Fic: Five Ways Special Projects Almost Wasn't (1/5)
This is a challenge fic written for
sanadafaye. She who made this awesome banner.
In exchange for the wonderful banner, I offered to write her fic. So she asked for a five-times story. The challenge was to write five ways in which one little change would have affected the special projects universe. In each of these stories, one minor thing happened, and sent our characters down a different path than the one they're currently walking.
Warning: These are not the characters you know. Because of one minor change, they walk a different path.
Fic: Five ways Special Projects Almost Wasn't. (1/5)
Author: Pen37
Beta:
clarksmuse
Rating: pg-13
Summary: Change one thing . . . Change everything.
Banner by
sanadafaye
Ch 1, Ch 2, Ch 3, Ch 4, Ch 5
1. Perry changed his mind.
Perry white frowned up at Chloe Sullivan. He'd thought that she would have been perfect for working in the new Special Projects department. She had a gift for seeing the big picture in a way that Kent, Lane, and Olsen just didn't seem to have. He would have thought that she, of all people, could have seen the potential for the new department.
But it seems that he'd underestimated her competitive streak.
Oh well, he sighed. There were other ways to turn this little bullpen family feud to his advantage. With Kent working foreign correspondence, and Lane-Kent giving Luthor ulcers through her work on the metro section, maybe he could use this incestuous war between cousins to his advantage and bolster the Gotham section at the same time.
After all, the readers just ate up stories about the nut cases in tights. And there was enough corruption in Gotham to keep Sullivan busy indefinitely.
“Okay. So no on the Special Projects,” he said. “What do you think about a lateral move?”
** *
Chloe and Bruce sat, heads together over the footage of the Luthorcorp raid.
“What I can't figure out: If he's not using them to harvest organs, and they're all genetically brain dead, then why does he need so many perfect clones?”
Chloe sighed. If the greatest detective mind in the world couldn't figure it out, they were so screwed.
Absently, she thumbed the Irish ring that she'd found when packing up for the move to Gotham. She'd slipped it onto her thumb - and promptly gotten it stuck there.
She glanced up at him, and then shook her head again. If you had told her a few years ago that she would work this closely with Batman, she would have laughed. They weren't really friends in any true sense of the word. But at the same time, she was closer to Bruce than she had been to anyone since Clark. Even if they didn't like each other, they understood one another.
“You could call Talia,” she began hesitantly.
He stilled. His back stiffened ramrod straight.
“I know, as a solution it sucks. She's still too close to her father. And her father still might be a demon. But you know that she worked inside Luthorcorp for years. If anyone would have any idea what the bald wonder was up to, it would be her.”
“Don't you have somewhere you need to be?”
Actually, she had several hours before she was due down at The Gazette. (She was using space there since The Planet's Gotham office had been firebombed last week. The Penguin hadn't liked her latest editorial. The actual Penguin. Not the nuns at Our Lady of the Sacred Heart.) But if she told Bruce that, he would insist that Flamebird use that time for training.
Sometimes it sucked to be a super hero.