Constellation

Part Three – Bigger Than My Body

Chapter One

It took some coaxing to get sense out of Whitney, and when sentences started emerging instead of broken phrases, they still seemed disconnected and incomprehensible.

“It went dark,” Whitney said, gulping for air and shaking.  “Clark, she was so scared, and then it went dark, all of a sudden.”

“Last night?” Clark asked.  “Last night, it went dark?  The power went out?”

“No, no,” Whitney said, shaking his head emphatically.  “Not – the lights.  The – things I can see, they stopped.”

“And that’s how you know,” Clark began, confusedly, “that she’s…gone?”

“It’s never been like this before,” Whitney said, earnestly.  “Sometimes she tried to close me out, but that was like a grey fog, and this – there’s just nothing there.”

Clark tried to understand, wondered if Whitney was maybe speaking in metaphor, and then gave up.  Very gently, he prompted, “Whit, you have to go back to the start here.  Tell me how you know that Lana’s – gone.”

Whitney looked up, blinking.  “You mean – you never guessed?”

“Never –” Clark repeated, frowning.

“I thought for sure Chloe knew, and if she knew, I thought she’d have told you.”  Whitney shook his head, his ears flushing bright red with some unidentifiable emotion.

“Chloe?” Clark asked, disbelieving – because if Chloe was involved, then –

“Remember at the end of my senior year?” asked Whitney.  “Lana and I were still dating, there was that gas pipeline explosion, and she was hurt?”

Clark nodded slowly, recalling.  He and Chloe had often joked, the next year, that Lana’s concussion had been a more serious brain injury than they had supposed, because it was after that when Lana had begun to change, begun to shed her fairy princess persona.  She and Whitney hadn’t lasted the summer after that, torn apparently by the stress of Whitney’s grief over his father, but then, strangely, Lana had been the one who’d seemed most impacted by the break-up.

“There were meteor rocks in the soil where she was lying,” said Whitney, confirming Clark’s fear.

God, it had been – yes, years.  Years since Clark had been faced with this kind of revelation, which had almost always come in the form of triumphant exposition from Chloe in the Torch office.  Then there’d been Brodie, and Clark had quit the paper, quit the heroics, too, but now it was all flooding back like a rush of adrenaline, but more bitter, more sickening.

“And afterwards,” Whitney said, calming in the exercise of recollection, “there was this link between us.”  He released a puff of air, half-smiling.  “She did research.  De Kretser Syndrome is the official term, but this was the meteor variety, so it was stronger.  It’s a kind of post-traumatic stress disorder.  I could see through her eyes, and she could see through mine.”

“A psychic link?” Clark asked.

“At first we couldn’t control it, it would just happen,” Whitney elaborated.  “But as the weeks went by, it got so we could turn it on, on purpose.  You could never turn it off – never off, just on.  When it started, it started, no stopping it.  Like I said, the most she ever managed was sort of a grey cloudiness to keep me from seeing everything clearly.  But back then, after the accident, it was – it was almost fun, you know?  She’d be at home in her bedroom and I’d be watching her, talking on the phone, getting her to make faces in the mirror for me.  And it wasn’t just a visual thing – there were emotions, too.  I started thinking, maybe it was meant to be.  Because we were soul mates or something dumb like that, and this way we’d never be apart, not really.”

“When did it stop?” Clark frowned.

Whitney laughed quietly.  “It didn’t.  Until this morning, it never stopped.  The link was never severed.  After a while, she got weird about it.  Said I was watching her all the time, she couldn’t stand it, like I could help it if I wanted to.  And she – she just *broke up* with me, like it was that easy for her to move on, like she could just forget about what had happened.  And then she started doing all these things, just to drive me nuts.  You know?  Sleeping around, partying with a bad crowd, doing drugs.  Every time I’d see her – you know, it happens about two or three times a day – god, every time, she’d be doing something to make me crazy.”

“She did that to hurt you?” Clark asked, shocked.  “I thought she was just – going through a phase.”

Whitney lifted one shoulder.  “Maybe she was,” he said, non-commitally.  “But when I tried to talk to her, it just got worse.”  He looked over at Clark, his features taut with pain.  “Imagine never being able to forget your first love.  Literally.  Imagine having it rubbed in your face every single minute, that you lost her.  That she doesn’t belong to you, she doesn’t want you, but she’s always going to be – inside your head.  Part of you.”

Clark closed his eyes, imagining – “God, that – Whitney, man, that’s – why didn’t you ever tell me?”

Abruptly losing his aspect of distress, Whitney just stared at Clark, as though Clark had suggested something impossibly stupid.  “You – how out of touch *are* you, Clark?  Jesus!”

“What do you mean?” Clark asked, affronted.

“God, I never knew you were *that* wrapped up in the kid, that you never noticed –” Whitney said, amazed.  “Are you seriously telling me that you don’t know?”

“Don’t know what?” Clark demanded, feeling more and more like he’d fallen into a bad dream.

“But – aren’t you one, too?” Whitney said, now dropping his voice to a whisper, leaning in close.  “How could you be one and not know?”

“One what?” Clark asked in a normal tone, and Whitney shushed him violently.

Like a spy in a bad movie, Whitney leaned in close and almost breathed the words, his breath tickling Clark’s ear.  “A meteor mutant.”

For a moment, Clark couldn’t breathe.  Whitney thought he was – but how did Whitney even *know*?  Clark looked away, feeling the telltale flush creeping up his neck and ears, annoyed because he’d never been a good liar, and how did Whitney *know*?  It had been so long since Clark had risked anyone finding out, years since his powers had been anything more than a weird fact.

“It’s okay, Clark.  We’ve got each other’s backs, man,” Whitney said, delivering a quiet thump of solidarity between Clark’s shoulderblades.  “It’s okay.”

Clark thought about correcting Whitney, but his curiosity still needed to be satisfied, and maybe it was easier to leave the matter ambiguous.  “What is it that I don’t know?  That I should know, if I’m – one of them.”

Whitney rubbed his nose with a closed fist, contemplating the dirt at their feet.  “I can’t believe Chloe never – I thought she’d warned everyone.”

“Warned them about what?” Clark asked, getting more annoyed with all this mystery.

“About –” Whitney paused, then seemed to gather his courage.  “About the Constellation thing.”

“Constellation?  What’s—”

“I don’t know what it is, not really,” Whitney interrupted, shaking his head.  “No one does, except maybe Chloe, and she left.  All I know is this: that if you’re one of them, you keep your damn mouth shut about it.  As soon as anyone finds out, anyone other than Chloe, I mean…”

“What happens?” Clark asked, bewildered.

“You disappear,” Whitney said, exhaling, his face growing paler, so that the faint freckles on his nose stood out against his skin.  “You just – vanish.”

“Where—”

“No one knows, I said,” Whitney said, more frantic now.  “You just go away, and that’s what happened to Lana, okay?”  He was on his feet again, pacing with his hands fitfully clenching fistfuls of his hair.  “And when I go to check on her, there’s *nothing*, and that can only mean that when people disappear, they don’t just go away, they don’t ever come back.  Clark, they *die*!”  He halted abruptly, dropping his hands and fixing a pleading look on Clark.  “You’re the one who helps,” he said.  “You have to help us.”

“Clark, it’s broken,” Brodie announced, suddenly reemerging from his quiet play nearby and dumping a toy truck into Clark’s lap next to Taber.

Clark automatically picked up the truck and studied it, taking the chance to think about something other than the staggering importance of what he had just learned, to ignore Whitney’s urgent presence and the plea still hanging in the air between them.  Over the past three years, Clark had become an expert at this sort of mending.  There were few plastic toys whose workings were a mystery to him, and the case was pretty simple – a broken axle and a missing wheel.

“Do you have the wheel?” Clark asked, and Brodie went back to look.

You’re the one that helps, Whitney had said, as though it was so simple, as though it hadn’t been ages since Clark had done much more than help Brodie with his broken toys.  Clark had given up on heroism that day in the NICU, or maybe he’d just focused his heroism, a greater deed in a much smaller arena.

“Fix it, Clark,” Brodie pleaded, and placed the wheel in Clark’s outstretched palm.

The plastic which was supposed to grip the axle was broken, Clark saw.  It would be a simple matter of epoxy glue to mend it, though Clark tended to glue wheels on a little crooked so that the truck would always wobble afterwards.

“I can’t fix it this second, two-bit,” Clark said, absently fitting the wheel to where it was supposed to rest.  “I need glue.”

“Clark,” Brodie whined, his lower lip beginning to protrude.  “Fix it now!”

“Brodie, listen to me,” Clark said, reasonably.  “Are you listening?”

“I want you to fix it!” Brodie cried, now rubbing at a teary eye and knocking his glasses askew.

“He’s tired,” Clark said as an apologetic aside to Whitney.

“I’m NOT tired!” wailed Brodie.  “I want you to fix it!”

“Okay, buddy, time for a nap,” Clark said.  “And when you wake up, we’ll fix the truck together, okay?”

It wasn’t as though Clark could go anywhere, he reasoned, as Brodie launched into a terrible (and completely predictable) tantrum.  He couldn’t just get into Whitney’s truck and go off to help him.  If it was advice, or even research, that Whitney wanted, Clark could do that, but – well.  It wasn’t as though Clark could go around breaking into offices and roughing up villains like he used to do, back in high school.

Clark pressed Taber into Brodie’s arms, because this often calmed the kid, gave him something to focus on when he was sleepy, but Brodie just screamed and pelted the bear into the dirt, facedown.

And now Whitney was talking, his voice raised over Brodie’s noise.  “Clark, aren’t you going to do something?”

“He needs a nap,” Clark said, deliberately misunderstanding Whitney’s question.

“Clark!” Whitney exclaimed, getting to his feet.  “You can’t keep hiding behind your little brother!”

Clark shook his head, dismissing this accusation as he picked up Taber in one hand and scooped Brodie off the ground with the other, heading for the house.

“I know what you can do!” Whitney shouted after him.  “Everyone knows!  You’re strong, and you’re fast!  You could help me find her!”

Clark’s instincts drove him faster now, because this was not happening.  Whitney was not telling him in loud tones that everyone *knew*, that Clark was somehow obliged to admit it, that just because he was strong and fast, he had some sort of responsibility to jump to Whitney’s aid.

“If you don’t help,” Whitney yelled, jogging to keep up, “I’ll tell them.  About you.  What’ll happen to Brodie then, huh?”

Clark stopped in his tracks, fear flaring through his chest.  Without turning to look at Whitney, Clark spoke.  “You don’t have proof.”

“You think I need proof?” Whitney laughed harshly.  “Jake Pollen, 2003!  He was kicking ass on the swim team, no one knew why, and the next week, he was gone!”

Clark shook his head and started walking again.

“Seth Nelson could always find your keys if you lost them,” Whitney continued, speaking more quickly, trying to reach Clark.  “Had this weird thing about metal, and he was gone two months after Jake.”

 Clark watched his feet going up the porch steps, concentrated on Brodie’s lusty bellows.

“Alison Sanders.  Greg Arkin.  Ian Randall.  Shit, Clark, you *remember*, you were around for half of them,” Whitney said, tone vicious.  “Tina Greer!  Sean Kelvin!  Ryan *fucking* James!”

Clark hesitated for the merest moment at this last name.

“You want something closer to home?” Whitney demanded.  “Karen Gallegher, total slut, right?  Got knocked up in early 2005.  Two days later, she has a kid.  *Two days*, Clark.  And Constellation got both of them.  Mom and baby.”

Brodie suddenly wriggled free and collapsed to the porch steps, wailing.

“Clark, they took a *baby*.  You think they’d hesitate to take you away from him?  Hell, they might just grab both of you at the same time.”  Whitney’s voice was dangerous and low now.

He meant to do it, Clark realized.  Whitney would stand in the middle of Main Street and scream it: “Clark Kent is a freak!”  He would let them take Clark away, he would let them take Brodie, even knowing that the end result might well be death for both of them.  Whitney, in fact, seemed to be showing a classic symptom of meteor infection – psychosis.

It wasn’t Whitney’s implied threat, however, that made Clark pause in that moment. 

It was the way the veil had been torn away.  Whitney’s words had evoked an entirely forgotten landscape of Smallville, snatching away the idyllic backdrop which Clark and many other residents were happy to accept as truth.  But underneath, there was something far uglier, more dangerous, more frightening.  Clark had caught a glimpse of it, those first two years working with Chloe, but then there’d been Brodie, and he had allowed himself to forget, to pretend that it had all gone away. 

But he’d known, deep inside, that it wasn’t true.  He’d suspected that there would come a day when he would have to take notice again.  Still, Clark had let himself be fooled for too long, and only now was he grasping the fact that even then, he’d never seen the whole picture.  He’d never guessed for a second that it was this widespread – that Whitney knew, that Chloe had been embarking on some sort of rescue mission without him, that everyone in Smallville who had been touched by the meteors knew the word Constellation and shrank away from it in abject terror.

How could Clark have been blind to it?  To the need that surrounded him every day?  To the whispered secrets and the constant disappearances and the sickening, all-consuming hum of the meteors?

The answer currently lay in a small screaming heap on the worn smooth boards of the Kent family’s porch.

He’d been blind to it because he’d let Brodie consume his whole worldview.  Even Whitney, whom Clark had lately been thinking of as self-involved and trapped in his own tragedy, had seen beyond, had seen everything around him far more clearly than Clark had.  Between his falling out with Lex and now Whitney’s staggering admission, Clark’s world had abruptly collapsed like a precarious house of cards.

Clark could feel it filling him gradually, the realization that he was standing over a precipice from which dangled a long line of struggling people.  He could either back away and leave Whitney and the others to fall to their deaths, or –

No, it wasn’t really a choice.  The old sense of purpose was already returning, no question of what should be done, the technicalities of the thing.  Only the certain knowledge that people needed help.

And Clark was the one who helped, as Whitney had said.

“We need a starting point,” Clark said, turning slowly to face Whitney.  “We need to know where they go.”

Leaving Brodie in Jonathan’s reluctant care, they went to Lana’s apartment first – though Clark couldn’t think of a worse place to begin.  He’d straightened up, of course, before leaving earlier in the day, but with the first step inside, Clark could hardly think of anything except the previous night, Lex’s desperate touch.

“She wasn’t here,” Whitney said, flicking on the lights, which helped.  “Where I saw her, it wasn’t here.  I don’t know where it was.”

“There still might be clues,” Clark said, half-heartedly.  The truth was, he didn’t know what he was looking for.  Chloe had always done most of the legwork before.  He stopped, absently flipping his jacket collar out of its twisted position, then halted, glancing around at the twenty other Clark and Whitneys surrounding them.  “The mirrors,” he said, softly.

“That started almost right away,” Whitney said.  “It doesn’t stop your normal vision, you know, it’s like you’re seeing two things at once – your own view of the world, and the other person’s.  She used to stare into the mirror when it happened, force herself to focus on her own reflection. That way, she knew which view was hers and which was mine.  After the accident, when the De Kretser didn’t seem to be going away, she kept getting more and more mirrors, so she would be able to see herself whenever it happened, so she wouldn’t feel lost.”  And now there was a gentleness to his voice which Clark had never understood before, though he’d heard it often when Whitney talked about Lana.

Clark looked around, imagining how disorienting it would be, to suddenly have two points of view to choose from.  “We always thought she was just – really vain,” Clark said, feeling stunned.

Whitney laughed bitterly.  “There was that, too.  Not more than a couple of weeks ago, she had Luthor fuck her in front of a mirror, knowing I couldn’t help seeing it.  She gets off on it now, I think – that I have to watch.  That I can’t look away.”

Clark hastily shelved that image for himself, not wanting to think about it too much, Lana and Lex in front of a mirror.  “I had no idea,” Clark said, thickly.  “That it was like this for her.  For both of you.”  He caught Whitney’s eyes in one of the mirrors.  “I think I would have left town,” he said.

“That’s why we broke up,” Whitney sighed, opening a few drawers absently.  “I wanted to.  I was going to join the Marines, and she said it wasn’t my choice, that she didn’t want to go into battle with me, watch my friends get shot.”  He lifted one shoulder.  “I told her off, but I couldn’t go, not when I thought of it that way.  Besides, I would never really leave town, not unless she did, too.”

Both bound to Smallville by shared secret misery, Lana and Whitney seemed tragically doomed to Clark.  He ducked his head in the direction of the bed, caught sight of the window with its blinds which had created striped shadows on Lex’s body last night.

Except the blinds were closed now, the slats shut tight so that no light came through.

“Someone’s been here,” Clark said, walking over to the window and flicking the blinds open again.

“How can you tell?” Whitney asked.

“It’s – uh.  One of my abilities,” Clark improvised, glancing out the window.  Directly across Main Street, the facing windows were above Fordman’s.  Which was, in fact, Whitney’s bachelor apartment.  “Hey, Whitney, were you home last night?”  Remembering those stripes of light from across the street, Clark already knew the answer.

“Yeah,” Whitney said, coming to stand beside Clark.  “Yeah, I was watching football.  Lana – she wasn’t at home.  But she was somewhere, watching a movie.  Some chick flick.”

“Did you – what time did you – Lana’s disappearance, when was it?” Clark asked.  Had Lana come back here since Lex and Clark had left?  That would narrow the time of her disappearance considerably, especially if she had disappeared after leaving the apartment again – because Whitney said she hadn’t been here when it happened.

“It was early this morning,” Whitney said, low-voiced.  “About five o’clock.”

Five o’clock was when Clark had woken the first time that morning.  He struggled to remember what had woken him, but he could only recall the vague sense of panic about Brodie’s whereabouts.  “And you were home, then, too?” Clark asked, unsure why he wanted to know.

“I was dreaming,” Whitney said.  “And in the dream, I started seeing through her eyes.  It was dark, and she was scared, and then – nothing.  I woke up screaming.”

A scream that must have carried across the street, thanks to Clark’s hearing, and roused him from his sleep.  The subconscious mind of someone who cared for a toddler would have supplied the rest – the panic and the alertness that had followed – even as the memory of why Clark had awakened faded.

“I thought it was part of the dream,” Whitney said, scrubbing a hand through his hair.  “I really did.  I went back to sleep, and when I woke up again, I hardly remembered.  It was only around noon, when I tried to – I just wanted to check in on her, because usually I would have seen something by noon – and.  There was nothing to see.  No link.  Lana was – and I remembered the dream, and realized…”

Whitney was brushing at tears as he sank down onto the bed.  “You couldn’t have done anything,” Clark reassured him.  “You don’t even know – the link might just fade over distances, or maybe it can be broken by another trauma – she might be all right, wherever she is, Whitney.  And we’re going to find her and bring her home.”

Whitney dashed a hand over his face, breathing hard but nodding in agreement.  “Yeah, you’ll find her,” he repeated.  “She’s okay.”

“What –” Clark began, uncertainly, “what do you remember about where she was, last night?”

Standing on the doorstep of the mansion, Clark jammed his hands in his pockets and carefully studied the industrial-strength mat under his feet.  He really didn’t want to be here, and judging from the way Whitney was echoing Clark’s posture, he could guess that Whitney felt the same way.  But they had to ask if Lex knew where Lana had been.  The only thing Whitney had been able to remember about Lana’s whereabouts the previous night was that she had had popcorn and it was a place she had been before.

Which was decidedly unhelpful.

So they had agreed, after Clark had hesitantly suggested it, that they try Lex’s place.  After Lana’s apartment, its atmosphere still rife with the morning’s argument and the sex which had come before, Lex’s house was probably Clark’s second favorite place in the world.  At least, he reflected, the memories here were mostly good.

Rita Palmer answered the door, appearing harried.  “Clark!  What are you doing here?” she exclaimed.

“Uh.  Is Lex home?” Clark asked, glancing behind Rita and catching a glimpse of the chaos within.  Cardboard boxes were littered everywhere and streams of employees seemed to be toting armloads of Lex’s possessions through the mansion.

“He left,” Rita offered, shaking her head.  “Very suddenly.  His father came and took him back to Metropolis, not more than a couple of hours ago.”

Clark opened his mouth, but could only manage words when Whitney gave him a nudge.  “Why?  Did he say why?”

Rita shook her head again.  “The Luthors aren’t usually very forthcoming with the details of why they do what they do,” she informed him gravely, but not without a slight note of sympathy.

“Do you mind if we –” Clark began, as Whitney elbowed him again.  “I think some of Brodie’s stuff is still here,” he said, letting his voice trail off hopefully.

“Oh,” Rita said, taken aback.  “Well, I don’t see why not.”  She stepped aside and waved Clark and Whitney in.

With a  quick grateful smile for the housekeeper, Clark led Whitney towards Brodie’s playroom.  Not wanting to dwell on the process, he was matter-of-fact in his ransacking of Brodie’s small chest of drawers.  “We should take a quick look around,” Clark said, straightening up with an armload of toddler clothes.  “See if you recognize anything.”

After making a hasty and somewhat stealthy tour, Whitney agreed that he had seen many parts of the mansion before.  The major discovery was that of a half-spilled bowl of popcorn in the entertainment room.  Though the room was itself in disarray, DVDs everywhere and the TV and components unplugged with wires trailing along the carpet, it was impossible to say how much of the damage had been done by the staff doing Lex’s packing and how much might be the sign of a struggle.

“I can’t believe they could take her from here, though,” Whitney said, puzzled.  “Between the staff and the security system, someone would have noticed, right?”

“He dismisses the staff at night,” Clark said absently as he righted the bowl.  “And most of the security stuff is just for show, doesn’t actually work.  Lex likes his privacy.”

Whitney’s eyebrows shot up abruptly and Clark blushed, realizing he’d revealed too much of his own knowledge of Lex’s home.  However, if Whitney was drawing any conclusions, he didn’t voice them, only fixing Clark with a curious stare, then returning to his study of the room.  “There’s nothing here,” he said, finally, his voice dismayed.

Clark swept the room one last time with his x-ray vision, prepared to agree with Whitney and depart.  But this time, he caught a glimpse of something metal hidden under one of the couch cushions.

A ring.

Clark lifted the cushion and patted around for the object, and his hand struck gold – Lana’s gold and diamond engagement ring.

“If I know Lana,” Whitney said, taking the ring from Clark’s outstretched palm, “she didn’t leave that thing here by accident.  She’d leave her clothes behind before she’d leave a rock like this.”

Clark was the one who voiced it.  “So they did take her from here.”

Whitney closed his fingers over the ring, making a loose fist before looking up to meet Clark’s concerned gaze.  “I’ve never felt this alone in my life,” he said, voice quiet and shaken.

“We’ll get her back,” replied Clark.  It was fast becoming a mantra for him, a comforting phrase that, if repeated often enough, had to come true.

But the trail ended here.  Unless Whitney could either reestablish contact or remember a helpful detail from his memory of Lana’s abduction, Clark had no idea of where to go next.

“No one comes back,” Whitney said, his voice desolate.  He sank down onto the couch, transferring the ring from palm to palm nervously.  “No one ever comes back.”

“Not one of them?” Clark asked, growing impatient with the apparent dead end.  “Come on, Whitney…of all those names you rattled off, they’ve all disappeared?”

Whitney nodded.

“What about the others?  You said there were more.”

“Nobody comes back,” Whitney snapped, rubbing his forehead.  “Wade Mahaney.  Alicia Baker.  Justin Gaines.  Emily Dinsmore.”

“Justin Gaines!” Clark repeated, shocked.  “He’s not – he’s – he was in a car accident!”

Whitney opened his mouth to answer, but suddenly his eyes lit up.  “Holy shit, Clark – Justin Gaines!  You – he was in town with you, yesterday!”

Only yesterday?  It seemed like months had passed since he and Justin had run into Lex on the street.  Then Clark remembered – Justin’s uneasy look, fixed on Whitney.  Between Lex’s coldness and Clark’s desire to keep their relationship hidden from Justin, Clark had completely forgotten.  “He goes to college with me – but Whitney, he was just in a car accident, he’s not a – he’s not one of you.”

Whitney shook his head.  “No, trust me – Chloe had a list, I saw it.  And he was on it.”

Clark blinked against this revelation.  Was everyone he knew a meteor mutant?  First Whitney and Lana, now Justin…was Lex next?  Brodie?  His father?  “What did he do?  I mean, what was his power?”

Whitney lifted one shoulder quickly, tossing away the question.  “Don’t know.  But Clark – he’s one of us, he got taken away, and – he’s back!”

Clark thought again about Justin’s expression when he’d looked at Whitney, remembered Justin desperate and hurt on his knees in the bathroom at school, thought about the wrenchingly vulnerable way Justin toyed with his hand brace when he was nervous… if Whitney was right, if Justin had survived whoever or whatever this Constellation thing was, then Clark thought that maybe the survival had been partial at best.  Justin, Clark suspected, was damaged in some way, and it was that suspicion which made him say, “I’ll talk to him,” adding, to belay Whitney’s urgent interjection, “alone.”

Justin was wearing pajama pants and a holey Smallville High t-shirt when he answered the door.  “Video games are the devil,” he said by way of explanation, and stepped aside for Clark to come in.

Clark entered, feeling uncomfortable doing so under the pretense of friendship, when really he was here to grill Justin, extract his biggest secrets.  “Is that all you’ve done today?” he asked with an awkward smile.

“’S Saturday,” Justin said with a shrug, collapsing onto his dorm bed and tucking his bare feet under his thighs.  His hair was sticking out in all directions and he exuded the kind of lazy weekend apathy that Clark dimly remembered from his early high school days.  “What’s up?  Where’s the rugrat?”

“Dad’s watching him,” Clark answered, knowing he should sit, too, feeling ill at ease in Justin’s aura of relaxation but unable to disrupt it.

“So you can join me?” Justin grinned, rolling onto his stomach and patting around for the game controller.  “Come on, join the cult.”

Clark hung back, glancing uncertainly around the small room.  He and Justin had only been hanging out for a few weeks, but it felt like longer. It seemed deeply wrong to do this, to poke at wounds that Clark knew must only be partially healed.

But Lana was in danger, so Clark took a deep breath.  “Justin, where did you go?  After the accident, I mean.”

Justin didn’t flinch, not even a little.  But his keys, sitting on top of the TV, suddenly clinked, as though jostled by an invisible hand.

Clark frowned, glancing that way, then back at his friend, who was casually flicking through the menu of his game.

“There was a hospital,” Justin said, “a children’s hospital in Metropolis.  My parents moved there to be with me.  When I got out, I went back to school in the city.”  He delivered this information casually, not even glancing over at Clark.

The obvious story, the one Clark might have guessed at, had Whitney or anyone asked him before this morning.  But Clark hadn’t imagined those keys jumping.

“So you were there for how long?” Clark asked, edging closer.

The keys shimmied again, and one corner of a ‘Shots of the World’ poster rolled down off the wall.  “Three months, give or take,” said Justin, still appearing uninterested.

“And it was just a regular hospital?  They didn’t do any weird tests on you?” Clark questioned, closing in a bit more.

The poster rolled off the wall completely and Justin cursed.  “Fucking thing won’t stay put,” he grouched, clambering back to a sitting position.  The keys, when Clark glanced over, were hovering gently over the TV, but Justin seemed not to notice.

“So,” Clark said, sitting now, feeling Justin’s body warmth and hearing his racing heart.  “You’ve never heard of Constellation, then?”

The TV exploded.

Clark had time to leap in front of Justin, shield him from the shards of flying glass and plastic, but it didn’t end there.  The whole room suddenly looked like the inside of a space shuttle, every loose object in the room floating free – no, not floating, *flying* around, rebounding off of Clark’s back and arms.  Justin was trembling, his outer semblance of control shattered, and more violently he struggled against Clark, the harder and faster the objects flew.

“Justin, it’s okay!” Clark shouted, trying to keep himself between his friend and the missiles.  “I’m not going to hurt you!”

Justin writhed out of Clark’s grasp and rolled to the floor, clutching his braced hand and sobbing.  He started to crawl under the bed, but Clark seized him by the legs and hauled him back, trying to be gentle as he could, but Justin was moaning, “No, no, no,” and he didn’t seem to be within the reach of reason.

Clark managed to get him into a sitting position, Justin clutching his knees to his chest.  With as much firmness as he could muster, Clark bracketed Justin’s shoulders with his own hands and ordered him, “You have to calm down.  Justin, listen to me.  It’s okay.  You’re safe with me.”

“It’s never safe,” Justin protested, his face streaming with tears, shaking his head.

“I can protect you, no matter what,” Clark promised.  “Justin, I’m different, too.  I’m strong and I’m fast and – and – saving people is what I do, okay?”

This last seemed to impact Justin somewhat more.  He made brief eye contact and the objects slowed down noticeably.  “It doesn’t matter how strong you are, they’ll get me.”

“Not while I’m on your side,” Clark said, feeling sure of it.  “Justin, I’m different, I mean it.”

“They get all of us,” Justin said.  “No one’s safe, they make you tell names, they get everyone.”

“Who?” Clark asked, seizing on the important point.  “Who makes you tell?  Who gets us?”

“Constellation,” Justin said, licking dry lips, lifting one hand as though to illustrate.

“What’s Constellation?” Clark demanded.  “Did Constellation take you because of what you can do?”

Justin laughed abruptly, then shuddered.  With a steady brown gaze that seemed to settle all the objects in the room back to their resting places, he answered, “They don’t just take freaks.  They make us.”

“Daddy burned soup!” Brodie announced proudly as Clark stepped into the kitchen, Justin in tow.

The air hung with the scent of scorched corn, and Clark stepped over to the stove to study the source of the smell.  It looked like it had once aspired to be corn chowder.  “Daddy should stick to frozen dinners,” Clark answered.  “Why aren’t you in bed, two-bit?  It’s late.”

It was nearly eight o’clock according to the digital display (which was smeared with chowder remains).  “We had pizza,” Brodie continued, ignoring Clark’s question.  “With sausage.”  Brodie seemed unusually chipper – even his voice was higher-pitched.  Clark was beginning to get an ominous sense of what might have caused the change.

“Where’s Daddy?” Clark asked, scooping up Brodie, who was vibrating faintly with suppressed energy, and slinging him over his shoulder.

“He’s watching TV,” Brodie answered, giggling into Clark’s back.

“You can wait here,” Clark told Justin, trying to temper his voice into something gentler, then went off in search of his father.

Jonathan was watching a sit-com half-heartedly, the room darkened and the volume down.  He nodded in greeting, but Clark wasn’t in the mood to smile and pretend everything was okay.  He plopped down on the couch next to Jonathan and hit the power button on the remote.  “Bedtime is in five minutes,” Clark said, wrestling with Brodie’s hyperactive form and trying to make eye contact.  “And you let him have coke with his dinner, didn’t you?”

“It doesn’t hurt for him to have a treat once in a while,” Jonathan answered, somewhere between defensive and dismissive.

“He can’t have sugar and caffeine after five o’clock, you know that,” Clark returned, finally setting Brodie free and watching with despair as the little boy raced around the room emitting siren noises.

Jonathan was silent, staring at the blank screen.

Too exhausted to fight, Clark dropped his head into open palms, sighing.  Between Lex’s cutting remarks, Whitney’s threats, Justin’s breakdown, and now Brodie’s hyperactivity, Clark had had one hell of a day.  “Tomorrow I have to go into Granville and do some schoolwork,” Clark said at length, looking up again to watch Brodie literally careening off the walls.  “And my friend Justin is staying the night.”

Jonathan took in a breath and released it.  “I’m not sure I like that, Clark.”

“Yeah, well,” Clark said, standing up, “deal with it.”

“Now wait a minute,” Jonathan said, perking up at Clark’s insubordination.

But Clark was trying not to scream, so he kept walking, heading back towards the kitchen and away from Brodie’s noise and Jonathan’s uselessness.

“Clark Jerome –” began Jonathan.

Clark seized Justin by the hand, sensing his father behind him.  “Come on, upstairs.”

“Son, you come here and talk to me like an adult,” Jonathan ordered, like it was any day when Clark was sixteen and rebellious, except that Clark was twenty and exhausted.  “First you’re out all night without so much as a word of explanation, then you leave me alone with – not saying when you’ll be back – and now you’re bringing – we have rules in this house, Clark.  You have responsibilities.  And you’re behaving like none of that matters.”

He pushed Justin in front of him up the stairs, looking back to watch Brodie attack Jonathan, and found himself quoting Lex.  “The only way,” he said, his voice firm, eyes averted, “that things are going to get better is if you accept that Mom is dead.”

It felt unspeakably cruel, like Clark had slapped Jonathan back across the room, like he’d taken Taber away from Brodie when he was crying.  But Clark was past the point of caring, past any sense of reason.

He left Jonathan speechless at the foot of the stairs, Brodie swinging on his limp arms.

Once upstairs, Clark closed his bedroom door and leaned against it, breathing hard as a sprinter after a race.  Justin, who had been silent and shocky on the way over in the truck, was now watching Clark with dark sympathetic eyes.

“I have to check my e-mail,” Clark said, and moved towards his laptop.

“I didn’t know –” Justin said.  “It was hard for me.  I didn’t –”

Clark brushed off these hesitant overtures with a shake of his head.  “Whitney was supposed to check Lana’s car, see if she took anything with her.”

“They try to make it look like you left town,” Justin volunteered.  “They’ll have taken her car, a few of her things.  It’s easier when the change is caused by a trauma, but disappearances aren’t that hard either – people get so reclusive when they change.  They’re worried about being noticed, they actually draw attention because of it.”

“Lana was never one to blend into the background,” Clark frowned, reading Whitney’s e-mail and finding that Justin’s predictions were coming true.  Lana’s car was gone, and just a few of her clothes.

“Which must be how she managed to escape notice for so long.  I never guessed about her,” Justin mused. 

“How did you get out?”  Justin had been too shaken earlier to do much more than mutely accept Clark’s explanation of Lana’s disappearance, and this sudden flow of information was a welcome distraction.

Justin lifted his braced hand as though in explanation.  “They found out everything they needed to know, I guess.  My powers kept fading as I recuperated, and eventually they gave up on me.”

“They just let you go?  With everything you know?” Clark asked, astounded at this sloppiness.

Justin shrugged in a single-shouldered gesture.  “There’s a technique they do, sort of – blurs everything.  But.  It doesn’t work as well as they think.”

“Technique?” Clark asked, mystified by the vagueness of Justin’s language.

Justin didn’t clarify, only sitting down on Clark’s squeaky bed.  “If they knew that I remember – ” And he blanched slightly.  “I don’t think I’d be safe.”

“You’re safe with me,” Clark said, automatically.

“I know,” Justin said, with startling calm.

“You – know?”

Justin’s gaze was steady.  “Everyone knew that.  You helped a lot of us, everyone knew you were special, everyone said so… but they never went after you.”  With a slight smirk, he added, “Half of them think that you’re part of it, that it’s the only way you could be as untouched as you are.”

“I’m not, you know that,” Clark assured him hastily, sitting down beside Justin.

Justin nodded, matter-of-fact.  “I never thought you were one of the bad guys… I’ve known you since we were, what?  Five?”  He looked over at Clark, punching him lightly with his good hand.  “So what’s the secret?  How have you evaded capture?”  Justin’s tone was playful now, confident that Clark would give him the information he wanted.

Clark opened his mouth to answer, only to find that he had no response.  Sure, he was strong, and fast, and he probably had a hell of a lot more power than any of these Constellation people reckoned for – but then, why hadn’t they *tried* to get him?  Why, if as Justin and Whitney said, everyone knew about him, was Clark free and unbothered by the danger of Constellation?

“Clark?” Justin asked, sounding concerned.

Clark fixed Justin with an earnest gaze.  “Tell you the truth – I have no idea.”

Clark woke the next morning with Justin tucked under one arm and Brodie nuzzling into his other side.  “How long have you been here?” Clark asked of his brother, rubbing a thumb across a face stained with dry tear-tracks.  He had heard the screams well into the night, alternating with Jonathan’s shouts and imperatives, but, with Justin to strengthen his resolve, Clark hadn’t descended to intervene.  He’d drifted off shortly after Brodie must have exhausted himself, an uneasy silence having descended.

And now Brodie was sweet and sleep-warm next to Clark, and Clark almost felt guilty for a moment – he was enjoying the calm after the storm his father had weathered.  But Brodie was blinking up at Clark with wide Martha-blue eyes, unblinkered by his usual glasses, and Clark’s chest was suddenly tight with tenderness.  “My bed had a monster,” Brodie said.

“You kill monsters,” Clark reminded him.  “With your flashlight.”

“Yes, and he left a big puddle of snot and I didn’t want to sleep in it,” Brodie further explained.

Clark smiled and kissed the curly blonde head.  “So you came in here.”

“Yes,” Brodie agreed.  “Did Justin have a monster too?”

Clark looked over at his friend, who wasn’t stirring in spite of the conversation being held right next to him.  “Yeah, I think he did,” Clark said.  “Did Daddy go to bed?”

Brodie made a face and rolled away, clearly not wanting to broach this subject.  The bed twittered with the displacement of Brodie’s thirty-five pounds of weight, and Justin inhaled noisily, stretching.  “Come and pee,” Brodie ordered, tumbling to the floor and tugging on Clark’s hand.

“Wanna come and pee?” Clark asked of Justin, grinning in spite of himself.  Justin groaned, grinding the heel of his hand into his eyes and delicately extending one bare foot out from under the twisted sheets.

“Nah, I’m good,” Justin answered.

Clark followed Brodie into the bathroom and guided him through his morning ablutions.  As he’d suspected he would, he found that his father was already up and doing chores, a pot of coffee emitting tempting aromas through the kitchen and the roar of the wood-chipper in the barn pinpointing Jonathan’s location.

Over cereal and glasses of apple juice, Brodie and Clark discussed trucks and various kinds of monster scat.  Justin came into the kitchen around the time the topic swung over to preschool and the various uses of glue and glitter.

“Glitter, huh?” asked Justin.  “So, your baby brother plays for our team?”

Clark rolled his eyes, throwing a couple of slices of toast on a plate and placing it in front of Justin.  “He’s three.”

“I’m just saying,” Justin smiled, grabbing the jam jar on the table, “Brodie enjoys the glitter.”

Clark punched Justin’s shoulder as the back door banged open.

“Clark,” Jonathan said, “a word?”

Clark stood, signaling Justin with a glance to watch Brodie.  He was still barefoot, wearing only flannel pajama pants and his pink Radiohead shirt, so he paused by the door to toe on a pair of sneakers.  The lines of Jonathan’s back were rigid as Clark followed him out into the yard.

“Son, I –”

For brief seconds, Clark had allowed himself to imagine that this was going to be an all-out fight, maybe even the fight that ended everything, sent Clark out the door, maybe with Brodie, maybe doing exactly what Lex seemed to think needed to be done – but then, even as Clark’s pulse began to race with panic and anticipation, he looked up and saw that Jonathan’s face wasn’t set or stony.  It was drawn and defeated.

“I’m sorry, Dad,” Clark said, before he could stop himself, even though it was the last thing he’d wanted to say.  “I’m sorry,” he repeated, fumbling to continue before Dad could cry or apologize in turn, “that I – I didn’t tell you.”

“T- tell me?” asked Jonathan, gathering himself together somewhat.

And for the second time, the words spilled out before Clark understood why.  “There’s something going on.  Lana’s missing, and Whitney wants me to help find her.”

“Missing… what?  Clark, what are you talking about?”

Clark drew in a deep breath, then released it, meeting Jonathan’s questing gaze.  “It’s the meteors,” he explained, quickly, feeling something like shame.

“The meteors?”

“*You* know,” Clark urged, flushing.  “It’s my fault, all of it.  I have to help.”

Jonathan seemed incomprehensibly baffled by this statement, almost as though he’d never seen all the effects of the meteor rocks, the havoc they’d wreaked. 

“There are people who are hurting other people, making them freaks on purpose, and then doing tests on them.  Justin – Dad, he’s not the only one.  And now they’ve got Lana, and I have to help find her.”

“I don’t understand –”

“You don’t have to understand,” Clark assured him.  “I just thought you deserved to know, because I’m not going to be around as much until I get this sorted out.”

Jonathan shook his head like Clark was babbling nonsense.  “Son, you can’t just go and join this crusade.  It’s dangerous, especially for you – you know what meteor rocks do to you!”

“What else am I supposed to do?” Clark exclaimed, spreading his hands wide.  “Sit back and watch my friends suffer?”

“Your mother and I didn’t keep you safe from those things your whole childhood to have you run off and get yourself killed!” exploded Jonathan.

Even as Clark bristled under his father’s unfamiliar attempts to control him, something was niggling at the back of his mind, something in that last declaration that made his mind light up with impossible ideas.  “What good is it, to keep me safe, if I can’t use my life, my gifts to help others?”

Keep you safe.

“You can help people, you *will*,” Jonathan urged, “but not this way, Clark.  You’re not here to fight this battle.”  And Clark’s father was fierce, intense and alive like Clark hadn’t seen him in ages.  It was almost frightening for Clark, to find himself suddenly engaged in the fight he’d been expecting only minutes earlier, except that his opponent was – not someone defeated and broken.  No, Jonathan had abruptly become someone with a ferocious energy.

Your mother and I.

Clark blinked, overwhelmed, angry, and confused.  “What gives you the right to start dictating what battles I can and cannot fight?”

Jonathan opened his mouth, about to answer, his anger and determination standing out around him like an electrical field – but then he stopped short, closing his mouth, the real Jonathan draining away as suddenly as he had arrived, dissipating and swirling out into the cold autumn air.

He’d been about to say something, Clark was sure of it.

“I’m going to do this,” Clark said, the words a challenge.  “Dad, are you listening?  I’m doing this.”

But Jonathan had retreated back into his former self, and whatever had lit the long-dead fire in him was gone – whether it had been Clark’s outburst the previous night, or his revelation of Lana and Justin’s predicament, or maybe just the way Clark had gradually been pulling away from Jonathan, away from this life, this unlife.

It felt like finality when Clark turned and went back into the house.

The three of them met in Whitney’s apartment over Fordman’s.  While Justin and Whitney exchanged halting pleasantries, Clark stood and stared out the window, looking across into Lana’s own apartment which still had its blinds closed tight.

“We knew, of course,” Whitney was saying, in response to Justin’s question.  “Chloe warned us, and besides, you’d have to be blind not to notice that there’s something weird going on in this town.  But Lana didn’t want to leave, and she wouldn’t let me go either, and with my father…”

Justin nodded, fumbling for his cigarettes and then putting them away again as he remembered he wasn’t in a Granville club.  “I never wanted to come back,” he said, “but, then, I didn’t want to really leave, either.  Otherwise, I wouldn’t have stuck so close to home for college.”

“Smallville has a way of making people stay,” Whitney agreed, “and the more they want to leave, the more they get stuck here.  Look at Clark.”

They both did look at Clark, who felt their gaze on him but refused to return it.  “Whit, why do you think they left me alone?”

Whitney was silent for a moment.  “I always thought it was because you’d had a run-in with one of them, way back when you were helping Chloe fight.  And maybe something you did scared them.”

Clark shook his head slowly, reaching out to set the blinds swaying.  Not part of Constellation, as Justin’s compatriots believed, or an overtly dangerous adversary, as Whitney thought – Clark’s best guess was that, somehow, the Constellation people knew that he wasn’t just another meteor freak, and thus outside their project’s scope.  But Clark had been raised to fear the curiosity of men in white coats, and he found it nearly impossible to accept that, knowing his secret, they wouldn’t want to understand it.

Which led him back to his father’s strange passion in the barnyard that morning.  Your mother and I, he had said, didn’t keep you safe so that…

Clark was slowly circling the phrase in his mind, not yet daring to pick at its edges, to discover what it might mean, how much it might explain.  “Who are they?” Clark asked Justin, hoping this time he might get an answer.

Justin shook his head.  “I don’t know, Clark.  I wish I could tell you.  I mean, we know where they work from – but they’re so careful, you never find out what they know, who they work for.  Most of what I remember comes from the others, and who knows how much of it was true and how much was just speculation… and, like I said, everything’s all blurry.”

“Where,” Clark began, then cleared his throat against a sudden hoarseness, “where do they work from?”

Justin looked up, startled.  “*You* know,” he said, and Clark was getting tired of finding out how much he *didn’t* know.  “Where we all go, when we get taken away.”

Clark looked across at Whitney, who, for once, appeared to be as baffled as Clark. 

“Belle Reve,” Justin said, and this time when he pulled out his cigarettes, neither Clark nor Whitney stopped him as he tapped one out and lit it.  Seeing the blank expressions of his companions, Justin exhaled a lungful of smoke, took another hard draw, and explained.  “It’s a mental hospital, supposedly state-run, not far outside town.”

“And that’s where they took Lana?” Whitney asked, rising and pacing.

Justin shrugged.  “Probably.  I mean, there might be more places.  Some people talked about a place in Metropolis, called Spring… something.  I can’t remember.”

Whitney cut a glance over at Clark, obviously surprised by this sudden vagueness, but Clark quelled any questioning with a brief hand gesture.

“Well, let’s go,” Whitney said abruptly, making a motion towards the door.

“No,” Justin said, at the same time as Clark.

“Why not?” demanded Whitney hotly.  “We know where the fuckers are keeping her, let’s go bust her out.  Clark can help to do it, he’s strong.”

Clark shifted his shoulders, instinctively uneasy with the way his powers were suddenly common knowledge.

“You can’t just walk in there,” Justin said, voice taut with anger and fear.  “God, you think they wouldn’t just take you too?”

“So we’ll let them take me!” Clark said, excited.  “I’ll go undercover, get inside and then rescue Lana.  And while I’m there, I might be able to find out more about Constellation.”

“You can’t go,” Justin repeated.  “Clark, think about it – you’re the one guy they don’t touch.  We don’t know why, but it’s true.  Of everyone in Smallville, you’re the least able to go in undercover.  They know about you, and they won’t trust you.”

“Well, I’ll do it, then,” Whitney offered.

“No,” said Clark, this time in unison with Justin.  “No, Whit, you can’t, it’s too dangerous.”

Whitney clenched his jaw and shook his head briefly.  “Justin can’t go back, they won’t take you – if we’re gonna get in there, it’s gotta be me.”  He squared his shoulders, standing tall.  “Besides, if they’ve got Lana, how long before they come back to collect the full set?”

Justin appeared confused, and Clark hastened to explain.  “He and Lana are psychically linked,” he said.  “That’s their power.”

Justin’s eyes opened wide with surprise, but he didn’t speak, only ashed his cigarette onto the floor.

“I wonder how they found out about her,” Whitney mused, “without finding out about me, too.”

“That’s why,” Justin said, almost to himself.  “That’s why they never took you.”

“Me?” Clark asked, shocked.

“No,” Justin said, shaking his head.  “Him.  Whitney.”  He stubbed out his smoke and looked up to meet Whitney’s eyes.  “I wondered, when I saw you on Friday…because I thought for sure they’d taken you by now.”

Whitney frowned, confused.

“They make you say names,” Justin said, and the plates in the cupboards rattled gently.  “I said yours.”

“You ratted on me?” Whitney asked, blinking with shock.  Clark recalled the strange look on Justin’s face when he’d seen Whitney in town, and suddenly it made sense.  Justin must have been torn between guilt and immense relief, to see Whitney still free.

“But they must have investigated and not found anything – but then they wouldn’t, not if your power is psychic.  It’s not like there are obvious symptoms to that,” Justin added hastily.  “I knew – well, I suspected.  That you were one of us.”  When they both looked askance, Justin elaborated.  “I saw the article on the explosion in 2002, the one with you and Lana.  And I thought you might have been made then.”

Whitney seemed unable to decide on fury or bafflement.  “You -- *told* them?  What, to come and get me?”

Justin shook his head.  “No, of course not.  But they ask for names.  And the way they ask – you don’t say no.”

Once more, Clark made a quick gesture to signal to Whitney that this wasn’t to be pursued.  The plates rattled again.

“So – did you tell them Lana’s name?” Whitney asked.

“No,” Justin said.  “Everyone said Lana, at first, because of how her parents died… but they must have decided there was nothing to it, because they never took her until now.”  Suddenly, Whitney’s assertion that people seemed to disappear for no reason made more sense – Constellation was using insider information from their captives to help them track down more freaks.

“But why –” began Clark, puzzled by how Lana should have suddenly become a target, then he blinked and realized that they were losing track of the point.  However Lana had been discovered, the fact was that she was in trouble, and they needed to save her.  “Whitney,” Clark said, “I think we have to go with your plan.  Justin, how do we get him in?”

“Nothing so easy,” Justin said, regaining his earlier calm.  “Whit, all you have to do is go psycho and try to kill someone.”

It took two full days to lay their plans and practice its execution while maintaining an outward appearance of normalcy.  Whitney kept the store running, and Clark and Justin headed back to class the next day as though nothing had changed.  At Clark’s insistence, however, Justin was now staying at the farm.  Though Clark had planned to make up the couch for him this time, they found, coming home on Sunday night, that it was already occupied.

“That’s kind of – cute,” Justin offered.

Clark wasn’t capable of the same kind of offhand commentary.

Jonathan was stretched out on the couch, snoring lightly, and Brodie was snugged into the space between his father and the back of the couch, a slight smile curving his lips.  Jonathan’s hand rested on Brodie’s head as though he’d coaxed the little boy into sleep before succumbing himself.

Three years, and Clark hadn’t really ever expected it to happen – but he’d been right, feeling like he was walking away that morning.  He’d been right to leave.

It felt like ages had passed since yesterday morning, when Lex had told Clark that his father was broken, beyond recovery.  So much of what Lex had shouted seemed to be true but maybe this last thing, this vital thing, wasn’t exactly as Lex had seen it.

Clark watched his brother sleeping, wondered what their day had been like when Clark hadn’t been there to buffer or to blame, when Jonathan had known that Clark wasn’t coming back, not really.  It had probably been horrible and exhausting and Brodie would be acting out, testing his father, not just sweetly reveling in Jonathan’s attention as usual, but sensing that something was amiss and reacting to it.  And Jonathan hadn’t walked out.  He hadn’t come to find Clark and he hadn’t called on May Schafer.  He must have fought Brodie, interacted with him, waited out his temper tantrums.  Clark doubted that either of them had eaten enough or gotten any farmwork done or had a moment’s peace during the long day. 

If Clark had been there, in the barn or in his room, he wouldn’t have been able to stand it, the noise and the disorder.  He would have long since taken over, carrying through on his long-ago promise to care for Brodie, even if he did it with resentment.

But he hadn’t been there, and Jonathan had gotten through on his own.

“You can go upstairs,” Clark said quietly to Justin.  “I just want to grab something from the barn.”  Justin nodded and headed up the stairs, and Clark spent long moments willing himself not to disturb the picture before him, not to scoop up Brodie and scold his father and put everything back the way it used to be.

Clark hadn’t expected it would hurt this much to see Brodie, finally where he belonged.

He eventually forced himself away, heading for the loft, deliberately avoiding looking at the various items of Brodie paraphernalia that littered the scene.  Touching the baby monitor was unavoidable, however – that was where Clark kept Chloe’s –

The red binder with the butterflies was gone.

Chapter Two

Apparently Lex’s clothes were now three months out of date, because no sooner had he stepped into his new office with the panoramic view on Monday morning than there was a click from his secretary’s intercom and a smooth voice informing him that he was to go directly to the corporate tailor’s for his appointment.  Lex admired the smog and buzz of his city for another moment, then replied that he would leave in a moment.

Now one of the double doors behind Lex shyly clicked open and closed again, and Lex turned to see that a young blonde had entered the room, clutching a clipboard to her chest and generally looking terrified.

“And you are?” Lex inquired, lifting his eyebrows in surprise.  He had seen his secretary as he’d entered and had immediately earmarked her – brunette, all legs, and English accent to boot – as the one his father had expected him to stray to first.  But he was now revising his guess, feeling mightily impressed with his father at this second and far subtler play.  She was small, shorter than Lana even, but for all her petite size, she gave the impression that she was bursting with energy, that under the pale big-eyed surface lurked the soul of a true spitfire.

“The lowly intern,” she answered, with a quick smile and a nervous tucking of blonde hair into the already immaculate ponytail.  “To show you the way to the tailor’s.  Um.  Patrice said it had moved since you left?”

“I don’t doubt that it has,” Lex nodded, shrugging his shoulders and realizing that he was still wearing yesterday’s clothes.  If he wanted to, Lex thought suddenly, he could probably sniff his shirtsleeve and smell Clark.

“Are you ready to leave now?  Because if you aren’t, I’m sure that Patrice has like seven more menial and degrading tasks for me.”  Another quick smile, another hair-tuck, and for all her nerves and high school speech mannerisms, the girl was clearly starting to relax a little in Lex’s august presence.

“Do you need rescuing?” Lex asked, feeling his mouth crook in spite of himself.

Finally, a real smile burst to the surface, a grin in fact, and Lex’s own smile faltered a little, because it reminded him a bit too much of – “God, yes,” she laughed.  “I’ve actually started contemplating why the alphabet is ordered the way it is, I’ve done so much filing.”

“I’ve always been a lobbyist for an earlier placement of the letter R, myself,” Lex replied as he moved towards the door, now needing to get out of these clothes, into anything else.

“I was just going to redo the whole thing,” the girl said.  “But I could start with R, if you’d like.”

“Tip on corporate culture,” Lex advised solemnly.  “Never wait to be asked.”  He held eye contact with the girl for a long moment, until her mouth opened in slight flirtatiousness, her head tilting coyly.

“I’ll have that new alphabet on your desk by noon tomorrow, boss,” she said, winking, then walking ahead of him.

Lex took the chance to enjoy the rear aspect of his new prey.  For the second time in as many months, he felt his mouth curl as he murmured,  “Thanks, Dad.”

At least the words were more heartfelt this time.

“So I changed my major,” said the intern, apparently unmoved by the spectacle of her new boss standing, arms extended, in nothing but his boxers and a half-buttoned dress shirt.  “And applied for work-study, and here I am.”

The tailor was moving around Lex with the tape, and took the rare moment of silence from Lex’s companion as a chance to ask, “Do you dress left or right, sir?”

“Left,” supplied Lex, looking up to see if the girl would blush now.  But she was grinning ear to ear, clearly amused by the whole situation.  He should have sent her directly back to Patrice’s tender mercies, Lex knew, but for some reason, the girl amused him.

“I have this theory,” she said, launching back into her monologue, “that there’s a statistical significance to which way men dress, left or right.”

“Do tell,” Lex urged her, feigning fascination.

“Well, I’ve just come up with this theory based on the very small statistical sample of  you, so bear with me,” she warned solemnly.  “But here goes: men who dress left are more likely to be patient with obnoxious and talkative college sophomores who watch them standing around in their underwear.”

“I imagine you’ll have to stick around here for the rest of the day in order to test your hypothesis,” Lex surmised.

“No, I’m content to go on blithely believing in my own theories without any proof,” she answered lightly.  “And you don’t know this about me, but that’s one way I’ve grown as a person since I transferred into business.  I used to be kind of compulsive about theory-testing.”

“It does sound like a quality that might work against you in the world of corporate politics,” Lex agreed, turning at a nudge from the tailor.

“You’re telling *me*,” she said.  “I would never have made it through the past two months if it weren’t for my completely untested theory that Patrice is actually an orangutan that underwent serious cosmetic surgery down in the depths of the LuthorCorp lab facilities.”

Lex laughed in spite of himself.

“Besides,” she continued, more seriously, “my dad is like I used to be, and nothing teaches you not to ask questions like watching your father get stranded in the nether-regions of middle management all because he can’t learn to keep his big mouth shut.”

“Who does your dad work for?” Lex asked, turning obediently and lowering his arms.  The tailor waved him down from the stool.

The girl’s fine brown eyebrows drew together as she smirked.  “Funny you should mention it,” she said.  “Up until this morning, I think he reported directly to you.”

“You’re Chloe Sullivan,” Lex said, stunned.  “You’re Gabe’s kid?”

The legendary Chloe, the genius theorist and investigator who had compiled the red binder Lex had pilfered from Clark’s loft, was standing in front of him dressed in a student’s version of business casual, wrinkled blouse and neat ponytail, scuffed low heels, the hint of a slip peeking below a tailored skirt.  She was so – young.

Lex actually laughed out loud, so shocked was he.  It seemed impossible.  In Lex’s mind, Chloe Sullivan had taken on mythic proportions.  Could all that brilliance be contained in this small blonde package?

“Wow, you actually listened to him when he talked about me?” she asked, squeezing her clipboard to her chest and rolling her eyes in sympathy.  “How polite of you!”

“He – you were in journalism at Columbia, though,” Lex managed, trying to collect his thoughts, still certain he must be mistaken somehow.

“I transferred to business, I told you,” she said, with a wave of her hand.  “But I haven’t told him yet, so don’t you go blabbing to him.  He’s going to have a cow.”

It was really her, then.  Lex’s grand gesture of departing Smallville, abandoning its environs and its inhabitants in one abrupt move, had lasted precisely two days and two minutes – Saturday, Sunday, and just now, the few moments that he had spent in his office alone.  Scarcely more than forty-eight hours of freedom had passed before Constellation’s chief investigator had walked into his life, as though the mystery had been tailing him all the way from Smallville.

“I won’t tell,” Lex said, sweeping his gaze over Chloe again and feeling somewhat shocked at himself for having recently thought she was sexy.  She was – god, she was Gabe’s *kid*.  Did Lex have some sort of subconscious attraction to Smallville natives?  First Lana, then Clark, now –

But Lex put those impulses aside and took the folded clothes he was being offered.  “I have to change,” he said.  “Will you wait for me?”  As if she might vanish.  In spite of himself, Lex was intrigued, and though he had no idea how he ought to proceed, he knew that he wanted to know more.

“Yeah, of course,” she said, puzzled now.  “Look, if Dad told you anything about my bodily functions, please refrain from remembering it.”

Lex only smiled awkwardly and ducked into a change room.

Chloe Sullivan.

Christ.

The important thing to discover, Lex thought as he followed Chloe back towards his office, was whether Chloe’s appearance was a strange coincidence or a deliberate move on his father’s part.  The odds seemed in favor of the latter – after all, what was the chance of Gabe’s daughter, out of all the interns at LuthorCorp, being assigned to Lex the very day he returned to the fold?  If Lionel suspected that Lex had begun to delve into Constellation, though, why on earth would he put Lex in proximity of the person who had to be the premier civilian authority on the project?  Was it a test?  Were they being monitored?  Somewhere, was Lionel waiting to hear if Lex made some gesture to Chloe, some signal that might tell Lionel that Lex knew about Constellation?

If that was the case, the best strategy would be to keep doing what he had been doing before – treating Chloe like she was a shiny toy laid out for him by his father.

But watching Chloe, glancing over at the playful liveliness of her features and knowing what she was, underneath all the smiles and jokes, Lex found it difficult to believe that Chloe herself would have walked into the lion’s den she knew LuthorCorp to be without some ulterior motive.  Could she be in Lionel’s pocket, herself the spy who would report on Lex?  It wouldn’t be the first time that Lionel had corrupted fresh-faced innocence and used it in order to lure his targets into a false sense of safety.

It didn’t, however, seem likely.  For some reason Lex couldn’t pinpoint, he instinctively trusted Chloe.  He couldn’t imagine that she had been tainted by Lionel.

Which meant she probably wasn’t a plant, and she probably also knew full well that she was in a dangerous position.  After all, she knew LuthorCorp, better than Lex himself had until recently.  Why, once she had safely escaped to Columbia, would she have returned?

There was only one explanation: Chloe Sullivan was back on the clock.

But why would Lionel allow her in the building, if she wasn’t working for him?  Chloe, with all her proof and her years of investigation, was a loose cannon that could destroy everything Lionel valued.

It took Lex longer to puzzle this one out.  Once they reached his office, he politely dismissed Chloe and sat down at his mammoth desk, turning the problem over and over in his head.

When the answer finally struck him, Lex couldn’t help grinning.

There’s no safer place to be than in the belly of the beast that’s trying to devour you.  Gabe’s words, referring to Level Three and the Wall of Weird, but a talent for strategy and intrigue must run in the Sullivan family as well as the Luthors, because Chloe would only have walked into this beast’s belly if she knew with absolute certainty that she was going in under the radar.

Lionel, Lex realized, had no fucking clue that he had swallowed his worst enemy.

Lex let Chloe come to him.  As difficult as it was to admit, between the two of them, she was the expert in maneuvering around LuthorCorp’s many eyes and ears.  Waiting for her to make her move should have been torturous, but in the meantime, Lionel’s promise of grooming Lex was coming true, at least on the surface.  Lex barely had time to shower and dress in one of his new suits before the paperwork and phone calls started arriving.  For years, he’d wondered when Lionel would finally trust him with some real responsibility, *if* Lionel would.  Now, faced with the mounds of work that began to stack up on his desk, Lex realized what Lionel expected.  He expected Lex to fold under the pressure, to bail and return to his old haunts, his old habits.

The Lex of two months ago, the Lex before Smallville, would have done just that.

But Gabe’s puzzles, the Constellation mystery, they had made Lex realize his own capabilities.  Even if he was out of practice, even if he was a novice at this game, Lex’s mind was made for this – corporate intrigue, project management, networking and using people to Lex’s best advantage.  It was so natural, so invigorating.  Lex sailed through four days’ worth of work in ten hours, and it was only when he looked up to see that it was after midnight that he realized that he was alone in the building, barring a few security personnel.

Lex rubbed his eyes and slowly shut his laptop, shelving a dozen ideas for the next day.  Midnight.

In Smallville, Brodie would have been asleep for four hours.  Eight o’clock, off like a light switch.  The sleepy weight of his head on Lex’s shoulder.

Lex stood up from his desk, hurriedly clearing it of papers and forcing himself to focus on something else, anything that might –

“My dad doesn’t know,” spoke a voice from the doorway.

Chloe, one foot into the cool blue light of Lex’s office, seeming even younger than she had that morning.

Lex cleared his throat, grateful for the distraction.  “He doesn’t know you’re here?” he asked, clarifying.

A small negative gesture.  “He wanted… well, he wanted something different for me.”  She emitted a short ironic laugh.  “So did I, you have no idea.”

“And now you’re here because…” Lex prompted, loosening his tie and flicking open the top button of his dress shirt.

She was silent, her gaze dropping to the stretch of floor between them.  It was a posture, Lex realized, of sweet helplessness.  She was trying to appeal to Lex’s heroic side, get him to drop his guard, get him vulnerable while he protected her own vulnerability.  She was playing him, in other words.

“Maybe we haven’t been properly introduced,” Lex said, feeling his voice grow sharper, almost angry, as he strode over to Chloe.  She looked up, startled, when he held out his palm.  “I’m Crow.”

The word unlocked Chloe’s taut posed posture, and yet nothing about her seemed to relax.  She took his hand, maybe simply out of instinct, and breathed, “He told you.  He went to you.”  Her eyes were wide, but it was impossible to tell if she was frightened or astounded.

“And I had every right to know,” Lex bit back, unable to shake the rising sense of anger, unable to even guess its source.  He drew back his hand abruptly, thinking that he might hurt Chloe by squeezing her palm too hard, but the gesture itself was almost violent in its suddenness.

Chloe, however, didn’t flinch.  “Does the pawn have a right to know he’s a pawn?” she asked, losing the last traces of her younger persona, becoming someone much older than she had any right to be.  “Does he deserve to know?  After all, he’s let himself be used.”

“I’m no one’s pawn!” Lex exploded, and reeled away, pacing back across the office, heading for –

For the scotch.

Lex stopped himself with a quick puff of self-derision.

“God, I can’t believe he’d risk that, letting you on in this!” Chloe exclaimed, her voice filled with irritation.  “Of all the stupid –”

“I’ve been helping!” Lex interrupted, turning back to face her.  “I’ve been helping your father, not working against him!”

“Helping?  You?” Chloe laughed, her voice echoing disbelief.  “What, are you sleeping your way to the truth?  No, wait, let me guess.  You’re going to take enough drugs so that you *hallucinate* the answer.”

“You don’t know me!” Lex exclaimed, truly aggravated now, but his instinctive motion at the end of the declaration again took him in the direction of the bar.  He stopped himself once more.

“Okay, what have you been doing that’s so helpful?” Chloe asked.  “Have you infiltrated the project?  Used your name to unlock doors?  Or have you started looking for blackmail material on a board member who could give us information?  What exactly have you done to help my dad?”

Lex wanted to answer, but his mind was freezing up like a sluggish computer.  All the things Chloe said, he could have *done* those things.  What had he been doing instead?

Butting his head up against dead ends.  Stealing information that Chloe and Gabe had already collected.  Distracting his father and sleeping with a local – make that *two* locals.

And, oh yeah, rolling around on the carpet with a three-year-old piano prodigy.

The fact was, Lex had done nothing to help.

“Look, I’m not exactly top of the heap here at SatanCorp,” Chloe’s voice sounded, dim under the roaring of Lex’s blood.  “But even I know that fucking a meteor freak isn’t the same as helping one.”

It took a moment for it to strike, and when it did, Lex didn’t think.  He just spoke, pivoting one last time to face Chloe.

“Clark?  He’s one of them?”

The look of shock that crossed her face told him that he’d blurted the wrong name.

Chloe laughed, a short high sound, once the immediate expression of disbelief had passed.  “Wow,” she exhaled, fine brows coming together as her gaze dove down and to the right.  “You really got around Smallville during your stay, huh?”

Lex opened his mouth, feeling the need to explain or apologize, perhaps both, but Chloe broke into sudden motion, stepping briskly across the office with an air of total dismissal.

“By the way, he’s not a meteor freak,” Chloe tossed back casually, rounding Lex’s desk and shuffling through the few papers he had left out.  “Lana is, but you’ll have figured that out by now – unless, of course, there’s another notch in your bedpost that you want to tell me about.”  She picked up an invoice and frowned at it.  “So, let me get this straight – you were helping my dad with the investigation, and you didn’t even notice that your fiancée is among your father’s victims?”

Her voice wasn’t derisive, not even angry.  No, it was cool and bored and somewhat impatient.  Lex had been put off by her confidence up until now, but finally his own sense of self-importance surfaced, and he joined her at the desk, snatching the invoice from her hand.  “The point of the investigation isn’t to collect a list of names,” Lex snapped.  “In fact, such a list might even be dangerous to the meteor infected people.  But you found that out for yourself, didn’t you?”  The sudden halting of articles in the Torch in 2002, Chloe’s subsequent decision to move her investigation underground – maybe Lionel hadn’t had to threaten her directly.  Maybe all it had taken was the suspiciously-timed disappearances of a few of the creature-features from her Torch articles, and Chloe had done the math.  And Lionel, no longer perceiving her as a source of information, had entirely failed to consider her as a threat.

Chloe met his eyes, gaze blue and steady.  “No, you’re right,” she conceded, sitting down in his own desk chair.  “The real crux of the mystery is here, in this building.”

“Which is why you came back?” Lex prompted, perching on the edge of the desk, trying not to be obviously annoyed by the way Chloe was making herself at home, so at odds with the uncertain bubbly college sophomore of that morning.

She replied to this with the briefest of glances before rolling back in the chair and folding her hands in her lap.  “Why are you doing this?” she queried, gravely.

Lex felt his mouth tighten.  “If you’re questioning my loyalties, then—”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” Chloe interrupted, almost smiling.  “I’m just curious – is this about revenge?  Because if so, why on earth have you just come crawling back into Daddy’s lap?”

Lex stood up abruptly, as though Chloe had struck him.  His impulse was to lie, say something about having the same purpose as Chloe – to investigate more closely.  But when he opened his mouth to do it, the words were different.  “I have,” he spoke, feeling his heart begin to hammer, “a bad habit of running away.”

Chloe relaxed noticeably at this.  “Sucks when your problems chase you down wherever you go, huh?”  Not cold and irritable now – her voice was friendly, sympathetic.

Lex turned to face her.  “Personal experience?”

She shrugged, kicking her feet up on the desk.  “Something like that.”  Then, a smile burst to the surface and she was once again the sunny young intern.

Lex couldn’t help but smile back.  “So, Miss Sullivan,” he opened, reaching across the desk and pushing her feet off it gently but firmly.  She moved, but not without an impish grin.  “Tell me how we’re going to raze this motherfucker to the ground."

Lionel seemed a bit surprised to find Lex in his office, but with typical panache, he covered his discomfiture with a shark-grin.  “You’re here early,” he greeted Lex, sounding proud.

Lex looked up from the stack of files in front of him, stretching out on the leather couch.  “Just playing catch-up,” he said, dropping a fat folder on the floor next to a dozen of its companions.  “By the way, I need you to give the okay for my platinum security clearance.  Can we get that done today?”

Lionel came up to Lex and toed aside a few files, casually checking on what Lex was reading.  “It’s a process, son.  First you have to go through that psychiatric evaluation we discussed.”

Lex waved a hand in the air, dismissing the obstacle, but keeping his eyes fixed on the new file in front of him.  “I’ve already made an appointment for tomorrow morning.”

“You’re certainly seizing the day,” Lionel commended him, a bit awkwardly.  “What’s prompted this sudden interest in the family business?”

“I’ve always been interested,” Lex lied blithely, frowning at the page, then looking up with a disingenuous smile.  “But you’ve never opened the doors for me before, have you?”

Lionel laughed lightly and took a turn around Lex’s office.  “Security tells me you were here late with your young intern.  Does that have anything to do with your enthusiasm?”

Lex didn’t bat an eyelash at this information, only smiled and turned the page in his file.

“Hmm,” breathed Lionel, clearly amused.  “A blonde sophomore from New York – and I thought you would pursue Patrice.”

Lex wetted his lips and raised one eyebrow, aiming to strike a balance between filial annoyance and male pride.  “I’ll look forward to that platinum clearance by this evening, then,” he said, dismissing Lionel by implication.

“You’ll come to lunch with me,” Lionel ordered on his way out.  “Important meeting with investors.  Try not to get so wrapped up in this new one that you forget.”

Lex watched surreptitiously as his father flung open the double doors to Lex’s office, striding self-importantly past Patrice and, behind her, Chloe looking unassuming and young in an ill-tailored business jacket.

Chloe was right – Lionel’s greatest weakness was how much he underestimated Lex.

Yves Thibidault was a small man, unassuming in style as well as stature.  Lex knew the type from his boarding school days, even if Lionel, with his nouveau-riche pretentiousness, didn’t.  Thibidault was old money, such old money that he dispensed with the trappings of wealth, preferring to intimidate by showing how unimportant he considered such things to be.

Lex shook his hand and greeted him briefly in his stilted long-abandoned Excelsior French.  Thibidault appeared amused by the attempt, but not affronted, so Lex considered it a point in his favor.

“Your father has told me you are taking on more responsibilities in LuthorCorp,” queried Thibidault.

“I think he means to say, I’m joining him in more of our public and investor relations endeavors,” Lex corrected mildly.  “I’ve been active in the company for years now.”

Thibidault accepted this as the obvious falsehood it must seem with a gracious smile and a murmured comment about misunderstandings.  Lex waved the investor into a seat at the table and sat opposite him, flashing a reassuring smile in Lionel’s direction.  He’d been assigned Thibidault in the limo on the way to the meeting, probably because – as Lex perused the mostly-typical crowd of blustering loud investors surrounding them – the Frenchman was by far the most difficult of the group.

They exchanged polite commentary over the menus – a Californian light version of high cuisine – recalling different meals in better locales.  Lex managed to draw a smile out of his dour companion by knowing a certain bistro in Montmartre of which Thibidault was fond.

Everything was going very well, in short, until the entrée salads arrived and Lionel leaned in with a too-white grin.  “My son,” Lionel said, “is lately engaged to be married, Yves.  Did he mention it?”

Yves eyebrows rose in feigned interest, and Lex cut a sideways glance at his father, suspicious but determined not to show it.

“The lady,” Lionel said, “is quite charming, if a bit young.”

“It’s better to marry young,” decreed the investor, raising his wineglass to Lex in tribute.  “It brings stability to man’s home life.”

Lex drank the informal toast being proposed, and then grinned at his father.  If Lionel meant to discomfit Lex by bringing up Lana so shortly after his supposed night of debauchery with the intern, he was gravely mistaken.  Besides the fact that nothing had happened between him and Chloe, there was the important truth that he and Lana also had far less interest in each other than Lionel supposed.  “She’s beautiful,” he advised Thibidault in a confidential voice.

Thibidault smiled indulgently.  “I have no doubt that she is.”

“A beautiful wife can be a dangerous commodity,” Lionel contributed, leaning in again.  “So easy to lose track of her comings and goings when one is so busy, isn’t it?”

Lex glanced over at his father again, wondering what on earth Lionel meant by this, wondering a bit queasily if Lionel was setting his sights on Lex’s fiancée.  But Lionel was aiming his sharp smile at Thibidault and wouldn’t meet Lex’s eyes.  Was this a power game between Lionel and the investor, then?  Was there a long-held grudge, some past or current adultery that Lionel knew about?  Thibidault’s ring finger was bare, but that didn’t indicate much.

“When can we hope to see your lovely bride-to-be again, son?” Lionel asked, shifting focus back to Lex.

Lex set his fork down and assumed the broad smile of a man in love.  “Very soon, I’m sure,” he lied cheerily.  “She’s supposed to be coming up for the weekend, I spoke with her this morning.”

“Did you indeed?” Lionel said, pulling a surprised face.  “I’m delighted to hear it.”

Lex returned to his lunch feeling uneasy without quite understanding why.  Thibidault, on the other hand, seemed to relax noticeably after Lionel’s interruption, and smiled quite freely when he and Lex parted ways.

When he pressed Lex’s hand in farewell, he leaned in as though to impart something deeply personal.  “Your father must be very pleased to have such a loyal son,” he said, with a significant brow raise.  “He could scarcely have won my continued support without you.”

And with this enigmatic parting line, Thibidault left.

It was difficult to keep mulling over what Thibidault could have meant, especially when Lex had a visit from LuthorCorp’s top security tech.

“And you’re done,” she announced, standing up and closing a window on Lex’s laptop.  “There’s a magnetic card and an ID badge, but those will take a couple of days to process.  Still, with your new passwords, you can access any platinum-level electronic files on the corporate servers, and of course anything below that.”

“Are there any restrictions on this?” Lex asked, slipping into his chair and quickly logging into the server.

“There are a few,” she nodded, to Lex’s surprise.  “It’s privileged information, obviously… so certain files can’t be mailed or printed.”

Lex accepted this mutely.  “Anything else?”

“Yeah.  There are some side projects which have separate security clearance codes, and unless you’re acting in some supervisory capacity, you’re not cleared for those.”

Lex couldn’t give himself time to think.  Instead, he followed quickly on the heels of this remark, hoping to catch the tech off-guard.  “Like Constellation?” he asked, not looking up from his e-mail inbox.

Her quick intake of breath told him that she recognized the word, but Lex kept his gaze fixed, not wanting to give away his interest.  “Y-yes.  Like Constellation,” she said.  “Are you – did you – I wasn’t aware that you were involved, I can check on getting you clearance for –”

“It’s fine,” Lex assured her, feeling his pulse thump as he realized that he may have just made a critical error – what if she went to Lionel with the news that Lex knew about Constellation?  “I’m not directly involved, I’m just peripherally aware.”

“I see,” she said, after a pause.  “Well, I should –”

Lex took her by the wrist as she prepared to leave, her head down and laptop clutched to her chest.  She froze, obviously frightened, and Lex knew from that instant that he had the power in this situation.  He just had to use it.  “I didn’t get your name,” he said, smoothly.

“M-molly.  Molly Griggs,” she stammered, wetting her lips nervously.

“Molly,” Lex said, releasing her wrist gently.  “Molly, have you heard of Belle Reve?”

Her eyes were wide and terrified as she looked back at him, and Lex stood, quick to reassure her.

“I’m trying to find out more,” he said, earnestly.  “My father, he’s hurting people there, and I need to know more.”

She backed away, tripping a little as she did so, eyeing Lex like he was insane.  “I – I don’t know anything.”

“But you can get me in, can’t you?” Lex asked, trying to sound soothing in spite of his urgency.

She shook her head, still backing away.  The way she was reacting, it was as though she expected Lex to hurt her.  “Please,” she whimpered.

“You – were you at Belle Reve?” Lex asked with a sudden flash of insight.

She shook her head again, “N-no.”  It could just have been fear, except that she sounded like she was telling Lex a fact, not denying one.

“But Constellation – you’re involved somehow.”  Lex didn’t know what else to do – everything he said only seemed to make Molly even more frightened.  Desperate, he took her by the shoulder and forced her to meet his eyes.  “I can protect you,” he promised, feeling the weight of the promise suddenly settling onto his shoulders.  “You’re safe, you just have to trust me.  Help me.”

“Why should I trust you?” she said.  “Mr. Luthor said the same thing before –”

As shocked as Lex was, he managed to keep his focus.  “I am not my father,” Lex said.  “Molly, look at me.  You can trust me.”

She was still.  She didn’t resist Lex’s touch, but her eyes were silently begging Lex to let her go.

“Whatever he did to you, to the others,” Lex said, feeling certain that he was right, “he’s going to pay.”

She searched his eyes for a moment, her fear slowly ebbing.  “Are you – are you sure?  You can protect me?”

“I just need your help,” Lex nodded.

Molly paused, then moved towards his computer again.  “It’ll just take twenty-four hours.”  She looked up at Lex, and for the first time, he noticed that she was quite beautiful, behind the horn-rimmed glasses and the serious expression.  “I’ll get you in.”

They had a celebratory dinner of chow mein and spring rolls in Chloe’s executive apartment in the LuthorCorp tower.

“We’re putting up interns in the executive luxury suites?” Lex had asked, gazing in appreciation at the sleek granite floors and the hot tub in the living room.

“Well, not officially,” Chloe had said, sashaying around the space, still gleeful from their victory.  “Your father had seventeen of these babies built when he remodeled the tower a few years back, but he forgot that most people would rather not literally live at work.  There was a guy in accounting over in Suite 5B, but apparently he got married and moved to the suburbs.  So – a little creative requisitioning, a little sweet-talking the key press manager, and tada!  Luxury living at a fraction of the price.”

“A fraction being –”

Chloe had wrinkled her noise and flopped down on the leather sofa, drawing figures in the air with her index finger.  “What’s ten percent of nothing?”

Lex had had to smile.

“The beauty,” she explained now, lifting a half dozen noodles on her chopsticks, “of a large, unwieldy, multi-billion-dollar corporation is that there are just so many loopholes.”

Lex was torn between laughter, disbelief, and the righteous outrage of a businessman.  “You can’t be serious,” he said.  “God, I couldn’t sneeze without it showing up in the security log when I was fifteen, and you’re telling me that you’ve managed to rip off free accommodation from my father’s bankroll?”

Chloe waggled her chopsticks.  “And a corporate expense account.  You see, you’re looking at Renee Welch from staff training and development.”  She fluttered her lashes and waved at herself coyly.

“Renee – you’ve got two jobs?”

“No,” Chloe said.  “Renee’s a real person.  She got laid off six weeks ago, but sadly, her boss’s Action and Status form never made it to human resources.  Seems some intern misplaced it.  She’s been knocked off the payroll, but they forgot to close her expense account because of the lost form.”

“That’s fraud,” Lex said, somewhere between appalled and impressed.

“It’s a weird and unfortunate accounting error,” Chloe returned evenly.  “Which may or may not be discovered at some point.”

Lex shook his head, biting into a spring roll.  “Must be nice, to be able to work the system from the inside.”

She nodded.  “I even managed to get one of the up-and-coming security techs to come by your office and debug it yesterday.”  She rolled her eyes.  “He was just *horrified* by how much intra-corporate espionage he found.  Sent a memo to your dad and everything.”  She snorted.  “Lionel will have to wait at least a couple of days before sending in a team to bug you again, or it’ll contradict the very censorious memo he was forced to send in response.”

Lex carefully held his face in an impassive expression, not showing the wave of resentment that washed over him.  That his father had been spying on him was not so much a shock as a disappointing reminder of how little he was trusted.  “I almost wish,” Lex said, feigning detachment, “that he hated me.  Fear is so much more difficult to predict.”

“Fear?” inquired Chloe, stealing a spring roll.

“He thinks I’m unstable,” Lex admitted.  “He thinks I – he thinks I’m like some of the other meteor freaks.  Homicidal.”

Chloe licked a spot of plum sauce from the corner of her mouth, frowning.  “I honestly have to wonder about that – the psychosis, I mean.  I know there are a few shining examples of what the meteors can do to a person’s mental health, but generally, people seem to cope pretty well.  I know most of the undercover meteor freaks in Smallville, and the worst of them are only a little obsessive – not crazy.  Like – well, take Whitney, for example –”

“Whitney Fordman?” Lex interrupted.  “He’s one, too?”

Chloe nodded, but didn’t advance any details.

“I’m not so sure that he’s completely stable, in that case,” Lex told her, seriously.  “He threatened me back in Smallville, told me to stay away from Lana.  He stalks her, she told me so.”

“I wouldn’t call it stalking,” Chloe said, “when he can’t help but follow her around.”

Lex raised his eyebrows in surprise, and Chloe quickly explained about Lana and Whitney – they were psychically linked, thanks to Lionel’s little green rocks.

“So it’s no wonder he’s jealous,” she said.  “Imagine having to watch your ex with someone else.”

Lex let himself imagine it for about two seconds, having to watch as Clark and his friend – but he forced the thought away.  “Lana and I aren’t really together,” he assured Chloe hastily.  “We were, but nothing serious.  I mostly used her as a distraction, to keep my father’s attention away from – from what I was really doing.”

“Away from your investigations?” Chloe asked astutely. “Or away from Clark Kent?”

“Both,” Lex replied.  “Your father warned me about – but you said Clark wasn’t – is it Brodie, then?”

“Brodie?” Chloe asked.  “No, he’s just an ordinary little kid.  Besides, Clark doesn’t let him eat locally-grown food, because of the meteor contamination.  Even their water is specially filtered.”

“So why did your father warn me away?” asked Lex, puzzled, momentarily dismissing the surprising revelation that Clark knew about the meteor contamination.

Chloe pursed her lips.  “My dad might think that Clark is one of them.  But – my dad.  He doesn’t have the whole picture.  There’s a lot I didn’t tell him, to protect him, and the others.  He doesn’t know most of the undercover mutants in Smallville, either.”

Lex thought there was more in this statement, but Chloe seemed to close down after she finished speaking, and he sensed there would be little point in pursuing the issue at the moment.  He paused, then tried a different tack.  “So, what you’re saying is that in order to distract my father from Clark Kent – who isn’t a meteor mutant – I used Lana Lang – who is.”

Chloe started to smile at this, but the grin froze into a worried grimace halfway through.  “God, that could have been dangerous for Lana.  I mean, she’s pretty good at hiding what she does, but if she’d made so much as a single slip while you were seeing her – she has no idea that LuthorCorp is linked to Constellation, none of them does.  When I warned them, I kept it vague, to protect them.  She wouldn’t have been on her guard.”

“She didn’t slip up,” Lex assured Chloe.  “She’s fine.  If anything, I’d be more worried about Whitney attacking her.”

“But you’ve spoken to her,” Chloe said, sighing with relief.  “She’s okay.”

It wasn’t a question, but the statement forced Lex to realize that he hadn’t in fact spoken to Lana since his last night in Smallville.  With a pretend-casual smile, Lex pulled his cell phone from his pocket and dialed Lana’s number, gesturing to Chloe to be quiet for a moment.  Lana was never far from her own cell phone, since it was the line from which she ran her interior design business.

“The number you have reached is out of service,” said a smooth computerized voice.  “Please check your directory and try again.”

Chapter Three

Whitney raised one finger and pointed it steadily at the wall while the patrons of the Beanery dove for cover and screamed.  A glimmer of heat, and when Whitney lowered his hand, the words ‘youre dead’ were flickering in flames on the wall behind the cappuccino bar.

“You forgot the apostrophe,” Justin told Clark helpfully, and Clark resisted the urge to give Justin the apostrophe personally, possibly burning it into his ass.

“Shut up, I’m trying to concentrate,” Clark scowled, elbowing Justin behind him to afford a clearer view of Whitney and his showdown.  Clark and Justin were crouched under a table, like many of the others in the coffee shop, but Clark needed to be able to see Whitney’s actions if he was going to convincingly fake Whitney’s supposed power.

“You took Lana, you all took her!” Whitney roared, giving quite an impressive performance.  “Where is she?”

He raised his hand again, and Clark hastily squinted and traced another word into the wall – ‘Lana’.

“Why did you write ‘llama’?” Justin asked, snorting.

“It says, ‘shut up Justin,’” Clark snapped.  “How long did you say it would take before they came?”

“I didn’t say – but it can’t be long, right?”

“What’s going to happen when they get him and he suddenly can’t do his – flaming finger thing?” Clark hissed, while Whitney reeled around and glared at one girl who wouldn’t stop screaming.

“He can tell them that he won’t do it for them,” Justin suggested.  “They might be patient about it – at first.”  His voice broke a bit on the last word, and he hastily cleared his throat.

Clark wondered yet again about what Justin had been through and silently vowed that he would break Whitney and Lana out of Belle Reve in front of countless guards if it would spare them meeting the same fate.

“Wish I could help,” Justin said, flexing his fingers.  “I could float a napkin dispenser, just to make things interesting.”

“Nah, keep it simple,” Clark said, leaving out the part where he didn’t want to implicate Justin in any way.

“She didn’t just *leave town*, what are you people, retarded?” Whitney roared, and swept a pile of dishes off the counter to crash onto the concrete floor.  “Someone kidnapped her, I need to find her!”  He pointed at a stack of paper cups and Clark obligingly lit it on fire, causing a gasp of fear to sound throughout the shop.

“Okay, it’s been long enough.  He should head out the door now,” Justin recommended.  “It’s not like they’re going to come in here with guns blazing.  They’re sneakier than that.”

Clark quickly blasted two dots into the counter next to Whitney, the pre-arranged signal for ‘get out’, and Whitney immediately made his preparations.  “I’ll find her, and then you’ll all pay!” he shouted, and stalked out the back door, towards the alley.

Clark wanted to follow, badly wanted to rush along behind Whitney, but he had to maintain his cover as just another patron.  As the other people in the shop slowly and hesitantly emerged, shaking and murmuring amongst themselves, Clark squinted through the walls, tracking his friend’s progress through the alley.

“—called 911,” said one man nearby, “almost as soon as he started in on it.  The sheriff’ll be here any second.”

Sure enough, a brief wail of sirens sounded, and Clark saw Whitney’s skeleton veer away down another alley at the sound.

“Come on, come on,” Clark whispered, hardly able to believe that he wanted the Constellation people to show up  and take Whitney away.  But a showdown with the local police could only be messy, and Clark didn’t want anyone to get hurt, especially Whitney.

Whitney had now maneuvered his way into the side alley next to his store, and Clark breathed a sigh of relief as he saw two other figures approaching rapidly.  “They’re here,” he whispered to Justin.  “Two people, one tall, the other one short – a man and a woman. Not armed.”

“They use tranquillizers,” Justin said, “usually.”

Clark tuned in his hearing, wanting to hear any conversation between the mysterious Constellation agents as they cornered Whitney.

“What did you do with Lana?”

For a second, Clark thought his ears were playing tricks on him – surely that was Whitney’s line?  But the words hadn’t come from Whitney.  They’d come from the taller of the Constellation agents, and he sounded oddly like –

“*You’re* the one behind all this?” Whitney asked, startled and edgy.

Clark must have turned pale with the wave of sick terror that passed through him, because suddenly Justin was squeezing his elbow, hard.  “What is it?” Justin asked, worried.

“It’s –” Clark turned his head to meet Justin’s eyes.  “The Constellation agent.  It’s Lex Luthor.”

“What did you do with Lana?” Lex asked, slamming Whitney up against the bricks.

Whitney’s look of shock as he recognized Lex would have been almost comical, if it hadn’t been for the fact that Lex’s pulse was racing.  He’d never done this, never played the hero.  “*You’re* the one behind all this?” Lex’s prey asked, eyes wide.

“Answer me,” Lex said, fierce, ignoring the way that Chloe was plucking anxiously at his jacket, saying something about not jumping to conclusions.

“You know where Lana is, not me,” Whitney said, still blinking.  “You’re the one who took her, you and the other bastards at Belle Reve.”  With this last accusation, he seemed to regain more of his confidence, struggling against the grip Lex had on his jacket lapels.

But then Lex had let go – he *had* to let go to keep his hands from being torn off, because something huge and powerful had grabbed him by the collar and hauled him backwards.  Lex’s insane thought was that he was caught on some machinery, so unstoppable did the force seem, but then, abruptly, he turned his head and saw that Clark Kent had him by the scruff of the neck, like Lex was a misbehaving puppy.

Lex had no time to absorb this development, to ponder Clark’s sudden appearance or his apparent strength, because suddenly Clark was the one doing the shouting.  “Get the hell away from him!” Clark bellowed, flushed, with sparking eyes.

It was a Clark Lex had never met.  Even Whitney and Chloe backed away instinctively at the sound of Clark’s fury.  Lex tried to move, tried to escape Clark’s grasp, but then he was backed up against the brick wall himself, and Clark was in his face.  “Clark, he hurt Lana,” Lex gasped, the wind slowly returning to his lungs.

“You’re the one who’s hurting Lana!” Clark shouted.  “You and your father.”

“Clark,” panted a newcomer, jogging into the scene, “this was so not part of the plan, remember?”

Clark ignored the intrusion.

“Lex, let’s all calm down,” Chloe said more firmly, as though Lex were the one who was being completely unreasonable, and this time Clark seemed to notice.  His head snapped up at the sound of Chloe’s voice and he glanced over at her.

“Chloe?  You too?” he asked, almost piteously.

“Of course not ‘me too’,” she said, irritably.  “Please unhand Lex and we can figure this out.  Preferably *not* in the alley.”

“But – if you’re not with Constellation,” Clark stammered, “then where are the real agents?”

“I don’t know, but wherever they are,” Chloe said, “they’re coming for Whitney, if his little tantrum in the Beanery is any clue.  Whitney, what the hell were you thinking, pulling a stunt like –”

She stopped speaking, and Clark released Lex so suddenly that Lex actually felt his heels slam down onto the asphalt.  The reason for her abrupt halt became apparent as Lex glanced in the same direction as Chloe.  There was a dark car slowly rolling past the alley entrance.  Lex quickly stepped behind Clark’s bulk, tugging Chloe with him, and they all froze for a moment, listening and watching as the car passed by.

“They won’t grab him while we’re with him,” said Clark’s dark-haired friend.  “But let’s get inside.”

Whitney nodded and the three of them – Whitney, Clark, and the mysterious boyfriend – all moved towards the doorway that led to Fordman’s store.  There was an awkward moment as Clark paused, casting a suspicious glance at Lex and Chloe, but after a brief hesitation, he waved them in after him.

“Correct me if I’m wrong,” Chloe said, once they were safely inside the back room, “but were you actually *trying* to get grabbed, Whitney?  There was a news report on the radio as we drove into town, said some local ex-football hero went berserk in the Beanery.  Please *tell* me that you’re not really going insane, because Lex here is just about ready to string you up for murder.”

“It’s the only way,” Whitney said, “if we’re going to find out where Lana is.”  He sounded as panicked as Lex felt, even if his words didn’t seem to make any sense.

“You threatened me,” Lex said, “and Lana went missing that very night, according to her neighbors, and you expect me to believe that you had nothing to do with it?”

“You’re one to talk,” Whitney said hotly.  “You blew town the day after she disappeared – is that just a coincidence, too?”

“Guys, stop it!” Clark interjected.  “Look, Constellation got her, okay?  Nobody here is a secret murderer, so let’s all just stop blaming each other and figure out what the hell is going on.”

“Lex and I came to investigate Lana’s disappearance,” Chloe started, sitting down on a cardboard box.  “And, like I said, we heard the news report.  We figured Whitney – I mean, if he’d really gone nuts, that is – would head for his homebase, so we booted it here and – well, you know the rest.”

“Except the part,” said Clark’s friend, “where you and Lex Luthor are apparently partners in crime investigation.”

Chloe seemed to notice the fifth member of their group, looking over with surprise.  “Justin Gaines?  Is it really you?”  She sounded happy to see him, even if Lex wasn’t.

“Yeah,” Justin said.  “Just – is everyone friends with Lex these days?”

“I’m doing a work-study at LuthorCorp,” Chloe hedged.  “I bumped into Lex and it turns out we have a few interests in common.”

“Like Constellation,” supplied Clark, glowering.  “You’re the one who stole Chloe’s binder from the loft?” he asked of Lex.

Lex paused, casting a look Chloe’s way.  He hadn’t yet admitted to this, but there seemed little point in denying it.  “I hardly think you’re one to talk about keeping secrets,” Lex returned, tacitly accepting guilt.

“The point is,” Chloe interjected loudly, “that Lex and I are on the same side as all of you.  We want to rescue Lana.  But what the hell did you think you were going to accomplish by getting Whitney taken away?”

Clark flushed slightly and divided a look between both his companions, neither of whom appeared to be particularly forthcoming.  “We thought, if Whitney got caught, we could follow him.  He could spy for us, get Lana, and we could break them both out of Belle Reve.”

“That’s the stupidest plan I’ve ever heard!” Chloe exclaimed, echoing Lex’s thoughts.  “You’ll only end up getting everyone in trouble.”

“Well, what do you suggest, then?” Clark asked, darkly.

“I suggest we keep investigating, get to the bottom of this, and kill Constellation from the roots up,” Chloe said.  “There’s something evil going on at LuthorCorp, and rescuing Lana from Belle Reve won’t fix it any more than –”

“LuthorCorp?” said Whitney, Clark, and Justin in unison, sounding stunned.

“Of *course* it’s LuthorCorp, Clark!” Lex said, annoyed.  “It’s all in that binder, haven’t you even read it?  It’s right there, in black and white.  All we’re lacking is real concrete proof, something to link LuthorCorp to all the mutations in Smallville, and Constellation is going down.”

Clark strode over to where Lex was standing.  “If you know so much about it, how come you never knew that your own father was using human beings as lab rats?  How come you exposed Lana to your father, when he’s the last person she should meet?”

This was too much, coming from someone who had hidden the truth from Lex from the first moment he’d met him – that act of Herculean strength in the alley was not attributable to adrenalin.  Whatever the reason, Lex was sure that Chloe had been covering for Clark when she told Lex that Clark wasn’t a mutant.  “At least I’m doing something now that I know,” Lex answered sharply.  “At least I’m not hiding out on a farm, pretending that I have no obligation to help people when clearly I could be doing much more than feeding cheerios to a toddler and moping about homework assignments.”  And if Lex had doubted before, the way Clark blanched and looked in Chloe’s direction would have erased any last shreds of uncertainty.  “Do you want to know why I haven’t been helping until now?” Lex demanded.  “Because I’m one of the lab rats, Clark! He even gave me a code name!  How would you like it if your own father treated you like that?”

He and Clark were practically nose to nose now, but that didn’t keep Lex from shouting as he reached the end of his tirade.  Clark blew out an infuriated breath and reeled away, pacing across the narrow dusty room to where Justin and Whitney were leaning against some metal shelves.  He seized Justin by the wrist and hauled him upright, dragging him over towards Lex.  “You see this?” Clark asked, brandishing his friend’s braced hand like a weapon.  “*This* is what happens to people when your father decides to fuck with them.  You ask me, if all you got from this is a wounded ego and a code name, you got off pretty damn easy!”

Justin tried to wrench his wrist back, shooting Clark an angry glare, but Clark wasn’t paying attention.

“It’s not just tests and experiments, Lex,” Clark said.  “They messed with his brain.  They erased his memory so he wouldn’t be able to tell anyone what happened.”

“Okay, both of you, stop it,” Chloe suddenly intervened, but Lex was in no mood to listen to her, and neither was Clark.

“Lucky him!” Lex shot back at Clark.  “I’d give anything to forget the fact that my father thinks I k–”

He stopped short, unable to say it.  A strange silence descended as Clark released Justin’s hand and looked away, unwilling or unable to meet Lex’s eyes.

“Um, guys,” Whitney said, quietly.  “Can we get back to the part where the men in white coats are literally coming to take me away?”

“We have to run,” Clark said, eyes widening.  “God, we can’t let them take him.”

“I have a better idea,” Chloe said, laying a hand on Clark’s shoulder.  “We’ll take him ourselves.”

Clark watched Lex and Chloe confer in low tones, head still reeling from the revelations of the past ten minutes.  Constellation was LuthorCorp’s project, and Lex – he knew about it.  He was part of it, an unwilling part.  He knew about Clark, or he thought he did.  And he and Chloe were planning to take all of it apart, everything that had been done over the past seventeen years, all of it.

The part that Clark couldn’t quite grasp, out of everything, was that he wasn’t involved in any of their grand schemes.  It was heroes’ work, and Clark was watching from the sidelines like a benched player.  Even Whitney was playing a more active role, with his willingness to sacrifice his own safety for the good of the plan.

“The thing is,” Chloe was saying, quietly, “you need to bluff your way through this.  Can you do it?”

Lex appeared mildly offended.  “Of course I can.”

“I’m not talking getting into a bar at the age of seventeen,” Chloe said, gravely.  “I’m talking about convincing a crack security team that they have to get on their knees and kiss your ass.  I know *I* can do it – but I need you to be just as confident.”

“I am,” Lex said, nodding once, dismissing Chloe’s worries.

“I am, too,” Clark said, impulsively.  “I can be – an orderly or something.”

Chloe seemed surprised to hear his voice, as though she’d forgotten he was still in the room.  “Clark, no,” she said, almost gently.

“Why not?” Lex asked, to Clark’s shock.

“Because,” Chloe said, and ended her argument with a significant eyebrow raise in Clark’s direction.

If Chloe was trying to tell him something, Clark wasn’t cracking the code.  He glanced first to Whitney, then to Justin, and last of all to Lex, seeking insight.  They all looked as puzzled as Clark felt.

“Is it because they know him?” Justin asked at length.  “Is it part of the reason they won’t go after him?”

“Who told you –” began Chloe, then stopped.  “It’s – complicated.”

“Why do I get the feeling,” Clark asked of her, exasperated, “that you’re keeping something back from everyone here?”

Chloe glanced around, suddenly on edge as the four men in the room all trained their eyes on her.  “I – it’s not something I can say,” she managed, at last.  “Look, we’re running out of time.  If we’re going to do this, then we have to act –”

“No,” and even though Clark thought the word, it was Lex who spoke.  Clark felt his heart begin to hammer, because he thought he knew what Chloe was about to reveal, deep down in some inky-black part of his soul.

Chloe looked around the room again, her gaze bouncing off each of them in turn, finding no respite.  Finally, with a shaky sigh, she answered.  “Constellation is a ticking time bomb,” she said, locking her gaze with Lex.  “And when it blows, it’s taking all of us with it.”

The sense of urgency drummed just under the surface of Lex’s skin, as though the tick of a second hand was being transmuted through him, driving him to something very near panic – but he’d told Chloe he could be calm, and so he was.

“We’ll take it from here,” he said, slipping on a pair of sunglasses from his jacket pocket.

The two Constellation agents appeared mildly surprised, but apparently were not high up enough in the ranks to challenge the authority of so lofty a personage.  With the barest hesitation, they glanced at each other, nodded, and headed back to their vehicle.  Whether or not they would report this to their seniors, whether or not their superiors would pass Lex’s intevention along to Lionel Luthor – Lex didn’t know, and he couldn’t pause to think about it.  If Chloe was right, they were within days or even hours of tipping their hand anyway – what was important was how much they could glean before the security gates came crashing down all around them.

Chloe was waiting in the Porsche’s passenger seat, Whitney slumped in feigned unconsciousness in the back seat.  Not knowing what the usual protocol was, he and Chloe were opting for confident execution of whatever actions they chose to undertake.

“There’s a GPS unit in the glove compartment if you want to check our route,” Lex told Chloe, gunning the engine and peeling out of the alley where he’d parked.  “There’s a map, too, if you want the old-fashioned version.”

Chloe silently pulled out the GPS and began to fiddle with it.  Lex twitched the steering wheel, swerving around a crawling Dodge truck with a blaring horn and tearing towards the highway.  “There’s no point to any of this if we don’t get there alive,” Chloe said, not looking up but holding onto the car door surreptitiously.

“I’m a very safe driver,” Lex answered evenly, “and this is an excellent vehicle.”

“What – what will they do with me?” Whitney asked, poking his head between their bucket seats.

“They’ll probably just confine you for the time being,” Lex improvised.  “Whatever they did to Lana, to dampen her ability to communicate with you – they’ll probably do the same thing.”  Lex just hoped that the dampening process hadn’t involved killing Lana.

“Do you think I’ll see her?  Should I let on that I came for her, or play it cool?” Whitney asked, his tone verging on panic.

“Play it cool,” Lex advised.  “Wait until you have a chance to speak with her in private, then let her know.  You might even be able to communicate with her again, who knows?”

“We used to write notes, in class – at first,” Whitney offered.  “It was funny, because all you had to do was write the note, then look at it until you knew she was watching too.”  For the first time, Lex detected something gentle in Whitney’s voice, and his heart softened a little, thinking of how terrifying it must be for Fordman, to lose his other half so abruptly and completely.

It must feel epic, Lex thought, a little wistfully – to have that kind of bond with another human, to be somehow beyond the boundaries of subjectivity.  For Whitney, and maybe even for Lana, though she obviously did her best to resist it, it must seem so clear that there could only ever be one person for each of them.  They couldn’t just walk away from it, and such petty things as circumstance and temper flares couldn’t come between them.

If Lex had that kind of bond with one other person, he had to admit that it wasn’t – it wasn’t a romantic attachment.  He and his father seemed fated to a death-struggle, nothing passionate about it, though it might yet become epic.

“Take Exit 34B and merge onto 480x,” Chloe said, cutting into Lex’s thoughts.

“Is it lonely?” Lex asked suddenly, unsure of how he’d formulated the question or when he’d decided to ask it.

To his surprise, both Chloe and Whitney answered at the same time.  “Yes.”

Before them loomed the gates of Belle Reve.

It made the tailgate of the truck shudder when he said it, but Justin insisted that he still wanted to stay in Smallville, to help see this thing through.  Clark studied him for a few seconds, probably not as long as he should have, before nodding his assent and getting into the truck.  Justin belonged far away from all of this, just like Clark belonged in the thick of it, but it seemed they were both stuck on the margins of the action instead.

As much as he’d wanted the distraction of Justin, Clark found himself coming back to Chloe’s words, to the brief and shattering way she’d delineated the end of the world as they knew it.

“I have some things set up,” she’d said, the rest of them so quiet they were hardly breathing.  “Sort of like electronic tripwires.  Certain words appear in e-mails and I get a copy.”

“You have access to the LuthorCorp servers?” Lex had asked, shocked.  “Why can’t you get all the evidence we need, then?”

“Because,” Chloe answered, “you have a crack team of three dozen information security techs monitoring every electronic fart joke that goes out of the building.  They don’t notice the rare e-mail, write it off as a glitch, but if I took a big chunk of data, the alarm bells would sound.  Anyway, one of the words I hot-wired is ‘election’.  And two months ago, that tripped a switch, and my inbox started filling up.”

There were few things more terrifying than the thought of Lionel Luthor in public office, let alone as a senator, but that was what he was intending to do.

What Chloe had gone on to say, however, definitely qualified.  “He can’t run with so much dirty linen in the closets, though,” she had said.  “Which he must realize, because the same week, another hot-wired phrase started lighting up.”

Project termination.

Justin probably was safer with Clark, after all, Clark supposed.  After all, the e-mails Chloe had received before she’d had to sever the connection for her own security left little ambiguity.  Constellation was to be eliminated, all its participants removed from the risk of discovery.

The mutants were to be rounded up and executed.

Clark was startled afresh at the wellspring of selfish relief that sprung up inside of him at this thought.  Even though hundreds, maybe thousands, of Smallville citizens were suddenly facing their deaths, Clark’s first thought was that Brodie was safe.  Jonathan was safe.  Even Clark, for reasons unknown, seemed to be safe.

Following quickly on the heels of this shameful joy was an overwhelming sense of guilt and responsibility.  Hundreds of innocent people who had already been victimized unknowingly by LuthorCorp were about to be murdered for their pains.  Clark had to tell himself over and over that he couldn’t do anything more than they were already doing, that even though it was unfamiliar for him, this subterfuge was ultimately the only way to triumph over Lionel.

Then he thought about Lex, about the fact that Lex was on the hit list, and Clark was flooded all over again with the fierce need to protect.  All the frustrations and hurts of the past few weeks faded in comparison with the vivid notion of losing Lex.

They got out of the truck in the driveway and headed towards the house, Clark pausing to retrieve Taber from the dirt of the yard.  It was certainly a sign that things were going well between Jonathan and Brodie if Taber was being sacrificed to the whims of weather and the neighbor’s dogs.  The rest of Clark’s family was nowhere to be seen, but Clark reassured himself by picking out the sound of Brodie’s voice through the muted whirr of the combine out in the east quarter.

Clark sat down at the kitchen table, Justin taking the chair opposite, and concentrated on the last part of Chloe’s message, the sliver of hope they were clinging to.

“Another fighter in the cause,” she’d said, “who has since been forced to move on, compiled a database of all the evidence we need to take Lionel down, to keep this from happening.  The problem is, I don’t know exactly where the database is.”

The vagueness of the message frustrated Clark even now, making him slam poor Taber’s head against the oak table with a vengeance.  But Chloe was insistent that she couldn’t divulge more at this point.  “All I know is that we have to look for it, and in the meantime, try to bring Lionel down ourselves.”

They kept using that phrase, ‘bringing him down’, and Clark could only let himself imagine the physicality of it, seizing Lionel and pulling him to the ground.  A man who would kill his own son to gain power – to kill him to prevent it would almost seem just.

“So it’s not you and the quarterback,” Justin spoke, interrupting Clark’s murderous thoughts, prying the besieged Taber out from between Clark’s fingers.  “It’s you and the billionaire’s son.”

“It was,” Clark corrected wearily.

“It is,” Justin countered in a matter-of-fact voice.  “It always will be.”

Getting Whitney admitted was surprisingly simple.  They waited at the gate for all of thirty seconds before a uniformed guard appeared.  Though he did seem a bit taken aback by the appearance of Lex Luthor and his Porsche, he hid his surprise with a matter-of-fact, “Intake?”, to which Lex responded with a nod.  Chloe slid out of the passenger seat and let the guard and an orderly manhandle Whitney out of the back of the car.  Even though Whitney was feigning unconsciousness again, they didn’t seem to take any chances, cuffing him to a stretcher and then injecting him with an unknown substance.  Both Lex and Chloe tensed at this development, watching as Whitney’s lids fluttered with true sleepiness, but they couldn’t intervene.  For all they knew, much worse treatment awaited him inside the building.  But Whitney had known, and he’d insisted that he risk it all for Lana’s sake.

They drove away from Belle Reve in silence.  Lex wanted to talk to Chloe, wanted badly to press her for more information, to extract the missing pieces in the disjointed story she had told earlier.  He tried several times, opening his mouth and taking in a breath, only to sigh the air out again, unable to think of any way of approaching the subject that wouldn’t highlight his own ignorance or make her feel threatened.

The last time he gathered his courage to question her, he happened to glance over at the passenger seat and saw that Chloe had fallen fast asleep.  He surveyed her in quick peeks, flicking his eyes over from the spooling highway to capture small glimpses of her relaxed form – one pump sliding off her foot, her neatly tied hair growing messy against the leather headrest, her blouse untucked on one side.  God, she was so young, it made a lump rise unexpectedly in Lex’s throat.  It was almost the same as when Brodie fell and hurt himself, this strange and unavoidable sense of  protectiveness.

He couldn’t interrogate her, not now.  Not yet.  He would simply let her rest while she could.

Unfortunately for both of them, Lex’s resolution was broken in short minutes when his cell phone shrilled, drawing Chloe out of her sleep.  Before Lex could reach for his phone, Chloe had scooped it up from the cupholder and was flipping it open.

“Lex Luthor’s mobile phone,” she said pertly in a professional tone, without even a trace of sleepiness.

She paused and listened.  “He’s not available at this moment.  May I take a message?  Or would you like to call back for his voicemail?”  Another silence, then Chloe said, “Ms. Griggs?  And what would you like to tell Mr. Luthor?  I see.  Is that all?  All right, I’ll be sure to tell him.  Thank you.”  She flipped the phone shut again and stretched her shoulders back, sighing slightly.  “Griggs,” she told Lex.  “Molly.  Wanted to tell you she’s done the thing you asked about yesterday.  She’s freaking out – she thinks someone’s onto her.”

“She said that?” Lex said, frowning.

“No, but she sounded terrified,” Chloe replied matter-of-factly.

“Send her a text message,” Lex said, nodding in the direction of his phone.  “Just say, ‘stay within sight of co-workers.’”  Lionel couldn’t hurt her in plain view, after all.  Chloe merely nodded and began keying the message into the phone.

They were almost at the Smallville town limits again, and Lex knew they should just drive through town and head straight back to Smallville.  He knew it, and yet he found himself turning down Hickory Lane, squinting into the sunset ahead of them.

“Where are we going?” asked Chloe, though she must know, too.

Lex answered the spirit of the question rather than its obvious meaning.  “I want to see him.”  Lex watched his fingers tighten on the steering wheel before relaxing again.  “I want to see that he’s okay.”

Chloe didn’t look his way, only slipped the cell phone into the cupholder and leaned back in her seat.  “Are he and Justin –”

“No,” Lex interrupted, reaching for his sunglasses, needing to be inscrutable.  “I meant Brodie.”

Clark went alone, after nightfall, and when his watch ticked past eleven o’clock, Clark started worrying.  They’d said eleven, they’d agreed on eleven, and yet Clark couldn’t seem to pick out Whitney’s voice among the dozens and dozens of murmurs, rants, and shouts that drifted across the field from Belle Reve.

Eleven-oh-six, and still no Whitney.  Was he being kept unconscious?  Lex had said he was unconscious when they took him.  Maybe he was being tested.  Maybe he’d had his watch taken away and he didn’t know what time it was.  Maybe Clark had missed it already.  Maybe Luthor wasn’t wasting any more time with the meteor mutant research, maybe they were just executing them right away.  Maybe it was too late –

“Clark Kent,” whispered Whitney, and Clark jumped, because it sounded like Whitney was right beside him, not a mile away and inside those concrete walls.  Clark had to resist the urge to respond.  Apparently the two days they’d spent honing Clark’s ability to hear Whitney’s voice at a great distance was paying off.

“Clark Kent,” Whitney repeated, sounding nervous.  “I’m in the john, it’s the only place you can get privacy around here.  But I’m okay, for now.”

He was okay.  Clark released a lungful of air he hadn’t realized he was holding in.

“Anyway, I haven’t seen Lana.  They’ve got me wearing these lead gloves, probably because they think I shoot fire from my fingers, and I can’t take them off – but they haven’t done anything to keep me from the other inmates.  I haven’t seen Lana.  The males and females are separated, I think.  But, Clark – I’m pretty sure that she’s here.  That she’s alive.  At dinner, I was eating mashed potatoes and beef, and when I looked down at my plate, just for a second, I saw green beans that weren’t really there, and I know she loves green beans, so I think I was seeing her plate.  I tried to reach her again, but she was gone.  They must be dampening her powers somehow and she’s trying to break through.

“No one will talk to me, not yet anyway.  I tried to make friends, but everyone’s acting weird.  I’ve gotta wonder if somehow they know about what Chloe said.  I wonder if it’s already started.  Tomorrow they’ll be testing me – damned if I know what I’m going to do when they pull these gloves off and ask for a demonstration – but it doesn’t matter, because I’m going to find her, Clark.  I am.  Can you hear her?  I wonder if you could if you tried.

“Anyway, I’m on the third floor, in a room with Ian Randall – both Ians, actually, they keep him separated.  West end of the building, I think, but I’m all turned around in here.  If you look inside – if you *can* -- I’m lifting up my left hand right now and waving it.”

Clark squinted, but the walls of Belle Reve must have been lead-lined, because there was no depth to the building in his x-ray vision.

“Well, it’s been five minutes so I’d better go before they start dosing me with laxatives or something.  It’s like the cuckoo’s nest in here, I swear, Clark.  It – it’s nice knowing you’re out there listening.  It’s like it used to be with her, almost.  Goodnight, Clark.”

“Goodnight, Whit,” Clark answered, his voice sounding small in the dark field.  He tried tuning his hearing to the din of the asylum again, listening for Lana’s voice in the mixture – but with night and sedatives falling, there were fewer and fewer voices audible, and only a couple of female ones, neither of which was Lana.  Clark waited a few minutes longer, fascinated to identify several of his past foes among those still speaking, intrigued by the indecipherable medical murmurings of the staff.  But it was dangerous to be out here, even at this distance from the asylum, and so Clark sped homewards again.

He tried not to think about the possibility that he would never hear Whitney’s voice again.

Back in Metropolis, Lex and Chloe only managed to download the contents of two data servers before the connection closed on them.  Two minutes later, while Lex was still cursing at his laptop and typing his security clearance code irritably, his phone rang again.

Molly Griggs was dead, said the voice on the other end.  Her car had crashed on the freeway as she drove home that night.

Molly Griggs had died for two data servers’ worth of encrypted information, Lex thought bleakly now, swirling the scotch in his glass and feeling his head pound sickeningly.  Why had she left the office?  Had she been frightened away, or lured perhaps?  And how had it been accomplished?  An explosive under her car’s back axle?

It didn’t really matter, he supposed – the mechanics of thing, the how and when.  The fact remained: Molly was dead because of him.  It was small comfort to think that she probably would have died anyway, exterminated by his father in some seemingly accidental fashion in the next month or so.  The fact remained, Lex had all but tied the noose around her neck and kicked the chair out from under her.

And Lex had retreated into scotch, several glasses’ worth, and Chloe had joined him, which made him feel strange.  He was unaccustomed to having company to go with his misery.  But as they drank together in silence, as they got more maudlin and more liquid, Lex became more and more aware of the hard knot of sick guilt that was lodged in his core.  Scotch wasn’t enough.

“I killed her,” he said aloud, just to hear the words.

“’S’not your fault,” said Chloe muzzily into her own glass, crawling over to him on her knees and patting his leg to comfort him.  “You couldn’t have stopped it.”  She rested her chin on Lex’s knee, the warm point of it digging into Lex’s thigh muscle, distracting him.

Lex contemplated Chloe, wondered if she was next, wondered who would lead them if she was.  By now Lionel would have made the connection, discovered who Chloe was if not her importance in the scheme of Lex’s betrayal, and really, there were not many stupider things to be doing than sitting here in Lex’s office with stolen information, getting drunk on the couch and awaiting Lionel’s next move.

There weren’t *many* stupider things, Lex thought, feeling drunk and desolate and hopelessly flawed.  But there was at least one more – Chloe was warm and pretty and the curve of her neck was like a fawn, and Lex was bending down, he was pulling her up into a kiss before he’d thought of anything else.

She was sweet and unresisting at first, more startled than anything, but then she was clambering away, batting at Lex’s grasping arms.  “Lex, no,” she said, shaking her head and ducking another kiss.  “No, Lex.”

“Please,” Lex said softly, capturing her long enough to whisper the words into her mouth.

“There’s someone else,” she said, eyes lowered.

Lex couldn’t quite grasp this for long moments, his whole body still surging forward, needing release and safety and the oblivion promised by that doe-like curve of Chloe’s neck, by the heat of her hand on his arm.  If scotch wasn’t enough, then he wanted this, he chose this, and he couldn’t make his mind understand that it wasn’t that simple.

But she was moving away.  Lex’s brain was sobering slowly, and as he released her waist, watched her stand up in stocking-feet on hardwood, he suddenly realized what he’d almost done.  This was Chloe, the person he’d grown to admire and respect over the past few days – and she wasn’t some diverting substance to be imbibed in case of emotional overload.  Lex blinked her form into clarity and saw how small she was, how nervous her motions as she straightened her skirt and her blouse.  She kept her eyes averted.

“I’m sorry,” he said roughly.  “That was out of line.”

She nodded, simple agreement, no accusation.

“I should go.  Home.  But you should – come with me.  Just for safety.”

“I’ll be safer here,” she said, shaking her head.  “I mean, at Renee’s place.”

Right, of course she was.  Lionel wouldn’t know about that, not yet anyway.  “Promise you’ll text message me first thing in the morning,” Lex demanded, suddenly terrified to let Chloe out of his sight.

“Promise,” she said, smiling more easily now.  “Lex, it’s really okay.  It’s been a hard day.  For both of us.”

“I was still out of line,” Lex said, shaking his head and feeling his skin prickle with embarrassment.  “Especially if you’re seeing someone else.”

Chloe opened her mouth as if to say something in response, then paused.  “Goodnight, Lex,” she said.

“Goodnight, Chloe,” Lex answered, and watched her walk out of his office.

“You take the bed,” Clark said, waving Justin towards his creaky old mattress.  “I’ll sleep with Brodie.”

“You sure?” Justin asked, uncertainly.  “I don’t mind sharing.”

“My dad minds,” Clark said with a rueful smile.  “Besides, if we’re going to squeeze two people into a twin-sized bed, it makes sense to have the three-year-old pair up with an adult.”

“Are you going to class tomorrow?” Justin asked suddenly, as Clark moved towards the doorway.

“Yeah, of course,” Clark said, mildly surprised.  “Life goes on as usual.”

“It just – feels weird.  Like putting gas in your car when you know the world’s ending tomorrow,” Justin said haltingly, sitting down on the edge of the bed, his vision focused on Clark’s area rug.

“Well, you want to be as educated as possible before the Apocalypse, don’t you?” Clark prodded with a smile.

Justin smiled back weakly.  Clark didn’t feel up to another round of bleak goodnights, so he merely backed out of the room and slipped into the dark doorway down the hall.  Brodie was sprawled on his back, one index finger tangled in his curls, his other hand resting on Taber’s fat belly. 

It had been a few days since Clark had done much more than see Brodie in passing.  Clark hadn’t spent so long apart from his brother in months, and it felt almost strange to reach out and adjust the small sleeping limbs, to clamber in beside the small bundle of warmth and to press a kiss onto the smooth forehead.

With all that was going on, it seemed almost wrong – but there was no denying that the first concern of Clark’s heart at the moment was the bone-deep sadness of knowing that he was losing Brodie.  Clark put an arm around his baby brother and squeezed gently, trying to convey all his love in a single gesture.

What was it Lex had said earlier in the day, during his brief stop at the farm?

Oh yes, kneeling in front of Brodie, studying him with that intensely tender look that only Brodie could get out of Lex, Lex had said, “Remember that I love you.  You’re going to be okay, because I love you.”   And Brodie had nodded, strangely solemn even though he couldn’t have understood it, and Clark had found himself fighting back the urge to laugh even as the lump rose in his throat.

It had sounded so much like something Clark’s mother might have said to Brodie in this exact moment, if she’d been around to comfort him.

And abruptly, Clark was wide awake – because it was something his mother *had* said.  She’d spoken almost those exact words to Clark a dozen times throughout his childhood, every time he’d manifested another freaky ability.  On the heels of Jonathan’s rhetoric about ‘gifts’ and ‘responsibilities’, she would close every discussion with those two short sentences, her hands bracketing Clark’s narrow boyish shoulders, her blue eyes sincere and urgent.

“Remember that we love you,” she would always say.  “You’re going to be okay, because we love you.”  And like a kiss pressed to a scraped knee, Clark would be magically comforted by this ritual.

Just as Brodie had been earlier in the evening.

Clark rolled out of bed, mind whirling.  How could it be a mere coincidence?  It couldn’t be, it just couldn’t.  He paced the length of the narrow room several times, turning possibilities and logic around in his mind, and finally found himself out in the hallway, walking towards the half-closed door of what had once been his parents’ bedroom.  Clark hadn’t been in there since –

“Dad?”

He was still awake, sitting up in bed reading, glasses perched on the bridge of his nose and his mouth marked by lines of fatigue.  “Son?”  Immediately worried, because Clark didn’t ever come in here, not since he was a boy and still scared of the dark.

“Did Mom ever have anything to do with the Luthors?”  Crazy hunch, and a good one, because Jonathan’s face darkened like a storm cloud.

“Why are you asking?  Does this have to do with that business with Justin and Whitney?”

“It’s not that,” Clark ventured quickly.  “It’s just – Lex said something about having met Mom when he was younger, and I didn’t get a chance to ask –”

“The meteor clean-up,” Jonathan explained, relaxing visibly, setting his book down on the sheets beside him.  “When you were six, you stumbled across some meteor rock at the old foundry, and you got sick, and that’s when we realized you were allergic.  Your mother couldn’t stand the thought of you running across the meteor rock again, so she spearheaded the campaign to clean up the meteor rocks in public places.  She and I spent hours out in the fields picking green rock out of the soil, locked it all up in a lead chest in the storm cellar years ago.  She was so scared you’d get hurt.”

His voice was going tender as he lost himself in the memory, and Clark briefly wondered why he didn’t allow this more often, this comforting reminiscence between them.

“Anyway, she got Lionel Luthor to fund the project, god knows how, and for a few years there, she spent a bit of time in Metropolis to get the job done.  I suppose she must have seen Lex back then.”

“When was the last time?” Clark asked, his throat tightening suddenly.  “The last time she would have seen him?”

Jonathan paused and thought.  “I think the last time was in ’95 or so.  The more she spent time with Luthor, the less she liked him.  It put a bit of a strain on things here at home, you can imagine.”

1995.  Clark had been nine, so it was small wonder that he didn’t remember any of this.  He had only the vaguest recollection of the incident that had triggered the clean-up, the day he’d been so sick at the foundry.  But in 1992, when it started – Lex had been twelve.  And that was the year, Clark remembered from his research into Lex’s background, that Lex’s mother had become ill and died.

A young boy, isolated and afraid and grieving – Clark knew his mother, and he knew with bone-deep surety that she would have offered whatever solace she could.  She had taken Lex in her arms and told him he would be okay, that he was loved.

And whatever else had passed in the meantime, Lex had remembered those words, had treasured them, and had seen fit to deliver them to a little boy whose own mother had since moved on. 

It was almost enough to make Clark forgive him for how Lex had behaved.

He was slipping between the covers again when he realized the true import of what he’d just learned.

That must be what his father had meant a few days ago when he'd said that Clark's parents had worked to protect him from the meteor rocks.  And his mother was the one who had helped Lionel Luthor stockpile all the meteor rock he’d needed to create Project Constellation – unknowingly, of course, but it was because of her that Justin – and that Whitney and Lana – and –

Clark pulled Brodie close and exhaled shakily.  It was a very good thing that Martha Kent wasn’t around to discover what she’d really created in her attempts to protect her small son.

To be continued on my Livejournal.

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