6/28/14: We're not dead, just both stuck in the hell of very recent full-time hours and new positions at our jobs. Right now, life is consisting of coping with a million new things with no training and little sleep when we get home. It's kinda beaten up the muse a bit more. The stories are still there, we still know everything we plan to write, and we want to write them. It's just finding the time and energy to do so. Hopefully some of you are still out there and want them to move forward, too. Words can't express how much we miss you and them. Being away from the account hurts in so many ways I can't even get into. Life just keeps getting in the way.

Also, since I have no format in which to write them, LSR7, check the New Readers Guide to the KLK AUs here for the order on the Little Secrets oneshots. I wish I knew a new to put them in chronological order. I think the only place they're like that is my Livejournal account, with the Indexs of DOOM. If you see this, thank you SO much for the reviews lately. All of them make me want so bad to come back and play in my sandbox.

I MIIIIISS YOOOOOU GUUUUUYS!

And just to prove that it's not all gone, a unedited preview for the next ATU and a little nibble of future events for one family member in the LS-verse:

AND BEYOND HERE THERE BE SPOILERS, SOME LARGE (in the great Lo tradition of only keeping SOME SECRETS):

ATU: Forever We'll Defend (Chapter 52 preview)

Claire Sutherland paused in the lobby of the base post office to sort through her mail. It was truly amazing how much junk mail tended to accumulate, even for someone who moved around frequently. Mostly advertising fliers of one kind or another…

…but she came to sudden, sharp alertness when she heard someone say "hostages". Without looking up, letting herself seem fascinated by the tempting offer from the nearest car dealership, she strained her ears to listen.

It was probably just nonsense, the way most of the talk was. But if the off-duty soldier who'd spoken was talking about what she thought he was talking about, then Claire was deeply intrigued.

The man was talking quietly with two friends, but a middle-aged woman engrossed in her mail passed beneath their notice, and they didn't bother to whisper. This was a base, after all, and there were Army wives around all the time. She was part of the scenery to them, and she blessed it even as her eyes ran over the small print on the flier. Despite passing over the words again and again, despite knowing the language, she got no sense of them, her eyes simply on autopilot while her mind was devoted to her ears.

"Mad Dog took off with a wild hair up his tailpipe," one of the men muttered.

"Think he's cracking up?" one of the others said, and that was nearly a whisper.

The third man snorted. "Cracking down, more like. Security's tight ever since the last of the hostages came home. Speaking of which, zip it."

They changed topics and moved on, but now Claire could only stare unseeing as the bright-red convertible in the ad jittered with the shaking of her hands. The hostages who had come home had to be the political prisoners held on New Krypton. And she hadn't known that they'd returned to Earth.

That was no surprise, though. The Mad Dog they'd mentioned was General Samuel 'Mad Dog' Lane, and his daughter Lois had been among the hostages taken. Some months later, as political intrigue heated up, his wife and younger daughter had quietly disappeared.

Into Witness Protection, though ordinary WitSec wasn't good enough for Sam. They were both living in military housing at Camp Zama near Tokyo—where Lucy Lane had been born, in fact—under assumed names. Of which Claire Sutherland was the one Ella had chosen. It had been months, long enough for her to answer naturally to Claire.

But not long enough for her to stop missing her eldest daughter like a lost limb, like some precious part of her that had been ripped away.

And Lois was back, all the hostages were back on Earth, and Sam … Sam hadn't even contacted her. That was rather the point of WitSec, but she knew he could circumvent it if he'd tried.

If he'd wanted to, or felt that a simple piece of information such as her daughter, flesh of her flesh, the first kick in her belly, was finally back in the same solar system with them…

Ella ripped the advertising flier without even knowing she'd done it, and that forced her to calm down. If she kept thinking about this, she'd give the entire game away.

One thing was certain. When she got hold of that stiff-necked husband of hers, he would be made to understand the depths of her displeasure.

…

Lois had never seen her father so quiet and so still for so long. Served him right. It was about time something other than her mother threw a wrench in his plans. Kal-El's little demonstration with the rifle barrels, and his absolute implacability coupled with utter non-threatening calm, seemed to have stymied the General. There was nothing here for him to fight, no possible avenue of attack that might be successful, and he seemed almost lost without it. After Sam posted the two men who'd seen that at the front and back doors, he let himself be persuaded to sit down at Martha Kent's long dining table and drink coffee while Kal-El talked.

And all the while, Pete and Lana watched him like a pair of hawks. Lana in particular had stationed herself so close to Lois that if she moved to rock Connor, her elbow bumped the redhead's hip. Lois spent a lot of her time just sort of swaying him, though Connor was peacefully asleep despite the disturbance the soldiers had caused.

Hard as it would be for most to believe, her son was the only safe, sane, reliable thing in Lois' universe right then. The Rosses' protectiveness counted, too, but it wasn't concrete the way her baby boy was. In less than an hour she'd found the love of her life again, introduced him to the son he hadn't even known she was carrying, gotten caught by her father, and witnessed her lover manifest super-human powers in her defense.

Trying to hold all that in her head made pre-calculus look simple. And dear God, what a headache she got realizing that under normal circumstances she would've been on summer break right now, trying to avoid thinking about what classes she'd be taking in the fall.

It was too much, and Lois looked down at Connor again to anchor herself. Her life had changed the minute she had stepped off Earth's surface and touched down on New Krypton. There was no going back. And would she is she could? The definitive answer was no, leaving the small scary details of her journey out. She felt more alive, more real, now than she ever had. This is who she was now.

Of course, then a new question reared up in her mind: would he have similar abilities? She needed to know how long it had taken Kal-El to develop these powers. Connor might be different, being half-human, but if he could … oh, hell, and she'd thought her life was complicated when it was just interplanetary spy games.

"You're awfully quiet, sir," Kal-El said. Lois looked up at him, noting that he was really selling the farmboy schtick. Oddly enough, it kind of suited him. That earnest, charming frankness that had been there from the moment they first met suited the soft flannel he wore and the time-worn table they were seated at better than New Krypton's sterile formality.

All the while she could practically hear the gears running in her father's head.

…

Sam raised one eyebrow. Of course he was being quiet. The boy was volunteering all kinds of information without being prompted, so why should he interrupt?

But even he knew that wasn't the whole reason why.

The Kryptonian invaders, he knew how to deal with. Superior technology could be worked around, and the Resistance on Earth had been learning and adapting for over a year, laying plans in place to nullify the aliens' advantage. It was long odds and a bad situation, but it was the kind of thing he'd trained for.

A young man who could bend steel in his bare hands, who had dropped a running chainsaw on his foot and broken only the saw, who could leap over a hundred feet and run faster than a car, who had placed his hand into a roaring bonfire without even scorching his sleeve … that was beyond General Lane's training and experience. Very nearly beyond his comprehension. How the hell did you neutralize that? Drop a nuke on him, maybe, but Sam had to face the very real possibility that not even that might work.

"This a lot to digest," he finally said, choosing every word carefully. "As a father, as a general in the United States Armed Forces, and as the officer in charge of handling the hostage situation. I hope you understand that."

"I do, sir," the boy said calmly.

Meanwhile his daughter was doing her best to glare a hole in him, which Sam summarily ignored. Lois wasn't the problem. She'd gotten her way, she had the ill-advised baby she'd wanted so much despite not even knowing about it until he told her, and now she had her alien boyfriend standing up for her. Priorities: he could bring Lois to heel later. Right now there were bigger issues, such as the blue-eyed one looking at him expectantly.

Sam sipped coffee and thought furiously. "You said you had amnesia that didn't resolve until today. So you're not in contact with the rest of your people on Earth, or anyone back home on New Krypton?"

"Not yet," the boy said, and Sam barely managed not to bristle. There was no way to stop him from hopping over to the desert and dropping in on the salt mine.

Lois chose that moment to interject, "And if he goes missing, I will tear your fucking throat out with my teeth. I will kill you, Dad. I hope you understand that."

That level of profanity had everyone else in the room, including the boy, turning toward her with open-mouthed shock, but it didn't faze Sam. "Duly noted," he said. He had to hand it to the girl, Lois was quick on the uptake—she knew those kinds of questions could be used to establish whether or not it was possible to take someone into custody without undue trouble.

"Lois," the boy said quietly, and she looked at him. The glance they exchanged was full of complicated things; Lois' hazel eyes so like her mother's, but the hard look in them was all Sam and he knew it, while the boy just appeared aggrieved. Maybe Kryptonians didn't talk back to their parents like that. Well, even a stopped clock was right twice a day, it was no surprise they did one thing right.

"I ask because that means you're not aware of the situation with the rest of your people," Sam said smoothly. That got their attention. "Namely, they're not on the planet's surface. Within the hour of the hostages landing, they were recalled—but not that far. The ship is parked behind the moon."

"Sir, all of the scientists are Rebellion sympathizers," the boy said.

"That's great, but the only one with a weapon is that damn Consular," Sam shot back.

…

Jonathan had startled back as if he'd been slapped when Lois spoke to her father. There was such deep vitriol there, so much anger laid down over years and compressed until it was diamond-hard. This was more than casual disrespect; he'd known a few family feuds over the years, and this was the nastiest one he'd ever seen. The implication that Lois thought her dad would have Clark arrested, maybe worse…

…well, she knew the general better than they did. And he had started the manhunt by making everyone thinking they were looking for a violent escaped prisoner. That could've gotten Clark shot, around here. Not that getting shot would hurt him much, but the general didn't know that.

Jonathan didn't know Lois very well, but she had Lana bristling over her like a mother collie protecting her pup from a wolf, and that was enough of a character reference for him. Her father must be a first-class horse's ass, then, to be so disliked and distrusted by his own daughter. Good on his boy Clark for setting the man back on his heels with that display of power.

The way she expressed it, of course, made him wonder how kind and self-effacing Clark had gotten mixed up with a girl like her—mixed up enough to result in the baby asleep in her arms. Opposites were supposed to attract, he guessed.

"Mining tools can be adapted as weapons," Clark was saying. "If they were recalled to orbit, though, Supreme Chancellor Zod knows the hostages landed safely."

"He doesn't know you did," General Lane pointed out. "We have a mole inside, one of your Kryptonians. Not the same line as our other Rebellion contacts. This one is very highly placed and only communicates on secure channels. The problem for us is we were talking to her on a console in the mining facility, when the scientists could get us in. Dropped a helluva lot of data to us, but we were waiting on a couple of confirmations that we can't get now."

"I don't have to tell you to be careful of who you're talking to," Clark said slowly. "She could just as easily be a spy."

"If she is, the quality of intel she's sent so far is worth it, and you're right. You don't have to tell me. This isn't my first dance." General Lane looked like nothing so much as an old fox then, gray-muzzled and wise to every sort of trap.

"What kind of intel?" Clark asked.

"That you were on your way, among other things," General Lane said. "She doesn't seem to know everything that your Rebellion knows—she didn't know some of the hostages escaped before your ship took off. But from the sounds of things, she's in your Council building itself on a day-to-day basis."

Clark mused aloud, "That sounds like someone Jhan-Or would plant … and he doesn't always tell everything to everyone. That way there's less we can be forced to reveal if we're caught. Not even I know all of what's planned."

"Jhan-Or's the ringleader, then?" General Lane said with studied casualness.

At that, Lois put her hand on Clark's shoulder, giving him a significant look. Jonathan chose that moment to speak. "Son, not to interrupt, but you should remember that everyone here has an ax to grind. Even me and Martha—we just want to get out of this without anyone we care about getting hurt, but that's still a bias."

Clark blinked at him. The boy could be so trusting, so willing to believe the best of anyone, and perhaps that was a godsend in someone with his powers. He had been so meekly grateful when they first found him. If he had chosen to be suspicious, if he'd wondered what their angle was, Jonathan figured things would've gone a lot differently. Luckily this Lois seemed to have all the caginess the pair of them needed.

"True, Pa, but we have to share information to help each other," Clark said. "Jhan-Or wouldn't say he's the ringleader, anyway. He doesn't like to be a leader of anything if he can help it."

"Good, because he's saying it was you and your uncle," General Lane put in. Jonathan saw the sour, unsurprised look on Lois' face, and suppressed a smile.

'Training Days: Cat and Mouse' (later in Love and Other Headaches) preview:

Cat and Mouse

The already long night was just getting longer and each additional second danced across her nerves like a samba contest. A blast of humid air struck Kala as she stared down from the rooftop in the yellow light illuminating the alley below. She grimaced uncomfortably, feeling the moisture under her domino. Never had she been more grateful for her decision to ditch her leather trench for the summer and just go with the close-fitting pants and corset-top; she'd have died of heat-stroke if she'd kept it with her. Without the heft of it, there would be less drama in the Blur's attacks, but she'd deal, she thought with a grin. At least the media had finally confirmed that she was a girl. She and Mom had had a good snicker over that when she called the other night.

They'd all been on stakeout for over an hour—she, Tim, Dick, and Bruce spread out across the perimeter and in constant contact with Oracle—and they'd been mostly silent the entire time, all listening for the signal. Kala was the only one chafing at the delay as usual; it was only through significant self-control that she wasn't fidgeting, as learning to simply stay still for long periods had been the hardest part of her training. Her family very rarely lay in wait for anyone, Dad usually listening in for his target and swooping in when the time was right. Mom had done quite a bit of surveillance back in the day, but had admitted with a laugh that she'd been caught a time or two because her patience had run out. Forced inactivity had always been difficult for her, and this was putting it to a definite test.

It didn't exactly help to know that she'd endure unending hell from both Dick and Tim if they knew all this waiting was making her crazy. Living in the shadow of Bruce all these years had made all of this second nature to them. The training sessions, especially the hand-to-hand and martial arts work, had been a source of constant amusement for them. Since they hadn't known what to expect from her, and vice versa, both of them had attempted to gang up on her.

If her brother hadn't been pulling his punches out of fear of the damage he could do, as she understood he had during his training with the Bats, they might not have done it. But then, her strength had never been one of her more prominently utilized powers, so it had become something most people forgot about, regardless of her origin. No one, certainly not Dick or Tim, had ever expected her to fight hard and dirty.

Looking back on that first training session, she grinned again. Being that unpredictable in a fight had become the main thing keeping the boys off her back. Well, besides her having been raised with a brother and therefore half-prepared. Because the only thing deadlier than their moves was the razor-sharp snark out of a Robin's mouth.

But her moment of mental self-congratulations was derailed then, as Oracle's voice finally sounded in her ear, the com-unit going live. "They're on the move. South-western quadrant."

About damn time, she cursed silently, swiveling as she rose from her perch to launch herself in the direction Oracle had indicated. God, it felt good to just move at this point. Any more time spent hunched over and still, and she'd worried that she might turn into one of the gargoyles that seemed to decorate half the city. The thought brought a flash of gleaming grin. Well, I guess they don't call it Gotham City for nothing.

Thanks to her training, her body responded as if she'd just warmed up, and she made the leap to the warehouse roof without even using a touch of her flight, landing easily on her toes to sprint across the roof and fall into another crouch at the opposite ledge. Her focus went right to the alley below, where Black Mask's men were starting to load crates onto a small, refrigerated truck. Weird. Why the heck do they need cold storage for heroin and cocaine? she mused to herself.

The man himself—if he could even be called that, with that damn skull thing over his face—wasn't present, but one of his senior lieutenants stood just outside the warehouse doors, directly beneath Kala, his arms crossed over a crisp suit as he supervised the transfer of the drugs. Kala couldn't help a snarl of disgust. The whole lot of them were scum and, after all she'd heard about his operations, they deserved everything Bruce had planned for them.

All Kala had to do was wait for the signal from deeper into the alley, a movement of shadow that she knew would be there when Bruce gave the 'go', and she'd be the one to swoop down and get the party started. Then it would be up to the Bats to come in and clean up the mess, taking each guy out one at a time as she drew any gunfire.

Of course, she wasn't exactly bullet-proof, but the armor in her costume, coupled with speed, went a long way, and she'd always loved turning heads—

A flash of the tip of a cape, shadowy movement in the dark of the alley, and the signal was given. Leaping down from her perch, Kala prepared to land right in front of Black Mask's lieutenant, her plan to sweep his legs out from under him before setting in on the hired muscle.

But gunfire erupted before she even made it the three stories down from the roof, coming in from a direction she hadn't anticipated, from the opposite end of the alley, where none of Mask's men had been sighted. Instinctively, she grabbed her target around the shoulders when she landed, pulling him down and out of the line of fire. Damn ethics, but what other choice did she have? Regardless of the horrors that their boss ordered at times, killing these creeps wasn't an option.

"Stay down," she ordered as she knocked his handgun away with a swift kick, the alley suddenly filling with bright flashes and the deafening roar of a dozen men all firing wildly, all of them shouting at once, incomprehensible beneath the cacophony. Her head spiked in pain; she hadn't knocked her hearing back from high-alert. Returning to a crouch and shaking her head of the sudden throbbing of her eardrums, she reclaimed her bearings and took quick stock of the situation. None of the gunfire seemed to be aimed at her, but instead at the direction of their unexpected company, so none of the thugs were at all prepared for the Bats as they surrounded them, precision strikes delivering pain and impermanent paralysis. So someone stole my thunder there. Can't be one of ours; not with gunfire. I wonder. … But the thought was forgotten as she plunged into the fray.

One by one, the hired muscle fell, Kala joining the action with a few well-aimed strikes of her own to take down two men. A few more seconds, and the alley went relatively quiet, Kala's ears ringing as she swiveled to check that all of Black Mask's men were accounted for. As planned, they were all down for the count, unconscious, a few bleeding, save for—

One more sudden gunshot, and Kala jerked her head up in instant reaction to find Black Mask's lieutenant lurching forward from where he'd been trying to reach for his gun, his hand going to his shoulder instead as blood poured from a fresh wound.

"What the hell are you doing, Hood?" Dick shouted, and Kala whirled to see Nightwing stalking across the sea of comatose thugs to grab their unexpected visitor around the bicep. "You were not read in on this one. If any of them die, it's on your hands."

But Kala didn't even have a moment to process what had just happened, as her comm unit hissed with sudden static, and Oracle's voice met her, "Blur, O. Report."

Tearing her gaze away from the scene that was brewing near the mouth of the alley, Kala activated her comm with the touch of a finger, and replied, "Targets are all down and accounted for. At least one shot. B and R are securing the rest."

"Understood. Ambulances are on their way. Oh, and give Red Hood my regards."

"Yeah, sure. Will do. Blur out."

Turning back to the shouting match that was escalating between Nightwing and Red Hood, Kala let out a heavy breath. So this was the elusive Jason Todd that she'd heard about, the infamous absent brother and second former-Robin. From what she could see of him, all leather and black denim, capped with a literal red helmet with indiscernible eyes, she had to wonder, was the little she'd heard of him true? Only one way to find out.