooding, too much baggage, a shadow she’d never be able to escape from, which was so unsexy it completely curtailed any attraction— but she wanted to understand him. Why was he lying? Why was he playing a cover when he could have been running the town?

She didn’t have time for a puzzle. It had been her favorite game as a child, to investigate the cracks in people’s facades, pry them apart with enough careful research and observation until their whole being was split open in her hands, but she was not a child anymore. She was an adult who needed to figure out how make rent at her shitty apartment. Most of the people in her classes were rich prep-school assholes who’s biggest secret was cheating on their significant others (one of the boys in her American Law seminar had slept with all of his girlfriend’s sisters at different times, and also her mother), and she’d expect the same from Bruce Wayne, of all people, but—

You don’t have time for this, she reminded herself, as she bused tables. You have papers and readings. You need to apply for internships. 

But—

She’d thought that part of her had died with them. And here it was, bright and shining. So much of her wanted to take it, cup it, coax it back to flame.

So she went to the party. 

Later, when she thinks about how she would structure a story about it all (a special feature in the New Yorker; in her daydreams it’s called “The Hack and the Bat: Lois Lane Tells All”), she decides to spin it around that party. Or, more accurately, what happens afterwards.

After all, she’s pretty sure it’s the lynchpin to the whole damn thing.

____________________

Lois texts Alfred: heading over, did he eat? and receives back No, Miss Lane; I believe if you could pick someone up that would be most satisfactory. She chuckles a little at his texts; she loves the man with her whole being and yet can not take him seriously over text. So she stops by the shitty Chinese place just on the Metropolis side of the Narrows Bridge, leave a tip that would have made Bruce proud, and speeds through the long dark Bristol streets.

Gotham is going through a quiet month— Scarecrow had accidentally inhaled his latest concoction and is clinging to life in a room at Gotham General, and word on the street is that Lisa Falcone, the princess of the Mafia, is such a Bridezilla that crime is being pushed to the side in order to prioritize cake tastings and dress shopping— which leave Bruce with a lot of time to work on his side projects. Which is good for Bruce, and bad for her, because she can count on one hand the number of night she’s spent in Metropolis in the last couple of weeks. 

But Alfred is waiting with a mug of tea with just a dash of whiskey, and she hands him the package of rangoons she’d picked up just for him, and he gives her a professional but heartfelt smile, and the clock hands spin under her careful fingers, and then the cool dampness of the cave, the bats conversing softly overhead.

(Sometimes, maybe, the Cave feels more like home than the glittery Metropolis apartment does, with the rented furniture and designer art she doesn’t understand. She rented it because of the location, because she is Lois Lane, Daily Planet darling and of course she has a fancy place in the city, but the reality of it is that she spends less than fifty nights there a year, between the couches in the copy room and the hotels in other cities and the Cave and the manor. She wonders if Bruce feel the same way— the manor reeks of the ghosts of his parents, but the Cave is his.)

The man himself is seated at the massive bank of computers at the core of the Cave, dressed in sweats. Papers are spread out around him, as well as several long forgotten mugs of coffee. The black eye that he’d suffered a week and a half ago is festering, and two of his fingers are still taped. He looks up at her and his face splits into a wide grin.

It’s been years, and it still catches her a bit off guard when he looks at her like that. He has a different smile for Alfred (soft, a bit sheepish, unable to convey how much care he has), and another one for Selina (sharp, glossy, maybe a bit hungry), but this was all hers.

Magnanimous, she calls it in the pieces she drafts in her head but will never write. Expansive. Maybe tinged with a bit of disbelief.

She give him a grin right back. “I brought takeout. What’s up?”

Thirty minutes later, they’ve migrated the papers to the floor of the Cave, retrieved some of Bruce’s special micro-fiber weave capes to use as blankets because the Cave is fucking cold, and are arguing over the meaning of their fortunes. Lois’s says: the future is right in front of you, just take the first step.

“It’s clearly that dude at The Planet you keep drooling over. What’s his name. Glasses,” says Bruce, like he doesn’t have a whole dossier on the man.

“You know his name is Clark. I bet you could tell me his third grade teacher’s name.” 

She waits a bit, and then Bruce looks down sheepishly at the floor and mumbles, “Tina Goldberg. Still lives in Smallville. No criminal record to speak of.”

She laughs. “You’re a fucking creep, you know that right?”

Bruce just mumbles, “I know,” and Lois remembers suddenly that it’s still so easy to hurt Bruce’s feelings. For all he has, he has so few people who take him seriously, as anything but a pretty face and good lay. 

“Which I love,” she amends. “And I’m glad you have my back.” Bruce glances up at her, reads her apology in her face, and raises his head back up, reaching out to take the last egg roll. Lois lets him. “God, I can’t believe I’m thinking about asking fucking Superman on a date.”

Bruce chews, and then says, “Don’t think of him like that. Think of him as a conduit through which you may get to be in the presence of his mother, one Martha Kent.”

Lois glances askance at him. “What?”

“Sure, Clark’s definitely Superman, he’s terrible at keeping covers. But more important is his mother, Martha Buford Kent, who has taken Best Pie at the Kansas Sate fair for the last thirty years.”

“Shit,” says Lois. 

Bruce finishes the last bit of egg roll and licks his fingers. “He’s a mama’s boy. My bet is he’ll take you home after like two months of dating. Pie will be a certainty.”

She laughs, and Bruce laughs. It’s a rare sound, but it’s becoming more common, real and liquid and loud. 

“What does yours say?” she asks, once their laugher peters out. He passes it to her and stands to throw the trash away. 

“Legit stuff,” he says as he walks away. A true friend not only accepts who you are, but helps you become who you are meant to be.

Lois holds the scarp of paper in her hand, and thinks, as she does only very occasionally, of the hospital, of the beginning.

____________________

Lois was aware she was supposed to hate hospitals, but there was something about them that had always calmed her. People were less good at lying in hospitals, she thought, their emotions splayed open. Panic, pain, grief, hope, joy, all cascading around her. Information sizzled in the air, clipped on beds and whispered in corridors. 

Her parents had died on the scene of the crash; she’d had to ID them in the cool dark of the city morgue. A hospital would have meant hope. Even if they’d died on the table, it would have meant there had been a chance, instead of their burned skin and blistered hands.

Beside her, Bruce’s uneven breathing whistled into the antiseptic-stained air. She resisted, for the fourth or fifth time, looking at his chart. They’d booked him in as Bruce Lane, her brother, which was insane, but something about the way he’d gripped at her as she’d dragged him to the car, had uncurled a tendril of protectiveness in her chest she didn’t know she had, and she’d wanted to keep the paparazzi away. Once he woke up, they could get into the truth, she could call someone for him, he could tell the truth, and hopefully file charges. They’d taken DNA, and she had a description. 

(And if he didn’t, she could burn the asshole who’d done this to the ground anyway. No way was his father’s fortune completely legit. She had an angle on the Dean’s office. She could ruin him.)

Bruce stirred beside her, opening his eyes and tensing. “Lane?” he rasped. She was a bit shocked he knew her name.

“Yep,” she said. “What do you remember about last night?”

Bruce pushed himself into a sitting position. The sheet slide, and the hospital gown didn’t cover the scars. She’d expected the occasional track mark, but not the ones that were clearly self-inflicted. “You need to leave,” said Bruce. Lois was expecting that, but it still stung a bit. “They can’t— Times won’t want an intern linked to me—“

Lois stilled, trying to process the information that Bruce Wayne of all people knew where she had applied to intern over the summer. “How the fuck do you know where I applied?”

“I know everything,” said Bruce, as if they was any sort of answer. “I can wire you some money if you want. Look, I bet you can slip out— there’s a service entrance through the gynecology ward—“

Just to get him to shut before he revealed anything else completely out of left field, Lois grabbed the chart from the end of the bed and thrust it at him. “I’m fine. You’re fine. I had them check you in as Bruce Lane.”

Bruce squinted at the chart. “Husband?” 

“You wish,” said Lois. “Brother.”

Somehow, that of all things, shut Bruce up. He ran his hand over the chart, but he wasn’t looking at it. “Were you— you were here all night?”

Lois nodded.

“You work doubles on Friday nights, though.”

Lois glanced at him. She could have sworn Bruce Wayne wasn’t into her, but this was starting to sound concerning. “Since when are you a stalker?”

Bruce furrowed his brow for a moment and then swallowed. “That did sound bad. I know this shit about everyone, though. Mia Kane’s at a gallery in West Chester this weekend with her girlfriend? Cory Perth gets his cocaine from a dealer from the Orlean cartel but it’s not pure grade and he’s way overpaying? Mandy Hendrix slept with the Dean of Humanities just to get into the Comp seminar she wanted to?” His voice tilted towards panic, and a bolt of understanding went through Lois’s chest.

“You’re like me,” she whispered. “You see everything.”

Bruce looked at her, looked down at his arms that splayed his current history bare, and put his head in his hands. 

____________________

“All of these are Diego’s notes?” Lois asks, as Bruce comes back from his vault (this is the real Batman: so paranoid he has three copies of all his files, one stored on paper in a fireproof vault at the Cave, one stored in on a hard drive in a Swiss vault, and one in an undisclosed third location— just in case you get tortured, he’d explained at one point, so you won’t have to choose) with a box of records. Diego Casablanca had been Gotham’s premier PI for years, until he’d suffered a massive heart attack a year and a half ago (the lifestyle had taken a toll). Bruce and Selina had spent the intervening time “borrowing,” photo-copying, and returning the boxes of his case files from the Gotham PD evidence locker. 

“Yeah. Selina nabbed this batch last week. I’ve been looking for open cases and tips and last week I found something weird, and tonight—“ He puts the box down and grabs the folder from the computer desk. 

She takes it from him and pulls the cape further up to cover her shoulders. “Walk me through it.”

Bruce takes a mug of cold coffee from his desk and downs it, then starts pacing the Cave, his footsteps eerily silent. She’s not sure he even realizes how spooky he is sometimes. 

Or maybe he doesn’t bother to think about it when it’s just her. 

“Okay. So. 1992, July 12th. GPD finds a body dumped at the docks. Autopsy confirmed it as a homicide, but there’s no ID. Victim is assumed homeless, no one ever claims the body.”

Lois nods. “Common in Gotham. You live in a shithole.”

Bruce nods in response automatically. “1998, July 19th. Pretty much same deal. It’s murder, gunshot, same as the first. No ID, likely a vagrant.”

Lois waits. Bruce is a drama queen, and she knows him well enough to tell when he’s building to something.

“So you know I keep tabs on all the unsolved Gotham homicides.” Lois does know this, and also knows exactly why. She also knows— she cannot prove it, but she knows— that the man Bruce is really searching for will never be found. Bruce, for all he is, for all he has fought for, will not be granted that basest of decencies by Gotham. “And these two have been on my radar for years because they weirdly both corresponded to the early morning after the Wilcox’s annual Gala.”

That gets Lois’s attention. “Like someone left the gala and then— what? Killed someone they didn’t regard as a person?”

Bruce holds up a hand— he’s coming to his grand finish. “So I was looking through Diego’s old files. And last week, I found this weird notation. 1992, July 17th. Marcus Harper comes to his office and asks for his complete discretion. He says he was assaulted at the gala, and doesn’t know who did it, but wants to know.” Lois looks down at the folder and scans the summary of the interview in Diego’s cramped scrawl, which goes into a lot more detail. “And then tonight, I found—“

Lois pulls out the photocopied page from Diego’s journal dated July 31st, 1998, detailing something very similar with Elias Ward. 

A jolt of something like electricity crackles through Lois, at the magnitude of what they have possibly stumbled onto. “Holy shit.”

“I know,” says Bruce. “And here’s the kicker: within a month of taking both of these cases, the men come back and tell him to drop it. That they’re over it.”

“Bullshit,” says Lois. “Someone threatened them.” She flips through the papers in the folder; there isn’t much more than what Bruce has described. “Do you think this is serial?”

Bruce shrugs. “I was looking for more when you came in, but honestly I have no idea. The unlikelihood of the wealthy reporting an assault, and if the killer got better at hiding the bodies—“ 

Lois flips through the folder. “Diego says he thinks it was ketamine— Harper had a pinprick on his neck. So our dude fits in seamlessly enough at a gala to get away with drugging and then assaulting people, but also is enough of a chameleon to be in Crime Alley at night without getting jumped.” She flips through the folder. “And they’re smart enough to only leave physical evidence on the victim that wouldn’t report, and only kill the people no one will report on.” Bruce picks up another mug of coffee, this one with a batarang in it that he used as a spoon still in it, and lets out a long sigh. 

“That’s why I called you,” he says, taking out the batarang and downing the coffee. “If this— if this is a serial killer— I mean, I just punch shit.”

Lois laughs, despite herself. “Yeah I have a Pulitzer, but no one calls me The World’s Greatest Detective. We’re in this together.”

Bruce weighs the batarang in his hand and then chucks it across the Cave; it sinks with a satisfying snick into the bullseye of one of his targets. Lois shakes her head. “At least I know how commas work, so, take that.”

Bruce chuckles, and walks back to the computer bank. “Did you get your article in? About the Marcello case?”

A bloom of warmth spreads in Lois’s chest— she only mentioned it offhandedly to him a week or so ago. “Yeah. It’s not great but Carlos will make it work. Do you want Selina in on this?”

Bruce works his jaw for a moment. “If we need her. She has a tendency to become… violent on cases like this.” 

Given what Lois knows of Selina’s history, she understands, but Batman has a code, even if bringing her in would be helpful. “You know you have a type, right?” she says, reaching for the box Bruce brought out of the vault. 

Bruce grunts, which Lois takes as enough affirmation to keep going. She pulls out a sheaf of papers and plops them on the ground in front of her. “Morally questionable, dealing with trauma through crime, and hot as hell.”

A moment of silence. She can see Bruce working through her points. “Selina’s smart too,” he finally says. 

“Good to know you’re raising your standards,” she says. “Want to look for more murders while I parse the notes?”

Bruce nods. “I haven’t gone through the 1997 notes yet, there might be something in there. 1991’s mostly a wash, water damaged, but you might be able to pull something out.”

The night bleeds into morning, the bats shifting above. When Alfred comes down to the cave to ask them about breakfast, he finds them both passed out on the training mats, the spare capes from the Batman suit as blankets. One of Lois’s arms is thrown over Bruce’s shoulders.

He lets them sleep. 

____________________

Miami was sticky, unsettling. Lois had been to much worse places in her three years with The Planet, but something about it tonight just unnerved her. Or maybe it was just the gala. She’d learned, in the past couple of years, how to blend in at these things, but she spent too many years scraping by paycheck to paycheck, going to bed hungry, to ever feel comfortable.

Bruce was there, newly returned from his self-discovery sojourn and taking the reins of Wayne Industries again. He had an especially fake version of the Brucie laugh that he reserved for whenever anyone asked about his quest to find himself, slippery and as fake as ricotta. 

She knew, even then, that he was Batman. Last August she’d campaigned Perry to let her do a think piece on the impacts of Batman on crime in Gotham, and he’d said yes, but it was mainly an excuse to be in Gotham and poke around. Each piece had slotted in perfectly, and she’d almost rolled her eyes at the obviousness of it all, until she remembered that she was probably one of the only ones who knew about the Bruce Brucie was hiding. The world just saw him as a himbo playboy, the kind of person who dated models and lost big in Vegas and occasionally did good for Gotham. 

They hadn’t been there, in the hospital. They hadn’t seen it all slip. When they held perfectly machined batarangs in their hands, and fielded tips from GPD on the fact that the Batman left them dossiers that solved their toughest crimes, they didn’t connect it back to Bruce Wayne, because why would they? He was nothing to them, just another contender for People’s Sexiest Man of the Year.

The champagne was upsettingly expensive, but she had more important things on her mind than drinking. She was in the midst of unravelling the threads of a money laundering scheme, the scope of which would eventually expand to the governors of three states and win her that first Pulitzer; one of her suspects was here, and she was trying to keep eyes on him without making too much of a deal of herself. Bruce was working on a merger or a swap or something; his fake laugh kept grating on her. 

In a lull, they’d locked eyes across the party, and something had run between them. Not chemistry, exactly, but an understanding. The way two serial killers look at each other at a church barbecue: I know neither of us are like the rest of them. It was the kind of look that forged alliances, screaming it’s us against them, isn’t it? 

They cut the party, got drunk to shit, and ended up talking off the buzz in a private rooftop garden Bruce happened to own, the Miami skyline glittered and neon around them. He told her about Nanda Parbat, and the blood, and how afraid he was about everything. All the time. She told him about the well of loneliness inside herself, and how she’d spent years after her parents died wishing she’d been in the car too. He’d hummed a murmur of ascent to that, and it both hurt and soothed something inside her.

They’d talked until dawn, looking out over a city that was not theirs. A city that was free of everything they carried around. 

It had felt, in the strangest of ways, like coming home. 

____________________

Over the next couple of weeks, they identify four more potential murders—  1989, 1995, 1999, and 2000— last July. Diego’s notes offer up only two more potential victims— Dustin Penn in 1993, and Angelo Williams in 2000. The scale is staggering. 

“We need to consider the possibility that the killer used ketamine in the murders sometimes,” says Lois, taking a step back from their completely excessive string-and-cork-board display, with pictures of the unidentified homicide victims. “What we know of him suggests he’s versatile.”

Bruce nods. Neither of them have gotten much sleep recently. “GPD has DNA for John Doe #3, 4, 5. We could bring Jim in on this, see if my setup could get a match where GPD didn’t.”

Bruce’s DNA database is expansive and very, very illegal. Lois stares at the emaciated face of John Doe #2. “I wonder if they even tried to get an ID. If they just wrote it off as a typical Crime Alley shooting, good thing the only victim was a homeless man.”

Bruce stills behind her and then lets out a sigh. “Probably. Case files for all of them are pretty much empty.” 

Lois runs a hand through her hair. “Okay. I think it’s time we put our skills to use. You cover the forensics, talk to Gordon, get Selina to break in, whatever. I am going to go talk to people. Print me out pictures of all our John Does, will you?”

Bruce does as asked. “Do you think you’ll get an ID?” he says, placing the glossy prints in her hand. 

“Someone’s got to know who they were.”

Bruce’s eyes drift down to the bottom row of the board, where the four socialite’s pictures are pinned. Marcus Harper was in Hong Kong, has been for years. Elias Ward was dead, from an overdose that no one was quite sure if it was accidental or note. Dustin Penn had cashed out of his family’s company in 1996 and even Bruce was having a hard time locating him. And Angelo Williams had committed suicide just last November. 

“They all left,” Bruce says softly. “One way or another. There’s been— there’s been a lot of old Gothamites who’ve left over the years. I figured it was just the fact that Gotham’s Gotham. But maybe— maybe that’s part of this psycho’s ploy.”

Lois turns to Bruce, the pictures heavy in her hand. “Like he’s trying to— to cleanse Gotham from two sides? Top and bottom?”

Bruce steps up to her and points to the pictures. “Insider trading. Unfair labor practices. Heavy involvement in the drug trade. Bribes on permitting. All of these people were accused of or alleged to be involved in something. Maybe he wanted to take them off the board.”

A shiver of fear runs through Lois, and she clutches the pictures tight in her hands. “Bruce, what if we’re dealing with some version of a vigilante?”

____________________

The first case she and Bruce had ever worked on together had also been a serial killer. Jim had gone to Batman with it after the forth body, and Bruce had come to her after the fifth. It was a classic MO— some psycho killing working girls because he didn’t seem them as real people— but the man was a ghost. Bruce was pretty sure he’d had some sort of Special Ops training. 

He’d brought the cases over to her apartment in Metropolis. At the time, she’d assumed he just didn’t trust her with the Cave yet, but looking back she realized that he probably needed space from Gotham for a minute. There were rumors on the streets that maybe it was Batman doing the killings, and even though it wasn’t true it must have hurt Bruce to hear. He always had had a thin skin. 

Bruce talked her through the cases, sitting on her couch while she paced in front of the bank of windows. He’d brought takeout, but had hardly touched it, and his face was an ashen color she was beginning to learn meant he’d been pushing seventy hours without sleep. 

“I think he’s accelerating,” Bruce said, rubbing a hand across his face. “But GPD can’t— or won’t— pull more forces to patrol his hunting ground. I’m starting to wonder if it’s someone on the force. Maybe someone higher up. But I pulled backgrounds and nothing’s striking me.”

He tipped his head back, and let out a sigh that might have been the beginning of a sob. Lois turned abruptly from the window and grabbed a throw pillow and a blanket from the winged back chair. “Here,” she said, offering them to him. “You need to sleep. Might as well do it here.”

Bruce look at the offerings, and then took them. He wasn’t wearing gloves tonight, and the scars on his hands shone in the dull light. 

(He hadn’t had them before he left, and as Batman he wore reenforced kevlar gauntlets. Ra’s al Guhl was rapidly moving up in her list of people to ruin the whole careers of.)

She grabbed her coat and her purse from the rack by the door, and put her hair up with a few quick twists. Bruce blinked at her. “What are you doing?”

“You’re great at punching people, and solving complex puzzles, and not sleeping, but I’m good at talking to people. And I think I can get someone to tell me enough for you to figure out who you need to punch.”

Bruce blinked at her for a long moment, and then nodded. “Journalist.”

“You’re damn right.” She reached for her keys, and then noticed the keys to Bruce’s Maserati on her side table. 

“Don’t even think about,” said Bruce, lying down on the sofa and drawing the blanket over himself. “That car is worth more than the whole Daily Planet.”

That was a bit of an exaggeration, but Lois let it slide, pulling on her street shoes and double checking both her taser and pepper spray. She was about to walk out when Bruce’s voice came again from the couch.

“Thank you,” said Bruce, and it was so dense and heartfelt that she stopped in her tracks. He’d curled up on the sofa, still in his coat and jeans, the folders littered around him. She suddenly realized that Gotham had been dealing with the case for nearly four weeks. He was Batman, the invincible, untouchable shadow, the World’s Greatest Detective and he hadn’t been able to get anywhere with it. And then he’d come to her. Lois Lane, twenty-three, barely a dozen bylines to her name. 

“We’ll get him,” she said. “We’ll end this.”

Two hours after leaving Metropolis, she was in Gotham, the smog in her lungs as the the fear hanging over the streets like a sheen. She tried not to let it scare her. She mostly succeeded.

Two hours later, she was beginning to form a picture of the situation. Two hour after that, she was in the backroom of a strip club talking to a girl who couldn’t have been more than seventeen, with a woman old enough to be her mother— Mary Kate, the patron saint of Gotham sex workers— standing there with a hand on her shoulder, as if she was the only think keeping the girl together. 

The girl had been picked up by a John who’d turned violent, and barely managed to make it out alive. Mary Kate cut her eyes to Lois over her shaking form, her wig and fake eyelashes catching the low light of the backroom: the one who has been hurting us. Both of them were confident he was a cop.

It took an hour for her and Mary Kate, working together once they realized they both wanted the same thing, to coax a description out of the girl. Lois sketched a quick facsimile on the back of a stray fake strip club dollar, and the girl nodded. 

Lois thanked her, and Mary Kate gave her a look that just said end him, and she nodded.

Another hour, back to Metropolis. She let herself into the apartment and was only a little bit surprised when she managed to gather all the files without waking Bruce. 

The copy room at the Planet was beginning to wake up as the sun crested the horizon, sending fingers of dawn into the maze of the cityscape. It wasn’t much of a request to ask Colton in Crime to pull the files of Gotham’s police for her, and she compared them to what Bruce had begun to build, and the sketch. Bruce had shift details for all the nights of the murders; Colton had informative notes like creeps me the fuck out and always professional attached to his profiles.

And then she found him, the face from her sketch glaring out at her. Sergeant M.K. Grinner. He was technically on duty for two of the murders, but there was no alibi, and his precinct wasn’t exactly far from the scenes. Special Ops background. And Colton had notated weirdly intense about solicitation? 

When she got back to the apartment, Bruce was still sleeping. She checked her watch: almost exactly thirteen hours since she’d left. 

Based on what she knew of him, she wondered if this was a new personal record. Then, she’d just assumed he was dead tired; later, she knew him well enough to understand the magnitude of the compliment. He could push himself almost inhuman levels of sleep deprivation in emergencies, and yet he’d trusted her enough to cover the case that he’d let his guard down. 

They went over the case with coffee, and then Batman dropped it off with Jim, and the arrest was all over the evening news. 

Something Lois had only felt a few times before bloomed in her chest as she watched the coverage, sitting on her sofa eating ramen with a splash of coffee, as if she was still a broke college student. Pride, maybe, or power. It would take her years to realize it was agency— the world was a messed-up place, but she was Lois Fucking Lane, and sometimes, it would bend to her, to what she was. 

A week and a half later, Bruce picked her up from The Daily Planet in the Maserati and tossed her the keys. It’s not until she was topping ninety out on 1 that he said it again, the thank you almost lost in the roar of the engine, but this time, she thought she heard something more behind it. 

They were twenty-three. They didn’t know how to say I love you without it sounding romantic. But that night, driving down the coast, eating a shitty dinner in a tourist town mostly closed down for the season, and then sneaking out to the beach and kicking salty surf at each other, she felt it for the first time: the immense and fecund landscape of platonic love.

____________________

Neither of them have mentioned the looming fact out loud yet: it is June. 

____________________

There had been a part of her that had left Miami expecting never to talk to him again. An emotional one-night stand of sorts. And then two weeks later, Bruce had called her, and asked her to dinner. 

The restaurant was so fancy she’d had to rent a dress, and the prices weren’t on the menu. She’d never thought a billionaire, let alone Bruce Wayne, Batman, could look awkward, but the man had mumbled through a long digression on how it wasn’t a date, but it also wasn’t professional, before Lois had put the pieces together. 

He looked like he had at the hospital. Like he’d never done this before, and none of his meticulously crafted masks would work. In a normal timeline, he’d be just out of college, and yet here he was, a shaking kid who didn’t know how to ask her f she wanted to do whatever they’d done in Miami again. And again, and again, and again. 

“So you want to be friends,” she’d asked. Bruce was in a suit jacket that she figured cost more than her annual rent, but he was so nervous he looked out of place.

Bruce just nodded, not even looking at her. She felt a warm rush of affection for him, smooth and platonic, like standing knee-deep in a river. 

“One condition,” she said. “You pay for dinner.”

That, at least, made him smile. 

Dinners bled into walks, into errands, into side-quests. He read her proofs, she flipped through his cases. It wasn’t until months of it— both in New York, unable to sleep, scouring the city for a latte together; Bruce calling her in a panic because he didn’t know how to use an oven and was trying to make a birthday cake for Alfred; a journalism case that needed Batman’s help and somehow ended with them eating greasy burgers on a signature Gotham gargoyle— that she realized she’d never done this either. 

Sure, she’d had her fair share of grade school friends, but everything had been different after the car crash, and then college, and then the newsroom. She had colleagues, and went on dates, but none of that was this. 

Was the fact that when she had an awful day at work, she had someone to call to bitch about it to. Was the fact that when she won the Pulitzer for the series, Bruce was almost more excited than she was.

It was novel. It was exhilarating. She had fallen in love several times, and that was like a great swoop of a wing, a flash and flush and then long tumble, but this was like a warmth that welled up from within. This was Bruce grappling up to her thirtieth story Metropolis apartment, stowing the Batsuit in the bathroom, and watching Gossip Girl with her. Slowly leaning into her, in that quintessentially Bruce way of approaching physical contact. After a couple of episodes, he’d open up about whatever it was that had made him want something that wasn’t the cool silence of the Batcave. A bad case. A brutal crime scene. One of his many triggers. 

And sometimes, on the long nights, where her insomnia bent over her like a scythe and she ended up on the highway, driving just to drive, just to feel the thrill of agency leaving gave her, she’d find herself in Gotham. Driving up to Bristol, punching in the gate code Bruce had given her. Slipping in through the servant’s entrance and ending up in Bruce’s study. He had top shelf stuff, and was good to bounce ideas off. World’s Greatest Detective and all. Sometimes, it’s just easier to sleep there, on the couch in his study, than at her apartment.

It wasn’t like Bruce didn’t have enough room for her to crash every now and again. He had a butler, for fuck’s sake. 

(It had been a fun Saturday, when Alfred had been out of the house and she’d found Bruce staring at the washing machine in dismay, and she’d had to teach him.)

It was warm. It was real. It was hers. 

____________________

In mid-June, she comes down to the Cave after a brutal day at The Planet— the sports editor had been named in an insider trading scandal, and the whole newsroom had been grilled by both Perry and the police— to find Bruce passed out on the floor, snoring lightly, files spread out around him, and it hits her that something needs to give.

“Bruce,” she says, and he jolts to consciousness in the way only someone trained by the League can.

“What?” he asks. “How long was I out?”

“No idea,” she says. “It’s Tuesday, eleven pm, if that helps.”

“Fuck,” he says, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes and stumbling to his feet. The sleeves of his turtleneck are pushed up, and she can see the places where the ropy tapestry of scars the League left him with thin to reveal the older ones that he gave himself. “Didn’t mean to sleep for a long time.” He walks back over to the computer and logs in, rummaging through the coffee mugs, hoping to find something, but unfortunately for all of them, Alfred is in England helping out his niece with her new baby.

He looks like shit. She’s pretty sure she looks like shit too, but he doesn’t look like he’s showered in days, and the wound above eye has begun to ooze.

“We’re taking a break,” she announces, her voice echoing into the dampness of the cave. Bruce’s only response is a single grunt, which means it’s worse than she thought. “I’ve never been to Arcadia, and with your budget we can afford a hotel with free breakfast.”

Bruce spins the chair and looks at her. His face is thin and pale, and he looks younger than twenty-six. God, they’re both still so young, really, in the grand course of things. They should be wasting their weekends on bar hopping and instead they’re trying to solve gruesome murders. He gestures with his hand to the computer; his knuckles are split and he didn’t bother to tape them. “We have a case.”

She crosses her arms. “If you can tell me when the last time you went upstairs to shower and sleep in your own bed, I’ll drop it right now.”

Something quirks in Bruce’s face. “We’re close,” he says, something almost like pleading in his voice. 

“Exactly,” she says. “We’re too close. We need to take a break and come back at it from another angle.”

Bruce’s hand twitches. He’s close. She can see the exhaustion in his face. “We take the F1, we stay in some stupid expensive hotel, we go see a lighthouse and go on a little hike to see some pebbly beaches or whatever. We pretend we’re not all this.” She gestures to the cave. “Come on, Bruce.”

A long beat of silence. He studies her, and she wonders if he can tell she’s probably gotten four hours of sleep in the last three days, and can’t remember the last time she slept in her own bed either. Probably. They’ve both always been good like this. 

“If you really want to take the F1, we should go west. Somewhere with space to actually open her up. I bet I could scrounge up a reservation somewhere in Yellowstone. Might actually be able to see the stars out there.”

But the truth is, once they’ve both showered and packed a bag (Lois isn’t sure how she should feel about the fact that she has more clothes at the manor than Selina), neither of them feel up to the F1, or Yellowstone. They take Bruce’s 1986 Corvette, and only make it as far as the outskirts of Philadelphia before exhaustion hits. Somehow, the clean but serviceable room in a reasonably priced chain hotel is just as good as something obscenely fancy would have been. Trashy takeout for dinner bleeds into a General Hospital marathon; Lois is a little ashamed that a soap opera is her favorite show, but it is. She knows every plot line and character like the back of her hand. 

Bruce falls asleep curled up against her, and doesn’t wake when she shifts to lie down. In sleep, he looks worse, somehow, like underneath everything he’s just a fucked-up kid. 

She wonders if he’ll see the same thing, when he wakes before her. It’s terrifying, in a way she cannot articulate, to be this intimate with someone. Without sex, the only thing to look at is the truth of who they are: no distractions, no holds barred. 

“I love you,” she whispers, hoping the truth of it will dull the hell-scape of his dreams. 

____________________

The first death threat had been disturbing, but nothing more elaborate than you suck because you’re a woman, I’ll kill you, a variation of most of her shifts at the dinner she’d worked at in college. They’d escalated once she’d won the Pulitzer, but Perry assured her that some people just did this as a hobby, and it would die down. So she tried not to panic, or overthink it. She was a reporter, and if was getting death threats, maybe that just meant she was exposing things people really didn’t want seen.

It wasn’t until she was twenty-five, the Pulitzer a year behind her and the next large-scale story taking shape, that she received the first one that chilled her to the bone. 

Lois Allison Lane, it began, and continued on in a blood-curdling tone, describing in horrifyingly explicit language what the sender wanted to do to her. And the details— whoever sent this knew not only where she worked, but where she lived. Where she got her coffee. Which line of the metro she usually took to work. 

It was signed only, your love, and Lois had to step out of the mail room to vomit.

She called the police, of course, and told Perry, but as she had known from the beginning, there wasn’t much to be done about stalkers who sent anonymous letters, until someone killed her. She thanked the officers who told her she should probably stay with a friend for a couple of days, thanked Perry when he told her she could have a couple days off, threw up again, and then called Bruce and asked her to pick her up from work.

She slept on the couch in his office that night, with him sitting on the floor typing away on his laptop, tearing apart footage. She was well aware that it was easier in the Batcave, and she knew logically that no one could break through the manor security to get to her, but it stilled something to have Bruce right there, between her and the door. 

Bruce had found him by the time she woke up. Jason Rutgers, an investment banker who’s previous girlfriend, a high-power lawyer, had mysteriously disappeared. Alfred made crepes for breakfast, and Bruce fell asleep at the table so she didn’t have to share. Rutgers was arraigned on Friday for the murder of the lawyer, and she went back to her glittery Metropolis apartment, and did her best to sleep.

Was that normal, to struggle to sleep without having your friend— your only friend, your best friend, maybe— there? Was any of what they were doing normal? All she knew was that she didn’t want to sleep with Bruce, but that she couldn’t imagine herself without him anymore.

And what did that make them? The English language wasn’t built for this, she thought, sometimes, as she turned the words over her mind. Love, friend: too generic, too broad. 

He was her friend. And she did love him. But saying that was like saying the F1 was just a car, and Lake Superior was just a pond.

Sometimes, on the bad nights, she gave in and drove the bridge to Bristol. He didn’t mind. She thought maybe he slept better with her there too.

____________________

It all comes together in a hole-in-the-wall cheesesteak place Lois had discovered when she was in Philly for her money laundering investigation. Bruce is wearing a motley collection of sweats, and she has a baseball hat, and they both look like crap, but at least no one seems to have noticed them. Bruce has started pulling napkins out of the dispenser to explain his theories; Lois hands him a pen from her purse. 

“Okay, so, we’ve found the pattern,” says Bruce, scrawling the years across the napkins. “And it’s possible we haven’t found all the assault victims, but my bet is that we’ve found all the bodies.”

“How so?” asks Lois, slurping on her soda. They’d found one probable last week, an alleged OD in 1995, with a blend of GHC and ketamine that matched what Diego had run from Harper, but they were still far off from the complete list.

“Think about the victimology,” Bruce says, and there’s a spark of life back in his eyes. “Whoever did this knew killing a socialite would launch a massive investigation, so he just did his best to hurt them. We don’t have all the details, but given the dropped investigations, it seems likely there was some sort of blackmail on them.” Lois nodded, as disgusting as that concept was. “Maybe you’re right, and he think he’s some sort of vigilante, policing these people. But then, after he does that, he goes to Crime Alley and murders whichever homeless person he comes across first.”

Lois takes three of Bruce’s fries. “Yeah, because he’s a psychopath who doesn’t see them as real people.”

Bruce nods. “Likely. But. What if he’s killing just to kill?”

Lois cocked her head. “What do you mean?”

“I mean, he can’t kill the socialites, but he still enjoys killing people. So, he does the assault, holds onto the rage, and then unloads into the first person he finds. That’s why I think we’ve found all the bodies. They don’t matter to him; he wouldn’t bother to hide them.”

So seven dead, spread out against the last two decades. “So we need to look at the guest lists of the galas. Figure out which who were there all seven years. Caterers, staff, the whole nine yards.”

Bruce nods. “But look at the dates. Every murder corresponds to a major Gotham scandal that year. I think the reason we don’t have a 1999 body is because the biggest think that happened that year was the DuBois wedding. No crime.”

Lois pinches her nose and sighs. “That’s smart. He’s selective. But that means we’re back to square one. He’s holding out, only doing his weird little cycle when there’s cause for it.”

“Yeah,” says Bruce. “I’ll vet the lists when we get back, anyway— they’ll limit it a little. But these things are massive.” Lois has never been to the Wilcox Gala before, only. heard about it, but she has no doubt Bruce will finagle her a ticket this year, just to have backup. Unless somehow they can solve it before then.

She tugs he napkin from Bruce and turns it towards her. “So this dude is so violent that after raping someone he doesn’t think he can get away with killing, he has to immediately find someone else to kill, but can go years at a time between crimes?”

Bruce shrugs. “People are good at bottling things up.”

“Not that good.” She drums her fingers on the table. Bruce had already run the other major galas of the city through the database, and this was the only one with assaults or murders to it. But there was something—

“Bruce. What if he’s killing elsewhere as a side hustle. What if it’s not a vigilante thing, but some sort of penance? He comes to Gotham, he helps it out, and then goes back to his normal life as a murderer.”

Bruce’s brow furrows. “Not out of the question. Metropolis doesn’t have any open serial investigations, and neither does here or New York but—“

“Baltimore,” breathes Lois. Three years ago, a demolition had revealed a mass grave, all men in their thirties. 

Bruce nods, stands, and collects their trash. “Should we take the Corvette or go back for the other car.”

The other car is the Batmobile. Lois shakes her head. “If it’s going to be borrowing, I think you know who we need.”

They walk out to the parking lot, the napkins stuffed safely in Lois’s purse. “She’s going to be pissed I didn’t tell her at the beginning.”

“Aren’t secrets supposed to be hot?” Lois asks, and Bruce just grunts, which makes her grin. 

____________________

From the beginning, Lois had been aware that Batman and Catwoman were doing a weird flirty enemies-to-with-benefits thing. Once she realized she actually cared about Bruce, she’d spent a probably unwise amount of time digging up dirt on Selina, just in case she ever tried to hurt Bruce. All the digging did was confirm that 1) boy, did Bruce had a type, and 2) Selina Kyle was way out of his league. 

For the first few years of her and Bruce’s friendship, she and Selina had been ships in the night— an official introduction at a gala, a couple of Sunday brunches at the Manor, and an afternoon tea that had started off chill, but then Bruce had gotten an emergency call-in the Wayne industries and Alfred had ended up giving the best thief on the Eastern Seaboard his own, very British version of the shovel talk. Lois liked her well enough, and she made Bruce happy, but they were very different people, with their own lives.

(And Lois was a little worried Selina might take it personally if she found out that she was allergic to cats.)

But last year, Lois had been having a quiet night at her apartment, eating ramen and binging General Hospital (yes, the 1990 season, and yes, the VHS tapes she’d made herself off taped re-runs), when a lithe shadow had tapped on her balcony door. 

Lois paused the TV and got up to let Selina in. “Hi?” she asked, sliding the door open. Selina was wearing her catsuit, and there didn’t seem to be any visible wounds or blood. “What’s up?”

“May I come in?” asked Selina, and it’s Selina asking; Catwoman’s seductive, flirtatious hiss was nowhere to be found. 

“Yeah,” said Lois, stepping out of the doorframe to make way for Selina, who closes it behind her. “Everything alright? Are you hurt?”

“I’m fine,” said Selina, pulling off her mask, and then her gloves, looking around Lois’s apartment. “Nice place.”

“Thanks,” said Lois. She cast her mind around for any reason Selina might have turned up at her apartment at two am (just because she’d seen the 1990 season countless times didn’t mean that she had any restraint around it, the cliffhangers still worked), and, coming up with absolutely nothing, put on a pot of coffee. 

“General Hospital?” Selina asked, gesturing to the TV. Lois nodded. She was far beyond embarrassment about her favorite show. “More a Guiding Light fan myself.”

Lois let out a hmm that, in retrospect, was very Bruce-like, and drew a chuckle from Selina, who took a seat at the barstool and put her head in her hands. 

Lois knew which elementary school Selina had gone to, which college her sister was at, which heist was funding that college education, and how she’d managed to steal the Cullinan III diamond in transit when she was only twenty-one, but she had no goddamn idea how to actually hold a conversation with the woman. 

She had the sudden realization that this was probably how Bruce felt most of the time. 

“Do you want coffee, or something stronger?” she asked. “I think I’ve got a bottle of some fancy-ass Scotch from Bruce, and some shitty vodka.”

A long moment of silence from Selina, and then she let out a long sigh. “Can you possibly put the vodka in the coffee?”

Lois laughed, surprising herself, and opened the freezer. “I’m glad both of our tastes in alcohol is trash. I’m going to have to regift that bottle of scotch or something.”

She poured for Selina, and then added vodka to her own for good measure. With her mask off, Selina looked exhausted. Lois mentally ran through rumors on recent Catwoman activity, and came up with nothing. 

Selina took the mug in both her hand and turned towards the windows, looking out over the Metropolis skyline. “I’m worried about Bruce,” she finally said. 

Lois, if she admitted it to herself, was also worried about him— ever since Joker had appeared on the scene, something about the whole enterprise seemed to have shifted. The other Rogues were many things— drama queens, wanton destroyers of property, whatever the hell Condiment King was— but only the Joker was sadistic, thriving off suffering. The shitty security of Arkham (one of her and Bruce’s long-term projects) didn’t matter much when it was Poison Ivy, but the brutal cycle of arresting Joker only to have him bribe or scheme his way out was taking its toll on the city. 

On Bruce.

“Me too,” she said, and saying it out loud felt like a great weight off her chest. 

Selina took a long swig of the coffee and turned back to Lois. “What are we going to do about it?”

(It was the work of a week, for Lois to find the right channels, the right judges, for Selina to crack open the right safes and lift the right documents, but the Joker was transferred to the high security wing of Blackgate, and Bruce stopped looking like a zombie, and for Christmas Selina gifted her a signed original cast photo of General Hospital, and Lois didn’t even do the research to find out where she’d stolen it from.)

(Sitting in the manor living room over Christmas with the two of them, Bruce with a concussion and Selina teasing him for it and Alfred passing her a cup of tea— that also had felt like coming home.)

____________________

Selina gets them the records they need from Baltimore PD, which are blood-curdling, and  Lois makes an excuse to get the hell out of dodge for her and Bruce’s argument / whatever about not looping her in. Back at the Planet copy room, the cool lights of Metropolis shining, she tries to think through all the pieces they have, slot them into a narrative that fits, but it’s like trying to cup the pieces of a shattered mug back together with only your hands to brace. They just keep sliding apart.

Why the Wilcox gala? Why wealthy Gotham men, and not literally anyone else? Why not just go for murder, if he potentially had been getting away with other murders? And perhaps most pressingly: would there be a target this year? 

Had one of Gotham’s elite had a large enough scandal to warrant his attention this year?

The nights blur into days. Once, Clark brings her a cup of coffee and asks her, in his gentle, midwestern-lilt if she’s doing alright and it makes something inside her go warm and fluttery, which isn’t helpful for the case but is an important note for her other, longer-term project entitled Do I want to date Superman? 

July dawns hot and muggy. They’ve developed a list of everyone who’s been at all the galas in question, but it’s got a hundred people on it. The three of them work in shifts, sleeping when they can, eliminating names— Bruce with surveillance, Selina with break-ins, Lois with interviews. It is Bruce who manages to definitively link the Baltimore killing to their guy, with ballistics from the 1989 murder, but Lois who gets the first ID on one of them. It is Selina who makes a complex deal with Ivy and Harley to maybe lay off the chaos until August, so Batman can go full in on World’s Greatest Detective, something involving breaking Harley into, and then out of Blackgate just so she can punch the Joker in the face, and smuggling the rare-but-illegal-to-import sapling that Ivy is obsessed with past customs. Lois doesn’t really have enough time to ask questions at the moment.

A week before the gala, the pool is down to thirty, and Charles Rowan has made himself the probable target.

“There are too many creepy men in Gotham,” Lois says, standing up from the computer desk in the Batcave. She takes a spare batarang from the desk and tries to chuck it at the target; it bounces off and clangs to the floor. Bruce doesn’t even look up from where he’s slumped over on the other side of the desk. She looks at it for a moment, and then walks over and picks it up. It balances perfectly in her hand, and she runs a finger gently along the sharpened edge. “Maybe whoever this fucker is won’t think the Charles Rowen shit is a big enough deal to target.”

Considering that Charles Rowen had been publicly accused of drowning his mistress, to the point where GPD were investigating it (it had been an accidental overdose, but that was beside the point), this seemed unlikely. Their killer didn’t care about facts, only perceptions. “Or maybe we can convince him to stay home.” That was also unlikely, unless Batman and/or Catwoman went the kidnapping route. “Or maybe we’ll catch the psycho in the act.” Given the size of the gala guest list and the enormity of the Wilcox mansion, and the fact that they didn’t know who the fuck they were looking for, that was also a big risk— Lois didn’t love the idea of using an innocent man as bait. 

She looks over at Bruce, who still has his head down on the desk. He’s shaking. A shiver of fear runs through Lois, and she steps towards him. “Bruce?”

Her phone begins to ring; she ignores it and continues towards him. 

“You should answer it,” Bruce says, his voice rough and shaking, and Lois pauses for a moment, and then answers the phone.

It’s Perry. “Lane, have you seen the morning issue of the Mirror?”

Lois hasn’t, and says as much, but it’s hard to focus on him when Bruce is visibly not okay, right in front of her. 

He reads the headline to her, and she can feel the blood leaving her face. Perry continues on in her ear, asking if she can get access to Bruce, asking if she think she can slot in a story on it for the morning issue of the Planet, but it is all a soft buzz behind the jarring cacophony of the headline. 

Truth About Wayne’s Missing Years Revealed: “I Spent them Building a Crime Empire.”

Lois puts Perry on mute and looks at Bruce aghast. 

“What the fuck have you done?”

____________________

If it hadn’t been Bruce Wayne, Lois would have called the police instead of driving him to the hospital. There had been no hiding what had happened, how drugged he was, but she figured he deserved a choice about if it was going to become tabloid fodder or not. That was the impetus behind the fake name too. 

It was harder to pin down exactly why she had waited in the hospital, except for the bone deep conviction that she didn’t want him to be alone. She wouldn’t have wanted to wake up alone, after something like that, even if it was just a classmate at her bedside. 

And now Bruce was sitting there with his head in his hands, everything laid bare. He wasn’t some vapid billionaire, he was like her. 

“Do you— do you remember what happened last night?” she asked softly. 

He nodded. “Enough.”

Lois let out a long sigh. “I didn’t— I didn’t call the police, but we can.” Bruce took a ragged breath in at that, and Lois felt the need to reassure him. “Or I can handle it, if you want.” His eyes snapped over to her, glassy and narrowed, questioning. She shrugged. “Shouldn’t be hard to pull together enough dirt to ruin him forever, if you want me to.”

Bruce ran his fingers over the knuckles of the other hand. He let out a long breath and whispered, “Really?” and for a moment, she thought he might be questioning her ability, but then she realized that he didn’t think she would do it for him.

“Yeah,” she said. “If you want. You deserve someone on your team.”

Something on Bruce’s face ripples, as if no one has ever told him that. 

Maybe in another timeline, it all starts there. Maybe he never becomes Batman, maybe she never becomes a Pulitzer Prize-winning Journalist, and they manage to make themselves into the sort of people who don’t need that to survive. 

In the timeline they lived, though, she drove him home from the hospital, handled the situation with a ruthlessness that scared even her, and returned to check on him a couple of days later to find him gone. 

She doesn’t see him again until four years have passed, and they lock eyes at a Wayne Industries press conference announcing his return. For the press, he is playing Brucie— older, more refined, the kind of playboy who knows enough self-defense to prevent himself from getting hurt. But she sees right through him, and she understands. 

They never talk about the hospital, even when they talk about everything and anything. But it is always there, hovering behind everything they ever do, maybe most of all, the fact that she waited there, for hours, until he woke up.

____________________

If the circumstances were slightly different, Lois would have supported the plan. Might have suggested it, even. But not on this case. Not like this. 

“You don’t have to go,” Lois says, as Bruce puts on his cufflinks— they, like several other accessories, contain trackers. “Selina takes care of Rowen, we go shoot shit somewhere, and we get another year to work it.” 

Bruce is silent, his jaw clenched, his face pale even under his stage makeup. 

“We have other options,” she says, for what feels like the hundredth time in the past couple of days. Selina also had thought the plan was stupid, but mainly because it should have been better staged— a month to build the scandal probably would have hit harder. Always got to put yourself in the crosshairs, she’d said, giving him a peck on the cheek. Admittedly, she’d been a little distracted with her part of the plan, and didn’t know about what had happened, but still. 

“Nothing’s going to happen,” says Bruce, snapping in the other cufflink. “You’ll grab Jim as soon as someone tries to get me to leave the room, and he’ll make an arrest, and then we’ll fabricate some evidence if we have to.”

Lois has spent the past week using every trick in the book to get him to call it off, and none have worked. This case is personal for him, and he wants it to be over, not even as Batman. As Bruce Wayne. 

Maybe, even without Batman, they’d still be here. They’d still be doing shit like this. Batman at least has a scary drug tolerance (she really needs to get on her whole Burn-League-of-Assassins-to-the-ground plan) and can punch people. 

“You should get going,” says Bruce, and he’s right. Still, she lingers in the doorway for a moment, and then reaches out one hand to him, hovering it over his. When he doesn’t move away, she takes it, clutches it tightly. 

“I’ve got your back,” she says. “I’m not going to let you get hurt.”

He looks at her, and there is a flash of something almost like fear in his dark eyes. Then he takes his other hand and clasps it around hers. He hasn’t put his gloves on yet, so the small scars rub against her soft palm. 

“I know,” he says. 

____________________

The Gotham Rogues gallery has a healthy respect for Batman. He messes up their plans, throws them in Arkham, generally ruins their fun. But despite all his lines about being vengeance and the night, most of them generally agree that he’s a goth kid with too much free time on his hands. Not that they really mind— it’s nice to be taken seriously as a criminal. 

On the other hand, the Gotham Rogues gallery is fucking terrified of Lois Allison Lane.

When the both of them were twenty-four, Alfred had called her, frantic— Bruce had been missing for twenty-four hours, and he had nothing. She’d cut work, driven to Gotham, and worked the leads until she had narrowed it to Black Mask. 

Then, she’d compiled everything she, Bruce, and the Planet had on the man, printed it out, and walked into his headquarters. 

“Lois Lane,” Black Mask had said, spinning around in his desk chair with an attempt at an aura of menace he didn’t quite capture. “To what do I owe the pleasure?”

She handed him the dossier; he opened it and began to flip through it, and she could tell when he got to the juicy bits, because his entire composure stilled. “What the hell is this, Lane?”

“The next article I’ve been compiling for the Planet. And before you think about just taking me off the board, please remember that I’ve got backups, and colleagues who know how to access my files. If you kill me, this will go to press.”

(That was a complete bluff, but they didn’t need to know that.)

“What do you want?” Black Mask asked. 

“Batman,” she said. He jerked his gaze up off the folder to her. “I know you have him. You give me him, I’ll drop this. And I won’t hold any of it against you going forward.”

Black Mask steepled his fingers on the desk. “And how will I know you won’t use it again anyway?”

“Well, next time, you can just shoot me. I would like to stay alive.”

A long moment of silence. Lois tried to find a sense of calm, but it was almost impossible. Then, at last, Black Mask snapped his fingers at one of his goons, and a moment later two men entered, dragging a beat-to-shit Batman between them. They dropped him at Lois’s feet, and she knelt to help him up. 

Once she had the man mostly on his feet (good Lord was he heavy), and had turned to go,  Mask called after her, “What’s he to you?”

“My second Pulitzer,” she’d called back, and honest-to-God, the man had laughed. 

No one in the Gotham underground— no one who was anyone, at least— crossed Lois Lane after that.

____________________

Lois hates galas, and knowing what she does about this one, she hates it even more. Selina had texted— Rowan was contained, but she’d gotten caught up in a Scarecrow plot in the Narrows, and is running late. Bruce is in full Brucie mode, his cracks carefully curtailed, and Lois does her best to mingle while keeping exacting tabs on everyone who passes near him. 

She does another pass of the room while pretending to nod along to a COO’s story about a steak he had to send back to the kitchen not once, but twice, on his last trip to Vancouver. Bruce is at the center, laughing along to a story, his party appeal apparently undiminished by his turn in the tabloids. She finds herself hoping for the hundredth time that their killer wouldn’t bite. That he’d see it as stupid tabloid shit and ignore it. Given enough time, they could probably narrow the list, and then—

Wait, is Bruce swaying on his feet? 

A thrill of fear crackles through her rib cage like a lightning bolt, and she ducks out of the  out of the circle of socialites without even bothering to make it seem tasteful. Jim. Where’s Jim. 

She weaves through the thick crowd— there are an ungodly amount of people here— trying to keep her wits about her. Maybe it was just a Brucie ploy. Maybe she read it wrong. Maybe, maybe—

She comes to the circle of conversation where she last saw Gordon, a mix of police brass and judges, none of whom she trusts. “Have any of you seen Jim?” she asks, trying to put on her Lois Fucking Lane face and hopefully mostly succeeding. 

“Had to run to the restroom,” says the police superintendent, a man who’s deeply incompetent, and has repeatedly ordered his officers to shoot Batman on-sight. “I think the shrimp were disagreeing with him.”

Fuck. She gives a polite nod. “I guess I’ll catch him later. You gentleman have a good night.”

She turns back to the party, and suddenly realizes that in looking for Jim, she let Bruce out of her sight. Her heart is hammering against her ribcage. Brucie act. It’s just a Brucie act, everything’s fine, no one here is going to hurt him— 

There. She catches a glimpse of his slicked-back hair and broad shoulders, a ways away from where he was before. Swaying. Definitely swaying. 

Someone is pulling him away from the party. His wrist is caught in someone’s hand. 

She forgets decorum and moves. “Bruce! Bruce!” 

The party won’t yield to her— it’s too late in the evening, people are too tipsy, the environment’s too loud for her to be heard, she hears snippets of conversation: never could hold his liquor, that Brucie; she looses sight of him as he is pulled into a hallway off the party; you’ve got trackers Lane, keep it together— 

She reaches the edge of the ballroom where she had seen Bruce disappear. A velvet rope cuts off the corridor, which is dimly lit and almost immediately branches, with heavy wood-paneled doors off-set at intervals. Bruce is nowhere to be seen

A spasm of fear cuts through her chest, so strong her chest seems to skip a beat. 

She forces herself to take a deep breath. Then another. Then, she pulls out her phone, texts Selina SOS, pulls up the app that shows Bruce’s location, and starts recording. Then, she steps over the velvet rope. 

____________________

They didn’t talk about the hospital, and they didn’t talk about the after. About how Bruce had vanished, no note, no nothing.

Alfred, she will later learn, spent the whole period wondering if Bruce was dead. With his incomplete picture of the situation, and the occasional financial alert that let him know Bruce had tapped into his bank accounts, he figured Bruce was off on some quest of self-discovery, and feverishly hoped he didn’t die climbing an eight-thousanders or something else inane.

Lois—

Well, Lois had known only about the event immediately preceding the disappearance, and there had only been one conclusion she’d drawn. 

She’d spent a month avoiding the news like the plague, waiting for them to announce they found the body, and the next year hoping feverishly he wasn’t dead, but half-knowing he probably was. 

Wishing she’d ruined that asshole’s life more than she had. Wondering if it was also somehow her fault, if she’d said the wrong thing at the hospital. 

A year after the night in question, she received a letter with no return address. The only thing in the envelope was a check for fifty-thousand dollars, signed Bruce T. Wayne, dated a week ago. The memo just said for seeing. 

“Fuck you, Bruce Wayne,” she’d said, sinking to the floor, clutching the check to her chest, but she was crying like she hadn’t cried since her parents had died. “Fuck you.”

____________________

She follows the tracker deeper into the manor, her other hand clutched around her taser. Selina hasn’t texted back, and she tries not to let that terrify her. She pulls up the short list in her mind, her personal picks for the killer, tries to go over their weaknesses to herself. The points she can use to distract them. 

Tries not to think about the bodies. 

The tracker stills, and she enters the hallway that leads to it, comes to stand in front of the door. She tucks the phone back in the pocket of her blazer, flexes her hand, and tries the nob of the door— locked, of course. Luckily for her, it’s a the sort that’s designed to have a built-in fail safe, and it doesn’t take more than a twist from a bobby pin to spring it open. She takes a deep breath, and then does her best to open it silently. 

The door opens into a small lounge— a couple of salon chairs, bookcases filled with leather bound books, an empty fireplace. The only light is a single lamp. Bruce is on the couch, and a man who’s features she cannot make out in the dim light is kissing him, undoing the top buttons of his shirt. As she swings the door all the way open, it creaks, and he looks up sharply.

The bottom drops out of her stomach at the sight of him. It’s Martin Wilcox, the patriarch of the family, the host of the party. Gotham royalty. 

Bruce is limp, but he’s shaking, trying to flinch away from Martin’s touch, but unable to. His bowtie is on the ground, a few feet away from Lois’s feet. 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Martin?” Lois asks, her hand clenched so tight around the taser the plastic creaks.

He giver her a venomous grin.“Just taking it away from the party for a bit. You know how it is. But I think this is a bit above your pay grade, honey. Lucy, was it?”

Martin Wilcox knows her name. He just doesn’t know that he should be afraid of it yet. She’s not close enough to use the taser, and she’s not entirely sure he’ll give her a moment to retreat before he shoot her. 

So she’ll have to get him to come to her.

She steps inside the room, shuts the door behind her, and leans back against it, trying to smooth the sheer terror out of her body language. “You know Martin, I got my first Pulitzer because I didn’t think anything was above my pay-grade. Certainly not the Baltimore Strangler.”

She thinks that his confusion would have fooled most people. But she’s not most people, and she noticed the very real flinch in there. “It’s a really tragic case, you know. Fourteen people, a mass grave— half of remains haven’t even been ID’ed yet. I bullied my editor into letting me cover it.”

“What the hell does this have to do with me?” he asks. She’s got his attention. If he thinks she’s got enough to ruin him stashed somewhere, he won’t kill her outright. Lois Lane, maybe, he could get away with. He won’t be able to get away with killing her and Perry and burning down The Planet.

“Baltimore PD didn’t find anything on ballistics, but a lot of the murders happened when GPD was understaffed and not processing evidence well. So I went through their database to see if there were any similar cases. Lo and behold, I found one. Casey Murdock.”

Delilah Green, a volunteer therapist at one Gotham’s shelters, had ID’ed him for her. The confusion she sees in Martin’s face is real this time, because he didn’t know his name. Didn’t know the name of the man he’d murdered in cold blood. 

Martin shifts off of Bruce and stands up, holding out his hands to her. Bruce twitches, but can’t actually move, and Lois tries to ignore it. “Look, Lois,” he says— her actual name, good—“This is all very interesting and tragic, but I’m not sure what this has to do with what’s actually going on here.”

How far have you gotten, he’s asking. Lois pushes off the door and takes a step towards him, trying to stay casual. In her purse, she can feel her phone buzzing with an incoming call— hopefully Selina. Please be Selina, on her way. 

“Casey Murdock was shot six times in the chest,” Lois says, injecting an undercurrent of brutality underneath her words. She lets herself being to pace, just a little bit, and then when Martin doesn’t react, she expands the scope of it, slowly creeping closer. “The weird thing is that the same night, Marcus Harper was assaulted by someone at the gala.”

Wilcox’s mask cracks, just a little bit. A mix of admiration and rage. He shakes his head. “I knew I should have killed that fucking PI. He knew too much.”

Lois takes it as the opening she needs, whips out the taser, and dumps voltage into his chest. 

He spasms, and then crumbles to the ground. 

She zaps him twice more for good measure, and then steps across the room to Bruce, already pulling out her phone.

Selina has left several frantic texts; Lois replies, Bruce secure, tased the fucker. 

Bruce’s eyes cotton onto her as she approaches. “Bruce?” she whispers. “It’s Lois. I’ve got you.”

She hesitates for a moment, zaps Martin one more time, and then calls 911.

____________________

Once, and only once, Bruce had let her drive the Batmobile. She’d worn a domino and a cape (she’d insisted on the cape part), and had felt the souped-up engine purr under her steady hands. It was after the whole thing with the Joker, and though he never talked about what she and Selina had done out loud, she was pretty sure he knew, and this was his way of saying thank you. 

They’d driven out along the streets and cloisters of Gotham, and then beyond, engaging stealth tech and swooping down the lonely coast roads. 

Eventually, they’d pulled over near a disused train trestle, and Bruce had grabbled both of them up to the top of it, where they sat on the rusting steel and looked out over the moonlit ocean. 

You could be Batwoman, Bruce had said, out of nowhere, and she’d just looked at him askance. 

You know I don’t want any of your Batman shit, she’d said. 

What do you mean, he’d said, sounding slightly hurt.

I put up with Batman, she’d said. But Bruce Wayne’s the one I care about.

A long bout of silence, and when he spoke, it had none of Batman’s gravel and only a half-broken rasp. I’m not sure if anyone’s ever said that before.

She leaned her head on his shoulder and looked out at the sea. 

Well, she said. I’m saying it, and I’m Lois Fucking Lane, so it’s got to be true.

____________________

Bruce had refused going to the hospital, though he had given his statement to a green-at-the-gills Jim Gordon while sitting on the back of an ambulance, wrapped in a shock blanket, while the ketamine wore off. Selina, as Catwoman, had lurked in the shadows for a bit, but she’d texted to say that she was going to keep an eye on Martin Wilcox in custody. Lois thought she understood the larger reasoning behind the statement. 

Once the police were done, Lois had taken Bruce back to her apartment, and he lay down on the carpet to sleep it off without a single word. She lays a blanket over him and puts on a pot of coffee. Night bleeds into morning as she works to put together the case she told Martin she had, falsifying her and Batman’s investigations as solely her own. It’s shaping up nicely by the time that Bruce begins to stir.

Bruce claws himself into a sitting position, breathing heavily, one of his hands flexing against the carpet. “Lois?” His voice is shaky, in the way that is pure Bruce and nothing else. “Why am I here?”

Lois stands and comes to the window, then sits gently on the floor, several feet away from him. Bruce is rubbing at the side of his neck, at the pinprick of the injection. “You didn’t want to go to the hospital last night, so after everything with the police I decided to bring you here. Seemed like it might be better than the manor.”

“But we— we got him. He’s in custody.”

Lois nods. “Selina’s keeping an eye on him in prison. Maybe even bribing a judge to make sure bail is denied. I’m putting together everything we have to make it look like it was just me.”

Bruce nods, his hands shaking “I— I don’t remember— there was a hall— and then you— Wilcox was kissing me— how— how far—“

“I think just kissing,” Lois says. She is trying to keep her voice low and detached, but she’s not sure how well it is working. “I got there pretty quickly.”

Bruce’s eyes dart up to her, scrutinizing her with the precision of Batman. “And you’re— you’re okay?”

“I scared the shit out of him and got him to confess on tape. I’m alright.”

Bruce lets out a shaky breath. “Thank you.”

“Of course.” 

He rubs his hand across his face. “Can I— can I use your shower.”

Lois nods, and he hauls himself to his feet and stumbles across the apartment. She makes another pot of coffee, and sinks down onto the couch to wait.

Forty minutes later, he comes out, his hair dripping, clad in one of her sweatshirts and a pair of sweatpants he left here a while ago, and curls up next to her on the couch, burying his face in her shoulder. She gingerly wraps an arm around him, and he melts into it. “I’m an idiot,” he whispers. “It was a shitty plan. You were right.”

“Yeah,” she says. “Yeah, it was a shitty plan. But we got him, and no one else died.” She doesn’t finish the statement out loud, but she does in her head, and she can tell Bruce does too.

“Thanks to you,” he whispers. 

“I told you I’ve got your back. That’s what best friends do.” The words float there, in the morning air, gossamer thin and shining, and a smile curls across Bruce’s face.

“I’ve never had a best friend before,” he says, soft, tenuous, but hopeful.

“It’s pretty fucking awesome,” she says. 

“Yeah, it is.” He tucks himself closer to her. “Do you— do you have to work today?”

She can hear what he’s really asking, and a swell of affection for him rises in her chest— so dangerous, so powerful, and yet so nervous about asking for affection and comfort. “Already called in sick. Do you want to watch HGTV or the soaps?” 

He lets out a long sigh, and she can hear the relief in it. “General Hospital. 1990 season. I’m guessing you’re on episode forty?”

She is. “How the fuck, Bruce?”

“I’m your best friend, and I love you,” he says, then lets out a sigh and burrows closer still to her, warm and relatively unhurt. Back in Gotham, Selina is gathering keeping tabs on Martin Wilcox, but for now, they’re twenty-six, and alive.

“I love you too,” she says, and the Metropolis sunrise baths them both in light.