"Broader readership. If you're building something real, you want people to know about it through a source they trust."
Clark considered that. "Smart thinking."
Henderson looked between them with the mild interest of someone who'd introduced many people to many other people and had learned to spot when two of them were going to have a real conversation.
"Clark, don't steal my interview subject," Henderson said.
"Just saying hello." Clark looked at James. "If you have time before you head back to Gotham, the coffee on the third floor is genuinely good. Unlike everything else about the third floor."
"I have time," James said.
---
The coffee was, as promised, good.
They sat at a small table near a window that looked out over a Metropolis street busy with midday foot traffic.
Clark had a notepad with him out of habit, James suspected, not because he was intending to work.
They talked for an hour.
It wasn't an interview. It was a conversation between two people who were both, in their own ways, paying careful attention to each other while appearing not to.
James understood the dynamic because he was doing the same thing himself.
Clark asked about Gotham. About what it was like building something legitimate there when the city had the reputation it had.
About whether the crime situation made long-term investment planning difficult.
James talked about Gotham the way someone who genuinely loved a complicated place talked about it. Not defensively. Neither with the performed affection of a PR line. With honest acknowledgment of what the city was and what it could be.
Clark listened the way someone listened when they were genuinely processing what they heard rather than waiting for their turn to speak.
At some point Clark mentioned that he'd been covering Sovereign's recent operations as part of his superhero reporting. Mentioned it casually, without weight, as part of a broader thread about Gotham's vigilante ecosystem.
"The Intergang coverage was interesting," Clark said. "The scale of what got dismantled. Ten cities simultaneously."
"I read that piece," James said. "You had good sourcing."
"I had a press release from GCPD and a lot of inference." Clark smiled. "Most of what I know about how that operation actually worked I got through other channels."
James understood exactly what that meant and gave no indication of it. "The Planet must appreciate having someone on staff who can get access others can't."
"The Planet appreciates results," Clark said. "The access is something I've had to build over time."
"That's usually how it works."
They finished their coffee. Clark walked James to the elevator with the ease of someone comfortable moving through the building, which he was, in more ways than he was letting on.
"If you're in Metropolis again, the Planet runs a business leadership roundtable every quarter," Clark said. "I could put you on the list if you want a seat at the table."
"I'd like that."
They shook hands again. James rode the elevator down to the lobby thinking about the specific texture of that conversation. What Clark Kent was. What he was doing in that building every day. The particular discipline it required to contain what he contained behind a pair of glasses and a practiced posture.
James had more in common with Clark Kent than Clark Kent knew.
---
He left Metropolis at four in the afternoon, planning to stop in Keystone City for dinner before the final leg back to Gotham.
The diner he chose was on a recommendation from a food blog he'd catalogued months ago. Small, independent, excellent pies according to three separate reviewers whose other recommendations had proven reliable.
He was halfway through something with apples and a crust that justified the detour when the woman in the booth across the aisle said, loudly enough to carry, "Are you seriously not going to fix that?"
James looked over, reflexively.
She was talking to her phone. Or rather, she'd been talking to someone on her phone who had apparently disconnected, because she was now staring at it with the expression of someone who had just been hung up on mid-sentence and was reassessing several of their life choices simultaneously.
Mid-twenties. Red hair, pulled back impatiently. A jacket with a press badge clipped to the lapel from somewhere local. A laptop open in front of her with six browser tabs visible from where James was sitting, which he wasn't trying to observe but couldn't help.
She noticed him noticing.
"Sorry," she said, not particularly apologetically. "My editor is a problem."
"What kind of problem?"
"The kind who kills a story an hour before it goes to print because someone called him." She set her phone face-down on the table with more control than the situation probably deserved. "Three weeks of work."
"What was the story?"
She looked at him with the particular assessment of a journalist deciding whether a stranger asking that question was curious or useful. "Chemical runoff from an industrial plant on the west side of the city. Affecting residential water supply in two neighborhoods. I had documentation, source confirmation, the whole thing."
"And someone called your editor."
"Someone called my editor." She extended her hand across the aisle with a directness that suggested she'd decided he was acceptable to talk to. "Iris West. Keystone Gazette."
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