Chapter Text
Gasps raced out the window as he pried it from its frame with a screech of disuse. If he had to guess, it was because they were about twenty-eight stories up.
Someone whispered, “…Superman?”
Someone else yelped, probably because, yeah, he was letting out all the air conditioning. He slid the window closed behind him, only to have it pop out of frame again. Oh. Maybe this wasn’t the kind of window that was supposed to open.
He treated the nearest woman—who he initially thought was a big Toy Story fan, because he mistook the logo on her red t-shirt for the one from Pizza Planet—to a sheepish grin.
“Oops. Superstrength.”
Red t-shirt lady’s mouth opened and closed without any noise.
“You…” Someone from the other side of the room gasped.
Another person finished, “Just came through the window. Oh man…”
“Man of Steel, actually,” he added, because he wasn’t about to have some other superhero foot the bill for his property damage. Not that he could pay for it, necessarily, because…Superman didn’t carry cash. No pockets.
But he’d make it up to them. By, you know, saving the city. And the world.
Considering the amount of screens flashing around the room, running programming from—if that was indeed the Taj Mahal—around the world, he doubted it had ever been so quiet on the floor before. He scanned over the metal desks, each with printed articles taped to their fronts like badges. The most decorated desk caught his eye immediately.
He thumbed towards it with a little smile to a man who looked like he’d rode out two different eras of handlebar mustaches and was trying for a third. “Lois Lane?”
“She’s…stepped out,” red t-shirt said, shuffling the mailcart in front of her back and forth. When that didn’t calm her nerves, she turned to fidgeting with her glasses.
“It’s cool.” And it was cool—the AC felt like a dream after the intense heatwave he’d just escaped outside. It was only March, but apparently global warming decided to remind people of its existence as flagrantly as possible. Spinning Lois’ desk chair out, he dropped in, putting his sunglasses in his pocket to better take in the fluorescent office glory. “I’ll wait.”
If he expected that information to break the tension in the room, well, that was his fault. Everyone continued to stare with the same goldfish expressions as before. One towards the back nudged someone else, like they wanted them to be the first one to shatter whatever this was.
Someone shouted, “Hey!”
He swiveled to find a man with muscles to rival his own. This guy had red, chin-length hair and appeared to be yet another handlebar mustache wearer. Maybe those had become popular and he missed it? He felt like that wasn’t something you missed, so more likely that everyone here was just out of touch. Which, considering it was a news station…didn’t bode well.
The guy treated him to the sort of look that jocks usually treat nerds, as if he couldn’t bench press him and his mustache. “You’re number four now, you know?”
He winked at the guy just to see it throw his entire persona for a loop. “Trust me: I’m number one.”
A strangled noise not unlike a fish drowning wrestled its way up the man’s throat; that seemed to be the signal that things could go back to normal. All at once, the room exploded back into the noise levels it had almost certainly had before his appearance. He propped his feet up on Lois’ desk—she wouldn’t mind, right?—and let it all wash over him. The bustle was like a lullaby, whispering calm through the chaos, and—
Shoot, no, couldn’t let himself sleep here. He leaned forward and tapped at the desk. A tablet poked out from under a pile of red-marked papers, like Lois had failed every English assignment since the third grade. His finger caught the corner, snapping the screen on. From underneath a paper whose headline was scrawled over with GET IT TOGETHER in messy handwriting, a news article declared:
SUPERMAN SAVES—
He yanked the tablet loose eagerly, only to reveal a dated photo of himself under the headline SUPERMAN SAVES WORLD ONE LAST TIME.
Oh. He’d been hoping for something more recent. What about that mugging he’d stopped yesterday? Or the jogger he’d prevented from getting run down by those punks? Why was Lois rereading old news stories anyway?
He tapped over to the app’s home, except that wasn’t him either. He finally found something, buried about six links back, about the jogger incident.
“I mean, like, these creeps are trying to turn me into road-kill, and then suddenly he’s there!” the bold quote read. “He was, like, not as big as I thought he’d be, but he was gorgeous. Oh, yeah—it was him. Y’know—”
“Superman?”
He tossed the tablet as his head came up, spotting a brown-haired woman with eyes such a unique shade of blue they practically looked purple. It was easy to pick out her eye color, because her eyes were so wide they practically took up her entire face.
“Lois!” he exclaimed, using context clues, because—well, the entire room had frozen again. If there was a better sign this was the person everyone had been waiting for, it would have to involve neon lights and a Broadway-type dance number. “I thought we had a deal.” He gestured to the tablet. “You know—I save the world, you write it up, we both end up on page one.”
Those periwinkle eyes blinked at him, face agape. From somewhere to his right, a camera shuttered.
Lois whispered, “You can’t be…Superman.”
“Is it the haircut? The haircut fools everyone.”
Another camera shutter, not loud enough to drown out the snort of derision from that side. “Superman? More like Superbo—ulp!”
His hand snapped out, grabbed a fistful of photographer, and flipped him upside down. The kid—because he had to be at least ten years younger than anyone else in the room—floated in his crunched up position, legs wriggling overhead as he leaned forward and growled, “Listen, pal…”
Getting as close to his face as he dared, he pointed a single, red-gloved finger and hissed, “Please don’t call me Superboy, okay?”
“Sure! No problem!” The orange-haired photographer squirmed, making faces, before realizing the missing part. “Superman! No problem, Superman.”
He flipped the kid back onto the floor, hopping up to sit on Lois’ desk. “See? He’s convinced.”
Lois pushed up her laptop screen, eyes focused and straight. Looking, apparently, everywhere but at him. Was this why he hadn’t made page one? Was she mad at him for something? Well, if so, she was missing context.
“Okay, okay, I can tell your cheesed, but you should know…” He swung his feet out in front him, crossing his heels in midair so he could lean back in front of her screen and grin. “I don’t have my memories.”
For the first time since she’d sat down, Lois’ eyes flickered in his direction. Her teeth hovered over her lip, like she was trying to avoid biting either it or the story in front of her. “…Your memories?” she asked. “Are you—kid, are you lost? Trying to create a spectacle so someone will recognize you?” Critically, she scanned his red pants, blue and black top, and the leather jacket draped over the ensemble. She winced at the symbol on his chest before skipping determinedly to his face. “Maybe Cat Grant can help…”
“Hey, Lois…?” Photographer kid poked at Lois’ arm. “He flipped me. I don’t think we’re talking about a normal kid here.”
The gaze on him sharpened, like it could cut the S right out of him. “What?”
“…although I have no idea how he suspended me in the air like that. It was like my whole body was stuck!”
He ignored Opie Taylor and flashed another grin Lois’ way, this time with a wink because, well, he was charming. It had worked on her once before, if all those other front page stories were anything to go off of. “No living brain,” he said. “So impossible to pull them over.”
“The memories,” she said hollowly.
He confirmed, “The memories.”
“Memories of…? Being Superman’s love child? Growing up on Krypton before following Superman here? What’s your story?”
“It’s a secret.” Technically. Except that was why he was here, because he’d waited long enough for Lois to come find him and she hadn’t. And, well, ‘secret’ got everyone’s attentions, but he really needed this to become public a.s.a.p.—as in, already seen across the planet.
She frowned in the face of his dazzling, winning smile. Like she could resist. “And the secret is…you have amnesia?”
“Oh, come on, Lois.” He planted a hand on his hip and used the other to toss back on the sunglasses he’d ‘borrowed’ earlier. “Thought Metropolis’s star reporter could put two and two together without coming up with five.” With a flourish, he fluffed his jacket so the S practically glowed, front-and-center. Another camera shuttered so fast it sounded like it had gotten stuck. “I’m Superman’s clone. The one and only.”