![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Section 1
Section 2
Part II: Gotham
So it is with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. – Emerson
Mercy stood in the doorway of Clark's office, her arms folded, looking larger than Clark knew she was. "What are you doing here?" he asked, his voice full of weary disgust.
She uncoiled, holding out a small envelope in her right hand. Like Lex, Mercy was a left-hander, and would never hold anything that wasn't deadly in her dominant hand. Clark knew this from bitter experience. That reminded him – he scanned her and found only two guns and no lead at all, a rarity for his encounters with her.
"Take it," she said. Her face had its usual determination, but her cheekbones looked as if they were about to cut through her skin. Two nights ago, she'd seemed tiny, sylph-like, splashed with Hope's blood.
"Why?" Clark prayed Lois would return with the coffee. He wished it had been his turn, though Mercy probably would just have waited.
Mercy rolled her eyes. "It's not Kryptonite, Mr. Kent."
No, just one last way to hurt me, Clark thought. "How is Hope?"
She looked away. "Recovering," she said huskily. "Thank you for asking." He noticed that she'd cut her hair, the neat braid replaced by a too-short style that still bore traces of a woman hacking away at herself in rage she couldn't otherwise express.
Turning back to Clark, Mercy stepped into the office, ignoring Clark's leap to his feet as only her due, and put the caramel-colored, unmarked envelope on the edge of his desk.
"The will's being read tomorrow at the LexCorp offices at three. I suggest you attend."
She turned around. Clark wasn't sure he'd ever seen her back. Her shoulder blades, prominent under her thin white blouse, were like folded wings. "I don't blame you," she said without turning, and left.
Clark sat and struggled to keep his Clark Kent face on. Lois might be back at any moment. Anyway, it wasn't as if he were a stranger to guilt.
When he looked into the envelope, he saw only a silver disc with Lex's handwriting on it. "C5," it said. Unwillingly, Clark rolled his chair over to the envelope, wondering about the fates of C1 through C4. He reached out, brushing his fingers over the smooth thick paper.
"Clark?" Lois fumbled with the coffees and bag of pastries at the doorway. Clark's hand automatically went to adjust his glasses as he hurried to help her. "What's the matter?" Their arms brushed as she looked up at him, her hazel eyes wide with concern.
It would be very easy to go home with her that night.
It would be much, much smarter to go to an anonymous club, one too tame for Superman to shut down, and head into the back room.
Clark was a smart guy.
"Don't take this the wrong way, Lois," he said, taking a cup from her, "but I could really use a hug."
Lois's expression dimmed. She blinked, hiding her eyes, then stepped forward to wrap her arms around him. "Sure, baby." Even her casual mischief was muted in response to his evident distress. Still holding a cup and the paper bag, she squeezed him tightly enough to interfere with a human's breathing and pressed her cheek against his chest.
Clark let his arms settle around her and closed his eyes. Lois smelled like sandalwood and oranges. She didn't ask – honestly, she must know, but Clark had a gift for keeping the people who loved him from talking about his plainest secrets – and she didn't let go.
A cleared throat from just outside the open door made Lois jump, and Clark let her go before she started to struggle. He raised his eyes to Perry's.
"Sorry to interrupt your little hug therapy session, but LexCorp's press office just announced a press conference in fifteen minutes," Perry said, gruff as ever. He believed that work was an anti-depressant. In his way, he wanted to help, even if he'd never understand Clark's grief.
"Sure, Chief," Clark said. Lois nodded, moving away.
"Son, a word –" Perry said.
"I'll get Jimmy," Lois offered, so Clark knew that he was visibly falling apart. Lois acknowledging nuance was a worse sign than a rain of toads. Taking her coffee, she swept past them, closing the door behind her with a thud.
Perry was looking across the office, staring at what Lois called the interstellar shipyard – awards of every size and shape, a miniature city in plastic, crystal and silver plate. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "It's a terrible thing to know you'll never get to finish with someone. To think that, if you'd only had more time –"
"Sir –" He talked just to keep Perry silent. Perry couldn't know what he was saying to Superman. More time might have let him think of a better plan, a plan that didn't end with fire and a greasy black ash where a man once was. "Lex and I were friends a long time ago. I always hoped he'd change back."
Perry nodded. "In the end, it was his choice. You can mourn that, Clark, but don't blame yourself."
Clark almost couldn't suppress a snort. "Thanks, Chief."
Perry scowled. "Well, I've said about all I mean to say on the topic. Go get Lane and get out there. The world hasn't stopped turning."
"Yeah," Clark agreed, and abandoned his coffee and subpar bran muffin along with Lex's disc.
****
Clark sent the final draft down to the Business editor and leaned back in his chair. Lois had given up on him over an hour ago, after one last offer to buy him a drink.
The envelope peeked at him from under a pile of corporate disclosure forms he could have sworn he'd placed dead on top of it. Maybe Lex was playing poltergeist.
"Okay," he said to the empty air. "Fine."
He tugged the envelope free and ripped it open. Lex's script was efficient, bold.
Clark shook his head, angry at himself for mooning. He checked again to ensure that the door was locked and loaded the disc into his computer.
There was only one file, lastwords. Clark had a moment of disbelief at Lex's high drama and then double-clicked.
Ice ages passed while Clark waited for his video player to start.
Lex's image appeared on screen, perhaps three feet back from the camera recording him. "Hello, Clark," he said, staring into the lens.
"If you're watching this, my death occurred under circumstances for which you might feel responsible. This message is to disabuse you of that notion.
"I refuse to be saved by you. My choices -- ill-advised as this message may show them to have been -- are my own. My successes and my failures are mine. Don't try to make them yours. If my death wasn't my own doing, then neither was my life."
He paused and drew a deep breath, but kept staring as if he could see through the lens, into the future. The video wasn't good enough to show the true color of his eyes, only meaningless gray pixels.
"I'm not leaving you any money. The last thing you need is deep pockets. My will does give you a number of files. Don't ignore them. They contain my analyses for Superman's major living enemies and the other members of the Justice League. As you well know, even your best friends can turn on you, and I suspect Superman hasn't prepared for that contingency as well as the Batman." By the time he said 'Batman,' his tone was acidic enough to eat through metal.
"If your conscience rejects this, I suggest you at least share the files with the other League members. They might be interested to know their own vulnerabilities.
"I never forgave you for looking down on me," he said abruptly. Clark heard a crunch as the mouse pulverized in his hand. "You think it was the secrets, but it was the condescension. You thought I didn’t understand your morality because obviously if I understood, I’d agree with you. So there must be something wrong with me, because my father screwed me up – oh, and I read your series on head injuries and criminality, for those of us not strong enough for free will. I refuse to be defined by your simplistic principles, Clark.
"I wish I could be around to see you learn that you can save lives, but you can't save people. Well," he leaned forward, half smiling, "in fact I wish I could live forever, but obviously I missed out on that. So good luck, and try not to let anyone else kill you. I'd be upset to see a lesser mind succeed where I failed."
The file froze on Lex's most annoying smirk, the one that made Clark want to grab some red Kryptonite just so he could give Lex the hiding he so thoroughly deserved. Clark stared at the image for a minute, then ejected the disc and melted it to slag in his palm. He wiped the remains on a wad of paper napkins left over from lunch, hid it and the crumbs of the mouse in the trash, shut his computer down using the keyboard, tidied his desk, rearranged the pens on his blotter --
And stood up, realizing that he was about to destroy his office with a few strategically aimed punches. He activated the image distorter to produce his uniform, flew out the window, and sped into the night.
Clark flew high, wanting to feel the cold, not breathing. The emotion started to bleed off as he sliced through the air.
What an idiot, Clark thought, veering off course and heading into space. He's being unfair. He's the one who talked about being saved. He's the one who elected me to be his conscience. And he does understand morals. He *wants* to be judged and found wanting.
These thoughts, and variations, cycled through his head as he flew to the asteroid belt, where he pummeled rocks into smaller rocks for a few hours, until he felt a little better.
****
"Duck!"
Clark obeyed Batman's command and felt the Kryptonite-tipped missile whoosh over him, leaving mild nausea in its wake. He kicked out, sending one robot crashing into the next, its purple beanie-like antenna spinning madly.
The little machines were no match for either of the superheroes, but there were hundreds of them. Cleaning them out of Gotham's main park was taking too much time, especially since they had to break off the systematic destruction every time one of the robots grabbed a hapless human and threatened to slice him or her to ribbons.
"What are these things, anyway?" he called out to Batman as the Caped Crusader vaulted over him and took out another three robots. Now that Clark thought about it, they resembled the creatures he and Lex used to watch on Robot Wars, all slightly different but equipped with cutting and crushing devices.
"Purple is the Joker's color, but he isn't usually this mechanical," Batman yelled back. He wasn't even breathing hard. Clark suspected that if he listened, he'd hear a resting heart rate. Batman was pretty frightening, even for a metahuman. Maybe lack of affect was part of his power set – which remained murky, even after months of on-and-off cooperation, since Batman was very fond of his gadgets and refused to engage in friendly banter about his abilities.
The robots were almost vanquished, most lying shattered around the park. He saw another missile heading towards him and swerved to avoid it.
Agony convulsed him.
As he plummeted, he realized that he'd been lulled by the one-missile-at-a-time strategy. The Kryptonite slurry from the missile he *hadn't* noticed had splashed all over his suit, sticking like mud.
Impact was worse than the first time he'd been hit by a car. Robotic apparatus stabbed into his back and legs.
Half-conscious, Clark rolled, trying to scrape off the Kryptonite. Even while he was biting on his lip to avoid screaming, he had to admire the tactic. Unlike the rocks, this Kryptonite had been modified somehow to make it sticky and clinging. Still, he was able to wipe most of it on the grass of the park.
"Need help?"
Batman stood above him, unsmiling, though Clark had the feeling he was enjoying his superiority.
"Got an extra cape?" he choked out.
Batman turned his head. "Better idea," he said and loped off. Clark let his head drop to the ground. He was inches from a robot head, its boxy purple form almost cheery now that it was attached from its killer body. Blue lights still winked from deep in the robot's eyes.
Clark tried not to throw up. Kryptonite never got any easier to handle.
A jet of water hit him with the force of a lightning strike, leaving him gasping and spitting water. The spray played over his body, washing the sludge away. He'd have to remember to get Batman to clean up the area.
Clark struggled to his feet, holding up his hand to keep the water out of his eyes. Not that it hurt, but it was annoying. Batman turned off the firehose and dropped it. Clark would have returned it to the firefighters, but Batman's town, Batman's rules.
"What's that smell?" he asked, shaking his head to throw off excess water. Because he could shake very fast, he was dry in under a second.
They looked around. Gray smoke was rising from the robot corpses, as if something inside was melting.
Acting on an intuition, Clark bent and grabbed the head he'd been staring at. It was soaked with water and didn't appear to be disintegrating like the others.
"I want to take a closer look at this," he said.
Batman shrugged. "Don't pay too much attention to the Joker's tricks, Superman. Part of being insane is that his acts are often meaningless."
Your acts are rarely meaningless, Clark thought. Still, he supposed he ought to be grateful that Batman had condescended to give the League a call; even if he was sneaky and sullen, he put the welfare of his city ahead of his paranoia, and that spoke well of him. Instead of saying anything, he launched himself into the sky, clutching the water-cooled metal.
****
The Fortress's lights flickered dubiously when Clark proffered the remains, which looked like a mechanical Medusa's head, trailing wires from the neck and silver chaff-like ribbons from its scalp.
"Can you tell who made it?" Clark asked, placing it in an alcove that conveniently opened for him.
There was a longer pause than Clark expected.
"There are no marks of geographic origin," the Fortress said. "But there is an anomalous configuration on the central microprocessor."
"Anomalous?"
A section of dove-gray, translucent wall turned white, then resolved into an image of a microchip.
"I don't –"
"Magnifying," the Fortress interrupted. The chip grew bigger in jumps. Finally, they were down to the molecular level.
"Oh God," Clark said, staring at the letters written on the corner.
A.J.L., surrounded by LexCorp's sunflower logo.
"This came from LexCorp?"
"There are no matches in my records," the Fortress replied. "In the past, LexCorp chips have been assembled in California and have borne manufacturer's marks that are absent here. None of the secret LexCorp labs of which I am aware could produce this type of chip."
Clark sat in the chair the Fortress extended for him. "Could there be other labs?"
"Naturally," the Fortress said, as if speaking to a slow child. "However, Mr. Luthor did appear quite confident of his computer security, and it seems unlikely that he would keep records of his genetic and Kryptonite-based experiments on his system and not of this comparatively mild project."
He closed his eyes, imagining Lex's skeletal hand reaching out from the grave to tug him into another disaster. Not that there'd been enough of Lex to bury.
"There is a match to other aspects of the construction," the Fortress continued, sounding almost wary. "The configuration is almost identical to the robotic soldiers used by the Joker two years ago to attack the First National Bank of Gotham."
Lex and the Joker had worked together? That didn't feel right. Lex had always relied on being the more unstable one in any alliance, to keep his allies afraid of crossing him. If they had joined hands, however, there might be other nasty leftovers from the alliance. It had only been three months since Lex died, and Lex always had plans in multiple stages of preparation.
"That Kryptonite sludge was pretty effective," Clark said, changing the subject because there was nothing he could do about Lex's unknown plans. "Do you have any countermeasures?"
"*I* do not."
The emphasis was bizarre. "What?"
The lights in the wall dimmed slightly, as if the Fortress were lowering its eyes in embarrassment. A building shouldn't have a personality, in Clark's opinion, but the Fortress rarely asked for that. "You instructed me to secure Mr. Luthor's files. You did not specify that I was not to assimilate their contents."
"Lex? Lex created that stuff, too?"
"I believe so. He also developed a formula to counteract Kryptonite. I can produce new uniforms impregnated with the formula, which should improve your Kryptonite resistance, though it cannot eliminate your vulnerability."
Clark gaped at the blank wall. "You didn't think to *tell* me before now?"
"You have not always been rational on subjects related to Mr. Luthor." Clark didn't know why the Fortress sounded so miffed. It wasn't at risk from the villain of the week.
"Well – just make me a new uniform, all right?"
"As you will, Kal-El."
Clark folded his arms and frowned, although it was a lot harder to do without a face on which to focus. Not rational? Lex's files were dangerous, which was why he hadn't read them. Clark Kent, he heard his mom's voice say, tell the truth now. Which was sort of ironic, since it wasn't the kind of thing she would really say, under the circumstances.
"Anything else in there I should know?" He could be rational.
"Nothing immediate, but I will analyze further. Some of Mr. Luthor's suggestions are quite promising. It is a shame –"
"*Don't* push it," he said, and the Fortress shut up.
****
Clark considered calling Bruce. Someone ordinary, if a billionaire could be called ordinary, to distract him from the things in his life that separated him from humanity. He went so far, once or twice, as to dial the first eight digits; if Bruce had been in the same area code, it would have been too late to stop.
Every scrap of sense remaining to him counseled against reaching out to Bruce. He didn't need to put a new obsession in place of the old one. And it could easily have slipped into obsession: too much of what he saw in Bruce was the surface smoothness provided by inheriting more money than God. He was looking for a dead man, and that was neither fair to Bruce nor likely to bring Clark any satisfaction, in the end.
Instead, he went out to meet bodies. Clark lost count of the people, lithe blonde women and gym-perfect dark men, splayed against graffiti-tattooed walls, bracing sweating hands on the doors of metal bathroom stalls, kneeling on concrete among cigarette stubs and broken bottles, grunting or sighing or saying words he wouldn't hear as he moved in the basic rhythm his kind shared with humans, little amnesias like a string of fireworks across the sky. His only rule was the same as always: no metahumans. At this point, the scan was second nature. It was simpler never to approach anyone whose cells screamed out mutation. Detecting the sometimes-subtle variations was a hard-won skill, developed to defend himself from potentially dangerous encounters.
A few times he chased the night halfway around the world -- all clubs are gray in the dark – returning to the Planet midday, still stinking of alcohol and ash, showering in the bathroom by Perry's office, coughing out some story to appease Perry and excuse his debauched condition, the words already dead black and white in his head before they appeared on the printed page.
He fucked until he was sick of it, not tired because Clark never tired, not any more. But when the contempt he felt at night began to spill over to the people he rescued during the day, he knew he had to stop. For a while.
He did not sleep with Lois. It was the one thing that made him think that he still might be a good man. She had such fire, lust for life and for knowledge, as if the two were entirely the same. He could have flown her above Metropolis and shown her the stars. But he was twisted out of true; he would have destroyed her, crumpled her like a lump of coal in his fist into something harder, brighter, and smaller, feeling the killing pressure all along.
Lex would have been happy. He'd finally managed to warp Clark's life as thoroughly as he thought Clark had mangled his.
****
Then the Joker released a virus that turned its victims hypoxia-purple, but didn't kill them.
"It is undoubtedly Mr. Luthor's handiwork," the Fortress said unhappily through its uplink to League HQ. "Portions of the RNA were taken directly from genetically modified organisms patented by LexCorp."
Batman's million-yard stare stayed unchanged.
"I don't understand," Clark said, pacing around the room. The stars, usually so beautiful to him, were just another distraction. "When did he have time to do all this?"
"He didn't," Batman said, over the Fortress's crisp, "Unknown."
Clark turned to stare at him. He tried not to look at Batman too hard because the man was, frankly, disturbing, but they were alone and Clark couldn't pretend to watch another League member instead.
"Did you see a body? I know they buried an empty coffin."
The wall of flame jumped up in Clark's memory, blue-white. The fire had been hot enough to melt brick. By the time he'd put it out, there'd been nothing left to bury. "I saw him on top of the building," he said. "There was no way –"
"Are you *sure*?" Batman pressed. Clark tried very hard not to clench his fists.
"It wouldn't make any sense," he protested. "Luthor had everything going his way – a popular public image, tremendous wealth – why would he fake his own death?"
"But could it have been done?"
Batman was, Clark reminded himself, far more experienced with crazies than Clark.
He forced his mind back to that awful day. The terrorists had appeared out of nowhere, taking two floors of LexCorp hostage and threatening to blow the entire building. They'd taken out Hope and separated Mercy from Lex, testament to their skills if not their ethics. Clark had suspected some deal between them and Lex gone wrong, but it didn't matter once innocent (or nearly so, given that they were mostly LexCorp employees) lives were at stake.
They'd prepared for an assault on Metropolis, each wearing chunks of Kryptonite cadged from who-knows-where – one reason Clark suspected a Lexian plot gone wrong. They hadn't counted on Clark's specially constructed lead box, an innovation the Fortress had suggested, that could swallow the rocks easily. If Clark approached at speed with the box properly aimed, he could insulate the Kryptonite in an inch of lead before he had time to feel the effects.
He'd sped through the building like a character from a video game, gobbling Kryptonite, defusing bombs and knocking out terrorists faster than they could see to respond, but somehow he'd missed a few. Too many. By the time he got to the roof, where the ringleaders and Lex were waiting for a getaway helicopter, they must have known it was futile, and one of them had chosen death *and* dishonor, triggering the bombs planted all over the roof and a few floors down. Clark had arrived in the open just in time to see the conflagration begin and realize that he'd have to deal with eight separate rocks in close proximity where the terrorists were bunched together around Lex, too much to handle even with superspeed. Given time, he could probably figure something out, but the whole building might go as the structural supports melted and collapsed onto the lower floors.
Three thousand people worked in the LexCorp tower, and the terrorists had refused to allow evacuation, mining the entrance to deter rescue missions.
Clark had turned from Lex's expressionless face, already washed in flame, and plummeted to the ground to grab a truck filled with fire-suppressant foam and hold it in position over the burning roof.
One of the terrorists couldn't face death by fire, and jumped, probably dead before he hit. Clark doubted that he would have flown to the man's rescue if he'd seen him in time.
That was all beside the point. He focused on those last glimpses – he'd seen Lex and the others, and then been gone over three minutes, because the truck required some delicate maneuvering.
"He could have been pulled out," he admitted at last. "If someone was very careful and very lucky. Can we pull all the footage from the news copters? One of them might have caught a rescue attempt."
The Fortress took this as a command addressed to it. "There is no available record of the aerial view from that side of the building at the relevant time."
"That's impossible," Clark said. "It was like rush hour up there. I nearly banged into about five helicopters, and there were more not much further off." They'd been thick as fruit flies around a bowl of week-old apples, interfering with the firefighting. He hadn't been a good mood, to say the very least, and had actually thought of shoving the more aggressive ones aside as they tried to outdo each other in closeups of Metropolis's own hero saving the day, mostly, once again.
"There's no *available* record," Batman said. "That doesn't mean that no records were made."
"Only that they were deleted," Clark finished. "So, what now?"
Batman turned to look at the computer screen where he'd pulled up mug shots of the terrorists Clark had captured. "I think we ought to have a chat with some of these men, don't you?"
****
Clark was working on a story in his office when a wave of nausea hit him. He looked around and saw that the vault in the old LuthorCorp building was open. Lionel's old office was lit up, teeming with workers, as Kryptonite bars were piled onto pallets and removed. A dapper man in an elegant suit – or perhaps an elegant man in a dapper suit – watched over the operation with interest. Clark looked closer and identified him as a fellow named Grossman, one of the directors of LexCorp, someone who'd been with LuthorCorp for years before that. Someone who'd spent hours every day close to Lex and who'd probably never known who Lex really was.
Clark figured that with Lex gone, the new management saw no reason to spend so much money and time on this strange mineral with no known industrial applications. If LexCorp's corporate culture hadn't changed, the stuff would probably be dumped in some isolated location, the regulators bribed not to see anything, and Clark would have to find it and get the other superheroes to clean it up.
The vault swung closed and Mr. Grossman locked it, then made a call. Shortly thereafter, while Clark was feeling the Kryptonite as it moved down the building in a freight elevator, men started wheeling expensive furniture into the office. Lex had left the room unoccupied, maybe as a symbol that he wasn't his father and didn't need anything of Lionel's, but a location as attractive as that office couldn't have stayed empty without Lex's need for petty revenge. So now someone was moving up in the world, literally and symbolically.
It kept getting shoved in his face that Lex was gone. Pretty soon they'd probably change the company's name to something futuristic and focus-group-tested, and then there would only be the monument in the Old Metropolis Cemetery, that useless pillar of white stone, to show that Lex had existed. That, and a few pictures in his scrapbook, the pages stuck together because he hadn't looked at them in years, and a section of railing on a bridge just a little bit newer than the rest.
He busied himself cleaning up the office, throwing out all the piles of printouts from old stories and stories that never worked out. Ancient, dried-out coffee cups and crumpled napkins, white plastic spoons and sugar packets, Post-Its and pen caps, until he'd filled his trash can and the cans in the offices to both sides of his and had to go get a bigger bin from Maintenance.
There was so much he'd let slide. What had he been waiting for?
"Kent!"
Clark turned and looked up at Lois, standing in the doorway to his office. She was dressed in a black track suit with white racing stripes, a white exercise top – and open-toed chunky black sandals high enough to induce nosebleeds (not to mention fetishes).
Her toenails, he noted, were a candy-apple red that clashed with the burgundy of her nails.
"What?" she snapped.
The feeling that his balance was off from the Kryptonite, which had dogged him as he cleaned, now made him incautious. "You look like Sporty Spice."
She actually spluttered. Then she drew breath, like a dragon gearing up to spit fire. "I was going to the gym, and then Jimmy emailed about the LexCorp reorganization – I didn't have time to change, and I can run in these just *fine*, and what are you, the fashion critic?" The end of the sentence was a lot louder than the beginning.
Lois rarely allowed him opportunities like this. "You didn't have time to change, but you did have time for high heels. Wait," he said, pretending to have a sudden insight, "you just can't stand to be a centimeter shorter than possible, can you?"
She looked away, busted, her cheeks pink. "I hate you. You are hated by me. Just so we're clear on that." Her embarrassment fascinated him, since in general she not only had no shame, but actually generated some sort of field that sucked shame out of her hapless interviewees, which was the only explanation for half the things she got them to say.
"Absolutely understood." He hesitated, then decided that he was already in so much trouble that he might as well enjoy it. "Sporty."
She darted forward and thwacked him on the shoulder with her purse before launching into her latest theory of LexCorp's shenanigans. Reporting on the story, which involved the internal machinations of the board of directors and the heads of the three biggest divisions, consumed most of the next twenty-four hours. Lois got a chance to demonstrate that she could run in those heels, not that Clark had doubted for a second.
Section 2
Part II: Gotham
So it is with this calamity; it does not touch me; something which I fancied was a part of me, which could not be torn away without tearing me nor enlarged without enriching me, falls off from me and leaves no scar. It was caducous. – Emerson
Mercy stood in the doorway of Clark's office, her arms folded, looking larger than Clark knew she was. "What are you doing here?" he asked, his voice full of weary disgust.
She uncoiled, holding out a small envelope in her right hand. Like Lex, Mercy was a left-hander, and would never hold anything that wasn't deadly in her dominant hand. Clark knew this from bitter experience. That reminded him – he scanned her and found only two guns and no lead at all, a rarity for his encounters with her.
"Take it," she said. Her face had its usual determination, but her cheekbones looked as if they were about to cut through her skin. Two nights ago, she'd seemed tiny, sylph-like, splashed with Hope's blood.
"Why?" Clark prayed Lois would return with the coffee. He wished it had been his turn, though Mercy probably would just have waited.
Mercy rolled her eyes. "It's not Kryptonite, Mr. Kent."
No, just one last way to hurt me, Clark thought. "How is Hope?"
She looked away. "Recovering," she said huskily. "Thank you for asking." He noticed that she'd cut her hair, the neat braid replaced by a too-short style that still bore traces of a woman hacking away at herself in rage she couldn't otherwise express.
Turning back to Clark, Mercy stepped into the office, ignoring Clark's leap to his feet as only her due, and put the caramel-colored, unmarked envelope on the edge of his desk.
"The will's being read tomorrow at the LexCorp offices at three. I suggest you attend."
She turned around. Clark wasn't sure he'd ever seen her back. Her shoulder blades, prominent under her thin white blouse, were like folded wings. "I don't blame you," she said without turning, and left.
Clark sat and struggled to keep his Clark Kent face on. Lois might be back at any moment. Anyway, it wasn't as if he were a stranger to guilt.
When he looked into the envelope, he saw only a silver disc with Lex's handwriting on it. "C5," it said. Unwillingly, Clark rolled his chair over to the envelope, wondering about the fates of C1 through C4. He reached out, brushing his fingers over the smooth thick paper.
"Clark?" Lois fumbled with the coffees and bag of pastries at the doorway. Clark's hand automatically went to adjust his glasses as he hurried to help her. "What's the matter?" Their arms brushed as she looked up at him, her hazel eyes wide with concern.
It would be very easy to go home with her that night.
It would be much, much smarter to go to an anonymous club, one too tame for Superman to shut down, and head into the back room.
Clark was a smart guy.
"Don't take this the wrong way, Lois," he said, taking a cup from her, "but I could really use a hug."
Lois's expression dimmed. She blinked, hiding her eyes, then stepped forward to wrap her arms around him. "Sure, baby." Even her casual mischief was muted in response to his evident distress. Still holding a cup and the paper bag, she squeezed him tightly enough to interfere with a human's breathing and pressed her cheek against his chest.
Clark let his arms settle around her and closed his eyes. Lois smelled like sandalwood and oranges. She didn't ask – honestly, she must know, but Clark had a gift for keeping the people who loved him from talking about his plainest secrets – and she didn't let go.
A cleared throat from just outside the open door made Lois jump, and Clark let her go before she started to struggle. He raised his eyes to Perry's.
"Sorry to interrupt your little hug therapy session, but LexCorp's press office just announced a press conference in fifteen minutes," Perry said, gruff as ever. He believed that work was an anti-depressant. In his way, he wanted to help, even if he'd never understand Clark's grief.
"Sure, Chief," Clark said. Lois nodded, moving away.
"Son, a word –" Perry said.
"I'll get Jimmy," Lois offered, so Clark knew that he was visibly falling apart. Lois acknowledging nuance was a worse sign than a rain of toads. Taking her coffee, she swept past them, closing the door behind her with a thud.
Perry was looking across the office, staring at what Lois called the interstellar shipyard – awards of every size and shape, a miniature city in plastic, crystal and silver plate. He stuck his hands in his pockets and rocked back on his heels. "It's a terrible thing to know you'll never get to finish with someone. To think that, if you'd only had more time –"
"Sir –" He talked just to keep Perry silent. Perry couldn't know what he was saying to Superman. More time might have let him think of a better plan, a plan that didn't end with fire and a greasy black ash where a man once was. "Lex and I were friends a long time ago. I always hoped he'd change back."
Perry nodded. "In the end, it was his choice. You can mourn that, Clark, but don't blame yourself."
Clark almost couldn't suppress a snort. "Thanks, Chief."
Perry scowled. "Well, I've said about all I mean to say on the topic. Go get Lane and get out there. The world hasn't stopped turning."
"Yeah," Clark agreed, and abandoned his coffee and subpar bran muffin along with Lex's disc.
****
Clark sent the final draft down to the Business editor and leaned back in his chair. Lois had given up on him over an hour ago, after one last offer to buy him a drink.
The envelope peeked at him from under a pile of corporate disclosure forms he could have sworn he'd placed dead on top of it. Maybe Lex was playing poltergeist.
"Okay," he said to the empty air. "Fine."
He tugged the envelope free and ripped it open. Lex's script was efficient, bold.
Clark shook his head, angry at himself for mooning. He checked again to ensure that the door was locked and loaded the disc into his computer.
There was only one file, lastwords. Clark had a moment of disbelief at Lex's high drama and then double-clicked.
Ice ages passed while Clark waited for his video player to start.
Lex's image appeared on screen, perhaps three feet back from the camera recording him. "Hello, Clark," he said, staring into the lens.
"If you're watching this, my death occurred under circumstances for which you might feel responsible. This message is to disabuse you of that notion.
"I refuse to be saved by you. My choices -- ill-advised as this message may show them to have been -- are my own. My successes and my failures are mine. Don't try to make them yours. If my death wasn't my own doing, then neither was my life."
He paused and drew a deep breath, but kept staring as if he could see through the lens, into the future. The video wasn't good enough to show the true color of his eyes, only meaningless gray pixels.
"I'm not leaving you any money. The last thing you need is deep pockets. My will does give you a number of files. Don't ignore them. They contain my analyses for Superman's major living enemies and the other members of the Justice League. As you well know, even your best friends can turn on you, and I suspect Superman hasn't prepared for that contingency as well as the Batman." By the time he said 'Batman,' his tone was acidic enough to eat through metal.
"If your conscience rejects this, I suggest you at least share the files with the other League members. They might be interested to know their own vulnerabilities.
"I never forgave you for looking down on me," he said abruptly. Clark heard a crunch as the mouse pulverized in his hand. "You think it was the secrets, but it was the condescension. You thought I didn’t understand your morality because obviously if I understood, I’d agree with you. So there must be something wrong with me, because my father screwed me up – oh, and I read your series on head injuries and criminality, for those of us not strong enough for free will. I refuse to be defined by your simplistic principles, Clark.
"I wish I could be around to see you learn that you can save lives, but you can't save people. Well," he leaned forward, half smiling, "in fact I wish I could live forever, but obviously I missed out on that. So good luck, and try not to let anyone else kill you. I'd be upset to see a lesser mind succeed where I failed."
The file froze on Lex's most annoying smirk, the one that made Clark want to grab some red Kryptonite just so he could give Lex the hiding he so thoroughly deserved. Clark stared at the image for a minute, then ejected the disc and melted it to slag in his palm. He wiped the remains on a wad of paper napkins left over from lunch, hid it and the crumbs of the mouse in the trash, shut his computer down using the keyboard, tidied his desk, rearranged the pens on his blotter --
And stood up, realizing that he was about to destroy his office with a few strategically aimed punches. He activated the image distorter to produce his uniform, flew out the window, and sped into the night.
Clark flew high, wanting to feel the cold, not breathing. The emotion started to bleed off as he sliced through the air.
What an idiot, Clark thought, veering off course and heading into space. He's being unfair. He's the one who talked about being saved. He's the one who elected me to be his conscience. And he does understand morals. He *wants* to be judged and found wanting.
These thoughts, and variations, cycled through his head as he flew to the asteroid belt, where he pummeled rocks into smaller rocks for a few hours, until he felt a little better.
****
"Duck!"
Clark obeyed Batman's command and felt the Kryptonite-tipped missile whoosh over him, leaving mild nausea in its wake. He kicked out, sending one robot crashing into the next, its purple beanie-like antenna spinning madly.
The little machines were no match for either of the superheroes, but there were hundreds of them. Cleaning them out of Gotham's main park was taking too much time, especially since they had to break off the systematic destruction every time one of the robots grabbed a hapless human and threatened to slice him or her to ribbons.
"What are these things, anyway?" he called out to Batman as the Caped Crusader vaulted over him and took out another three robots. Now that Clark thought about it, they resembled the creatures he and Lex used to watch on Robot Wars, all slightly different but equipped with cutting and crushing devices.
"Purple is the Joker's color, but he isn't usually this mechanical," Batman yelled back. He wasn't even breathing hard. Clark suspected that if he listened, he'd hear a resting heart rate. Batman was pretty frightening, even for a metahuman. Maybe lack of affect was part of his power set – which remained murky, even after months of on-and-off cooperation, since Batman was very fond of his gadgets and refused to engage in friendly banter about his abilities.
The robots were almost vanquished, most lying shattered around the park. He saw another missile heading towards him and swerved to avoid it.
Agony convulsed him.
As he plummeted, he realized that he'd been lulled by the one-missile-at-a-time strategy. The Kryptonite slurry from the missile he *hadn't* noticed had splashed all over his suit, sticking like mud.
Impact was worse than the first time he'd been hit by a car. Robotic apparatus stabbed into his back and legs.
Half-conscious, Clark rolled, trying to scrape off the Kryptonite. Even while he was biting on his lip to avoid screaming, he had to admire the tactic. Unlike the rocks, this Kryptonite had been modified somehow to make it sticky and clinging. Still, he was able to wipe most of it on the grass of the park.
"Need help?"
Batman stood above him, unsmiling, though Clark had the feeling he was enjoying his superiority.
"Got an extra cape?" he choked out.
Batman turned his head. "Better idea," he said and loped off. Clark let his head drop to the ground. He was inches from a robot head, its boxy purple form almost cheery now that it was attached from its killer body. Blue lights still winked from deep in the robot's eyes.
Clark tried not to throw up. Kryptonite never got any easier to handle.
A jet of water hit him with the force of a lightning strike, leaving him gasping and spitting water. The spray played over his body, washing the sludge away. He'd have to remember to get Batman to clean up the area.
Clark struggled to his feet, holding up his hand to keep the water out of his eyes. Not that it hurt, but it was annoying. Batman turned off the firehose and dropped it. Clark would have returned it to the firefighters, but Batman's town, Batman's rules.
"What's that smell?" he asked, shaking his head to throw off excess water. Because he could shake very fast, he was dry in under a second.
They looked around. Gray smoke was rising from the robot corpses, as if something inside was melting.
Acting on an intuition, Clark bent and grabbed the head he'd been staring at. It was soaked with water and didn't appear to be disintegrating like the others.
"I want to take a closer look at this," he said.
Batman shrugged. "Don't pay too much attention to the Joker's tricks, Superman. Part of being insane is that his acts are often meaningless."
Your acts are rarely meaningless, Clark thought. Still, he supposed he ought to be grateful that Batman had condescended to give the League a call; even if he was sneaky and sullen, he put the welfare of his city ahead of his paranoia, and that spoke well of him. Instead of saying anything, he launched himself into the sky, clutching the water-cooled metal.
****
The Fortress's lights flickered dubiously when Clark proffered the remains, which looked like a mechanical Medusa's head, trailing wires from the neck and silver chaff-like ribbons from its scalp.
"Can you tell who made it?" Clark asked, placing it in an alcove that conveniently opened for him.
There was a longer pause than Clark expected.
"There are no marks of geographic origin," the Fortress said. "But there is an anomalous configuration on the central microprocessor."
"Anomalous?"
A section of dove-gray, translucent wall turned white, then resolved into an image of a microchip.
"I don't –"
"Magnifying," the Fortress interrupted. The chip grew bigger in jumps. Finally, they were down to the molecular level.
"Oh God," Clark said, staring at the letters written on the corner.
A.J.L., surrounded by LexCorp's sunflower logo.
"This came from LexCorp?"
"There are no matches in my records," the Fortress replied. "In the past, LexCorp chips have been assembled in California and have borne manufacturer's marks that are absent here. None of the secret LexCorp labs of which I am aware could produce this type of chip."
Clark sat in the chair the Fortress extended for him. "Could there be other labs?"
"Naturally," the Fortress said, as if speaking to a slow child. "However, Mr. Luthor did appear quite confident of his computer security, and it seems unlikely that he would keep records of his genetic and Kryptonite-based experiments on his system and not of this comparatively mild project."
He closed his eyes, imagining Lex's skeletal hand reaching out from the grave to tug him into another disaster. Not that there'd been enough of Lex to bury.
"There is a match to other aspects of the construction," the Fortress continued, sounding almost wary. "The configuration is almost identical to the robotic soldiers used by the Joker two years ago to attack the First National Bank of Gotham."
Lex and the Joker had worked together? That didn't feel right. Lex had always relied on being the more unstable one in any alliance, to keep his allies afraid of crossing him. If they had joined hands, however, there might be other nasty leftovers from the alliance. It had only been three months since Lex died, and Lex always had plans in multiple stages of preparation.
"That Kryptonite sludge was pretty effective," Clark said, changing the subject because there was nothing he could do about Lex's unknown plans. "Do you have any countermeasures?"
"*I* do not."
The emphasis was bizarre. "What?"
The lights in the wall dimmed slightly, as if the Fortress were lowering its eyes in embarrassment. A building shouldn't have a personality, in Clark's opinion, but the Fortress rarely asked for that. "You instructed me to secure Mr. Luthor's files. You did not specify that I was not to assimilate their contents."
"Lex? Lex created that stuff, too?"
"I believe so. He also developed a formula to counteract Kryptonite. I can produce new uniforms impregnated with the formula, which should improve your Kryptonite resistance, though it cannot eliminate your vulnerability."
Clark gaped at the blank wall. "You didn't think to *tell* me before now?"
"You have not always been rational on subjects related to Mr. Luthor." Clark didn't know why the Fortress sounded so miffed. It wasn't at risk from the villain of the week.
"Well – just make me a new uniform, all right?"
"As you will, Kal-El."
Clark folded his arms and frowned, although it was a lot harder to do without a face on which to focus. Not rational? Lex's files were dangerous, which was why he hadn't read them. Clark Kent, he heard his mom's voice say, tell the truth now. Which was sort of ironic, since it wasn't the kind of thing she would really say, under the circumstances.
"Anything else in there I should know?" He could be rational.
"Nothing immediate, but I will analyze further. Some of Mr. Luthor's suggestions are quite promising. It is a shame –"
"*Don't* push it," he said, and the Fortress shut up.
****
Clark considered calling Bruce. Someone ordinary, if a billionaire could be called ordinary, to distract him from the things in his life that separated him from humanity. He went so far, once or twice, as to dial the first eight digits; if Bruce had been in the same area code, it would have been too late to stop.
Every scrap of sense remaining to him counseled against reaching out to Bruce. He didn't need to put a new obsession in place of the old one. And it could easily have slipped into obsession: too much of what he saw in Bruce was the surface smoothness provided by inheriting more money than God. He was looking for a dead man, and that was neither fair to Bruce nor likely to bring Clark any satisfaction, in the end.
Instead, he went out to meet bodies. Clark lost count of the people, lithe blonde women and gym-perfect dark men, splayed against graffiti-tattooed walls, bracing sweating hands on the doors of metal bathroom stalls, kneeling on concrete among cigarette stubs and broken bottles, grunting or sighing or saying words he wouldn't hear as he moved in the basic rhythm his kind shared with humans, little amnesias like a string of fireworks across the sky. His only rule was the same as always: no metahumans. At this point, the scan was second nature. It was simpler never to approach anyone whose cells screamed out mutation. Detecting the sometimes-subtle variations was a hard-won skill, developed to defend himself from potentially dangerous encounters.
A few times he chased the night halfway around the world -- all clubs are gray in the dark – returning to the Planet midday, still stinking of alcohol and ash, showering in the bathroom by Perry's office, coughing out some story to appease Perry and excuse his debauched condition, the words already dead black and white in his head before they appeared on the printed page.
He fucked until he was sick of it, not tired because Clark never tired, not any more. But when the contempt he felt at night began to spill over to the people he rescued during the day, he knew he had to stop. For a while.
He did not sleep with Lois. It was the one thing that made him think that he still might be a good man. She had such fire, lust for life and for knowledge, as if the two were entirely the same. He could have flown her above Metropolis and shown her the stars. But he was twisted out of true; he would have destroyed her, crumpled her like a lump of coal in his fist into something harder, brighter, and smaller, feeling the killing pressure all along.
Lex would have been happy. He'd finally managed to warp Clark's life as thoroughly as he thought Clark had mangled his.
****
Then the Joker released a virus that turned its victims hypoxia-purple, but didn't kill them.
"It is undoubtedly Mr. Luthor's handiwork," the Fortress said unhappily through its uplink to League HQ. "Portions of the RNA were taken directly from genetically modified organisms patented by LexCorp."
Batman's million-yard stare stayed unchanged.
"I don't understand," Clark said, pacing around the room. The stars, usually so beautiful to him, were just another distraction. "When did he have time to do all this?"
"He didn't," Batman said, over the Fortress's crisp, "Unknown."
Clark turned to stare at him. He tried not to look at Batman too hard because the man was, frankly, disturbing, but they were alone and Clark couldn't pretend to watch another League member instead.
"Did you see a body? I know they buried an empty coffin."
The wall of flame jumped up in Clark's memory, blue-white. The fire had been hot enough to melt brick. By the time he'd put it out, there'd been nothing left to bury. "I saw him on top of the building," he said. "There was no way –"
"Are you *sure*?" Batman pressed. Clark tried very hard not to clench his fists.
"It wouldn't make any sense," he protested. "Luthor had everything going his way – a popular public image, tremendous wealth – why would he fake his own death?"
"But could it have been done?"
Batman was, Clark reminded himself, far more experienced with crazies than Clark.
He forced his mind back to that awful day. The terrorists had appeared out of nowhere, taking two floors of LexCorp hostage and threatening to blow the entire building. They'd taken out Hope and separated Mercy from Lex, testament to their skills if not their ethics. Clark had suspected some deal between them and Lex gone wrong, but it didn't matter once innocent (or nearly so, given that they were mostly LexCorp employees) lives were at stake.
They'd prepared for an assault on Metropolis, each wearing chunks of Kryptonite cadged from who-knows-where – one reason Clark suspected a Lexian plot gone wrong. They hadn't counted on Clark's specially constructed lead box, an innovation the Fortress had suggested, that could swallow the rocks easily. If Clark approached at speed with the box properly aimed, he could insulate the Kryptonite in an inch of lead before he had time to feel the effects.
He'd sped through the building like a character from a video game, gobbling Kryptonite, defusing bombs and knocking out terrorists faster than they could see to respond, but somehow he'd missed a few. Too many. By the time he got to the roof, where the ringleaders and Lex were waiting for a getaway helicopter, they must have known it was futile, and one of them had chosen death *and* dishonor, triggering the bombs planted all over the roof and a few floors down. Clark had arrived in the open just in time to see the conflagration begin and realize that he'd have to deal with eight separate rocks in close proximity where the terrorists were bunched together around Lex, too much to handle even with superspeed. Given time, he could probably figure something out, but the whole building might go as the structural supports melted and collapsed onto the lower floors.
Three thousand people worked in the LexCorp tower, and the terrorists had refused to allow evacuation, mining the entrance to deter rescue missions.
Clark had turned from Lex's expressionless face, already washed in flame, and plummeted to the ground to grab a truck filled with fire-suppressant foam and hold it in position over the burning roof.
One of the terrorists couldn't face death by fire, and jumped, probably dead before he hit. Clark doubted that he would have flown to the man's rescue if he'd seen him in time.
That was all beside the point. He focused on those last glimpses – he'd seen Lex and the others, and then been gone over three minutes, because the truck required some delicate maneuvering.
"He could have been pulled out," he admitted at last. "If someone was very careful and very lucky. Can we pull all the footage from the news copters? One of them might have caught a rescue attempt."
The Fortress took this as a command addressed to it. "There is no available record of the aerial view from that side of the building at the relevant time."
"That's impossible," Clark said. "It was like rush hour up there. I nearly banged into about five helicopters, and there were more not much further off." They'd been thick as fruit flies around a bowl of week-old apples, interfering with the firefighting. He hadn't been a good mood, to say the very least, and had actually thought of shoving the more aggressive ones aside as they tried to outdo each other in closeups of Metropolis's own hero saving the day, mostly, once again.
"There's no *available* record," Batman said. "That doesn't mean that no records were made."
"Only that they were deleted," Clark finished. "So, what now?"
Batman turned to look at the computer screen where he'd pulled up mug shots of the terrorists Clark had captured. "I think we ought to have a chat with some of these men, don't you?"
****
Clark was working on a story in his office when a wave of nausea hit him. He looked around and saw that the vault in the old LuthorCorp building was open. Lionel's old office was lit up, teeming with workers, as Kryptonite bars were piled onto pallets and removed. A dapper man in an elegant suit – or perhaps an elegant man in a dapper suit – watched over the operation with interest. Clark looked closer and identified him as a fellow named Grossman, one of the directors of LexCorp, someone who'd been with LuthorCorp for years before that. Someone who'd spent hours every day close to Lex and who'd probably never known who Lex really was.
Clark figured that with Lex gone, the new management saw no reason to spend so much money and time on this strange mineral with no known industrial applications. If LexCorp's corporate culture hadn't changed, the stuff would probably be dumped in some isolated location, the regulators bribed not to see anything, and Clark would have to find it and get the other superheroes to clean it up.
The vault swung closed and Mr. Grossman locked it, then made a call. Shortly thereafter, while Clark was feeling the Kryptonite as it moved down the building in a freight elevator, men started wheeling expensive furniture into the office. Lex had left the room unoccupied, maybe as a symbol that he wasn't his father and didn't need anything of Lionel's, but a location as attractive as that office couldn't have stayed empty without Lex's need for petty revenge. So now someone was moving up in the world, literally and symbolically.
It kept getting shoved in his face that Lex was gone. Pretty soon they'd probably change the company's name to something futuristic and focus-group-tested, and then there would only be the monument in the Old Metropolis Cemetery, that useless pillar of white stone, to show that Lex had existed. That, and a few pictures in his scrapbook, the pages stuck together because he hadn't looked at them in years, and a section of railing on a bridge just a little bit newer than the rest.
He busied himself cleaning up the office, throwing out all the piles of printouts from old stories and stories that never worked out. Ancient, dried-out coffee cups and crumpled napkins, white plastic spoons and sugar packets, Post-Its and pen caps, until he'd filled his trash can and the cans in the offices to both sides of his and had to go get a bigger bin from Maintenance.
There was so much he'd let slide. What had he been waiting for?
"Kent!"
Clark turned and looked up at Lois, standing in the doorway to his office. She was dressed in a black track suit with white racing stripes, a white exercise top – and open-toed chunky black sandals high enough to induce nosebleeds (not to mention fetishes).
Her toenails, he noted, were a candy-apple red that clashed with the burgundy of her nails.
"What?" she snapped.
The feeling that his balance was off from the Kryptonite, which had dogged him as he cleaned, now made him incautious. "You look like Sporty Spice."
She actually spluttered. Then she drew breath, like a dragon gearing up to spit fire. "I was going to the gym, and then Jimmy emailed about the LexCorp reorganization – I didn't have time to change, and I can run in these just *fine*, and what are you, the fashion critic?" The end of the sentence was a lot louder than the beginning.
Lois rarely allowed him opportunities like this. "You didn't have time to change, but you did have time for high heels. Wait," he said, pretending to have a sudden insight, "you just can't stand to be a centimeter shorter than possible, can you?"
She looked away, busted, her cheeks pink. "I hate you. You are hated by me. Just so we're clear on that." Her embarrassment fascinated him, since in general she not only had no shame, but actually generated some sort of field that sucked shame out of her hapless interviewees, which was the only explanation for half the things she got them to say.
"Absolutely understood." He hesitated, then decided that he was already in so much trouble that he might as well enjoy it. "Sporty."
She darted forward and thwacked him on the shoulder with her purse before launching into her latest theory of LexCorp's shenanigans. Reporting on the story, which involved the internal machinations of the board of directors and the heads of the three biggest divisions, consumed most of the next twenty-four hours. Lois got a chance to demonstrate that she could run in those heels, not that Clark had doubted for a second.
Tags:
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
You thought I didn’t understand your morality because obviously if I understood, I’d agree with you. So there must be something wrong with me, because my father screwed me up – oh, and I read your series on head injuries and criminality, for those of us not strong enough for free will. I refuse to be defined by your simplistic principles, Clark.
So very true...
(Have just friended you, incidentally)
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
From:
no subject
Ahem.
I admire your restraint in not using the AI Fortress as a deus ex machina.
That was quite a jump from part 2 to part 3. I spent some time looking around to see if I'd missed a part somehow. You sneaky bugger, you.
I like your (The Fortress') solution to the K problem. It reminds me of that scene in CONSPIRACY THEORY where Julia Roberts refuses to have a car chase just because it's such a Guy Thing to do. ;)
From:
no subject
Lois is continuing to delight me in characterization. I like how Clark has set her off limits, finally aware of his capacity for destruction when it comes to a woman like Lois (and by extension, like Chloe). I can't tell you how delicious his romp in Metropolis night life is- I'm sure Lex has his electronic eyes watching Clark trying to lose himself in the various bodies.
Favorite part: What an idiot, Clark thought, veering off course and heading into space. He's being unfair. He's the one who talked about being saved. He's the one who elected me to be his conscience. And he does understand morals. He *wants* to be judged and found wanting.
As much as I loved Lex's final words, this was perfect. It's exactly what I thought when I heard the confession in "Devotion" and then later to some extent in "Bound". I love this older Clark finally wise to the ways of Lex. As much as I love that Luthor, he's not a blameless victim, and he's certainly not above painting Clark into a corner where he can't help but fail Lex.
I can't wait until tomorrow, to see how this Emerson quote fits into the story.
From:
no subject
I love how the whole tone shifted with the change in narrator. Clark *so* thinks he's the sane one. Ha!
And my investment is such that when I read the first couple of paras and realized that Lex was dead, I had to close the file because "Lex dead" equals "spike not dealing" and yet, after a while I had to come back and read *anyway*. Glad I did. Lex is aliii-iive. Or... a brain in a jar, but that's okay. BTW, please don't feel pressured to reply to my comments. My comments are a no-pressure zone that are just me sharing the pleasure your story gives me, with you.
From:
no subject