My God, I've been writing a lot lately, haven't I?

*is quietly baffled*

Anyway, here 'tis.

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: Oh, Lordy... no one's going to believe me here, but simply getting the second part wrapped up was the big reason why I've been so writer's block-y. And, completely uncharacteristically, I've actually had Part 3 planned out in moderate detail for months now, so with any luck, this'll be a much faster flow of words than the end of Part 2. And yes, this is where the questions start getting answered!

Part 1
Part 2:1
Part 2:2
Part 2:3
Part 2:4
Part 2:5
Part 2:6
Part 2:7
Part 2:8
Part 2:9
Part 2:10
Part 2:11
Part 2:12
Part 2:13
Part 2:14
Part 2:15
Part 2:16
Part 2:17
Part 2:18
Part 2:19



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.”

***

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 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’d 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.

***

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.”

***

“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.”


***