Archive of Our Own

Chapter Text

The trouble with Smallville, Clark reflected, was that trouble came in so many forms--it made it hard to recognize. Especially when you threw Kryptonians into the mix. Clark's parents were concerned about a sudden change in their grandson's behavior. After getting off the phone Clark gave this some thought.

Well. Could be an alien thing. Maybe it was a meteor mutant. Or a supervillain. Mind altering drugs. Hypnosis. Pod people. Mental imprinting tech. Evil robot. Dimension double. Effect of one of the many, many, apparently endless varieties of kryptonite, and just why the heck did it come in so many colors anyway?

Or, not to go too far out on a limb with the wacky conjecturing, there was always the possibility that it was just normal teenage drama and insufferability.

Heck, maybe it was puppies.

With a sigh, Clark slumped back into the chair at his kitchen table, shuffling aside the notes for the Johannsen article he was working on. He didn't have the faintest idea how concerned he should be.

On the one hand, this was Smallville they were talking about, and Kon was a budding superhero with a reckless streak wide enough to spot from orbit. And, on the other hand, Kon's behavior change was nothing more ominous than a sudden dedication to his school work, coupled with a not too surprising tiredness and tension. Likely he was just trying to impress a girl, or something equally innocuous and teenager-y.

And it had been years since the most dramatic outbreak of meteor-mutants, all the meteor exposed Smallville children hitting adolescence around the same time as Clark. Since then first LuthorCorp and then LexCorp had managed to clean out--or, rather, acquire--most of the area's kryptonite, and a few discreet government organizations had all but completed the job. Smallville was fairly quiet now.

Still...

If Kon's problem was kryptonite related Clark needed to play it careful himself. He leaned back in the chair and rolled a pen between his fingers. A sudden masochistic streak of diligence at school didn't really imply world-conquering tendencies or other lack of inhibitions so Red K was probably safely out of the picture.

What would be the opposite of red kryptonite? Green kryptonite? Wouldn't that just be ordinary kryptonite? Why was there never a logic to these things except when there was? No, really, he wanted to know. That pink kryptonite incident had been as embarrassing as it was politically incorrect. It was like the universe had the most warped sense of humor ever.

Maybe Kon was just settling in. That would be nice. Clark couldn't think of a person who more deserved the chance at a normal, happy adolescence, at least to the degree that those two terms weren't mutually exclusive. Kon hadn't had a chance at childhood, and Clark wanted him to have it now. After the labs...it still amazed Clark that Kon had turned out to be so...happy. But he was; a joyful, loving, giving boy, and instinctively a defender. Also quite frequently an insufferable brat and a troublemaker.

Cadmus labs hadn't so much as dinged that insuppressible spirit.

Maybe it was due to the accelerated aging technique the lab had used. Kon might be physically and mentally sixteen now, but he had technically only been alive for six years, and the majority of that time had been spent hooked into a computer learning interface. Maybe that had shielded him from the damaging effects of an appalling reality.

So much of Clark's life had been spent terrified that his secret would be discovered, betrayed, that he would wind up strapped to a table somewhere, nothing more than a laboratory experiment, lines of numbers and data.

Kon had been that experiment.

A year since, and Clark couldn't forget the shock of discovery.

~*~

He hadn't thought it would be a big job, just an abandoned project of Lionel's, another loose end to tidy up. But of course it was one of Lionel's, and Clark never learned. The impact of the man's death could steal deal deadly aftershocks all this time later.

Which was how Clark, or rather Superman, had come to be standing awkwardly in the rubble of Cadmus labs, trying to stay out of the way of the cleanup crew. The scene had been a wreck, the labs in flames, the earth plowed up everywhere as if hit by a giant hand. The government people were still hauling off kryptonite in about every form imaginable. Clark was sort of wondering if he ought to call the Justice League in on the mess.

There was a sudden commotion of activity; the aftershocks of an underground explosion. A confused swarm of people poured out of one of the buildings. Clark had had only a moment to glimpse the milling huddle of agitated people, before a figure had broken loose, shot out from among them—and into the air.

Blue, red, yellow. And Clark had a moment to think: Kryptonian, before he was blurring off, zipping into superspeed, cutting off the figure's retreat as automatic and desperate an action as staunching a slit throat.

Clark confronted him at a dead standstill two hundred feet in the air.

And looked into his own face.

Younger, like a time-warped mirror. Maybe fifteen. Clark discovering his powers. The reflection looked back, equally fascinated, less surprised. "Hey, you're Superman."

The words stretched tight in Clark's throat, nearly strangled with tension, before he could release them. "Who are you?"

The kid grinned—Clark's grin, with a twist—and tucked his hands behind his head. "I'm Superman, too."

Clark looked into that smile, and—the lab, the genetics equipment, the kryptonite—flashed across his mind in rapid succession. He felt something icy twist and curl low in his gut. Fear.

No clarity, just the deep, atavistic certainty that he was looking at something that shouldn't exist. The monster from the nightmares was real, and he wasn't sure if this mirror-child was the monster or the nightmare.

The kid looked at him, glanced back at the labs. "I'm not staying here."

And... something; a flicker of some emotion, crossing that face and then gone in a flash...

The decision was irrational but instantaneous. "No. You're not."

There were things to be taken care of first, and Clark still needed to talk to his parents. Another electric shock to the system when the government team started sifting through salvaged files. Lionel had been trying to clone Superman—and the data on that was disturbing enough to guarantee Clark nightmares of tubes and kryptonite and tiny misshapen bodies—but Lionel had used his own son's DNA to stabilize the mix.

Superman...and Lex Luthor.

Old memories, new memories, all of them painful, some bittersweet.

There were a thousand reasons this was a bad idea, a million ways this could turn back to hurt Clark and the people he loved. His parents had spent a lifetime protecting him. They knew and recognized these dangers as automatically as Clark.

He barely had to speak.

They were Kents. They were family. Their decision was as irrational and instantaneous as his own.

Clark brought Kon—Kon-El Luthor, Kon-El Kent—home the same day.

And he couldn't forget, when they landed at the farm, and his parents held out their arms to their newest, unexpected, dangerous, wonderful gift—

For the first time Clark looked into that familiar face, and didn't see his own reflection. Not in that expression. Cheerful bravado and desperate nonchalance, and farther down, nearly invisible, a muffled, panicky incomprehension that anyone would offer him something—offer trust, offer family—unconditionally, without hooks or stings.

It was Lex looking out at him. The Lex he'd met on the bridge in Smallville; the painful, long ago memory of Lex that Clark had long since given up as a lie, a false creation of Clark's teenage insecurities and loneliness.

And it had been a lie, but maybe not the lie he thought, because he can see it here, again. A fragment of Lex behind Clark's own green eyes.

And just like he had a decade ago, Clark fell a little bit in love.

~*~

Clark shook his head and laid his pen down on the still blank notebook, giving it up for a lost cause. Too many distractions and memories tonight. Clark shook his head ruefully at himself, wandering over to the fridge on a probably too optimistic quest for sustenance. Twenty-six wasn't nearly old enough to be wallowing in nostalgia.

He'd spent years hating Luthor when it hurt too much to remember Lex. Righteous hatred to conquer bewildered, guilty pain. It still hurt and in honesty he still hated--too much had happened not to--but he thought maybe he'd grown up enough to examine the past a little more clearly.

Righteous he was not.

He wouldn't let Kon make the same mistakes. Not Clark's, not Lex's. Not the big ones, the ones that mattered.

Of course, one of Clark's mistakes was thinking it was his job to save people from themselves. Clark was still trying to find the line on that one.

And he might be able to see the past with clearer eyes, but he still couldn't see a way beyond the anger and suspicion of the present. No, Clark could look back, and he could reapportion blame and forgiveness and see the harsh blows of chance and the missteps of two frightened and confused boys tackling crushing responsibilities, but understanding the course they had taken didn't change the place they had arrived at. They'd been kids then, even Lex, but they were both well grown into themselves now. Even Superman couldn't turn the clock back to try things again, and the walls and patterns they'd built up between them had been forged to the insurmountable standards of two very stubborn and powerful men.

Still, a year of seeing flickers of Lex in Kon made him want to try.

Of course, that particular feeling tended not to survive an actual encounter with the man. Possibly a side effect of all the kryptonite.

Giving up, Clark closed the fridge door on the lonely condiments and deteriorating leftovers and toyed idly with the notion of dropping in on the farm. See his parents, check up on Kon, eat real food.

It was for a good cause, after all. He didn't like his parents to worry. Also: pie.

Some decisions, at least, were easy. After all, the reporter and the superhero deserved some time off every now and again. And if it also meant he could stop obsessing over things long past and put Lex Luthor well out of his mind, that was all to the good. For one night he was going to spend time with his family and not worry about anything else.

All of which made it that much more ironic when a half hour later saw him crashing through the large penthouse window of LexCorp Tower in a blind rage.