Oy. Remember this thing?

THIS EVIL BEAST OF A STORY THAT RUINS EVERYTHING?

Yeah. It's nearly a year old, now. But I shall prevail, dammit!

At the risk of being a complete feedback whore, can everyone who still gives a crap about this story please comment and say so? I need to know that anyone at all cares about my finishing the EVIL BEAST OF A STORY THAT RUINS EVERYTHING. So yeah. Love me!

Rating: NC-17
Characters: Clark, Lex, Jonathan, Whitney, Lana, Gabe Sullivan, plus one.
Summary: The most heroic thing Clark did on a regular basis was to stitch up Taber’s right side whenever he needed it.
A/N: Okay, it's *going*... I swear. BLEARGH.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3:1
Part 3:2
Part 3:3
Part 3:4
Part 3:5
Part 3:6
Part 3:7
Part 3:8
Part 3:9
Part 3:10


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 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.”