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Section 1
Section 2
Section 3
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Metropolis had been a fringe right-wing organization for decades. The MPD had been extremely embarrassed when an investigation after the LexCorp incident revealed that it had classified the PFLM as a threat so minimal that no ongoing surveillance was required. According to the MPD, the PFLM was responsible for a few hate crimes and some minor property damage once every couple of years when the aging members got drunk.
"When did you join the PFLM, Jordan?" Clark stared across the table at the kid staring unblinkingly back. He was nineteen but looked younger, and would have been handsome if he'd gained fifteen pounds.
Jordan's face was set in a scowl and he was trying his best to do the serial-killer glare, the one that screamed "touch me and your hand will come back in pieces." Clark, however, was not only invulnerable; he'd seen the look from people entitled to give it, and Jordan Baker just didn't have the stuff. In fact, Jordan had the look of a young man desperately wishing he could take back certain ill-considered decisions. That look was easy to recognize. Clark didn't have to go further than his own mirror to see it.
Clark ignored Jordan's silence. "I don't think you knew everything the PFLM stood for when you joined. I think you fooled around, maybe broke a few windows, and then other things started to happen and before you knew it, you couldn't back out. I don't think you intended to be a terrorist."
"I'm not a terrorist!" Jordan's hands, chained together on the scuffed table in front of him, twisted around each other like nervous spiders. "I just – it wasn't supposed to happen like that. I thought the explosives were to blow shit up at night. You know, like bridges and synagogues and shit."
Clark didn't let his expression change. "Who supplied the explosives, Jordan?"
The kid looked down, apparently fascinated by the deep scratches in the beige plastic coating of the seventies-era table in front of him.
"Don't stop talking now, Jordan. Do you know why I'm here?"
He didn't look up, but he shook his head. He needed a haircut. Clark supposed that grooming wasn't a priority in jail.
"Superman's word carries a lot of weight around here. If you give me what I need to know, I'll get the capital charges dropped."
That got Jordan's attention. "No shit?"
"Like I said, I don't think you knew what you were getting into." In point of fact, Clark didn't believe that Jordan's initial ignorance, and the cowardice that kept him from defying his "comrades" when the scope of the operation became clear, were any excuse, but he wasn't a supporter of the death penalty and he would rather solve the mystery than see another man die. "Now, who supplied the explosives?"
"I never knew his name," Jordan said, and Clark knew he'd won.
****
Clark drank from a bottle of water as Batman reported on the results of his inquiries. Metropolitans weren't exactly accustomed to the Batman interrogation style, Clark suspected, but that hadn't slowed him down any.
"Everything's pointing to Gotham," he summarized when Batman finished. The mid-level thug who'd delivered the explosives was one of the Penguin's minions. Batman had followed the money used to equip the PFLM back to an account owned by the Riddler under one of his puzzle names. Most significantly, the Fortress had tracked helicopter rentals and traffic for the day Lex died – Clark wasn't saying disappeared, not even in his own head, not yet – and found a rich man who remembered allowing a beautiful woman to take his copter, for no reason he could explain. The pilot had been found dead three days later, poisoned with a plant alkaloid.
"Too much so," Batman said. "There's no way all these people joined forces to extract Luthor."
"He could be pretty persuasive –"
"No." The big cowled head shook, and Clark was again tempted to peek inside. He didn't, in large part because he thought Batman would know somehow, and probably had a lead-lined hood in any event. "Occasionally two of them will get together, but it's always a race to betrayal, and this many working in tandem is impossible. None of them play well with others."
Clark didn't point out that this was a Gotham trait (and still hadn't stopped Batman from his flirtation with the Justice League), but Batman scowled as if he'd heard it anyway. Clark wondered whether the man's uncanny insights were part of his powers; Ryan hadn't been able to read Clark's mind, but every metahuman seemed to be slightly different.
Clark cleared his throat. "Back to what we know for sure. The Joker is the only one actually using LexCorp creations."
"He's capable of emulating any of the others, for the perversity of it," Batman agreed.
"It's just not adding up. If L-Luthor –" the pause was all but unnoticeable, which meant that Batman had certainly noticed it – "wanted to drop out of sight, which he had no reason to do, he's too smart to go right on signing his microchips and using genetic sequences that lead back to him. It defeats the purpose."
"Maybe that's the point."
Clark's eyes widened. Batman tapped at a keyboard, bringing up a map of Gotham.
"We've been assuming that Luthor had a part in planning this, that the lack of significant fatalities at LexCorp was evidence that he didn't want to destroy what he'd built up. But it's also possible that the Joker went and got himself a pet mad scientist on his own initiative, and Luthor doesn't want to stay in his cage."
Clark moved to stand in front of the map, which had dozens of glowing circles on it.
"These are places the Joker might have hideouts. With your help, I can investigate them all in a few days."
Lex, a prisoner? It didn't compute. He couldn't imagine a prison from which Lex couldn't escape, except perhaps that of Lionel's expectations. Lex seeking outside help, sending *Clark* coded messages in his weapons, was nearly inconceivable.
"Let's get going," he said.
****
The first two sites were completely useless. An abandoned building and an office park supposedly connected to shady activities, but you couldn't have proved it by Clark. All he saw was some OSHA-noncompliant workstations and two office workers screwing in the Xerox room.
They weren't even very good-looking, not that he would have kept watching if they had been. He didn’t use his powers as part of his sex life; peeping would have smacked of secrets and hiding, and he didn’t do that when he went out to get laid. Anyway, he could get people who *wanted* to show off for him.
****
Three, four, five.
Clark's count of the Batman's sites was the only thing that made him aware that time was passing. They all looked different, but they were all the same. He wondered, some, whether Batman's theory wasn't just another search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, an excuse trumped up to get him to help clean up Gotham.
But Batman covertly wanting his help was so much less likely than Lex being alive that he discounted it, glad that there *was* something less likely than Lex being alive.
****
Six, seven, eight.
He returned from Gotham in time to watch Lois leave for her date. He hadn't watched her shower and get dressed, only listened for the small sounds, but when she left the apartment, he followed, at an appropriate distance.
She smiled at the man's jokes and he guffawed at hers, even snorting once. Clark believed him, but that didn't mean much. Lois seemed to think they were on the same wavelength, and that had to be enough. When they were at the movie and he whispered a rude comment about the police procedure onscreen, she whacked him on the arm, as hard as she would have whacked Clark.
And when he left her apartment, long after midnight, when Lois turned her face into her pillow and didn't even let herself hear the crying, Clark did what he always did.
He went back to saving the world.
****
Nine: a poor showing indeed, a metahuman brothel. He was glad enough to get the underaged girls and boys into protective custody, but it left him dissatisfied with regard to the main mission and haunted by the tableaux he'd seen in some of the special rooms. The depraved imagination, he thought, was infinitely inventive.
He flew back home and didn't shower, because that wouldn't help the dirt. Also, he was later than usual for his meeting with Lois.
He caught up with her as she left the building, heading to interview – who was it, again? – yes, State Senator Graham. It was getting harder to remember who Clark Kent was these days.
"Hey," he said, pretending to be out of breath.
She didn't look at him.
He debated saying that he was sorry for being so late, but decided it would just make her angry. Angrier.
She was wearing a suit the color of poppies, with shiny black heels high enough to make her look like she was on tiptoe. Her hair, freshly cut, swung as sharp and gleaming as a guillotine blade.
"Let me buy you coffee."
Lois stopped walking and turned to him.
"Am I your partner?"
"What?"
"Am I your partner?" she demanded again, stepping close and shoving her finger in his chest, right at the center of the hidden "S."
"Of course, Lois –"
She pulled her hand away as if he were made of molten steel. "Don't 'of course' me! You haven't even been phoning in your role as reporter these days, you've been *instant messaging* it. Where are you always going? I almost wish it were a story, Clark, because then someday you might clue me in on it."
"I – I'm just running late, that's all." He could hear the desperation in his voice.
Lois's eyes grew shinier still as she set her jaw. "I think maybe we'd better talk to Perry about changing our assignments."
"Lois, no –" A thousand late nights flashed through his mind, laughing with Lois as the city turned over in its sleep, holding his hand up to fend off the rubber bands she liked to shoot at him across their desks, reading the scurrilous shorthand notes she took during interviews and trying not to smile. Rescuing her as Superman, allowing her to rescue him as Clark, rating the looks of the other staffers on a scale from Jack Benny to Michelangelo's David. Watching her eat her second order of banana nut pancakes from the Silver Star diner after they finished a stakeout, marveling at the amount of butter and syrup she was able to make them absorb.
She drew in a shuddering breath, forcing Clark to pay attention. "I mean, we're hardly ever together anyway. It's not like –"
"I think Lex Luthor is alive," he blurted.
"*What*?"
"Maybe," he said hurriedly. "I didn't – I know you think I'm – biased. But – there are things that don't add up." Briefly, he recounted some of the evidence he and Batman had collected. "I didn't want to tell you," he finished, "because –"
And oh, he was good these days, wrapping the lies in just the right flavor of truth, because he had her back now. She lectured him about partners sharing information, but she was already wrapped up in writing the story in her mind.
"We can't print anything yet," she said, her eyes unfocused. "We've got to go to Gotham. Perry –"
"We can't tell Perry. Somebody at the Planet might talk."
Lois's brows drew together. "Buy me that coffee. I need to think."
Clark followed her as she turned and headed for the convenience store that was right by the Planet. The coffee was terrible, but cheap and hot.
"Can you get your buddy Bruce Wayne to give you another interview?" she asked, pushing open the door.
"So soon after yours?"
She frowned, pursing her lips. The guy behind the counter saw the two of them and nodded, going to the coffee machine to prepare their usual order.
"Well, get him to do *something*," she said. "He's a lot more interesting than he wanted me to think."
"I'll ask," he promised. "But in the meantime –"
"In the meantime, it's all extracurricular," she agreed, letting him pay for the coffees. He watched as she dumped even more sugar than usual into hers and then tossed him two sugars and two creamers for his.
Clark was seized with love for her. Standing in the narrow aisle of the store, surrounded by candy and chips and lottery ads, her nose wrinkled as she stared into her coffee as if it were about to talk back to her, she was everything wonderful about Metropolis. "Lois," he said.
Her head whipped around, alerted by his tone.
"You know I –"
"Quit while you're ahead, Smallville." She took a sip of her drink, wincing as it burned her tongue.
"Right," he said, relieved, and looked around for something else to say. On the news rack by the door, the cover of the Inquisitor caught his eye. "Batman's Love Child," it yelled, with a picture of a chubby infant with little bat wings hanging off its shoulders, the photo upside down so it looked like the baby was hanging from something.
"Look," he said, nudging Lois as he took a sip of coffee. "I mean, really, how implausible is that?"
"Yeah," she said, putting a plastic cover on her cup. "As if *Batman's* condom would ever break."
Clark choked on his drink, which Lois undoubtedly took as a point scored. He'd been thinking more along the lines that Batman was a guy in a batsuit and unlikely to have a bat-shaped child without an extended stay in Smallville, but that just went to show that he'd never in a million years understand how Lois thought.
They went out into the sunlight, and Clark felt better than he had in a long time.
****
Ten, eleven.
Batman was a strange fellow, which Clark had known before they'd started working together, but repeated exposure revealed new depths of strange. It was as if he'd carved huge chunks of personality out of himself, never realizing that those very mutilations made him a creature driven by emotion rather than reason. Logic in the service of an insane aim was not sanity. Still, he was thorough and practical, which Clark appreciated, given the nature of their project. It helped him remember that all he was doing was cleaning up Gotham, and maybe stopping the Joker's deadliest tricks.
He was also hoping that their project might get Batman to reconsider the idea of becoming a full-fledged member of the Justice League. Batman was too smart and too, well, high-strung to be ignored. Clark wanted to be able to keep a discreet eye on him nearly as much as he wanted Batman's assistance with the various evils of the world.
****
Twelve, thirteen.
Clark was beginning to think that they might not find anything. Sure, weapons caches and other illegalities; Batman's information was good enough for what it was. But nothing that went beyond Gotham, nothing on Lex.
The Joker's activities were threaded like inoperable cancer through Gotham. By comparison, Metropolis got off easy. Lex had been crazy in socially acceptable ways, and physically different in socially acceptable ways, whatever it might have seemed like to him. He could go out without people pointing and staring, or at least the stares were appreciative rather than horrified, but the Joker was a living gargoyle. The Joker had so much less to lose, and that made him deadlier than Lex by far.
Still, Clark saw many similarities. Both had to give everything they were to one identity. Lex running a business instead of an empire had been like using a nuclear reactor to power a go-kart. It was no surprise that things didn't turn out right.
The Fortress wasn't reminding him that he had other obligations. It probably should have been, but maybe it was possible for it to get hurt feelings after being yelled at enough.
****
The fourteenth site proved a revelation, though not because of anything Lex-related.
Clark tried very hard not to use his super-smell unless absolutely necessary to track a criminal. It had been a blessedly late-developing sense, and he'd been fortunate that his experience in controlling the other senses had served him well in mastering – and suppressing – this new one. But after the first time with Bruce, he'd deliberately indulged in the rich dark scents they'd made.
At the fourteenth site, a luxury apartment in a converted warehouse, there was a still-damp towel. Clark thought it might be worth a try, so he braced himself for the sensory assault and inhaled.
He smelled Batman, of course. Underneath the plastic and metal, the scent was unmistakeable. He froze, completely distracted from the task at hand.
Bruce hadn't exactly lied.
But it was awkward, to say the least, to be accidentally sleeping with someone you had to work with. Like meeting someone in a chat room for virtual sex, then discovering that your partner was actually your editor.
Only you, he thought to himself, could get yourself into these situations. Secret identities – it was enough to make him wish that he didn't need one, that there was some way to keep his parents and Lois and the rest of his friends safe so he could reveal himself.
And anyway, what the hell was a *human* doing, fighting alongside those with real superpowers? He hadn't considered the possibility that Batman might be relying entirely on technology and training, because it was ludicrous.
Oh, and Bruce – no, the *Batman* -- was going to be angry when he figured it out. Clark couldn't hope to keep the two identities separate as far as Batman was concerned forever. Look how quickly Lex had connected the dots – and he and Lex hadn't even been fucking.
"Anything?" Batman asked, breaking into his reverie.
"Uh, no," Clark said, and tried to refocus.
As it happened, when they did track the minion down, he didn't know a damn thing.
****
"Wake up," Lex whispered in his ear, as Clark opened his eyes in the dream.
They were in Clark's old bedroom, shabby walls and shabbier furniture, all of it radiating such love and security that he couldn't help but smile, even with Lex sitting next to him on the bed.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, because it was expected.
"Speak for yourself, Clark," Lex replied.
Clark got up and went to the window. Looking out, he saw the view from the top of the Daily Planet, directly opposite LexCorp's higher floors.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" He could feel the ghost of Lex's breath on the back of his neck, Lex's coarse velvet voice low and invasive.
Across the way, a mechanical replica of Lionel was dancing, spinning like a circus clown through the vast empty spaces of his boardroom, his blue metal arms jerking and spasming. A portrait of Lex, done in broad purple brushstrokes with a sun that wasn't yellow behind and above his head, watched over the spectacle.
"If I am only for myself, what am I?"
Clark turned, to find Lex standing outside in the hall, the door open. The hallway began to telescope, dragging Lex into the distance so that he shrunk into a manikin, hardly there at all. "If not now, when?"
"Maimonides isn't really your style," he said, calm though his heart shuddered in his chest.
"Clark," Lex said reproachfully, and Clark turned to see him in the mirror over the chest of drawers. "Have some respect for history. It's Hillel." Clark approached the silvered glass, raising his hand to watch Lex do the same, reaching out. "Just because *our* fathers weren't wise is no reason to be sloppy about it."
Their palms hit the mirror at the same time, the collision sending shocks up Clark's arm as the cold, flat surface refused to let them touch. Lex splayed his hand out, his fingers invisible behind Clark's, leaning into the mirror with the confidence he always had that nothing would yield without his permission.
"Stop trying to define yourself by what I'm not," Lex said, drawing his free hand back and curling it into a fist. Clark found his own arm reacting, pulled without his volition. "Because, Clark, there's a lot of room for contradictions in 'alive.'" The fist began to swing.
Clark shattered awake.
****
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
They stood outside the seventeenth building, deep in the shadows Batman preferred. Clark did a quick scan to see what awaited.
"Some people, with guns. And a lead-lined room," he said, telling himself not to hope even as his heart sped up.
"We'll go in together." Batman must have seen that Clark was picoseconds from speeding in, because he continued, "I know the people. I know who's dangerous and what things might be tricks."
Clark nodded, uncertain what his voice would sound like.
He ripped the small door beside the loading dock off its hinges and walked through a hail of bullets that felt less annoying than gnats. Clark sped around the enormous, cluttered warehouse floor, disarming everyone but one fellow who had a Kryptonite-enhanced vest – and, shortly, a Batarang in the face.
The dismayed groans of the men faded into the background as Clark slowed to a stop and looked, drawn like a magnet, towards the small room that had been constructed in the back. There was a white-coated woman hastily punching in a code – he looked through her skeleton to get see what it was – and she bolted through and slammed the door. Light bled out around the edges.
He gave Batman a chance to catch up with him. The man was fast, Clark had to concede that, and he didn't make any sound, even though he ought to have been trying to catch his breath.
"I'll go in first," Batman said, which was only sensible but still made Clark twitch.
"Fine," he said and told him the code.
Clark kept scanning around, in case the Joker showed up to watch the fireworks, while Batman entered the numbers as if offended by the very existence of the electronic lock and pushed open the door.
There was a series of violent thuds. A tiny form in motley came hurtling through the door, the bells on her cap jingling as she hit the concrete floor. She groaned and tried without success to push herself upright. Clark bent to cuff her hands behind her back with a piece of scrap metal as she kicked weakly, and deposited her against some large unmarked boxes.
"Batman?" Clark called. "Are you all right?" Even though it wasn't entirely safe, he moved to stand in front of the open door, trying to look in.
Batman's bulk took up most of the doorway. With bright bluish light behind him, he looked like the creature of nightmare he wanted to be.
"Luthor's here," he said, and his voice had an unfamiliar note.
Clark stepped forward. Batman put a gloved hand to his chest. "You don't want to see."
"What?" He wasn't going to shove Batman aside, but he was considering a gentle push.
Batman drew in a breath. "Luthor said – Luthor *asked* that you stay out, and I think he's right. You take charge of the cleanup, and I'll have a medical team here –"
Clark picked Batman up by his shoulders, turned, and deposited him next to the still-struggling woman.
And walked into Hell.
The room was clean, which made the smell of old blood hard to understand. The floor sloped downward on all sides to a central drain. On one side, the woman who'd used the code to lock the door was slumped, unconscious, her hands bound behind her and her coat smeared with grime from the floor. There were cabinets on the walls, mirrored so that the body on the elaborate surgical table was reflected to infinity.
Clark's mind refused to admit what it was seeing, skipping over Lex to the knives, retractors, and other silver implements on the tables beside him.
When that tactic failed, he still couldn't quite comprehend it, thinking of old plates of Vesalius he'd seen in Europe.
From his toes to his calves and to the wrist of his right hand, Lex had been flayed, half dissected, the skin at the edges of the cuts rolled back like someone might roll a sleeve. His abdomen was an open sore, loops of intestine bulging wetly, a sick purple Clark had only ever seen at major accidents. The red, seeping flesh that remained around the bones of his feet, the yellow streaks of fat, the blue veins seemed unreal, plastic, some mannequin of a visible man.
Lex's chest rose and fell. His head was turned away from Clark, and the face in the mirror was too distorted to recognize.
Clark staggered back out. Batman was speaking into the cowl of his outfit, presumably talking to the police. The jester-woman was curled up on herself now. She'd managed to twist so that the makeshift cuffs were in front, and her hands were drawn up to her chest in a pose that reminded Clark of a praying mantis. Praying mantises eat their mates, he remembered. She was giggling. On some of the white diamonds in her costume, Clark saw dark spots and lines, blood black with age. Different velocities, different angles –
"Did you do this?" he asked, his voice buzzing in his head.
Batman was saying something to him. Clark couldn't hear it as he picked the woman up by the front of her costume. She gibbered like a monkey, her mouth stretched as wide as a slashed throat. Her colors were like those in the room, white cheeks, red lips, yellow and white and blue diamonds on her costume. The fabric sagged as he held her up, unable to think or move. Gradually, she calmed down, staring back at him, her eyes like cyclones.
Clark became aware of Batman's hand on his forearm. "Put her down, Superman," he was saying, in the tone of a man who'd been repeating himself for a while.
When he let go, the woman tumbled to the ground like a string-cut puppet. Batman stared at her for a moment, then turned to Clark. His eyes were dark under his mask.
"I'll go check for – anything else that got left behind," he managed, and fled.
****
Lex didn't acknowledge his entrance, continuing to stare at the laptop screen in front of him. The computer cords draped across the hospital bed, merging with the other equipment that bleeped and ticked around Lex.
His left hand jittered over the keyboard like an ecstasy-sodden teenager at an old-style rave. His right lay concealed beneath the sheets. There was a sort of tent over his feet, with even more monitors and displays clustered around it.
"How are you doing, Lex?" Clark asked.
"Go away, Superman," Lex said. He hadn't even looked up. How he could tell that Clark was in uniform and not mufti was only the beginning of the mystery, when Clark hadn't even known Lex was alive.
He stepped closer to the bed, drinking in the sight of Lex's too-thin face. Lex had carried that deceptive softness around for years; without it, he looked more like his father.
Lex's fingers slowed and then stopped. He turned his head to look at Clark. It was like being hit with a firehose; Clark could stand it, but it took concentration. "Batman was here earlier. Don't you have some more deserving charity cases to look after?"
That was disturbing. Batman wasn't exactly the candy-striper type. Clark was used to visiting hospitals, doing the Make-a-Wish thing until he was sick with helplessness, but he couldn't imagine why Batman would have checked up on Lex, unless Lex and Bruce –
It didn't bear thinking about.
"I wanted to see you," he said, because sincerity without full disclosure was always his best weapon against Lex.
Sure enough, the pressure of Lex's gaze faltered for a second. "You've seen me," he said, but without finality.
"How are you?" Another half-step closer. Given a few months, he might be right beside Lex.
"My doctors haven't given you all the latest news?"
"I didn't ask them." In fact, he'd stood behind Mercy, arms folded, as she explained to all the doctors, nurses, and other attendants how extremely displeased Mr. Luthor would be if any information on his condition were to appear in the press or even in hospital gossip. It wouldn't have been fair to ask after that.
Lex smiled, unamused. His eyes were the dark gray of a summer thunderstorm. "Well. Due to my remarkable healing powers, the flesh on my feet is regrowing nicely. They tell me I'll walk in under three months."
"I'm glad to hear that, Lex. Really."
"I know," Lex said, looking down at his fingers, still on the keyboard. "You'd never be so petty as to want me crippled." There was a pause. "I lost the hand."
Incomprehension, again, like being back in the Joker's sick bunker. "What?"
"The exposed bone got infected, there was gangrene – they took it off at the wrist three days ago." Lex's voice was calm, but it sounded as if he were reminding himself that this was no nightmare. Clark's vision flashed into X-ray, searching below the bedsheet. Lex's familiar skeleton was truncated, mutilated.
Clark stumbled back, bumping into a chair by the wall and collapsing into it. "Lex –"
"*Superman*," he said, a reminder.
"I'm so –"
"Shut up!" Lex's left hand – his only hand – pounded on the plastic tray in front of him, nearly sending the laptop flying. "You don't get to be responsible for this. That psychotic bastard is, and I'm going to kill him." Lex's face, already strange in its new thinness, twisted into fury redder than anything Clark had ever seen aimed at himself. "I'm going to rip out his spine and use it as a watch chain. When I'm done with him, blood is going to be the new black."
Clark realized that he was making noise, a wheezy sound lost under Lex's rant. He tried to control himself as Lex raged on.
"And don't you *dare* go after him yourself. That sick fuck is mine, and if you try to protect him out of some misguided ideal of justice you'll discover that I've hardly been trying to hurt you at all until now."
"Lex –"
"He *broke* me," Lex said, his voice as flayed as his skin had been. "I thought I was – I thought I was strong. I thought I was my own man. I thought no one could make me do anything I didn't want, and sixty hours after he took me I was his." He wasn't looking at Clark any more. Clark thought he wasn't seeing the hospital room at all. "I would have killed – I would have done anything to make it stop, and I did.
"The only reason," Lex said and halted. He breathed out, swallowed, and raised his eyes to Clark's. "The only reason he doesn't know who you are is that he didn't ask. I don't think it ever crossed his mind that I might know." Lex looked so suddenly young, lost against the too-white sheets and the bleeping electronics.
Clark stood and took three steps towards Lex's bed. "Don't."
"Don't what? Don't tell the truth? Isn't that what you always wanted?"
It's not even close to what I wanted, Clark thought. Guilt was supposed to be his great fault, not Lex's. Pride, Luthor pride, that was what Lex needed now, to be made strong by his fatal flaw.
After a minute, Lex made a sound that could have been a laugh reflected in a funhouse mirror. "At least you're not spouting Bruce's claptrap about how no one resists torture, as if we were just *ordinary*." His tone made it a curse.
Well, this day just kept spiraling towards perfection. The last thing Lex needed right now was Bruce shoving his moral superiority in Lex's face – and yeah, Clark was aware of the irony, but that was kind of the point. Clark really needed a clear field on which to make his own moves.
"Listen, Lex," Clark said and crossed the floor to stand by the bed, breaching the force field Lex had emanated against him for years. "When we all thought you were dead, Mercy gave me a message you recorded for me."
Lex blinked, obviously remembering the contents of the message. His lashes dipped in embarrassment, only part-feigned. "I'm a sentimentalist, what can I say?"
Clark knelt so that he and Lex were at the same level. "I knew that already. Here's the thing: I refuse your refusal."
"What?" Lex looked honestly confused, for once.
"You refuse to be saved, okay. I refuse to not save you." He was reminded of Pete's old line: You're not the boss of me. He smiled, feeling better as Lex's expression clouded with outrage. Lex shouldn't be reflecting on his own perceived inadequacies; that made him mean and dangerous. Mad at Clark was much safer.
"You patronizing little shit," Lex began.
"Yeah, probably," he admitted, silencing Lex – another blast from the past, to be able to shut him up. "But you know you didn't take me seriously either."
Lex actually gaped at him. It was almost enough to make Clark smile, even with everything else. "Look, how far did all this guilt and angst get us? I know *I'm* not happy. Maybe –"
The Fortress's super-miniaturized link chimed in his ear, letting him know that a forest fire was threatening a California town.
"I've got to go, Lex. But I think we need to talk more."
He deliberately didn't listen for Lex's answer as he flew towards California.
Section 2
Section 3
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Metropolis had been a fringe right-wing organization for decades. The MPD had been extremely embarrassed when an investigation after the LexCorp incident revealed that it had classified the PFLM as a threat so minimal that no ongoing surveillance was required. According to the MPD, the PFLM was responsible for a few hate crimes and some minor property damage once every couple of years when the aging members got drunk.
"When did you join the PFLM, Jordan?" Clark stared across the table at the kid staring unblinkingly back. He was nineteen but looked younger, and would have been handsome if he'd gained fifteen pounds.
Jordan's face was set in a scowl and he was trying his best to do the serial-killer glare, the one that screamed "touch me and your hand will come back in pieces." Clark, however, was not only invulnerable; he'd seen the look from people entitled to give it, and Jordan Baker just didn't have the stuff. In fact, Jordan had the look of a young man desperately wishing he could take back certain ill-considered decisions. That look was easy to recognize. Clark didn't have to go further than his own mirror to see it.
Clark ignored Jordan's silence. "I don't think you knew everything the PFLM stood for when you joined. I think you fooled around, maybe broke a few windows, and then other things started to happen and before you knew it, you couldn't back out. I don't think you intended to be a terrorist."
"I'm not a terrorist!" Jordan's hands, chained together on the scuffed table in front of him, twisted around each other like nervous spiders. "I just – it wasn't supposed to happen like that. I thought the explosives were to blow shit up at night. You know, like bridges and synagogues and shit."
Clark didn't let his expression change. "Who supplied the explosives, Jordan?"
The kid looked down, apparently fascinated by the deep scratches in the beige plastic coating of the seventies-era table in front of him.
"Don't stop talking now, Jordan. Do you know why I'm here?"
He didn't look up, but he shook his head. He needed a haircut. Clark supposed that grooming wasn't a priority in jail.
"Superman's word carries a lot of weight around here. If you give me what I need to know, I'll get the capital charges dropped."
That got Jordan's attention. "No shit?"
"Like I said, I don't think you knew what you were getting into." In point of fact, Clark didn't believe that Jordan's initial ignorance, and the cowardice that kept him from defying his "comrades" when the scope of the operation became clear, were any excuse, but he wasn't a supporter of the death penalty and he would rather solve the mystery than see another man die. "Now, who supplied the explosives?"
"I never knew his name," Jordan said, and Clark knew he'd won.
****
Clark drank from a bottle of water as Batman reported on the results of his inquiries. Metropolitans weren't exactly accustomed to the Batman interrogation style, Clark suspected, but that hadn't slowed him down any.
"Everything's pointing to Gotham," he summarized when Batman finished. The mid-level thug who'd delivered the explosives was one of the Penguin's minions. Batman had followed the money used to equip the PFLM back to an account owned by the Riddler under one of his puzzle names. Most significantly, the Fortress had tracked helicopter rentals and traffic for the day Lex died – Clark wasn't saying disappeared, not even in his own head, not yet – and found a rich man who remembered allowing a beautiful woman to take his copter, for no reason he could explain. The pilot had been found dead three days later, poisoned with a plant alkaloid.
"Too much so," Batman said. "There's no way all these people joined forces to extract Luthor."
"He could be pretty persuasive –"
"No." The big cowled head shook, and Clark was again tempted to peek inside. He didn't, in large part because he thought Batman would know somehow, and probably had a lead-lined hood in any event. "Occasionally two of them will get together, but it's always a race to betrayal, and this many working in tandem is impossible. None of them play well with others."
Clark didn't point out that this was a Gotham trait (and still hadn't stopped Batman from his flirtation with the Justice League), but Batman scowled as if he'd heard it anyway. Clark wondered whether the man's uncanny insights were part of his powers; Ryan hadn't been able to read Clark's mind, but every metahuman seemed to be slightly different.
Clark cleared his throat. "Back to what we know for sure. The Joker is the only one actually using LexCorp creations."
"He's capable of emulating any of the others, for the perversity of it," Batman agreed.
"It's just not adding up. If L-Luthor –" the pause was all but unnoticeable, which meant that Batman had certainly noticed it – "wanted to drop out of sight, which he had no reason to do, he's too smart to go right on signing his microchips and using genetic sequences that lead back to him. It defeats the purpose."
"Maybe that's the point."
Clark's eyes widened. Batman tapped at a keyboard, bringing up a map of Gotham.
"We've been assuming that Luthor had a part in planning this, that the lack of significant fatalities at LexCorp was evidence that he didn't want to destroy what he'd built up. But it's also possible that the Joker went and got himself a pet mad scientist on his own initiative, and Luthor doesn't want to stay in his cage."
Clark moved to stand in front of the map, which had dozens of glowing circles on it.
"These are places the Joker might have hideouts. With your help, I can investigate them all in a few days."
Lex, a prisoner? It didn't compute. He couldn't imagine a prison from which Lex couldn't escape, except perhaps that of Lionel's expectations. Lex seeking outside help, sending *Clark* coded messages in his weapons, was nearly inconceivable.
"Let's get going," he said.
****
The first two sites were completely useless. An abandoned building and an office park supposedly connected to shady activities, but you couldn't have proved it by Clark. All he saw was some OSHA-noncompliant workstations and two office workers screwing in the Xerox room.
They weren't even very good-looking, not that he would have kept watching if they had been. He didn’t use his powers as part of his sex life; peeping would have smacked of secrets and hiding, and he didn’t do that when he went out to get laid. Anyway, he could get people who *wanted* to show off for him.
****
Three, four, five.
Clark's count of the Batman's sites was the only thing that made him aware that time was passing. They all looked different, but they were all the same. He wondered, some, whether Batman's theory wasn't just another search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, an excuse trumped up to get him to help clean up Gotham.
But Batman covertly wanting his help was so much less likely than Lex being alive that he discounted it, glad that there *was* something less likely than Lex being alive.
****
Six, seven, eight.
He returned from Gotham in time to watch Lois leave for her date. He hadn't watched her shower and get dressed, only listened for the small sounds, but when she left the apartment, he followed, at an appropriate distance.
She smiled at the man's jokes and he guffawed at hers, even snorting once. Clark believed him, but that didn't mean much. Lois seemed to think they were on the same wavelength, and that had to be enough. When they were at the movie and he whispered a rude comment about the police procedure onscreen, she whacked him on the arm, as hard as she would have whacked Clark.
And when he left her apartment, long after midnight, when Lois turned her face into her pillow and didn't even let herself hear the crying, Clark did what he always did.
He went back to saving the world.
****
Nine: a poor showing indeed, a metahuman brothel. He was glad enough to get the underaged girls and boys into protective custody, but it left him dissatisfied with regard to the main mission and haunted by the tableaux he'd seen in some of the special rooms. The depraved imagination, he thought, was infinitely inventive.
He flew back home and didn't shower, because that wouldn't help the dirt. Also, he was later than usual for his meeting with Lois.
He caught up with her as she left the building, heading to interview – who was it, again? – yes, State Senator Graham. It was getting harder to remember who Clark Kent was these days.
"Hey," he said, pretending to be out of breath.
She didn't look at him.
He debated saying that he was sorry for being so late, but decided it would just make her angry. Angrier.
She was wearing a suit the color of poppies, with shiny black heels high enough to make her look like she was on tiptoe. Her hair, freshly cut, swung as sharp and gleaming as a guillotine blade.
"Let me buy you coffee."
Lois stopped walking and turned to him.
"Am I your partner?"
"What?"
"Am I your partner?" she demanded again, stepping close and shoving her finger in his chest, right at the center of the hidden "S."
"Of course, Lois –"
She pulled her hand away as if he were made of molten steel. "Don't 'of course' me! You haven't even been phoning in your role as reporter these days, you've been *instant messaging* it. Where are you always going? I almost wish it were a story, Clark, because then someday you might clue me in on it."
"I – I'm just running late, that's all." He could hear the desperation in his voice.
Lois's eyes grew shinier still as she set her jaw. "I think maybe we'd better talk to Perry about changing our assignments."
"Lois, no –" A thousand late nights flashed through his mind, laughing with Lois as the city turned over in its sleep, holding his hand up to fend off the rubber bands she liked to shoot at him across their desks, reading the scurrilous shorthand notes she took during interviews and trying not to smile. Rescuing her as Superman, allowing her to rescue him as Clark, rating the looks of the other staffers on a scale from Jack Benny to Michelangelo's David. Watching her eat her second order of banana nut pancakes from the Silver Star diner after they finished a stakeout, marveling at the amount of butter and syrup she was able to make them absorb.
She drew in a shuddering breath, forcing Clark to pay attention. "I mean, we're hardly ever together anyway. It's not like –"
"I think Lex Luthor is alive," he blurted.
"*What*?"
"Maybe," he said hurriedly. "I didn't – I know you think I'm – biased. But – there are things that don't add up." Briefly, he recounted some of the evidence he and Batman had collected. "I didn't want to tell you," he finished, "because –"
And oh, he was good these days, wrapping the lies in just the right flavor of truth, because he had her back now. She lectured him about partners sharing information, but she was already wrapped up in writing the story in her mind.
"We can't print anything yet," she said, her eyes unfocused. "We've got to go to Gotham. Perry –"
"We can't tell Perry. Somebody at the Planet might talk."
Lois's brows drew together. "Buy me that coffee. I need to think."
Clark followed her as she turned and headed for the convenience store that was right by the Planet. The coffee was terrible, but cheap and hot.
"Can you get your buddy Bruce Wayne to give you another interview?" she asked, pushing open the door.
"So soon after yours?"
She frowned, pursing her lips. The guy behind the counter saw the two of them and nodded, going to the coffee machine to prepare their usual order.
"Well, get him to do *something*," she said. "He's a lot more interesting than he wanted me to think."
"I'll ask," he promised. "But in the meantime –"
"In the meantime, it's all extracurricular," she agreed, letting him pay for the coffees. He watched as she dumped even more sugar than usual into hers and then tossed him two sugars and two creamers for his.
Clark was seized with love for her. Standing in the narrow aisle of the store, surrounded by candy and chips and lottery ads, her nose wrinkled as she stared into her coffee as if it were about to talk back to her, she was everything wonderful about Metropolis. "Lois," he said.
Her head whipped around, alerted by his tone.
"You know I –"
"Quit while you're ahead, Smallville." She took a sip of her drink, wincing as it burned her tongue.
"Right," he said, relieved, and looked around for something else to say. On the news rack by the door, the cover of the Inquisitor caught his eye. "Batman's Love Child," it yelled, with a picture of a chubby infant with little bat wings hanging off its shoulders, the photo upside down so it looked like the baby was hanging from something.
"Look," he said, nudging Lois as he took a sip of coffee. "I mean, really, how implausible is that?"
"Yeah," she said, putting a plastic cover on her cup. "As if *Batman's* condom would ever break."
Clark choked on his drink, which Lois undoubtedly took as a point scored. He'd been thinking more along the lines that Batman was a guy in a batsuit and unlikely to have a bat-shaped child without an extended stay in Smallville, but that just went to show that he'd never in a million years understand how Lois thought.
They went out into the sunlight, and Clark felt better than he had in a long time.
****
Ten, eleven.
Batman was a strange fellow, which Clark had known before they'd started working together, but repeated exposure revealed new depths of strange. It was as if he'd carved huge chunks of personality out of himself, never realizing that those very mutilations made him a creature driven by emotion rather than reason. Logic in the service of an insane aim was not sanity. Still, he was thorough and practical, which Clark appreciated, given the nature of their project. It helped him remember that all he was doing was cleaning up Gotham, and maybe stopping the Joker's deadliest tricks.
He was also hoping that their project might get Batman to reconsider the idea of becoming a full-fledged member of the Justice League. Batman was too smart and too, well, high-strung to be ignored. Clark wanted to be able to keep a discreet eye on him nearly as much as he wanted Batman's assistance with the various evils of the world.
****
Twelve, thirteen.
Clark was beginning to think that they might not find anything. Sure, weapons caches and other illegalities; Batman's information was good enough for what it was. But nothing that went beyond Gotham, nothing on Lex.
The Joker's activities were threaded like inoperable cancer through Gotham. By comparison, Metropolis got off easy. Lex had been crazy in socially acceptable ways, and physically different in socially acceptable ways, whatever it might have seemed like to him. He could go out without people pointing and staring, or at least the stares were appreciative rather than horrified, but the Joker was a living gargoyle. The Joker had so much less to lose, and that made him deadlier than Lex by far.
Still, Clark saw many similarities. Both had to give everything they were to one identity. Lex running a business instead of an empire had been like using a nuclear reactor to power a go-kart. It was no surprise that things didn't turn out right.
The Fortress wasn't reminding him that he had other obligations. It probably should have been, but maybe it was possible for it to get hurt feelings after being yelled at enough.
****
The fourteenth site proved a revelation, though not because of anything Lex-related.
Clark tried very hard not to use his super-smell unless absolutely necessary to track a criminal. It had been a blessedly late-developing sense, and he'd been fortunate that his experience in controlling the other senses had served him well in mastering – and suppressing – this new one. But after the first time with Bruce, he'd deliberately indulged in the rich dark scents they'd made.
At the fourteenth site, a luxury apartment in a converted warehouse, there was a still-damp towel. Clark thought it might be worth a try, so he braced himself for the sensory assault and inhaled.
He smelled Batman, of course. Underneath the plastic and metal, the scent was unmistakeable. He froze, completely distracted from the task at hand.
Bruce hadn't exactly lied.
But it was awkward, to say the least, to be accidentally sleeping with someone you had to work with. Like meeting someone in a chat room for virtual sex, then discovering that your partner was actually your editor.
Only you, he thought to himself, could get yourself into these situations. Secret identities – it was enough to make him wish that he didn't need one, that there was some way to keep his parents and Lois and the rest of his friends safe so he could reveal himself.
And anyway, what the hell was a *human* doing, fighting alongside those with real superpowers? He hadn't considered the possibility that Batman might be relying entirely on technology and training, because it was ludicrous.
Oh, and Bruce – no, the *Batman* -- was going to be angry when he figured it out. Clark couldn't hope to keep the two identities separate as far as Batman was concerned forever. Look how quickly Lex had connected the dots – and he and Lex hadn't even been fucking.
"Anything?" Batman asked, breaking into his reverie.
"Uh, no," Clark said, and tried to refocus.
As it happened, when they did track the minion down, he didn't know a damn thing.
****
"Wake up," Lex whispered in his ear, as Clark opened his eyes in the dream.
They were in Clark's old bedroom, shabby walls and shabbier furniture, all of it radiating such love and security that he couldn't help but smile, even with Lex sitting next to him on the bed.
"What are you doing here?" he asked, because it was expected.
"Speak for yourself, Clark," Lex replied.
Clark got up and went to the window. Looking out, he saw the view from the top of the Daily Planet, directly opposite LexCorp's higher floors.
"If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" He could feel the ghost of Lex's breath on the back of his neck, Lex's coarse velvet voice low and invasive.
Across the way, a mechanical replica of Lionel was dancing, spinning like a circus clown through the vast empty spaces of his boardroom, his blue metal arms jerking and spasming. A portrait of Lex, done in broad purple brushstrokes with a sun that wasn't yellow behind and above his head, watched over the spectacle.
"If I am only for myself, what am I?"
Clark turned, to find Lex standing outside in the hall, the door open. The hallway began to telescope, dragging Lex into the distance so that he shrunk into a manikin, hardly there at all. "If not now, when?"
"Maimonides isn't really your style," he said, calm though his heart shuddered in his chest.
"Clark," Lex said reproachfully, and Clark turned to see him in the mirror over the chest of drawers. "Have some respect for history. It's Hillel." Clark approached the silvered glass, raising his hand to watch Lex do the same, reaching out. "Just because *our* fathers weren't wise is no reason to be sloppy about it."
Their palms hit the mirror at the same time, the collision sending shocks up Clark's arm as the cold, flat surface refused to let them touch. Lex splayed his hand out, his fingers invisible behind Clark's, leaning into the mirror with the confidence he always had that nothing would yield without his permission.
"Stop trying to define yourself by what I'm not," Lex said, drawing his free hand back and curling it into a fist. Clark found his own arm reacting, pulled without his volition. "Because, Clark, there's a lot of room for contradictions in 'alive.'" The fist began to swing.
Clark shattered awake.
****
Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen.
They stood outside the seventeenth building, deep in the shadows Batman preferred. Clark did a quick scan to see what awaited.
"Some people, with guns. And a lead-lined room," he said, telling himself not to hope even as his heart sped up.
"We'll go in together." Batman must have seen that Clark was picoseconds from speeding in, because he continued, "I know the people. I know who's dangerous and what things might be tricks."
Clark nodded, uncertain what his voice would sound like.
He ripped the small door beside the loading dock off its hinges and walked through a hail of bullets that felt less annoying than gnats. Clark sped around the enormous, cluttered warehouse floor, disarming everyone but one fellow who had a Kryptonite-enhanced vest – and, shortly, a Batarang in the face.
The dismayed groans of the men faded into the background as Clark slowed to a stop and looked, drawn like a magnet, towards the small room that had been constructed in the back. There was a white-coated woman hastily punching in a code – he looked through her skeleton to get see what it was – and she bolted through and slammed the door. Light bled out around the edges.
He gave Batman a chance to catch up with him. The man was fast, Clark had to concede that, and he didn't make any sound, even though he ought to have been trying to catch his breath.
"I'll go in first," Batman said, which was only sensible but still made Clark twitch.
"Fine," he said and told him the code.
Clark kept scanning around, in case the Joker showed up to watch the fireworks, while Batman entered the numbers as if offended by the very existence of the electronic lock and pushed open the door.
There was a series of violent thuds. A tiny form in motley came hurtling through the door, the bells on her cap jingling as she hit the concrete floor. She groaned and tried without success to push herself upright. Clark bent to cuff her hands behind her back with a piece of scrap metal as she kicked weakly, and deposited her against some large unmarked boxes.
"Batman?" Clark called. "Are you all right?" Even though it wasn't entirely safe, he moved to stand in front of the open door, trying to look in.
Batman's bulk took up most of the doorway. With bright bluish light behind him, he looked like the creature of nightmare he wanted to be.
"Luthor's here," he said, and his voice had an unfamiliar note.
Clark stepped forward. Batman put a gloved hand to his chest. "You don't want to see."
"What?" He wasn't going to shove Batman aside, but he was considering a gentle push.
Batman drew in a breath. "Luthor said – Luthor *asked* that you stay out, and I think he's right. You take charge of the cleanup, and I'll have a medical team here –"
Clark picked Batman up by his shoulders, turned, and deposited him next to the still-struggling woman.
And walked into Hell.
The room was clean, which made the smell of old blood hard to understand. The floor sloped downward on all sides to a central drain. On one side, the woman who'd used the code to lock the door was slumped, unconscious, her hands bound behind her and her coat smeared with grime from the floor. There were cabinets on the walls, mirrored so that the body on the elaborate surgical table was reflected to infinity.
Clark's mind refused to admit what it was seeing, skipping over Lex to the knives, retractors, and other silver implements on the tables beside him.
When that tactic failed, he still couldn't quite comprehend it, thinking of old plates of Vesalius he'd seen in Europe.
From his toes to his calves and to the wrist of his right hand, Lex had been flayed, half dissected, the skin at the edges of the cuts rolled back like someone might roll a sleeve. His abdomen was an open sore, loops of intestine bulging wetly, a sick purple Clark had only ever seen at major accidents. The red, seeping flesh that remained around the bones of his feet, the yellow streaks of fat, the blue veins seemed unreal, plastic, some mannequin of a visible man.
Lex's chest rose and fell. His head was turned away from Clark, and the face in the mirror was too distorted to recognize.
Clark staggered back out. Batman was speaking into the cowl of his outfit, presumably talking to the police. The jester-woman was curled up on herself now. She'd managed to twist so that the makeshift cuffs were in front, and her hands were drawn up to her chest in a pose that reminded Clark of a praying mantis. Praying mantises eat their mates, he remembered. She was giggling. On some of the white diamonds in her costume, Clark saw dark spots and lines, blood black with age. Different velocities, different angles –
"Did you do this?" he asked, his voice buzzing in his head.
Batman was saying something to him. Clark couldn't hear it as he picked the woman up by the front of her costume. She gibbered like a monkey, her mouth stretched as wide as a slashed throat. Her colors were like those in the room, white cheeks, red lips, yellow and white and blue diamonds on her costume. The fabric sagged as he held her up, unable to think or move. Gradually, she calmed down, staring back at him, her eyes like cyclones.
Clark became aware of Batman's hand on his forearm. "Put her down, Superman," he was saying, in the tone of a man who'd been repeating himself for a while.
When he let go, the woman tumbled to the ground like a string-cut puppet. Batman stared at her for a moment, then turned to Clark. His eyes were dark under his mask.
"I'll go check for – anything else that got left behind," he managed, and fled.
****
Lex didn't acknowledge his entrance, continuing to stare at the laptop screen in front of him. The computer cords draped across the hospital bed, merging with the other equipment that bleeped and ticked around Lex.
His left hand jittered over the keyboard like an ecstasy-sodden teenager at an old-style rave. His right lay concealed beneath the sheets. There was a sort of tent over his feet, with even more monitors and displays clustered around it.
"How are you doing, Lex?" Clark asked.
"Go away, Superman," Lex said. He hadn't even looked up. How he could tell that Clark was in uniform and not mufti was only the beginning of the mystery, when Clark hadn't even known Lex was alive.
He stepped closer to the bed, drinking in the sight of Lex's too-thin face. Lex had carried that deceptive softness around for years; without it, he looked more like his father.
Lex's fingers slowed and then stopped. He turned his head to look at Clark. It was like being hit with a firehose; Clark could stand it, but it took concentration. "Batman was here earlier. Don't you have some more deserving charity cases to look after?"
That was disturbing. Batman wasn't exactly the candy-striper type. Clark was used to visiting hospitals, doing the Make-a-Wish thing until he was sick with helplessness, but he couldn't imagine why Batman would have checked up on Lex, unless Lex and Bruce –
It didn't bear thinking about.
"I wanted to see you," he said, because sincerity without full disclosure was always his best weapon against Lex.
Sure enough, the pressure of Lex's gaze faltered for a second. "You've seen me," he said, but without finality.
"How are you?" Another half-step closer. Given a few months, he might be right beside Lex.
"My doctors haven't given you all the latest news?"
"I didn't ask them." In fact, he'd stood behind Mercy, arms folded, as she explained to all the doctors, nurses, and other attendants how extremely displeased Mr. Luthor would be if any information on his condition were to appear in the press or even in hospital gossip. It wouldn't have been fair to ask after that.
Lex smiled, unamused. His eyes were the dark gray of a summer thunderstorm. "Well. Due to my remarkable healing powers, the flesh on my feet is regrowing nicely. They tell me I'll walk in under three months."
"I'm glad to hear that, Lex. Really."
"I know," Lex said, looking down at his fingers, still on the keyboard. "You'd never be so petty as to want me crippled." There was a pause. "I lost the hand."
Incomprehension, again, like being back in the Joker's sick bunker. "What?"
"The exposed bone got infected, there was gangrene – they took it off at the wrist three days ago." Lex's voice was calm, but it sounded as if he were reminding himself that this was no nightmare. Clark's vision flashed into X-ray, searching below the bedsheet. Lex's familiar skeleton was truncated, mutilated.
Clark stumbled back, bumping into a chair by the wall and collapsing into it. "Lex –"
"*Superman*," he said, a reminder.
"I'm so –"
"Shut up!" Lex's left hand – his only hand – pounded on the plastic tray in front of him, nearly sending the laptop flying. "You don't get to be responsible for this. That psychotic bastard is, and I'm going to kill him." Lex's face, already strange in its new thinness, twisted into fury redder than anything Clark had ever seen aimed at himself. "I'm going to rip out his spine and use it as a watch chain. When I'm done with him, blood is going to be the new black."
Clark realized that he was making noise, a wheezy sound lost under Lex's rant. He tried to control himself as Lex raged on.
"And don't you *dare* go after him yourself. That sick fuck is mine, and if you try to protect him out of some misguided ideal of justice you'll discover that I've hardly been trying to hurt you at all until now."
"Lex –"
"He *broke* me," Lex said, his voice as flayed as his skin had been. "I thought I was – I thought I was strong. I thought I was my own man. I thought no one could make me do anything I didn't want, and sixty hours after he took me I was his." He wasn't looking at Clark any more. Clark thought he wasn't seeing the hospital room at all. "I would have killed – I would have done anything to make it stop, and I did.
"The only reason," Lex said and halted. He breathed out, swallowed, and raised his eyes to Clark's. "The only reason he doesn't know who you are is that he didn't ask. I don't think it ever crossed his mind that I might know." Lex looked so suddenly young, lost against the too-white sheets and the bleeping electronics.
Clark stood and took three steps towards Lex's bed. "Don't."
"Don't what? Don't tell the truth? Isn't that what you always wanted?"
It's not even close to what I wanted, Clark thought. Guilt was supposed to be his great fault, not Lex's. Pride, Luthor pride, that was what Lex needed now, to be made strong by his fatal flaw.
After a minute, Lex made a sound that could have been a laugh reflected in a funhouse mirror. "At least you're not spouting Bruce's claptrap about how no one resists torture, as if we were just *ordinary*." His tone made it a curse.
Well, this day just kept spiraling towards perfection. The last thing Lex needed right now was Bruce shoving his moral superiority in Lex's face – and yeah, Clark was aware of the irony, but that was kind of the point. Clark really needed a clear field on which to make his own moves.
"Listen, Lex," Clark said and crossed the floor to stand by the bed, breaching the force field Lex had emanated against him for years. "When we all thought you were dead, Mercy gave me a message you recorded for me."
Lex blinked, obviously remembering the contents of the message. His lashes dipped in embarrassment, only part-feigned. "I'm a sentimentalist, what can I say?"
Clark knelt so that he and Lex were at the same level. "I knew that already. Here's the thing: I refuse your refusal."
"What?" Lex looked honestly confused, for once.
"You refuse to be saved, okay. I refuse to not save you." He was reminded of Pete's old line: You're not the boss of me. He smiled, feeling better as Lex's expression clouded with outrage. Lex shouldn't be reflecting on his own perceived inadequacies; that made him mean and dangerous. Mad at Clark was much safer.
"You patronizing little shit," Lex began.
"Yeah, probably," he admitted, silencing Lex – another blast from the past, to be able to shut him up. "But you know you didn't take me seriously either."
Lex actually gaped at him. It was almost enough to make Clark smile, even with everything else. "Look, how far did all this guilt and angst get us? I know *I'm* not happy. Maybe –"
The Fortress's super-miniaturized link chimed in his ear, letting him know that a forest fire was threatening a California town.
"I've got to go, Lex. But I think we need to talk more."
He deliberately didn't listen for Lex's answer as he flew towards California.
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It's always great to see what other people see in the stories, because I miss a lot of what goes on!
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All this just shows that I've been reading your SV stories over and over again in an attempt to get through my schoolwork.
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WOW.
I have to go think about a response that will do these chapters justice, but for now, just, WOW.
I only found this story today. I was off reading something else, but thank goodness I found it.
I'll be back.
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I am loving this story, and the only thing that raises the bar on my awe for you is the knowledge that, while you can write this sort of dark drama, you can also, with complete ease, write light-hearted screwball comedy.
I'm using your LJ for a sekrit message, as Hotmail seems to be screwing up our communication: I emailed you your beta'd story (as a Word doc, not in the email's text) at about midnight EST last night. If you haven't rec'd it, let me know via my LJ, and I'll send it again from a non-Hotmail email address.
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Wow!
I made you a little present sweetie, it's over in my lj and you can find it here: http://www.livejournal.com/users/digitalwave/94569.html
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I came here via a rec on
I loved all the Lex and Bruce interactions in the beginning. The way they danced around each other, and how furious Lex got when he thought Bruce might be threatening Clark. It's so Lex to be possessive of Clark even as his enemy.
I also really enjoyed Lex's supposed "final words" to Clark.
It was really interesting to see Bruce finally make the connection between Clark and Superman, as well as waiting to see when Clark would finally get the Batman - Bruce connection.
LOL, and I almost spewed soda over my monitor when Lois made the "as if Batman's condom would ever break" comment. Hee!
Clark's dream of Lex was a fantastic bit of writing. Creepy with perfectly cryptic Lex.
And like I said, in this part, the horror of what was done to Lex was so vivid, you felt it.
You're spinning a fantastic tale. Thanks so much for entertaining me on my extended lunch break. *g* I look forward to seeing where you go next with this tale.
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I'm afraid I can't take full credit for Batman's condom. Livia (
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Your story is amazing. Yesterday I read it before going to bed and now I wish I didn't. This is the first time that I wished there were clear labels and if there were I probably wished that I would have considered them! ;-)
Perhaps over the time it came to your attention I swallow lots of NC-17 stuff for breakfast, this one really really really shook me.
The tortue scene – I couldn't read through it, simply couldn't, had to close the file for a moment or two to gather a courage. Then Lex's confession – breathtaking, heartbreaking, made me ache, swallow in sympathy, just pain terrified to read it.
What disturbed me the most is that I didn't buy Lex's death from the begining, (duh) that it just was, thou death is like that. Still this is fiction, it didn't feel right, and all the time I thought – he didn't let go of those formulas willingly, why the fuck is Clark not looking for him? Why the fuck is Mercy not pestering Clark about that? I knew he was in trouble, but when I was hit with the cruel detail of the image you brought to my eyes I choked. I couldn't fall asleep and had to reread Lenore's Schizophrenic Jealousy and Love for sale to calm me down.
Great writing, great story, great thrill!
Some really interesting thoughts, and the meeting of Joker and Superman was fun.
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I'm glad the story is inspiring a strong reaction. And I hope you got some sleep after all.
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This fic totally rocks. I *love* the way you handle Clark and Lex, but that's practically a given in any story of yours. Your supporting characters are wonderful as well. The scenes they appear in (Lois! Perry! Harlequinn! [sp? I'm not all that familiar with Batman]) just *give* the readers so much in terms of characterization. It's just amazing how much you can say about them in so short a time.
Anyway. So I scrolled up a bit and realized *again* how much I love this section. Every scene is just *wow*. Build up, climax, aftermath -- all great.
And of course! Dissected!Lex made my heart go pit-a-pat *laughs* How's that for a spin on *your* nightmares, Clark? No, seriously, that's such a gripping scene. I really, really like horror (be it subtle or total gross-out) and after years of deliberately watching or reading horror movies and stories in near total darkness to get the full freak-out effect, I gotta say that that deserves a stamp of excellence *wide grin* Right out of a Stephen King novel. Even better, since it was Lex that got all tortured and how I love that man *sighs*
That...didn't sound very sane.
But! Best scene still's Clark's dream. The first line in that part *killed* me. So understated and beautiful, especially with next paragraph.
So yeah -- I love you and my firstborn child's on the way.
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I wasn't going to comment on this until I was done reading the entire thing, but I couldn't help it.
This chapter made me cry, which I never do, and almost throw up, which I also never do.
"He *broke* me," Lex said, his voice as flayed as his skin had been. "I thought I was – I thought I was strong. I thought I was my own man. I thought no one could make me do anything I didn't want, and sixty hours after he took me I was his.
I don't even think I can give you words for how much that affected me. That paragraph alone has made this one of the most powerful, real works of fiction I've read in a long time, and I'm horrified and disgusted and moved and completely overwhelmed.
Congratulations on a superb job.
-Alice
p.s. Do you mind if I friend you?
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Welcome aboard!