Author's Note: Hello and welcome! If you've read our other work, feel free to skip down to the line and the meat of story. Just know that you, our readers and friends, are half of the reason this fic is getting posted. We couldn't leave you hanging without knowing how the next saga goes.

The other half is our dear friend and coauthor, Saavikam77. She is an awesome writer for DC fanfic, and we both fell in love with her Bat family, especially her troubled and compelling Jason Todd. This story exists because Saavi loves our little world, too, and had some very interesting ideas on how the Supers and Bats team up in a universe where Superman and Lois Lane have twins. World's Finest, indeed...

If you're new here, we're sorry. There's a LOT of backstory. We (that's Lois and Anissa, the coauthors using this ID) set out waaay back in the summer of '06 to write a short fanfic showing how we would've started Superman Returns. Lois-the-author had an idea as a 12 year old girl watching Superman II that Lois Lane was pregnant at the end of the movie. I mean, who craves a hamburger with everything on it at 9 am? She told her little sisters bedtime stories about Lois Lane's twins and how they grew up.

When SR was announced, she was stoked. Anissa the coauthor was ready to throttle her if she heard one ... more ... spoiler. We watched the movie several times, and loved it, though there were choices made that bothered us both as fans and writers. So, the first few chapters of Little Secrets were written by Lois-the-author, and the crowd at Blue Tights dot net and on Livejournal enjoyed it so much, they convinced us to both continue the story, and post it here.

Over a million words of fanfic later, while in the middle of two epics and planning/writing a third with Saavi, Anissa's father died, our writing suffered for it, and then we both lost our muses. However, the characters and the story still lived in our minds, and we've never quit talking about them.

So here's the briefest possible recap: (edit: I know, it's not brief at all, bear with me. Over a million words of fanfic I'm summarizing here, six main characters, dozens of supporting characters, fourteen years of story time, eight years of real time writing.)

Lois Lane found out Clark was Superman, tricked him into proving it, and confessed her feelings for him. They ended up going to bed, but he relinquished his powers, choosing her over his mission. The very next day, General Zod and company arrived on Earth, searching for the son of their jailer. Kal-El got his powers back, kicked villain butt, and broke up with Lois, believing (thanks to Jor-El's influence) that he could not have a normal life or a relationship and be Superman. And unfortunately, the world needed Superman more. Lois did not take this well, and he loved her too much to watch her grieve, so he discovered a power he didn't know he had and stole her memories in a kiss. Including her memory of figuring out his dual identity.

That meant that Lois was right back to playfully teasing her best friend around the office and flirting with the hero, and heartbroken Kal-El could barely cope with that, wanting so much to just tell her. He believed Jor-El, though, and when information came to light that indicated Krypton might still exist, he leapt at the chance to find out for himself. Perhaps there was a home out there that needed him more than Earth, a place he belonged even more than here.

Krypton turned out to be thoroughly irradiated, and he barely survived the trip home. Kal-El was absent for almost six years, during which Lois Lane wrote an editorial called Why the World Doesn't Need Superman, for which she was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize. He learned that on returning to the Daily Planet, and shortly thereafter learned that she was both engaged (to Richard White, Perry White's nephew) and had twins. Kal-El assumed that Jason and Kala were Richard's kids, at first. His friendship with Lois was strained, not least because she knew that he was the twins' father, and was terrified of him finding out and deciding on Jor-El's advice to take them from her. He was also surprised to reconnect with Lana Lang, now a successful fashion designer, who arrived in Metropolis and bumped into both him and Richard.

Before he could question their parentage and before Lois' also strained relationship with Richard hit the breaking point, Lex Luthor cropped up in all their lives again. It was Kal-El that Luthor wanted to hurt, to kill, to vanquish, but to get him, he needed Lois. So he kidnapped her children. Lois, Clark, Richard, and Lana all worked together to find the twins, forging unlikely yet lasting friendships. In the end, though, Luthor lured Lois to his yacht and took her captive as well. She very nearly shot him in the process, something Luthor has never forgotten. He confiscated her gun and locked her up on the yacht, taking the twins to an enormous island he'd created from impure kryptonite.

On that island, Kal-El faced both the substance that can kill him and his cruelest enemy ... but he faced them knowing the children in danger were his own. Luthor almost defeated him, but was forced to leave, and Kal-El managed to rescue the kids and himself. He squared off with Luthor again, with Luthor holding a handcuffed Lois over the sea and a gun at her side. Only the gun was loaded with hollowpoint bullets, and those points were packed with fragments of pure kryptonite. Kal-El was shot, and Lois dived into the sea to save him. Richard, with Lana beside him in the sea plane, dove on the helicopter until they scared Luthor's inexperienced pilot off, then rescued both Lois and Kal-El.

It should have been enough, but Luthor's island was still growing, still threatening more earthquakes and tsunamis that would devastate the coast. Once Lois pulled the bullets out of his chest, Kal-El turned to leave and deal with that threat. Lois begged him not to go, but he had to, knowing it might be the last thing he ever did. In their moment of love and grief and leavetaking, neither of them were thinking about the fact that they had an audience. Richard and Lana both figured out that Superman was Clark in that moment, just before he flew off to try and pick up an island made of kryptonite and push it far enough from Earth's orbit that it would cause no further harm to his adopted world.

The aftermath saw a period of adjustment, as all four adults got themselves sorted out, Lois and Clark got back together, Richard and Lana pursued the more-than-friendship that had sparked between them, and the twins discovered that no, we can't all live in the same house together and be one big happy family and get a dog too while we're at it. Maybe a pony.

Little Secrets ended with the mothers-in-law collaborating on Lois and Clark's wedding, which included the very first L. Lang wedding dress ever designed, and Lana and Richard babysat the twins during the honeymoon.

There were small fics in between (see A New Reader's Guide... if you want to catch up on everything I'm giving massive spoilers for), but the next big story kicked off ten years later. The twins were now sixteen, and like any teenagers, they had issues. Jason had discovered girls, found the perfect one for him, and scared her off by proposing marriage at fifteen. Kala, meanwhile, had become Goth and wanted to be a singer, something that caused some parental consternation. Imagine if they knew she was also flirting with a college boy...

The major arc of both twins' adolescence was them dealing with their parents' legacies, and their parents trying to save them from making the exact same mistakes (right down to the college boy, which gave Lois hives). It didn't help at all that there was new and unwelcome distance in the Lane-Kent marriage, an old secret made in desperation gnawing guiltily at Lois, and Clark trying to spare her stress by airing his own grievances to someone else, whom she thought was one of his caped colleagues. All of that could've been dealt with, if Heirs didn't also open with the death of Lois' mother, with which she was not coping well.

Luthor turned up again, marketing technology clearly based on the Kryptonian memory crystals he'd stolen in Little Secrets, and Lois was trying to hunt him down. She had promised him at the end of LS to leave him alone, because he knew the truth of the twins' parentage and threatened to expose it to the world. A miserable bargain, but she made it to protect her family ... and kept it secret from everyone, even Kal-El.

When Kala broke curfew on New Year's Eve, showed up home late after super-speed-running across town, and sported a nice collection of hickies from the guy no one knew she was sort-of seeing, Lois lost her temper. Clark not being there, off dealing with a nuclear reactor meltdown, just escalated the argument until Kala fired off at her mother and Lois slapped her across the face. Lois regretted it instantly, seeing her little baby girl again in Kala's shocked expression, but in the next second Kala proved whose daughter she was and got angry, ready to return the smack. Kal-El arrived in time to stop it, since Kala had a measure of his strength and might've killed Lois. Pointing that out won him no bonus points with Lois, and everyone spent a very upset night apart from one another.

The next day, Kala accepted being grounded and was facing a Family Conference to deal with her behavior, when she learned that Jason's new girlfriend whom she despised, and who had been there the previous night, was telling everyone in their friend group that Kala had done a lot more than neck with the college boy. This news, delivered by her best friend Sebast, who unfortunately believed it for just long enough to break Kala's heart, decided her course of action. Kala packed the essentials and ran away.

Jason discovered her absence, and when he saw she'd packed a portrait of the family, he realized she was serious. All of the extended family was roped into the search, and the Lane-Kents even tracked down Kala's college boy, who turned out not to be a horrible person and who was also worried about her. They didn't find her, however, because Luthor had been waiting and watching, and his goons kidnapped her within an hour of her leaving home.

Then brought her to his secret research facility under the Nevada desert, where Luthor was trying to unlock the vast store of knowledge in the Kryptonian crystals he'd taken. He needed a fluent speaker of Kryptonese, and apparently also a member of the House of El, to access what he really wanted: everything the 28 known galaxies knew of weapons technology. Kala found herself in hostile territory, without possibility of escape, and almost immediately was attacked by Luthor's goons. She was saved by Luthor's first attempt at cracking the crystal code with another fluent speaker: General Zod, presumed dead but held captive by Luthor.

As Lois' secrets came to light, her marriage to Clark nearly shattered, and everyone in the family escaped death by the narrowest of margins as Luthor sought to end them once and for all, and didn't care how many civilians were caught in the crossfire. Despite everything, they still tracked Luthor down, and Lois had him in her sights once more ... only to be shot by him, using her own gun. Meanwhile Kala and General Zod forged an alliance born of necessity ... and some very subtle manipulation on his part. It all came down to Lois in the hospital, Kal-El and Jason going after Kala, and fighting Zod. Kala broke conditioning when the battle almost got Jason killed, and that gave all four Kryptonians time to wonder where the hell Luthor was. They caught up to him opening the weapons locker where he'd stored a modified Kryptonian mining tool that concentrated a laser beam through a crystal ... in that case, pure kryptonite, making the gun at rest noticeably radioactive and lethal to all Kryptonians in the vicinity when fired.

Kala had realized that Zod was using her, and he intended to let Luthor kill her family before killing Luthor himself. So when he dove into the weapons locker to keep Luthor away from the gun, she beat him there by nanoseconds - and grabbed the gun herself, aiming it at him. He tried to reason with her, but she called his bluff, locked them both in, and shot him, intending that they both die.

Jason and Kal-El saved her, though Zod died, forgiving Kala with his last breath. And in the unfiltered sunlight required to revive her after kryptonite poisoning, Kala discovered she could fly. The end of the fic, and Sessions after it, dealt with her making her peace with her mother and coming to terms with the psychological trauma left behind by her captivity. The story ended with Jason set to go to Gotham to train with the Bats and take up his family legacy in full, and Kala pursuing a singing career.

Love and Other Headaches followed both twins as they navigated relationships, college in Jason's case, pursuing a crazy dream in Kala's, and also detailed the lives of the Bats as they intersected with Jason especially. Tim Drake (Red Robin) and Cassie Sandsmark (Wondergirl) along with Jason as Superboy were the current leaders of the Titans, while Kala's band (which included her best friend Sebast) had actually gotten signed and was working a brutal tour schedule. In the midst of this, the presumed-dead second Robin, Jason Todd, returned to Gotham as the Red Hood, following a very similar storyline to Under the Red Hood in comics. At the end of his confrontation with Batman and Joker, he's spirited from the city by his mentor, Talia al Ghul. He learns a few disturbing things about her, though, and goes solo. The outline of LaOH, including the ending which we never wrote, can be found in the last two chapters of the fic.

All which leads up to this: the next chapter in Kala's story. What does a Goth rock singer who happens to be half-Kryptonian do when she's forced to get proper training among the caped crowd? Go to the Bats, who have their own wild card on their hands.

We both hope you enjoy this story.

Nightwing leapt from the rooftop, his body arcing out into space with feet together and hands outflung, just as if someone would be swinging from a trapeze to catch them. Even after all these years, muscle memory had not forgotten, though his conscious mind knew only a flicker of nostalgia. He had always felt most alive in midair, with no net beneath him.

No warm hands catching his, only the metal railing of the opposite building slapping into his palms, and he swung underneath to tuck and roll across the balcony. From there it was a serious of easy, graceful jumps from one handhold to the next, scaling the old tower's ornate façade. A bit of loose masonry gave him pause, and Dick Grayson hung from one hand's grip for a moment as chips of stone clattered down and down below him. The tips of his toes gave him purchase for a lunge upward to the next grip, and from there it was as smooth an ascent as anyone could wish. Well, anyone who had trained first as an acrobat, then as a Robin, and who lived the life of a Gotham hero.

The clock face itself loomed over him as he touched the hidden catch on its access panel, and moved past the whirring and humming of its gears to room beyond. Bluish-green light from dozens of computer monitors filled it, and flooded the face of the woman seated before them, her eyes scanning the data intently. Anyone else should've looked like a zombie in that light, but instead the reflected characters scrolling across her skin made Oracle look like an extension of the screens she watched. Sometimes when he talked to her, he wondered where the line between living mind and machine calculation was actually drawn. Once he would've given a confident answer to that, but they had all grown older and wiser since those days of such easy certainty.

Dick knew better than to believe his arrival was a surprise, and as he approached he noted a quick replay of his near-miss on a screen. "Need to get Huntress or Canary out there with some mortar and a trowel," he said. "The brickwork's getting loose."

"Since it offers an extra layer of intruder alert system, I consider that a feature, not a bug," Barbara Gordon told him with a smile. "What brings you to this side of town tonight?"

"Your scintillating company, as always," Dick said with a smile, and bent to kiss her cheek.

"Of course." Babs ruffled his hair for a moment, and gave him most of her attention as she turned away from the screens. Her eyes sparkled with amusement as she asked, "And what else, besides your complete inability to stop flirting for ten seconds? I know you don't miss me that much. Besides, I hear Alfred's doing lasagna tomorrow, you know I'll show up to the Roost for that."

Once upon a time, he would've asked her how she knew the things she did, but his answer had always been a too-sweet smile and 'feminine intuition'. Wise enough to know when he was on shaky ground, Dick had learned to leave that topic alone.

"Big drug bust in Crown Point today," he told her.

"I saw that," Babs said, and touched a few keys without looking at them or the monitors. The pertinent details popped up, naming half a dozen gang members and two mid-level dealers who'd been arrested. The real catch, though, was one of Black Mask's lieutenants, and based on the evidence, he would likely do time for this one. GCPD was practically turning cartwheels in delight.

And as far as Dick knew, neither he nor Bruce had known the lieutenant was going to be there. It had sounded like a lower-level deal, something they had to ignore to pursue Joker's latest mayhem. "Your crew was in the East End last night," Dick said carefully. "And you know where we were. So how did GCPD hear about the meet, and show up to find everybody neatly bagged and tagged for them?"

Babs cut him a Look that he remembered from his Robin days. She'd always had his number. "Oh come on, don't play coy with me. You already know how, and you're pretty sure I know, too. You just want to make sure I know that you know that I know."

"He's back in town," Dick said flatly, unable to help the bile that rose in his throat. Their last confrontation had been spectacular … and had ended badly. So much so that he couldn't even speak the name.

"No Red Hood sightings in town yet, but Jay always tended not to leave witnesses," Babs said calmly.

"Yeah, he kills them," Dick snapped. Talking about Jason Todd, who was still a brother to him despite all he'd done, despite trying to kill Bruce, was one of the few things that brought out Dick's temper.

"He left the dealers alive," she pointed out. "And he's not running the gangs this time, he's turning them in."

Dick began to pace, weaving in between computers and forensic equipment. "He's working the Bowery again. You know what it's like down there. He'll be tempted. And I'm guessing if you know he's here, then B does too. Are we going to do something about it?"

She watched him impassively, and not for the first time Dick realized he had never completely understood how Babs' mind worked. His own powers of observation and deduction had been honed to keenness under Bruce's training, but Babs seemed to operate on a different level. She could be just as dispassionate as the Batman himself, and if anything, more insightful. The combination came off cold, in both Bruce and Babs, and for all his detective work Dick still responded to most things with very human warmth. Emotion was an asset, for him. "We've got video of the takedown," Babs told him.

"Show me," Dick said, heart hammering. She put it up on the large screen nearest him, and he watched in silence as the men met and postured and talked. Two briefcases were brought forth and opened, one full of money, the other loaded down with more cocaine than Dick liked to think about. Only once the deal was done did the real action start. The moment that red helmet appeared in a shadow, his stomach lurched…

…but Jay appeared to be in control this time. Harsher than the Bats and Birds were, no pity for the thugs, but he was clearly trying not to kill them. Dick ached to watch him, to see the pure athleticism of the man that troubled boy had become, and hurt worse to see that ineffable grace turned to such deadly prowess. Half a dozen times he could've killed, and didn't, but none of the men would forget the encounter. Rainy days would bring back the memory in the form of old aches for the rest of their lives, most likely.

Jay had to know about the video, too, and he hadn't pulled the camera. "He left the evidence of the deal," Dick said. "Made sure the cops had enough to hold those guys."

"He did. The copy GCPD has is blurry whenever he's on screen—well, it is now—but this is the original." And then Babs simply folded her hands and looked at him.

Dick couldn't help feeling defeated, and they hadn't even been arguing. "You're going to leave him out there. You and B, you've decided to let Jay run loose as long as he doesn't leave too many bodies in the streets." He swore under his breath, stalking away from her.

"Not quite," Babs said. "I'm planning to enlist him. Better that he works with us than against us. I can teach him everything he needs to know about programming, and he can give us intel we'd never get any other way. Not to mention, busts like last night. I just need to sort out the proper angle, and I can make my move."

After a long, incredulous silence, Dick burst out with, "How the hell are you going to get him to follow the code?"

"I don't have to. He's doing it himself. Look, Jay's got a history in this city that none of us can match. I'm not going to waste his experience, his contacts, his training—"

"Assassin training," Dick cut in. "Some of those moves he got from the League of Shadows, and for all we know he's still working for them."

"No," Babs said serenely. "That's old news and you know it. He's working for himself. He always has been, even when he was Robin. It was never about serving the city, it was always about sticking up for people like himself. If we couldn't rope him into our capital-A Agenda, what makes you think the League could?"

Dick would've stormed off, but there wasn't room for effective storming. He had to settle for turning away from her, clenching his fists, and forcing himself to get his breathing back under control. "Jay is not stable. That mess with Kyle should've proved that. Even when he's not trying to kill us, he's a loose cannon."

"Do you think any of us who've worn the bat symbol are stable?" Babs asked, and the gentleness in her voice cut deeper than any shouted insult. And before he could respond, she continued, "How much of this is about Donna?"

Dick swore again, bringing his hands up to scrub his face as if he could rub away the scowl there. "Dammit, that was low. And this isn't about her. Babs, do you really think that bringing Jay onboard is a smart idea right now?"

"Why wait? He'll only increase his contacts and strengthen his own network. I need to get him working with us, and enjoying the benefits of having me for backup, before he starts thinking about making this a competition again," Babs replied.

Scoffing, Dick shook his head. "I wish it was as easy as you make it sound. Babs, I want him to come home, you know that. I really do. I always wanted to save him, even after what he did to Tim."

"He's saving himself," she pointed out, and somehow he'd lost the argument without even realizing it.