Clark and the Wayne Articles

"Hey Lois," Clark was on the phone from his apartment, "Are you still at the Planet?"

Lois hummed, "Mr. White just put me on another assignment. After I manage to find what I'm looking for, I think I'll call it a day." Clark heard Lois sigh from the other end, "If I find it. By the by, is Johnny still with you?"

"Johnny? Uh… No he- his father came to pick him up a couple of minutes ago." He lied.

"He's such a sweetheart. Clark, you have to tell me all about it. Are you on your way back to the Planet?"

"Yes! Yes, I actually called to let you know I'll be there soon."

"Okay. See ya', Smallville."

"See you too, Lois." Clark hurried out of his apartment, but as he stepped out of the door, he thought he might have heard something click from inside his living room.

Clark had finally finished the heaps of paperwork Mr. White assigned to him that morning, when he heard Lois' heels rapidly tapping against the polished floor as she bustled around the office.

"Smallville," Lois called out as she rummaged through archives, "Would you mind lending me a hand? This is driving me insane."

"Of course. What are you looking for?"

"Remember Wayne and the kid?"

"Bruce Wayne?" Clark was internally screaming no not Wayne again, but said, "What about him? Is he part of the assignment Mr. White put you on?"

"You guessed it. The boss asked me to do a follow up on the whole adoption thing since it's been 6 months since it happened. But-"

"But?"

"Ah! Here it is!" Lois beamed to herself, but it quickly turned into a frown, "Nope. God, why is it always so difficult to find anything around here."

"What are you looking for?" Clark asked again.

"All the articles about Wayne! The last thing I want to do is piss Mr. White off by writing something another paper has already done."

"Don't you think it might be easier to look them up on our online archives? You could try the keywords 'Wayne' and 'adoption'. "

"Yes," Lois sighed and shook her head, "I know. It'll take forever to read through all the articles manually. But apparently there's some bug in the archive servers, or something, I don't know. I can't find a single one of those articles. Not one."

"Huh?"

"Believe me when I say I looked. I spent twenty minutes just typing in all the keywords I could think of. But still, nothing." Lois made a gesture with her hands, "Oh, except yours."

Clark blinked a couple of times, "Mine?"

"Your article. There isn't a single article on it except the one you wrote."

"Oh. Well yes, that is… strange."

"It is. There should be tons of them, it was hot news. I've already filed a report to the server admins, or whatever you call them."

"I… could call the papers and request them to send the articles over. Or maybe ask for verification that what you're doing will not be considered a form of plagiarism."

"That would be great. Thanks Smallville, I owe you one."

Clark slowly put the phone down, his mind racing. He had called every other newspaper available in Smallville, and coincidentally all of their archives were having problems at just one particular area: the Wayne articles. There was something going on here that was decidedly strange and thorough.

It took Clark longer than he would've been proud of to come to the notion that this might actually have been Wayne's own doing.

"Clark? Did you find those articles yet?"

"Uhm, you see, Lois. They seem to be having server breakdowns too." Clark tried his best to act as if it was all just a funny coincidence and nothing more. Lois had always been much too sharp for her own good, the last thing Clark wanted was to become even more involved with Wayne. "But they did verify that you'd be the first to do a follow up, and that they would have nothing to claim plagiarism for."

"First to do a follow up, huh?" Lois cocked her hip to one side, "That's unlikely. I'm sure someone must've thought of doing it before, it's been six months and we're talking about Bruce Wayne!"

"Uhm- It's a little bit strange, but maybe there were more… interesting things to cover these last few months."

"Yeah? Like what?"

"Well, like- like the Joker! The Joker had broken out of Arkham didn't he?"

"Hmph. My guess is Wayne is hiding something and paid all of these papers to shut up. Well, I'd like to see him try to shut me up."

And Lois stormed away.

Bruce Wayne could easily have paid all the papers out. It would've been a small effort on his part, but still… Wayne had never, ever tried to avoid publicity. Not even when he was caught in that international scandal with the Russian Minister's married daughter. The publicity then had caused Wayne Enterprises a major setback, but Bruce Wayne never even tried to hide anything. (Not even the nude photographs that inevitably leaked out)

Clark blushed, and tried to hide it behind the thick rim of his glasses.

Somewhere within the depths of his gut instinct Clark knew that there was probably something more to this, but for the moment Clark decided Lois was right, as she almost always was.

Well, at least he didn't have to worry about young Dick Grayson accidentally coming across any more highly inappropriate material. Clark supposed that was good enough.