Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Harrison Luthor’s world was a symphony of pain. It began with a whisper, a low hum in the marrow of his bones that he had learned to recognize as a death knell, a prelude to the violent crescendo. It was a cold, alien ache, unlike anything a normal human body should ever feel. He was accustomed to it—he had been a ghost in his own flesh for as long as he could remember—but the crescendo was what he dreaded.

It started with a warmth, a sudden heat that bloomed beneath his skin like a burning flower. Then, the glow. First in his fingertips, a faint, sickly green light that pulsed with the beat of his heart. It was beautiful, in a terrifying, grotesque way. It spread up his arms, a spiderweb of emerald veins visible just beneath his skin, and then across his chest, a luminescent pattern of ancient, impossible runes. The pain was no longer a hum; it was a shriek. A thousand needles, hot and sharp, piercing his every nerve. His muscles spasmed, his teeth clenched so hard he thought his jaw would shatter.

“Harrison!”

Lex’s voice was the only thing that could ever cut through the noise. It was not the cold, controlled baritone of Lex Luthor, CEO and public figure, but the raw, frantic sound of a terrified older brother. It was a sound Harrison cherished, a reminder that in this second life, he was not alone.

Lex was at his side in a second, his hands, so often gloved in polished leather or clasped behind his back, now held Harrison's face, his thumb stroking a frantic line across his cheek. “The sedative. Now!” he bellowed to the med-droids.

Harrison’s vision swam, his perception of the meticulously clean, sterile lab blurring into a watercolor of white, steel-gray, and the horrifying, neon-green of his own body. He felt a phantom weight on his chest, a heavy, suffocating sensation that had nothing to do with the present. The pain from the Echo was a tidal wave, pulling him under and back, not just in space, but in time.

Metropolis, thirteen years ago.

The air in the LexCorp R&D lab was thick with the scent of ozone and heated metal. Nine-year-old Harrison sat curled on a stool, a sketchpad in his lap, drawing a fanciful dragon with three heads. He didn’t look up as his older brother, Lex, a severe-looking fifteen-year-old even then, paced furiously around a glowing containment field.

Lex had been distant since their parents’ death. Colder. He had always been brilliant, but now his genius had a frantic edge, a ruthless ambition that left little room for a quiet, sensitive younger brother. He tolerated Harrison's presence, but rarely acknowledged it.

Harrison, however, was persistent. It was his nature. He wanted to love his brother, to be loved by him, no matter how cold Lex was. Every day, he would ask about Lex's projects, bring him a glass of water he hadn't asked for, or simply sit in the same room, a quiet, loving presence.

“Maybe the thermal regulators are off by a few degrees, Lex? It looks a little stressed,” Harrison said, his voice small but clear. He had noticed a flicker of light, an irregularity in the humming device that Lex hadn't seen.

Lex stopped pacing. He stared at Harrison as if he were a particularly irritating insect. “Did you just give me a diagnosis?”

“I-I just… it looks like it’s struggling,” Harrison stammered, shrinking a little. He felt Lex’s disapproval like a physical blow.

Lex just scoffed and turned back to his console, muttering, “What would you know?”

The next few minutes were a blur. A warning siren blared, a jarring, electronic scream that cut through the silence. The blue light in the core pulsed faster, brighter.

“Lex, it’s not right!” Harrison cried, scrambling off his stool.

Lex, ignoring the alarms, was furiously typing commands into the console. “It’s fine! The containment field can handle it.”

But it couldn't. With a shriek of tortured metal, the containment field buckled, and the fusion core went critical. The blue light pulsed once, twice, and then a brilliant, searing wave of energy shot out, aimed directly at Lex.

Time seemed to slow to a crawl. Harrison saw his brother’s face—not the face of the brilliant genius, but the face of a terrified, vulnerable child. He saw the flash of the incoming energy and something inside him snapped. It was not a thought. It was an instinct. A raw, unthinking reflex from a life he didn’t remember, from a body that was more than just flesh and blood. He pushed. Not with his hands, but with something else. Something deep inside his core, something that hummed and pulsed with a kind of power that defied physics.

An invisible shield, a transparent dome of pure, unadulterated magical force, sprang into existence around Lex. It was a perfect, protective bubble. The wave of energy hit the shield with the force of a nuclear detonation, but the shield held. It glowed a brilliant, emerald green for a single, excruciating second, and then the energy dissipated into a cloud of sizzling, harmless motes. The shield flickered and vanished, leaving behind nothing but the stench of burnt wiring and a stunned, silent silence.

Lex’s eyes were wide, fixed on the empty space where the energy wave had been. His gaze slowly shifted from there to Harrison, who stood trembling, his hand outstretched, his body glowing with a faint, green luminescence that was not from the lab. He was a boy, no more than a child, but for one brief, impossible second, he had been a god.

Lex stared at him, and for the first time in months, his cold facade crumbled. He fell to his knees, not in fear, but in a kind of raw, overwhelming awe. “Harrison… what was that?” he whispered.

“I… I don’t know,” Harrison said, his voice shaking. “I was just… worried about you. I couldn’t let you get hurt.”

Lex stood, his brilliant mind racing. He reached out and touched Harrison’s face, his hand gentle, almost reverent. He had always known Harrison was different, had always loved him in a distant, intellectual way. But in this moment, a new, fiercer kind of love was born. He didn't see a boy with a strange power. He saw a lifeline, a reason to live, a reason to be more than just a genius. He saw a soul who would run into danger for him without a second thought, and he vowed he would spend the rest of his life protecting him from that same danger.

Metropolis, twelve years ago.

The day the world changed was a Tuesday. Harrison Luthor, a boy of ten, was in the family's private penthouse on the top floor of what would one day become the LexCorp tower. He was at a console, playing a simple flight simulator, the kind Lex had built for him from scratch, when a tremor shook the building. It was not a natural quake. It was a ripple in reality, a tear in the fabric of what they knew as normal.

Lex had just stepped out of the room to retrieve a fresh coffee. From the doorway, he saw his brother, and then, a piece of something else—a piece of the robot, a jagged, serrated piece of metal, hurtled through the air, aimed directly at the penthouse. It was a stray, a piece of a cosmic fight that had no business being there. But it was.

Lex froze. He watched, a horrified spectator, as a flash of red and blue streaked across the sky below, too fast for the human eye to track. The flash was a blur of chaos and destruction. And Harrison was standing, just standing there, with his back to the window, watching the city below.

“Harrison, get down!” he screamed.

But it was too late. The fragment of metal, alien and impossibly sharp, pierced the reinforced window and sliced through the room. Harrison, in his childlike innocence, just stood there, staring. It was a clean, precise strike. He felt a sharp, burning pain, and then a kind of numbness.

The piece of metal had hit him in the side, a glancing blow that would have been a mere cut for an adult, but for a child, it was a mortal wound. He fell to the floor, blood blooming across his white shirt, a dark crimson flower.

Lex was there in a second, his face pale with terror. He had seen the entire sequence. The flash of red and blue, the chaotic fight, the stray debris, the blood. It was all so quick, so senseless. His brilliant mind, his ruthless genius, was useless. He couldn’t save his brother.

As Lex knelt beside him, a raw, primal grief clawing at his throat, Harrison’s body began to glow. It was a faint, sickly green luminescence, pulsing with his frantic heartbeat. It was not a light of healing. It was a light of struggle, a silent, internal war. The pain from the wound was nothing compared to this new, violent ache. He didn’t understand it. He only knew that the light had been dormant inside him, a sleeping giant, and that the moment he was struck, the moment the alien energy entered his body, the giant had awakened.

Lex held his hand, his eyes wide with a mix of fear and helpless rage. He looked up at the window, at the sky where the flash of red and blue had disappeared. He saw not a hero, but a force of destruction, a being who had come to their world and, in his arrogance, had brought pain and suffering to the one person Lex loved most in the world.

“I’m sorry,” Harrison gasped, his voice a strained whisper, his eyes on his brother. He didn’t know why he was apologizing. He was just a child. But he knew, with a certainty that was as old as time itself, that this was his fault. That somehow, in another life, he had been a hero, a force of good, and he had failed.

Lex shook his head, a tear tracing a path down his cheek. “No, Harrison,” he whispered, his voice cracking. “Don’t you ever apologize. This wasn’t your fault. This was his. He brought this here. He did this to you.”

And in that moment, in the raw, aching silence of a child’s pain, the foundation of Lex Luthor’s hatred for Superman was laid. It was not a hatred born of arrogance, or jealousy, or a philosophical fear of alien power. It was born of a far simpler, far more terrible thing: love.

The memory faded, and the pain of the Echo washed back over Harrison, a cold, sharp blade. The med-droids had finally succeeded in injecting the sedative. The heavy, cold wave promised a temporary reprieve. The pain didn’t vanish, but it receded, softening from a shriek to a low, bearable ache. The emerald glow faded, and his muscles unclenched, leaving him trembling and weak. He sagged against Lex, who wrapped an arm around him, holding him with a fierce possessive grip that told the world he was not to be touched.

“I’m sorry,” Harrison murmured into the pristine fabric of his brother's suit. “I ruined the data again.”

Lex let out a shuddering breath, his body visibly relaxing as the crisis passed. He didn’t reply immediately, just held him, his head bowed, the familiar scent of his expensive cologne a comforting presence. When he finally spoke, his voice was low, raw with the effort of control. “Don’t you ever apologize for being in pain. You didn’t ask for this.”

It was this kind of quiet, unspoken kindness that made Lex bearable. The world saw him as a cold, calculating genius—and he was. But Harrison saw the man who had stayed up for three days straight, reviewing a hundred thousand scientific papers in a desperate search for a single, new lead. He saw the man who had personally designed the anti-rejection treatments, the man who had installed a hyperbaric chamber in his bedroom, and the man who, right now, was holding his trembling body as though it were the most precious thing in the universe.

The med-droids silently retreated, their diagnostics complete for the moment, leaving the brothers in the quiet of the lab. Rain lashed against the towering windows of LexCorp Tower, a gray curtain obscuring the sprawling cityscape of Metropolis below.

Lex gently guided Harrison to a cushioned bench, then turned to a massive bank of monitors. His expression hardened into the familiar mask of ruthless genius as he began to review the latest data. The monitors showed nothing but a series of erratic spikes, a meaningless scrawl of lines. He ran a diagnostic, and a cold voice from the computer confirmed his fear.

“System diagnostics complete. All data from the 11:03 p.m. event has been corrupted and overwritten by the subject's bio-signature.”

Lex slammed his fist on the console. The sound was a sharp crack in the silence. It was not a sound of rage, but of pure, unadulterated frustration. He had done everything. He had thrown billions of dollars at the problem. He had hired the top physicists, biologists, and neurologists. He had even, in his most desperate moments, consulted with occultists and mystics who promised him a cure in the realm of the unknown. And every time, the answer was the same. A brick wall.

“We’ve hit a wall, Harrison,” he said, his back to his brother. “A hard, impenetrable wall. The Echo… it’s a form of energy we can’t measure, we can’t contain. It’s like trying to catch starlight in a sieve.”

Harrison watched him, a familiar, hollow feeling settling in his chest. He knew this frustration, this despair. He felt it every day. But he had a different kind of understanding.

The Echo was not just a power, or a sickness. It was a memory. A scar from a life he didn't fully remember. Fragments would flicker at the edge of his consciousness, just out of reach. A flash of green light. A cackle that was both cruel and familiar. The feel of a thin, wooden stick in his hand, a feeling of innate, powerful control. And then, the hollow, vacant echo of something vast and terrible. A death he could not place. A name that was a curse.

This new life had been a blessing, a second chance. He had been reborn into a family—a broken, strange family, but a family nonetheless. He had a brother who would do anything for him, a brother who had wrapped his arms around him the first time the sickness hit and had never let go. And the Echo was the cruel price he had to pay. It was his past life's magic, trying to exist in a world where magic was not a natural law, where it was something alien and feared. The resulting conflict was slowly killing him.

“I’m not a sieve, Lex,” Harrison said quietly, his voice raspy. He knew his brother, knew how he was seeing this. Lex saw the sickness as a problem to be solved, a puzzle to be conquered. He was brilliant enough to conquer anything. But Harrison knew some puzzles weren’t meant to be solved.

Lex finally turned, his gaze intense and unwavering. “No. You’re not. You’re a vessel for a power that we, as a species, are not equipped to understand. We’ve exhausted every Earthly solution. We’ve tested every theory, every exotic material, every energy source. The answer isn’t here.”

His eyes narrowed, and a cold, dangerous glint entered them. Harrison knew that look. It was the look he wore when he was about to do something reckless, something the world would see as a political move, but which was, in reality, an act of sheer, unadulterated love.

“So we look elsewhere,” Lex said, his voice dropping to a low growl. He strode to the window, staring out at the rain-swept sky. A single, dark shape cut through the clouds, a streak of red and blue. The Superman.

Harrison watched his brother’s body tense, his hands clenching into fists at his sides. The hatred was a palpable thing, a force that seemed to push the very air out of the room. It was not a shallow, petty jealousy. It was born of a deeper, more primal place. It was born of a Tuesday twelve years ago when a boy lay bleeding on the floor. Lex saw the alien not as a god, but as a ghost—a ghost of the past that had stolen his brother’s life from him.

“He is a living library of alien knowledge,” Lex said, his voice a low, furious whisper. “He represents everything we need and everything we are denied. He claims to be for humanity, but he hoards a power that could cure you, a million pains.”

“He is not a monster, Lex,” Harrison said, his voice soft, full of a world-weary understanding. He had seen enough of those in his past life. This one felt different. He knew his brother saw him not as a hero, but as a cosmic curse.

“He is worse,” Lex snapped, turning to face him. “He is a coward. He came here with a knowledge that could save you, and he stood by while you suffered. I know his kind.”

Harrison knew he was talking about more than just Superman. Lex was talking about a deep-seated fear of power, of a force he could not control. But the fear was, for him, a secondary concern. The primary one was Harrison.

“What are you going to do?” Harrison asked, the thought a cold knot in his stomach.

Lex smiled again, a predator’s smile, full of a terrible kind of glee. “Then he’ll regret the day he ever landed on this planet.”

He put a hand on Harrison’s shoulder, a gesture of affection and resolve. “Now, get some rest. I have some plans to make. We’re going to find a cure for this, Harrison. We’re going to find it, no matter the cost.”

And as Lex walked away, the rain began to fall harder, and Harrison was left alone, watching the lights of Metropolis flicker, wondering how he could have a second chance at life, only to find himself at the center of a new kind of storm.

Chapter Text

The podium was a precipice, and Lex Luthor stood on the edge of it, perfectly at home in the vertigo.

Before him, the press corps of Metropolis was a sea of flashing bulbs and hungry eyes. They were sharks, but Lex was the ocean; he dictated where they swam. Behind him, projected onto a screen the size of a cathedral wall, was a slow-motion loop of the "Incident"—the day the tectonic plates of the city had shifted, the day the sky had cracked open, the day Harrison had begun to die.

Lex didn't look at the screen. He knew every frame of the footage. He knew the precise millisecond the Kryptonian debris had sheared off the engine block. He knew the trajectory. He knew the scream.

"They call him a savior," Lex said. His voice was not loud, but the acoustic engineering of the hall carried it like a thunderclap. He didn't use a teleprompter. He spoke from the open, festering wound in his chest. "They call him a god. But look at the rubble. Look at the fire. A god does not bleed his mistakes onto the pavement of a human city."

He gripped the edges of the podium until his knuckles turned white, the only physical sign of the rage boiling beneath his tailored suit.

"We are not pets to be kept in a terrarium," Lex continued, his gaze sweeping the room, cold and blue and terrifyingly lucid. "We are not collateral damage for their intergalactic brawls. When they break the sky, we are the ones who are cut by the glass."

A murmur rippled through the crowd. He had them. He always had them. Fear was a potent currency, and Lex was its wealthiest banker.

"LexCorp is announcing the 'Planetary Sovereignty Initiative'," he declared, smoothing his tie with a robotic precision. "New protocols. New defenses. If the alien refuses to be accountable to human law, then human ingenuity will enforce it. We will no longer look up and pray. We will look up and aim."

The applause was thunderous. It was a roar of validation.

But Lex felt nothing but a cold, hollow exhaustion.

He walked off the stage, the benevolent smile sliding off his face like melting wax the moment he crossed into the shadows of the wings. His expression settled into something jagged and weary. Mercy was waiting for him, a tablet in hand, her eyes scanning his face for cracks.

"Trending worldwide," she said, falling into step beside him as they moved toward the private elevators. "The 'Alien Negligence' narrative is polling at eighty percent. The Mayor is already calling to pledge support for the new defense contracts."

"Good," Lex said, loosening his tie as if it were a noose. He felt dirty. He felt like a cheap magician distracting an audience with flash paper while he stole the watch from their wrist. "And the other matter?"

Mercy’s stride didn't hitch. "The shipment from the crash site in the Indian Ocean. It arrived an hour ago. Secure Lab 4."

Lex stopped. The elevator doors slid open, revealing his reflection in the polished gold brass—distorted, stretched, monstrous. He looked at his own eyes and saw only desperation staring back.

"Is it active?" he asked, his voice dropping to a whisper.

"It's radiating," Mercy confirmed. "Same signature as the shard extracted from Harrison's shoulder. But Lex... the energy readings are spiking. It's singing."

"Then we don't have time for the Mayor," Lex said, stepping into the elevator. "Cancel everything."

Secure Lab 4 was buried three hundred feet beneath the foundation of LexCorp Tower. It was a lead-lined tomb designed to contain the things that shouldn't exist.

The air here was colder than the rest of the building. It hummed with the sound of high-powered ventilation and the low thrum of the containment fields.

Lex stood before the viewing glass. Inside the chamber, suspended in a magnetic field, was a jagged piece of metal. It was black, veined with a pulsing, violet light. To the uninitiated, it looked like scrap. To Lex, it looked like the bullet that was slowly killing his brother.

"Analysis," Lex barked, not looking away.

Dr. Teng, the head of his xenobiology division, wiped sweat from his forehead. He looked terrified. Everyone who worked in Lab 4 looked terrified. "Sir, the radiation output is... it's inconsistent. It's not just energy. It's data. It's rewriting the cellular structure of anything it touches."

"I know what it does," Lex snapped. "I asked for the counter-frequency. I asked how to stop it."

"We're trying, Mr. Luthor. But the energy... it adapts. Every time we introduce a stabilizing agent, the radiation shifts. It's like it has an immune system. It's fighting back."

Lex slammed his hand against the glass. The sound echoed like a gunshot.

"Then fight harder!" he roared. The calm, charismatic politician from the podium was gone. In his place was a man fraying at the edges, his eyes wild. "My brother does not have time for it to 'adapt.' He is burning alive in his own skin, Teng. If you cannot find a way to neutralize this frequency, I will find someone who can, and your next research assignment will be in a landfill."

Teng nodded frantically, retreating to his console.

Lex leaned his forehead against the cool glass. He closed his eyes, his breathing ragged.

Harry.

He could still see him this morning. Harrison had been sitting by the window, staring out at the smog, his skin so translucent Lex could trace the blue veins beneath it. He hadn't complained. Harrison never complained. He just endured, with that infuriating, quiet acceptance that Lex could never quite understand.

Lex had tried to analyze it for years. Was it shock? Was it the neurological degradation of the pain? But it didn't feel like damage. It felt like wisdom.

It was a stillness that didn't belong to a boy of twenty—an ancient, weary patience that made Lex feel, terrifyingly, like the younger brother. Sometimes, when Harrison looked at him, Lex felt like he was being pitied by a grandfather who had seen the end of the world and knew it couldn't be stopped. It unnerved him. It made him feel like he was fighting a war Harrison had already surrendered to.

“It’s okay, Lex,” he had said, his voice barely a rasp. “You can’t fix everything.”

Watch me, Lex thought viciously, the image of Harrison’s fragile smile burning in his mind. Just watch me.

"You're running that equipment hot, Luthor."

The voice came from the shadows—gravel grinding on concrete.

Lex didn't flinch. He didn't turn around immediately. He took a breath, composing his face into a mask of arrogant boredom, forcibly smoothing the lines of panic from his forehead. He slowly pivoted.

Batman stood on the gantry above the main lab floor. His cape hung around him like the wings of a gargoyle, blending perfectly into the industrial darkness. He was a silhouette of judgment.

"Security," Lex said calmly to the empty air, "is becoming a suggestion in this building."

"You're drawing a lot of power for a 'sovereignty initiative,'" Batman said. He dropped down, landing silently on the polished floor. He was tall, imposing, an armor-plated myth. But Lex had stared down gods; a man in a bat suit didn't impress him. "And you're hoarding Class-A xenotech. That's a violation of the UN charter, Lex."

"The UN charter applies to weapons," Lex countered, walking toward a console to casually close a file. "I am conducting medical research."

"On wreckage from a Kryptonian warship?" Batman’s lenses narrowed, glowing white in the dim light. "I saw your speech. You're whipping the city into a frenzy. You're making them afraid."

"They should be afraid!" Lex snapped, the mask slipping again. "You play dress-up in the shadows, waiting for the monsters to strike so you can punch them. I am trying to build a shield before the blow lands."

"By scavenging their trash?" Batman stepped closer. He towered over Lex, but Lex stood his ground. "I know you, Lex. You don't do anything for the 'public good' unless there's a profit margin. What are you building?"

"I am building a future where we don't need you," Lex hissed.

Batman tilted his head. He was scanning the room, his cowl recording everything. His gaze lingered on the containment chamber, on the violet-pulsing debris. Then, he looked at the monitors.

Lex’s heart hammered against his ribs. The monitors didn't show weapon schematics. They showed bio-readouts. Human bio-readouts. They showed a genetic sequence degrading in real-time. They showed Harrison’s file.

Batman saw it.

Lex saw the realization ripple through the vigilante’s posture. The shift from threat assessment to investigation.

"Subject H.L.," Batman read the label on the screen. "Cellular decay. Energy rejection." He looked back at Lex. The aggression in the Bat’s stance lessened, replaced by a dangerous curiosity. "This isn't a weapon. It's a patient."

Lex stepped in front of the screen, his hands clenched into fists. "Get out."

"Who is it?" Batman asked. "Who are you trying to cure with engine radiation?"

"That is none of your concern," Lex said, his voice trembling with a lethal quiet. "You trespass in my city, in my building, and you question my methods? You have no idea what is at stake. You have no idea what it costs to be human in a world of monsters."

He pressed a button on the console. The room bathed in red emergency light. "I have just triggered a silent alarm to the Metropolis Special Crimes Unit. They are three minutes out. Unless you want to explain to the Commissioner why you are harassing a private citizen conducting legal research, I suggest you leave."

Batman stared at him for a long moment. He was analyzing, deducing. He was putting the pieces together—the reclusive brother, the desperate resource hoarding, the timeline of the "incidents."

"You're playing with fire, Lex," Batman warned. He fired a grapple gun toward the ventilation shaft high above. "If that energy destabilizes, it won't just kill your patient. It will take half of Midtown with it."

"I have it under control," Lex lied.

"For now," Batman said. "The League is watching. And Lex? If that radiation is what I think it is, you're looking for a cure in the wrong place. Earthly physics won't hold it."

With a rush of air and the whine of a winch, he was gone.

Lex stood alone in the red strobing light. His hands were shaking. Not from fear of the Bat, but from the terrifying closeness of the truth being exposed. If they found out about Harrison—if they found out that the younger Luthor was a meta-human time-bomb triggered by their precious Superman—they would take him away. They would put him in a containment facility. They would "quarantine" him.

"Never," Lex whispered to the empty lab.

He turned back to the jagged metal shard. It pulsed, mocking him. It seemed to hum a song he couldn't hear, a song that sounded like home to a species he hated.

He picked up his phone and dialed Mercy.

"Increase the security grid," he ordered. "Lead shielding on the penthouse. Frequency jammers. And tell the PR team to double the ad buy for tomorrow."

"Sir?" Mercy asked.

"The Bat knows we're hiding something," Lex said, staring into the violet light. "So we need to make so much noise that he can't hear the heartbeat."

He hung up.

Upstairs, fifty floors above, Harrison was sleeping, or trying to. Lex looked at the ceiling, as if he could see through the concrete and steel to the brother he was damning his soul to save.

"I will burn it all down, Harry," Lex vowed softly. "I will burn the sky until it's black, if that's what it takes to keep you warm."

Chapter Text

The silence in the penthouse was not empty. It was heavy. It was a physical thing, built layer by layer from reinforced steel, triple-paned bulletproof glass, and the suffocating weight of his brother’s love.

Harrison Luthor sat on the edge of his bed, the silk sheets cool against his feverish skin. He didn't move. Moving hurt. Breathing hurt. Existing was a negotiation between his will and his nervous system.

So, he thought.

He thought because if he stopped thinking, the pain would become the only thing in the universe. He treated his mind like a grand, chaotic library, constantly pulling books off the shelves just to hear the sound of the pages turning, just to drown out the screaming of his own cells.

Seventeen, his mind whispered, pulling a dusty volume from the shelf labeled Before.

He remembered being seventeen. He remembered the Forbidden Forest. Not the visual of it—that was fading, like an old photograph left in the sun—but the feeling. The cold, smooth weight of the Resurrection Stone in his palm. The smell of damp earth and pine needles. The absolute, terrifying clarity of knowing he was walking toward his death.

He remembered the green light. It hadn't hurt. It was just... a cease-fire. A sudden, absolute stop.

And then, the error. The glitch in the cosmic machinery. The crying. The screaming. Waking up in a nursery in Metropolis with a soul that was centuries too heavy for his infant bones.

Harrison looked at his reflection in the dark glass of the window. A young man with old eyes.

"It’s a cage," he whispered to the glass.

Lex called it a sanctuary. Lex called it a sterile environment. But Harrison knew what it was. It was a mausoleum built for a living corpse.

He looked down at his hands. Pale, trembling, veins tracing blue maps under translucent skin. The "Echo"—that’s what Lex called the sickness, a clinical name for a spiritual rejection—pulsed in his marrow. It wasn't a virus. It was his body trying to exorcise his soul. It was the biological rejection of magic by a vessel that had no capacity to hold it.

I am a fire in a paper house, Harrison thought. And Lex is trying to reinforce the paper with steel, but he doesn't understand that the burning is coming from the inside.

His mind drifted to Lex. It always drifted to Lex.

Harrison had seen the signs early. When they were children, he had watched Lex dissect the world with a cold, terrifying brilliance. He had watched Lex isolate himself, pushing people away before they could leave him. He had seen the sneer, the arrogance, the desperate need for control.

He had seen Tom Riddle.

The comparison haunted Harrison’s quiet hours. Tom, the boy in the orphanage. Lex, the boy in the mansion. Both brilliant. Both lonely. Both convinced that love was a weakness because the world had never given them a version of it that didn't come with teeth.

Tom became a monster because he had no one to tell him 'no', Harrison thought, closing his eyes against a spike of pain in his chest. He had no anchor. He floated away into the dark.

Harrison gripped the edge of the mattress. This was why he stayed. This was why he endured the needles, the scans, the suffocating security protocols.

I am the anchor.

It was a heavy thing to be. To be the morality pet for a future supervillain. To be the reason Lex Luthor hadn't burned the world down yet—or perhaps, the reason he would.

"Harrison?"

The voice shattered his spiral.

Mercy Graves stood in the doorway. She moved like a cat, silent and lethal. She was the gatekeeper of his cage.

"Lex cleared the excursion," she said, her voice softer than she used with anyone else. She stepped into the room, checking the vitals monitor on his bedside table before she looked at him. "Twenty minutes. Centennial Park. Perimeter security is strictly non-negotiable."

"He built this room to keep death out," Harrison murmured, standing up. His joints popped, a dry, brittle sound that made Mercy wince almost imperceptibly. "But sometimes... sometimes I think he just built it to keep me in."

Mercy didn't answer. She knew better than to engage in the philosophy of Lex Luthor’s obsession.

Harrison walked to the closet, his movements slow and deliberate. He pulled out a heavy wool coat. As he buttoned it, he felt the familiar flare of the sickness—a hot, jagged line of lightning running up his spine.

"Let's go, Mercy," he said, turning away from the window and the stifling silence. "Before I suffocate."

Centennial Park was an assault.

After the dead, scrubbed air of the tower, the park was a riot of life. The wind bit at his cheeks, smelling of ozone and roasted nuts. The noise—children screaming, dogs barking, the distant roar of the mag-lev trains—battered against his hypersensitive nerves like physical blows.

It hurt. But it was a good hurt. It was the ache of being alive, not the rot of dying.

Harrison sat on a secluded bench near the duck pond, huddled deep into his coat. He watched a father teaching his son to throw a frisbee. The boy missed, laughing as he chased the plastic disc.

Harrison felt a pang of envy so sharp it almost knocked the wind out of him. He had died at seventeen. He had spent his childhood in a cupboard and his adolescence in a war. And now, in this second chance, he was spending his youth in a lab, waiting for his brother to cure the incurable.

Don't think, he told himself. Just breathe. You’re here. You’re not in the forest. You’re not in the lab.

"Whoops! Sorry—careful there!"

The voice crashed into his solitude—deep, frantic, and unmistakably human.

Harrison looked up. A man was stumbling past the bench, a chaotic whirlwind of limbs, a messenger bag, and a precarious stack of file folders. He tripped over nothing—perhaps the air itself—and the stack exploded. Papers fluttered like panicked doves, landing all over the pavement and onto Harrison’s boots.

"Damn it," the man muttered, adjusting a pair of thick, black-framed glasses that were sliding down his nose. He looked up, his eyes meeting Harrison’s.

And the world stopped.

It didn't just go quiet. It went still.

Harrison gasped, his hand flying to his chest.

The "Echo"—the constant, screaming vibration in his cells, the background radiation of pain he had lived with for five years—suddenly vanished.

It was as if someone had flipped a switch. The static in his head cleared. The nausea settled. The fire in his joints was extinguished by a wave of cool, impossible relief.

Harrison stared at the man. He was huge—broad-shouldered, tall, with messy black hair and a suit that fit him like he was borrowing it from a larger relative. He looked like a bumbling, harmless office worker.

But he felt like... the sun. He felt like the first deep breath after drowning.

"I am so sorry," the man said, scrambling to pick up his papers. "I swear, gravity has a personal vendetta against me today."

Harrison couldn't speak. He was too busy experiencing the miracle of a painless existence.

"Here," Harrison managed to say. His voice sounded different—stronger. Less brittle. He reached down, his hand steady for the first time in months, and picked up a stray sheet of paper.

He handed it to the stranger. Their fingers brushed.

Zap.

Not a static shock. A connection. A circuit closing. A hum of golden warmth traveled up Harrison’s arm, bypassing his frayed nerves and settling deep in his core, right where the alien shard was lodged. It didn't just numb the pain; it answered it. It felt like a key sliding into a lock.

For a second, Harrison’s hand glowed—a faint, barely perceptible shimmer of gold under the cuff of his coat.

The stranger froze. He looked at Harrison, really looked at him. His eyes were a startling, vivid blue, and for a fleeting second, the clumsy facade dropped. There was a depth in those eyes, a terrifying clarity.

"Thanks," the man said softly. He took the paper, but he didn't pull away. He stayed crouched there, close enough that Harrison could feel the radiant heat of his body. "You okay? You looked... you looked like you were in pain a second ago."

"I..." Harrison swallowed, his mind racing. What are you? "I have good days and bad days. This is... suddenly a better one."

The man smiled. It was a blinding, genuine thing that crinkled the corners of his eyes. "I'm Clark. Clark Kent. Daily Planet."

"Harrison," he replied. He choked back the name Luthor. He didn't want to break this spell. He didn't want the wall of prejudice to slam down between them. "Just Harrison."

"Nice to meet you, 'Just Harrison'," Clark said, standing up. He hovered there, seemingly reluctant to break the proximity. "Do you mind if I... sit? My editor is going to kill me if I don't organize these, and I think the wind is plotting against me."

"Please," Harrison said, shifting over.

Clark sat down. The bench dipped under his weight.

He was a furnace. A massive, radiating source of warmth and stability. Harrison, who was perpetually cold, felt the heat seep into his side, thawing places in his soul he hadn't realized were frozen.

"You're not from Metropolis," Clark observed, shuffling his papers with hands that were large but surprisingly gentle.

"Born and raised," Harrison lied. Born in England. Died in Scotland. Reborn here. "Why?"

"You're too quiet," Clark said, glancing at him sideways. "Metropolis people are loud. They project. You... you sit like you're used to being invisible."

Harrison raised an eyebrow, a flicker of his old, dry wit returning. "Observant for a clumsy reporter."

"I listen," Clark said simply. He looked at Harrison again, his gaze lingering on the faint scar on his forehead, then drifting down to his chest, as if he could see the monitor strapped there. "You feel... heavy, Harrison."

Harrison stiffened. "Heavy?"

"Like you're carrying a weight you can't put down," Clark said. He looked sheepish, rubbing the back of his neck. "Sorry. That was intrusive. I just... I get a feeling about people. A vibe. Sometimes... sometimes it feels like a void. Like you're absorbing the light around you."

Harrison looked at him sharply. A void. That was new.

"We all carry things, Clark," Harrison said softly, looking out at the water to hide the tremor of unease in his eyes. "Some of us just have heavier ghosts."

He thought of the Resurrection Stone. He thought of the faces of the dead. He thought of Lex, terrified and desperate, burning the world to save him.

"True," Clark said. He finished stacking his papers. He didn't get up. He just sat there, a solid presence in a chaotic world. "But sometimes it helps to have someone sit on the bench with you for a minute. Share the weight."

Harrison looked at him. He felt a lump in his throat.

"Yeah," Harrison whispered, leaning almost imperceptibly closer to the warmth. "Maybe it does."

A sharp whistle cut through the air. Mercy.

The spell broke. The reality of his cage came rushing back. The vitals monitor beeped once, a warning.

"I have to go," Harrison said, standing up. The pain returned—a dull ache creeping back into his joints—but the memory of the relief was still there, buzzing under his skin.

"Will you be here again?" Clark asked. He looked hopeful.

Harrison hesitated. He should say no. He should protect this radiant creature from the darkness of the Luthor name.

But he remembered Tom. He remembered the coldness. And looking at Clark, he felt something he hadn't felt in two lifetimes.

He felt safe.

"Maybe," Harrison said, a small, genuine smile touching his lips. "If the wind behaves."

He walked away, feeling Clark’s eyes on his back—a warm, watchful weight. And somewhere deeper in the shadows of the park, he felt another gaze. Something colder. Something calculating.

As he reached the car, Mercy opened the door. She looked at her tablet, her brow furrowed. "Vitals stabilized," she muttered, sounding confused. "Heart rate dropped. Cortisol levels bottomed out. The 'Echo' interference pattern... it almost flatlined. It's like your cells just... stopped fighting."

Harrison slid into the leather seat, leaning his head back against the cool headrest. He closed his eyes.

"I found a quiet spot, Mercy," Harrison whispered, clutching the memory of that warmth to his chest like a new stone. "I just found a quiet spot."