Codes: Clark, Lex
Rating: NC-17
Spoilers: Precipice
Summary: It's not because they think they can win.
Author Notes: This AU breaks with canon as of Precipice, season two. Thanks to RivkaT for the beta and advice, Madelyn and Nonchop for the prodding and encouragement. Never could have done it without you all.
Archiving: No

Part I: Scorched Earth

It was the third of the month, which didn't really mean anything except that it was billing time, and Clark was trapped in the house on a Saturday afternoon, watching his mother write out the bills.

Lots and lots and *lots* of bills.

For some reason that Clark had never completely understood, the computer was used for anything and everything *but* this--every bill was carefully handwritten, amounts figured on Dad's old calculator and checked against the spreadsheet before being entered. One for every sale--single customer, business, or other. It was a weekend-long job, culminating in Clark hand-delivering each as he picked up payments on the seventh of every month, come hell, high water, mutant-angst, or Sunday afternoons.

Tapping his fingers into the worn kitchen table, owned by three generation of Kentish men, built by one of the grandfathers involved in the Creation of the Kent Family Traditions (damn him), Clark watched his mother going through the print-outs of the month's deliveries, one for every day of the week. Yes, Dad liked the entire old-fashioned, my-daddy-did-it-so-I-will-too, and Clark has a sneaking suspicion his mother gets a kick out of it as well. It's more personal, she'd told him, the first year after they'd gotten the computer and he'd found her at the table, surrounded by printouts, but with her good pen and a stack of customized billing statements beside it. We're a farming family, she'd explained as she carefully signed each bill. Sit down and help me finish this, she'd added, grinning up at him with blue eyes half-hidden beneath a strand of bright-red hair.

But. It was Saturday and it was spring and there was no homework. Outside was one of the those perfect days, bright and clear with a blue sky and Pete's dirtbikes were waiting for him to show up and exercise his right to be a teenager and completely irresponsible.

Not mentally checking his mother's and the computer's math for hours while the day aged depressingly around him.

"Mom?"

Mom made a sound like a snicker. "Not until this is done."

Was she *psychic*? Drumming his fingers on the table, Clark caught himself before he could leave dents in the carefully polished wood, clenching hands into fists as his mother continued to murmur numbers her breath.

Hell could be the monotonous sound of a calculator's clicking for hours straight. Maybe the Smallville water-torture, a take on the Chinese version but without the water or the Chinese.

"All right, that's A-F," Mom said, lifting her head and stretching her neck. "Get me some tea from the refrigerator, honey?" Rattling her glass, she neatly stacked the finished bills in the box, pulling over the next stack of print-outs. "G-K."

Oh damn. Picking up the glass, Clark clumped across the floor--immature, oh God yes, but he felt the need to exercise his immaturity, opening the refrigerator door and finding the pitcher of ice tea. "How does Dad get out of this anyway?" Clark asked, putting the pitcher on the counter and pouring the melting ice from the bottom of the glass into the sink. The freezer was stuffed with ice trays; Mom was a good organizer.

"You know he had some things to pick up in town, Clark," Mom said, so deadpan that Clark knew she was laughing at him. Right, of course Dad had some things to pick up in town. In another *state*, if the fact that he and the truck had disappeared well before seven and hadn't been seen since was any indication. And Mom *knew*. And she let him do it anyway.

Dad was going to pay for that.

It was going to be a *very* long afternoon. Clark spared a wistful look out the window as he sat down, pushing the glass toward her. The good weather mocked him.

And he was definitely sulking.

Mom picked up her glass, taking a drink as she scanned the print outs, her other hand reaching blindly for the stack of receipts by Clark's elbow.

"Am I interrupting?"

Clark's head turned too fast, and catching startled blue eyes made Clark wonder if Lex was flashbacking to the Exorcist as he gingerly pushed the screen door open. Mom waved a hand, inviting him in while her lips chanted out the price of spring vegetables.

"Nope. Sit down. Want some tea?" Maybe the overeager puppy thing was overdone, but it got him a brief smirk before Lex gingerly took a chair, glancing at the piles of papers and Mom with an amused look.

"I'd love some tea. Bill day again?"

Clark saw Mom's head nod briefly before the clicking of the calculator stopped and she straightened. "As usual. How've you been, Lex?"

"As usual." Long fingers slicked the table briefly, like Lex was reading Braille.

"How's Helen?" There was real worry in Mom's voice, enough to bring Clark's head sharply upward, and more than enough to miss his aim and spill tea over the counter. Hissing, he grabbed for a rag, trying to keep half an eye on the table, plenty to see Lex's expression shut down like lights going off. No one named Lex Luthor here to show any kind of emotional reaction, try the next house, please.

"Better." And if that wasn't an invitation to close the subject, Clark didn't know what was. A few images rippled across the surface of Clark's mind--that guy and Lex's face, the rage that was somehow more terrifying for the fact it was so rare and never before controlled. Lex acted out when he hit that level, but this time he hadn't, and that told Clark a few things that he wasn't entirely comfortable with, none of them to do with Helen.

Lex was emotion, for all the cool reason he played with at his leisure, like some insanely complex game of chess. Like feelings were something he pushed around on the board and used to his advantage, and he was good at it, but Clark trusted the stripped down Lex more. The one who simply acted without thinking how each move would go. The one that could be counted on to, right, screw up, but at least screw up honestly.

The one who could channel it back and think it through had pulled back, but Clark wondered a little if that one would also have shot the gun anyway if he'd had enough time to think.

The glass got placed in front of Lex with a little too much force, and Lex looked up in surprise as cold tea dripped onto his hand. "Sorry."

"No problem." Blue eyes glinted as Lex picked up the glass. "What are you up to this afternoon?"

That sounded disturbingly mischievous, like perhaps Lex had something specific in mind. Maybe even fun. And fate was a bitch, because Lex hadn't had any time at all between work and Helen and whatever the hell he did with his remaining free time.

"Bills," Clark answered shortly when the silence stretched too long. "For, like, ever."

Lex didn't snicker, but it was a very close thing. "Special screening of Matrix Reloaded coming up soon. Got tickets. Want to go?"

What, Helen wasn't interested in superhuman virtual reality? Probably too busy pouring over a microscope with Clark's blood on it. "Absolutely. When?"

"Next weekend." Another grin, and Lex reached for an apple. "If your parents agree."

"What time?" Mom asked, and wow, she was listening. Damn.

"Midnight. We'll leave at seven and be back in time for Clark to do his morning chores."

Mom's pen stilled briefly, head lifting, and Clark caught a flash of something close to worry, then the clear eyes smiled at him and Lex. Maybe she'd noticed the distance, too. "Take a nap in the afternoon and do all your work before you leave, then yes. Speaking of work, you need some air, honey?"

He couldn't be that lucky. Almost bouncing, Clark turned toward his mother, elbow hitting his full glass of tea, and only a little-too-much speed caught it. Oh. Well. That was stupid. "Yes." And just maybe Lex didn't see that. Because right, Lex never saw anything.

A single glance made his stomach drop for all the wrong reasons, because Lex was smiling down at his glass, eyes completely turned inward. He hadn't noticed a thing.

"Run over and see if Mr. Granger's got a copy of this week's order. Your father couldn't find it."

"He didn't order anything. I saw all the orders." And a mental flip through the freakishness of his memory--thank you for that term, Chloe--pretty much confirmed. "Must have forgotten."

"That's odd." Picking through the receipts, Mom lighted on one, looking down at it for a minute before entering it into the calculator and comparing to the spreadsheet. "Check and make sure? I don't want to lose an order. He's been a faithful customer since before your father and I got married." She made it sound like dinosaurs had wandered the earth back then. Clark glanced at Lex, but that inner look was still there. Like Lex wasn't here at all.

"All right." Sighing, he stands up, reaching for the order form Mom handed him, barely breaking her concentration on the numbers.

"Need a ride?"

Clark almost froze--almost, but not quite. From the corner of his eye, Clark saw his mother look up, pulled from the mental zone of advanced accounting, but Lex just looked like Lex, except distracted.

"Um--"

"I noticed the truck wasn't here."

Right. And how else would Clark get from point Kent to point Granger unless he took Mom's car, which she never, ever let him drive anymore, what with the little barn door issue he'd perpetrated last year with it.

"Sure. You mind, Mom?"

"Go ahead. Just be back in time to help with dinner." A little smile, strained and distracted, and that was getting old. Everyone seemed distracted these days. "Have fun."

With Mr. Granger? Sure thing. Clark watched Lex get up, keys in hand, and followed him to the door, vaguely aware that his mother was already back in number land, but that he, at least, would be tasting fresh air. The day was going pretty damn well, come to think.

Maybe great, even.

A few weeks before, Clark had helped Mr. Granger in his garden. To be generous, Smallville called it a garden, though it only vaguely resembled even the loosest definition, a limping clump of greenery broken by rusting metal cars and farm equipment probably built during the Civil War. That would make sense, seeing that Mr. Granger was pushing three hundred or so.

Okay, maybe only seventy, but still.

Helping had consisted of listening as Mr. Granger griped about fertilizer and allergies, and Clark had just bit his lip on asking if just maybe, the fact that the garden was *full* of weeds might have something to do with it. He'd almost have thought the man was looking for an excuse to have some company except Mr. Granger didn't like anyone but his cat and the kid that delivered his newspaper, and Clark still hasn't figured out exactly what that kid has that he doesn't, other than a really great bicycle.

"It's a big yard," Mr. Granger had said as Clark pretended to struggle with what could have been abstract art or a very, very desiccated bumper. From the porch, the high weeds, trees, and grass kept Clark from getting a good view of what was kept back there, but on ground level? You got the whole picture. Motors like the corpses of better days sprinkled around like Leggos, several Ford bodies built in the forties with no remaining paint, and God knew why any sane person would collect *buckets*, but they were everywhere. A high chain-length fence ran around the entire yard, a demarcation of the property line that separated the Granger holdings from the Abbots, who had all moved to New York years ago but apparently never got the itch to sell their property, though they hadn't visited since before Clark had arrived. Clark was still fuzzy on the reasoning for the fence, though Mr. Granger cited confusing stories involving domesticated pigs making for his porch and his valiant battle to save his skin from their rapacious teeth with a broom. Clark might have believed him if he'd ever seen *any* wild pigs out here in his life.

Kansas was a lot of things, home to mutants, aliens, and billionaires, but not to gone-wild domesticated pigs, unless you counted the ones five miles over that belonged to little Tiffani Summers and had been raised for 4-H shows before Tiffani lost the nerve to have them butchered.

And this, Clark thought a little wildly in the passenger seat of Lex's Aston, was the kind of thing his brain came up with to talk about in lieu of intelligent conversation.

"Pigs, hmm?" Lex's voice was so close to neutral that Clark honestly didn't want to know what was going on in his head.

There'd been an uncomfortable cloud in the car since the door had shut, and Clark regretted his need for fresh air. Give him a cramped kitchen and endless columns of numbers until his eyes crossed and he lost the will to live. Lex was the kind of thoughtful that came right before some kind of necessary conversation, and they'd had enough of those for Clark to mark every warning sign one by one.

Thoughtful, distracted, still interested but distant. And that entire calm was covering something completely different, something that was making Lex smile for no good reason and every road led right back to Helen these days.

Helen this, Helen that, baby this, baby that, oh, and right, his parents weren't much better, with his mother's secret smiles at his father that seemed to shut him out. Adopted kids felt this way when their parents had biological kids, he'd read all about it in the book that had mysteriously appeared on his desk a few months back. Normal, even. Mom, thy name has never really been synonymous with subtle.

He wasn't feeling left out so much as--bored. Okay, and left out. Crap.

"Clark?"

More bizarre Mr. Granger stories jumped to the tip of his tongue, but Clark bit them back, aware that at this point, delaying the inevitable would be stupid. And obvious. He was willing to go with stupid when necessary, but the obvious thing he really had to work on.

"Yeah?"

Lex shifted on the seat, almost uncomfortable, and Clark noted that he wasn't wearing his driving gloves. Meaningless, but the dark red shirt and the way his mouth quirked in a secret smile wasn't helping the entire 'this is so me overreacting to nothing at all' mentality he was trying to build up. Stupidity was art, and Clark was good at art. At this point, he might as well make it his profession.

"I asked Helen to marry me."

It wasn't shock, even as Clark kept his gaze on the worn county road, watching how Lex cleverly swerved around one pothole to hit a bigger one, cut off curses murmured under his breath as he downshifted again. It wasn't a shock because Clark had seen this coming forever and he was okay with that.

Forever being, since the train, when he did some basic math and figured that Helen moving in had been a prelude to this.

Lex must have been paying attention better than Clark had thought, though, because the expectant silence was broken too quickly.

"I like to move fast when I find something I want."

Imagine that.

"Like the other time?" The glance from the corner of Lex's eyes was almost angry, and Clark bit his lip. "Sorry. I mean, I'm happy for you."

"Helen's nothing like her."

Except for the entire living together and getting married, height and eye color, and that unfortunate taste in shoes? But besides that, nothing at all.

"No, she's not. I like her." Clark did. He liked her a lot, best at a comfortable distance, especially with a few walls between them. And it wasn't just Dad's horses already out of the barn paranoia thing, but Mom was looking vaguely odd when her name came up these days. "I'm--if you're sure, then yeah, it's great. Really." His mouth stretched like warm plastic, and it was a four on the Clark Smile Scale, but Lex wasn't noticing him these days. So he probably wouldn't notice now.

Which of course, he didn't, and Clark wondered if a three would have been a better choice.

"I wanted to ask you something."

Clark's desperate eye saw a light at the end of the wedding. "There."

"What?"

Desperately, Clark pointed at the coming turn. "Right there. The Granger place."

Lex downshifted for the turn, just grazing a pothole the size of a small dictatorship, before sliding into the long gravel driveway that led to the house. Lots of wincing and attention paid to the fact that the paint job would never be the same, and maybe Clark could live without any Lex attention for a bit while he absorbed the fact that Lex was getting married. Again.

And this time? Clark couldn't think of a single disturbing thing, except that Helen knew about his blood and Lex knew about other things, and neither of them, as far as Clark could tell, were the kind to be stupid and not eventually share.

Clark got his seatbelt off, pushing the door open before the car even came to a full stop. Mr. Granger was gripey, but Lex was apparently feeling sincere and full of sharing things. Clark had some preferences on what he had to listen to, and Mr. Granger was beating Lex out with a seriously big stick.

The front yard was the ultimate desert zone of dust and sad, scraggly brown grass struggling to survive, a raw shape in dark dirt cut in a rough half-circle where the truck usually drove on its way to the small open-air garage. Obviously, Mr. Granger didn't pay a lot of attention to the front. Taking a step, Clark watched dust puff up around his shoes, giving the garage a quick glance to confirm the presence of the truck.

"Clark?"

That would be Lex, getting out of the car for no good reason. Why?

"I'll only be a second, Lex," Clark threw over his shoulder, trying to sound casual. Stay where you are, Lex, while I find the crazy guy who called me Reggie sometimes for no reason. Really. Right there.

But Lex didn't respond to telepathic aliens, or at least, not to Clark, which could actually be the result of Clark not actually *being* a telepathic alien, but he decided to blame it on the fact Lex was *still* distracted. In love, Clark's mind offered helpfully. See, he has a future wife and a brother *and* other, important, close things to worry about. You, my friend, no longer make the priority list.

Clark told his brain to shut up and concentrated on walking to the porch.

The house itself would have been good in some kind of movie involving insane cannibals in out of the way places. Big, wrap-around porch built in another era, but not nearly enough maintenance, the old wood looking almost fragile. A decided sag in the left side of the stairs--settling, maybe, sinking into the ground, not enough foundation to keep it up.

It would totally top off this day if he fell through the boards and became trapped, forced to listen to Lex talk about Helen and weddings while waiting for rescue.

He knocked more sharply than he meant to, knuckles sinking a little into the wood the second time, and Clark jerked back, blinking at the imprints of his bones in wood. Kind of creepy, that, but then, Mr. Granger was all about the creep factor. Straightening, he blinked into x-ray, peering inside. Nothing.

That meant, backyard. Dammit.

"Is he home?" Lex was still in the dust, looking between Clark and the porch with a dubious expression. Smart. He knew structural destruction when Clark was daring it personally. Coming back down, Clark glanced around.

"Probably in the yard out back." It really wasn't that pretty a day, Clark thought as he went to the gate, staring into the overgrowth with an absolute determination not to look at Lex again until he had to. It was hot. Sticky. Sweat was popping up all over his skin in a thin, slick film, and his shirt was clinging to his back. And the dust wasn't helping, clinging to him like another skin, but that seemed kind of okay, now that he thought about it, because Lex was getting married, ignoring Clark, *and* would get a very, very dusty car from this experience.

Bright side, there it was.

The gate unlocked easily and Clark slid in, hitting thick weeds. This wasn't a jungle, but it could be someone's bad dream of a garden grown amuck.

"You said garden, Clark." Lex sounded as dubious as Clark felt. Sighing, Clark stepped inside further, letting Lex in behind him, before pushing the heavy wooden gate closed.

"He's--very weird." That being the understatement of the year. Pushing aside a spindly bush that really needed to be put out of its misery, Clark gave the area another once-over. A lot of the parts here were laced with lead, which made x-ray spotty and strangely surreal--normal spots he could see, then blank areas that almost made his head ache when he looked. "Mr. Granger? You back here?"

Clark paused to listen, hearing Lex come to a stop beside him. Hmm. Slight rustling--could be Mr. Granger or Victor the Dumbest Cat Ever, who had tried to slash Clark with his claws the first time they met and ran whimpering away soon after. No, Victor would never be president of the Cat's Coalition Clark Kent Fan Club, and certainly not MENSA qualified either, since he still tried it *every damn time*.

"You sure he's here?" Lex asked dubiously, picking his way through the dust with a look that Clark would not. Laught. At. Seriously.

"He's not exactly Mr. Sociability," Clark answered, and that really did hold true for most of Smallville. Say what you like about small town warmth and friendliness, Clark was beginning to think that the town attracted more in the way of solitary isolationists with psychological issues than anything like wholesome down to earth farmers these days. "And his truck's here."

"Maybe he went for a walk?"

Clark shook his head, pushing by another bush, blinking a little as he met the body of another classic truck that glinted in that charming state of near-perfect rust. "He's really into his garden."

Ten more feet, and Clark noted that at least in some places, the grass was thickening up--well, the mulch was working, apparently, and Clark stopped to admire a sapling. "You know, he's getting better." Thinking of Lex's garden, Clark glanced back and saw Lex's incredulous expression. "Kind of. Come on. The back yard's only two acres. He's probably at the back fence, making sure no one's encroaching on his land."

"Like wild domesticated pigs?" Lex came up beside him, glancing down at the sapling before looking into the underbrush and half-grown trees, like he had x-ray vision himself. Clark could feel the curious gaze fix on him briefly, weighing. Right, they'd had a conversation going on in the car and maybe Clark should be a little more enthusiastic. "About you and Helen, Lex. It's really great."

"You seemed a little--ambivalent in the car."

That was a word for it. "Just worried. Like any friend. But I'm happy for you, Lex." There might have been desperation in his voice. "Mr. Granger? It's Clark Kent!" Come on, Mr. Granger, save me here. I need help. Sweat dripped down the back of Clark's neck, and it was definitely getting hotter. Well, great.

Wiping the back of his hand along his forehead, Clark narrowed his gaze, but the sporadic clicks of the x-ray and blank spaces of lead gave him a headache every time. "Crap. Where *is* he?"

A line of overgrown bushes hid the remains of another vehicle--behind him, Clark heard Lex stumble and half turned, catching the blue gaze staring down at the car with surprise as he pushed himself away from the bumper. "What?"

"That used to be a very nice car," Lex answered, wiping a hand absently along his knees, rust clinging to the tan of his pants. "What does he do, collect from the junkyard?"

Clark shrugged. "Never asked. I think it's kind of his equivalent of statues in a garden, though." Clark stopped to check out a vaguely identifiable bumper, growing over with weeds. "I think he likes cars."

"I like cars, but I don't make large scale cemeteries for them, either." Clark almost mentioned the Porsche in the garage, then thought better of it. He hadn't even checked recently to see if it was still there Wiping sweaty palms over his thighs, Clark flicked casually at his shirt, trying to get some air movement. Where was the wind today, anyway? "Is it just me or is it really hot?"

"I--" The words trickled off, and Clark dropped the edges of his shirt, glancing back to see Lex staring at something with a look of utter absorption. A slow turn, and he followed the fixed gaze to what appeared to be yet another burned-out car body, seated neatly in a clearing of brush, surrounded by scraggly grass. "Now that is interesting."

A rusty car? Clark frowned, not moving as Lex pushed by him with a beautiful lack of concern, nearly jogging to the desiccated body to run appreciative eyes over it's surface. "Um, Lex? What is that?"

"Lamborghini. I'd recognize it anywhere. And not too outdated if the body shape is any indication." Even from here, Clark could see Lex's fingers twitch acquisitively as he studied the car. "I thought I was familiar with all the models, but this one--" And Lex was gone in car-appreciation, like Pete got about motorcycles and Dad about beer. The world might stop revolving, the sun go down, and the apocalypse begin, but all of it was secondary to that moment of pure connection, of finding the non-sentient soulmate. Clark almost sighed but didn't. Mostly because it'd be wasted--Lex wouldn't even hear him. "I wonder--"

"Jesus."

Clark was moving instantly. The note in Lex's voice was completely new and completely familiar at the same time. Clark followed the shocked eyes to a kif standing on the other side of the car, staring at them in shock.

A brief impression of wide, dark eyes and wide open mouth before a flash of pure pain rippled through Clark's skin, and Clark grabbed for his stomach at the unmistakable signs of meteorite. There wasn't any here--there *couldn't* be, he'd been in and out of Mr. Granger's garden since he was a kid--but logic wasn't being helpful.

Logic, in fact, had taken a long walk, because the boy wasn't alone. Like the ghosts of embittered car owners guarding their precious relicts, figures emerged almost silently from the wood and brush, seeming to materialize from thin air. With every body came another flash of pain, intensifying slowly and steadily, and Clark felt the first stretch of his skin, like something was trying to crawl out from beneath.

"He's one," someone whispered, and the high, pulsing fear in his voice was almost as intense as the pain. Clark found himself taking a step back, trying to catch his breath. Flashes of green seemed to be everywhere--like these people were using it as jewelry. "Jesus. That's--that's--"

They flowed like water around the car--Clark hit the ground, unable to even breathe, hearing Lex saying something to him, but sounds were melding into a white-hot agony, every power he had turned inward like it was trying to rip out of him by sheer force. As if from far away, Clark heard Lex talking, then hands supporting him, but clarity was dead and he felt himself curling up with the ripple of another cramp.

"He's not one. I don't--"

"There's more if there's one--"

"Don't you know who the fuck that *is*?"

The last voice cut even through the pain, and Clark opened his eyes, trying to orient himself, vaguely aware of his cheek pressed to soft cotton and Lex's hands on him, protective and afraid at once.

"Kal," someone breathed, like invoking a curse, and Clark watched blearily as the circle take a *huge* step back.

"I'm Lex Luthor," Lex said from somewhere above him--the soothing hands were somehow cool, a relief like ice on a warm day, and Clark couldn't help leaning into it. "This is Clark Kent, and who the fuck are you?"

Clark narrowed his gaze, trying to concentrate. Meteor rocks--small, definitely, but everyone was wearing them, and okay, why? Clark's head refused to clear enough to process, but Lex seemed to be doing all the processing for both of them, trying to pull Clark to his feet and managing by force of will alone to get Clark a few desperately needed feet away. Still too close, but at least he could breathe again.

"Lex," someone murmured, and Clark tried to identify the strange edge to their voice.

"Lex--" His voice was a horrifying scratch in the back of his throat, and if sound could bleed, they'd be soaked in seconds. Have to get out of here. Preferably fast. How Lex was holding him up was anyone's guess, but Clark was thinking pure Lexian will was doing most of the work for him. Another dragging step back. Clark pushed his feet down to help, trying to find some kind of balance, but his body still wasn't responding. That thing he said about weird people being nonsocial in Smallville? That was way too damn prophetic.

Apparently, however, while they might not socialize with the other residents? The weird people *did* associate with each other. He groaned even as the stupid laugh slipped from between his lips. Lex's hands tightened briefly. Clark wondered if Lex thought he was losing it.

Of course, at this point, Lex could be thinking a lot of things.

"You okay?" Lex asked hoarsely, but Clark could hear the hysteria just beneath. Yes, a stupid question. No, he wasn't okay, which was why Lex was practically dragging him painful inch by painful inch over bare dusty ground. But it had to be asked and had to be answered.

"Great," he whispered back. Crap. *Crap*. What was going on and why and all of those questions? Totally irrelevant to *getting the hell out of here* before something--

The sudden flare of green on someone's throat killed rational thought dead, and Clark collapsed, bringing Lex down with him. Lex might forgive a lot of things, but being rolled around in mulched dust was probably not on the list. Curling onto his side, he could just hear someone screaming, feet pounding into the earth.
 
Rolling onto his back, Clark gazed up into gunmetal grey solidity hovering a hundred feet above him, eyes fixing instinctively on the insignia beneath. A thrumming beneath his skin that was nothing like meteor rock, and--

--like that moment on the bridge, like his first glimpse of Kryptonian symbols, instant recognition, his augmented memory kicking up like electricity, zeroing in and out. He had never seen it before, had known it all his life.

That was the insignia of his house.

Maybe they'd never really woken up this morning.

That was Clark's opinion, unsure and shaky on his feet, feeling dizzy in a way that had nothing to do with glowing rocks or illness. Lex, kneeling in the dirt beside him, hadn't moved, barely breathed, staring up with the rapt attention of someone seeing God.

Enslavement of the kind that made Clark's blood run cold, and he was already leaning over, grabbing one slim shoulder and jerking Lex's attention back to him. Maybe not the smartest move--this was the moment that some might call 'revelatory'--this was the fucking opening of the secret life of Clark Kent in one easy step, and when Lex's eyes met his, he saw the knowledge written there like script on white paper. Every question both spoken and not, answered by one ship and one look at Clark's face.

*You.*

"Not now," Clark said hoarsely. Somewhere were hoards of scared people wearing meteor rock and running away from ships with Clark's genetic family's insignia. Add a little Jor-El pep talk into the mix, this wasn't rocket science. His parents weren't as dead as thought and they'd arrived for a long-term visit. That or he was in his own worst nightmare. Either way, he wanted time to think before facing anyone and anything else. "Come on."

But they'd said--they'd said *Kal*....

"Clark." Lex had never sounded like that before. This was going badly, and that ship was close. Right above, even. Were they like him? Were they looking for him? Did he want to be found?

Answers to all questions were pending. Leaning down, Clark scooped up Lex and glanced around. Bodies of dead cars--they should get back to the house, to the car. No, wait. They didn't need the car. They could fucking *run* back to--where? Oh, lead them home?

Oh God, he wasn't meant to think about things like this.

"Clark?" Lex was feather-light in his arms, eyes huge. Swallowed blue iris in solid black, mouth almost slack, and Clark swallowed hard, turning toward the thickest brush, heading into the forest that once-upon-a-time held Kyle's lonely cabin and a mystery.

Lex's arms went around him only belatedly, and Clark remembered enough to pull Lex closer, block his face from the speed of his passage in fear of windburn, clutching the body close, his mind a maze of confusion and fear and this powerful desire to sink right back into denial and never come out again.

The forest was a blur. Clark kept running, dodging trees and shrubbery, wondering if he would leave a trail, but it was too much to think about. Enough to run, blank-mind and shocked. It felt good to give up thinking and just start doing.

It was hours or seconds later when they were surrounded with greenery even Clark didn't recognize--and they should have been out of the forest but they weren't. Kansas wasn't exactly known for forests, after all. Coming to a sharp stop, Clark looked down to see Lex, ice-pale and utterly still, windburned cheeks and limp hands.

Oh fuck. He'd never run with someone so long.

Kneeling, Clark lowered Lex to the ground on a pile of dried leaves, breathing out as Lex simply let himself go limp. Processing, maybe, but the slim arms pressed into the dirt before his head touched the soil. Lex recovered from shock the old fashioned way, through sheer determination, though Clark could see the edges of panic in the jerky movements of his body, revelation coating him like his clothes. Knowing.

"You." Lex took a breath, letting it out, trying to clear the high, scratchy sound of his voice. "What the fuck--"

"I thought they were dead." It's a short, breathless rush of words that trailed off when his mind helpfully reminded him, hey, but you didn't know *that* until recently. And what was your excuse for not-telling before? Because Lex really might not buy the entire 'worry for safety of me' thing when right now, the human race was in jeopardy. Could be in jeopardy. Maybe they were here just to see how Clark was doing. Visiting. How was life here, son? No, really, just passing through.

Clark heard himself stutter out a laugh, fingers digging into soft, damp dirt. Clark, Kal, and those people with the rocks, they'd *known* on a look. *How*?

Sitting fully upright, Lex rested both elbows on upraised, spread knees, head hanging between. Clark could hear the strong sound of his breathing. Leaves were sticking to his clothes like the dust and sweat, but the part that bothered him was the smear of mud on Lex's face, arrowing from cheekbone to beneath his jaw. Something wrong with that, that Lex didn't try to brush himself off or clean himself up, but merely sat there, that mind moving faster than Clark could ever run, and then the blue eyes came up sharply. Like being stabbed with a bamboo shoot or something--too quick to even register pain above the surprise that it had happened at all.

"You're an alien." It didn't even pretend to be a question.

Denial wanted to rear up, and a thousand different stories were making their way through his head, offering all kinds of possibilities, and one might even work, except they, his people, were *here*. And lies would only work if you weren't pretty sure you just saw your family's spaceship up above your head.

Oh Jesus. His *family*.

"Yeah."

Lex's head slipped back down--more thinking, and Clark wished, insanely and hopelessly, that he'd just stayed at home drowning in boredom and adolescent angst.

"You were--what, a scouting party or something? To find out about us?"

He might have been hurt by that, except truth's an unbelievable thing when you have to use it after logical conclusions have been drawn on half the data. Yes, that was a ship, and yes, that was humans running away, and Lex had seen both and was doing the math. The very, very reasonable math.

"No. I don't know." Even to himself, he sounded unbelievable. "I thought they--that they were all dead." Head still down, Lex only nodded, still everywhere except maybe behind his eyes. Breathing out, Clark sank down in front of him. Worst timing of a telling in history. Clark felt himself begin to shake and clenched his hands into fists. It had to be Lex here. Pete, God, even Chloe might have been better for this, but on the other hand, he wasn't sure it was even possible to hide something like this. "You--Lex, you have to believe me."

And that, right now, was just damned funny. Clark choked back another hysterical laugh, trying to ground himself. Just--calm. Ships and sails and sealing wax and what was the rest of that quote? And yes, that was definitely a priority to know right now.

"If I ask for a timeline, would I get an honest answer?" There was a note in Lex's voice that made Clark ache--resignation beneath everything, slow and dull. Too much to process, but right now, they had zero time to process anything. Clark's instincts were screaming uncomfortable things about running out of time and bringing up helpful memories of sci-fi shows involving sensors and tracking.

"Meteor shower." Looking up, he watched Lex's slow nod. "Then. You know--the rest." He could hope, anyway, and wasn't that just a reversal of almost two years of behavior? But Lex only nodded again, and to think, he was taking comfort from Lex's obsessions. "I--the ship. It told me--a month ago. Why I was sent. My planet exploded and killed everyone."

"Except them."

Clark squeezed his eyes shut. "Yeah, they may have underestimated the survival rate or something." His birth father's voice echoed in his head, and he bit back the next words, but like Dad's attitude about Helen, this was well after the horses had escaped the barn. "They--sent me here to keep me safe. To save me. And to--" Conquer. Destroy. Follow my biological destiny. "Um. Change things."

Lex was better at reading subtext than Clark would ever be. Body language, too. "Conquer the world?"

His head moved involuntarily in a sharp nod, and Lex drew in an audible breath.

The silence was a bizarre amalgamation of terrifying and comforting. Silence meant Lex was thinking, but it also meant that there was no one close, no ship coming, *time*.

"They called you Kal," Lex said slowly, and Clark looked up. Knees down, cross-legged in dry leaves, Lex was coming back with his usual bounce of energy, which probably had a lot more to do with necessity than anything like acceptance.

"That's the--the name my parents gave me," Clark answered. Blinked a little at the strangeness of that, on top of everything else. "How--how would they know that?"

"Maybe they found something from when you crashed," Lex offered unsteadily. Too much information. Far too much information. "We need to--God, we have to warn people."

Mom. Dad. Clark was on his feet, trying to mark where they were, how to get to the Kent farm from here, but he wasn't even sure where they *were*. Find a road. Something.

"You're not leaving me here."

Right. Leaning over, Clark scooped Lex up and waited just long enough for Lex to cover his face before he began to run.

Clark came to a stop so sudden that he almost fell, Lex bumping into him hard enough to leave bruises, but this time, at least, Lex was a little prepared and both hands braced himself on Clark's shoulders.

Barely felt. Shivering edges of maybe insanity, but Clark was staring at dead fields and he couldn't have anticipated this.

"Clark?" No hysteria, but only because Lex was as much on auto as Clark had been, and numbly, Clark let Lex down, feet finding the ground unsteadily, two stumbling steps before righting himself. Beneath their feet, dust still clouded, slowly settling in a grey-brown haze of dead earth.

Oh God. God, God, God.

His eyes fixed on Lex--somehow the only color left in the entire world, red and white and black, who turned in a slow, confused circle, studying the bare land, unmarked by anything made by human hands. Anything. Even life. "Clark. Where--" His voice stopped short, mouth a tight line. Crouching, he picked up a handful of soil that trickled through his fingers in a dull grey-brown cloud. "This is the farm, isn't it?"

Clark knew it in his bones--no visual cues were possible, there was nothing *here*. Except them, and dirt, and endless fields of scraggly weeds and a sun brilliant and hot above them, lighting the world in a dead yellow stare that made cold sweat slide down Clark's back.

"I--" Clark stopped, trying a single stumbling step, but this time, he didn't even try to break his fall, hitting the ground on his knees, unable to comprehend what he was seeing. "This is the farm, Lex. It's--we left *twenty minutes ago*. They destroyed it. They--vaporized it or something. They--"

"Clark--"

"My mom was doing bills." He can see her--red hair like fire, grinning at him with clear eyes and sending him off to play while she kept working. The table had been *here*, and she'd sat *there*, and that freakish memory was a bitch, because he didn't need structures to mark the mental map--he had only to think and it was superimposed over bare earth almost as vividly as life. His mother--his dad--*Smallville*--

He didn't know why--didn't even really think, because instinct was taking over and he was running, Lex somehow in his arms, and come hell or high water, he wasn't letting him out of sight. Smallville, and it was close, even if he wasn't running on asphalt at all, the dust left clouds behind him to mark his path for anyone in the sky to see and he didn't even care.

Pitted earth and he wasn't letting go of Lex even when he stopped. This must be what insanity felt like when it started, like the world had shifted and left him behind, nothing but cratered ground and burned-out rubble the color of old bone, and Lex was saying something, a lot of something, hitting his shoulder, but Clark couldn't bring himself to care.

"Clark. *Clark*."

"They--everything's gone." He was holding too tight, leaving bruises, but Lex was pushing himself up, blocking his vision, grabbing for his face. "They--in a few minutes, they--"

"No. No, Clark. Not for years."

What? Nothing was penetrating the hot, dusty haze, reaching inside and freezing things in place, and he wanted to throw up, but aliens didn't do that, or he didn't, and oh God, aliens, them, *him*. Us.

"They're dead!"

"We don't know that."

Clark blinked--something in Lex's voice brought him back. Lex wasn't trying to get away--the hands on his face were hard and sure, and Lex's straight, unwavering gaze was anchoring.

"Lex--"

"We don't know because they may not have been here in the first place."

Clark sat down, careless of the fact he held Lex. Just dropped, kneeling in clouds of brown-grey, but Lex didn't let go.

"I did this."

"That we don't know either." The voice was cool, sharp, impersonal. "We don't know anything because this isn't Smallville anymore."

He couldn't follow Lex's logic, but then, few could. A gentle touch to his face this time, thumbs stroking over his cheekbones, and Clark realized he was crying.

"I--they--"

"Whatever happened here happened years ago." Still sharp, to break through, maybe, and Clark forced himself to focus. "Look at the land." One foot found the ground, kicking a cloud of dust into the air. "This hasn't been used for anything for years. The farm. The roads. There's nothing left of it. Whatever happened--Clark, whatever happened, it was a long time ago. Not today. Not in the last twenty minutes."

Reorienting himself was difficult, but Clark tried, staring around to take in the world again. Brilliant spring afternoon, like the one that he'd left, but no greenery here, nothing but dead land and the scattered rubble of a long-dead town. Only his memory could mark out where roads had been, because even the foundations were gone.

"Lex--"

"We aren't home."

No, they weren't home. This perversion couldn't be home.

"I--" Taking a breath, Clark realized how tight he was holding on. Slowly, he peeled his fingers back, reluctant to leave Lex, the only sane thing left in the world. And certainly the only thing that made any kind of sense, if this could ever make sense at all. "I don't--"

"This could be the future. An alternate world. Hell, it could be some kind of Smallville meteor rock induced dream, and for that one, I sure as hell better remember this when I wake up." Lex wasn't pulling away, even when Clark's hands fell limply to the ground beside him, and it seemed the strangest and most surreal part of it all--Lex Luthor, multimillionaire and CEO, sitting in his lap and trying to keep him calm when--when, well, of the two of them, Clark should have been the more ready for this.

Instead, Lex was being his usual self, albeit shocky and dirty and scared in a way that Clark could understand, but the fear tamped down and replaced with action. Slowly, Lex let go of his face and stood up, wincing and tripping when he found his feet, but the man was a scientist, no matter how rarely he chose to exercise it. Turning in a slow, thoughtful circle, eyes tracking the world like he could pry up the mysteries by will alone. Maybe he was clinging to the dream-idea as much as Clark was.

"The future?"

Lex nodded, pacing a few inches, hissing softly when he pulled the muscles Clark had bruised with his tight grip. Vaguely, Clark hoped he hadn't broken anything. "Maybe. Or something. Stupid fucking--that car. No wonder I didn't recognize the make."

He shouldn't want to laugh, but he did anyway. Clark heard his own snicker start, startlingly loud in the quiet, and Lex spun around to look at him, eyebrows raised.

"Leave it to you to notice a car. At a time like this."

"It was made before I was born. I wouldn't ever have driven it, just seen it." Limping a little, Lex began to move, pacing the length of dirt like he could find an answer through simple energy. "We have to find out where we are. When we are. Something--"

Insanity was maybe a good thing. It made impossible things like this seem commonplace. Or maybe it was Smallville, whose flexible borders on what and what was not possible kept them all ready for just such a moment. Or hell, maybe it was just that they didn't have any better options right now.

"Lex--" It was surprisingly difficult to find his balance--a part of him was just ready to move, run, and keep running. "Lex, I don't--this doesn't make sense."

"Feel free to share with the class when something comes to you. We need--to find someone. And not whoever was running that ship." Slim hands were clasped behind him. Clark could see them shake. All the calm was superficial, like Clark's own. Somehow, that was comforting. Even if Lex didn't happen to have alien family visiting, there was the memory of Lionel Luthor who, it had to be said, wasn't any better, really.

"Find people." Yeah. That was a plan. Provided that they didn't have meteor rock jewelry he would need to worry about.

Lex agreed that staying under trees was a good idea, with a kind of cool indulgence that suggested, just maybe, he didn't think being out in the open or within trees would make any difference at all. Intellectually, Clark knew that--a ship, for crying out loud, it's not like technology that could *travel through space* couldn't see through lots of leaves, but on the other hand, Clark was still working out the finer points of panic-reduction, and at this point, placebos were cool. They helped him breathe.

"Kal," Lex said softly from just ahead of him, and Clark blinked at how the word sounded in Lex's voice. "When did you--"

"Dr. Swann." Frowning, Clark stopped his instinctive need to lie, pushing the words slowly around the Jonathan-shaped lump in his throat. "He--that's what my--what I was named. Before here." Even to himself, he sounded more than usually stilted, but Lex didn't seem to be paying that much attention.

Every step in the mulch of the woods made him more jumpy, and he couldn't even explain why. Maybe something to do with the wasteland outside it.

"Why--" Stopping, Clark tried to figure out a way to frame his question, rubbing at his head. The low-grade headache wasn't receding like it usually did after meteor rock exposure. "Did you notice--I mean, there's trees, but the fields--" Or, why fields and not trees?

"Yes." The crinkle in Lex's brow was a good indicator that Lex had been thinking the same thing. "It--I'd need to do analysis on the soil, but it makes me think about something I read about Russia during Napoleon's march--"

It came back to history for Lex, and Clark couldn't even explain why something in him relaxed at the cool cadences of Lex's voice in historical analogy mode--or whatever it was called. Surreal, but grounding, too. It couldn't be too bad if Lex was still so relentlessly Lex-like.

"And?"

Lex's gaze snapped to him, mouth curving in a thoughtful frown. "Scorched earth. When--well, to spare you the extreme detail, when invasion came, the Russians couldn't fight, but withdrew."

Clark waited as Lex's voice trailed off, and then Lex turned around, gazing through the trees as if he was seeing something Clark didn't. "It--well. The army--and the locals--would destroy everything. There are even report that, when it was feared Napoleon would conquer them, they sowed their own fields with salt. Scorched earth."

Shaking himself, Lex started walking again. Clark quickened his pace to keep up, wondering exactly where they thought they were going. Find people, Lex had said, but people so far consisted of whoever was running that ship and those meteor rock citizens who Clark wasn't in a hurry to meet again anytime soon. He could pick up Lex and run to, like, California, but well, the point of that was kind of lost. Assuming Clark could even find California.

"Anything else you want to share?" Lex asked, voice deceptively light, and Clark dragged his attention back to the man walking so calmly in front of him. "Such as, the ship? You recognized it?"

Oh damn. He didn't even realize he was coming to a stop until Lex was almost out of sight, and a few million answers crowded his head, not the least of which was, 'me, recognize an alien ship? No, no, just, you know, shock' and Jesus, habit, stop. Stop.

Stop.

"I--" Clark swallowed. No more secrets. At least, none that would be dangerous to keep. "You noticed the thing with the rocks?" Lex nodded slowly, without any surprise at all, and Clark began to wonder, just a little, exactly how much Lex had guessed before now. "And the. The ship. The--the writing--"

"It's from the caves." Lex's certainty somehow made it easier. He really wasn't betraying anything, just confirming. A very fine line of difference, but it worked. Clark took another breath and nodded. "And how did you learn it?"

"Thing in the caves." And God, what did you call that anyway? "The key thing you found? Goes in it. It--sort of did this thing. Um."

"What thing?" For a second, Lex just blinked, then something seems to light up in his eyes. Memory. "Walden. What hit him--"

"Yes." Wow, that was easy.

"It--what? Gave you information?" Curious. Like they were in a perfectly normal world where Lex could ask these questions and they might not mean the difference between life and death, or something like that.

"Language, some--I'm not sure of all of it. I can read it. Speak it." In theory. The words sometimes slipped out--once during a private moment in the loft and he's still not entirely sure Mom believed he was just practicing his Kryptonian language skills for fun. "It was weird." He still remembered the strange feeling of it, and while it wasn't exactly comparative to alone-time in the loft in terms of sensation, there were some uncomfortable parallels that he really didn't think Lex needed to know about. "So. Um. The writing was my family's name. I think. El, anyway. For all I know, could be a trademark or something. Like, Hunts." Hunt's Ketchup, Hunt's Spaceship, and he couldn't help grinning a little. "I--I really don't know."

For a wonder, Lex only nodded, adding it to whatever little database in his head that he'd set up for This Very Damned Weird Day. There esd a limit to how long anyone can sit around in shock and saying 'this can't be happening' without reverting to something close to quasi-normal, Clark thought as he jogged the few steps that separated them, falling into step beside Lex. And as long as all bizarrity stayed well out of range until, say, they *woke up*, well, then, everything was good. Or at very least, dealable.

"Interesting method of transferring information," Lex mused, almost to himself as he stepped over a random root without stumbling, though Clark would swear Lex wasn't paying any attention at all to the world around them. "Direct download--some kind of computer? No, scans would have shown that, but maybe it can cloak itself somehow. Hide itself from conventional methods of excavation. Especially in that cliff base." Lex's voice stopped as he seemed to consider something else. "So you put the key in, which activated it--but how would they--" Lex's eyes found his. "One of you was here before?"

"Kayla said that, yeah. And the cave sort of backs that up. A little." There were other things there, but Clark wasn't sure what they meant. He just got the feeling that some of it was supposed to be figurative, because really, fires spouting from the earth in great gouts for his greater glory? Seriously. Even in Smallville, that was too weird.

Lex nodded and fell back into silence. Disconcerting. Clark wanted to know what was going on in his head. Or maybe he just wanted the forest to be a little less quiet.

"Lex?"

"Hmm?" Still lost in Lexland, apparently. Maybe this was another kind of coping mechanism. Treat it all as a huge mystery instead of what it was. Whatever the hell that was.

"I--when we find people?"

Lex looked at him. "Yes?"

"What do we say exactly?"

From the startled look on Lex's face, he wasn't the only one who thought people, while great in theory, could be a little strange in practice. Because really, you can't just walk up to someone and say, hey, I'm sort of out of my *dimension*, timeline, whatever, and could you give me a short history of what the hell's going on? And why are people wearing Kryptonite anyway?

"They recognized us--you at least," Lex pointed out, and see, Clark had been sort of trying to forget that part. "We'll worry about that when we actually find people. Though--" Lex kicked at the mulchy ground. "You--may need to stay out of sight."

May need to-- "Hold it. You think we should find people and then *you* go to meet them alone? Have you lost your *mind*?" People that wear dangerous to alien boy jewelry and didn't look exactly enthusiastic to see either one of them. Jesus. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe Lex wasn't coping. Maybe this had driven Lex insane.

Lex gave him an annoyed look and kicked up a pile of rotting leaves. Strangely childish. "They didn't recognize me."

"And that guarantees no one will?"

"That guarantees--" Lex stopped short, and Clark wondered for a second if he'd actually won that argument, reviewing the conversation in his head quickly, but no. They hadn't even gotten started. But Lex--Lex wasn't looking at him, eyes narrowed and then, sudden and shocking, he was *pushed*, and Clark was too surprised to even try to hold his balance, hitting the ground on both knees, scrabbling at the leaves and ending up with one wrist buried in solid dirt trying to catch himself. A vague blur of black and red and white as Lex moved by him. He hadn't even known Lex *could* move that fast.

By the time Clark righted himself, Lex wasn't anywhere in sight, but the sound of feet crunching through dead leaves gave him the direction. He jumped up, barely restraining himself from superspeed, because that might make him overshoot the mark and what the *hell*--

"Stop, dammit!"

Obvious signs of progress, with low-hanging branches still swinging softly and trampled too-thick undergrowth that heralded the path of someone who wasn't taking the time to find an easier way. The sounds were closer, and less like running, more like fighting, or maybe someone holding down Lex and killing him for some incomprehensible reason, and Clark hit speed without even thinking--

--skidding almost through a tree when he passed a blur of moving bodies. Grabbing onto the bark desperately, trying not to crumble it in between panicked fingers, Clark stared at Lex straddling the slim boy from this morning, one hand wrapped neatly around his throat, the other....

"Damn." Clark leaned into the gouged tree, sucking in a slow breath. Far enough away not to make him wish he was dead. Close enough to make him wish he could throw up. Lex wasn't looking at him at all, knees trapping too-thin arms and his face a mask of chilled indifference.

"Talk." The low, even tone promised all kinds of unpleasant things. Clark made a choked sound as Lex's hand tightened. A vision of Lex with a gun slipped into view, and that expression may not be exactly the same, but maybe it was also a little too close for comfort.

Maybe Lex had reached the end of his coping abilities. That--couldn't be good.

"I--I wanted to make sure," the kid said. Eyes huge and pupil swallowing dark iris, turning them almost black. The thin fingers were gripping at leaves as if they held the key to salvation. "I--we weren't sure, and he took you away and you'd never let them--not if you were--and you said--"

"Who?"

Dark eyes flickered to Clark, fixing, widening even more, if that was even possible, and Lex's gaze followed. For a second--just a second--Clark thought that Lex wasn't even seeing him, but then the free hand clenched around the necklace, throwing it aside. Clark breathed out in relief as it left his range, walking over, and the kid began to struggle in earnest. Lex bore down with his knees, careless of the differences in weight and age, but the kid only fought harder, willing to lose skin and bone if it got him free. Like a rat in a trap, willing to do anything to escape. Clark's breath solidified in his throat when those dark eyes met his, ignoring the hand tight around his throat, as if that would be a relief, to die strangled on a forest floor, compared to facing Clark. The pale lips moved soundlessly, but the shape of the word was as obvious as speaking.

*Kal*.

Jesus. Slowly, Clark forced himself to step back, dropping onto his knees to simply watch, and Lex freed the kid's throat with a start, like he had no idea what he was doing. Eyes closing for a second before opening again, and the scary blank look was gone.

"Clark." Lex's voice was firm and very sure. "His name is Clark."

Somehow, that got the kid's attention, and he stared up at Lex. "But you--"

"Who do you think I am?"

A pink tongue crept out, licking dry lips, and Clark saw the gaze flicker to him again before jerking back to Lex. Like despite the fact Lex was the one who had chased him, the one holding him down, the one who had had his hand around his throat, Clark was still the one to fear.

"Lex. You said Lex. The one who--we thought you were *dead*."

Maybe the air stopped for a second at the word--or imagination, that the very trees seemed to stop swaying and the tiny clearing grew cold and dark, or maybe it was the fact that Lex had lost that look of thoughtful cool, if only for a moment. Something flickered just behind his eyes, something unreadable that flashed out of existence in the time it took to draw a breath, but in that second, Clark thought he understood.

Like the farm for Clark, something had clicked and settled. Lex had just made this real.

"I'm not dead."

"They said he killed you." The voice was louder, and the dark eyes were fixed on Lex with--Jesus. Hope. "That he killed them all when he found them. Or that--or that they took you back and were going to do things--" His voice trailed off. "You not, though. You--but you're with him."

"He didn't try to kill me." The words were careful, and Clark could almost see the way Lex was pushing aside everything else, living directly in this moment. "He--rescued me. From the ones that did kill them."

What the *hell* was Lex doing?

More shock, and the kid managed to project disbelief like light. "They--he got me out. Away."

"No human gets out of Metropolis alive."

There. Information. Clark rolled the words in his head, trying to find something useful in them. There was a Metropolis, and a Lex, and apparently, a Kal who looked a lot like him. A Kal who had maybe killed some people and maybe Lex, too.

The slow shake of the kid's head wasn't exactly negation--if Clark was the kind to categorize, he'd say that the same mind-bending weirdness he and Lex were feeling right around now was nothing compared to how this kid was taking the idea of this Kal getting Lex out. Of Metropolis.

Where humans don't get out.

There was so much wrong there that Clark pushed every thought aside, focusing on Lex, who was watching the kid carefully. "What's your name?"

"J-James." The voice shook. "You're Lex, aren't you?"

There was no way to deny that. "Yes. But--"

And the kid smiled. Huge and bright, almost sitting up before he remembered he was being held down, and staring up at Lex in wonder, like he was seeing God, like Lex had looked at that ship, like every question had been answered.

"My mother told me about you." His voice was--indescribable. "About what you've done. They--they say you'll save us all, that you'll drive them from our world, that you'll--"

"James." Lex lowered both hands into the leaves and pushed off, dropping into a crouch beside the kid. Instinct made Clark move, but one look from Lex sent him back down. Lex was playing a hunch. A really educated one, considering, but that kid had been wearing meteor rock and had been following them. "What did you hear about what happened to me?"

Slowly, James sat up--smart, not to make any sudden moves, but then again, in this world, maybe that was just instinct. Slowly pulling his legs up, he looked up at Lex with the kind of worship that people who get burned for God usually have. Terrifying as hell in the face of a kid that young. "The entire cell was killed. One week ago. All the--everyone. No one knows who betrayed them. It was--it was everyone who was leading. It was--" The kid stopped, eyes wide. "They said--"

"They were wrong."

The kid's glance flickered to Clark. Somehow, it didn't surprise him when James shifted closer to Lex, as if he was the best protection in the world. Not surprise, not even real pain, just this endless numbness that Clark hoped would never wear off.

No human gets out of Metropolis alive.

"Cl--Kal got me out and brought me back here. To find the others." Lex could probably sell ice to Eskimos, as his dad might have said, with that voice. Persuasive as hell. Powerful. He made you believe. Clark had always known Lex was good at this sort of thing, but he'd never seen it turned on like this. "He--wants to help."

"He--he *killed* them--"

"No. That was a lie that was--spread. To keep him from helping more." Jesus, Lex was pulling this out of his ass and doing it well. "We need to find the others. Now. I have to tell them--"

"Yes." Apparently, this qualified as an actual plan, because the kid was on his feet, face transfigured. And if he was careful not to look at Clark, Clark tried really hard not to blame him. Because Kal was apparently murdering people. Human people. James' people.

His hands felt sticky, and Clark didn't look down, didn't dare. Metaphorical blood that belonged to Kal just as surely belonged to him, if this wasn't all a hallucination.

"Will you take us?"

James paused, and Clark watched him wipe his palms over the faded, ragged jeans, pale face working. "They--Lex, they might--"

"We'll tell them. Explain what happened. But--we have to get out of here before we're found."

Apparently, that was a *good* reason, and James' eyes flickered skyward with a flinch that Clark felt like a punch. Nodding slowly, he stepped back, eyeing Clark warily before slowly reaching for Lex's arm. "I can show you. Come on. It's--you might not find it on your own. We're good at hiding."

Yes, Clark thought bleakly as he caught Lex's slow nod. They might be very good at it by now. And he had no idea if he wanted to know why.

It's weird, how fast you get used to paranoia, because James was doing a great impression of one who lived really happily with that fact. Under the cover of trees--and Clark had no idea why the kid seemed to think it could protect them, but he wasn't asking questions--he moved in a way that reminded Clark of Lex when Lex was feeling particularly vulnerable. The straightness of his back, the flicker of his eyes everywhere at once, always watching, always worried. The one time Clark had spoken to Lex, James had gone stiff and still, and Clark hadn't tried it again. No one should look like that just hearing his voice. No one.

Lex had given the necklace back, and the kid, after a second's hesitation, had stuffed it deep into his pocket, basking in the smile Lex gave him as a reward. Clark kept his distance, too, pretty sure that no matter what Lex said or did, there was no way James was going to take his presence too well. With all the layers and space between them that James kept, the feeling of the rock was almost muted, the vaguest sensation of unease just in the pit of his stomach, and hell if it didn't make the headache worse.

The journey was unnerving as they angled through the woods almost at random. This strange, uncomfortable suspicion that James was deliberately taking the longer, more convoluted way, and right, smart, but the kid was barely *twelve*, if that. He shouldn't be--

"....built after the last incursion into our territory," James was saying brightly. "Mom said they were driven out with their tails between their legs. They can't get past the barrier conventionally, but they've been adapting their ships for short excursions. That's how--how the last time--" The soft tenor trailed off, almost breaking as he looked up at Lex with wide eyes. "I. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have--"

"No problem." Lex sounded so calm. So--well. Normal. "Tell me more. After all, I've never been to this zone--"

"It's Smallville," the kid answered with a wrinkling nose. "The Kryptonians can call it anything they want, but it doesn't make it true, Mom said. They say all kinds of stupid things."

Clark's stomach did a strange pitter-patter that had nothing to do with meteor rocks or sanity. Breathe. Just breathe. You can do this.

"What do the Kryptonians call it?"

James shrugged. "The Badlands." Another shrug, even more careless. "Too much kryptonite--" James stopped, hesitating, and Clark could almost see the war in his head reflected on his face. Coming to a stop, his mouth opened like a fish gaping in air, then shut tight. Instinct fighting reason. Worship of Lex against conditioning, maybe, and Clark found he couldn't even blame James for that. "There's a shield up. He--if he gets too close--" James' voice trailed off, and from the look on his face, he regretted saying that much. "I--can't bring it down. I can *tell* them, but--"

Jesus. Clark thought of the little necklace in James' pocket. Shield? What the *hell* was that? A--shield. Of meteor rock--Kryptonite? Clark's imagination offered up morbid visions of solid green walls and dying in front of them, and oh God, he had to do something, anything. Think of something else.

Just--take it in. This wasn't his world. This was--like Lex said. A dream. A something that made no sense, but nothing real-real. Even if the remembered pain of kryptonite poisoning was still trembling through every nerve in body memory. This was--this was wrong.

"C--Kal is my friend, James." Clark watched Lex turn all his intensity on James--Clark remembered being fifteen and feeling that for the first time, the way Lex could refocus, make you feel like you were the center of the universe. That nothing was as important as you were. That--and God, and all of that, only strengthened in the years they'd known each other. Lex did it like habit, almost unconscious, but right now--right now, it was deliberate, and this was something Clark was glad Lex had never used on him. He wasn't sure he could stand up to it.

James nodded slowly.

"I can try." His voice implied he'd do more than try. Small, callused hands clenched against the dirty thighs of his jeans, he nodded firmly. "When they know--when they know you're *back*--" Shaking his head, he turned quickly, moving faster, and Clark imagined that they were getting along faster, less--twisted path. What did they know about them? About Lex, about Kal, about--about a shield and ships and Kryptonians, Jesus, it was like his worst nightmare flooding into his best dream ever. His *people* were here, and they had answers to every question he'd ever thought to ask.

Just not the answers Clark would ever have wanted to know.

"Clark." Lex was dropping back, and Clark jerked his gaze from the ground, watching Lex's eyes fix on him, worry clear. "You okay?"

"Dream, right?" He didn't sound nearly as light and casual as he'd hoped. Dammit. There was a moment of hesitation, almost painful, before Lex nodded. "Lex, don't coddle me. What are we dealing with?"

Both pale eyebrows raised. "Did I forget about my doctorate in Smallville weirdness? Clark, your guess is as good as mine."

Clark snorted softly, knowing he was being unfair. "It's--Lex. The way he looks at you--shit, can he hear us?"

Lex's eyes flickered up, catching James', and Clark watched in fascination as James smiled back, bright and carefree. Like a kid. A normal, human kid who had no bigger problems in the world than what was for dinner and whether he could play baseball with his friends afterward.

Clark stopped the shudder, but just barely.

"No," Lex answered in a lower voice. "I--. Clark, this--they. James can't even tell me what year this is. He doesn't know."

That brought Clark's full attention back. "What?"

"He doesn't use the standard we're used to. It's year fourteen, if that means anything, but I'm not sure from what. Since the landing?" Lex bit his lip briefly, frustration written into every line of his body. "Shit. I can't ask the right questions because I'm supposed to have the answers already."

That would make sense. Simple math, simple deduction. Anyone could figure this one out. His people were here, had been here. "I'm seeing some obvious parallels."

"That's a lot of maybe's for definite conclusions," Lex answered shortly, but he'd been thinking the same thing, it was obvious. Close enough to touch, but Lex was far away now. He was--what? A leader? Supposed to be a dead leader, like the kid said. A dead leader, because of Kal, according to the uncertain revelations of a preadolescent who was possibly leading them to their deaths.

A *shield*. Jesus Christ, it was too damned much, and Clark wanted just to sit down and take it in. Curl up and ignore it until it all went away. Story of his life, he thought a little viciously. Like his dad. If you just ignore it, it will go away.

"Clark." Lex's voice was careful. Clark hated that voice. The one Lex only used when he was dealing with Clark like he was any adolescent in the world, not his best friend, not his closest friend, not even that since Helen, who took up all that space in Lex's head that had been Clark's exclusively.

Oh yes, and that was a seriously vital bit of whining to get out there. Kicking at the leaves, knowing he was being stupid and knowing he didn't even care. "I--I want to go home."

"That makes two of us," Lex murmured, and fingers brushed against his arm, slow and gentle. "We'll get out of this, Clark. It's Smallville, after all. Everything eventually returns to a variable status quo. Cheer up."

Clark almost smiled at the amusement in Lex's voice. Manipulative, yes. But in this case, it couldn't be considered a bad thing.

"I--" Clark stopped, mouth working on words that didn't want to emerge. He tried again. "This is--Lex, what do you think's happened?"

Lex's mouth tightened briefly, and Clark almost regretted the question.

"We shouldn't jump to conclusions yet," Lex answered slowly, testing out each word. "We only have James' narrative--"

"Humans don't get out of Metropolis alive. Those people--him--knew my other name and were scared to death of me. They're wearing *kryptonite*--meteor rock. He used the word Kryptonians. And fourteen years? Come on, Lex, I'm not stupid." Panic tried for a grip, but anger was good for blocking it, rechanneling it, and Lex was such a good target, being right here and being reasonable. "Fourteen years ago, I landed. And apparently, I wasn't alone."

Blue eyes met his straight on. "Yes."

That--Jesus. "I can't take this." He couldn't. He wanted to wake up now. And Lex--Lex just watched him with almost-pitying eyes and that wasn't helping either.

"You have to. We have to." Lex's hand closed tightly over his arm, pulling him to a reluctant stop. He could have just kept walking, dragging Lex behind him, but James was already scared and Lex was the only one in this entire place who, so far, wasn't insane. Sucking in a slow breath, Clark focused on the fine fingers against his skin, noting the break in one nail, the dirt ground up beneath and over his knuckles. Like Lex Luthor's hands had never been in memory. "Clark, look at me."

It was harder than learning to control his vision--harder than looking at James--harder even than watching Lana when she was with Whitney and Clark knew he couldn't have her. Slow and painful, to lift up and meet and hold, and Lex's fingers tightened. "We're going to get through this. We'll find out what happened and we'll get back home and this--we will."

"Easy for you to say. You're a hero." Lex's mouth turned up at one corner at that, and Clark snickered softly. "I--"

"Trust me. We'll find a way."

Trust wasn't the problem. "We don't even know how." Though Clark's guessing meteor rocks and some kind of bizarre reaction with those, but hell, for all Clark knew, interdimensional portals were like, Mr. Granger's obsession. Maybe that would explain all the cars. And wow, what a stupid thought.

A single glance showed James watching them, eyes sharp, hand jammed in his pocket. Closed tight around that necklace, apparently. Clark took a deep breath and stepped away from Lex. Almost instantly, the kid relaxed. Right. He's Kal and a threat. To Lex, to humans, apparently. He could deal. He'll deal and have his nervous breakdown *later*, and had he really been upset at having to do an entire day of bills? Give him boredom and a worn kitchen table right now.

"Not much farther," James offered into the silence. "I--um. You wait here. I'll tell them. I--" James frowned, looking between them. "But they--um, may not believe me. About Kal--Clark. So. You know."

Clark's stomach dropped, visions of kryptonite-clad people surrounding him instantly intruding on his vision, and damn, that sucked. Sucked so very, very much. Lex tensed beside him, but merely nodded. "We'll wait here."

"Okay, good." And like a ghost, James vanished into the trees like he'd never been here at all. Clark gaped a little, but Lex's eyes were narrowed and thoughtful.

"Lex, I'm not so sure--"

"It's this or the alien overlords. And I think these people could catch us if we ran. After all, James tracked us quickly enough." Hands stuffed into his pockets, Lex began to pace, needing to work off excess nervousness. No, Lex wasn't thrilled by what they were doing at all.

"I could get us out."

"You did, and ran us around what could have been half the state. James still found us." Lex's eyes narrowed again, glancing at where James had been. "I wonder--"

Clark watched Lex come to a stop. "What?"

"Meteor exposure. A shield. He's below fourteen--he'd have been exposed *in utero* if they've been hiding and fighting this long." The scientist was emerging with a vengeance. Clark watched him tune it out, focusing on the situation at hand with an effort. Poor Lex, doomed to so many interesting scientific discoveries and not even able to so much as spend a few minutes marveling at them. "How do you--"

The first thing Clark knew for sure was that there was pain.

Every time, after, he'd think he remember how it felt--the spasms of shocked muscle trying to pull free of bone and curl inside, the hideous feeling of his blood trying to seep through his skin and dribble onto the ground, the lurch of every organ, and every nerve awake and alive and screaming so loudly he couldn't think--but memory wasn't reality. Reality was collapse. Clark's vision was out, weak as a kitten in the grass, splayed hands unable to even grasp for the ground and Lex--God, Lex. Was alone. Facing....

There was a massive buzzing in his ears. He could just feel Lex's hands trying to touch him, and God, that made it hurt even more. He could have screamed, but his throat was raw, and he thought he tasted blood.

Lex. Jesus, Lex, he was leaving him alone. Clark tried to form words and gave up with the next ripple that shocked out his mind, thank you God, please.

Thank you God, please God, never let me wake up again.

He'd never had a hangover.

Not after the RedK incident, not after that evening at Lex's where they'd drank shot after shot of brandy and Lex had collapsed in a strangely vulnerable pile on the floor of the den, speaking nothing but Latin and making Clark suspicious every time he giggled at some particular phrase. He's played at it before--after a kegger his freshman year that Pete made him to go for the purposes of raising his profile, when he was *really* young and he and Chloe and Pete had drank all that hard cider at Mr. Johnson's without anyone knowing.

He wasn't sure this was comparable to what he'd heard, but it sure was close. Clark rolled over, wishing Mom would come upstairs. She *so* didn't approve of drinking, but he thought she'd be sympathetic, bring him water and lecture him a little when he felt better. His mouth felt dry and tasted like he'd been sucking on handfuls of rusty coins for hours. All of his skin seemed to be trying to subtly crawl off his body to pool on the floor. God, even his *hair* felt weird, like every strand had a little weight attached.

"Mom," he murmured, trying to get one hand up, and that made his ears ache, too. God. Dammit. "Mom, I feel--"

"...off me or you'll lose it."

Lex had never had what anyone sane would call a soothing voice--low and rich and soft when he worked for it, but also? Kind of hot. In a way Clark tried not to think about too much. Right now, Lex wasn't trying for soft and conciliatory and it showed--every vowel was as sharp as a razor and trying to cut into Clark's skin individually. Clark wondered if his mom would mind that Lex was here when Clark had his very first hangover.

Oooooh. Maybe Lex *caused* the hangover. There was a thought.

"Sir, you don't--"

The sound of a door slamming felt a lot like hitting that car when he had no powers, and wow, that was a memory Clark could have survived without reliving, like, ever. Curling up, or trying to, Clark wished someone would make Lex shut up. And go away. Or come here with water. Something.

A slow weight eased itself onto the mattress, but Clark didn't dare open his eyes.

"Clark?"

Lex. Sitting on his bed. Clark considered opening his eyes and then decided against it. The nausea-inducing shift of the bed was really enough. "Clark. I need you to focus."

Clark sucked in a slow breath. "Go away." Or bring Mom here. Either would work. "Feel--terrible."

"I know." There was something in Lex's voice that made Clark wonder, and he slowly shifted onto his back, slitting his eyes open.

Stupid mistake. Dark room, but not too dark. Lex nearby. Entirely not his room. Entirely not his--

"Lex."

A hand almost touched his face, then pulled back. Clark wondered briefly if anyone had ever made Lex look like that besides him. Make him pause and consider, before the hand dropped away, and headache be damned, stomach be damned, hangover be damned, Clark sat up straight. "What--"

Memory was fast and as painless as a stiletto. One minute nothing, the next everything, no transition, no time to panic, no time to wish he'd never woken up at all. Clark sucked a breath like he was suffocating, hands clenched in the thin sheets, shredding beneath the pressure.

"Look at me. Don't--Jesus, don't freak out." He'd almost think Lex was shaking, too--pale oval of a face, features blurred in the dark, circles under his eyes easily visible. "I need you to focus."

Not as easy as it sounded.

"You're--we're in. There's meteor--kryptonite in the room. That's why you feel like shit." Thanks for noticing, Lex. "Everything's going to be fine."

Clark didn't laugh, but only because Lex seemed so *serious*. Blinking slowly, Clark let Lex lower him back down when his arms wouldn't hold him up anymore, trying to take in what little of the room he could see. "Cave."

"Yes." Lex took a deep breath. "I don't know much more. They're--not happy you're here."

That was probably a massive understatement. Clark thought it was almost sweet that Lex would take the trouble. "You?"

Through slitted eyes, Clark could see Lex's sharp smile. "They're--very suspicious." Wow, that would be a huge shock. "I'd speculate that--" Lex almost instantly cut himself off, eyes narrowing. While Clark was way too out of it to try and translate his expression, the context was good enough. They were being observed.

Slowly, Clark nodded, and even that hurt--Jesus, he couldn't stay like this for long. Even broken ribs hadn't been like this--this endless moving nausea and pain. Knocked out would be good. Dead might be good. Somewhere not here would be even better.

"They all wear--"

"Like a pop teen fad." Lex sounded disgusted, and Clark tried to grin.

"I'll--be okay."

Lex hesitated for a minute, then the hand touched him--oh God, blessedly cool, sweet. Wonderful. He wanted to move into it like a cat, curl up against Lex and leech all the cool from his body and wow, that was kind of weird, but he'd worry about it later. Later, when the world made sense and he didn't feel like complete shit.

"I need to tell you some things," Lex murmured, and Clark tried to concentrate. "Important things."

Clark's eyes fixed on Lex's face, then slowly sat up. The dizziness was dismissable. He needed to focus. Direction. Where--would they put it. The little room was depressingly bare--made Clark wonder if they often had Kryptonian guests. Focus, though. Where it was coming from. Why it was coming from there. How to--

"Left," Clark said, and his voice sounded terrible. "Under the bed. Maybe in--"

A hand on his arm pulled, and Clark wished, a little desperately, that Lex wouldn't be so focused in speed over comfort, because he was in a tangle of sheets on the cool stone floor before he could finish the sentence. And since when the hell was Lex so damned strong? Trying to get to his elbows, he watched Lex methodically pull apart the cot, mattress and bare metal railings, jerking those apart too, and a little pile of green rocks slid out of the hollow tubes to pool in Lex's hands.

Even looking at them made him sick.

Behind him, Clark could hear the door open and a part of him was ready to push up. Lex was so damned often in danger and not so great at getting out of it often, but his body refused any kind of movement. Lex was already crossing over him, coming to a stop only a few inches from his head.

Was Lex trying to--oh the moron.

"You shouldn't have done that." A woman's cool voice, not one that Clark recognized, but he didn't mind. "You do understand our reservations--"

"If I'm who you think I am, then you know what I'll do when faced with a direct threat." There was a steel in Lex's voice that, until now, had only been present when faced with his father. "If I'm not, then you have no idea who you're dealing with and you should act accordingly."

Quiet.

"Kal is my friend. I don't want him in pain."

"Do you have a better solution?"

Clark thought he could almost hear Lex thinking. "Take your little toys out of the room. Stand guard outside for all I care. If the best humanity can do in war is torture without reason, then maybe there's a reason we haven't won yet."

Silence. Clark could almost hear the arguments going on in their heads, see the face-off between Lex and whoever was facing him now.

"Can you prove you are Lex Luthor?" Her voice was almost soft.

"I don't plan to try."

So much confidence--but then again, that's all Lex had to work with. Playing this Lex, rebel leader, was all well and good, but in a question and answer session, he'd be outed. And they both knew it. God, he wished he could do something besides lay here and wish for his own death.

"You'll be watched." It should have been a threat, but Clark didn't care much because--oh God. The rocks were going. Muscles were relaxing and his body was calming and oh God, yes, it was wonderful. Vaguely, he was aware of the door closing again, and Lex dropping beside him, not even bothering to return to the disassembled cot. Instead, the mattress was pulled over, and Clark willingly climbed onto it, pain replaced with exhaustion.

Opening his eyes without real pain--and oh God, that was good, too--Clark looked at Lex.

And blinked. "They changed your clothes." And did Lex have a black eye? Clark flickered in vision automatically, scanning the slim body, wincing as abrasions and cuts and what looked like a nasty set of blisters across one bandaged thigh.

"Surprisingly, they didn't take the word of a twelve year old child," Lex answered softly, and Clark glanced around, trying to listen for the hum of audio. "Don't worry. They don't have the resources to bug."

"How would you know?" Every instinct was awake. They'd--hurt him. A lot. Nothing broken, so far as Clark could tell anyway, but they'd hurt him. Asked him questions, certainly, about Clark, and Lex had lied and that was why Clark was still alive.

Lex's smile was almost painful--probably was, Clark thought with a sick feeling. Split lip. "Their computer systems are well below the quality I'm used to."

Oh. Clark flickered his gaze around the room to double check. Nothing. "Talk quietly anyway?"

"Pretty much. They're watching, but I doubt they're watching for more than sudden movements and attacks. They--" Lex trailed off, frowning. "They're a very badly, badly organized rebellion, if this is supposed to be the current headquarters."

"Good weapons. Or whatever I was hit with."

"Equivalent of a Kryptonite laser, you might say. Think a green laser pointer with a lot of range. Not a bad innovation either." Lex *would* be intrigued, and Clark pulled up a pillow from the floor, letting his eyes fall half-closed as his body recovered. "They--took me by surprise."

"Me too. I didn't hear them."

"I don't think anyone hears them if they don't want them to. Badly organized, not badly trained." The thoughtfulness was back. "From what I understand, there was--a raid not long ago. Some leaders got together in one place in an act of utter stupidity, and predictably, they were betrayed. The best and the brightest and pretty much the core were killed, including--well, Lex." Clark wondered how long Lex had worked that over in his head before he could sound so casual. "These are civilians. And apparently, the new best and brightest."

"That's--bad?"

Lex sighed softly. "I have no idea if they're telling me anything that even vaguely resembles the truth. But just from overhearing--it's bad for them. And it's not going to get better."

Clark opened his eyes. "If there's a Lex and a Cl--Kal here, that means there's other--"

Lex's mouth tightened. "I know."

There were a lot of things in Lex's voice that made Clark want to know, but he bit back the questions. Mom, Dad? Maybe who looked at him like James did.

"Any idea how we got here yet?" His voice was hoarse. He really wasn't up to that.

Lex's mouth twisted. "Magic? I have no idea. These people--" His voice trailed off. "I had only a few minutes to look at their computers, and I wasn't exactly focused on looking for history. We're pretty far underground, if my calculations on the way down were right. Away from sunlight. Ask me why."

Clark pulled himself up on an elbow. "Not wanting to be caught outside?"

Lex grinned. "Interested to know why you have these--powers?"

Oh. Clark blinked. "I--what? Sunlight?" He was joking. Lex only looked at him. "Sunlight. You're kidding."

"Nope." Yes, the inner scientist was having a moment alone with the information. "Yellow sun. And there's an expiration date on how long you can go without it, in case you're curious."

He really wasn't at the moment. "Okay. I--what else?"

"The woman you heard--" Lex took a long breath. "Elizabeth Ross."

Clark sat up straight. "Pete."

If possible, Lex seemed even more tense. "Yes. He's here."

Clark opened his mouth to ask, where, how is he, can I see him--but even before the words could form, everything fell back into place. Different Pete. The woman who had put rocks in this room with him was Pete's mother and he wasn't Clark, and--

A hand on his shoulder brought his head up. Lex looked back at him with careful sympathy. "It's not the same people."

Swallowing, Clark nodded, not able to believe a word. "How many would I know?"

"Not many. Pete--Pete and his family. What's left of them." Clark winced, shoving back the spurt of non-kryptonite nausea. This place was apparently an inspiration to entirely new kinds of guilt. "They--" For a wonder, Lex stopped, obviously searching for words to cushion the blow.

"Want me dead?"

Lex didn't answer, but then, he didn't need to.

Laying back down, Clark stared up at the low, dark ceiling. Underground, Lex said. Like rats. Like animals. In caves. Hiding from sunlight, from Kryptonians, from--him.

"Clark--"

"I'm not a kid." Yes he was. He was a kid. He was whining a few hours ago about staying at home and wanting to ride dirtbikes with Pete and thinking about Lana. He was sulking because his best friend was getting married and not paying him enough attention. He was worried about algebra and gerunds and those misplaced commas on his book report that lost him the A. He was worried about meteor mutants and saving his friends and where his people came from. And why he was here. There.

Now he knew, and he didn't want to.

"They sent me to conquer," Clark whispered, and Lex's eyes on him felt like an accusation, even if it wasn't. "In the ship. My ship. At home. That's what it said. That's what I know. This is what they wanted."

Lex didn't say anything, but the tentative, uncertain brush of fingers across his cheek wanted to help. Lex didn't know how to give comfort, only how to share pain. "What am I here?"

"You're Clark," Lex said slowly, measuring out each word, like it was the most important thing he'd ever said. It probably was--after all, he was as lost as Clark was, wasn't he? The only other person Lex knew was having a breakdown, and he had to get Clark out of it before something dangerous happened. So they could get home. Practical.

"Can you--go?" He couldn't look at Lex, knowing what he did. What little he did, anyway. Surely someone was going to enlighten him Real Damn Soon, tell him what he'd done to their families and their friends and--and--and then Lex's hands were on his shoulders, pulling at him, and Lex--

God, Lex, trying very hard to hug him. Like someone who had seen it done but never quite got the practical experience behind him, awkward and not quite sure how it was supposed to work. Clark closed his eyes and held on, too.

"He's not you," Lex whispered. "I'll get you out of here, Clark."

"They'll--Lex--" They're watching, he wanted to say, but he shut his mouth and just held on. Held on even as the door opened and Lex's arms tightened protectively. "Lex, you can't risk--"

"He's not staying in here," Lex said over his head, and maybe Lex had just gone crazy with all that had happened. Someone was at the door, maybe Judge Ross who made pot roast on Wednesdays and had come to Career Day and made them all want to be judges if they could get their very own gavels. Judge Ross, who was someone else entirely. Clark couldn't make himself look at her "Cl-Kal is no danger to anyone here. I want him let out and left alone."

"He can't, Lex," she said in a low, unhappy voice. "Lex, even if I trusted him--"

"Then you put us back on the surface and we'll take our chances." There was a finality to Lex's voice that made Clark shiver. Lex might very well do it.

"There's a price on your head high enough to buy all of us pardons," she answered slowly, every word dropping like a rock. Clark tried to pull away, tell Lex no, don't risk yourself, but Lex was good at holding onto things that he wanted. Clark had forgotten about that somehow. "You wouldn't. Not for him."

No one told a Luthor no. No one told Lex what not to do. And no one sane told Lex he couldn't beat every odd ever made, and there was a kind of inevitability in Lex's next words, because they didn't surprise Clark at all. "Try me."

"I don't know who you think you are, but you're attacking a facility of the oligarchy. This is punishable by--"

Kal thinks of that smile on the screen. "I don't think it ever stopped."

"Jesus." Clark sat up as soon as he was awake, fingers gripping at sheets so wet he must have sweated out half his weight in water. His clothes were soaked, clinging to his skin, and he ripped them off, breathing through the images that were dying too slowly from his mind.

Jesus. Staring around the silent room--and he could pretend this was a room, he could, just for this moment, he could--he listened at to the sound of Lex's breathing change.

"Clark?" The low voice raised every hair on his body. Glancing up, he saw Lex across the room on the other cot, watching him with unconcealed worry.

Lex. God, this place--does it have to get into his dreams, too? Closing his eyes, he drew his knees up to his chest, ignoring the way the bed dipped, pressing his forehead into hard bone.

For a long time Lex didn't do anything, before an uncertain hand touched his shoulder. "Bad night?"

Clark nodded shortly. The hand tentatively brushed the bare skin at the back of his neck. Impossibly soothing, all wrong, and Clark wanted to pull away. "What they told us about--" Clark choked it out over an uncomfortable laugh. "They tell great stories, did I mention that?"

When he looked up, Lex was all greys and blacks, eyes sunken pool of darkness, but Clark could see the twitch at the corner of his mouth. He supposed Lex hadn't been too hot to listen to how he was supposed to have died. "Yes. They do. Very--vivid."

Clark didn't think he'd ever forget how everyone looked at him when Lex led him out of that room. It reminded him of every warning his father had ever given him and all the ones he hadn't. No one can know, his dad had said. They'll hurt you. He'd never said, no one can know, because they'll look at you like that. Like you're something that should be killed and the ground salted where you walked.

Mrs. Ross had been the hardest to stand, because he *knew* her. She liked classic jazz and swing dancing and made the best lemon meringue pie and had graduated from Yale at the top of her class, went to Harvard Law and became the youngest judge ever in Kansas. There was so much difference, it should have been enough--a whip-thin woman, underfed, professional dress discarded for refugee chic, but the dark eyes had held his and it was like coming home in the worst possible way.

This start of recognition, all wrong, when she'd stepped back, hand going to her throat instinctively, and he knew what her fingers groped for.

Shuddering, Clark pulled away from Lex's unsure hand, laying back down to stare into the ceiling. "I should have stayed in that cell."

"No." Lex's voice was very sure, but then again, he wasn't looked at like that, either. Clark had been watching, still trying to work out what these people saw when they looked at Lex. More than admiration, more than disbelief--Clark wasn't sure what it was, but it almost scared him.

"You okay?"

Clark almost laughed. No, he wanted to say, but what good would it do? "Sure." Kal, this creature that they talked about like some modern day demon or mass murderer. Clark hadn't gotten a look at the database yet like Lex had--he got the feeling that it was deliberate on Lex's part, edging him away from information systems, never leaving him alone, though maybe that was partly the fact he couldn't be sure Clark would be alive when he got back. Clark didn't rate his chances too high either if he was left alone.

They lived in a fucking *cave*. For some reason, that was kicking him the hardest. He'd slept outside, inside normal walls, with sunlight and moonlight filtering through all his life. Claustrophobia was creeping in a little more every minute.

And God, the headache, that never seemed to stop.

"It's all leaded," Clark murmured, and he could feel Lex's attention snap back to him. "Every one of these caverns. I--God, they must have worked on this for years. Meteor rock is soaked into everything around here. No wonder they haven't been found yet."

"You'd think the Kryptonians would have found a way to get around that by now," Lex answered thoughtfully. Leave it to Lex to get all interested in something like that. Clark almost resented him, but he was--just too fucking tired right now.

"I'm sure they've tried." Clark sighed softly. "I--" Sucking in a breath, he let it out slowly. "You know, when Kal shows up on one of their information runs, they're really going to be curious as to exactly who I am."

He didn't need to see Lex's face to know the mobile mouth had tightened. "Kal's been oddly absent from the radar since the--event." Lex was being tactful.

"Massacre."

Hands clenched in the sheet by Clark's hip, and Clark tried not to find it comforting. Just to see Lex as on edge as he was. Just a little. It was wrong. And stupid. And juvenile.

And it helped. A lot.

"Clark--"

"That's what it's generally called when one man kills fifty-seven people, right?" Man being a loose term. Even now, he could see the faces of the other refugees when Mrs. Ross said those words. "Mass murderer. Arsonist. Genocidal maniac. Sociopath. Or just following orders. Take your pick."

"It wasn't you."

He made it sound simple. It's not you, Clark, this is some Kal guy who looks like you and fits your description, except for that nasty sociopathic habit of genocide he's picked up. Don't worry about it. You're nothing like that. Get some sleep. We have a long, hostile, nightmarish day ahead of us.

Rolling onto his other side, Clark took a slow breath. "I'm fine. Go back to bed."

"You're not fine if you're dreaming crap about this." And maybe Lex wasn't as utterly philosophical as he'd been playing it so long. Gritting his teeth, Clark closed his eyes again and concentrated on thinking of anything but this room.

Think of--Smallville. Bills he needed to deliver. Mom making apple pie--it was Sunday now, right? Or did they have an entirely new calendar here?

"Go to bed, Lex."

The hand that brushed his shoulder pulled back instantly, like Clark's skin burned. He regretted saying anything. He--God--

"It's not easy for me either, Clark." It was almost worse than Lex's anger--anger at least, would have been something to fight against, spend his own rage on, but the cool, dispassionate voice cut like anger never could. You're being a brat, his voice implied. Unreasonable. Childish.

I'm in a fucking nightmare, Clark almost said, but he couldn't answer things that Lex wasn't saying.

"They were burned to dust and ashes," Clark whispered, opening his eyes on the dark. When they closed, he saw what must have happened that day. "I flew in and killed you all. They said it was fast. But it was personal. Just dust and ash, all that was left of their leaders. Of--" You. But it wouldn't come out and Clark wasn't sure he could say it.

"Stop it."

"They look at me like they expect me to kill their children in front of them."

"Clark, *stop* it."

"They know Kal and they know me. One day, Lex, you're going to look away and they're going to kill me--"

"Shut *up*."

"--and when you look again, they'll tell you how great you are while my blood's covering their hands."

What in the name of God was *wrong* with him?

"Jesus *fuck*." He never felt Lex move--one second beside him, the next a slim, angry body against his, hands braced on his shoulders like he could be held down, and he pushed, just lightly, just enough for Lex to lose his balance, falling to the floor with a soft gasp. Maybe to remind Lex that he wasn't dealing with sweet, bumbling, stupid little Clark Kent. A sickening sound, like a ripe watermelon being thrown into the wall, that was Lex's head against the bare, brushed stone of the floor, and Clark heard himself laugh--this high, choked thing that sounded a lot like sobbing. He cut it off.

Silence. Clark could hear Lex's breathing, slow and even, Lex's body shift as he sat up.

"Taking it out on me won't help." Simple words belied by the fact that Lex didn't come close. Not too close, not to the monster, the murderer, the man these people wanted to kill so badly Clark knew they could taste it ever time they looked at him.

There were *children* here, and they had seen him and he was--God, this was so fucking hysterical--he was their bogeyman.

"Afraid of me?" Clark whispered, and the blue eyes flickered down. He moved before he knew what he was doing, his mind gibbering in shock, but his body had control now, slamming Lex into the wall, fingers wrapped around that pale, vulnerable throat that was left open to him, like he was just that Clark Kent who would never do anything even close to this.

Mrs. Ross' voice murmured in his mind. They wore black, the military, and Clark could see himself standing outside that building and burning everyone inside. People had run from him and when the building went up, so did Kal, disappearing and leaving them alone to watch the end of hope.

They told the story by rote, like it was memorized, like a rallying cry. This is how it happened, Mrs. Ross had said. This is how they died, and this is who did it.

Lex. Didn't. Understand.

"Afraid yet?"

What are you *doing*? Lex's heart was beating so loud, so fast, gasping for air. Breathing out, Clark jerked himself back, stumbling until his legs hit the bed, going down like the awkward teenager he'd been only yesterday, hearing the soft crack of the headboard when he grabbed for it, the squeal of overstressed metal.

That, Clark thought dully, was Kal. That's what Kal was. A man who killed without thought or mercy.

Lex didn't move from the wall. "Is that what you want?"

Jesus. No. "I want to go home."

The footsteps didn't pause--God, why? What the hell was Lex thinking, to come this close? Clark couldn't find it in himself to move, though, and then Lex was stretching out beside him. Close enough to feel warm breath tickle his skin, even through cheap cotton. Lex.

"Clark."

"Pete's dad was there." The catch of breath beside him was enough. Clark turned his head, just enough to see Lex's eyes close briefly. He'd known. "She told you?"

"Yes."

Clark took a deep breath. "What did they tell you, when I was in that room? I need to know, Lex."

The darkness that filled the place of blue had nothing to do with the room around them. Clark rolled on his side as Lex looked away.

"Lex?"

"You're right." A hand traces the sheets between them thoughtfully. "You do."

"Who are you?"

One day, he was going to get one knock too many and start actually believing the shit his dad poured out about rarified air and Alexander the Great. Wasn't that a hell of a thought when he was getting the shit beat out of him by a *girl*?

Okay, a woman about twenty years older than him with a hell of a right hook.

The kid, James, had been taken away from the scene, yelling at the top of his lungs like someone had just started to slaughter Santa Claus right before his eyes. This was definitely something no child should see, though Lex was beginning to think there was a completely different baseline going on here for what was appropriate for minor eyes and ears.

Clark. It pounded in his head, an endless litany, memories of green-tinged, *crawling* skin like something out of the worst low budget horror movie in history blocking everything else. Clark. He had to get to him. And that required getting through this. Alive.

He ducked the next punch and had the satisfaction of hearing a man's voice yell in shocked pain when the fist collided with solid stone. Women he couldn't hit, fucking rules of behavior and Mother's training, but a man he *could*, and Lex--well, Lex had some aggression to work out.

Figure out something, Lex thought as he felt his knuckles split under the force of a blow that ricocheted up his arm and made his shoulder ache in a way wholly satisfactory. Voices kept asking him questions, people had taken Clark away, and the only chance either of them had was to make them believe he was who he already was.

In a manner of speaking. Lex hit the cave floor spitting blood and wondered if Mrs. Ross a universe or so over had ever had this fantasy about him and his father.

Christ, she was strong.

"You're dead."

Lex almost laughed. "Better people than you have tried and they sure as hell couldn't manage." His lip was already swelling, eye ached from that second--third?--fourth?--punch, but it really was funny as hell. "What the fuck do you think you're *doing*? You think I got of there just to get killed by my own people?"

Mrs. Ross hesitated, hand coming up sharply, and the others fell back. Leaning into the wall, Lex finally got the chance to take in the numbers. Ten. All too-thin and too-pale and too fucking wired, and not too sure what the hell they were seeing.

He knew the feeling. Hell. He had to wonder what he was seeing himself. That was Judge Ross, the one that had signed Ryan's papers, Clark's best friend's mother, down and dirty and way too fucking scary, the familiarity jarring as hell. God, he'd kill to get some time to have a breakdown now. If Luthors did that. If Lex did that.

Which Lex did *not*.

The others were blurred faces--maybe people from the plant or Smallville residents themselves, but Lex focused on her, the nucleus of all the power in the room. She'd be deciding what happened to them both.

She'd decide whether he was the Lex they'd lost.

Thank God he was such a good liar.

"I'm obviously not Kryptonian."

That gave them all pause, taking in the bleeding and they might, just might, have cracked a few of his ribs. Nothing new there. One hand against his side, Lex braced himself against the wall, wondering what on earth he could use. He didn't know *anything*.

"You could have been sent by them," one voice offered uncertainly. Well, they'd certainly raised paranoia to a new level. "One of their--creations."

Jesus, so much more than he could absorb right now in one simple sentence. Forcing it aside, Lex got his head up, holding Mrs. Ross's eyes. Dark and suspicious and terrified from the second she'd seen who came in with him. Disbelieving and wanting to believe.

Needing to believe. He got that. He'd seen the look on James' face and here it was again, written into them all.

"They're all dead." Another one of them--Michael Phillips? Didn't he work waste management?--stepping forward uncertainly, freezing when Mrs. Ross glanced over.

"I got away."

That look--he'd seen it on his own face before. When instinct and reason and need collided, when what you wanted was more important than what actually was. These weren't reasonable people who would use logic, who he could appeal to, work on with simple rationality.

"No one--no one does that."

Lex grinned, wondering if there was blood on his teeth, tasting it in his mouth. "I can do anything."

What kind of man would lead a fucking *rebellion* at his age? And how? Lex tried to imagine that other self--fourteen years under the heel of alien invaders, like something out of the weirdest and least likely sci-fi movie in history, but there. Here.

God, his head hurt, and not just because of what had to be a record number of concussions.

"Can you prove it?"

Lex stared back at her, watching how her eyes fixed on him, looking for a single flaw, a single difference between her memory. These people, he suspected, had never met him. He was--what had the kid said? A legend. A--distant figure of hope. They told stories about him.

God, don't laugh, don't laugh, this wasn't the time, but if Jonathan Kent could only *see* this....

"I don't plan on trying." Somehow, he was off the wall, standing on his own two feet, nausea sweet on the back of his tongue, and dizzy as shit, but he wasn't swaying, please God, and even his voice sounded sure. More sure than Lex had ever been in his life.

"Kal killed all of you." Michael licked his lips uncertainly, eyes flickering to Mrs. Ross. Taking a deep breath, Lex took a step forward. Surprisingly, the floor didn't tilt and he didn't fall.

Clark wasn't Kal, but was an alien, and someday soon, that was going to sink in, too, but right now, it wasn't Kal Lex needed to think about.

"He saved me." So many times. Even when I didn't want to be.

"That's impossible."

Lex almost laughed. He'd been in Smallville too long. Nothing was impossible these days. Man could fly, aliens walked among them, and a trip into a car cemetery could turn into this. "You know better than that. Nothing's impossible, Mrs. Ross."

She jerked at the sound of her name and Lex grinned again. "How--"

"You don't think I'd recognize the badlands cell leader?"

The dark eyes widened. "No one knows about us except--" Her voice cut off abruptly, and for the first time, he saw something besides blank fear. "No one knows we're here, even the Kryptonians."

"Except us."

Silence.

"No one survives a Kryptonian raid." Her voice was uncertain, but God, did she want to believe. He wondered if he'd ever wanted anything like she wanted this.

"I did."

"That's all?"

Clark watched Lex's eyes flicker. Not all, but Clark wasn't sure he wanted to hear more. Involuntarily, his hand reached out, touching Lex's mouth, the almost completely healed lip, and it was pathetic, how much he relaxed when Lex didn't flinch away.

"They--believed me. I suppose the rampant bleeding had something to do with it." Lex shifted uncomfortably. "They want to believe so badly that they're willing to--see what they wanted to."

Clark nodded slowly, imagining it out. "What are they doing here?"

"They used to mine the meteor rock. Kryptonite." Lex didn't seem to think it was weird at all that Clark's hands were tracking his face like this. "The Kryptonians won't find us. They don't even know this cell is here still."

Clark blinked. "How do they--"

"I don't know. Explains the fields, though." Clark blinked, and Lex pulled away to roll on his back thoughtfully. "They call it the badlands because of meteor poisoning. I was right. Apparently, it's pretty damaging to the respiratory systems of Kryptonians." Lex snorted softly.

Clark blinked. "I--when we were on the surface, I didn't feel it." Though that might explain the headache.

"You would have if you'd breathed enough of it in." Lex's voice was very hard. "Dust. They sowed it into the earth. Kryptonians can't grow anything in it, can't purify it, can't do anything but avoid it or go out in suits, and since they think that this area's been mined out of meteor rock, they don't really want to anymore." Lex sighed softly. "Relatively speaking, this is probably the safest place on the planet for us, especially with the shield up."

"The shield?"

Lex glanced over at him. "I only got a look at it, and I've never been a physicist or an engineer. From what I understand, it's the failsafe, in case the Kryptonians take it into their heads to go looking for more rock." Lex's voice sounded frustrated. "I can't get good explanations because I'm supposed to know this crap. I need access to the databases without them seeing me and wondering why on earth I need information I should already have."

Clark shivered a little.

"The ship we saw--"

"Scared the shit out of them. They thought someone had finally noticed that they were here."

Clark stared at Lex's profile. "Why are they here?"

Lex grinned suddenly. "The caves."

That made him sit straight up. The caves. Oh Jesus, he'd completely forgotten.

"They know about those?" In here? Somewhere? Images danced in his mind, remembering the parasites, the things on the walls--that thing in the wall. His voice caught in his throat. "Do they know what they are?"

Lex looked thoughtful. "Not exactly, but close." The blue eyes flickered to Clark, amusement obvious. "Though this does make Kyla make sense."

Lex stared around the brightly lit room. A glance at the power generators told him that they didn't do this often. The worn-out machinery had obviously seen better days--much, much better days--but they wanted to show him this.

And God, did he want to see.

"We've been trying to translate for years," Mrs. Ross said from behind him. "We sent out records by secure channels, but even those who live among the Kryptonians don't understand. Apparently, this is a formal dialect of the language, which even the collaborators don't know."

Lex looked at her sharply. "They're taught the language?" For some reason, that unnerved him.

She smiled, slow and bitter. "You know the rules of conquest. Everyone who wants to live knows."

Lex nodded, pushing the subject aside. "You've kept it intact." For some reason, he would have expected them to destroy it, but--no. Passionate people, but not stupid. They knew a mine of potentially valuable information when they saw it, no matter its origins.

Mrs. Ross crossed to the wall, hand touching the octagonal hole lightly. Lex thought of the key. "This is important. We--we don't have the equipment or the knowledge to scan and find out what this *is*, but--" She shrugged. "There's something here. Something they don't know about, and we want to find out what it is."

Lex nodded slowly, turning in a careful circle. So carefully preserved; the floor showed the signs of thousands of feet who must have trampled through here, desperate for information.

"You need a Rosetta stone." Lex thought of Clark--he'd still been unconscious when Lex had been allowed to check, but very much alive. So far so good. "This is the reason you destroyed Smallville, isn't it?"

Mrs. Ross nodded. "You were only a kid when the decision was made. They were--too interested in the area. They were getting the rock before we could, and they were--" She stopped, frowning. "It was a difficult decision. We needed these caves. We had to keep them away. If they saw what we were doing, they'd know something was here that we wanted to hide."

"How did you do it?"

Mrs. Ross' smile twisted. "We had a plan. The town was already almost deserted, but--there was enough to make it look real. An attack on the Kryptonian officers stationed here, coordinated with as many cells as we could contact. Enough to look genuine. Enough to make it reasonable that we'd risk the last of our supply of Kryptonite."

Lex tried to imagine it. "They chose big, obvious targets."

"Yes."

"They knew they'd fail."

Her voice was quiet. "They knew what they were dying to protect."

Lex kept his eyes on the wall, staring blindly at an unfamiliar character that blurred. Tried to imagine giving orders to attack something that couldn't be breached, different cells in different places, all to hide one attack that would succeed in its own failure. That's all they'd needed. One meteor-laced bomb....

"It contaminated the ground."

"For almost a decade, they haven't walked this earth." Her eyes flashed. "They didn't dare. And they had no reason. They thought that the meteor rock had been mined out, and that day--" Her voice caught. "They thought the rebellion was over."

Lex nodded blindly.

"It's dangerous here, for humans." Her voice dropped even lower. "We lead shield everything, and hope to God they don't wander through looking too hard and notice. Some left, after. Some--didn't."

Lex thought of James, who couldn't have been more than a baby the day that bomb was set off. From the look on her face, she knew what he was thinking.

"Mutation?" His voice almost cracked.

She nodded slowly. "Most of us, in various ways. We--then we didn't know. Not until--" she stopped short, sucking in a breath. "James adapted. Most didn't. Some left and were--discovered. The Kryptonians are very interested in the effects of the rocks on humans. They can--find those of us touched when we leave, somehow. So we hide here."

Lex nodded slowly. He felt her eyes study him, almost clinical.

"You'd know about that, though." The sympathy froze him, and he turned to face her, but the dark eyes were understanding. He shook his head, feeling the first vague stir of panic. "Hiding."

"I'm not--"

Her smile was sad, a brush of fingers against the black eye that no longer hurt. He winced away too late to pretend there was pain. Even to himself.

"It's all in the database," she said softly, and Lex couldn't make himself step away. So many questions he'd never wanted to ask, answered. "The day they came to earth. You were there. And you were touched."

Clark stared at Lex, watching his mouth, a tight line of something that wasn't quite anger. Clark thought he understood.

"That--explains a lot." It was all he could think to say. A vivid memory of a certain Porsche came to mind, and he wondered if Lex had felt like that. "You--didn't know?"

"I didn't know you were an alien either." His voice was tight, and Clark wondered how on earth anyone could go through life not noticing that they healed *really* fast. Maybe like they didn't notice they never got cuts or scrapes when they fell, or that they rarely bruised, or excused superspeed as something that, sure, was weird, but at least human.

Maybe he really wasn't the only one who did oblivious like a lifestyle choice.

"Lex--" Jesus. His hair and his body. Clark didn't even try to stop the habitual guilt from settling back in. "I'm sorry."

A few long moments, then Lex sighed. "I should have known."

Clark almost smiled. "Yeah, well, if it's any consolation, the alien thing? Kind of new to me, too."

Lex looked at him, sharp interest, and Clark smiled then, couldn't help it. "How new?"

"Weird accident. Car hit me. You might have heard about that."

The blue eyes widened, staring into his for an endless moment. "*That* is when you found out?"

Clark snickered softly. "Let's say a run in with some farm machinery the next day solidified the whole thing."

"Jesus Christ." Sitting up, Lex looked down at him. "You didn't know."

"Not a clue."

They stared at each other for a long second, then the smile broke--Lex was grinning down at him, and it was like being in the castle, at home, with a Lex he knew, with a *Clark* he knew. Clark sucked in breath and laughed softly. After a second, Lex joined him, breathless and shocky and relieved all at once. Clark couldn't even have said why, but it felt good.

Made the world--right, somehow.

Collapsing on the cot, Lex stared at the ceiling as if it had answers to every mystery in the world.

"I don't want you to be afraid of me," Clark heard himself say, and what the *hell*? Biting his tongue a second too late, he caught Lex's eyes. Oddly, right now, they seemed so full of light that the room seemed brighter. Blue like a Smallville summer before the heat took over.

Breath catching in his throat, Clark stared back, surprised at the touch on his face. Soft and gentle and so very not-Lex, still learning how to do this, how to be close. How to want to be when you need to be. "I never have been."

Clark's gaze flickered to the wall, remembering Lex against it, the way Lex had looked at him before Clark backed away. "I would be."

The slowest smile in the world. The Lex he'd first met, maybe, before the lies between them had grown too thick to look beyond. Before they'd stopped thinking that some day, they'd never have to lie at all. "I'm not."

It was a more comfortable silence. They might be in a cave in the middle of a war and surrounded by lead, and right, they were in a place that made no sense, but--it seemed. Better, somehow.

"We're going to get out of this," Lex told him softly, still with that endless touch, a single spot of pure warmth and familiarity in an unfamiliar world. "We're going to get out of here. Trust me."

It said a lot about this moment that Lex could say that without irony.

And it might say more that Clark could, too. "I do."

There's a spread of paper on his desk--wood-pulp, his mind offers, thinking up the chemical equations from habit, fingers skidding across the uneven surface. There aren't a lot of paper mills left in the world. He could be looking at a piece of what will be distant history.

Sitting down, Lex looks at his computer screen and thinks about what he'll say this time. There's a subtle kind of satisfaction in this particular game that he's sure anyone with a recalcitrant father could appreciate.

"Lex?"

He'd been quiet since he got up--a thoughtful frown on his face, palms rubbing into his thighs as if he was trying to wipe something away. Clark had never seen Lex this on edge, but then again--well, who wouldn't be?

Mrs. Ross and some others were bent over a folding metal table in another room--had been, for hours, staring down at maps that made no sense, mumbling shorthand as good as a foreign language. Bits and pieces filtered down as comprehensible words, but some of those, he realized distantly, weren't English at all. Certainly not human.

Lex stopped his circle of the room, restless still even when he wasn't moving. Claustrophobia, or maybe just nerves strung too tight; Clark couldn't be sure.

"We--we might need to tell them what we know about the caves," Clark said softly, and Lex's head whipped around, as if Clark had just suggested a double suicide.

"No." Almost dreamily, his head shook in negation. "Not--not yet."

That Lex had excused himself from whatever plans were going on had been a surprise, unless it was simply to alleviate Mrs. Ross' continuing suspicion. It was such a small group--somehow, when Clark had envisioned the concept of a rebellion, he'd been thinking of something else entirely. What, he wasn't sure, but computer systems and spies and people who looked more. Professional? Hardened?

Not at all this group of less than thirty people, refugees of a normal life. Thin and tired-looking and worrying about when it was safe to go to the surface to get water, for God's sake, and the filters that were supposed to remove the kryptonite from it and make it safe to drink. All squirreled away in the endless lines of caves that by no stretch of the imagination could appear homey, not by any amount of furniture and threadbare rugs and third-rate computers.

Lex was back at a console now, probably mourning his laptop. Fingers darting over the keyboard, eyes on the monitor, and God knew what he thought he was looking for.

Mrs. Ross' presence at the rough arched doorway was unmistakable. Clark felt himself shrink into the wall, hoping she wouldn't see him. The thin, hard hands had fed him cookies and those sharp eyes had more than once had grinned at him. There was something intrinsically wrong with how she looked at him now. Right now, as a matter of fact, hard and cool and thoughtful, before she turned toward Lex.

"The Kryptonians are hitting bases all along this side of the country," she said, like that was supposed to mean something.

"They're taking advantage of the lack of cohesive leadership," Lex answered shortly, turning around. Clark wondered how much Lex had held back about his conversations with them. "It's the perfect time if they're trying to finish this off. Frankly, I'm surprised you've lasted this long."

"We." Her voice was cool. "Or after this, are you rolling over with the rest?"

Lex made a gesture toward the monitor that seemed to encompass the world. "Honestly? You don't have any options. Not unless you have some hidden resources that I don't know about."

Obviously, that wasn't what she had expected to hear. "You--you can't mean that."

Lex apparently did, but then again, this wasn't their Lex and Mrs. Ross couldn't know that. Of course. She thought she was talking to whatever great war leader Lex was, and that was still kind of trippy.

"The ambush took out everyone who knew anything--every person who had the mainframe codes, every person who knew where the fuck anything was, everyone who could name off the cells in position. There's nothing to unite them, nothing to--"

"There's you."

Lex stopped short, breathing out. "I'm not enough."

"You were before."

Silence. Lex rubbed absently at his head. "I think out here, you might have overestimated my--influence."

"My husband didn't." Leaning into the doorway, she seemed bigger, almost towering over the small, dusty stone room that until now hadn't seemed anything like a rebel base, like this woman would never have seemed like a rebel leader until now. "He wasn't a gullible man, Lex. He believed in you enough to leave here and join the unification."

"That was before I saw the death tolls." Lex's voice was so sharp it could cut. "Have you read them or is your fantasy of a Kryptonian-free world getting in your way?"

The dark eyes narrowed. "Before the massacre--"

"Before, you were living on a very slim chance, which is now dropped to zero. The majority of the population is quite content with their current living arrangements. Open recruitment was nearly impossible before and now has all the attraction of an instant death sentence. How the fuck do you think you're going to repopulate? Breed yourselves some little rebels for the future? What a wonderful reason to reproduce."

She's getting really pissed. Clark backed into the wall a little more, glad all that attention is on Lex. "We can win."

"You can't even manage to scare them. All of your best and brightest were killed in the most secure zone on the planet, and want two guesses on how *that* happened?" Lex's voice hardened. "I've looked at the reports, what few they are. Someone was tired of fighting and betrayed them. And what exactly do you want me to do? Send out a message for another meeting and see if I can't get a few hundred *more* killed?"

Mrs. Ross turned on a heel, walking back to the room where the others were. So. That's why Lex wasn't with them.

Lex was looking at the console again, though, fingers moving slowly on the keys before speeding up again, and Clark slowly walked over, feeling strangely vulnerable as he crossed the room, pulling up a chair to sit beside him. "Lex?"

Lex shook his head and pushed back, almost sending the chair tumbling. "They--Jesus Christ. This is ridiculous." All wiry energy coiled beneath, ready to spring. Clark wondered if he really wanted to feel the blunt edge of Lex's temper right now.

"She--thinks--"

"That miracles are possible. Even--shit, even if I was who they thought, this is--ridiculous. You can't build anything on what they have. No resources, few people and after--that--they're so deeply underground we'd be digging them out with shovels to find them now. Fuck. We've got to get out of here."

And what the hell could he say to that? "It--Lex, we're kind of visitors. It's not like--like we can do anything--"

"But they expect me to."

There was no way to argue that one.

"They think it's some kind of sign, that I survived. That--they lost everyone but me."

"You were important. Are. Um." Stupid pronouns in weird situations. "You know what I mean."

Lex nodded, eyes shadowed. "I know. What I really want to know is why." A tilt of the head at the monitor, and Clark saw what Lex had been pulling up. A roster of the dead at--that Kal had--that had died that day. "Everyone there was over thirty, except me. How the hell did that happen? I don't care what the hell is going on, no one gives this kind of leadership to a kid."

"You convinced Smallville."

That got him a wry look. "Smallville didn't have a lot of choice."

"Maybe they didn't, either." Clark looked away from the roster--he was scared to see names he recognized, though the possibility was remote. Only Mr. Ross would be on there. God, please let only Mr. Ross be on there. "Lex, it's--different."

A flicker of the keys. "This was encrypted, by the way. A four year old could decrypt it, as you can see. That's how great their security is. It's surprising to see my own war record. Bet you didn't know I had my first command before I was nineteen."

Clark hissed a breath. "How long--"

"No idea. Their data's pretty sketchy, but I got a few things. The Rosses have held this area successfully since the invasion. They're the only ones who haven't had to surrender. Not even once."

Nodding slowly, Clark leaned back in his chair. "We still don't know why we're--how we got here."

Lex nodded distractedly. "I don't even know how it's possible. Except the badlands are soaked with that fucking meteor rock, so hell, maybe on off-days, when it isn't mutating people, it sends them on little journeys. Fuck if I know."

Clark wished he had the leisure to wonder. Lex rubbed his temples with thin fingers, and Clark could see the sharp line of worry cutting his forehead. Lex had always had an overactive sense of responsibility. "Lex--"

"I dreamed about Helen."

Clark bit his lips shut, fixing his eyes somewhere to the left of Lex's head. "Oh?"

"It's--this place." The frown deepened, and Clark almost reached out, wanting to smooth away the frustrated lines. "Just strange. This entire fucking situation is strange, so status quo, I suppose." Another sharp rub, leaving dark red lines on pale skin.

Clark didn't want to know. "About home?"

Lex laughed softly. "No, here. She--" Lex shook his head. "Someplace underground. There were casualties. She was a doctor. Kind of." Lex turned back to the keyboard, code for no-more-talking, which would have been fine, except--

"In the rebellion? Resistance?" Clark's mind filled with dream-ships, and the familiar blue eyes through a screen.

The stiffening of Lex's shoulders was the only response, but it was enough. "It was just a dream."

Maybe. Letting out a breath, Clark stood up, brushing his hands against his jeans. Dust was everywhere--soaked into everything, clothes, worked into his skin, thick in his hair. His mom would have gone crazy living like this. No sun or wind, just the stone ceiling above them and the stone below.

If he were more claustrophobic, these people might actually have had something to worry about.

"They're fucking suicidal." Lex's voice cut through Clark's thoughts, bringing him back to the man beside him, who yes, was so ready to spring and do damage, even though there was nothing to do. On his feet and moving, restless, and maybe the space issue was getting to Lex, too. "Fuck, they don't have a chance."

"Lex--"

"They're fucking planning another summit--whatever the hell they want to call it." Lex's mouth was a tight line. "To announce I'm still alive--what kind of fucked-up shit *is* this? They can't--*Christ*...."

"Maybe--from other countries?" Clark had no idea why he was saying that, but the bruised look on Lex's face hurt too much. "Maybe--"

"Not after the massacre." Turning on his heel, Lex fell back into the chair, closing his eyes. "I don't--we've got to get out of here. Before they can--before they--"

Before they announce the resurrection of Lex Luthor, rebel leader extraordinaire. Before everything else that could go wrong did. Before Lex found himself standing on a podium somewhere, being told he was somehow supposed to save the world.

"Lex--"

"What if those idiots actually*listen* to her?" The rising edge of Lex's voice brought Clark up straight. "Come on. We've got to--shit, I have no idea. That fucking yard--it's where it happened. We have to find out how it did and fix it."

"Fix it?" Clark blinked, wanting to argue, but the hunted look stopped him. He wasn't sure that Lex wouldn't just go off without him in this mood. "Lex, we--it's kind of dangerous out there? With us being, you know, hunted?" You, anyway, but Clark was sure he didn't want to run into any of his people either. God knew what the hell might happen, but none of the scenarios his head could draw came up good. Clark might be in danger here, but Lex was a walking dead man out there.

"I don't give a shit." The jeans they'd given him were a million years old, caked with dust, though they'd been clean enough when Lex put them on this morning. The faded green shirt and boots made it just that much more surreal. War leader, Clark thought, looking at him. The man who wore tailored suits had disappeared with the clothing.

Or maybe it was the look on his face--helpless frustration, anger, bone-deep fear that never seemed to end. A lot like the people here, maybe, but for entirely different reasons.

"Lex--" Lex was serious, and Clark's mind flickered through every argument, discarding them all. "Lex, we can't just--go out there. Ships. Them."

"Ross said they don't come around here that often."

"They sure as hell were wandering around when we got here!" It was like Lex didn't have normal human scruples about danger. God knew, Smallville hadn't helped with that much--the number of times that Lex had been injured had eroded his good sense.

"I've been thinking about that." And from the look on Lex's face, he really had been. "When--what happened to us, getting here--they might have sensed it. With the ships. If we can find out--"

"What? Just find one, nicely ask it to land, and see if they let us check out their data? Because last I checked, you are not only supposed to be an enemy, but unless you forgot to tell me something, neither of us have a *clue* how to even understand whatever they picked up even if they did!" The caves had given Clark a lot of knowledge during his unfortunate immersion period, but they hadn't quite gotten around to spaceships. At least, Clark didn't think so.

If it was possible, Lex looked even more stubborn. Christ. "You have any better ideas?"

Yes, Clark almost said. Stay here. Safe. Where no one will kill you on sight, but then again, here wasn't going to be much better soon, if Lex was right.

"You can stay or go, Clark," Lex said, breaking into Clark's panic like a knife through hot butter. "I'm going."

"How are you going to get out? The shield--"

Lex smiled with utter calm, and that was always bad, because that was Lex with a card up his sleeve, who already knew the end of the game and was only playing with you. Clark watched the slim fingers track the keys, then a screen came up, and Clark stared at the meaningless jumble of numbers with something like resignation.

He didn't need to read it to know what it was. Mrs. Ross and this merry little band of rebels had showed him how to do it.

"We only need five minutes to get out," Lex said, and all his calm was restored, or the surface of it, thin as ice on a pond in spring. It could crack for anything. Anything at all. "Let's go."

Lex was right--it was easy. And for paranoid rebels, they sure as hell had given Lex a lot of knowledge on the way in and out. Tracing up another endless cavern, which looked the same as the last, Clark wondered when that had happened. "When did they show you how to get out?"

No one else would have seen the hesitation, the single stutter of Lex's step, but Clark did, because he knew Lex up and down and practically inside-out. "I--"

It almost made Clark stop. "You don't know, do you?"

Lex half-turned, but all they had was the little light from the bare bulbs overhead, the shadows making a mystery of his expression. Clark wondered if Kryptonians made them or if they had different sources of light. He could be looking at some of the last light bulbs in the world. Such freaky thoughts to have during what amounted to being an escape. "I know."

"How?"

Lex didn't answer, moving on without another backward glance. "The databases must have had something I read."

"Did you dream about it?" Clark thought of the ships again, how real it felt. The taste of Kryptonite smoke in his mouth, filling his lungs, constricting his chest--the feeling of looking at those people outside like strangers, like less than human. No. Less than Kryptonian. Less.

He didn't want to think about that right now.

"We're almost there." The challenging edge in Lex's voice was enough to stop Clark from saying a word. Fighting with Lex wouldn't do either of them any good.

"Here." Clark's stopped at the sound of Lex's voice, narrowing his eyes to see what he was doing. A panel was open and Lex was busy doing something inside it that Clark couldn't see. Before he thought to switch to x-ray, the room brightened, and Clark blinked at the grey-brown walls reflecting light at them, and the view of green grass and trees outside.

It looked so *normal*, Clark could barely believe what the rebels had told them. Kryptonite sown into the ground, the dirt itself these people's only defense against the invaders.

"Lex--" But Lex was already going out, like a man released from prison, and Clark wondered why his own feet dragged, slowly emerging under fading sunlight, *feeling* it this time, knowing--knowing this was what made him what he was. Sunlight.

And he'd never wanted solid stone back around him so much in his life.

"Clark?"

Exposed. Through the canopy of too-green trees above, wooded forest around. He could pick Lex up and run him out of danger, until the kryptonite worked its way too deeply into him.

"*Clark*."

Clark jerked around to see Lex already yards away, like he knew exactly where he was going. And maybe he did, Clark thought, taking another slow step. He might know exactly where they were.

"I'm coming. Lex--" It's really not too late to turn back. We can go back. We can be safe. And wasn't that just a load of manure, because they weren't safe. This entire freaking *world* wasn't safe. Forcing his foot out, Clark took another step, looking up to see Lex already outdistancing him, like he didn't care he was leaving Clark behind, like it didn't matter if he was a big, human target for an entire world, and God....

A brush of superspeed brought them even, and it may have said a lot about this world that Lex didn't even blink. "I can run us there, if you can tell me where to go." Or a close proximity, anyway. Clark knew Smallville backward and forward and side to side, and he *should* know how to get back, but his mind refused to even try. All those *trees*. This ground, that should be as familiar as his own face, but wasn't.

"I--I'm not sure." But Lex didn't move like someone who wasn't sure. He moved like someone who knew Smallville like Clark should have. Like he knew it the same way that he knew how to breathe. "Hurry up."

Clark glanced up at the sky. It was coming on dusk fast. They probably didn't patrol at night, and Lex was right, this place was anathema to them. If it had been their arrival that had attracted attention, then after looking around, they wouldn't be coming back.

Or conversely, they might be coming back, curious about what they'd felt.

He was over thinking this in a big way.

"What do you think got us here?"

Lex snorted. "God knows, your Kryptonian brethren might know, but I don't." Lex paused, looking around at what seemed to be the a faceless mass of trees, before swinging a sharp right, ducking under a branch on his way. "I'm going to find out."

"How?"

Lex shrugged. "I'll figure it out when we get there."

He didn't seem inclined to talk, but the eerie silence was working on Clark's nerves. He was years out of being the kid who was scared to death of the dark, but he supposed he was allowed a little space for regressive freaking out. "What if--"

"I don't *know*," Lex said sharply, and Clark winced away from the heat in his voice. "I don't have any better ideas. You have something better? They're you're people, after all."

"No, they're not."

Ahead, Lex froze, turning around, but Clark was tired. He was scared and they were in the open and he had no idea what the hell they were going to do. Lex was acting like he was on some sort of spiritual journey that doubled as a suicide mission. And more than all of that, Clark wanted his mother.

Oh God, did he want his mother. These people had nothing of him, in their ships, sharing his blood, but the people in the caves that hated him were closer than the others could ever be. Staring at Lex, Clark stared this into Lex's eyes, trying to make him understand. "They aren't my people, Lex. They never will be."

No matter what the dreams seemed to say.

"Clark--" Lex's voice shivered, like he was having problems breathing, and then, he came back. Just a few brief steps on land, but a million miles in mind, and Clark recognized the man again in front of him. The one who reached for him, hand warm and solid on his shoulder. "I'm sorry."

"S'okay." Taking a breath, Clark let it out. "You have a theory, don't you?"

"I think that it had something to do with the yard, yeah. More than that--"

"And Kryptonite."

Lex laughed softly. It even sounded real. Thank you God. "What else? If this land is saturated with it--"

"But how would that--"

"Cause a rift in the space/time continuum?" Lex grinned. "I watched a lot of Trek in my misspent youth. I don't know. It can mutate humans and vegetation--anything living, really. Maybe somehow we--" Lex ran out of words, running a hand over his bare scalp, maybe a leftover habit from when he had hair. "If I can see--see where it happened, it might give us a clue."

Clark will go with that. It's not like he *does* have any better ideas.

"When they find out we're gone--"

Lex frowned, staring down at his nails, turning away so abruptly that Clark regretted he'd said anything.

"They--it doesn't matter. We don't belong here. We can't help them."

Clark supposed, looking at Lex walking away, body and mind, vanishing into that Lex-place that Clark could never follow, that Lex might be right.

Later, Clark thought, he'd ask Lex exactly *how* he knew how to get here so easily.

"There's got to be something." The look on Lex's face was enough to freeze Clark cold, stopping in his tracks on the other side of a beaten up Lincoln. Lex was staring at the Lamborghini across from him like it had just announced it had been responsible for the Kennedy assassination.

"Lex--"

"We were here." A stomp emphasized the point, like Clark needed the reminder. "We walked over here from that *fucking* non-existent fence and we came *here*, and that's when you started getting sick--"

"When we saw them. The rebels."

Lex shot him a sharp look. "Thank you, Clark. I completely *forgot* about them trying to kill us." It was like watching a five year old's temper tantrum, trapped in an adult body. It was a bad idea to talk, Clark knew, but the silence--he just couldn't handle it. Home never sounded like this. Home was animals, birds, *people*, cars, the feeling of life and living, and here, it was everything else but. Rubbing his temples, Clark tried to concentrate.

"No animals," Clark whispered, low enough so Lex wouldn't hear and leap, but it was comfort enough to hear his own voice. Animals knew by instinct when something was bad. This was a prime example of instinct beating intellect with a big stick of illogic. Example A, a car graveyard in the middle of nowhere. Clark would almost wonder about insect life, but didn't there kind of *have* to be if there was plant life?

He should have paid more attention in biology last year.

"What the hell *did* this? How the hell did it *happen*?" The desperate edge of panic scared Clark more than anything else. Lex had been okay so far. Freaked out, but okay. Clark had been the mess. And he wasn't giving that up, not for a much better reason than a freaksome yard in the fucking *boondocks* of the county, but God, he might have to.

He might have to *cope*, and God, he wasn't ready for that.

"Lex?" Lex was done with his fifth circuit of the car, not even turning at the sound of Clark's voice, making his way through overgrown weeds toward where the house had once stood. "Lex, what are you--"

"It has to be here."

"*What* has to be here?" Superspeed wasn't needed, but Clark did it anyway, overshooting his goal and almost colliding with the skeleton of a sad looking sixty-nine Ford. "Lex--"

"What got us here."

"What, like, a portal or something?" It would be funny if Lex wasn't in such deathly earnest, staring around him like he expected to see something, who the hell knew what, like a glowing doorway? What did he think he'd see?

"Anything," Lex ground out, and Clark wanted more than anything to reach out and touch him, but the slim body was as closed off as if Lex was miles away. "Anything. A--something to tell me how we got here. Something--"

There was a fence there, Clark remembered, watching Lex stand there, motionless. A gate only a few feet ahead. Clinging ivy and dying climbing roses. A house there. Mr. Granger somewhere, lost in time and space. When, they didn't know. It could have been--

"When we came through the gate," Clark heard himself say, and Lex blinked, like he'd forgotten Clark was there. Slowly, Clark circled the space Lex occupied. There was nothing different about. The look on Lex's face suggested he'd better get to the point fast. "Here. Mr. Granger didn't answer. If he was in the backyard, he wouldn't have heard us in the front. When we got back here, when we came through the gate--"

"We were here." Lex looked quickly down, like he expected the earth to show him footprints leading back. "Then--what? How the hell do we--"

"Get back?" Something turned over in Clark's stomach. No gate, just this bare land. No gate, just Clark and Lex. No gate to look at and study and find out how or what or why. Kryptonite laced land. "Lex--"

"If we could just test--"

"Lex." Lead seemed to have settled inside him, making him feel strangely heavy, the world moving too slow. "Lex. There isn't--it might be--"

"No." Lex knew. Lex had to have known.

"The same conditions don't exist here." Clark had no idea how his voice remained so steady. "What if--"

"Stop it."

"They don't have kryptonite here like we do at home." Home. He flashed on an image of Mom and dinner and God, right now, she and Dad had to be scared to death. Police might be looking for them. Lionel Luthor would have sent out search parties and investigators and hell, maybe the FBI. And Clark--and they-- "They don't have--if it was the kryptonite, they don't have the right amounts anymore, they hardly have any at all--"

"Shut the *fuck* up, Clark!"

He could feel Lex's fear, dripping off of him like sweat on a hot summer day, taste it like salt on the back of his tongue. "There may not be a way back."

"We don't even know how the fuck we *got* here!"

Clark looked up from the ground. Dust seemed to fill his mouth, making each word dry and dirty. Wrong. "You have any better ideas?"

He'd never felt more alien than he did this second, Lex staring at him with blank blue eyes and clenched fists, like he wanted to use them on Clark, on the ground in front of them, on the world itself.

"I don't accept that," Lex said slowly, enunciating each word like stones to throw at Clark. "There's got to be a way."

Dust clouded their feet like fog, and Clark took a deep breath. Lex was right. There had to be a way. All they had was maybe's and might-have-beens and--yes. They would get home. They would, because this was Lex, the smartest person Clark had ever met, and he was Clark, and no matter what, they always got home in the end. Always.

"You're right."

Lex stopped short, mouth shutting tight, like he hadn't expected that.

"You're right. There's got to be something we can do."

Turning away, Clark paced back to the cars. They were here and at home. That was something. So no gate, no house, not even the stone foundations left, but the yard was here and that meant--God, Clark didn't know. Lex had to figure this out. Clark couldn't.

"We need--" Lex's voice trailed off uncertainly. Clark leaned into the rotting frame of something vaguely sixties and huge, metal warm through his clothes. The sun was almost set and they didn't have a plan, didn't even have the beginning of one. "We should go back."

Oh thank God.

"We'll tell them--" Lex broke off. Clark thought he'd never seen Lex look so lost. Kicking up dust in clouds, like the wind that swirled it around them, and it was getting bad, really bad, they needed to get out of the wind. Kryptonite dirt might suck for Lex, but it could be deadly for Clark.

Lex's eyes fixed on the ground suddenly, then flickered upward, mouth opening in a silent o, and Clark felt a strange coolness trickle down his spine, breaking through sweat and dirt, making Clark shiver.

"Clark--"

It was full dark, and Clark slowly turned, following Lex's fixed gaze, up to the sky above, gunmetal grey like dusk and that insignia that spoke to that which had been created in him in the caves. That place that knew things that it shouldn't, about a people and a world that should be long dead and now weren't.

"Oh God," Clark heard himself say, watching it hover, so close it was almost like he could touch it if he tried. He couldn't imagine wanting to do anything less. "Lex--" His voice sounded hoarse, thready, and he wondered if Lex could even hear him through the dust, the shock, the distance, and he found himself moving, reaching out, grabbing Lex by one arm and pulling him toward the trees. It was like moving in syrup. He couldn't seem to catch his breath.

"Clark--"

"They think you're him. And they want you dead." Like Lex didn't know that, but Lex wasn't helping, one stumbled step before digging in his heels, still staring up. Clark couldn't exactly blame him, but he sure as hell wasn't making this easy. "Lex! They can't--"

"How long has that ship been there?" Lex whispered, and Clark got him another step. A part of him was laughing. These people--they had *ships*. Trees wouldn't protect them from that ship.

But maybe the ground could. "Lex, we have to get back to the cave." Clark could superspeed them there. "We have to--"

"Lex!"

Oh Jesus. Mrs. Ross, complete in trendy rebel gear, was only feet away. Armed, too, and Clark's head hurt from just looking at the thing she carried, remembering how it felt when it hit, but at least she wasn't pointing it at him. "Stay back!"

And now she was. Great. Just fucking great.

"Clark." The thready whisper brought Clark's head down, and Lex pale lips formed words. "They--that ship. They might know--"

"Your life isn't worth that." The way home could be in that ship. Clark couldn't even feel tempted. Maybe later, he'd think it was worth the risk, maybe if it wasn't Lex, maybe if a whole group of rebels weren't behind them, maybe if he didn't already know that the kind of people that would teach a boy to commit mass murder wouldn't be the kind to help out a few stray travelers from another dimension, he wouldn't have done what he did, and that was push, using the strength Lex had never really seen before, toward them, out of the path of that ship, under a canopy of trees that couldn't be any protection at all. "Get him out of here!"

He could superspeed Lex, but not all of them, and why the hell had they followed? Clark turned back around, just in time to see the faint outline of figures through dust--and he knew he didn't want to see more. "Go! God, go, I'll--"

"Clark--"

"They don't want *me* dead!" God alone knew what would happen, but he was Kal and had killed a whole group of these rebels. He'd survive. Lex wouldn't. "Run!"

Mrs. Ross stared at him like he'd grown a second head, but she wasn't getting up close and personal with the controls on that kryptonite stick of doom either, so it was good. One hand wrapped around Lex's arm, she was pulling him under cover, and Clark thought about what he was about to face. His *people*. With his powers. And probably with a lot more practice than he'd ever had.

Lex was making noise that Clark didn't bother listening to--it was just words and getting farther away. Clark would--distract them. How long had it taken to get here? An hour or two? More? Lex had known, but Clark didn't. Maybe no time at all. Clark hadn't been paying attention, and God, that had been stupid. He should have.

"Kal," came a voice, though they were still indistinct blurs in front of his eyes, and Clark took a breath, straightening. Weird blurs--suits, Clark's mind offered up at random, to protect from the dust. "Where is--"

Clark closed his eyes and thought of Lex and that group, running under the cover of trees, and then stopped thinking. Opening his eyes, Clark looked straight at them and let himself get angry. It wasn't hard.

It shocked them, jumping back, and his aim was for shit in all this dust, but glassy heat where there was once bare dirt got their attention, stopping short a few yards away. How much time would Lex and the rebels need? Kryptonians didn't like this place, but that didn't mean they wouldn't search every inch for Lex if they knew--if they saw him--if they had seen the rebels, and they had to have.

They weren't moving, and Clark wondered what they were thinking. Their Kal sounded like an all around psychotic, so maybe it was totally in character for him to be attacking allies. Probably not a good sign. One figure lifted something, a vague outline that disturbingly resembled Mrs. Ross's weapon, and this was even worse. Clark remembered how it felt to get hit by one of those. He wasn't in a hurry to repeat the experience anytime soon.

From behind him, a stream of green light hit the suited figure so calmly taking aim at Clark.

*Dammit*.

Clark turned around, just in time to see Lex, looking a little too comfortable with all this brand new technology, and Clark was reminded of a gun a long time ago, the same cool, thoughtful expression on Lex's face when he sighted Roger Nixon and blew him away, all in the time it took to draw a breath.

The blue eyes widened, fixed over Clark's shoulder, and Clark moved, not even thinking about it, putting himself between Lex and whoever was behind him.

No. Not Lex.

Green and red light, like the most disturbing Christmas ever, and Clark breathed dust before everything greyed out.

Kal knows a lot more about Lex than most people, even the scientists who studied him and study with him, even Mother, who knows Lex's chromosomes by heart and his psychology by rote, even Father, who Kal used to think knew everything.

"Find out how. And bring me a copy of his reading list and everything he's accessed on his terminal." Mother had smiled then, and Kal had wondered why this boy pleased her so much. "I'll want an interview at the next cycle. See to it."

Clark woke with a dry mouth. He was getting tired of being knocked unconscious. He was beginning to understand why Lex was always so grumpy after a concussion.

"Clark?"

A hand touched his cheek. Clark tried not to wince away from the touch, but his skin felt too sensitive, like his mother had described a sunburn. Reaching up, Clark slid his fingers around Lex's palm, letting his eyes open slowly. It was dim enough to not hurt, but just bright enough to make out Lex, sitting beside him.

"What happened?"

"You got hit again."

Touching his forehead, Clark sighed. "My head hurts."

Lex nodded slowly, and Clark let go, settling carefully into the flat, hard pillow under his head. Almost tentative fingers touched his forehead, smoothing away the ache. "I suppose you know all about that," Clark continued, letting his eyes fall closed. It felt too good. He never wanted to move from this moment.

"Yeah. The headache will fade." Lex's fingers lingered on his temples, so gentle that Clark thought he'd melt into the bed. It felt so *good*. "Clark--"

"What happened?"

Lex paused, and Clark opened his eyes, trying to read Lex's expression. It was too dark to see anything clearly, but the feeling wasn't good. "Lex?"

"Most of us got away."

Clark licked dry lips. "What happened?"

The pause stretched out, and a thousand possibilities flashed. They were in the caves. They were safe. They were-- "Was someone--killed--" When Lex didn't answer in the negative, Clark's throat tightened. Damn. "Who?"

"I don't know him." Lex shifted on the mattress, standing up, and Clark carefully sat up to watch the pace, jarring across the small space of the cavern. "They incinerated him. The weapons they carry aren't meant to disable."

God. Clark bit his lip. If they hadn't gone out-- "I--"

"Mrs. Ross was taken."

Clark stopped breathing.

"They recognized us both. She--she pushed me down and--" Lex stopped, voice cracking. I got you out while they were--involved in stopping her. They didn't kill her."

Recognized her.

"This place is a secret. She--she isn't." Lex spun on a heel, and Clark knew he was thinking what Clark was. If they hadn't-- "There's a meeting in the morning. I'm expected to attend."

"Attend?"

Lex stopped, turning to look at him, and even though Clark couldn't see his face, he could feel Lex's anger from here.

"With Mrs. Ross gone, Clark, they--don't have a leader. Except me."

Clark bit his lip. "You're not their leader. You're--"

"All they have now. She was their only contact with any other cells. Besides Lex Luthor. The only one they could trust. Besides Lex Luthor. The only person who can do shit. Except. Lex. Luthor." The amused rage made Clark hurt for him. No one should sound like that. "So guess what? I'm it."

"You don't know--you don't know anything about--" About this war. About them. About whatever the hell it was that they needed him to do.

Lex's smile was sharp and slow and felt like it might cut if Clark got too close. "It looks like I'd better learn."

"You want me to do *what*?"

"You specialize in explosives." That was from Pete, and Clark's chest tightened at the sharp, decisive sound of his voice.

"There's a difference between lighting some fucking fireworks and going after a military installation. Do you even know where she's being *kept*?" If they did, Clark would be surprised.

"We will." A thin-voiced echo, one of the people Clark doesn't know, doesn't want to. "When--"

"How?"

"Broadcasts. We can hack into their intership communications. And something like this will be public knowledge." Pete's fingers drilled a rough sound into the table; the incessant tapping was getting on Clark's nerves. "Mom--she's one of the ones that lived. One of the only ones. They'll want to do it all in public--trial, sentencing, execution."

"Example and warning," Lex murmured, too softly for anyone but Clark to hear--Clark could almost hear the wheels in Lex's head slowly turning. Thinking, always thinking, but right now, not about the right things. "They won't broadcast where they're keeping her."

"You kidding me? They'll sell fucking *tickets*. We can do this."

If they were suicidal. Clark could count the ways. Public, security out the ass--it would take a genius to get through that.

Lex had twitched through the night. Even from the other side of the room, Clark could feel his frustration, like something tangible. It had made him think of his father's restlessness the night before storms came in, late spring, huge with thunder and lightning and rain that never seemed to end. Something, his mom had told him with a smile, that came with the blood, the feel of the earth. Something instinctive, buried deep in the mind, and Clark had sat up those nights, wondering if he tried, he could feel the same thing.

Through feet of solid rock, Clark could hear their voices if he focused. Leaning back in bed, eyes closed, looking for all the world like a sleeping, ordinary, completely harmless alien, because Clark wasn't stupid enough to think that *someone* wasn't checking in to see what he was doing. A cracked open door and Lex down the hall--if he was them, he wouldn't trust him either.

If he was them--

Clark rolled onto his stomach, pulling the pillow out to stuff it under his head again. Lex couldn't think they could--that *he* could--but he might, he did, he sat there in that room and pretended to be who they thought he was, drawing up weird, impossible plans, like he had any kind of clue what he was doing.

Staring into plain, cheap cotton, smelling of caves and dust and himself, Clark tried to think of something. There had to be *something* he could do, something that would make all this somehow work. Anything that wasn't this, like being in jail or something, and God, being *watched* like this, like he was--dangerous.

He supposed that he was.

"...and they're going to look until they find him."

Clark tried not to twitch, wondering what he'd missed in this bout of self-pity.

"Through solid lead? You said yourself that it's secure here." Lex sounded tired now, like this was an argument he'd heard too many times.

"You can't be that stupid." The lowered voices were harder to hear, somehow. Maybe the stone, or the fact that Clark's just not good at this yet. Lack of practice, probably. He doesn't like being different. "...danger to us all. They know he's around here somewhere, they *saw* him...."

"Before or after he started attacking them to give us the opportunity to get the hell out of there?"

Pete would have an answer to that. Pete always had answers. "It was a trick. He wants something from us. From you. Jesus, you're *from* Metropolis. You know what they're like. They'd do anything to--"

"He saved me." Lex's voice was flat. He sounded like that with his dad, with business associates, and occasionally, with the random meteor-mutants trying to kill him.

"How great of him, after he killed--"

"He *didn't*." Lex, too tired to remember to be careful. "We don't know what the fuck happened that night. We don't know if--"

"You expect me to believe that crock of shit? What fucking side are you on?"

Clark straightened, knew he was giving himself away, and still couldn't quite care.

"For some reason," and now Lex was sounding more than hostile, and Clark turned his head enough to look. Just to--yes. Lex was an elegant, casual sprawl in the chair that fooled no one, or at least, didn't fool Clark at all, looking just on the edge of homicidal.

Lex was unarmed, though. Clark suspected he was the only one in that room who was.

"The side that doesn't die because they're too fucking stupid to figure out a plan." Lex languidly straightened, staring up at Pete without a trace of mockery. "You want to go out there and die? Go for it. I sure as fuck didn't spend my life fighting them just to get killed because you're too fucking clueless to know shit about what you're trying to do.

"None of you have combat experience. Jesus, that's the whole fucking *point* of being here--protect those fucking caves. You've never even been in the field long enough to know what the fuck they can *do*. So tell me again how you can manage a rescue when not fucking one of you know shit about them. Your father knew. Your mother knew."

"And you know."

Lex licked his lips. "I had soldiers, not civilians."

Pete stared back down. "There's no such thing as a civilian here." His gesture took in the room; what was left of the best and the brightest, people who almost never saw daylight.

Who ran from those ships like field mice from a hawk. Clark shut his eyes against the memory.

"You can't blackmail me."

"I'm not my mother." Pete's hoarse voice cut through the rock like butter. Maybe Clark wouldn't have even needed superhearing to hear that. Not the threat, not the warning, not the simplicity of it. "I'll lock Kal in the interrogation room and you can watch him die. Or you get my mother back."

Clark's forehead snapped against solid stone, trying to see, but he couldn't get a view of anything but backs. Mrs. Ross had been their leader. Through only got him bare skeletons, and he thought one was Lex, on his feet, but he couldn't be sure.

Pete didn't--Pete hadn't--

"You can watch him die and I'll stake you out in a Smallville field and let them have you. That's your choice. Get her back or you're both dead."

"Pete--" An uncertain voice, one of the others. Clark didn't put any faith in that voice. That was Pete's *mom*--for his mother, Clark thought he might say something like that. Might force out those words and watch them sink into another person, make them understand that there was nothing more important.

And he might--just might--mean them.

"You may be a war hero out there, but this isn't the field, Luthor." Pete's voice was low, and sure, and Clark believed him. His grief so old and so real it soaked his voice. "This isn't your fan club that thinks you can do no wrong. My family died when we burned out the land. We lost what was left when they killed our leaders, except my mother. We won't lose any more."

There were answers to that--answers that Mrs. Ross would have supplied, that Lex, if he was ruthless enough, could say. About the war, and the importance of a leader, of Lex--but Lex would never say it. He wasn't their Lex. And he wouldn't ask them to let Mrs. Ross to die for a man who didn't exist.

But he *should*. Clark bit down so hard he felt his lip break, tasting blood, and he wondered, in that part of his mind that always thought, if his blood tasted like anyone else's.

"You'll go tomorrow, when we know where they're keeping her, and Kal goes in that room. He comes out when I see my mother, alive."

Clark knew what Lex would choose. Knew because he knew Lex, who was usually practical, but sometimes he was stupid like this.

"I can't make miracles," Lex said, and Clark thought of Mrs. Ross, just for a second, who traded her life for Lex's in the yard, giving them the time to run away.

Pete's voice was frighteningly even, exhaustion and anger running under it all. "Sure you can. That's what you *do*, everyone says so. I'll contact you when we find out where she is."

Clark closed his eyes, turning to lean back into the stone. He didn't want to hear Lex agree.

There was kryptonite outside the door.

Clark found out when he tried to leave. Not enough to feel in the room, but close to the door, it hit like the hooves of a small pony, waves of sick-green nausea and weakness that pissed him off and sent him scurrying for the bed like a kid, as far away as he could get. Lex hadn't come back. Clark wondered what they were doing to him. Okay, stupid, they wouldn't hurt *him*, not when they wanted him to save Mrs. Ross, but--he wanted Lex *here*. To tell him to be practical and smart and not do this, because Clark wasn't going to be anyone's hostage for good behavior.

To tell him that he wasn't scared, that he'd find a way out of it.

To hurry, because Clark thought about that room and felt the kind of nausea that even kryptonite couldn't cause.

But he didn't come, and they kept Clark here, trapped in solid stone, and hell, he'd start fucking *burrowing* through it if he thought he'd get anywhere, but with his luck, he'd end up finding a brand new cache of Kryptonite and probably die trying to get away.

And that would leave Lex here alone. Clark leaned back against the wall and watched the door.

No one came.

Not to look and see if he was planning bad things against humanity, no one to hand over food with a sick look of disgust, like they were touching a slug, no one to simply stare, wide eyed with terror at their own personal nightmare in old jeans and a ratty blue shirt.

He had *power* to them, and to himself, too--he could knock down walls and burn through stone with a glare, hear a whisper, he could--he *could* be their nightmare. Here, whoever he was here, *was*.

But it wasn't him. Kal could have gotten them both out, no sweat--solid stone was like air.

But he wasn't Kal, and that, right now, was a problem.

He kept his eyes closed when he heard movement at the door, hesitant footfalls before the door closed. Clark opened his eyes on Lex, standing at the door, as blank as he'd ever been standing before his father, before Smallville. Everything in him turned inside, tuning out the world, focusing in that private Lex-place that Clark could never follow. Until now, he'd never wanted to.

"Clark--" His voice was--calm. Lex telling a subordinate what he was going to do, Lex instructing a servant, Lex--being Lex Luthor, Lionel's son. "They--"

"I know."

That snapped him up, staring at Clark for a second, bringing him into the here-and-now of this room, this place, this person. Clark. To a subordinate, not a servant, mostly a friend, and everything that went with it.

"Pete thinks--"

"You're going to get yourself killed." Not that they had a lot of options, short of burrowing out, and Clark wondered if they could do it--if they could get away fast enough, no Lex in the field, no interrogation room--but God, where would they *go*? He didn't get this, didn't understand it, give him a meteor-monster and he was *fine*, but this....

"I won't get killed."

"What the hell do you know about raiding?" Random television shows flashed in front of Clark's eyes, but TV wasn't reality, wasn't Lex, who might be smart and maybe even brilliant, and resourceful as hell, but that didn't make him capable of leading a *rescue*. Lex didn't get out of bed in the morning without his personal assistant.

"About as much as they do." Lex turned away, crossing to the bed. "She was caught because of me--"

"Of us. I was there too."

Lex gave him a sharp look. "She was caught, and if Pete's right, they're going to kill her. She's their--hope. She knows everything--"

"Lex, you *saw* those ships--"

"You have a better idea?"

Not going in that room and waiting to hear that Lex had died in the line of stupidity. That would be good. Not being here, also good. "I could try and get us out--"

Lex sat down heavily. "You wouldn't get ten feet. They're watching for you to do something like that."

But would they be fast enough? Clark stared at the door. He could get away. Solid rock, no problem. Faster than they could possibly get to him.

Getting Lex out with him was a different story.

"They're using me to get you to do this," Clark said slowly, testing out the idea against the screaming of his instincts--that leaving, taking away their blackmail, would leave Lex alone, and Pete's words about staking Lex outside to wait for the ships was too possible to be dismissed. There were other ways--there *had* to be other ways, he wasn't their Kal, but he could--he should--

"No." Somehow, Lex was beside him, a thin layer of warm air away. Pale skin and blue eyes that weren't distant at all. "You--could get away. I can make a distraction--"

"I'm not leaving you." Clark stared at Lex, trying to make him understand. "But I could--they think I'm *Kal*." And Kal, by all reports, wasn't a nice guy, wasn't Clark Kent. Clark could be that, maybe, could remember Red Kryptonite, feel that sense of invulnerability and power both. On Red K, he might not be so different.

Lex's fingers closed over his, hard enough to notice, though never, ever hard enough to hurt. "No."

"Lex--"

"No." A second passed, then another, with those drilling eyes and absolute stillness. "You aren't risking yourself--"

"It wouldn't be a risk--"

"To being Clark Kent, it would be."

Clark looked away. "I can do it."

"No, you can't." The pause lengthened again, then Lex pulled away. "I'm going to try, Clark. No matter--don't you fucking *dare* try anything--anything you'd regret later. Not for me."

"I wouldn't--"

"I would."

Clark licked his lips, staring into the floor to escape the calm acceptance. Lex did this sort of thing. Walked into buildings without bulletproof vests, faced down meteor mutants and hostile sheriffs with nothing but his voice, faced his father with nothing at all. "You don't know how to do this. You--you don't even know how to--"

"I'll figure it out."

Like this was just a new challenge, like running the plant. Clark drew in a slow breath, staring at the floor.

The worst part was, Clark couldn't think of a damn thing to do to stop him.

"You ready?"

Lex looked at the staff-like weapon, wondering where they took their template from--history or the Kryptonians? Using it in the heat of--it was just pretentious to call it a battle, more like a schoolyard fight with some deadly bullies--using it then had been instinctive.

Like his hands knew the feel of it, knew the buttons to push, the angle to tilt, knew in his cells that this was something he could *do*.

Like this raid, standing here with Pete, staring at the compound. "You have any idea how to get in there?"

Pete's raised eyebrows were classic. *He* should know, of course. He was Lex, the war hero, the resistance fighter, the person who did this three times a day and went out for snacks after. He was Lex Fucking Luthor, knows-all, sees-all, and also, the only thing keeping Clark from being drowned in a Kryptonite bath. Lex had seen the room, felt a shiver that traveled up his spine and hadn't stopped yet, reminding him every second spent out here was another second off Clark's life.

Clark needed *sunlight*, and he needed to be away from that green rock. Those two things could only be bought with Mrs. Ross' life.

A square, gunmetal grey building, just sitting there, almost nothing in the way of outside security, here on the edge of Metropolis, getting here in a beat up Buick that had to have come from that damned yard that had so very fucked them over. If he squinted, Metropolis looked the same at this angle--broken buildings and narrow alleys--but this building had never been here before. Either that, or Lex had been way too high every time he'd been down here in his teenage years.

He still wasn't sure how they *got* here. Paranoia aside--even aliens couldn't watch twenty-four-seven--the fact that they were, the lack of security on where they were holding a rebel leader--it felt wrong. Every instinct learned from Dad and the boardroom was screaming it.

Instinct older than that demanded he get his ass *out* of here.

"They know we're going to do this," Lex said softly. Pete was good with hiding--either high familiarity with the terrain, or a lifetime of skulking around Smallville had left their mark. "No security."

"It's Metropolis," Pete murmured, like Lex should know this kind of thing. "Ground zero."

Lex glanced at Pete, fluidly crouching in the shadow of a dumpster. They were only blocks away. The absolute certainty in him was awing, and terrifying. And was going to get everyone killed. Only seventeen could feel like that, be so sure. Only seventeen and never done a damn *thing* could believe they could even *try* this and come out alive in the end. Lex shifted the staff between both hands, feeling the sweat break out on both palms, slicking the metal.

"Who else do they keep here?" Lex asked. There were so many questions he needed answers to, and not one he could actually ask, not and keep the pretense of who he was.

"Used to keep the kids here."

Lex's felt the rise of goosebumps that had nothing to do with the warm spring afternoon. "Kids?"

Pete frowned at him. "You've been away too long. The *kids*. The muties. It used to be where they kept them. The ones that couldn't be used or fixed." Pete scowled. "It's been awhile, but they haven't got the rock to make new ones, so it--sort of decommissioned."

"Make new ones." Lex worked not to make it a question, because God knew, he sure as hell didn't want the answer. *Make new ones*. "Right. So what's the plan, Ross?"

Pete blinked, eyes automatically scanning the area. Lex couldn't see a thing, but somewhere in all these alleys and buildings, the rest of the group were hidden, scattered according to some logic that Lex hadn't quite worked out yet.

"We have the codes to the outer doors," Pete said, sounding so much like he knew what he was doing that Lex might have been fooled, if he hadn't seen the way those thin hands were clenched around the staff, yellow-white knuckles stretched so tight enough to split. "There are six levels. The outer rings are safe enough--we've gotten in there before. It's where we get our supplies sometimes." Pete stroked the staff with one hand. "They'll be keeping her on one of the lower levels, probably C, high security."

"Okay." They'd done this before. "You've been in there."

Pete gave him a long look. "In and out since I was twelve years old. Dad took me on missions when I was old enough to hold a staff."

Lex nodded, not trusting his voice.

"And the codes will still work?"

Pete made a low sound that could have been mistaken for a chuckle. "That's the weird thing. They never change them. Not after a raid, not after a battle, never. It's like they think it was a fluke we got through in the first place, every time." Pete shook his head. "Except the El family--but they don't have a lot to do with keeping track of prisoners or much to do with the holding cells after they got their pets working. The rest--they think we're *stupid*." Ross shook his head, a grim smile curving up the corners of his mouth. "They think of us as livestock."

Lex bit his lip, controlling the images of livestock that a life in Smallville brought to mind. "Yeah." Shaking his head, he shifted his grip on the staff again. "So we just get down to Level C--"

"Blast down." Pete patted his staff like a pet dog. "These babies will cut through solid metal, you know. They don't *do* a lot of interior security. They try to keep people *in*, not out."

For a powerful alien race, that was just strange. Or Pete was being epically stupid. Lex shifted, trying to ease the strain of crouching out of his thighs. He wasn't used to this much physical activity all in one day. A few hours daily at the gym didn't adapt anyone's body to doing this sort of shit. "Just a little while longer." There was a gleam in Pete's eyes that Lex didn't recognize, though he'd take a wild guess and say that martyrs looked like that right before they let themselves be nailed to objects before burning. There was no way Pete seriously thought that they would survive this. "Then we'll get Mom out."

Clark had never clocked his meteor-rock exposure, because as far as he was concerned, minutes equaled eternity with that kind of pain. But he'd say, with all honesty, that this might be the longest he'd stayed conscious enough to still feel it.

They knew what they were doing, definitely. A look at the rock on the table only feet away was all it took. Big enough to keep him curled up on the floor, nausea and twisting skin and the feeling of his entire inner body trying to slowly scratch its way out through his skin. But not enough to knock him out, not enough for even a few seconds of blissful unconsciousness.

They were *good* at this, from the circular shape of the room that didn't leave a far corner, to the table, to the rock, set high enough from the floor that even if he lurched to his knees, he couldn't reach far enough to get to it. Clark had tried getting close enough to knock the table over.

The curve of the wall was better. Not much, but a little. Curling up more, Clark pried his eyes open to give the door a glance, but everything was a grey washed blur. They could probably come in here, walk around, and carry on entire conversations, leaving the door open, and he'd never notice.

Pete had made it disturbingly easy, once Lex was sent out with the rest. Just a lead box that opened with a flicker of his fingers, and if it hadn't been Pete--hadn't been best friend and co-conspirator of years and years--Clark might have moved fast enough to knock it out of his hands. But he'd just stood there, like the biggest idiot ever, taking in the too-thin body and grey-tinged skin, the manic light in his eyes, the *hate*, and let Pete put that thing down, let Pete watch him hit the floor and choke out a painful, shocked breath, because no matter how many times Clark remembered how this felt, memory was shit compared to the reality.

This morning, Lex had shifted from his bed, his body recognizing morning when it came. Clark knew he hadn't slept--Clark hadn't slept. He didn't nightmares when he was living one.

"You know what would be good?" Clark had said, wanting that blank look wiped from Lex's face. "A bath."

He'd surprised Lex, no question. A flicker of something real in dull grey eyes, something that might have been amusement in another life. "They have showers."

Clark had shrugged. Their idea of adequate showers and his were light-years apart. And the dust here, ground into both of them so deeply, didn't seem to wash off with just a spray of cool water. "A bath. Or to go swimming." Soak out every damned molecule of this shit, duck under and be *submerged*. It would feel so *good*. "The lake--"

"Polluted from kryptoradiation," Lex had said, interest fading. Clark had bit his lip, looking for another subject. Anything to bring Lex back in here. "Clark, you--I know--" His eyes had fixed on the back wall, Clark's avenue to freedom if he would just take it. "You can--"

"No."

Now, Clark wasn't sure he could have said that, meant that, if he'd remembered *this*. A slow, leisurely shudder rippled up his body, and it felt like *bones* were shifting, muscle trying to tear free to squirm out through his flesh. He thought he would have, hoped he would have, but he's not sure that if he'd known, really *known*, he would have been able to say that.

There were so many reasons Lex had to come back, but God, he wasn't sure what it said about him when the only thing that stuck was that, if Lex came back, they'd take him out of here.

Lex wasn't clear on all the reasons they had for waiting for nightfall--it *seemed* more logical, but these people didn't really subscribe to any kind of logic that Lex had ever heard of. Pete was impatient, a ball of shifting, twisting, restless energy, and Lex thought that may be the best argument that outside security was for shit, because hidden or not, there was no way that someone on perimeter guard couldn't just *feel* him.

Or this could be a really simple trap. The kind of trap that even Wyle E. Coyote would have had enough sense to avoid.

It wasn't helping that Lex still didn't know what the hell Pete thought they were going to do once they were inside. Or how the hell he thought they'd *ever* make it back to Smallville in one piece with their liberated prisoner in tow. Because man, if she was so fucking important, a political prisoner, then they would damn well follow, badland pollution or not.

He'd left Clark standing in the middle of what passed for their conference room, pale and straight, so much like a kid pretending to be brave that Lex had hurt for him. Only Clark would be so incredibly stupid as to hang around for torture when he could burrow his ass out for freedom. Or whatever freedom he could get on this planet, but hell, there had to be somewhere he could go and be safe. Somewhere. Somewhere that wasn't that tiny round room with its plain metal table and the promise of a slow, lingering pain that would end with his death or Lex's return.

As a motivator, it was pretty fucking inspiring. Fuck Pete and his band of merry psychos--success or failure, he was getting back. On an even trade, Mrs Ross' life didn't equal Clark's to him. He wasn't sure anyone's life did or ever would.

Pete shifted restlessly, and Lex controlled the impulse to snap at him to *keep the fuck still already*. How fucking hard could it be? He was, apparently, a resistance fighter. Hadn't anyone ever told him being still was a bright idea in enemy territory?

"I was ten, you know."

Lex stared down at the broken concrete under his feet.

"They didn't keep me long--I was resistant. Mom negotiated me out with some prisoners we had that they wanted back."

Lex blinked, looking up to see Pete's eyes on the building.

"You were kept here." He shouldn't have been surprised. But this was something that even their Lex Luthor might not have known. "You were--"

"When they were trying it under experimental conditions, to see if they could make things happen. It worked on some but not others." Pete stared at the building, like he could see inside it from here. "I was resistant. At least, at the levels they were using. When they went higher, cancer resulted, but they were--talking about trying. Just to see if--"

See if. Livestock and lab rats. "They couldn't replicate the effects of their landing." God, did he wish he had time to sit down and really *think* about what he'd learned these last few days. All the curiosities and weirdnesses of Smallville, explained in one fell swoop. What he *wouldn't* have given to know the truth.

Lex stopped the thought, shying away from the implications of that statement, turning back to Pete, who still watched, that vaguely martyred glow making Lex more nervous than even Kryptonians. Which was really saying something. "How much longer?"

Pete bared his teeth. "Just a few more minutes."

At some point, someone left water--Clark wasn't sure when or how, or especially why, but an old fashioned clay jug, like his mom used to make lemonade in on hot summer days, was placed close enough to him and the wall that there was some vague chance that eventually, he might be able to reach it.

Break it into tiny pieces, too, but hopefully, he'd manage a drink first.

"I can't stop it or anything, but I can--if you let me--"

Clark cracked his eyes open. Everything was hazed in shades of red and black, grey-edged, like that second before unconsciousness that never came. A vague blob took up most of his vision, and it hurt every place the blob touched--his face, drawing hot, sharp agony across his cheek, like Clark imagined molten metal might feel to a normal human. He tried to shudder away, but he'd lost any resemblance to motor control a hundred years ago. The slow drip of cold water, though--he hadn't known it would feel this good. Just for a second, all the pain seemed to mute. Not gone, not ever gone, but--one step away, while his entire body writhed for more of that feeling. Cool where he was hot, wet in the endless dry of wringed out flesh and bone, and so *good*.

"You can't have much, you'll just throw it up." Clark licked his lips, trying to focus his eyes as another spasm ripped through him--like revenge for even that brief second of relief. His throat felt weird, raw and sore, like he'd been screaming. "I--" the voice stopped. Clark, in the part of his mind that didn't shiver with every slice of pain, wondered who on earth would make the effort to come in here. "Pete called in a few hours ago. They're in position. So it'll be soon."

Clark wished he could laugh, because this really was funny. "Oh." He wished he could say more. Pete had called in. They were in position. Lex was that much closer to dying. So was Clark.

"Pete trained under his dad. His dad wasn't here a lot--he used to leave for months to serve with Lex and the others." The low voice somehow cut through the pain, keeping Clark focused on something beside his body. "He--got weird after the massacre. He--Mrs. Ross kept him from doing dumb shit, but. It's like, he. Like he stopped believing."

Clark could just make out the outline of--oh. James. Vision greyed out again, and Clark closed his eyes, giving up trying to keep any kind of hold on the world in a body that was pulling itself slowly apart.

Lex had to get back. He had to.

So far, Lex was pleasantly surprised.

Contrary to television, a raid was a lot like a basic burglary. You moved quietly, you got the door open, and then you got inside. A rescue, Lex thought with a little nostalgia of days gone by, was just a burglary involving theft of people, not material goods. Not so strange.

He wondered what Clark would think of *that* and almost grinned. Considering what he knew of Clark now, a little burglary was nothing.

"They don't keep a lot of guards," Pete had told him with that manic laugh. "Not in Metropolis. No one lives here who doesn't belong to them."

Navigation was easy, too--Pete knew exactly where he was going. After so many endlessly dark, grey metal halls, Lex was beginning to feel he did, too. A pattern in layout, possibly, that his unconscious brain recognized.

"It used to be part of the space station," Pete had said, stretching over the penciled map on what looked like wrapping paper. Kryptonians had probably moved to more efficient ways to store common data by now. "Upgrades or something, so they left it here."

Lex nodded, touching the wall with one hand. Smooth, unlike any metal he'd ever felt. A darker natural sheen, brought out by the sheer *cleanness*. For a facility that Pete said wasn't used anymore, it was very well-taken care of. Maybe Kryptonians were just natural neat-freaks.

How--human? Of them.

At what felt like an arbitrary point, Pete came to a stop. Behind Lex, the other three froze, like rabbits seeing a hawk. Lex watched Pete's eyes narrow, circling a section of the floor that didn't look any different than any other.

"When we blast that--" Lex whispered.

"They won't know until we penetrate past the first sublevel." Pete didn't sound too worried, and Lex shot a sharp glance up. Like Pete might welcome being caught earlier, which he supposed might be natural. He was a teen guy. Fighting impossible odd and bad guys was their *thing*. Hell, even Lex wasn't immune to the draw, every rush of fierce adrenaline not completely balanced by the fact he really had no clue what they were doing and wasn't convinced Pete did, either. "We'll have to move fast."

"Do we have a way out yet?" Levels were subterranean. Climbing back up the hole would be a lot harder than dropping down it, especially if the space between ceiling and floor was considerable. This corridor was ten feet high. Not impossible--they were carrying rope--but climbing up a rope was a lot less easy in practice than it was in theory, no matter what your upper arm strength was. Especially hauling along someone else.

Pete's glance at the ropes the other three were carrying answered *that* question. Shit. And shit. And shit again.

Pete pointed the staff at the ground after some nonsensical playing with a tiny panel near the middle, around where a person held it. Lex didn't recognize the pad of unfamiliar symbols--nothing even close to English numbers, or any numbers he could recognize--but his fingers slid to the matching panel on his own staff, feeling out the thin grooves that hid the controls.

Pete didn't ask if they were ready--a thin stream of dark green cut the metal like a blowtorch. Lex's stomach congealed as he watched the smoking, melting metal--they pointed these things at *people*.

*He'd* pointed one of these at someone and let it--let it--

The sharp vision of Roger Nixon faded with a shake of his head. No. Not now. Really, *really* not now.

Pete waited a few seconds to let the metal solidify, then grinned at them, fast and bright and utterly, utterly insane. A single step vanished him from view, leaving Lex to stare at the spot he'd been standing with a growing sense of horror.

This was a *plan*. This was Pete's plan. Lex Luthor, the guy who did this sort of thing, might have known what to do here, but Lex Luthor, businessman, did not.

But he did know this. He tucked the staff, taking the step that led nowhere, like he was sure there weren't, oh, *knives* waiting down there, which was as probable as anything else that had happened. A drop that took too long--long enough for Lex to imagine Clark curled into a ball by the wall in that damn room, tinged green and dead. Stranger, that his body rolled even when he didn't know how to do it, coming up in a crouch that made his thighs ache, but he was still, staring at Pete only feet away, manic grin still in place.

Lex wasn't just suspecting Pete Ross was crazy. He was pretty damn sure now.

"Maybe you're more than hype after all," Pete murmured as the next man fell through, barely missing a break in his ankle. The next two seemed to get the roll part, staring around dazedly before standing up, obviously surprised they'd gotten this far without dying. Lex knew the feeling. "Down two more levels."

Lex nodded, because there was nothing else to say to this. Pete held a *weapon*, and Lex had known since he'd been piled into the car that Pete would have no problem using it as the situation required. But Lex--Nixon aside, those Kryptonians aside, there was no way he was capable of shooting in cold blood.

He didn't want to know that there could be a time he *could*.

"We just keep cutting holes? You think they aren't going to notice on rounds?" Lex asked. Pete rolled his eyes, turning left to study a door.

"They don't do rounds. Like I said. They try to keep people *in*."

"And you don't think--just maybe--that holding your mom, they *might* be ready for an attempt to free her?"

Pete turned around completely, blinking, like Lex had just asked the dumbest question in history. "We don't do that."

We don't-- "You don't rescue?"

"Die before surrender. They don't get a lot of prisoners alive. Not any good. We--learned that."

Lex took that in. "You leave them to die?"

"Better than the alternative," Pete said, like it should be obvious. "They think they have something we want--they. Do things. To the prisoners. Until we do what they say. So we stopped doing anything at all. Safer. Quicker."

The logic was sound. The sentiment behind it was logical. Lex closed his eyes against the ball of lead filling his chest. It made this entire farce make a world of sense. Lex swallowed hard, bile sweet on the back of his tongue. "Right."

"An entire cell committed suicide to avoid being taken once." Pete turned back to the door. "We follow the rules of engagement, too. But this is special."

Of course it was. It was his mother. "Why didn't you just try to trade me?"

Pete entered a complex series into the panel beside the door. This was insane. Didn't these people even watch their computers? Security? They were fucking *alien overlords*. Did they really think--

"Won't work. I wasn't important enough to keep. Mom is."

The door opened, no hostile Kryptonians in sight. That was probably the most unnerving thing so far.

The halls were a lot like the halls above--Lex trusted Pete's judgment, though why he was deciding to make holes all over the ship was beyond him. In one area would be smarter, save time in getting out. Twisting through mammoth corridors--

They passed a wall that was nothing but what looked like glass. Lex stared at it for a long moment, taking in the interior. The vague feeling of a school room--desks on one side, neat, orderly lines and rows; what looked like rows of small keyboards along one wall. His mind inserted children, playing, all shaved heads and uniform clothes, sudden starts of fire and screaming, tall bodies surrounding them, herding them....

"It was attacked."

Pete was beside him, looking inside with a smirk.

"You'd know." What? "They decommissioned the station while they made repairs. Brought this down planetside." Pete gave him an amused look, like some kind of joke he was supposed to already know. Lex had a second to wonder, but then Pete was cutting another hole, slower this time, and Lex readied himself for whatever happened next.

The absence of pain was the worst. He'd been tricked like that once--when someone came in to clean around him, all the things that he couldn't admit he did, covering the foul smells with dusty lemon, roughly pushed aside with tiny snickers. Once when he relaxed, if only for a second. Once, when his entire body uncurled only as long as it took for him to take an easy breath, and it was back, and it was worse, and Clark never wanted to breathe again when it felt like that.

He winced away from the hand on his head, on his face, expecting the burning pain that didn't come, but he didn't believe it wouldn't. He *knew* it wouldn't. Curling up tighter, Clark tried to burrow into the wall, rock rough against his skin, grating between his teeth.

"Clark."

He wasn't strong enough to fight long--hands stretched him like taffy, every muscle screaming protest. Fighting always made it worse--tearing pain, like something ripping out his skin, kicking at the floor for leverage against every convulsion.

"Jesus Christ," came the voice, and he*knew* that voice, like all the others. Hours of hearing nothing but familiar voices, mom's, dad's, Chloe's, Lex's, even Pete's, but the words were meaningless noises. They said--things. About aliens, and conquest, and wars that never ended, and they said things about *him*. Kal. The murderer and the monster and the thing they should have destroyed. "*Clark*."

Something warm dripped on his face; the smell was thick and nauseating. Clark lifted shaking hands to push it away, and his fingers blurred red. Red. Thick. *Blood*. He was bleeding. He was--

"*Clark*." From somewhere else came more noise, more voices, and then there was sight, grey-red-black and a face he knew, that he *knew* he knew, even if he didn't know why. Grey eyes like stone and lips pulled white against clenched teeth. "It's me."

He was tricked before, when they took away the pain and brought it back; this was just another kind. A way to make him whimper because he couldn't scream anymore, even air hurt too much to breathe. He wanted to push away, but there wasn't any strength left in him for that, and Clark stopped moving, waiting for it to hurt again.

It didn't.

More wet drops on his face, a gentle touch on his cheek. "Clark, it's me."

Clark let his eyes open again. This time, he knew the face. "Lex?" Weeks ago, months ago, someone had sat by him and given him water, told him Lex would come back, with the kind of faith that Clark could only dream of.

"More or less." The bitter curl of his mouth was pained, and Clark had never wanted to touch him more. Drag him down and just feel him, the only real thing in this place, the only thing he'd wanted for so long that he didn't know that there could be anything else to want. Pain was forever and the person who gave him water vanished easily, but there was always Lex, who had to come back, who *would* come back, even Clark didn't know anymore why he was supposed to.

"Lex." Clark reached up to touch, but he couldn't get farther than his own face, slick and sticky, and the glare of red on Lex's sleeve. Blinking slowly, Clark began to register other things. Hard floor. A wall rough against his side. Lex's hands on him. No pain.

No pain at all.

"They said they took it out." Lex's fingers stroked his face, sticking, smearing, but Clark didn't care. "They said they'd do it when I called."

"They did." Another voice. The one that brought water and told him things, that left and didn't come back. "They did, I--they just. He just didn't move. I swear, I was here, they took it out."

"Fifteen hours, give or take," Lex said, and that made no sense, but Clark didn't really care. Lex was here. "Can you stand up?"

Clark nodded.

"No," the other voice said. "Not--I saw it before. I can help."

"You've seen this before." Lex's voice was so low that Clark barely heard him. "How fucking fantastic. This is what I was supposed to have fucking died for?" A shift took him from Clark's touch, and that was bad, Clark tried to shift after him, ending with a roll into the dust that hurt his chin. "He needs sunlight."

"We can't take him out, not with them--"

"I don't give a fuck if they're sitting *outside*. Get on his other side. Now."

"Lex--"

"Shh." Clark might have imagined the way fingers pressed against his cheeks. "Shh. It'll be okay."

Clark nodded blankly. It was okay. Lex was here, pulling him up with one hand, but something was wrong--the pallor of his skin, the sweat that stood out on his upper lip, the way he winced even as he pushed an arm under Clark's shoulders.

"...Lex?"

"You shouldn't do that." The other voice, coming up on his other side. "They said--"

"Fuck them. They should have taken him out." Lex's voice hissed against his ear. "Only a few minutes, Clark, I promise--"

"You might pass out, like you did before. Your arm--"

"Shut *up*." The trip to the door was slow, and Clark tried to push the fuzziness away. There was so much that wouldn't come together--this room, these voices, the damn *words* that melted into his head and tried to coalesce with something he knew he was supposed to already know.

They almost went down in a heap just outside the door. Clark thought there were other people, but he couldn't be sure, and they didn't move even when Lex struggled back to his feet. Just stood there, blobs of humanity that smelled of fear. Not of him, not this time.

"I'll--be okay." Clark bit his lip, trying to find the words. "I just--need to lie down."

"He'll be okay," the other voice said, sounding desperate. "Your room's right here. He'll be fine, I swear. I *saw* this--"

"When you were a toddler?"

"When Mr. Ross brought one here and let him go." The voice rose. "Please, if he's not better in a little while, we'll take him up, I promise, I'll go with him, just please sit down. Please."

Clark nodded desperately. Lex was shaking under his arm and that--that was just wrong, even if he couldn't say why. Lex was so strong. "Yeah. Let's do that." Not to mention, Clark didn't think his legs were going to hold out. They'd all go down in a mess, and the body on his right wasn't doing any better than Lex.

"You need sunlight."

Clark shook his head, though he knew Lex wasn't looking at him. "I need to lay down. Please, Lex?"

Clark didn't know what convinced him--maybe the plea, or maybe Lex was reaching the end of whatever strength was driving him, because their angle changed, going toward the door of their--cave?

Clark's mind slipped memory into the gap. *Your room* it said, condescendingly, like Dad on a lecture high. *Where you sleep. With Lex. In this place.*.

In this place.

They were maneuvered in by sheer will, and Clark collapsed on his cot, wondering if he'd ever been so happy to see it. Cave, Lex, mission, right. It was sliding into place, slowly. Lex sat at the foot, panting, and the other person was James. James, who knelt on the floor at Lex's feet, staring up at him like a holy image, white to the lips. Lex's right arm was crossed across his stomach, head down; even now, with vision acting so weird, Clark could see how deep his breaths were, the shudder of every muscle. "Lex? Is--are you okay?"

"Fine." The word comes out like broken glass between teeth, jagged and raw. "Just--need to catch my breath."

The mission. The-- "Did you get her out?" Clark shifted onto his knees, wincing at the headache that punctuated every stray movement.

If it was possible, Lex went even paler. "No."

But he was alive, and that was all that mattered. Clark shifted the length of the cot, eyes finding the bloody sleeve, fixing for a second. Something was wrong, and his mind couldn't quite work out the what.

"You need to lay down," James said urgently. "They said when you got up that you would be ill, that you needed rest. You need to lie down."

Lex looked like he needed more than rest. He needed a transfusion; all the blood in his body seemed to be gone, leaving this yellow-white, frighteningly still presence that leaned precariously toward Clark a little more with every breath. Clark shifted close enough to circle him with an arm, sucking in a breath at the trembling. "You were hurt."

"Yeah." Lex closed his eyes, letting Clark take his weight. Not quite unconsciousness, but so close. Clark gently eased him down, staring at that sleeve. It tickled the edges of his mind--there was something he should see. Something that wasn't there. Something that--

"Lex." Breath caught in his throat, Clark reached out, knew by the flinch he was right. "Oh God, Lex, your--your hand."

Lex's mouth shaped a parody of a smile. "Those green beams? Fucking *sharp*."

That's the last thing Lex said before he closed his eyes.

People came and went, just outside the door, never quite venturing to open it. Clark was glad of that, still half beneath Lex's limp body, unwilling to move, but he still had laser vision and thought that might be enough.

For what, he didn't know, and honestly didn't care. If they came in, they'd find out.

But they didn't, and Lex slept on, closer to unconsciousness than true sleep, sweat standing on his skin. They'd given him sedatives, James had told him in a quiet whisper, and they'd wanted to give him more, but he'd said he had to get up, had to get Clark, didn't believe what they'd told him about the rock being gone, Clark being safe. He'd wanted to *see*. He had grudged them the time it took to sling his arm.

Clark hadn't seen it before, hadn't registered it as there. Just a thick piece of cloth, roughly pinned to a strap, hold the arm and--nothing else. X-ray had shown what Clark hadn't wanted to look for. Lex had lost his hand to the wrist.

James had said, "It was an accident. Pete was trying to get them out and one grabbed Lex. He did the only thing he could."

Lex whimpered, a sound Clark had never heard, never wanted to again.

James had said, "It was fast. They cauterized it in the field and got him back fast. They--it'll be okay. He'll be okay. He didn't lose too much blood, they said."

Just too pale, too still, and Clark laid back gingerly on the pillow, wishing the angle was right, that he could pull Lex closer, block him from the door, from the world, with his own body. His own perfectly fine, perfectly invulnerable body. The body that could have protected Lex and kept him safe, not left like this, not--not--

"God, Lex," Clark whispered against the dingy cotton. He didn't dare move more than this--his body kept Lex unmoving, no way to shift and hurt his arm, on his back, so still it took effort to see him breathe. But God, he wanted to touch him. Smooth away the lines on his forehead, around his eyes, touch the lips thinned with pain, like even in sleep, Lex could feel it.

They cauterized it on the field. Clark couldn't imagine what that must have felt like. Couldn't imagine--couldn't even comprehend--

"They used a staff," James had said. "It--the heat--was enough. To get him back here. He would have bled to death if they hadn't."

Clark shuddered, staring at Lex's tense face.

"He'll be okay," James had said, and then he left, closing the door carefully behind him, as loathe to disturb Lex's uneasy rest as Clark. If anything like this could be called rest, with Lex's head shifting against the wall, muscles bunching every so often, like even sleep brought no relief.

The next shift went wrong--Lex's arm hit Clark's knee, and Clark watched the blue eyes flicker open. No second of confusion, no relief of even a moment--just knowing, blinking quickly, the look of pain on his face going way beyond physical. His head turned, fixing on Clark, and Clark watched as he shoved his arm closer to his body, like he was trying to hide it.

"Don't." Sitting up, Clark shifted over to the edge of the bed, pulling his legs from under Lex. Carefully--had to be careful, had to get this right, everything had to be right or Lex would pull so far away Clark would never find him again--he coaxed Lex up the bed, watching the wary, awkward settle into the bed, on the pillow. Lex wouldn't meet his eyes. "Lex. How--do you want something?" James said they gave him sedatives. Painkillers? Something, God, anything. Clark watched Lex's face clench. "Do you need--I can ask if they have something--"

"It doesn't hurt." It was a lie, not even a good one, but Clark didn't move, didn't dare. He had no idea how Lex would take it if he did. "I'm okay. It--they stopped the bleeding fast."

With that green staff that took the hand in the first place. Clark bit into his inner cheek to keep from asking any questions. If Lex wanted to tell, he would. Asking wouldn't get him anything but short answers. Slowly, Clark laid back down, curling on his side. There wasn't much space between them, leaving Clark half-off the bed, but it would take a shitload more kryptonite than had ever existed anywhere to move him away. He could feel Lex trying to draw back, melt into the stone, and that wouldn't do at all. "Lex. I'm so sorry."

Stupid, inadequate words that made Lex flinch, eyes fixing on the wall behind Clark, the ceiling, anywhere but at him. Lex flinched again when Clark reached out, but he ignored it, touching the silky skin of Lex's jaw with a careful hand. He needed the contact. He thought Lex might, too, even with his personal space issues. And he'd never rejected Clark's touch.

Never.

"Lex."

"I'm *fine*. I'm just maimed." The bitterness was sharp, and Lex would have pulled away if the wall hadn't stopped him. "I lost a hand, not my life."

Clark shifted closer, telling himself that he'd fall off the bed if he didn't. It was a lie. He needed--God, did he need to feel Lex there. In that room, with that rock, it was the only thing that kept making sense; after the words had stopped, the concept stayed, unmovable, irrefutable. Lex would come back. Lex *did* come back. He was here, and he was alive, and he'd lost his hand to Pete's insanity and they had failed, but Lex was *alive*, and that was all that really mattered.

Clark struggled for something to say--something to bring Lex back to him, bring him back in the room, get that horrible, distant look off his face. "Uh--I. I guess it's a good thing that you're left handed."

Oh God. Clark blinked at his own words. God. He hadn't--he didn't--and Lex was looking at him now, all right, staring at him like he'd grown antenna and was living up to the word 'alien' in every clichéd, X-Filey meaning of the word.

"Yes, there is that." Lex's voice broke, but the distance was gone. And Lex was looking straight at him, seeing him, right arm tucked defensively against his body, but his left reached out, and Clark took it, raising it to his face, shutting his eyes when the cool fingers shaped themselves to his jaw. "You're--okay?"

Clark's grin wobbled, but he didn't mind. "Right as rain." He sounded so much like his dad that he laughed, just so--Lex was alive, against bad odds and he was on this bed, here, and Clark just wanted to kiss that small smile.

It was probably the worst time he could have admitted that to himself, and right this second, he didn't care.

"You're going to be fine," Clark told him, moving closer, keeping hold of Lex's hand in case he had some idea of pulling away. "I'm fine. *We're* fine. We're going to figure out a way to get back home. Both of us." And he believed it. When Lex looked like that, when he needed so much--God, Clark could feel the need like heat off of him, no idea what it was Lex needed, but he'd give him anything right now, anything at all, to keep that small smile.

Their clothes brushed. Clark had never been so aware of another person as he was of Lex at this moment, in all the wrong ways, or the right ones, if he was honest. Best friend, still true, more true now than ever. The need to protect--it had always been there, always, he knew that, felt it the first time he touched him on the bank of that muddy excuse for a river. This--this was new. Not entirely new, not since Lucas came to town and whirled out again, not since the first time he realized he was watching Lex move just because he liked it, but this time, he could *feel* it. Lex, here and close, smelling of antiseptics and sweat and blood, but still Lex. Lex, who needed comfort and didn't know how to ask for it, even really know that was what he wanted at all. Clark let Lex's hand slip from his face but didn't let it go. He wasn't sure there was anything that could make him.

Protect. "You should sleep." He kept his smile on his face when he said it. "I--kinda think we both do. I've never felt this tired."

Instantly, Lex was trying to get up on one elbow, looking him over. "That shit--did it do something to you?" Forgetting, if only for a second, what he'd lost, all that focus on Clark and Clark alone. He'd missed it when he hadn't had it, and Clark basked in it, wondering if Lex could see it in his face.

"No, really, I'm just tired. It was--" Forever. He bit down on the words, watching Lex's face. "Just stay here, okay? I--" Saying Lex was weakened from everything would be so incredibly stupid even Clark knew better than to try it. "I'll feel better if I know you're okay." And that was totally true.

Lex slowly relaxed back into the cot, sharp eyes still running over Clark as if he was looking for visible wounds. Kryptonite didn't do that. All the scars were in Clark's mind and would stay there. "You're sure?"

"Very. Come on, get some rest. I need it, and you probably do too." Lex was trembling, though he tried to hide it. "Let me--let me ask for something for you?"

"They don't have anything."

Clark felt his teeth grind together. This *place*--a place where humans hid in caves and couldn't ease pain. "When they--" His voice froze in his throat. "On the field. They--" It sank like a stone into his stomach.

"I was conscious."

Clark moved, almost crushing Lex into the wall. He couldn't help it; touching Lex with both hands, feeling him, strong muscle and shaking body, damp skin. Shock, Clark thought, dragging out memories of biology and ER at nine every Thursday night. Blood loss. Pain like Clark couldn't imagine. And Lex was conscious. "Lex."

Lex's hand touches his face again, right arm clutched to his stomach still. Lex couldn't hold him with his left, but Clark could hold him. Space issues be damned. Clark held him, letting his forehead rest against Lex's. "Tell me. Tell me what happened."

Lex didn't remember anything from the second that two of Pete's little squadron dragged him out of the building and slumping into the Buick with someone wrapping a piece of rope around the stump where his hand used to be.

"You'll be okay," Pete said from the driver's seat, bloody and ashen, driving like the entirety of the Kryptonian forces were after them. They weren't, and Lex wanted to ask about that, wonder, but he could barely think through the pain.

"He's losing blood fast." One of the idiots that came along for this hell. Lex tried to draw breath, but his voice was shot to hell and he couldn't get enough air to do anything, even scream. Bleeding to death. His hand was gone, but he thought he could feel it, which made sense, phantom pain, but--God, his hand was gone.

His *hand*.

They pulled him out of the car, stopping at the side of the road, and someone had his head in their lap, and someone was holding his arms down, and there was Pete and his fucking staff, the one that had sliced through flesh and bone, so fast Lex hadn't registered the pain until they were almost topside again. None of this made sense--not this mission, not this run without a pursuer in sight, and certainly not this--not these people holding him down and Pete aiming the staff at--

"No," he heard himself whisper, and soothing noises came from somewhere above him, pushing something between his teeth that tasted like wood. He tried to spit it out, turning his head, and he wished he hadn't when he saw that beam hit the ground and those bastards move his arm into it.

Nothing could match it. It was being maimed all over again, and third degree burn heat, charring skin and bone, turning the bloody cloth wrapped around the stump to ash. A normal human would have passed out, their own bodies shutting them down from this much input, but Lex's didn't, clinging stubbornly to consciousness as it went on and on, nerves screaming up his arm and down his body--everything hurt. Like he was being bathed in fire that would never end, even when the beam did, when they rewrapped the stump in the remains of someone's shirt and it formed around the wound. No blood. Cauterized.

The three hours back to the caves were three years that never ended. Not when they carried him downstairs and stretched him out on a makeshift operating table that they'd used for strategy less than a day before, the straps that went over him that he instinctively fought, cinched tight, and the smell of chloroform filling the air from the cloth they held to his nose.

*Chloroform*. It hit him all anew that second--this wasn't his world. They didn't have anesthesiologists and surgeons and bright, clean, metal-filled operating theatres. They had this dusty cave and chloroform and simple scalpels and needles that didn't look like surgical needles at all.

Lex saw Helen standing in that far-away room, looking at him from under blood-splattered hair, tired eyes, the cuts on her hands. They were out of anesthesia again, he thought, blankly. They weren't just out anymore. They didn't have it at all.

"Get Clark out," Lex heard himself say, hoped they heard him, and they said that they had, he was fine, that he'd called earlier and they'd took him out. Lex didn't remember that, but he didn't remember anything right now that wasn't this pain. Chloroform didn't do shit. It made him high, made him sick, but it didn't stop it. Blurry eyes focused as they went down on his arm, and Lex watched bloody, blackened skin fall away with every silvery cut.

He couldn't stop watching, and he couldn't stop feeling. And his throat reminded him that he couldn't make himself stop screaming.

Clark, he thought, watching the flash of the needle, the scalpel, the shapes of people around him, holding his straining body down. God, let him be okay, and it's worth it. It'll be worth it.

Clark left Lex just long enough to find James, conveniently sitting outside their door. "You said sedatives. No painkillers?"

James slowly shook his head, mouth tight. "We don't have much call for them. But we have sleep stuff, if that'll help him."

"Where can we get painkillers?"

James stared at him, eyes wide, chewing slowly on his bottom lip as he thought. "I dunno. The other groups--they are long gone, and no one knows where they are but the leaders."

The leader they had was currently still incarcerated. Clark tried to think. He knew shit about medication. Ibuprofen, aspirin, but they didn't have anything but *chloroform*? Not even any damned morphine?

Metropolis, they might have it, but Clark wouldn't know where to look, even if he could afford the risk. If he was caught, Lex would be alone, and look what happened if Clark wasn't there to watch out for him. Hell if he was leaving Lex in their keeping, even for a second.

A figure coming out of one of the other caves caught his eye. Pete. Pete, who caused this, did this, cut Lex's hand off in some asinine attempt at a rescue, burned it after in green fire. Clark didn't think--he moved. Faster than he'd ever let a human but his family and Lex see before, and Pete was against the wall, staring down at him with bulging eyes, feet kicking helplessly at raw stone.

"I could kill you before you could take another breath," Clark gritted out between clenched teeth. Pete's eyes bugged out, lips working soundlessly. "He needs painkillers. Get them."

He held Pete up a little longer, some part of him amazed how easy it was to separate this Pete and his Pete. So easy. All it had taken was a glance at Lex's sweaty body, pale face, right arm. Leaning close, Clark stared into the huge eyes. "You can lock me in that room with kryptonite again, you can fucking *feed* it to me, but it won't stop me from doing to you what you did to him. I swear, I'll make you *hurt* before I'm done. Find him something. I don't care how you do it, just fucking *do* it."

Stepping back, Clark stared down at Pete. That room made his skin crawl, and the dangerous look in Pete's eyes reminded him of every second there, and who the hell would *stop* him? Clark shoved it all away, focusing everything in him on staring Pete down, making him believe that Clark could do that.

Clark *could*. He would. Never in his life had he ever been so sure of anything, not even that rush of hate that made him want to hurt Phelan, but the ethics that brought him back down then didn't exist now. Nothing could match Lex shaking in his arms, cradling his maimed arm, almost *dying* for--

"You wouldn't--"

Clark thought of everything his parents ever told him, about his powers, about the person he was supposed to be, and then let it go. It was surprisingly easy. "Try me."

Turning away, Clark saw James's open mouth in peripheral vision, but he couldn't bother to stop, going back in and shutting the door behind him, going back to Lex, half-conscious and whispering. Shock, his mind said. Blood loss. Infection, fever, and his own enhanced healing might be enough to keep him alive, but it wouldn't help the pain.

Curling up beside him, Clark stared into his face and hoped Pete understood, really *understood*, that Clark would do it. Kal wasn't so far away right now, close enough beneath his skin to touch, to use, like a weapon with a single target.

Pete would do it, Clark thought, touching Lex's sweaty forehead with shaking fingers. He had to, because Lex was riding on this, and Clark was, too. He could be Clark Kent with just threats, but he wasn't sure who he would be if Pete refused, if he failed. He just knew that what Clark Kent wouldn't, couldn't do, in another time and another place, he *could*.

It took ten hours.

Clark didn't leave him, not when James came in to quietly ask him if he needed anything, not when Lex struck out with one arm, damp stump grazing Clark's cheek. It took everything in him not to throw up, just knowing it was there, knowing how Lex had been hurt with nothing to help him. With people who wanted nothing but for him to be whatever the hell they thought he should be, and Lex would kill himself trying to live up to it.

*Was* trying, murmuring into the wet pillow. Clark heard Helen's name, soft and gentle, in a voice Clark had never heard before. Helen. Helen was a doctor, could do for Lex what Clark couldn't, didn't know how to do. She'd know how much water to give him, how to make him drink it, know instinctively to replace the compresses when they got too dry, know how to make everything easier, better. But there wasn't Helen, love of Lex's life and the one who could help him, make him better, stop the fever, ease his pain, touch him to make him smile. Just Clark, who didn't know a fucking thing.

He could wipe his forehead, though, and say things--anything that came to mind. Words stringing themselves together and coming out, and Clark had no idea what he said, a pail of brackish, flat water beside the cot, the cloth that James had found clutched in his hand. Rudimentary knowledge of what to do. Keep him cool. Try to make him comfortable. Breathe, because Lex didn't have Helen, just him.

White skin pinked, reddening with fever. Glazed eyes opened on the ceiling, talking to his father, Helen, telling Gabe about something that sounded financial and incomprehensible, to people whose names Clark didn't recognize. Once, to Desiree, voice husky and low, sending velvet warmth up Clark's spine, and so damned wrong to feel like that right now.

Ten *hours*, and nothing like that kryptonite room. Lex wouldn't die, *couldn't* die, his meteor-rock health would keep him alive and here, Clark was sure of it because he had to be.

James was the only one who would come in--probably the only one Clark would accept. Tiny, old fashioned glass bottles filled with some substance that Clark had never seen before. Needles. Not pills, not that Clark knew how he'd make Lex swallow. He was supposed to do this with injections.

"This is--" James scrunched his face up. "Morphine. You're only supposed to use this much," James touched the needle at 10 mg, "at a time. This one is antibiotics. For the fever."

Clark took them both, noting the labels before glancing around the room. "Get me that table over there?"

James did it while Clark stared at the old fashioned needles. People hadn't used this kind of stuff since before he arrived on the planet. Not like anything he'd ever seen a doctor use. Glass and sharp, hollow metal points. No IV, not here. Just him, trying to figure out how to do this and not overdose him. Kill him by accident when an amputation couldn't. Too ironic for words. Clark pulled up silly memories of television and his hands shook.

"You've done this before?" James' eyes widened on the needle.

Clark wondered if dosing the cows counted, then almost laughed. "Not like this, no." He didn't know what he was doing. He could kill Lex. "I don't--" Turning to look at Lex, Clark sucked in a breath. Hollowed cheeks and bright, wide-open eyes. Antibiotics to make him well, morphine to stop his hurt.

James, standing beside the bed, seemed to understand. "I've done it before." Clark didn't think to wonder--why and how were both obvious. "If you can hold him still."

Clark shifted onto the bed, carefully removing the sling, stretching Lex's right arm out, hands braced on Lex's upper arm, trusting the weight of his body to do the rest of the work for him. Lex muttered, trying to push him off, and Clark shut his eyes when the kid tied a piece of rubber around Lex's upper arm and didn't look again until James said he was done.

"Unresponsive to stimuli."

Kal never stops talking, bright chatter that clears the cobwebs from Lex's mind, and he thinks, a little drowsily, that he might be glad he came here, too.

Clark woke up when Lex stopped struggling.

Lex was awake--the absolute dark of the cave is broken by the lamp James had gotten from somewhere, God alone knows how he got batteries. Clark watched Lex studying the ceiling with a frown. Carefully, Clark shifted, not sure if Lex was really aware of his presence. Turning, he pressed his wrist to Lex's forehead--almost two days had taught him the feel of fever. But he's cool.

"Clark." Lex blinked slowly, turning his head just enough to see Clark. "Kal."

Clark stiffened, watching the blue eyes grow distant, then realized what he meant. "You were dreaming."

For a second, Clark thought Lex was going to deny it. But he didn't. "How long?"

"Two days." The antibiotics ran out last night. The morphine had enough for one dose more, but Clark had cut him off early the evening before. He didn't know enough about dependence to know if just to keep giving it to him was a good idea, and he had slept almost normally all night.

Lex nodded, reaching with his left hand to touch the stump, shivering. Clark wasn't sure what to do, only knowing he had to be careful. "You'll be okay."

"Infection?"

Clark nodded slowly, really not sure enough of anything to make definitive statements. Lex had been sick, then he stopped being sick. Drugs or enhanced healing, Clark honestly didn't care. Lex made it through. Everything else was details.

"What did you--" Lex began to sit up. Clark bit his lip against the urge to tell him to be careful, watching Lex take a long look at his left arm. The sleeve was still pulled back. Even Lex's superhealing hadn't quite finished clearing the track marks. "Do I want to know?"

"James helped," Clark said, sitting up, ready to catch Lex if he lost his balance, but Lex shifted so his back was against the wall. "I--"

Lex gave him a sharp look. "Where--and how--did you get anything?"

Clark shrugged. "I asked."

From the look on Lex's face, he would have to do better than that. Sliding off the bed, Clark tried to remember where James had said he'd be if Lex needed anything. "I'll go get you something to eat--"

"Not now. Come back here." The narrow look in Lex's eyes was convincing, but moreso was the fact that Lex might be recovered, but he wasn't at full strength or even close. Sitting gingerly on the edge of the cot, Clark waited as Lex studied him.

"I was dreaming again." Lex paused, eyelashes flickering down. "I recognized the ship."

Clark frowned. "What ship?"

"Grounded planetside. That's where they're keeping Mrs. Ross." Lex shifted uncomfortably, and Clark wished he'd just lie the hell down. "There was an explosion."

Clark nodded.

"I think I was the one that caused it."

Lex stared down at his clenched hand. "I--was on that ship. I remembered it. There was this room--like a playroom--"

"With an observation wall," Clark answered slowly, meeting Lex's startled eyes. "I watched you through it."

For a second, Lex didn't say anything. "This doesn't make sense. That's not--even--" He groped for words, the scientist in him struggling with the very concept. Interdimensional portals were fine, but apparently, dream-memories weren't. Lex was funny like that. "How can I--"

"I saw you with the rebellion, too," Clark said slowly. "I--it was like *being* him for a moment. Being Kal. Living it."

Lex closed his eyes. "Do you think it's real?"

"If you remember that ship, yeah." How Clark felt in Kal's skin, yes. It was real. It was them--the them of here touching the them of now. And way too weird for Clark to even want to think about.

Lex nodded, and Clark didn't push, content to let Lex absorb the implications for a few long seconds.

"Pete said something." Lex's voice was low and even. Processing. Not really here at all. "About me coming from Metropolis. Now I know what he meant. I was raised there. By them." The blue eyes opened, fixing on Clark. "By your parents. Lara and Jor--"

"El," Clark said, feeling dizzy. Stretching out beside Lex, Clark took a deep breath. "So now we know."

"The great rebel leader was great because he knew them, inside and out." Lex's mouth quirked in a smirk. "God, what I wouldn't give--" He stopped short, smile fading. "Clark--"

"You need rest." Clark dared a little, smoothing his head over the sharp lines in Lex's forehead. "Just sleep right now. In a few hours, we can talk again, but you've been sick. I'll get you something to eat. It was--kind of hard to feed you, you know."

Lex nodded, but Clark noticed how the thin fingers clutched his hand before Lex made a concerted effort to let go. "Some water would be good."

Clark grinned. "Anything you want."

Clark woke up to voices.

Pete's voice was the loudest, and the closest, just outside the door. Clark shot a look at Lex's cot, only feet away, unsurprised to find it empty. Pushing the blanket back, Clark sat up, running his fingers through his hair, wincing at the feel of the dust thickening the strands, wondering if he'd ever be able to get the feeling off his skin.

"...three hours ago. We don't know why."

"I think you do." Lex's voice was harsh and he sounded winded. Lex hadn't really gotten his strength back yet in the last two days since the fever broke, and James had been great at running interference with the others. Not that they did much interfering--Pete had shaken them, Clark thought. Lex's injury had shaken them, reminding them all anew they were civilians in this war, no matter what they thought. They didn't know shit about how a raid worked. They didn't know shit about how the rebellion worked, either.

Standing up, Clark tuned his hearing, approaching the door. Beneath the anger, Clark could hear Lex's exhaustion breaking through, too-hard breathing and the strain underneath. Without morphine, they didn't have anything to ease the pain in his arm. Clark had thought longingly of his mother's medicine cabinet in the last two days; aspirin, ibuprofen, acetaminophen. Common things that weren't so common here.

"Lex--"

"If they didn't follow us, they sure as hell had a good idea where we'd go to ground. Before now, they didn't have a real *reason* to look here, did they? That was the entire fucking *point*." The thickened breathing brought Clark to the door, reaching out to drag it open, but he stopped himself with his hand on the door. Lex wouldn't be happy with Clark hovering, and as yet, Clark wasn't sure there was a good reason to hover.

"They knew--"

"They didn't know *shit*. Your mother spent years making sure the Kryptonians didn't have any interest in this area, and in one fell swoop, you show them that, yes, there *is* something interesting here, there *are* humans here, enough of them to make problems." Lex sounded like he was talking through his teeth. "Not just a few wandering people, but a fucking *group*, organized enough to attack one of their facilities where they were holding one of you. Think about it, Pete. You think they're going to stop until they find something?"

"They can't spend much time in the badlands," Pete answered hotly. "Even with their suits, it--gets in. Their ships don't function well. They never did it before because--"

"They never had a good enough fucking *reason*. Why the hell should they care a few humans were stupid enough to want to live here? They were no threat. Your mother made sure of that. Now it's fucking gone to hell, because they have her and now they know there's something here. And if they don't know how to get information out of a prisoner--"

"She'd die before that."

"Do you think they'll give her the fucking chance to try?"

Silence.

"It's been ten years since this cell was active, you said it yourself. Ten years, and they weren't interested because you weren't much of a threat. But do you seriously think that they're going to think that *now*?"

"How the fuck would *you* know? You never came to the badlands before now."

Clark blinked a glance through the door. Lex was leaning into the wall, all casual defiance, but Clark could see the effort it was taking him to stay on his feet, arm cradled protectively to his chest.

"This is fucking *elementary school* logic. They let us get away, Pete. They know something's here, and they know someone's guarding it, and they're sure as fuck going to find out, one way or another."

"We have defenses." Pete's voice rose on an uncertain note. Clark shuts his eyes against the utter fear on Pete's face. "We can--"

"We are *fucked*." Clark opened his eyes in time to see Lex pushing off the wall, taking a step forward that didn't look nearly as shaky as it should have. Maybe he was the only one who could see the erratic pulse in Lex's throat, the way his hand shook. "Jesus, are you paying attention? They haven't before this because it wasn't worth the effort. We *made* it worth the effort." Lex's fingers clenched for a second, every muscle tightening as a wave of almost visible pain slashed across his face. "Does anyone here know how to contact any of the other cells?"

Pete nodded slowly. "Yeah."

"Then get these people out."

"We can't leave the caves!" Pete took a step forward, freezing at the look on Lex's face. Lionel had gotten that look once upon a time, too.

"This isn't negotiable." Lex's voice dropped, all casual menace, and Clark shivered a little at that glimpse into the other side of Lex, the one he almost never saw. "This is what is going to happen. You will pack up and get the hell out."

"The caves--"

"We'll seal them off. Now go get started on how the fuck ever you contact other cells. We don't have a shitload of time. Go."

Clark waited until Pete left before pushing open the door. Lex was standing, as relaxed and calm as he always was when he was giving orders, but Clark could see the sweat standing out on his face, the tension of every muscle.

"Lex." Clark reached out a careful hand, touching a wire-tight shoulder, feeling the tension jump almost instantly. Circling around, Clark looked into eyes that didn't seem to see him at all. "Lex. Come sit down. You--"

"I'm fucking *fine*." Lex didn't push him away, which told Clark everything he needed to know about the state Lex's body was in. Will might be enough to keep him upright, but not for much longer. "There's no fucking way we're getting out of here. Not after that attack."

"Okay." Clark didn't plan to argue when Lex was inches from falling flat on his face. "Then come on and tell me what you plan on doing about it."

"Dying, it looks like." Lex shook his head sharply--fatalistic he was not, no matter how much he might want to be. Lex Luthor would fight well after hope was a luxury. "Shit. I need--"

"To sit down." And apparently, plan an escape. Clark waited, letting Lex come to the conclusion that, yes, standing here for no reason wasn't winning points anywhere. Stiffly, he turned, walking back into their room with none of his usual grace, just barely escaping collapse when he reached his cot. Gingerly, Clark sat down on his own, watching Lex's face. "What--are you sure--"

"No. But from what Mrs. Ross told me--they've never been that interested."

"They were here when we arrived."

Lex made an aborted gesture with his left hand, freezing when he realized it left his right arm exposed. "That was--I don't know. They know humans are here. They just don't really give a shit. This is where they *exile* people who piss them off." Lex shook his head, amused. "They--this is just crap to them. Ruined land. Who the fuck cared if a few idiot humans wanted to wander through it?"

"That raid that took Mrs. Ross--"

"Yeah, they got the idea that something was going on here. Pete said she was well-known enough to be recognized and kept. And there's no fucking good reason for a rebel leader to be here unless something was up."

Clark nodded slowly. "And you and Pete--"

"That she was important enough to break their own rules for. And that there were enough people here, enough organized people, to cause problems. Or that there was something here. God knows what they think it is," Lex rubbed his head absently with the back of his hand, eyes closing. He hurt, Clark could see it, and there was nothing he could do to help. "Maybe they think the rebellion is reforming, or hell, maybe they just think that we've been out here too long and want to get rid of us. Either way, they're showing a hell of a lot more interest than they have in the last ten years."

Lex and Mrs. Ross had talked a lot, Clark knew, but he hadn't really known how *much*. "How do you know they're--active?"

Lex jerked his chin to the door. "Their mainframes may suck, but they have some basic surveillance technology. There's activity all over the badlands that hasn't been there before."

"But they didn't follow you back here."

Lex grinned sharply. "They didn't have time to get suited up to do it. Unlike the rebels, their technology doesn't like meteor infested ground. We got out because of pure fucking good luck. Pete's little band of merry men covered our tracks, but they aren't stupid. There really aren't that fucking many places to hide. One good look at a geo survey of this area would show the underground caves, and they have reason to look now. I'm just fucking shocked it never occurred to them before."

Before, they never had reason. Clark thought of the symbols in the cave, wondering what use they could have been to Mrs. Ross, what she thought they could do. Without the key from the ship that had brought Clark here in the first place, they were useless. Even with it, they were only good for one Clark Kent, to become indoctrinated in the ways of his people.

They didn't mean anything to humans, except proof aliens existed. They didn't mean anything to Clark Kent, except a way for him to discover his fucked-up genetic heritage. And not even that, without the key.

Clark realized Lex was watching him, that look that had once meant Clark had slipped and Lex was re-evaluating, putting pieces together of the mystery of Clark Kent that would never fit together quite right, not without knowing what he was. It wasn't comfortable, had never been easy, but Clark could stand it now.

"Clark?"

Clark shrugged slowly, feeling the tension ease out of him. "The caves--they can't use them. I've been trying to think what they could use them for--but they were just. A kind of, I don't know, a big recorder. They told me who I was, what I was, but--I mean, nothing that would help anyone. I don't even know how it's useful, and I used it."

Lex's eyes widened slowly. "So that's what they were. I wondered, after Dr.--" Lex cut himself off, but Clark fixed his eyes on the blanket. Yes, that moment of monumental stupidity in forgetting the key couldn't be matched. "It cant' help them?"

"A crash course in Kryptonian, if they don't go crazy from--whatever it does." Clark shrugged uncomfortably. "It didn't tell me anything that--that would help here." Clark shook his head tiredly. "It's--an artifact. It's as useless to the Kryptonians as it is to humans."

Lex nodded, eyes distant, like he was looking at something Clark couldn't see. "All those people died to protect it. And it was just a giant history book."

Clark winced at the reminder, staring down at the hands folded in his lap.

"We need to get them out."

Clark's head jerked up. "We--"

"They're going to find us. I--" Lex frowned, shaking his head. "I know it."

"Or they might lose interest--"

"Despite what Pete thinks, we really aren't as hidden as we think we are. And when Mrs. Ross starts talking--"

"You think she will?"

Lex grinned bitterly. "I don't think they're going to give her much of a choice, do you? They wouldn't have to resort to torture--certainly a civilization advanced enough for space flight has got an arsenal other methods at their disposal." The grin faded, leaving Lex looking--tired. Tired in a way that had nothing to do with injury. Like he'd looked so often at home, and Clark recognized it, knew the look from his own face. Living up to someone else's expectations was always hard. Living up to expectations that included miracle working couldn't be easier. And living up to what they seemed to think Lex Luthor was--

"Lex--" Clark swallowed around a dry throat, feeling the words shape in his head. He wasn't sure he could say it, but he was almost sure he could do it. "I can--I can get us both out."

Lex's head snapped up. "Clark."

He could do it. He could pick Lex up and burrow through the back of this cave, get them both out. He'd been in the badlands already, he knew what they were like. He could get Lex somewhere else--both of them somewhere else. No fucking idea where, but somewhere. He could-- "I can--"

"No."

He hadn't expected any other answer, and he thought, maybe, that he could ignore that. That this once, the greater good could take a long walk somewhere else, and he could get Lex out of here, before he killed himself trying to be something he wasn't, couldn't ever be.

"There's no way I can move everyone without being seen." Not over thirty people--Clark knew his limits, and he knew that the badlands might be okay for short exposure, but that amount of time would probably sap him too much. "But I can--"

"I can get them out."

"You're kidding me."

But no, this was Lex Luthor, who actually believed his own press, always had, that when someone told him something and believed it enough, he'd believe it too. They told him he could do this, and they told him he was supposed to, and here he was, making a calm argument for unassisted group suicide.

"I--" Lex broke off, taking a deep breath. Still too tired. Clark could do it when he slept. So easy, just pick him up, and by the time he figured out what Clark was doing, it would be far too late to do anything at all. "I think I know how. If you help me, they can all be free." The smile returned. Lex was always happiest when he had a plan. Even an insane one. "Assuming Pete was right and he can contact another cell so I have somewhere to send everyone."

This was Lex, all over. Insanely complex plans were his *thing*, like the fondness for brandy and inappropriate poetry quotes and purple shirts. Of course he thought he could do it. Everyone in this place thought he could do it, *believed* it because they believed in whatever Lex Luthor was here, and Lex was starting to believe it, too.

"You don't know anything about--Lex. You're a *businessman*. You--" Clark ran out of words.

"I'm also a chemist," Lex answered contentedly, relaxing against the wall. Something had flipped over in his head, like maybe his sanity. "I went to school for more than a varied sex life, Clark."

"And they taught guerilla warfare 101 when you weren't sleeping in class?" Lex couldn't be serious.

"No, I learned that from my father. This is just another kind of maneuver. More direct." He actually seemed to believe he could do it. Clark could read it on his face. A *plan*. All this time talking about how fucking impossible it was, and Lex was just sitting there, like he had any fucking clue.

"I'm not watching you get yourself killed."

Lex brushed that aside with a wave of his chin. "No, you're not." The smile came back, all Lex--unshakably sure of his power to do anything he damn well pleased, unbelievably confident that he could do anything and be anything anyone needed him to be. Savior of a plant, financer of a boy's little dreams, and apparently, rebel leader of a lost cause.

It wasn't even out of character. It was just insane.

"You can't possibly think you can pull this off, Lex." Clark heard himself say, and he even knew how stupid it was, how utterly pointless. This was *Lex*. Change the course of rivers, and maybe he could even move mountains, but Clark didn't know a power in the world that could stop Lex when he got like this. He wasn't sure there was one.

Lex looked back, no smile, nothing but cool determination and belief that, somehow, despite the laws of god and man, he could pull this off. Clark wondered if he actually could.

"There isn't anyone else who can."

Lex wandered out to look at the mainframes. Lex knew the entire cave complex a hundred times better than Clark, who hadn't stepped outside their cave, the room where the computers were, and the path to the surface. But the caves he *knew*, body memory from exploration, and even down here, disorientation of direction wasn't enough. They called him like a magnet home, and a few false starts eventually led him to the right corridor.

It was like they called him, though it wasn't that, and he couldn't have explained it even if he tried. A sense, maybe, that went deeper than instinct, that led his fingers to trace the images painted on the walls even in his own bed at home, on the edges of sleep.

Circling the chamber, Clark looked up and down every drawing.

"When I found this, I thought it would tell me something." Clark wasn't sure who he was talking to--himself, the caves, or the kid he'd been that stumbled into them, aglow with discovering his past.

What had it told him, anyway? A place that no longer existed, a man that sent him off to live or die in a tiny ship, and a long-dead people that were no longer so long-dead, not in this place. Instead of one tiny ship and one brilliant meteor shower to change the world, there was a world changed by a people Clark would do anything not to claim.

At home, in his basement, was the only remnant of his people, the ones he'd wondered about all his life until now. Now, he knew way too much.

"Is this what you wanted me to do?" Clark asked a painting. He felt stupid, but anything was better than that tiny room, knowing Lex was off plotting his own death, staring through walls to watch him work his magic, make people believe he could do anything. Not that they needed much convincing. The Lex of this world came fully equipped with the faith of the people.

It was funny, or would have been, if he was anyone else.

"I wanted to know everything about you, about what you were, about what I could be." What he was, and now he knew. His people were *this* kind, the kind that took planets, killed people, destroyed civilizations, just to take. To have. They were his kind, with his powers, and they'd done *this*.

Clark wondered if his parents had ever feared this in him--the power to destroy and the will to carry it out. The ruthlessness to not even care.

"You don't act like Kal."

Pete's voice was low and amused, with a tight edge that reminded Clark that Lex hadn't been the only one injured on the raid. Just the only one Clark gave a damn about.

"I had a change of heart." Every instinct said he was an idiot for saying anything, but Clark could only see that staff in Pete's hand, cutting through Lex's wrist like butter, then burning the stump. So he wouldn't die. So he wouldn't bleed to death. Like that meant something, when Pete was helping Lex right now, making him think he could do something he could never, ever do.

"Really? Before or after you killed my father?"

"Inigo Montoya said it better," Clark snapped, turning around. Pete was almost grey from dust and exhaustion, and maybe Clark would have cared more if he hadn't been sure that Pete was also so damn close to crazy. From the loss of his mother or from this life, Clark didn't care, it just didn't matter. "What do you want me to say? I'm sorry your father is dead, but I didn't kill him." Kal might have, but Clark didn't. And right now, no matter how close he felt like Kal, he wouldn't take his crimes on himself, too. He had plenty of his own to deal with.

"Why the hell should I believe that?"

"Why shouldn't you?" No one lived but Lex Luthor, who hadn't. The only witnesses who would know were long dead, dust and ash, in a place Clark had never seen. But he was Kal, here and now to them, and it was a lie to say he hadn't, even if it was the truth. "I don't have to listen to this."

"Luthor was our best because he was the only, Mom said. The only one who could make everyone believe." Pete took a slow step into the cave, looking around with curious eyes, like his Pete had when Clark had first shown him. It was too close--Clark's throat closed, making it hard to breathe. Too close to the boy he knew, too close to someone he cared about, even knowing this boy would kill him without a second thought. "He was with them for years, you know. His father sold him in when the arrived."

Clark slowed a blink, remembering what Lex had said about remembering the ship, what Clark's dreams had shown him. Lionel Luthor would sell Lex for power. Lionel would sell himself for power. "He's a mutant."

"Everyone knew but didn't, you know? When he got away. They knew what he was, what he'd been." Pete leaned into a rough pillar, still so damned amused. "When you--when you saved him from the massacre, were you trying to make him go back with you? Did you think he'd forget he was human first, no matter what you'd done to him?"

"No." The world seemed to slide sideways.

"We got a lot of kids out. Half his group, once. The ones that stayed behind--we never knew what happened to them. Not until Lex came back."

"He--he was never hurt."

Pete's smile twisted, eyes darkening. "There's a lot of definitions of hurt, Kal-El."

Clark dragged in a shaky breath. Metropolis born and bred, in Kryptonian hands from childhood. Clark couldn't imagine what they'd done to him. "He--came to our family. We never--" Clark had no idea. Lex hadn't told him, and Clark didn't know how to lie without even a little of the truth to bracket it. Clark wondered what Lex had seen, had felt, just that it had happened. What his family had done, what *Kal* had done....

"You're going to get him killed," Clark said flatly, before Pete could say another word. "He--"

"He'll save us," Pete said, leaning into the post more deeply.

"You didn't believe that when you took him out there to get maimed."

Pete winced. Clark had struck a nerve, and he was glad he had, wanted to do it again, dig it in and make it *hurt*, the way Lex hurt, to make up for every second Lex spent in that fever. Every time Lex looked down and saw what he had lost.

"I believe it now."

"*Why*?" Clark took a stumbling step toward him, stopping himself when he realized that if he got too close, he might *not* stop. He might grab Pete up and shove him against that rock and make him pay, make him *hurt*. It caught him, like Phelan all over again, but with so much more reason. He was *Kal* here, and Kal would do that, and Kal would enjoy it.

Kal would--

"Because there isn't anything else," Pete said slowly, almost surprised, like he couldn't believe he was saying it. "He said you were going to help. Are you?"

Clark imagined Lex, standing in front of those frightened people, turning on all that power to persuade, to make them believe. He'd made Clark believe in unlikely things before. That clear, sure voice that said that he was Lex Luthor, and he could do anything. Anything at all.

Make them believe he could *save* them, and make them believe the man who had killed all their leaders would help. It was like magic.

Clark stared into Pete's eyes. He did believe. Somehow, some way, Lex had made him believe, and he could make Clark believe it, too, if he wasn't careful, if he didn't remember that Lex believed a lot of things that were pure bullshit.

Taking a deep breath, Clark nodded. "Yeah. I'll help."

Clark had had only the haziest idea of how many people lived in these caves, guardians to what they'd thought was a mystery that would save them if they could only discover its secrets. He hadn't been welcome anywhere they were, he knew that without being told, and the group that had met with Lex and Pete before the failed rescue attempt had only brought out the, for lack of a better word, leaders.

But there weren't just thirty. There weren't a hundred. Clark hadn't explored the cave system his cave belonged to thoroughly enough. If Lex was right, if Pete was to be believed, and Clark didn't have any reason to disbelieve either one, there were three hundred people who hid here, some Smallville born and bred who refused to leave their land, others here to help protect their secret.

Their incredibly useless, pointless secret, a cave that only had value to Clark, who no longer needed it to discover who he was. It showed in their eyes when they looked at him, the masses of people spilling through the huge cavern that Pete had chosen for this speech. Men, women, children, some familiar, some not. Clark didn't know whether he was glad or sorry he didn't recognize more.

Clark knew what Lex wanted to do, had heard it a dozen times since he'd returned to his room to see Lex, glowing incandescent, almost unrecognizable, but recognizable in the essentials. This was the Lex who made things *happen*, the Lex who loved to win and loved it best when the win was on his own terms.

"We can do this," Lex had said, sitting him down like they were in his office at Smallville, sitting on the little couch while Lex committed sexual offenses on innocent water bottles and made Clark's early acquaintance with him a special hell of being completely turned-on with no real clue why this was happening to him. "Bait here--down here. We'll give them exactly what they want--the secret."

"A whole bunch of caves."

Lex had grinned. "Yes. A whole bunch of caves. A whole bunch of *caves*. No people, no information. They'll come thinking they found a rebel base and find nothing but the abandoned living arrangements of a few hundred people." Lex took a deep breath, eyes sweeping the room, and Clark thought for a second that Lex was looking right at him. It was an old public speaking trick, but like most old tricks, it *worked*. Clark could feel the pull, there when he first met Lex, growing stronger every day. Clark wondered, a little uneasily, how much that would grow as Lex grew up, if he could be this now. Lex at thirty, at forty, when he'd matured and honed this talent, turned it into art....

Hell, he was scary *now*. Clark resisted the pull from instinct, but that didn't make it any less powerful.

"What about the cave?" The voice was high, a woman's, and afraid.

Lex nodded, like he'd expected the question. Just behind him, Pete was nodding thoughtfully, but his eyes were fixed on Lex.

"Once the caves are cleared, we'll create a rock fall to block access." Lex spoke over the sudden murmurs. "They won't suspect we were hiding anything, and they won't want to take the time to examine, not in the badlands, not if we give them an obvious answer to the question. They've always known humans were here. They didn't know we were an organized part of the rebellion, and they're not going to know after we leave."

Clark bit his lip. Pronoun shift. Not you. We.

"But how we will get out?" A man, up front. Pete's eyes flickered over the crowd, obviously searching out the possible troublemakers. The five men ranged behind Lex with him seemed equally intent on just that. Crowd control, Clark thought a little inanely.

Lex grinned. "That's where Kal comes in." The word seemed natural on his tongue, eyes finding Clark's with impersonal warmth. Playing to the crowd. Clark sucked in a breath, wondering if he could sink back into the solid stone of the cave. What felt like a million eyes focused on him, and Clark felt the stone begin to crumble behind him. "We have a twelve hour window--Pete's been clocking the ships and how long they can stay in the badlands before their technology malfunctions. You'll be taken to the only other badlands outpost on the border, and from there, everyone will be sent out to secure locations." Lex's voice rose over the frightened whispering. "Under the cover of dark, right through the center of the badlands and the areas of worst contamination."

"They don't stay out for twelve hours." An aggressive voice of a frightened man. Clark watched Pete stiffen and all eyes turn toward the man, pushing to the front. Lex didn't look surprised.

"No," Lex answered easily. He wasn't even *nervous*. "But they clock at six hours in at maximum, three out to recharge. They don't really consider us a threat yet. They just want to *know* what's here, if there's something they should know. And we'll give them that. When I set off the explosives, they'll come here." Lex grinned. "A cave system mined with kryptonite, and nothing interesting to see."

"How will you get out?" The same man, less aggressive, more curious. Lex was *doing* this, right now, drawing them in, making them think that this had a snowball's chance in hell of succeeding.

Lex smiled. "I can always find my way home. Any other questions?" Lex paused, but this seemed enough, and Clark wondered, in a little awe, if it was really that easy. "All right. We have six hours before we begin evacuation. It will be a six hour trip by vehicle, but some groups have already volunteered to set out independently and distract attention from the main group, emphasize the idea that we aren't anything but stray humans wondering the badlands. If there are any questions, ask your group leaders." Waving a hand over the crowded masses, Lex nodded. "Okay. You know the plan. Be ready."

Lex stepped back, and Clark watched Pete come up beside him, a little smile of satisfaction on his face. Clark pushed off the wall, sliding easily through people that weren't paying any attention to him, too caught up in their own concerns, and Clark followed Lex and the others.

Lex was deep in discussion with a tall woman and another man.

"...as long as you don't look suspicious, they won't stop."

"IF they think--"

"They don't *know*. They're looking for an organized group, not a few stray people. If they see you, run, don't change routine. It won't be any different from any other time you leave the caves."

Some won't make it, Lex hadn't said that, but Clark thought they might know that already. Distractions and decoys. Obvious groups to take attention from the big one that Kal would be taking to that safe place. Clark watched Lex speak to a few more, waiting for him to bow himself gracefully out, walking casually over to Clark.

"This will work."

The insane thing was, Clark thought it just might. "I don't see why you want me with them."

Lex frowned, rubbing absently at his right arm. Tucked into the sling, Clark could barely tell the hand was missing. Only if he knew to look. "I want you with them in case I'm wrong, and they figure out what we're doing. I don't think they will, not at first anyway. They're used to seeing bands of humans wandering around, or so Pete tells me. If they stumble on you--" Lex let the words trickle off. "We talked about this."

"And I didn't like your explanation then, either."

Lex frowned, shifting. "Their sensors are going to be adjusted for humans. If they sense a Kryptonian, they're going to be less inclined to investigate."

"You don't think that'll be suspicious in itself? One Kryptonian, a lot of humans?"

Lex shrugged. "I don't think they find you. But if they notice, they're going to go after the human only ones, not one that seems already under control of a Kryptonian." Lex took a deep breath. "Clark, we don't have a lot of time to figure this out. They're going to find the caves, that's a given. I'm hoping that they'll find them right off the bat and prepare an invasion force to investigate."

"How will you get out?" For some reason, Clark's mind kept coming back to that.

"Pete and a few others will be nearby. When I set off the explosives, trust me, it'll be noticeable. They'll all come here, and they'll be *hours* working through the rubble to figure out what happened. Me and the others will be out, just another little band of humans too stupid not to know to avoid contaminated land."

They'd argued already, and it hadn't helped. Lex's certainty buoyed by Pete's faith were enough to make everything Clark said meaningless. And God, Clark was tired, and that was an entirely new feeling. He'd never been tired before. Never really understood how the word *felt*, but even right now, his hands wanted to shake. Lex's expression changed to worry, coming closer, warm left palm on his shoulder. "Clark?"

Clark shook his head.

"You've been out of sunlight too long." Lex's frown deepened. "After what the meteor rock did, we should have--"

"I'm *fine*."

Lex didn't look too sure of that, and Clark wasn't too sure of that either. It seemed like forever since he'd seen sunlight, and right now, he didn't dare go outside. "You need to rest. Go lay down for a little while."

"You're not my mother, Lex." Clark jerked away from the concerned touch, angry and unable to explain any better now than he had before. "You don't know this will work, and you're risking your *life* on maybe--"

"Staying here's a death sentence for everyone." It might be better if Lex would just get *angry*, like he used to when Clark doubted him, but it was all sweet, patient reason, like Lex was talking to a child. A stupid teenage kid who didn't know what was best for him. Clark wanted to shake him, make him *see*, but it was useless and he knew it. Turning away, he went down the short hallway to their room, pushing the door shut behind him.

He wanted sun. He wanted to be warm. He wanted to be home But most of all, he wanted to pick up Lex and run the hell out of here, and knowing Lex would never allow it, that Clark himself couldn't live with himself if he did...

They weren't meant to do this. Clark still had a curfew and homework and farm chores. Lex was just a businessman. Neither of them were formed to this, made for this, no matter how well they both played the parts, no matter how the circumstances changed. Falling on the cot, Clark took a deep breath, staring up at the ceiling.

Six hours wasn't a lot of time. It really wasn't any time at all.

Interrum

"You don't need to be there."

"When this is over, you're coming home." Kal stared down at him, wondering if just carrying him off would be such a bad idea. So the fuck what for the plan--this was insane. Even Lex couldn't--"

--think he could pull this off.

Clark was driving a truck so much like Dad's that, if he wasn't careful, he could almost believe he was just on an errand, that the back was full of vegetables, not people, that the person beside him was Dad, not a too-silent, embittered farmer who never said a word. Behind him, a dozen beat-up, barely functional flatbed and farm trucks. Clark still wondered how they got gas for these things, but it had never really occurred to him to ask until now. Much less where they'd kept them.

A ten minute walk to a designated spot had revealed them, like a more functional version of the car graveyard, and Clark had almost laughed, wondering how the hell they would manage to fit in two hundred and ten people into them, but somehow, they did. Forty had somehow stuffed themselves into an old flatbed trailer, strewn with limp straw, almost like a hayride if you ignored the grey-tinged faces, the utter silence. No chatting, no talking, almost no *breathing*, like a single sound could give them away. They hadn't brought much, knowing the premium on pure space. Clark didn't know how they could stand being shoved so close together on bouncy, uneven country roads, but he supposed that survival beat out comfort any day of the week.

Somewhere back here, Clark thought, watching the road through the grimy windshield, Kyle had hid, and he wondered what Kyle had done in this world. Rebel leader, maybe--with his power, he'd be good at it.

James was stuck between him and the farmer, and Clark hadn't argued. James, at least, didn't look like he expected Clark to kill and eat them all just for kicks. A silent kid chewing on a green-tinged piece of straw that Clark had to force himself not to snatch away. James was born and bred to Smallville and everything that went along with it, breathing meteor dust in with every breath of air. Clark wondered what he would be, or what he was already.

James and the farmer were also the only two who had ever been to the border, to this outpost that was supposed to be salvation and utopia and Canaan land all at once. From there, they would go to secure locations, though Clark wasn't clear on what was secure and where those places were.

And God, Clark was tired. His head ached, and vision sometimes seemed to blink out, vibrant green forest replaced with moving colors that made no sense.

He needed sunlight. .

"And I'm telling you, do it my way."

"Go. It's almost time."

"Lex?" Lex could hear Pete's voice, echoing through the silent caves as he set the last fuse. One for the mainframes, a sacrifice that Pete had understood had to be made. One for the living caverns, strewn with meteor rock that would saturate the earth even more than it already was. Another for the corridor to the caves. His and Clark's room. Lex frowned as he fumbled the wires one-handed. It was so natural, so easy, that when he didn't think about what he did, what he was doing, it was like his body had its own memories. Pinning wire under one knee, Lex cut it off and nudged the fuse box to his hip.

"Almost done." Standing up, he stepped back, wondering, not for the first time, where Pete got his supplies. As if thinking his name summoned the man, Pete poked a head in the door, giving him a slow nod. "Ready?"

"Almost. Evacuate everyone and send them to the rendezvous point. How much more time?"

"One courier ship was spotted an hour ago. It went off sensors. Lyra and Gabe both reported that they saw one ship that hovered but didn't bother to stop. She thinks they might come back but doubts it." Pete pushed the door open wider, leaning into the frame. "How much longer?"

"This is the last one. I'll double check before we go out." It seemed so--easy, like something Lex had done before. Everything was set by remote. One would trigger the rest, one by one, until what had been living quarters for a people became nothing but collapsed rubble. Lex wasn't entirely sure the all-important secret cave would survive, but in the long run, it didn't matter. It wasn't valuable, not the way they thought it was.

All on its own, his mind drifted to Clark, somewhere out there, safely driving a flatbed truck to whatever passed for safety in this place. It hadn't been easy to get him to go, but Lex hadn't expected it to be. Once they hit the halfway point, Lex would set the explosions and every bit of badlands attention would be focused here, trying to find out what was so important that they would blow up their own base to protect it. Not that different from the men and women who died to contaminate the land, creating an almost-safe haven to hide their secret.

It was almost funny, in a way that Lex didn't think he'd ever be able to laugh about.

"How much longer?" Lex asked. His watch was in Clark's pocket--for some reason, Lex hadn't wanted it here at the last, though he wasn't sure why.

"Thirty minutes, maybe less. They'll hit the halfway point and then be on open ground. After that, they know to drive straight through and not stop for anything. It should be enough."

Should be. Lex took a deep breath and stood up. It had to be. "All right. Let's do one more round and then we'll go."

"Lex?"

When Mr. Ross walked out, Lex walked to the corner and let himself throw up.

"We're almost to the open," said James, stating the obvious. Clark gritted his teeth and nodded, because snapping at a little kid was just wrong, no matter how weird he felt or how much his head hurt. It wasn't like the meteor rock, not blinding pain, but the steady low-grade pulse was making him sick. Like how Chloe described migraines. Clark wasn't sure how humans could stand that.

Though it wasn't actually possible, Clark thought he could feel the people with him perking up, coming out of their silence at this tangible proof of progress. Open land at full speed, Lex had said. Don't stop for anything at all. Get them there. Even the silent farmer seemed to look more alive, straining to see out the windshield, like will alone would move them faster. In his hand was the really fancy walkie-talkie that Pete had given him, and for the first time, Clark heard his voice.

"We're here," he said, and put it down, like that was all there was to it.

Any second now, Lex would be setting off the explosions, and--

--Kal would get him the fuck out of there.

Like it was responding to his thoughts, Kal saw the first explosion, the trigger, on the far side of the building, and fixed his eyes on the doorway that Lex would come out.

"Lex?"

Lex stared at the small remote in his hand. A modified walkie-talkie, basically, and it was long past for Clark to report in. Turning around, Lex watched Pete, who hadn't moved from the door.

"How much longer?" he asked, feeling a creeping numbness start in his jaw from his clenched teeth. His instincts were screaming and he couldn't quite pinpoint the why.

"Not long," Pete answered easily, leaning into the door. "Any second now."

Lex fixed his eyes on the bare belt, the casual lines of his body, the thrumming excitement that seemed to make him glow, reminded of Pete deep in the ship, fighting through Kryptonian guards, the razor cut of the beam through his hand, the gleeful laugh as Pete dragged them all surfaceward.

"Did they promise you your mother back?" Lex whispered, hand going strangely numb. Even anger couldn't break through--nothing could. Clark was out there, and Pete--Pete--

For a second, Pete's gaze flickered, fixing on the ground at Lex's feet. "They offered the trade. I didn't seek it out." Pete shrugged, shifting uncomfortably. "They got the DNA from your hand. They contacted me. They promised our freedom and my mother's, for you."

Lex breathed out. "What about Kal?"

Pete grinned, bright and pleased, guilt falling away like it had never been there at all. "I decided that they could live without Kal."

"What did they promise you?"

"It wasn't supposed to be this way," Lex said, his voice choking. There was bile souring the back of his tongue, and he thought he'd never stop smelling burning metal, stop hearing the screams of the dying. "It was supposed to be--"

"--faster. Shit, why didn't it work?"

Clark stared up at the staff pointed out his face from the smooth carpet of grass, not entirely sure how he ended up on the ground. Open road was just beyond his fingertips, and James was screaming somewhere behind him, though Clark couldn't imagine why.

The kick to his side didn't hurt, shouldn't have, but maybe the sunlight deprivation was working on him in ways he hadn't expected, because it was like falling on a car all over again, that long ago day he lost his powers.

"Shit, why aren't you *dead*?" The staff wavered, and Clark wondered why the man had thought it would kill him. It might--a room of meteor without sunlight could kill a Kryptonian, this Clark knew. But the man acted like it was supposed to be instantaneous, and he really hadn't even gotten in a good shot. His arm was numb to the shoulder, but he was conscious, though that wasn't saying much. "Pete said--"

Clark stiffened, a wave of vertigo washing over him, bright in colors, sounds, sights, things he never could have seen. Lex, and a man he didn't recognize, unbearable smells of burning metal and burning meat, and only Lex would be stupid enough to just stand there and take it.

Kal broke the wall like paper-mache, nausea rising at the smells filling the room, the green glare of kryptonite on the ruins of the man's burned throat, lighting up when he walked in. Stumbling against the wall, Kal watches the staff lurch to fix on him. It wouldn't kill him, but it would hurt. It'll hurt a *lot*, and the building's collapsing, and he has to get Lex out.

"No. I'm not."

"Lex, just walk out. It'll be easier." Pete straightened, and Lex clutched the remote tighter. Taking a step back, then another, Lex came up against solid stone.

Somewhere out there, Clark was dying, where Lex had sent him, thinking he'd be safer there than anywhere else. Somewhere, ships were landing, this place sold by Pete for the price of Lex's life. Mrs. Ross would be free, and it might be a fair trade that Lex would have given if he'd been given a choice.

But he hadn't been asked. And Clark was never part adn parcel of any decision he would have made.

"Lex." Pete's eyes widened, fixing on Lex's hand with the remote. "You don't--they'll leave us alone. They don't *care* what's down here, they just want *you*. You--you have to understand. She's my mother. You'd do the same."

"And Kal?" By now, Clark was dead, or dying, and Lex only wished he'd told him--God, so many things. How, if he had to be here, he was so glad it was Clark that was with him. How many things he would have done differently. And dammit, you little bastard, I wish I'd known what you were when we could have enjoyed it.

"He killed my father." Pete's eyes flared, with that peculiar insanity that Lex remembered on the ship. "He deserves to die for what he's done."

Clark, who trusted him, who would die for it, alone in this godforsaken place.

"You're a *rebel*! You know we have to make deals we hate to get the things we need! I--we need Mom! *You know that*. You're the leader of the rebellion."

Lex almost smiled when he looked at Pete, pushing down on the button. He wondered, a little inanely, if it would hurt.

"No, I'm not."

Clark heard James' enraged scream from somewhere far away, just as the staff went off again. Clark thought of Lex, alone in the caves, and of Pete, who would sell anyone and everything to get his mother free.

Somewhere far away, Clark though that he heard something explode.

"Lex, no."

The world was nothing but brilliant, hot light.

End Part I

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