He's not sure where he is.
The navigation system gave out six hours ago, the engine two. He's not sure of the time since his watch froze, eternally at eighteen to three, like some paperback horror novel on the discount shelf that didn't understand real horror always starts at midnight. Walking's not smart in the Arctic, but coming hadn't been either, and that hadn't stopped him.
He's so *awake*.
After five sleepless days and nights of an Arctic winter, he's never been this wired in his life. Something to do with the stimulants, perhaps; more with the way exhaustion and rage became a world all their own.
It's hours, or days, or just seconds when he sees it, for the first time and maybe the last time. It's what he expected and nothing he expected at all--Fortress or glorified igloo, pick a term, colored like the snow and about as friendly. But it lets him inside, and that's all he cares about.
The heavy metal doors open at a touch, a slow progression of light chasing itself down the hall like a path he follows as blindly as the instincts that led him north. He hates the cold stone, the way that it reminds him of the castle in dream-images, like the memory of memory. It's easier to follow than think, feeling the snow melting from his coat, the prickle-burn of slowly, slowly warming fingers and face.
Somewhere a thousand miles back is dynamite and nitroglycerine, left behind when the engine cut and instinct took over. Now, he's not sure that would have been the answer, even if he'd known the question.
God, he's so tired.
The main chamber comes to life with a slow, subliminal grind that Lex can feel in his bones.
"Lex Luthor." The voice is contralto female, richly toned, and it's almost as if she's standing in the room. It's indecent. Only Clark would want to humanize a computer like this. "State your purpose." If the AI were human, he'd say it was hostile. If it were human, they wouldn't be having this conversation, though. He's listing into the wall, head aching.
"Can't I just drop in for a visit?"
The silence stretches. It's waiting, and it can, because it's ageless. It's patient. And he's not, never has been, never grasped the reason why he should *have* to be. "I want to see him."
"You do not have access permissions here."
Computers are stupid. They follow instructions, bound by the parameters created by their programmers. A smart person can tell a computer the sky is green and it'll believe it, if you know the way to tell it. If all he wanted were databanks, he could do that, no problem. What he needs, though, is something only the AI can provide. "Does it matter?"
There's something surreal about arguing with a machine, even this one, but it knows him like it knows them all. His name didn't get him in here, but his DNA did and always will. Like calls to like. "A recording was released to the newswires two point five days ago--"
"Not that. I want what you saw."
"State your purpose."
Lex takes another step into the room, pausing as the door closes behind him. Light like something out of a near-death experience, but so cold, and how could Clark live here and think he could ever find anything close to peace? Another step, he's so close to the glow of the screen that he should be able to feel it like heat. "James Friedman. Eric Mahoney. Edward Michael Trew. Dr. Lizabeth Parkinson. Timothy Allen Davis. Josephina--"
"Current employees of LexCorp."
"There's nothing current about them." Lex stares at the screen, wondering why he's bothering. It's just-- "Lucas Dunleavy Luthor. Pete Ross. Senator. Lana Ross. His wife. Chloe Sullivan. Inquisitor reporter. Lois Lane. Planet reporter. Clark Kent. Planet reporter. Her husband." Lex takes a deep breath. "I want to see what you saw."
Another pause, and it works on drug-enhanced nerves like sandpaper, rubbing him raw from the inside out. This need to twitch and move and scream that's always burning just below the surface of his skin. They've called him crazy for so long that he can't remember when they weren't right.
"It would serve no purpose--"
Christ save him from machines with delusions of judgment. "It would for me. Why did you let me in?"
"You are incapable of threatening this facility or using it to threaten any other on the planet." There are far more interesting things now for that particular career choice, it doesn't say. It doesn't need to. "Why are you here?"
There are reasons on reasons, but the important things always stayed the same. Jesus, he's so tired of explaining, even if it's only to himself. "I need to know." It hurts to say it, God, it's been so *long* since he needed anyone for anything. He wonders what the computer hears in his voice.
The AI rumbles something, and Lex watches the lights with a kind of fascination, because he *remembers* lights the way he remembers so fucking little that's ever mattered. Just watching it, it looks like any machine in the world, mindless and silent, unable to offer answers to the questions Lex doesn't know how to ask.
"I need to see him."
*****
Memory's a tricky thing. It twists and changes with time and experience, with what-should-be to what-could-have-been, until sometimes, he's not sure of the difference. He hated Clark for longer than he ever loved him, but he never forgot him.
He remembers this.
It had happened so fast--he remembers ducking beneath the rubble of the building, gun in his hand, like it was any kind of use against machines with dreams of conquest, like anything he did could be any kind of deterrent at all. He remembers stepping over Mercy's body and kneeling by Hope, as if he could save her, as if he could save anyone at all, even himself. Murmuring words into her ear that didn't mean shit, because they were all dead and this was just marking time.
He remembers putting the gun against her temple and giving her the peace he couldn't give himself. Remembers the screaming and the silence and the bodies he'd stepped over like litter.
And he remembers Clark.
Not Superman, caped and alien, blurred images that overlap from a thousand encounters, but Clark, like he'd been in Lex's never-reliable memory, suddenly this too-pretty man in a ridiculous outfit with serious, too-old eyes.
Clark, beside him, catching him when he fell, hand over the wound he hadn't known he had. It was way too much like Smallville, except Clark's fashion sense had taken a downturn. He'd have said it, too, if he could have found the breath to speak.
He hadn't, he couldn't, he didn't, and now, God, he wished he had.
He remembers Clark's hands and Clark's slow, sweet smile, and he remembers the way he couldn't believe that even Clark could be this naive, to think that he could do anything against this.
"You can't save everyone, Clark," Lex had said, and God, what the *fuck*? Like those were last words that meant anything, but he'd meant them, every one of them. Stop fucking trying, Clark, a million are dead and a billion more will die, just fucking *stop*. Get the fuck out of here.
Not that Lex had ever taken advice like that.
Clark had just smiled.
"You can't save everyone," he'd said, and Clark had just laid him down and touched his face, like they were kids in Smallville playing at grown-up manipulation, playing rivals that become enemies, playing at everything that they'd never wanted to be.
"But I can save you."
*****
The recording of the thing that was brought to the Fortress doesn't look like anything Lex can recognize as human. As Clark.
Is that what you needed to see? The AI doesn't need to ask it for Lex to hear it, the thrum of the Fortress rocking him in his chair. If he didn't know better, he'd say it was angry. If he could think, he'd wonder if it even *could* be.
He can't. Lex doesn't answer.
*****
He falls asleep, at some point. When he wakes up, the image is still there.
*****
"Are you sure?" That he's dead, because he's *Superman*, for Christ's sake, and Lex had tried to kill him and never had. There was always comfort in that, a twisted kind, the man he could never give up, would never let go.
"Yes." For a machine, it sounds almost sad. "I verified his demise at twenty two and sixteen--"
"How the hell can anyone be sure?"
"His body ceased to absorb radiation," the machine answers slowly, like it's talking to an idiot child, not Lex Luthor, so fucking brilliant, Lex Fucking Luthor who could do anything and have everything and make anyone do whatever he wanted except this fucking machine didn't seem to know that. "Metabolic processes were absent. Brain scans showed no electrical activity after seventy-two hours of observation."
Lex breathes slowly. "What did you do with his body?"
"Cremated, as per his instructions."
Of course. Not leave his body to whatever hungry fascinations scientists would have with their not-quite-immortal alien. As if any scientists left had the time to care.
"I don't remember any of it." His voice seems to crack, though that's not right. "He didn't stop it, did he?"
The computer is silent for too long, and Lex's chest tightens. "It was badly damaged at the end, before it left. It will take time for it to reassemble itself, but no, it was not destroyed."
He knew that, somehow. Knew it like he knew his name, knew he breathed, and knew Clark had died and died for nothing.
"A fucking waste."
Like talking in a tomb. He wants to raze it down and salt the ground where it stood, do clichéd and dramatic and over the top things, but it seems such a waste of energy compared to sitting. Superman had to die, and if he was going to, it was going to be Lex who did it, Lex, who knew him better than anyone living and didn't know him at all. But Superman hadn't died in the middle of Virginia, in a forgettable field surrounded by the bodies of LexCorp's best and brightest. Superman hadn't, wouldn't have, thrown himself into a war he could never win. Superman was smarter than that, Lex knew it. He *knew* him.
He knew Superman, but it wasn't Superman who died in twisting, melting metal, slow and silent and staring into the sky he came from. Only Clark would have been that stupid. Only Clark would fucking *get up* and go to die like that.
Only Clark would have done that, and only Clark would have thought that Lex's life, anyone's life, was worth it.
"A fucking *waste*."
His hand aches, and Lex stares at bruising skin, the console, the edge that deflected him. It should hurt more.
"Yes." And with that, the computer seems done with him, screen going dark and silent. He doesn't move, though if ever an artificial intelligence could use body language to indicate he was to get his ass out, this one did, with dimming lights and a chill to the room as the temperature gauge fell.
He doesn't care.
"You couldn't teach him better than that?" And somewhere in his head, it seems like a logical question. "Christ, your people were what, suicidal? How the fuck can you have been an advanced civilization? How the fuck did you survive getting the fuck up in the morning?"
A few lights flutter lazily, like the slow blink of an eye. It's annoying as shit.
"We didn't."
*****
Thirty-four straight hours haven't given him any more answers than he'd had when he arrived.
"Did it hate him? Clark?" It seems like it must have. The targets had been so strangely specific, a connect the dot from California to Virginia, Chloe Sullivan to Lex Luthor and everyone and everything in between.
The computer doesn't like him, but it lets him access information, though he hasn't tested the limits of its security, and between flickers of the screen, he falls asleep on the console, dreamless sleep filled with suffocating silence. The thing that killed Clark will be back and there's no one to stop it, because the Justice League is hopelessly outclassed and possibly dead, and Superman is gone, but not forgotten, or so a thousand television talk shows and CNN keep reminding him, like he needs the reminder.
And he hates Clark a little, a lot, sometimes when he's staring at the news reports, sometimes when he's studying one of a thousand bits of data the computer gives him, the ones Clark accessed before he lost his mind and died and left them alone.
A thousand bits that tell him the same thing the first did--that kryptonite is good for anything and everything, and most especially for this thing, and the entire world can mourn or prepare as they pleased, but they'd better get ready to mourn themselves.
"I do not know." He's beginning to suspect the entire computer-drone voice thing is deliberate, just to annoy him. He lived half his life with Lionel Luthor. The AI doesn't even come close to the mindgames his father could play.
"But you suspect?" Sometimes, it helps if he's specific.
"The--entity--seems to have no pattern other than mass destruction."
"And targeting of Clark's family and friends." Or enemies, as the case might be. Very familiar enemies. "There's a pattern." A few flickers of his fingers bring up a new screen that vanishes before he even has the chance to read it. "Get that back up."
"You do not have permission--"
Lex bangs on the keyboard. "The world's fucking ending anyway. What the hell do you think I'm going to *do*? I don't want to die."
The news is becoming amusingly hopeful. It almost scares him, if he had the energy or cared enough to bother. They think it's over.
"I'm aware of that." The dry voice makes him twitch. "Nevertheless--"
"Fuck *off*. You want that thing coming back?" Though come to think, it might not care. Superman's dead and this thing has no link to humanity. "You think Superman would have wanted that?" Though it may not give a good shit about that, either.
"I do not pretend to understand Kal's--eccentricities."
Lex almost grins. He'd never understood them either. "There's got to be a way to stop it." Superman hadn't found it, but Superman was for shit when it came to advanced tactics. That's why he'd had--had Bruce.
He winces away from memory again, turning his gaze on the screen. At least the damned computer wasn't arguing with him about accessibility. "There's got to be something here."
The screen seemed to freeze, briefly, and Lex found himself staring up at the lights like they were eyes, like he could read something in them. Stupid and fucking insane, but he's okay with that right now. "You know something."
"Yes, and no."
Fuck. Twenty questions time. Again. "Can't you be specific?"
"I'm not--sure--that the information will be applicable to the situation at hand."
Of course not. That would make things *easy*. "You want this?" He waves toward the walls, feeling that rise of rage again that starts somewhere impossibly deep. Hate and anger and hurt. He's not sure he's ever felt anything else. "It's going to get itself together and *kill everyone*. You can't tell me why, you can't even tell me what it wants."
"This facility--"
"He's *dead*." Lex isn't sure when it will become real, isn't sure why repetition doesn't make it any different. It feels like a dream, where you can't run fast enough and everything happens in slow-motion and waking up is the only thing in the world that makes it okay. "There has to be a way--"
"There isn't." The computer pauses. "Not in this place."
Lex lets out a slow breath, staring at the monitor, waiting, but it stops there, like it has any right to. Fucking machines and their drama. "What do you mean?"
The pause may only be something Lex can hear, the nonexistent clicks of a computer thinking, and there should be something to remind him this isn't a real person, a human being, but then again, real is so subjective these days, isn't it? Nothing feels real here, feels real now, and it's this place that makes it. Like leaving, which he wants to do ten times an hour, will change it, will make it fact. No matter how many times he watches Clark die, it won't be true until he's in what remains of Metropolis and accepts that the sky will never see him again.
It's not fucking *acceptable*.
"What do you *mean*?"
The computer doesn't answer, but the monitor whirls to life, bringing up equations like Windows contemplating a breakdown, too fast for Lex to get anything but alphanumeric combinations in unlikely places, random symbols he can't possibly understand.
It takes forever to comprehend what it's showing him; it takes even longer to believe it, reaching out with one hand to touch the screen, freezing the image. It's so--it's--
"How?" he says slowly.
The computer's voice is strangely gentle. "That depends," it says, slow and careful, "on what you're willing to risk."