(no subject)

[11calls]

Despite his working the overnight shift, Danny Reagan had made it a point to spend quality breakfast time with his daughter since she had arrived in their home. Alice was there more often than not, though when there was cooking to be done, she left it in her husband’s capable hands. This was such a morning, and autumn was truly arriving in its glory, the chill spinning cereal and fruit into the warmer and heartier apple and cinnamon oatmeal.

Normally, the smell of her father’s oatmeal would drag six-year-old Alex from her sleep, clamoring in excitedly with one shoe on her foot and the other in her hand, her half half-plaited, half a wild mass of tangles. Today, though, there was a delay in the oatmeal’s siren song, and when Alex finally came into the kitchen, she was fully dressed and looked more solemn than Danny had ever seen her since her betta fish, Clark, had died.

“Mommy,” she said seriously, looking at Alice for a moment before her dark gaze turned equally stoically to her father. “Daddy.”

“What’s the matter, kiddo?” Danny’s voice matched the gravity in his daughter’s own, his eyes meeting hers as he leaned down to brush calloused fingertips across the coolness of her forehead as he shared a glance with her mother. “Are you sick?” Alex wasn’t normally one to feign sickness; she loved school, so if she didn’t want to go, then clearly there was something very out of sorts with the youngest Reagan. Flanking her daughter on the other side, Alice was already reaching for the phone to get an appointment with the pediatrician even if she needed to shout to get it.

“I’m not sick.” The words sounded clear enough that Alice’s sigh of relief was audible, and she brushed one of the braids back from Alex’s face.

“Okay, kiddo.” Danny’s voice was as steady as it was before, and he watched Alex expectantly without rushing her. Sometimes Alex’s words were a jumble in her head, and she needed to bounce them around a few times before they fell out without the good sense a filter might give them.

“I need a suit.” There was no room for denying Alex’s request, not with the jut of her chin and the steadiness of her gaze. Danny didn’t laugh, but Alice did.

“You can’t tell me you’re sick of your school clothes already, sweetie! It’s only been a month.” A month, and each article of clothing was carefully negotiated before its purchase. Alex Reagan could be quite particular about the things she wore but within some semblance of reason. First grade was important in Alex’s eyes, but no so much that she needed to entirely give up her love of fluffy pink tutus.

“It’s for Halloween!” Alex insisted, looking from one parent to the other and back again. “We only have thirty days left till Halloween, and you don’t know what I’m gonna be yet!” Halloween was writ very large in little Alex’s imagination. She loved ghost stories and trick-or-treating and being someone else. The last several years had been her dressed as a witch, of course, but now it seemed she was ready to hang up the green face paint--or so Alice hoped, anyway. That stuff still ran a pale green line around the white ceramic of her tub from the previous year.

“So why do we need a suit, Alex?” Danny’s voice was more serious than Alice’s because someone had to be more of a rock than his wife. The two other Reagans had bonded over Alice’s tough stands more than once, so it was an appeal that Alex was making to him rather than to her mother. More than once, she’d learned about safety in numbers when it came to things like going to church on snowy winter days, and Daddy always tended to agree with her.

“I’m gonna be Lana Lois this year.” The words were a heavy pronouncement, as solemn and grave as any from church. “Lois is a reporter, and she needs a suit, so I need a suit, too.”

The words quickly released the tension, and Alice laughed. “Sure, honey, I can do that. I’ve got some fabric left over and can make you a suit, no problem.” Alex’s face split into a wide grin, and she was ready to rush towards her mother but stopped when Alice continued on. “Doing a Amazingman costume for Daddy is going to be harder!” Alice wanted to say she was up for the challenge, but Alex quickly interrupted with a violent shake of her head.

“Daddy. Can. Not. Be. Amazingman.” Using the full words and punctuating them with spaces only made Alice’s level of amusement more visible the longer Alex took to come to her point. “Amazingman is Lana’s boyfriend, Mommy!” The last words were hissed like a secret, and Alice bit down her laugh and shook her head as she went to the dishes in the sink to avoid laughing at her daughter.

Danny ignored the bubbles and splashes from the sink.

“But honey--we always go together! It’s our thing, right?” Long before, Danny had discovered that logic didn’t often--well, never--worked on his daughter, but he was still trying to be hopeful about it. Alex got her hope from her father, even if she didn’t get his good sense.

“Not. Amazingman. Daddy, do you promise?” Alex stared up at him expectantly until he nodded, and she followed that by putting her pinky into the space between them. “Pinky swear?”

“Pinky swear, munchkin.” He hooked his finger around hers. “But you’ve got to pinky swear that you won’t go looking for what it is I’ll actually be!”

For a moment, Alex stared, and her weight shifted back and forth in her sneakers. Secrets were her currency, and every time Christmas came close, Alex would go into full-on snoop mood. Now, Danny was telling her the same thing he’d tell her then. The shrewd look on her face reminded her father just how determined his daughter was. She bit her lip, then offered her pinky finger.

“Alex, this means no going into Mom’s sewing room unless she calls you in there.” He caught his daughter about to wind up at the mention of the guest room that Alice had repurposed as an occasional sewing room. “No, you don’t ‘go in there all the time,’ Alexandra. Don’t even think about saying it.”

Sighing, Alex opened her mouth to say something else, but her mother said, “Put the pout away, Alex. You know it doesn’t work on me. If you want this, you’re going to be good about it.”

“Okay,” Alex agreed after a very long moment. “I’ll try and stay out of there.”

Of course, Alex trying not to uncover a secret went against everything that she was, so she tried to be sneaky about it, snooping while her father was at work or her mother was cooking dinner, but for all of her efforts, she didn’t find anything. Oh, there was her suit in various stages of completion the closer they got to Halloween, but even Alex asking her mother to teach her to help didn’t yield any results. If there was a costume that her mother was creating for her father somewhere, Alex couldn’t find it.

The week of Halloween, Alex had grown despondent. At breakfast the day before, she finally managed to ask about it. Giving her father a pitiful look with her big brown eyes, she asked, “Daddy, you’re still going to go trick-or-treating with me, right?”

Kneeling down (and then stooping even further--Danny was tall), he looked into his little girl’s eyes. “Have I ever broken a promise to you, baby girl?” His voice matched the serious tone in Alex’s voice and face.

“No, but…” she began, raising her chin, and the flash of tears made her eyes gleam behind her glasses.

“But you snooped,” Danny filled in for her. “Of course you did, honey. But curiosity isn’t a sin! You just need to tone it down a bit. You know we told you not to look, but you looked anyway, didn’t you?”

“Yeah...but Daddy!” Her chin jutted out, and she frowned more harshly now with her disappointment and displeasure.

“But Alex, you need to remember that your words hold weight. Next time, we might not keep our promise if you don’t keep yours.”

“It was an unfair promise!” she protested immediately. “You knew I’d look! I had to look, Daddy! I had to know!”

Danny laughed softly. “Of course we knew, Alex, but you can’t always have your way. No more snooping, and we’ll have it ready for Friday, okay?”

When Friday night came, there was no sign of her father, not even when she put on the suit and the ruby slippers (they were the closest things to heels Alex had, and despite her begging her mother, there was no way Alice was going to put her daughter in heels for trick-or-treating; Alex was clumsy enough without them). She did manage to talk her mother into lipstick, and Alex was wiggling like a puppy while she waited for her father to come downstairs.

Before she saw him, there was the shutter flick of a camera and a flash of light that heralded Danny’s entrance down the stairs. When he stood at the bottom, Alex could see that his hair had been spray-painted red. His freckles matched hers, and he was wearing a bowtie and crewneck sweater. Breaking out into laughter, Alex threw her arms around him. “Johnny Oldson! Yes, Daddy, perfect!”

Picking her up and giving her a swing around by the crook of her arms, Danny laughed. “Every ace reporter deserves a good sidekick. So Lana needs her Johnny!”

Alex joined in the laughter, too, before Alice called out, “Well, before Johnny starts taking pictures of Lana with everyone else, I need to get a couple of you two together!” The two pulled faces before the last picture ended with Alex under her father’s arm like he was dragging her away from a burning building as he said in his booming voice, “Gotta save Lana from a story!”

As the night went on, Johnny Oldson took pictures of Lana with three different versions of Hawkeman, five Jesters, a Bug-man, an assortment of ghosts and ghouls, and finally with an Amazingril who caused Alex to blush as red as her lipstick.

After her bath and her teeth were brushed and her sugar rush had died down some, Alex just hugged her father tightly. “Thank you for being Johnny and chronicling my being Lana, Daddy. But you know what I realized tonight?”

“What’s that, baby girl?”

“I think that Chris Kenner is a better boyfriend than Amazingman. I’d rather have him.”

Danny snorted, choosing not to remind her that the two were one and the same. Instead, he said, “Well, I guess we’re gonna get to keep an eye out for Chris Kenner. Good night, sweetie.” He leaned down and kissed the top of her head. “Happy Halloween to my ace reporter.”