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1.
“You're pretty good,” the kid tells her, offhand.
Cissie pauses as she's nocking an arrow, and wonders when she started thinking of people in their early-to-mid-teens as kids. Possibly when she was one herself; she didn't have the most typical teenagehood.
“I'm amazing, is what you mean,” she says. She's focused on the target, on the other end of her arrow, but out of the corner of her eye she can still see the girl shrug. She's putting a lot of effort into looking nonchalant. She's got bleached blue hair, a denim jacket that was fashionable when Cissie was her age, and enough attitude to fuel a small airplane.
“Yeaaaah, I guess. I mean, you're not bad or anything,” she grants.
Very glad my Gold Medallist skills pass muster. Cissie doesn't say it because that's unfair, to shut the girl up when she's still trying to work her courage up, and Cissie's not exactly pulling a Robin Hood here. She's shooting every arrow bullseye, but she's not far enough for it to be really impressive to watch. It looks like basic, solid archery.
“But you're not exactly Green Arrow, y'know what I mean?”
Cissie lets go of her string and puts her bow down. She takes a breath and turns to face the girl straight on. “That's pretty rude.”
The girls shrugs, so-sue-me, unrepentant.
Cissie bites back a snipping comment, and just raise an eyebrow.
“Would I be more impressive if I used bubble-bath trick arrows?”
“Don't you mean boxing gloves arrows?” the girl asks, like Cissie is a bit slow.
Cissie waves the contradiction aside. “Boxing gloves are for amateurs,” she says airily.
The girl laughs. “Maybe.”
“Yeah, well, I seem to be all out of those.” She pauses. “But I could show you a couple of stuff with these plain old boring arrows.”
The girl tries very hard not to look interested, but she says, “sure, okay,” and she settles down on a nearby stump.
It's not her competition bow or her Arrowette bow – she doesn't touch that one anymore – but it's not about the bow, it's about the arrows. People don't see the bow; they look where the arrows go.
So Cissie whips her arrows out faster and faster, until she pulls on the string and she releases three arrows at once, and they plant into the training target with a snap, finishing to form a victorious C. It's a trick she only allows herself to do in strictly controlled environments, if only because she doesn't want the kids trying to do the same at home.
Sneaking a glance at the girl, Cissie is gratified that she looks suitably impressed.
Coolness factor reassured, Cissie lowers her bow. “I could teach you,” she offers.
The girl looks tempted a moment, and Cissie can see her fingers twitch and shiver, she can see the moment where the girl will lift a hand to receive the bow and grudgingly say, “yeah, all right.”
Instead, she shakes her head, blue strands rustling. “I can't. I have a violin recital tomorrow, and if I do something to my fingers my mom will freak.”
Steadily, Cissie looks back to the target, and raises her bow again, breathing in and out as she eyes the bullseye at the end of her arrow, and the C branding it as hers. Once upon a time she used to be furious at her mom for putting a bow in her hands and a costume on her back, but the thing she's best at is thanks to Bonnie's insistence that she develop her gift. She wishes it didn't go so far as to eat up what else she could've been, as a young teen, but the tenseness of the string, the twang of the arrows, and, yes, Robin Hood and William Tell, she loves that.
“You like violin?” she asks, voice carefully neutral as she adjusts her aim. This arrow will be a sharp dot after her initial.
“What if I do?” the girl asks, with the aggressiveness of someone who has to deal with a lot of mocking on her dorky taste in music.
“Well, good for you for doing something that you enjoy, then, especially if you're good at it.”
The girl sighs and relents. “Yeah, but sometimes I wish I could do something else too. Mom won't even let me listen to punk; she thinks it'll rot my brain. Or my ear,” she grimaces. “As if.”
“But you do anyway, right?”
“Yeah,” the girl sighs. After a moment, she adds, “And I'd also like to try out your kind of bow.”
Cissie smiles, and the girl relaxes. “Come back Saturday, I'll be here. If you use a tab you won't ruin your fingers.”
“Cool,” the girl nods, and she stands up again. “By the way, my name's Amber.”
“Cissie.”
“See you on Saturday,” Amber says before turning away.
“Good luck with your mom,” Cissie calls. Which is much truer than for the recital.
2.
The summer before Cissie starts college, she does voluntary work at the Amazon women’s shelter in Boston.
It's during one of those period of unrest that seem to have become a common plague; it's not quite as bad as how it was after Wonder Woman killed Max Lord, but there are still anti-Wonder Woman pickets in front of the place, and pamphlets that explain how the Amazons are trying to indoctrinate our daughters and brainwash them into lusty, anti-patriotic man-haters.
It's particularly noisy on the day Cissie comes in, and a woman pushes some of pamphlets in her hands, and another screams insults at her, and all the while there's a man shouting in a megaphone, fizzling in an inhuman voice. She's pushed from one way to the other, but finally she manages to reach the door.
Inside, she only needs to ask to meet the lady in charge for the woman working at the welcome desk to nod and tell her where she can find her at this hour. “Look around if she's not there, we're kind of understaffed,” she tells Cissie.
On her way, Cissie looks for women with the Amazon Shelter armband that says they work here, but only finds another.
She's as Amazon-tall as Cissie expected, but thin and white-skinned and delicate like a porcelain doll; next to her, Cissie doesn't feel awkward. It's the exact reverse of the try-outs for the Summer Games, when there'd been those mutters that Cissie looked like a cheerleader. Bottle-blond and doubtlessly stupid. This woman will never dismiss Cissie for painting her nails.
Her name is Iphtime; she breaks into a smile when Cissie tells her she wants to work here.
With the unrest, they have few workers and fewer applicants, and Cissie thinks that's probably how she gets in. She doesn't have a lot of qualifications, but Iphtime assures her it doesn't matter. “All we ask is compassion, an open mind, and your time.”
Then Iphtime introduces her to the other Amazon in charge of the shelter, Anaya, who Cissie thinks looks a lot closer to what the people outside expect of Amazons, buff and dark-skinned, and Anaya agrees. “You'll get your experience here,” she tells Cissie, and that's when Cissie realizes that she's really doing this.
She's left St Elias and college doesn't start before three months; she could do anything. She could drift. She could use the money from the action figures and her fame as a gold medallist to set herself up in a mildly fancy hostel with a pool and cute pool boys somewhere, and cloister herself there until fall. But she's be alone with herself, then, despite the cute pool boys, just herself and her thoughts and nothing real to take her mind off it.
It's about as unappealing as spending the summer at her mother's.
Her mom would take her in without a second thought, pretty much the one place in the world where she would. But Cissie's afraid of the second thoughts that might still turn up. All aims toward getting Cissie back into a kevlar/spandex outfit. Or at least back on the first-of-the-world, money-making track, and Cissie...
Cissie's figuring things out. For herself. They don't include a skimpy outfit or showbiz deals as far she can tell, but maybe that's because at the shelter, it feels like she couldn't be further away from either if she tried. Maybe if she was getting a tan on a beach somewhere or listening to her mother's ten-years plan to take over Hollywood, she'd be dreaming of these things.
It's not about being unable to. It's about what she wants.
She spends her days doing good, helping people. More than she has in her whole life, with or without a costume, with or without a medal.
There's a narrow, empty stripe between the main buildings that no-one uses because it doesn't lead anywhere; it's blocked with a naked wall at the end and the carcasses of a handful of broken chairs that someone forgot here instead of taking them out, and it's in murky shadows from 11 a.m. The only windows peppering the side walls are from maintenance and a couple of the art rooms, including the exposition room that's Iphtime's baby.
It's quiet and out of the way, while at the same time Cissie only needs to steps outside to find herself back under the arcs that surround the main courtyard. She's never far removed from the others.
When she's got some time to herself, Cissie takes her bow and arrows, and shoots. The pleasure of cutting through the air to reach for something far away, to mark it as in her reach, to pull on the string and release an arrow that flies through the air and strikes her target exactly as she intended, is unsullied once more.
There was a time, after Dr Marcy’s death, when every time she thought of pulling her arm back and letting go brought a wince, and acid knots in the pit of her stomach. For as long as she’d been practising, archery had meant control, and in one day she’d revealed that promise for a lie.
Time helped, there, as well as the Olympics, but most of all so had quitting the cape scene.
When she shoots, she's focused. More than she was when she was Arrowette, because she hasn't needed those skills in a while, but not so much that people can sneak up on her. That's part of what being responsible with weapons means; always allow a part of yourself to remain unengaged, so that you don't startle when someone gets closer. Even so, she's not sure when Anaya starts watching. The Amazon doesn't say anything, and Cissie doesn't think she's doing anything wrong, so she doesn't stop. Anaya leaves after a while, anyway, and Cissie retrieves her arrows, unstrings her bow, and puts her things back in her room.
Another time, Iphtime is with Anaya, an arm around her waist. She leaves not long in, but Cissie thinks she may have said something to Anaya before kissing her on the cheek.
Sometimes there are other women pausing to watch for a moment. They don't try to talk to her, and Cissie doesn't mind. The shared silence doesn't break her intimacy, merely extends it to include others in. It connects them like a shield raised over their heads.
After a while Iphtime seeks her out, and smiles her friendly smile.
“Anaya thinks you're a great archer.”
By the markers of Western culture, Cissie knows she is; but she's not sure how her skills must look to someone raised a warrior, and for whom the different forms of battle are as an art. She has vague memories of Cassie throwing her hands in the air and ranting about the Greek depiction of Amazons – there was none of this automatic archery-means-cut-your-right-boob misogynistic crap, she affirmed, but somehow she and Cassie never got around to a proper comparison of Amazon and US practice of archery.
“Thanks. It must be very different on Themyscira.”
Iphtime nods. “It is, and Anaya told me it's different from Bana-Mighdall, as well. Anaya is from Bana, you know.”
Cissie didn't, but the name brings back stories swapped with Cassie. “I have a friend who told me one of the best teachers she ever had was from Bana-Mighdall.”
Surprise registers on Iphtime's face. Amazons aren't so common teachers, and Amazons from Bana-Mighdall even less so. “You must have interesting friends, Cissie. All the better; I like interesting friendships.”
Wonder Girl's identity hasn't been a secret in a long time, and it's never been one to Amazons, but Arrowette's was, sort of. And Cissie isn't her anymore, so she doesn't give out details.
“We were thinking you could take up a workshop, if you wanted. The atrium is large enough. Haley and some of the others asked Anaya.” Iphtime pauses, and expectantly looks at her.
Cissie passes her tongue on her lips, her mouth dry at once. It's a good idea, an archery workshop. Archery is about control and confidence, and practice gives you both.
“And you want me to do it?”
“I'm not very good at it, and Anaya and I are too strong. Your style of archery reflects that. We've thought of ways to make our martial arts appropriate for non-Amazons – well, that was mostly Princess Diana's idea. But we haven't worked so much on archery. Anaya wants to adapt our traditional teachings, but it will take time.”
There have been women watching her, and Cissie tries to imagine how that would be. On a much bigger, much different scale from her afternoons with Amber. It's a big responsibility, giving someone a weapon. It's a bigger responsibility to entrust someone with guiding others.
She’d been angry and she’d carried a weapon once, and she’d almost killed someone.
“I'm not sure I'm the best choice,” Cissie admits. (It didn't matter if it was the pitch that got away, like Kon called it. It did get away, and she'd let it.)
But she can see it in her mind's eye. Correcting stances – lower your elbow; there; try with both eyes open; it’s windy today so aim to the right of the centre; I think you can try from 50 yards now. Making sure the targets were reached.
She wants that.
“I think you'll be a great teacher,” Iphtime says, in a tone of gentle conviction. “Think about it; talk with Anaya. It might help you, too.”
When Iphtime leaves, called away by an incident outside the portal, her words still echoes in Cissie's mind. And when Cissie looks at her bow – looks at the courtyard outside, and the women in small groups, and Iphtime hurrying towards the door – she can taste how it will feel.
3.
When the positive reply to her internship application arrives, her dormmate looks at her, looks at the letter Cissie is staring at – face splitting into an ear-to-ear grin – and says, “Well. Fuck that. Congrats.”
Jamila is so clearly disgusted by the complete unfairness of it all that she doesn’t even put up a token protest when her friends insist on dragging both of them out for celebratory drinks.
Jamila, Cissie’s dormmate, is a workaholic over-achiever who swears like a fishwife; all of her friends are either inveterate party girls or boys who turned down their dad’s frats and have probably tried to write poetry at some point in their life.
It makes very little sense to watch from the outside, but it reminds Cissie pleasantly of her own ragtag friendships.
She doesn’t know how they came together or how they get on so well when they’re all so different, but it’s familiar and comfortable. They have history they don’t talk about, and it informs their interactions in ways they don’t even realize, but she’s used to that, too.
It feels like it’s been a long time since she’s had these sorts of friendships herself, but it’s not unpleasant to be around, when they’re people who never used to have this kind of relationship with her.
She lets them take her out and pay her drinks.
It’s so late when they leave the bar Jamila has started threatening them all with the perspective of their morning classes. And it works, even though two of the classes have been cancelled and one of her friends doesn’t ever take a class before mid-morning at the earliest. Which proves the point, Cissie guesses. Jamila doesn’t drink, so she glances at the others, sighs, and tells Cissie she’s going to bring Nat back to her dorm and crash there.
Back in the dorm, vertigo catches Cissie for a moment, and she braces herself against the door. The room is bathed in the dark, shadows so deep as to fill Cissie’s sight with static. The outside world’s sounds are dampened almost to complete silence, and the clearest sound Cissie can hear is her own staccato breathing, hissed between her teeth.
She’s… alone.
So quickly she almost knocks her waste-paper basket over, Cissie turns her computer on, and the small lamp on her desk. She busies herself with pretending to put a couple books back in their place on her small shelf while the computer starts humming. The letter’s in her pocket, and Cissie fancies she can feel its warmth. It’s silly, but she doesn’t pull it out then. Not until her computer is on and she’s sending the e-mail, or she’s afraid she won’t have the nerve to.
When she’s opened a tab on her browser with her e-mail in it, she very deliberately types out the names of her recipients. Every name is a hesitation, but she forces herself to go on until she’s entered the names of all her friends from Young Justice.
And then it’s time to write her message, and her hands hover above the keyboard.
It’s been so long since they’ve been in touch. People grow up and grow away, that’s part of being a teenager, she’s been told time and again by people three times her age who most of the time have no idea what her life is like. She stayed close to Cassie the longest, and if she casts her mind far enough back, she can remember a time when they were closer than sisters. But that was mostly when she was still Arrowette. Their friendship never was the same after they’d started navigating the different turns their lives had taken, and after Kon disappeared it was like Cissie lost her best friend at the same time. It’s been so long since Bart rushed in last, in a whirlwind of classwork photocopies or leaving behind a mess of snack wrappings, or Kon knocked on her window, or she found an e-mail from someone whose name was sometimes Alvin Draper and sometimes totally not in her inbox.
And she knows snippets of what happened to them, but not because they tell her. She’s fallen away from that world. No; she removed herself, but she never meant to remove herself from her friends’ life. It’s just that... Cassie was right when she said this was her life. It’s their life, and it’s not Cissie’s anymore.
They’re the Teen Titans now, and Cissie’s a bit unclear whether her Robin is a part of it, but Wonder Girl is their leader, and she has Superboy and Kid Flash on her team, back from the dead or the future.
Greta’s in Mexico , Anita is… busy; the only person from that time in her life she sees at all is Traya.
Traya is the only one who knows Cissie was looking for an internship. She’ll be happy for Cissie, when Cissie tells her; not every first year college student is lucky enough to get their dream internship at a real daily newspaper that employs the reporter with the most Pulitzers to her name in the country. Cissie’ll call her tomorrow.
She takes the letter out and unfolds it, reading again and again the words that says the Daily Planet will be delighted to have her from May to October , until they’re burned in her retinas, and they seem to swarm on the white page like tiny black beetles.
Abruptly, Cissie closes her tab. It’s not chickening out if she’s making her own way.
4.
There’s little doubt that Cissie snags her internship (unpaid, overworked, and the best thing that ever happened to her in the eyes of everyone who learns about it) because she’s Gold Medallist Suzanne “Cissie” King-Jones.
She’s put on the sports beat, and that’s not what she wanted to do, but it at least carries the hope that she’ll have more interesting things to do and she won’t just be here as a glorified photocopying clerk.
In the morning before she goes, she dithers in front of the glossies she uses for autographs. She’s still asked, though not as regularly as she once was. The Wendy craze that jumpstarted her into a fad has passed, but there are still people, every once in a while, who recognize her, bite their lips and work up their courage to ask her. It just seems so arrogant, to get into work at the Daily Planet with photos of herself in her purse. Like she expects them to fall all over her in admiration oh god.
That’s when Cissie realizes she’s getting close to hyperventilating over being prepared. Okay, enough wavering, she’s gonna take them. It’s not like she’s planning on brandishing them over her head everywhere she goes. It’s just in case someone asks her, for their children. Sports reporters, there’s bound to be one with a kid collecting autographs of famous athletes.
She’s putting a few glossies carefully away from sight in her purse when she realizes that she’s thinking about coworkers asking her for an autographs, Daily Planet coworkers, and she’s on the verge of hyperventilating again.
The Daily Planet. Where Lois Lane works.
All the advice on how to succeed at your newspaper internship stresses the same things: be outgoing, ask for more work, if you have ideas at a meeting speak up, don’t turn down a task, and never blow a deadline. The other piece of advice Cissie’s found is meant for grad students: set yourself a goal.
Cissie’s goal for her internship isn’t to write a report on archery tournaments – though she wouldn’t say no, and not just because that’d be shooting her chances of anything in the foot.
It’s to work with Lois Lane.
On the second day, Cissie realizes even approaching her is nigh impossible.
So, no more and no less difficult than most everything worth doing Cissie’s ever achieved.
Lois Lane is constantly on the move, a whirlwind of energy and fast-paced gunshots tirades when she’s surrounded by people she smirks at in a way that’s more shark-like than anything Cissie’s seen since she quit being Arrowette. Everyone at the Daily Planet talks loud, but Lois Lane seems to speak louder than everyone else; and everyone gets things done all the time, but Lois Lane seems to get more done.
She’s the only one Cissie has seen who dares shout back at Mr Perry, and she seems to take up more room than everyone else; which is kind of a feat, because her usual sidekick is that Clark Kent guy, who holds himself hunched up like he’s trying to make people think he’s not as in shape as he clearly is. Cissie isn’t sure if he’s fooling anyone beside himself. He sure isn’t fooling anyone in the sports section.
“He’s tall,” Cissie still can’t help but mumble under her breath the first time she sees him unfold from his small desk chair and lean over to what Lois Lane is pointing at – to - him.
Cissie may or may not be keeping a hawk’s eye on the side of the room where Lois Lane has her desk. Waiting for an opportunity to strike and ingratiate herself into the circle of the most inventive reporter America has known since basically Watergate.
Whit, who’s peering at the documents Cissie is helping put together, glances the way Cissie’s looking and chortles under his breath. “Yeah. There was a betting pool a few years back, where he got this linebacker stature from, but Lois cleaned out. She claims he spent his teens dragging a plow at his parents’ farm in Kansas .” He shakes his head. “I’ve got a sister who married a farmer, and her kids don’t look anywhere near like that, but what can you tell her?”
“So she won anyway?” Cissie asks, fascinated.
He pushes the glasses higher on his head, and they reflect both the lighting above their heads and the shine of his bald scalp. “She said she was the one person who’d ever get closest to the truth anyway, and she claimed the winnings for a wedding present. She did buy some very good wine with part of the money,” he reminisces.
Cissie straightens. “They’re married?” she asks, sharply.
Suddenly, Kent doesn’t look so innocuously funny anymore. Even the name is ringing a bell. Kent, Clark Kent … He got a Pulitzer too, it comes back to her at once. For something on Intergang; she remembers reading about him on Wikipedia.
As she watches, he leaves Lois’ side and walks to the coffee machines, and returns with a steaming cup for himself and one for Lois. It’s amazing to imagine that guy can keep up with Ms Lane, but Cissie doesn’t doubt that he can. She can’t imagine Lois Lane settling for anything other than the best, and if she’s married this guy, then surely this guy must be something pretty special.
Though the figure explains part of it already, she thinks, eyeing him and trying not to look like she’s picturing him naked. Though she totally is.
And when she’s done, that only confirms what she thought of Lois Lane. Clearly, the woman’s got taste.
“Yeah,” Whit says vaguely, back to staring at his screen, and Cissie feels herself blushing. She is so lucky he wasn’t looking at her right now. “I imagine it must be a lot like irresistible force meets object.”
“Immovable object?” she can’t quite keep the scepticism out of her voice. She’s willing to believe he can keep up. She’s not sure at all sure he or anyone else could stop Lois Lane from anything she puts her mind to.
“No, just object. That woman’s like a bulldozer. Or a speeding train,” he says, and Cissie recognizes one of these Metropolis phrases. It’s something they apparently can’t avoid any more than Robin could avoid trained by the world’s greatest detective. “Come on, take a look at this and see if you can’t find a better picture.”
Photographs aren’t so much Cissie’s thing, but she’s got an archer’s eye and she knows what good sports photos are, so she can at least do that much. Meanwhile she plots on how best to approach Ms Lane , or at the very least her husband-slash-writing-partner.
The key to a successful career, Bonnie’s drilled into her, is the ability to be at the right place on the right time. Or, better yet, to create your own right time to be in your own place.
Cissie’s had mixed results with that part until now, but as the Teen Titans’ activities involve a heck of a lot less galactic baseball matches on other planets, it’s unlikely she’s going to be pulled away from her self-imposed mission to get closer to the best reporter of America. Or if they are, at least they leave her out of it.
She’s not as much the gofer of her little corner of the newspaper as she was afraid she’d be; turns out journalists prefer doing the small things that aren’t too time-consuming themselves, in the second that they think of it, but on the other hand she’s quick to understand that when she does get saddled with photocopying to do, it will be huge, heart-stoppingly boring amounts.
There’s however one thing that does happen a lot, it’s that when someone goes for a coffee there’s at least one or two other persons pipping up asking for their own, so in the end it’s a big round of coffee-drinking.
The thin juice the coffee-machine slurps down is pretty disgusting stuff, and when Cissie counts how many cups one reporter gobs down on average in one day, she starts to understand why it’s so weak. Eight cups of good, strong coffee would leave anyone a nervous wreck in ten days. Or just about.
On her third day, Cissie stands up and casually tells her coworkers she’s going for a coffee.
It’s just a matter of bringing a couple cups more for Ms Lane and Mr Kent. Years of archery prevent her hands from trembling as she carefully brings the cups, mentally flipping through conversational gambits.
She needs to make Ms Lane notice her. She thinks. It’s not going to work out if she fades into the wallpaper. Bonnie drilled that into her, too.
But bringing them coffee, well, it’s a start.
“--not that you’d know, Smallville,” Ms Lane finishes as Cissie edges the paper cups on the inches of the desk that aren’t littered in papers.
“Because we didn’t have baseball in Kansas,” Mr Kent says drily. “Thank you,” he tells Cissie as he takes the cup from her hands. Behind his glasses, his eyes widen in recognition. “Er, you’re—”
“The new intern,” Lane says, before throwing her head back to gulp the coffee down like she’s chugging down whisky in an action movie. “Thanks.”
“Cissie King-Jones,” Cissie introduces herself, again, because the both of them were away on assignment when she did the rounds on her first day.
“Yes,” Mr Kent nods, like he’s thinking about something else. In Cissie’s experience, it’s the look agents get when they're struck with bright ideas to diversify her target audience.
She retorted once that target doesn’t mean the same thing to her, but in this case she doesn’t think Mr Kent is thinking about photo ops.
Ms Lane sets her cup down. “Olympist Cissie King-Jones.”
“Yes,” Cissie says, because she’s not sure what else she’s supposed to reply to the deliberate gleam in Ms Lane ’s eyes.
She’s getting the very clear feeling she’s about to be in over her head, and to be honest she can’t sign up for whatever Lois Lane’s thinking about fast enough.
Lois Lane is wearing an expression that makes her look like the cat that’s plotted out not only to eat the canary, but also how to get rewarded for doing so.
“Tell me, what do you know about base-ball?”
It’s not her fault if she flashes back to the interstellar baseball match on Myrg then. Maybe it’s because she’s in Superman’s city, or because Ms Lane’s conspiratorial smirk reminds her of Robin’s, but she has Young Justice on the brain.
“Is that a trick question?” she asks without thinking, and then, when her brain catches up with her mouth, she hastily adds, “er, I mean, enough, I guess? I mean, yes, I know baseball.”
“You don’t even know enough for what yet,” Mr Kent sighs, but he sounds quietly amused.
“Oh, she can do it, Smallville,” Ms Lane says, waving the argument aside. “Pretty young thing showing genuine interest? They’ll be all over her.”
Cissie feels the conversation sliding away from what she can control. “Er,” she starts, but Lois Lane steamrolls her.
“I’ve been working out how to infiltrate the Metropolis baseball league,” Ms Lane says, leaning forward, and Cissie leans forward as well; she’s included in their discussion, she realizes. “They’ve been laundering drug money, but I haven’t been able to get into their private parties and catch them in action. Yet.”
She gives Cissie an intent look.
“I’ll do it,” Cissie immediately says.
“It’ll be dangerous,” Ms Lane warns, when Mr Kent clears his throat.
“Lois,” he mutters.
“I know,” Cissie says. “I’ll do it.”
“Okay. Grab a chair, I’ll fill you in.”
Mr Kent clears his throat again. He’s got a funny look. Cissie kind of hopes he’s not going to try and stop her from doing this, but she’s comfortable knowing that if he tried Lois Lane would steamroll over his objections. Probably. He is her husband, after all; she must listen to him more than to the rest of the world. “Lois, you can’t just steal an intern.”
“That’s okay,” Cissie jumps in. “It’s pretty quiet on the sports beat.”
Mr Kent looks wistfully amused at her reply, but doesn’t say anything more.
“Right,” Lois Lane says, and she leans back on her chair and shouts across the bullpen, “WHIT! I’M STEALING YOUR INTERN, HOPE YOU DON’T MIND!”
On the other side of the bullpen, Whit looks up, and nods helplessly. “Try to give her back by the end of the week! We’ll need her for the photocopies!”
Ms Lane waves at him, already turned back to face Cissie. Mr Kent chortles under his breath. “I hope he doesn’t get his hopes up,” he mutters, and smiles.
5.
If one gold medal made her a celebrity, two make her a contender.
She's still young and female and she likes short skirts and pink lipgloss, but there's something about the sports culture that means when she speaks up about something, there's always someone to pick up on it. The difficult part of her job isn't catching attention; attention follows her in the form of flashes when she starts doing something a little out of the ordinary. (Cissie is so glad she didn't decide on a show business career. If the photographs and sleazy paparazzis were her life, she's not sure she'd be able to take it.)
The trick is for her to make them do what she wants with what they catch. Just because they listen doesn't mean they respect the integrity of what she says, and scandals help sell newspapers.
So it becomes a question of which scandal she wants them to sell.
You're in a position to ask questions; use it, Lois Lane advises in an e-mail. When Cissie stops and thinks about it, she marvels that she exchanges e-mails with Lois Lane. But then, she's good at making friends with extraordinary people.
And it's true she gets invited on talk shows, and in some cases she knows going in it's going to be more about her skin-moistening regimen than about her achievements and more about who she's involved with than her involvement.
But they can't keep her from speaking.
Rumors of her dating one of her former co-stars on Wendy are greatly exaggerated – and really, she was only on for two episodes – but here, have some statistics about how violence against women is less likely to culminate into a murder when shelters exist and are properly publicized.
Yes, she's from a single-parent household – by the way, since you'll have Governor Fouquet on next week, could you pass on that I'd like to hear his justification for cutting thirty percent off from the Maternal and Child Health Program, which grants low-income expecting mothers, children and their mothers access to health care, while the expenses of the governor's mansion have risen by seventy percent since he was elected?
No, Cissie wasn't needing for money during her childhood – but volunteering has taught her a lot. The Amazon shelters have an archery outreach program that she's worked with for a couple of years now.
When they start asking her to come in to debates with politicians, she notes that she's doing something right. When she makes someone sputter and shut up, because they don't know what they're talking about, she tells herself she shouldn't feel that surge of intense satisfaction, but that's just lip-service.
The fan-mail makes her feel good about herself and the hate-mail makes her feel better about what she's doing.
She receives a thank-you letter from Diana, Ambassador of Themyscira for her endorsement of the Amazon shelters, and this time, when she does e-mail Cassie about it, Cassie e-mails back. That's awesome, she says, and I've missed you so much, I'm sorry I didn't write.
She doesn't spend all her time on television studio sets; for a girl who didn't know what to do with her life, she's got a lot going on.
College takes up some of that, and the drafts or articles Cissie keeps on typing. Mr Kent – call me Clark – took an interest in Cissie's writing when she was an intern and encourages her to send some of her work. His criticizing is a lot more precise than what Cissie understood of Ms Lane's – the difference between a grandfather's clock, opened so the cogs are showing, and an atomic clock.
Catching up with friends take up some of the rest, and there's volunteering. Some of it hinges on her fame. In demonstrations there's a certain kind of newshound that's likely to zoom on her, flies to the smell of fame, that Cissie takes great pleasure in ripping into. She's doing this weird thing with her life where the more time passes, the more entrenched in the world of journalism she becomes, and she hates a lot of what it chooses to stand for.
Are you advocating violence? There's a microphone shoved in front of her face, and Cissie grins because before she was Lois Lane's plucky intern, Bonnie explained everything about smear campaigns.
We're just fighting back, she says, and grins and grins.
If it does no more good than fluster the person parroting questions, it amuses her deeply.
“Nice,” Mia tells her, appreciative. They've seen each other today for the first time, but they know who the other is. It's better to meet this way than some place else, where the costumes and the histories would get in the way.
Mia doesn't look so much like her, here. She's shorter, and her hair tends to frizz. She's wearing biking shorts that Cassie wouldn't have rejected a few years ago.
“Thanks. I've got practice.”
“Looked that way to me,” Mia agrees. “You reminded me a bit of Ollie, back there.”
Cissie thinks back to what her mother told her, about Green Arrow, and tries for casual. “Yeah?”
“He's not exactly fond of the establishment.” From Mia's way of saying the words, Cissie guesses it's a quote. “Or newspeople.”
There's a lot she and Mia will have to talk about. They'll have to talk about Cissie's friends and Mia's team. They'll have to talk about the legacy of blond archers ever so slightly out of their leagues.
Maybe, at some later point, Cissie will talk to Mia about her very probable father Green Arrow. Maybe she'll want to meet him and she'll worry about Mia feeling like she's being replaced, the same way Cissie did. Maybe she'll want to hang out at the Arrow house, with Speedy and Green Arrow and the other Green Arrow and sometimes the former Speedy, and Black Canary.
But that's a lot of trust to be built and shared beforehand.
“You want we do another?” she asks on an impulse, with a jerk of the chin toward another TV crew.
Mia's eyes light up in delighted mischief. “Hell yeah.”
For today, she's happy to march.