Authors' Note: So, this story got abandoned. We didn't mean to – we were working on Love and Other Headaches and Across the Universe at the same time. LaOH was always a sprawling fic, intended to set up for Into the Shadows and then Blood Will Tell. ATU was almost finished. But then there were complications.
There are notes in LaOH about Anissa's father having surgery. What we didn't tell you is that it was brain surgery. He suffered a massive brain bleed, and though he survived the surgery and appeared to be recovering, within two weeks he died of complications from that. His death effectively silenced both of our muses. It took years, and a complete change of fandom, for us to write again. In the meantime, fandom moved on, most of our friends getting involved in other projects, LiveJournal getting bought by Russians, and DC rebooting their movieverse with Man of Steel (which we mostly liked) and Batman vs. Superman (which we didn't). Neither of those films have any bearing on our headcanon, btw.
We've both recently re-read all of LS, Heirs, the oneshots and small series in LS-verse, and now LaOH. And it doesn't sit right with us to leave you all hanging. At the same time, there's no way we could actually finish LaOH as it was intended. We really did bite off more than we could chew this time, trying to introduce and manage this many separate plot threads in one fic.
So if you're interested, we thought we'd post our notes as to where the fic was going, and how all this tied in. But first …
Quick recap: Lex Luthor is hanging out in Australia, keeping a low profile, but he's hesitantly working with the immortal Ra's al Ghul – and pursuing his own unspecified means of extended his life. We know he is responsible for creating Bizarro, he also has something called Project Scion which appears to be a young boy with Kryptonian powers, and something called Project Uplift where Kryptonian genes (specifically Project Scion's genes) were spliced into a litter of puppies. Only one puppy actually 'took', and is already displaying super-strength and unusual intelligence. Some mention of the Injustice Society was made, but none of the villains trust each other long enough to work together. Mercy Graves in particular is unsettled by Ra's al Ghul, and despises his daughter Talia. The feeling is very much mutual. Talia and Ra's both disdain Luthor, and Talia has more irons in the fire than anyone else realizes. Her relationship with her father is complicated, at best, not least by the fact that she is trying to run his empire and raise her four-year-old son, Damian, whom no one but Ra's and Talia herself know is the son of Batman.
Batman, meanwhile, is in dire straits, as is the whole of the Gotham hero contingent. Red Hood, aka Jason Todd, aka the second Robin, had resurfaced and revealed himself by damn near killing Red Robin aka Tim Drake. He also set off a huge confrontation with Batman and Joker, using Black Mask to get Joker out of Arkham. He almost died in that battle, but was saved by his mentor, benefactor, and lover, Talia al Ghul. When he learned she was keeping an extremely detailed file of notes on Project J – namely him, everything back to his first appearances as Robin and his freakin' grade school report cards – he left her. Her men have been following him, and likely her father's men as well, since it was Ra's al Ghul's Lazarus Pit that restored him to health and something like sanity. Red Hood was last seen working with Ravager, aka Rose Wilson, a sometime Titan. The pair of them were busting up a child trafficking ring in lethal style, and happened to fall into bed together on the way. The best partnerships are the ones based on mutual goals, not on anything dramatic, Jay would say.
Lois Lane-Kent was the same old fierce reporter, still stubbornly refusing to acknowledge that Perry White would not live forever as Editor in Chief, or that she would someday take over his role. Her marriage to Clark is strong and sure, and despite fighting over stories and by proxies in the form of their reporter proteges, there's nothing seriously wrong in her life.
Clark himself mourned the loss of his mother, but it brought him closer to his stepfather Ben Hubbard, who now knows the family secret. Kind of hard to miss when you call your wife's son in Metropolis to tell him of her passing, and he shows up only minutes later despite the 1500 miles between you. Ben had decided to will the family farm to Clark, holding it in trust for one of Clark's children to hopefully take it over.
Superboy, aka Jason Kent, had broken up with his high school sweetheart Elise yet again, and after finally accepting that breakup, he had let her go – only to start dating his colleague Wonder Girl, aka Cassandra Sandsmark. Things were going well for a while, until Jason ran afoul of a magic-using villain and got stripped of his powers. The first inklings of trouble between him and Cassie cropped up then, in her insistence on going to the League for help, and his refusal to say anything to anyone until he'd exhausted all possibilities of reversing the power-loss on his own. Cassie wasn't aware that Jason feared a return of his childhood weakness and vulnerability. With him off the roster and staying at the Kent farmhouse, their relationship grew a little more distant as Titans business had been one of the things they always discussed. Meanwhile, the League's premier magic-user, Zatanna, had carefully studied both him and the sorcerer who stole his powers, ultimately finding that the effect should have been short-term, and there was no magical or physical reason for him to be without them. Her conclusion was that he was dealing with some kind of mental block, and she and Clark were working on a plan to hopefully reverse that. We last saw Jason en route to Metropolis, just after his father and sister had dealt with a new, kryptonite-powered villain named Metallo.
Said sister, Kala Lane-Kent, lead singer (along with her best friend Sebast) of various garage and cover bands, had finally gotten signed to a label. The cost was her relationship with old friend Dustin Carmichael, who had never felt comfortable in the city and couldn't handle the crazy traveling and long hours of a touring musician. He ended up back home in Smallville, while she set her sights on stardom. Just as that childhood dream seemed within reach, she found herself getting sucked back into hero business. Kala was known only as the Blur, someone too swift to photograph who showed up only when Superboy was in deep trouble. With Jason out of the picture due to losing his powers, he's tried to convince her that she should step up and represent their generation of Supers. And in his absence, she did go to help her father.
Back in Gotham, the Spoiler, aka Stephanie Brown, who is Tim Drake's girlfriend and was briefly Robin, just learned in not-so-many words that Bruce only made her Robin to tempt Tim back into the uniform. Her reaction was … not good. She's always felt not good enough, for anyone important, and even her sometime partner in patrol Batgirl, aka Cass Cain, had resorted to knocking her out rather than letting her fight by her side. Steph decided to prove herself by enacting one of Bruce's own plots for dealing with Gotham crime, which has been in turmoil ever since Red Hood shook up the whole city and smashed Black Mask's organization. The plan failed, resulting in a huge riot, and Steph got hurt, only to be saved by a new thief in Gotham known as Catwoman. She didn't take Catwoman's advice to stay out of the escalating riots and dove right back in despite being injured. That resulting in her being knocked out again, and waking up in cuffs and in the custody of someone smart enough to remove the tracking devices in her gear.
Pretty dire stuff, all in all.
We are now working on collating our old notes (and five years' worth of conversations – just because we stopped writing, doesn't mean this world stopped living in our minds) into something coherent, so we can tell you how this story would've ended, and how it would've set up for everything meant to come after.
The next chapter will basically be one HUGE spoiler for the ending of a fic that will never be written.