And grumbling.

For some reason, my FrontPage has just stopped communicating with my ISP. I spent an hour updating my site, and now? No one will appreciate all that hard work.

*sobs*

Also, going through and replacing all < i >'s and *'s with italics, I realize two things:

1) I use italics way too much

2) I go especially italic-crazy in the following writerly situations:

a) fight scenes

b) porn

c) humour.

Does this strike anyone else as odd?

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: This part officially cracked the 200 page mark. And just for reference? When Omiai (AKA the last massive WiP that keeeled me ded) hit 200 pages? Lionel was already dead. THEY WERE PLANNING HIS FUNERAL AND THE FIC WAS LIKE 80% OVER OMG THIS FIC WILL NEVER EVER END.

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Part 3:1


“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.”

***

“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 the two minutes that he had spent in his office alone before Constellation’s chief investigator had slipped into his office, as though the mystery had been tailing him all the way.

“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.

***

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?”

***

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.

***