No Darker Than Yours: 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 turned sour. 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.

****

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 current alliance 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 walls were white and the tables gleaming silver metal, 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.

****

Once the fire was out and Clark was able to check in at the Fortress, he realized that he needed to deal with his other big problem. Maybe it was abusing his Justice League credentials to use Batman's contact information this way, but the whole mess was making him paranoid, and he needed not to be distracted right now. Thankfully, the Fortress put the call through without any commentary on the madness that was his life.

"We need to talk," he said when he heard Bruce pick up the phone.

"Come to Gotham," Batman said. "You know where I am."

Clark's jaw clenched reflexively. "That's what I wanted to talk about."

"Is it that important to you?" Batman sounded indifferent. Clark just hated this macho bullshit. Not that honesty was always the best policy, but they were supposed to be allies. He'd just helped Batman clean out half the bad guys in Gotham, for goodness' sake. They needed to come to a mutual understanding.

Okay, so maybe he should implement his own ethic. "We need to understand each other," he said. "And I think it would be easier face to face." Thank God he was old enough not to flush with embarrassment as he flashed back to being face to face with Bruce.

"I'll see you in a few minutes, then."

This was so not a good time, not with Lex newly risen and plainly still very angry. (Clark was aware that this was something of an understatement, but defining Lex's emotions had been a losing battle for him even in their best days.) Clark didn't need to deal with two brilliant, screwed-up men with virtually no resource constraints.

Maybe, he thought, I should have considered that before I came on to him. I did know he had the money, even if I didn't know the other thing.

That would teach him to underestimate humans.

Really, it had seemed like a bright idea at the time. He had known Lex would find out, and there had been a nasty thrill from that, thinking of Lex shaking hands with Bruce at some business meeting. More than that, Bruce was gorgeous and sex was fun; Clark was good at it; it was a way to make people happy instead of just saving them from death and dismemberment. It was nice to be good at something not associated with painful revelations or just pain.

Casual sex was more honest. He was careful, not careless like Lex had been. He picked only men and women who were just looking for a night outside their own heads. That way, he didn't have to make promises he was sure to break or pretend to share what he was thinking. He didn't even have to choose who to be, Superman or Clark Kent, since he didn't have to wear a costume at all.

He'd thought Bruce understood. Bruce had seemed to be having fun, too, and fun was not an activity that Clark had ever associated with Batman. Bruce hadn't seemed like the type to go psycho on him. Though as it turned out, that was only because he already was.

As usual, Clark's judgment sucked.

This was so unfair. Who would have thought that Bruce Wayne, the male equivalent of Paris Hilton (minus the widely distributed sex tape, though there were always rumors), would moonlight as a superhero? Conversely, who would have thought that Batman's special powers were composed of weirdness and money?

Clark had the irritating suspicion that Lex was probably the answer to those questions.

He flew to Gotham.

Bruce's -- Batman's -- creepy butler let him in. Lex never had a butler. Maybe it was an old money thing. "Master Bruce is waiting for you in the study," the man intoned, as nonchalant as if men in superhero costumes came by every day. He led Clark into the labyrinthine mansion.

Bruce had his back to the door to his den, looking out the window over his enormous dank gardens. He was wearing a suit tailored with exquisite care to make him look slimmer and weaker than he was. Clark felt a flash of resentment. Money made things so easy. Sure, alien technology was helpful, especially with the appearance distorter he used with the suit, but the Fortress didn't print money and it couldn't replace all the clothes he destroyed running to rescues. It was money that provided Batman's nice toys; without it, all the attitude and genius in the world wouldn't have outfitted him to play on the League's level.

"This is awkward," he began.

Bruce didn't turn. "I know."

Clark closed his eyes. Bruce was deliberately being aggravating, and Clark was not going to play. "I didn't know until a few days ago. If I had --"

"I knew I should have lined the mask with lead."

Clark shook his head, even though Bruce couldn't see -- except, Clark saw, Bruce was looking at the window, and there was a reflection in the glass.

Breathe.

"That's not how -- that's not the point. I need to know if we can still work together."

"That depends," Bruce said, turning at last. "Whose side are you on?"

"I believe in the Justice League and what it stands for," Clark said.

"And Luthor?"

Clark stared at Bruce. "I don't know what's going to happen with Lex. But I am -- I'm going to do everything I can to make it work."

"Have you considered another round of electroshock?"

Clark didn't think, just moved, grabbing Bruce and shoving him against the nearest wall so hard that he heard the creak of aristocratic wood. "You think that's funny? Lex's father tortured him, as bad as the Joker did -- his father, his own father. Yes, Lex has done bad things. Yes, Lex hasn't tried hard enough to escape his legacy. But I will not believe that it's too late for him. I'm sorry if that makes you jealous or -- or whatever it is with you, but I did not know who you were, and I sure as hell wouldn't have had sex with you if I had. I've got about all I can handle with one obsessive psycho genius, thanks a lot. You were supposed to be this gorgeous pinhead, and, you know what? It's your own damn fault if false advertising gets you in relationships you don't like."

Clark paused for breath.

Bruce's blank face broke into a smile.

"Freak," Clark said, but he was already smiling back, helpless against the mockery, which was almost gentle -- as close as the Batman could get to gentle, anyway.

"You see?" Bruce asked, pushing Clark back and stepping forward. "Now we have a basis for communication."

"Then I guess it's your turn," Clark said, regaining his composure as he folded his arms across his chest.

"I didn't know either," Bruce said, making it sound like an insight instead of a confession of ignorance. "Not until recently. I don't know what I would have done if I'd known. I don't trust you and I don't trust Luthor, not separately and definitely not together. You're too powerful and he's too ambitious. I'm not going to stand by and let him use you to take over the world, or let you enforce your own vision of morality on it. However attractive that morality may be."

Clark shut his mouth, considered, and nodded. "I wouldn't expect anything else. But I'm worried that you'll do something preemptive against me or Lex, and you're very good. You need to understand that I'm uncertain about you, the same way you're uncertain about me."

"Fair enough," Bruce said. "We worked well together, these last few weeks. I'm not averse to trying it again, when necessary."

That sounded like the best he was going to get, right now. Trust had to be built slowly -- at least Clark thought so; he still wasn't all that good at it. If all went well, he could make sure the Batman had access to Kryptonite, just in case. It might make Bruce more confident. Maybe Bruce would even see that Lex's presence in Clark's life could be the same kind of balance. Bruce didn't seem to have grown up with all that mythic prophecy stuff, so maybe he didn't understand how Clark and Lex had these roles to play, no matter how hard it was.

"So," Bruce said, "can I offer you dinner?"

Clark laughed. "Thanks," he said, meaning it. "But I should get back. I'll -- be in touch, okay?"

Bruce seemed willing to let it go at that.

****

Clark wrote the story of Lex's miraculous return from the dead. He had to; he'd established himself as Superman's media contact long ago, and Superman's adventures in Gotham had been fairly public. And he did have all the background research about the search for Lex, which Lois knew. Superman did refuse to discuss Lex. Clark made up a sharp quote about privacy and letting Lex reclaim his life.

How many resurrections did this make?

Lois made the routine call to Lex's office, asking for comment. She liked to be the one who did that because she liked the creativity of the responses -- sorry, but Mr. Luthor has gone fishing. Sorry, he's almost got the meaning of life figured out and he can't be interrupted. Sorry, he's journeying to the center of the earth, out of cellphone range. Sorry, he's getting a haircut. Sorry, he's got bubonic plague.

Lois was wide-eyed, her customary wry smile missing, as she listened to Lex's assistant. Covering the receiver with her hand, she turned to Clark. "Luthor says he'll talk to you at three o'clock today."

Clark stared at her, equally taken aback. He nudged his glasses further up the bridge of his nose. Lois hastily turned back to the phone. "He'll be there," she said, listened for a minute more, and hung up.

"So, Kent," she said, her eyes bright with speculation, "tell me more about your childhood friend Lex Luthor."

He looked down, casting his hearing around just in case he could go to someone's rescue.

"Listen," she said, scooting her chair across the floor so that their knees were almost touching. "I watched you go into mourning for months and I didn't say anything. I even let you have your little Search for Spock thing -- good call, by the way. But he's not dead any more and you are a journalist about to have an exclusive interview with the biggest story of the year. I'm your partner and I deserve to know how your reporting is going to be affected by your personal life."

Clark looked up, trying to figure out what he could say. Her eyes were hazel, green spiked with brown like petrified wood, patient and hungry all at once.

It was something of a miracle that she hadn't asked before. She'd never had any hesitation teasing him about Lana, asking him about being adopted, and otherwise prying into his thoughts. He hadn't noticed that Lex was the only topic she skipped.

"We were best friends," he blurted. "When he first arrived in Smallville. Until -- he changed, and I couldn't --"

Lois's eyes unfocused as she thought. "You were -- what, fifteen? And he was already running that LuthorCorp plant. How'd you get to be best friends?"

"Smallville's not like other places," he said, even though everyone in Smallville had asked the same question. And mostly come up with the answer Lois was about to generate.

His history in Smallville hadn't been a problem for him in years. The Metropolis papers had never printed his name as Lex's rescuer, and he'd burned down the building where the Ledger archives had been kept when he was home for fall break his junior year of college. He'd blown out the fire as soon as the records were destroyed, and there were no human casualties. There was no need to worry about back-up copies. His interests had been aligned with Lex's on that. Destroying the electronic versions up through 2005 was probably the last thing Lex had done to help him, however inadvertently, until Clark had received his bequest of useful information.

"You weren't --" Lois said, then swallowed and barrelled onwards -- "fucking him?"

Clark shook his head. "Lex wouldn't do that. Lex had scruples, just not normal ones."

"It sounds," she said slowly, "like you wanted him."

Clark didn't say anything.

"You're both grown-ups now," she pointed out.

"He's Lex Luthor now."

Lois wouldn't tell him that maybe all Lex needed was the love of a good man.

"So," she said at last, "can you do this story?"

He nodded. He could do anything. He had ten years of superheroing to prove it.

****

Clark had never entered the LexCorp building from the bottom. The security was impressive: discreet but all-pervasive metal detectors, cameras, pressure sensors, heat sensors, and machines whose functions were unknown to him. The lacquer-perfect receptionist (cross-draw holsters and stiletto in a thigh sheath) examined his credentials without comment, then gave him a badge with the date and his picture on it, the word "Visitor" written across it in large red letters. The elevator to the top floor had a human operator (one gun at his waist, another at the ankle) and Clark had to give his badge to be scanned before the doors would close.

All this, and Lex hadn't been paranoid enough. Clark looked at the elevator operator and wondered if he'd been one of the men who let Lex be taken.

At last, the elevator decanted Clark into an empty, dimly lit waiting area. Up by the ceiling, in between camera lenses, there were small holes for gas, either poison or simply incapacitating or, most likely, a choice of both. As he remembered, the walls were lead-lined; either they hadn't been destroyed in the Joker's attack, or they'd been replaced. Since he couldn't see out, all he could do was test the batteries in his recorder and wait.

A section of silvery-gray wall slid aside, revealing Hope standing in a corridor. The lights were bright enough to make a human blink after the twilight of the waiting area. She'd changed her hair, twists instead of braids, and her fingernails were polish-free and bitten, as if she hadn't quite come back up to speed. "Come this way," she told him, and watched as he walked past her.

Their footsteps were swallowed by the black flooring.

He didn't notice whether she even entered Lex's office or said anything before she closed the door.

Seated behind his massive exotic-wood desk, Lex looked just the same as ever, though a quick X-ray revealed that his chair was actually an extremely well-made wheelchair. He'd been wearing leather driving gloves that day on the bridge, Clark recalled. Today's black leather pair covered Lex's hand and his prosthesis, disappearing into the sleeves of his fine suit. When Clark shifted his eyesight to look through the fabric, he saw plastic straps biting into the flesh of Lex's forearm.

Lex followed his gaze and held his arm up, turning it so that the prosthesis moved. With its fingers in fixed positions, it looked more unnatural in motion than it had resting on the desk.

"I'm still working on the bionic hand," Lex said lightly. "I could get some mobility with a claw-type arrangement, but it makes most people uncomfortable and I need to reassure people more than I need to be able to tie my own shoes."

Clark controlled his wince. "I hope that works out, Lex."

"Thank you." Amazingly, Lex's tone was irony-free. But he wasn't done surprising Clark. "I want to apologize for the way I spoke to you at the hospital."

Clark gaped at him.

"I was extremely angry and I lashed out at you when in reality I once again owe you my life."

This was the part where Clark was supposed to say something about repaying him by becoming a productive member of society. "You don't owe me anything."

Before, Lex had been so wrapped up in his own suffering that his smooth manipulativeness hadn't been functioning properly, stripped away like his flesh. Now Clark could feel Lex turn it on, extending across the desk like a magnetic field. "I didn't expect you to save me. It wasn't your fault. It's never been your fault."

Lex was a liar, so good a liar that he himself believed every word just as long as he needed to. Clark knew that, so Lex's sincerity shouldn't have felt like a Kryptonite-fueled punch in the stomach.

"We should -- we should get started," he said, back to stuttering like a farm-fresh kid.

Lex's brows raised a fraction, but all he said was, "Very well."

Clark raised the recorder, preparing to turn it on.

"I'd prefer it if you didn't record our conversation."

Clark closed his hand and let the crushed pieces fall to the floor. Lex's eyes lowered in satisfaction.

Oddly, the interview began well. Lex's answers, declining to go into detail about his ordeal, were eloquent and would come across in print as charming and sincere. When he wasn't actively raging, Lex probably had a hard time turning off his charm. It had been years since Clark had been caught in the sweep of Lex's seduction, like a beam of light from a lighthouse, guiding ships to their doom. He'd forgotten how Lex could electrify the air, making everything sharp and alive, like the snap in the air of a brisk fall day or the view from the top of a high mountain.

"What?" Lex looked at him suspiciously, as if wondering whether Clark was reading the documents stashed in Lex's desk.

Clark blushed, not having realized that he'd let the pause between questions go on so long that he was just staring at Lex like a moonstruck calf. They weren't friends any more. Smallville was a lot further away in time than in space. He'd do well to remember that.

He cleared his throat and squared his shoulders, trying to be professional. Lex kept saying that he wanted people to stop thinking of him as a victim and remember that he was a businessman, so -- "Moving on to current events, what's your reaction to allegations that LexCorp is indifferent to the human costs of its business decisions, specifically regarding the job cuts that came two weeks after the buyout of GreenTech was finalized?"

Lex, whose relaxed demeanor had disappeared while Clark was trapped in nostalgia, snarled. "You know, I am fucking sick and tired of being treated like Attila the Hun because I run a growing business. Hasn't anyone been paying attention? Twenty percent of American children go to bed hungry, it's worse elsewhere, and I. Feed. People. Global warming is making the summers hotter and the storms worse. Half the country doesn't have working aquifers anymore. Whole towns are poisoned by factory farming. The only way to save the environment is to grow more food on less land."

He turned towards the window, gesturing out at the city with his living hand as he talked. "The fat times are over, and the lean times are going to last a lot longer than seven years. We need new weather-resistant strains of rice and wheat, new fertilizers for worked-out soil, new desalinization technology, new distribution methods, and LexCorp provides them. I feed people. When I fire employees, it's because they're bad at feeding people. The real price of a dozen basic foods have dropped nearly ten percent in the U.S. in three years because LexCorp leads the market.

"If I have to fire a thousand people every month to make sure that progress continues, I'll do it. I make it possible -- I make it easy -- to eat. I'm the best at it, and I won't stop because it's so basic as to be unpopular with college student activists." He was panting, shaking with fury. Clark half expected him to start throwing objects from his desk.

"Well?" he demanded, hunching his shoulders as if he expected to be hit.

It was fitting that Lex would be obsessed with hunger. In so many ways, he'd been starving since he was a little boy.

But that was flippant. This was far more than armchair psychology.

Clark looked him in the eye. "I didn't know you felt that strongly about it."

Lex had recovered himself enough to give an ironic little smile. Clark wondered again why the scar on his lip was the only survivor of all Lex's misadventures, then barely stopped himself from wincing as he remembered Lex's more recent loss.

Lex's next words were a relief, because if it had been up to Clark to restart the conversation they might have been sitting in silence for months. "Though you may find it hard to believe, the only retroviruses I want to work on insert benign genes into plants."

Wait, was Lex feeling guilt? Guilt over helping the Joker, when he hadn't flinched at ruining lives and reputations to build his own empire -- it was ridiculous, and perfectly Lex.

Clark had the feeling that "I believe you" would go across very badly, for a variety of reasons. "It's an important project, Lex. And you're probably the only person who could do it."

Lex blinked at this compliment, as well he might. "Why did you come here, Clark? What do you want?"

Again, Lex was ignoring his role in the whole thing, as if Clark had just shown up unannounced the way he'd done too many times when Superman had to curtail some Lexian experiment. Still, Lex deserved an answer. Try honesty. What the hell, you've tried everything else. "I missed you."

A muscle in Lex's jaw twitched; a vein pulsed on the side of his head (which must be an annoying tell, Clark thought, since most people didn't have that exposure). Lex exhaled, swallowed -- Clark must have really fazed him with that. Lex probably thought that was why he said it.

"I knew you'd figure it out eventually, you and the Batman." Lex's voice was as even as if it had been sanded down.

Clark leaned forward in his chair. "I missed you longer than that."

"I don't know what you --"

"It's not too late," Clark said.

"Sometimes," Lex said, looking down at his desk, "I think it was too late the moment you pulled me out of the water."

"Sometimes," Clark said, "I think the most amazing thing about you is your inability to accept a happy medium. You weren't born doomed, and you weren't born saved. You have choices every day. I only wish you believed that."

"I don't need your pity," Lex sniped, looking angry more at himself for losing his composure than at Clark.

"I don't pity you."

"You're not going to tell me you admire me."

Clark shook his head, wondering how Lex could think that there were only two options other than fear. "You've lived so many times when you should have died. You lived when no one else would have; you've lived when it was crazy to survive. Don't you think it means something? Don't you think you're meant for something more than tormenting Superman and dodging the law?"

"It means that I'm a freak. But you knew that already."

"Meteor mutants die all the time, Lex. I saw a lot of them die. It's not that."

Lex was silent. Behind him, Clark could see the highest part of the Metropolis skyline, the view he got when he was flying above the rest of the world. The sun was out of sight, but the light was still bright and welcoming.

Screams in the distance.

"I have to go. Emergency," he said awkwardly, unused to explaining his departures. "If you want to talk, or -- anything, you know where to find me."

He thought Lex almost smiled at that, though he could have been imagining it, as he rose from his chair and Lex punched a button that opened half the wall for him.

Clark's dad was a bit set in his ways, but about one thing Clark had learned he was absolutely right: You can't make a man's choices for him. They're what make him a man, for better or worse. Clark could only hope that, for Lex, they'd get better.

End Part II

On to Part III: Smallville