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jakrar: SV - Clark/Lex: The Justice League turns against Superman and imprisons him, and Lex has to rescue Clark (despite the enmity between them)“This is not what I planned on doing with my Saturday,” Lex said conversationally as his fingers floated across the keyboard. “As a matter of fact, I had to leave my business unattended this afternoon, and I had arranged a pleasant evening at the symphony with the Countess, to be followed by an even more pleasant night.” He paused, staring at the screen as if cracking the encryption by sheer force of will—a possibility that couldn’t entirely be excluded, come to think of it—and resumed typing. “The next time you name me your greatest enemy, Superman, consider that I threw away a valuable takeover opportunity, a performance by Yo-Yo Ma, and at least three excellent orgasms on your behalf.”
The Kryptonite force field released at last, and Clark took the opportunity to rip the gag out of his mouth—he blamed Batman, who probably feared that Clark would talk Wally into helping him escape if given half a chance—and then rip the rest of the restraints off. “What are you doing, Lex?”
The look Lex gave him was rich with contempt. “Obviously, the League has finally thrown off whatever vestiges of sanity its members possessed. I’m intervening to ensure that the balance of power remains appropriately positioned.”
Clark was pretty sure that the problem with the rest of the League was mind control. It often was. He was just grateful that the compulsion hadn’t been enough to override their respect for life, or at least that Batman hadn’t had time to rebuild the containment chamber to make it immediately lethal. He wasn’t quite sure which was more likely to have happened, and it wasn’t like he was going to get a real explanation out of Bruce when this was all over.
Lex was still sitting at the control station, leaning back in his chair as Clark stalked towards him. “Why not let them take me out? Without me in the way, you’d be able to do whatever you wanted to the rest of them.”
That earned him an eyeroll and crossed arms, unconscious imitation of Clark’s own Superman pose. “Your confidence in me is touching, though I imagine your comrades would be somewhat miffed by that assessment.”
Clark moved closer, because he was detecting some anomalies—Lex’s skin temperature was rising, his heartbeat quickening, his pupils dilating. Lex’s nostrils flared as he jerked his head so that he was looking over Clark’s shoulder—
Oh. Clark looked down and fully appreciated the extent to which the modified Kryptonite exposure had destroyed his enhanced suit. Since he didn’t get hot or cold, and he didn’t notice the subtle pressure of clothes unless he was paying attention, he hadn’t had reason to discover his nudity until Lex’s reaction had clued him in. It was a good thing that the years since Smallville had made him more confident; there’d been a time when Lex seeing him in his underwear had seemed like the end of the world. He wondered whether Bruce had known about this side effect of the containment field, and then decided that he might be better off leaving that question for later investigation.
There was still the issue of Lex’s apparent discomfort, which cried out for investigation—Lex was so cosmopolitan that Clark would have expected him to be able to carry on a chess game and a hostage negotiation standing naked on one leg. “Am I bothering you, Lex?”
“Every minute of your existence,” Lex snapped, which was fairly weak given that he’d just rescued Clark, and his annoyed squint said that he knew that as well as Clark did.
Clark double-checked with his X-ray vision and yes, Lex was reacting to his proximity. At least, Clark was pretty sure that the Countess wasn’t what was making Lex take an interest.
“Listen,” he said, “I’ve got to fix this thing with the League.”
“Brainworms sent by R’as al Ghul,” Lex said, like it had been ripped out of him. “Chill their bodies as fast as possible; that will preserve the human cells but kill the worms, which will then disintegrate naturally.”
“Thanks. And—ugh. Okay, so I’ll take care of that. And then maybe I can drop by and at least make sure the night ends the way you planned.”
The look on Lex’s face was totally worth the lingering Kryptonite nausea.
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meret: SPN - Dean reads Mystery Spot and finds out what happened. Sam had refused to talk about his own private Groundhog Day. Dean had got the point that he’d died a lot, in a lot of stupid ways. He’d figured that explained how much weirder Sam had been afterwards.
When he picked up Chuck’s account, he expected an embarrassing list of the Wile E. Coyote ways in which he’d died, and he wasn’t disappointed, except that Sam figured out it was the Trickster and confronted him only halfway through the book. That never happened—they always had to dick around long enough to make 180 pages, or thereabouts.
Sam hadn’t told him about the back half, the Wednesday and the months after it.
Dean found himself clutching the book, pressing it to his mouth like he was going to scream if he didn’t keep it in. Except that Dean wasn’t the one who’d suffered, this time. (Or had he been in Hell too, then? Had he been down long enough to turn into a demon, before the Trickster pressed rewind one last time? Chuck didn’t say, and Dean wasn’t about to call him up and demand to know the answer.)
The crazy thing was, there was no way he could say anything to Sam about it, not after so much time. Scar tissue couldn’t be treated the same way as new wounds. So much had come after—not even counting what happened to Dean, Sam had changed so much since Florida that Dean wouldn’t even know where to start.
He was still frozen when Sam came back from getting dinner, so rattled that he didn’t manage to hide the book before Sam saw. Sam jerked back, like seeing the name was enough to scare him, then carefully shut the door, turning his face away from Dean. By the time he’d finished unpacking the styrofoam containers and setting out the drinks, he looked no more troubled than usual.
The barbecue was good, but Dean didn’t get much pleasure out of it. “Sam—” he tried at last, when it was clear that Sam wasn’t going to be able to say a word until they’d—he didn’t even know what Sam wanted from him; not that he ever did, these days.
“I should have told you,” Sam grated out, staring down at his beer.
That wasn’t anything like what Dean had been expecting. “I’m not mad.” Of all the things Sam should have told him, this was pretty low on the list, and Dean didn’t blame him for wanting to just forget it all. “I’m just—you shouldn’t have had to go through that alone.”
Sam snorted, and Dean got why it was funny, or Winchester-funny anyway. Dean watched as Sam picked up his bottle cap and squeezed the edges with his fingertips so that they made red dents in his flesh. “I didn’t want to be that guy again, walking dead, so angry it was like I was frozen solid. So when you—when the hellhounds came, I tried to let it out. Let myself feel it. I got sloppy, and Ruby—”
Dean nodded, because he wasn’t going to make Sam recite again how Ruby had seduced and betrayed him. He’d known it was his fault that Sam had been put in that position, but the realization felt new again, a fresh spurt of guilt thinking about how the Trickster—Gabriel—had teed Sam up to be used, and Dean’d been just as vital to that part of it.
They could spend an eternity of repeating days cataloging all the ways they’d screwed up.
“I can’t turn back time,” he said, soft, and Sam looked up, confusion and the beginnings of irritation written across his face. “I don’t have angel powers, and I won’t ever. I got more regrets than there are miles on the highway.” He swallowed and forced himself to continue, even if he couldn’t keep meeting Sam’s eyes. “But I think, maybe, we need to forgive ourselves just as much as we need to forgive each other. We got played every which way. That’s history—fuck, that’s gospel.” He gestured at the book, abandoned on the bed. “So, you know, yeah, tell me next time, so I don’t have to read that godawful writing. But nobody knows how it ends, not yet. Who knows, maybe we’ve learned something by now.”
The smile he gave Sam started out weak, but when Sam returned it, Dean felt ten degrees warmer.
He abandoned the book with the rest of their debris when they left. Anything more he needed to know about what had happened, Sam would tell him.
cathexys: I like The Inside on a non shipping level...We never got Web's background...maybe have the team come across that?Paul found Rebecca’s file on Web by accident. If it was an accident to click on the file that said “Open Investigations,” anyway. He was only being proactive. Rebecca’d gone nearly two months without being cornered by a killer she was tracking. Like one of their unsubs, she was due.
Paul, Melody and Danny had discussed profiling Web before, in that half-joking way that meant they were all too scared to go through with it. The abyss had nothing on Web.
Rebecca hadn’t found Web’s foundational trauma. And she’d gone back far. School records, data about his parents and his—holy shit, his brother and sister; he came from an actual family--transcripts of interviews with his doctor and his first-grade teacher and the principal of his middle school. Notes on conversations with members of his Boy Scout troop and some of their parents. Statistics on reported fires and animal deaths in his neighborhood. Scanned copies of papers he’d written in college. Leases, FBI instructor evaluations, even a speeding ticket.
“You won’t find it.”
Paul jumped, more startled than guilty. He’d been so engaged that he’d forgotten that he wasn’t supposed to be here.
When he turned, Rebecca didn’t look surprised, or angry. But then she rarely did. When she had his full attention, she began again. “You won’t find it because it’s not there.”
“He hid it,” Paul inferred. Whatever trauma had made Web into the serial killer-without-portfolio, sadistic genius manipulator that he was, of course the first thing he’d have done with his position at the FBI would have been to erase his tracks, just like Rebecca but on a bigger scale.
“No.” Rebecca’s voice was, as usual when she was working, bell-like in its clarity, certain down to the ground. “It’s not there because it doesn’t exist. It never did.”
“Are we talking about the same thing?” Paul stared up at her. Sitting in her chair, he felt almost small: she loomed haughty and cold above him, skin doll-perfect, like a girl on a billboard. “I mean, something had to make Web into—what he is.”
“That’s what I thought,” Rebecca admitted, leaning over him, her arm brushing his shoulder as she took hold of the mouse and started closing documents. “But it’s not true.” She sounded—regretful? “He had a loving family, an idyllic upbringing, an unbroken record of success in school, and then in the FBI.”
“But—” Paul protested. There had to be—look at Rebecca herself, wringing a terrible brilliance from her own story, her own self-rescue.
“You thought he sees me as another version of himself,” she continued, inexorable. “Sometimes it’s not the circumstances, Paul. Sometimes it’s who you are.”
“Yeah, but Web--I mean, manipulativeness that extreme, the amorality and the insight—”
“You found where I’d written my password down,” Rebecca interrupted. “Now that they make me change it every two weeks, I can never remember it. It was in an unusual location, but you found it because you know where to look.”
Paul’s mouth snapped shut. He doubted he could get away with claiming she’d forgotten to lock her desktop down. He hadn’t been snooping. Rebecca would have had to have a personal life before he could have pried into it. “I don’t—what are you getting at?” Paul asked, hating the near-whine in his own voice.
“I’m damaged,” Rebecca said, matter-of-fact, pulling back as she finished logging out. He felt a chill where they were no longer touching. “I’d need to be fixed before I could take on Web’s authority, and we all know that would require too much downtime, if it’s possible at all. I’m not Web’s heir, Paul.”
He knew what she was about to say, and she knew he knew, but sometimes it was the words itself that made a thing real. More real than his doubts and his curses and the wall that had built itself between him and Karen. Real as his ambitions, real as his need to bring a perpetrator down. He closed his eyes and tried to feel sick, or guilty, but instead there was only the sense of a puzzle piece clicking neatly into place.
“You are.”
Also: Thanks to
norwich36 and pinkfinity for the Hanukkah gifts! And, okay, fine: if I came with a warning label, what would it say? (Let’s take “contents under pressure” as read.)
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