Um.

Sorry about that All American thing.

I bring you slashy cookies in the form of a Constellation update in which no one dies!

*bats lashes*

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: I was thinking about this story as I was driving around today and I came to the conclusion that it is IMMENSE. Which means that if I expect anyone to give a shit about how it all ends, I should try to finish Constellation before Tom Wellling needs dentures. So I'm picking up the pace, starting now.

Part 1
Part 2
Part 3:1
Part 3:2
Part 3:3


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 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 you.”

“Not me,” 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.”

***

Chloe laughed, a short high sound, once the immediate look of shock had flitted over her face. “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."