Archive of Our Own

October 7, 1989

Spend some time together, his mom had said. And be gentle, Lionel, please.

Lex had overheard them, like always, perched on the highest step of the staircase, hidden in the dark to watch them. At least it wasn't a fight this time. In the helicopter he had started wishing it had been.

Luthors are not afraid, Lex. We don't have that luxury.

Maybe he shouldn't be a Luthor, then, because he's scared a lot. He's scared for his mom when Dad gets angry, and of his mom sometimes, when she squeezes Lex's shoulders too tight and shakes him when he says something he is not supposed to say, like the truth. He used to be scared of bugs, too, then he forced himself to read an entomology encyclopedia, staring at the pictures until his heart stopped hammering.

He's scared of his Dad, most of the time.

He feels sorry for the man with a gentle face and a cowboy hat, now. He wants to say, How much is a cream corn factory worth? and I saw my Dad push someone off a roof.

Lex stays quiet, and ventures into the fields instead. Lex had understood some time ago that he was not very brave.

Spider webs stretch between corn stems, and he swallows the fear to shove his way through. They're not as scary as turning around would be.

The labyrinth breaks open into a clearing, and Lex thinks of that book about aliens cutting shapes into fields, the book his mother gave him in secret because his father would have called it childish nonsense. The sun hits the back of his head like a fist.

"Help me."

Lex stops walking, a shiver running down his back. There is no one. And he thinks of the other book, the one he found in the attic, about the aliens that take little boys away to open them up and see what's inside.

"Help me, please!"

He jerks around, eyes going everywhere — corn all around, a scarecrow leaning between the stems in flannel and a straw hat, and Lex decides not to wait and find out whether that one will grow eyes like the things in his nightmares.

He runs. He looks back every few steps, the leaves slashing at his face, and before he has gone any real distance his lungs are climbing the back of his throat. He claws the inhaler out of his inner coat pocket and gets it to his mouth just as his feet go out from under him. He lands face first in the dirt, coughing and gasping, blinking around for where it fell.

This has got to stop. Open your eyes, Lex.

He drags in a breath when he finds it, and another as he clutches it in his palm. The band around his chest loosens a little. He sits up, blinking dust out of his eyes. He pushes himself backwards through the dirt on his hands — until his spine meets something hard.

"Hey, kid." A soft voice, right behind him.

Lex turns his head slowly. Bare, filthy feet, bound to a post with straw rope, and a body that goes high above Lex's head. He yelps and scrambles away. There is a teenager, half-naked and tied to a cross, a red S painted on his chest.

"Help me. Help me, please."

Then the sky splits open along a trail of fire, and something lands behind him, and Lex's brain refuses, for a second, to comprehend what he sees. He gets to his feet, his breath short. The ground shakes, then he sees the dust, a wall of it rushing towards him, flattening the stalks on its way, and he turns and runs, the boy on the cross already gone out of his head.

Afterward Lex will remember it in pieces: the feeling of being lifted, then slammed against the ground. The dirt going hot under his palms, then cold, a strange cold, spreading across the top of his head. And later, much later, the feeling of being held, and carried by someone who does not strain to lift him.

Then opening his eyes, surrounded by strangers and his father with a face he has never seen before. There is a child looking at him, smiling, reaching a hand to touch his head, fingers brushing the skin.

Lex stays still, drowsy, wondering whether this is all a dream still, something his mind has put together to explain his father's arms around him. Then something takes hold behind his sternum, a string pulled taut and tied off, and its other is somewhere inside the warm hand now mapping the side of his face.

He manages, with the very last of himself, a smile. He has been told he has his mother's smile, closer to a smirk, foxy. The boy smiles wider.

Lex falls back sleep.

He spends the evening in Smallville in a countryside hospital bed, and the next morning he is on his feet with better lungs than he has had in his life. A week later, back in Metropolis by helicopter, he stops eating.

Two weeks later he stops getting out of bed.

The doctors find a remarkably healthy and remarkably hairless nine-year-old boy with a slight fever and a heart that beats a little too fast. Delayed shock reaction from the meteors, they write down, while Lex sleeps sixteen hours a day and dreams of corn fields and a little boy with green eyes under a sun the color of blood. When his mother asks what hurts he tells her There is something pulling on my heart.

(Somewhere, in a farmhouse he has never seen, the other boy is also not eating. He sits at a kitchen window every night with his forehead pressed against the glass, looking for a planet whose light is still on its way to him and will be for a long time. He cannot say it to anyone.

He does not speak, because he is not understood. The two people from the field make soft sounds at him, slower when he doesn't answer, as if the trouble were the speed, and he has learned a few of them: milk, because the woman gives him a cup every night and says it each time as she leaves the porch light on. Clark, they say often, although he is not quite sure of the meaning. Once, the man had cried it out across the yard, his face afraid, having found the boy folded on the ground and sick with something no one managed to understand, the veins under his eyes swollen and green under the porch light. The boy, carried inside by arms that would rather rot than drop him, had wanted to tell the man it was not his fault, that it was the ground, that it was everywhere here, but he had not had the words for it.)

Lillian, who has been a ghost in the house for years, comes back briefly into her body and packs two suitcases. She tells Lionel, in a voice that surprises both of them, We're leaving.

In the car, somewhere past the city limits, Lex sits up, the color coming back into his cheeks. By the time the cornfields begin, he is hungry.

Smallville Elementary has one floor and colorful crayon drawings taped to half its windows.

Lex stands in the corridor in front of the secretary's office in a pressed shirt — ironed this morning by the maid at his insistence, a decision he now regrets — and waits to be told where to go. His good shoes squeak on the linoleum every time he shifts his weight, which is often, and he is, as far as he can tell, the only human being in the building wearing a blazer.

The secretary does not gasp at the sight of his bald head — a feature he has only begun getting acquainted with, and self conscious about, now that he is no longer stuck in bed where no one could see him.

"Lex, is it? That short for something, honey?"

No one has ever called him honey before. His chest puffs up with it. "Alexander, ma'am, it's Greek, it means defender of men. The proper diminutive would be Alex; Lex is a misnomer my mother is fond of."

The secretary blinks, then offers him butterscotch from a glass dish. He takes it because he doesn't want to be rude, and the wrapper goes sticky against his palm.

At Excelsior the floors had been parquet and the uniform had been a small boy's version of a business suit, wool socks to the knee under a coat thick enough to stand up on its own. At Smallville Elementary, Lex has already seen a girl going down the hall in sweatpants with unicorns on them. He had not been able to keep himself from staring, and gone a furious red when she caught him at it, then caught the gleam of sun off his SPF 50'd scalp.

Smallville Elementary also has a teacher named Mrs. Rose, which appears to be her first name and makes Lex want to apologize for his manners ever time he says it. She looks at his bald head once and then moves on.

She does, however, ask him to introduce himself to the class.

Lex stands, smooths the front of his blazer, and clears his throat, his hands behind his back. "Good morning. My name is Alexander Luthor. I've transferred from Excelsior Academy, which was founded in 1877. My interests are astronomy and classical languages. At present I am reading 'The Starry Messenger', written by Galileo in 1610, which was the first scientific treatise to be published based on observations made through a telescope." The students stare at him, and a drop of sweat slides down Lex's back. "I also play chess, and I'd be glad to give anyone a game."

A chair creaks somewhere at the back. Mrs. Rose says, brightly, "Thank you, Lex, you can sit down now," which he does, replaying the speech in his mind to find out what he said wrong.

At recess he goes outside because his mother told him to make friends. The difficulty is that he has not had friends in Excelsior, only the boys who stole his gym shoes and made fun of his mountain of books, but he takes a deep breath and resolves to attempt.

He stands against the wall and surveys the field. The bigger boys are playing dodgeball with a smaller boy who appears to be forbidden from dodging. Off to one side, a group of girls is giggling, and he works out what about when one of them lifts a boiled egg in his direction and the rest of them lose it entirely. He turns the other way, towards two girls braiding each other's hair, and as he begins praying for the bell, he sees the boy.

The boy from the truck a month ago. The boy Lex is almost sure he has been seeing in his dreams ever since, when he quiets down Lionel's voice in the back of his head telling him to stop escaping in his imagination and face reality. He is sitting on the curb at the far end of the lot, alone, doing nothing, his hands flat on his knees and his chest moving in slow, controlled breaths. Thick brown hair, green eyes. He and Lex are the only children out there on their own.

Lex looks at him for a long time, but the boy does not look up.

Behind Lex's sternum, the string pulls, like it has been doing since the day of the meteor shower, someone on the far end taking up the slack. He puts his hand on his chest and breathes through it. It had been worse in Metropolis, the pull so strong he had thought his entire ribcage was going to go with it, and has shrunk to puppy tugs since he got in Smallville. When he looks up again the boy is gone, and the bell rings.

(The boy's name is Kal. The boy's name is also Clark; he is learning the shape of it in his new parents' mouth. His mother whispers it at night when she dries his tears with the corner of the sheet, then sings him a lullaby. His father says it in the daytime, with a warm hand on his shoulder, pointing out things and naming them, and Clark says them back, a little better every day.

He remembers the ship, and the trip he thought would never end — the months lost in darkness sometimes interrupted by the light of a star through the small window, and the doubt nipping at his throat, that this was all there would ever be again. He remembers that at home, things had not folded to nothing in his too-strong, too-clumsy hands. He remembers his other parents, and their last raḥmin lak l-'alam [1] whispered in his hair as the planet's crust was splitting beneath their feet. But with every day that passes their faces grow blurry in his mind eye, because in the ship there had been nothing to look at but them, and now there is something new in front of him every hour. Some nights he wakes up certain he has lost them entirely, and has to lie very still until a piece of them comes back, an eyebrow, the sound of a laugh, and then he can sleep.

The pain comes and goes. Some days it lives behind his eyes ; some days it climbs up his throat and he cannot speak at all. It gets worse near the field where they found him, where the green rocks glow dim in the dirt, and less when he goes the other way, but it never leaves. Someday he cannot seem to remember whether he has ever felt any other way.)

Lex is bald and Lex is rich and Lex talks like a small, angry encyclopedia, and the boys at Smallville Elementary have decided, by committee, that this is unacceptable.

The committee, it turns out, was convened before he arrived. Their fathers work at the plant, or used to work at the plant, or stopped being able to work at all after the plant, and Luthor is a name they have been hearing at dinner tables their entire short lives.

Something similar happened at boarding school, back before he lost his hair, and back then his mother used to tell him the other boys were only jealous of the vibrant red — now she says nothing at all when he comes home with scrapped knees and his shirt soaked with the spoiled milk they spilled down his collar at lunch. He prefers her silence, mostly. These days he can at least tell himself the boys hate him for his father, rather than for any inherent strangeness of personality or physique, though this does nothing to stop them from commenting on both, at length.

But he can run, now, even if he is not particularly fast, and not having to clutch at his chest while he watches his inhaler get kicked farther and farther is almost worth the sun screen he has to plaster over every inch of his skull every morning. He has also spent the back half of November memorizing the town's rear lots and the irrigation ditches, before the bullying began in earnest, so that he can usually get away without being caught.

He might have been thinking of the memorization as a way to fit in, though admitting it now would be embarrassing. It made sense at the time — something about learning the culture, or at least having something to talk about, like the self-help book his mother gifted him said. No one in the playground had appreciated his project for a new town wide sewer, for some reason.

Today he cuts behind the gym, breathing through his mouth, his chest aching in the good way that only means his body is doing its job at keeping him alive ahead of the boys whooping their awful joy at his back.

He ends up in a thin patch of woods at the edge of the playing field, bent double with his hands on his knees, panting. When he finally raises his head, the boy from the truck is there, and Lex jerks back before he gets a hold of himself — this one might be silent as a ghost, but he is at least no scarecrow nor half-dead teenager strung up in a field.

No, he is only crouched in the leaves with the stillness of a garden gnome, apparently oblivious to Lex's stumbling arrival. He is watching a… centipede? Lex, who had been drifting closer and squinting to see, recoils on instinct, then remembers his entomological exposure training and forces himself to hold his ground with the dignity of a Luthor and the heart rate of a startled rabbit. The insect skitters across the dirt, and the boy does not look up.

"They are coming," says Lex, who has been practicing not crying for so long that his voice comes out flat and a little British, a thing it does when he is frightened. "Sean and — you know."

The other boy looks up at him with every appearance of having no idea who, or what, Lex is talking about. He studies Lex's face, head tilting like a puppy's, then returns his attention to the centipede. Then he stands, slowly, steps in front of Lex with his back to him, and folds his arms.

He is seven, apparently, and shorter than Lex by a few inches. Lex may have unsettled the secretary somewhat when he asked, out of pure and innocent curiosity, after the name of the green-eyed boy in grade 2-A, as well as his address and social security number. Lex had not understood why she gave him that look.

The boys come crashing through the underbrush and stop, and there is a confused beat in which they take in the situation: the bald Luthor kid and the weird foster kid.

Lex takes one single step backward, then, for reasons he cannot account for in himself, stays where he is, planted behind a boy half his size. Resignation, he settles on, over the next pair of shoes he is bound to lose today, perhaps a drop of reluctance at another round of being chased, because he flatly refuses to believe he has lost his survival instinct so thoroughly that he would willingly stand his ground for a kid too stupid to run.

Then the tallest one says, "Oi, Kent, move. We're getting revenge for Ross' dad."

Mike Ross, son of the man who lost his factory to Lex's father. Today it is him, tomorrow it will be somebody else's parent, because Lionel may be too far away to berate Lex in person for letting farm boys push him around, but he is evidently not too far to stop biting chunks off Smallville and making problems for his son.

The other boy, Kent, says, "Go away please." His accent is — strange. Impossible to place. Lex, who has been studying three languages with private tutors, raises a bald eyebrow at it even as he braces for the beating of the century.

It does not come. He cannot see Kent's face, only the stubborn line of his shoulders, but he can watch the other boys' face change by degrees. The smugness and bellicose spirit drain out of them; they start shuffling on their feet and glancing at each other, then Sean — Sean! — declares, with an audible wobble in his voice, "Fine, I was getting tired of chasing the bald freak anyway."

And by some collective animal instinct, the boys start to turn around and leave at a pace just slightly too fast to be called walking.

"… What the hell was that," Lex says, to the empty space where six boys had been a moment ago.

Kent turns around, and Lex takes a step back on reflex, but all that there is a boy of seven, with green eyes a little too old for his face, beaming at him as though Lex has personally hung the moon. Lex's chest tugs, the way that has now grown familiar.

"Ḥaḇar nafshā," Kent says warmly. [2]

Lex blinks. That did not sound like any language he has ever come across. "… Thank you?"

Kent only smiles wider, showing a slightly too numerous amount of teeth, and Lex's ribcage pulls again, traitorously. "Thank you," he repeats with a great deal of formality, because his hands are shaking and he thinks of what his father would say about his son being rescued by a boy half his weight, and the chest is not helping.

The boy nods as though this is the correct response, then kneels back down, pats at the dirt beside him with one filthy hand and points at the centipede, looking back at Lex with clear expectation.

Lex glances at the centipede, then the boy. He crouches down in his good shoes in the dirt, and very nearly doesn't cringe. The centipede, he decides after a moment of close study, is actually rather interesting, and since Lex has just spent two months with no one to talk to and a great deal stored up, he cannot help himself.

"That's not actually an insect, you know," he says. "Common misconception. Insects have six legs, and this one has rather more than that, which makes is a chilopod, which means 'lip-foot', because the first pair of legs aren't really legs, they've evolved into venomous pincers called forcipules." He points, careful not to touch. "Those. They could technically bite you. Well, sting. It's a bit of a debate. The point is you wouldn't enjoy it."

Kent watches his mouth move, which Lex chooses to interpret as a good sign. "They can have anywhere from fifteen to a hundred and seventy-pairs of legs, but never an even number of pairs, which is a genuine biological mystery, nobody knows why, isn't that —" he catches himself, then decides to press on because Kent's stare has a different quality than the students' in Lex's class. "And they're a lot older than us, even older than dinosaurs. This thing's family has been alive on this planet for four hundred million years!"

He runs out of breath, and slightly of nerve, going a faint pink at the ears as he looks at Kent's green eyes that have not blinked once since Lex arrived in the underbrush, which Lex is almost certain is a medically concerning amount of time.

"More please," the boy says, patting the dirt again.

Lex's chest pulls so sharply he nearly says ow. "It's a chilopod," he repeats, slower, watching with fascination as the boy mouths it back at him — chi-loh-paw-da — and Lex suddenly understands that the boy has probably not gotten a single word of what he has just said. "Yes, like that," he says still, at the boy's botched attempt, and the boy beams.

(Clark had felt him before he saw him — the same cord that has been threaded behind his own ribs since he landed. On Krypton his parents had spoken of it like the people here speak of weather, his mother's hand flat on his chest, over the place the cord would someday be tied. He had thought it would be one more thing the ship had carried away from, until the dead corn and the bald boy asleep in the truck, the cord pulling tight enough to ache when Clark had touched him.

He knows Lex. He had known him before milk, before he had understood that Clark meant himself. But knowing is not the same as crossing the lot and making his mouth do what he wants with it, so he had watched from across the field, and he had waited like he waits at the window every night for a star that is already gone.)

Clark lives on a farm, Lex learns. The Kents adopted him in October, just after the meteor shower, which is, Lex notices and does not say, a strange thing to do, adopting a child the same week the sky fell on your town. The Kents are not strange people, in Lex's professional opinion. Mrs. Kent makes pies for the church bake sale and Mr. Kent is on the volunteer fire department. These are facts Lex acquires through entirely respectable channels, like the county records room and small-town gossip, because it turns out his bald head isn't nearly so recognizable under a hat, and because Lex enjoys sneaking around.

Mr. Kent, although he has not said so in so many words, does not like Lex. Mr. Kent has said hello, son and has let his eyes travel over Lex's shoes, and the car waiting at the end of the drive, and then has not said anything else. Lex, who has been disliked by a significant number of people for a variety reasons, and who considers himself something of a connoisseur at his ancient age of nine, gets the message. Although Lex is relieved the Kents do not forbid Clark to see him, there are still afternoons when the steady weight of Jonathan Kent's gaze on the back of his neck makes Lex wish that the man would simply throw a punch or a shout, the way the boys at school do and Lionel sometimes affectionates.

In any case, it is clear that the Kents are exactly the kind of people who do not adopt a child in the middle of a disaster, and they have, but nobody in town seems to find this worth remarking on.

Lex, despite his investigation, hasn't either. The chest-tug has gone — not quieter exactly, but no longer painful, more like a bruise with an ice pack held to it, ever since the afternoon behind the school. For this reason and this reason alone, and certainly not because he now has someone to talk to during recess and after the bell — monologue to, as the traffic is mostly one-directional — Lex is willing to let a few of his questions stay questions. It does not mean he will stop snooping around.

Clark's English is getting better in uneven jumps; he can say field and fence but cannot remember the word for fork. "We did not have those," Clark explains one rainy afternoon in the school library, the two of them bent over an astronomy book with more pictures than words, and Lex, who has approximately two hundred follow-up questions, beginning with who is "we", discovers in himself a previously untested capacity for restraint, and asks none of them.

Clark also laughs, without sound, all shoulders. The first time Lex causes it he loses his entire train of thought and has to be prompted, twice, to finish his sentence. Those days the questions vanish entirely from his mind. Clark laughs with sound once, like a startled donkey, and when Lex went home he wrote the joke down so he might one day reverse-engineer his success.

They look at the stars together often. Clark points at Orion and calls it Kəsîl, and Lex memorizes it like all the other words Clark teaches him in the language he is slowly losing. [3] They lie on their backs on the hill behind the Kents' farm in December, with their coats unzipped because Clark says he is not cold and Lex will not let himself be cold if Clark isn't, and Clark names stars Lex has never heard of. He names himself too, one night, Kal-El, which he says means star child, and Lex writes the name down the same evening and sits looking at it for a long time, thinking of the dream of the boy beneath a red sun.

Clark gets sick sometimes, in the strangest places: near the old Creekside Foundry, and near the rocks Lex's father has started shipping out by the truckload to be studied. He goes leaves-green and quiet, and tells Lex he is fine in a voice that is not fine, a voice Lex has used himself of countless occasions, and which he discovers he cannot stand at all coming out of Clark. On the bad days Lex walks him home the long way, which adds twenty minutes and takes them past the cemetery and nowhere near the rocks, and he fills the extra distance with whatever is on his mind, from Saturn's ring system to a chess opening he is teaching himself out of a library book. Whenever Clark's brow furrows at a word he hasn't met yet, Lex stops and explains it, with enormous gestures and metaphors of escalating absurdity, until one of the two laughs surfaces and the furrow smooths away.

Mr. Kent meets them at the gate, on the bad days, puts a hand on Clark's shoulder and says thank you, Lex and does not invite him to dinner. Lex walks home the long way after that, too, after watching the warm yellow square of the Kents' kitchen window a little too long, his toes numb and his breath fogging.

Things they do, that winter into spring:

They hold hands once, crossing a frozen creek in December. Lex had slipped and Clark had caught him faster than should have been physically possible, and neither of them had not let go afterwards. Lex's hand is smaller than Clark's even though Lex is older and bigger, which Lex finds personally offensive and brings up for approximately six weeks.

They build a baking-soda volcano on the kitchen table at the manor in January, and Lillian, drifting through in her dressing gown, claps for them. She claps a few times and then forgets why she was clapping. Clark watches her go. Lex looks at the volcano, and he does not say anything when Clark's hand finds his under the table. Clark stays for dinner, and somehow the great cold dining hall, where Lex eats alone in every evening, ends up warm, the two of them chasing each other the entire length of the table, shrieking with laughter, leaving their grilled cheese sandwich to go cold and untouched.

(Clark had requested a grilled cheese from Martha every single evening for a fortnight, since the first evening she had made it on, one day where Clark had walked too close to the bad fields. The manor's chef had read the order and considered it an insult to everything he stood for, which Clark had listened to from his bed at the farm, giggling.)

They put a frog in Sean Kelvin's locker in February, or rather attempt to. Lex knows the combination because Sean shut him inside that same locker a week earlier, and Clark supplies the frog and an earnest speech about returning it safely to the pond when they are finished, which runs to a startling four sentences, roughly triple Clark's usual output. Lex promises to do exactly that, in a voice he will deny to his dying day was the least bit unsteady, and in the end they never get as far as the locker at all. They take the frog straight back to the pond, where it is dark and Clark, for once, talks more than Lex does, and Lex sits in the cold mud of the bank ruining his good trousers and cannot make himself regret a second of it. That night Lex adds sahra, for the moon, and ḥadwa, for joy, to the steadily growing Clark-language dictionary he keeps.

Lex is sometimes, still, awful. There are afternoons he hears his father in his own mouth before he can stop it: a small mean comment about the patches on Clark's elbows, about the way Clark holds a fork. Clark goes very quiet on these afternoons, which is worse than if he yelled, and Lex spends the night sleepless and writes apology notes in the margins of his self-imposed Latin homework and brings the best one over in the morning, and is finally able to breathe again only once Clark has read it, tucked it into one of his pocket, and offered Lex half a peach.

In March, Lillian orders a telescope, and the boys assemble it on the back lawn from a diagram, passing the instruction sheet back and forth between them, Clark holding the pieces steady while Lex tightens the screws because Clark broke one small piece when he tried. Lex elects not to remark on the fact that the snapped component had been solid steel. The whole business takes them an hour and a half, by the end of which Lex's fingers have gone white at the tips while Clark's are exactly as warm as they started, so Clark takes both of Lex's hands and folds them between his own, and Lex, flushing furiously, fills the silence with a lecture on the inefficiencies of the human cardiovascular system.

After that the telescope stays set up in Lex's bedroom by the window all winter, and Clark comes over on Friday nights, and they take turns at the eyepiece and argue about which one of them is hogging it. Clark, whose entire rhetorical strategy consists of the word please deployed alongside puppy eyes of terrifying intensity, wins nine times out of ten. Mr. Kent drops Clark at the gate and does not come up to the mansion, which Lex gracefully ignores.

Clark says, one afternoon, "You are my friend", the way he says everything he has rehearsed in advance, which Lex has grown an ear for. Lex says, "Yes, obviously", after a too long silence, and goes home and lies on his bed for an hour because his chest hurts in a way it has never hurt before.

In April, when the river is finally warm enough, they jump in.

It is Clark's idea, because he is the only person present who believes the river is warm enough. Lex points out that the river is snowmelt. Clark points out that Clark does not feel cold. Lex points out that Lex does. Clark, very generously, offers to push him in.

Lex jumps in before Clark can push him and the water is, in fact, freezing. He comes up swearing in three languages, because Lex will not let the imminent prospect of hypothermia rob him of an opportunity to show off, and Clark laughs the donkey laugh so hard that he snorts water up his nose and has to hold onto a root to stay upright. They haul themselves out and lie side by side on the bank under a gentle spring sun, their clothes plastered to them, their teeth — or at least, Lex's teeth — chattering.

Clark turns his face up to the sky. "This is the best day. Shlama li." [4]

Lex turns his head. He has catalogued a great many of Clark's words by now, but this is a new one, and so, for that matter, is best — Clark says good and okay, and has never once in Lex's hearing promoted anything to best. "What does that one mean?"

Clark hums. "Like — nothing is pulling. Inside." He taps his own chest, over the sternum, in roughly the sport where Lex's own does its mysterious tugging, which Lex notices and frantically declines to think about.

"Your birthday is next month," he says instead.

"Ah."

"May 3. You don't know your own birthday?"

Clark cracks one eye open. "We did not do that."

There it is again, we. Lex has had practice, by now, not to let any of the questions slip past his lips. "Well, you have one now. So." He clears his throat with great formality. "What would you like?"

Clark thinks about it a long time, and Lex watches a piece of cottonwood fluff land in his hair. "Nothing, I think."

"Nothing?" The thought is ludicrous. Lex scales down on his original ideas, and privately shelves the half-formed plan to acquire Clark a pony, mostly out of consideration for Jonathan Kent's heart issues.

"This." Clark lifts one hand off the grass and sweeps it overhead, at the river, at the enormous blue nothing of the sky, and then, possibly, at Lex. "I have this. So, nothing."

Lex looks very hard at the river and does not say anything for a while, because his chest is doing the tugging thing again, and there is nothing in his head to fill the silence.

He still gets Clark a star chart, on the third day of May, because the alternative does something painful in his chest. A telescope was the obvious choice and the rejected one, since a telescope at the farm would render the Friday visits to the manor redundant, and Lex is, if nothing else, a strategist. Clark unwraps it slowly and looks at it in total silence long enough for Lex to begin composing a defense of the gift, then winds both arms around Lex's neck and holds on. Lex pats him twice on the shoulder, stiffly, and tries very hard appear calm while his pulse attempts to ruptures his arteries. Mrs. Kent, in the kitchen doorway with a dish towel, makes a small sound and turns away.

Lex's mother gets worse that month, which is not a sudden thing — she has been declining since she and Lex arrived in Smallville, something the doctors mutter about in connection to meteor radiation whenever they think Lex is out of earshot — but in May it stops being something Lex can put on her ordinary strangeness. He has a private theory that it is a matter of balance, since he has been so unforgivably happy lately, and his father has always maintained that life saves its sharpest lessons for the fool who believes himself fortunate. The doctor from Metropolis stays three hours and leaves without addressing a single word to Lex. The nurse stays, and Lex stands in the corridor pressing his fingernails into his palms until they leave little crescents.

His father does not come, because of a meeting that cannot be moved, and Lex knows better than to ask.

Clark, who has been told none of this and who Lex is nevertheless privately certain knows all of it, starts coming over more. He brings things from the farm that makes Lillian's face flicker briefly back to life: a jar of raspberry jam one week, a box of apples so sweet they taste like candy the next. Lex makes himself ill working through half the box in a single sitting at his desk, listening to her cough through the ceiling, thinking that if the universe intends to punish him for happiness regardless, he may as well commit to the bit. The Friday telescope visits turn into Tuesdays, and then a Wednesday, and finally a whole weekend in which the two of them fall asleep head to head under one blanket, a single failing flashlight propped between them and Lex's book on the rings of Saturn open across both their chests.

In late June, on a warm Thursday, Lex comes home from one of the last days of the school year on his own and finds his mother sitting up in bed, more lucid than she's been in months.

"Alexander?" Her eyes are wide and clear, a blue he had filed away as gone for good. "Baby, you've grown so tall."

Has he? Clark has been shooting up like a tree, lately, and Lex is conflicted over the subject. "Yes, Mom."

She holds his gaze a beat past comfortable. He stays where he is in the doorway, weight shifting from one foot to the other.

"Come here, sweetheart." She turns mobile all at once, patting the coverlet, as if someone offstage has fed her the line. "Come, sit. How have you been?"

They live in the same house, Lex thinks, and does not say. "Good. Better." He perches at the edge of the room rather than the edge of the bed, and then, because the silence is heavy and filling silences is the one thing he is reliably good at, it spills out of him: "We saw Comet Levy last Friday, at four in the morning. It was discovered by a man in his own backyard, can you imagine, his third comet — David Levy, he's quite well known — which suggests anyone could do it, even us, if we stayed up late enough. It's tracking through Pegasus at the moment but it'll cross into Andromeda by the end of the month, and I've told Clark it might go naked-eye, which would be—"

He hears himself, and stops, feeling the heat climb all the way to the crown of his bald head.

Lillian's mouth curves. "Clark. The Kent boy."

Lex nods and finds the cuff of his sleeve very interesting.

"He came over to dinner, once." She says it as a discovery, never minding that Lex had been the one to seat him. "He held his fork as though it had just been given to him that morning. Did I mention it? I thought it perfectly charming."

She has mentioned it, the day after and two days after, and once more last week with Lex halfway through reading her a chapter, and each time she had thought she was telling him for the first time. Lex says, "Yes, you did. And he did."

"Charming." She pats the mattress beside her hip. "Come closer. I shan't bite, darling, I haven't the strength."

The mattress dips under him, more than it used to, because she has grown so light, and he is careful about where he sets his weight, and more careful about where he sets his trust. There have been versions of this bedside, in Metropolis and elsewhere, where come here, darling was only the opening of a convincing speech, and a small Lex had been handed a line to deliver downstairs to his father, sometimes earning his right cheek the back of a hand. He watches her for the tell, and doesn't find it. That frightens him in a different way.

"Tell me about him."

"There isn't much to—"

She cuts him off, with a voice that is a ghost of the one that used to command ballrooms. "Alexander. I am asking my son to tell something that makes him happy. Indulge a sick woman, will you? It's nearly the only entertainment left to me."

So he tells her, in careful chosen pieces: the centipede, without the chase, and the volcano, which he knows she has forgotten, if she has ever known at all. The river in April goes through, even though he was expressively forbidden to swim in, because he knows it will amuse her now. The donkey laugh, but not its meaning, and the star chart on the third day of May and not the hug that came after. He tells her about the telescope, finally, past the point he meant to stop at, because she is listening the way she used to listen before all of this, head tilted, lips holding that not-quite-smile he has caught on his own face in mirrors, and he is suddenly, childishly afraid that if he finishes the story she will leave again before he can start a new one.

"You love him," she says when he has finally run dry. Her thumb moves slowly over the back of his hand

His face goes hot. "He's my friend."

"That is what I said." She studies him, her face unreadable like it usually is when she is in her body, and he has had so little practice this year. "You father will not understand it."

Lex nods, because this is obvious.

"He will try to understand him as a thing he can use, or have. Do you know what I mean?"

He hesitates, and then nods.

Her grip finds her old strength, the bones digging into his flesh. "Do not help him, whatever else you do."

"I wouldn't!" It comes out loud, fierce and scared underneath.

"Oh, my darling, you will think you wouldn't, that is how he does it." Her face softens, her eyes shining like old, worn out stones. "He will make you think you are protecting him, and he will let you believe the protection was your idea. He did it to me for years. I want you to understand that I wasn't a fool the entire time. Only most of it."

"I don't think you were a fool."

"You will, later."

She says it kindly, without heat, and he has nothing for that, so he turns his hand over under hers and holds on. She lets him, her eyes drifting shut for long enough that his stomach drops, certain that she has gone under again.

Then, without opening them: "Is he kind to you?"

He blinks. "Who, Clark?" She hums. He presses on, "Of course he is. It's Clark."

A breath of a laugh. "Good. That's the important thing." Her thumb resumes its slow circle. "Your father was kind to me too, you understand. In the beginning. They always are at the beginning. It's how the door gets left open." Her voice thins. "Mind the door, Alexander."

"Mom—"

"I'm tired now." She sinks into the pillow, and something in her face quietly unclenches, something that has the heaviness of years, and Lex realizes with a lurch that she looks relieved, and hates, in the same instant, that he understands why. "Tell Clark I said hello, won't you."

"You can tell him yourself. He's coming Friday."

"Mm." Her mouth moves. "Yes. Friday."

She is asleep before the word has finished. Lex stays on the edge of the bed with her hand in his until the nurse comes in at six and tells him, very gently, that his mother needs her rest now.

The next morning Lillian is sleeping and will not wake up, the nurse says, and the evening Lex spends with Clark around the telescope is quieter and shorter than usual. The morning after that, the same.

Lionel flies in on Sunday. Lex hears the helicopter before he sees the car, the chop in the air that has meant Father since before Lex could spell the world. The winds rattle the windows of a house that has spent eight months being quiet. By the time the door opens, Lex has put his face in order and repositioned himself at the top of the stairs, because being found hiding would be worse than being found.

Lionel does not go to Lex first, passing by him without a word on his way upstairs, to the woman who will not wake, and stays behind her door for eleven minutes by the hall clock. He comes down again with nothing visibly different in his expression, and only then does he looks at his son.

A hand settles on Lex's shoulder, heavy. "Alexander. You've been at the neighbors' often, I hear."

Lex doesn't let himself move. "Yes, Dad."

His thumb presses into the muscle of Lex's shoulder once and releases. Lex will find the shape of it in the evening, during his shower. "We don't make a spectacle of ourselves in front of strangers who will sell the story for the price of a tractor part, Lex. Whatever is coming," he tips his head minutely towards the stairs, "we meet it standing up, and together."

"Yes, Dad."

"Good."

The word hits the same soft place in Lex's throat it has always had, fitting around his airway like a collar. Lionel goes off to make phone calls about a death that has not technically happened yet.

Lex spends the rest of that week with his breath held, his hand curling in his pocket for an inhaler he has stopped carrying nine months ago. Lionel does not ask Lex how he is.

Clark does not come over the following Friday. Lex calls the farm from the kitchen the day before and tells him not to, because his mother is not well. Clark says okay, Lex and then they listen to each other breathe, the long-distance hiss between the manor and the farm, until Mrs. Kent says, in the background, to think about the phone bill and Clark hangs up with a Goodnight, Lex that goes unanswered.

Lillian dies on the second day of July, a week after the call, two days before Lex's birthday, which strikes Lex as exactly the sort of joke his life has begun reliably telling at his expense.

The nurse comes to find him on the stairs, where he has stationed himself every afternoon since the bedroom, as though sitting close enough to the second floor might count for something. She tells him very gently. The words arrive from a long way off, like Lex is underwater. He nods, and thanks her, and thinks a half-second later that thanking her was an odd thing to do, and that he ought to go up and see his mother one last time. Then he walks out the kitchen door and walks to the Kent farm in his slippers.

He gets there at dusk with his feet rubbed raw, and Martha opens the door before he can knock. She puts her arms around him, and Lex stands very still inside them.

When she lets go she keeps her hands on his shoulders and looks at his face long enough that his eyes flee down to his ruined slippers.

"Oh, honey — your feet."

She brings him inside and sits him at the table, then she fills a basin with cold water and washes the raw places with hands so careful they go blurry in his vision. She does not mention it. She works eucalyptus-scented cream into the cuts, humming low and tuneless under her breath. Lex look very hard at a knot in the pine tabletop.

"There," she murmurs, winding soft bandages over his feet. "You poor thing, walking all that way."

She pulls a pair of Clark's thick wool socks up over the bandages, patting each one when she's done.

"Jonathan's in town. He'll be back within the hour." She sits back on her heels and looks up at him. Whatever she finds in his face makes her own go soft and sorry. "Have you eaten anything today, sweetheart?"

"No. Thank you, Martha." His voice is steady. He uses her name because she spent eight months coaxing it out of him, every single time he tried to hide behind Mrs. Kent.

"Then there's half a peach pie in the fridge, and it'll keep till you want it." She rises, one hand briefly cupping the side of his bald head as she passes, so naturally he doesn't have time to flinch. "Clark's up the hill as usual. Go on and find him — mind those feet on the grass, and take the flashlight by the door." She catches his sleeve. "Honey. Does your dad know where you are?"

"No."

She closes her eyes for a second. "Alright. Go on, I'll take care of it."

The hill is just past the orchard, and Clark is on his back at the top of it in the grass, feet bare. Lex switches the flashlight off at the bottom and climbs the rest of the way in the dark, by feel and by the pull behind his sternum, and lies down in the cold grass beside him.

They look at the sky.

"My mom died," Lex says, to the stars.

"I know."

Lex does not ask how, like he did not ask how Martha knew before he opened the door.

(Kal had heard the heartbeat slow, three fields and a county road away, then stop. He had found Lex's next, the one heart he can sort out of every heart in the state, and felt it going fast but going, and only then let himself breathe.

Clark had climbed down and told his parents before any telephone could ring, and had watched his father's face flinch like it always does when his son knows something a human child would have no way of knowing. Jonathan said he was going for a drive, which meant he was going to the bar in town. Martha sighed, and gave Clark a hug. Clark then went up the hill to wait, because the cord behind his ribs had already gone taut across the dark, because he could hear the gravel of the road below Lex's slippers, and he knew that Lex was on his way.)

"Your feet are hurt," Clark says.

"Better now. Martha fixed them." And then there is nothing, the endless chatter that usually fills every silence Lex is in now dried out, and he lies there scraped empty beside Clark and cannot find one word, in any of the language whose knowledge he hoards, to set into the place where his mother used to be.

Clark does not seem to mind the silence. After a while he lifts an arm out of the grass and points. Lex follows the line of it to a patch of sky to the south, just above the dark line of the orchard.

"There," Clark says. "Home was there."

Lex knows that word. Clark gave it to him in the winter, lying in the same grass. House, the place you belong to. Lex wrote it down that night like all the others, but hearing it now, aimed at an empty stretch of sky, makes Lex's throat tighten.

Clark goes on, low. "I look every night. To be sure it is still gone."

"I'm sorry," Lex says, and hates the words the instant they leave him, the emptiness Clark spared him about Lillian.

Clark doesn't twitch. He lowers his arm back into the grass. "I had a mother, before. Her name was Lara."

It's a very normal name for someone who lives in the stars, Lex thinks. He does not say it, partly because he has already said one wrong thing and won't say another, and mostly because his heart has gotten too loud to talk over, loud for a hundred reasons, from alien all the way down to he's telling me, he has never told anyone this.

"Was she kind?"

"Very kind." The smile arrives and then slides off Clark's face quickly. "Some days I only have the laugh, but no mouth. Some days nothing, and then I am—" his jaw works around the shape of it "— afraid."

"What do you do," Lex asks, very quietly, "on the days there's nothing."

Clark turns his head in the grass, towards Lex, who has been watching him for some time. "I go to you. Whatever is gone, you are still there."

Lex's breathes hitches. His eyes have started to burn, and for once he lets them.

"You can go to me too," Clark says. "When you have nothing. You come, and there is me." He reaches across the cold grass and finds Lex's hand, covering it with his own warm one, exactly as he was on the frozen creek in winter, and under the table at the manor, and in the garden after they built the telescope. "Ḥaḇar nafshā. I told you it. It means I do not let go."

Lex is fairly sure it doesn't mean that, but he lets it stand, and turns his hand over under Clark's, and holds on, while overhead the comet they promised each other in April keeps burning its slow way toward Andromeda.

Lionel comes the next morning. The black car eases up the dirt drive, the chauffeur swearing under his breath at the mud stains on the metal. There was a phone call, an hour earlier, that Mrs. Kent took in the kitchen with one hand on the counter and the other on the receiver at her ear, saying yes and he slept here, he was very tired, until she stopped saying anything and only listened, her knuckles going pale on the countertop. Mr. Kent had been sitting at the table, eyes on his journal but not reading. He had been silent since the night before, when he came back from the bar and found Lex in Clark's bedroom, and apparently intended to keep being so.

Lex is on the porch in Clark's clothes, a flannel with the sleeves a bit too short and a pair of jeans going up to his mid shins. His feet are bare, still shining faintly with ointment, and Clark is on the step beside him, close enough that their shoulders press together the whole length of the arm.

The car door opens. Lionel rises out of it, black suit rumpled and black loafers sinking into the dirt.

"Alexander," his father calls out, ice cold eyes, red-rimmed, on the clothes Lex is wearing, on the space where Clark and he are touching. Not on Clark himself. "Get in the car. "

The consequences will come later, Lex hears. With no one to witness them.

Lex breathes in, then out. His hand finds Clark's in the gap between them.

The screen door creaks, and Mr. Kent comes down the steps unhurried, and stops at the bottom of them, between Lionel and the two boys.

Lionel smiles, the skin of his cheeks drawn tight. "Mr. Kent."

"Mr. Luthor."

Lex stares at Mr. Kent's back, flannel-covered, the shoulders squared.

"Mr. Kent," Lionel repeats, almost pleasantly, "I'm in your debt. You've sheltered my son in a difficult hour. The Luthors don't forget."

Mr. Kent does not answer, but Lex, who is looking closely, sees his right hand twitch.

Lionel sees it too, and something eases around his temples. "You'll forgive a grieving father his bluntness. The boy didn't tell a soul where he was going, walking out his own home, in the dark, on the night his mother—"

His breath hitches, and Lex cannot tell if it is faked. He cannot let himself believe the opposite.

"And he turned up here, of all places. You can appreciate, I think, how that sits with me."

Lionel's gaze slides to Lex, and Lex does not look down.

He already knows he is getting in the car. He knew before leaving the manor the night before. But all week his father has shown nothing, and being the only one who carried the grief had been half of what made it unbearable. Now he sees the creases in the suit Lionel keeps flawless, and the same bruised color Lex has been wearing under his eyes, and he leans towards it, the bottomless grief inside of him that had latched itself onto Clark turning its head towards the only other person who lost her.

"He was hurting," Mr. Kent says, low. "He came somewhere he felt safe."

Lex's head comes up. He stares at the side of Jonathan Kent's face, and thinks of being handed back at the gate eight months running, at being found wanting in those eyes, and does not think past that.

Lionel only looks back at Mr. Kent, his face building itself back up into its familiar wall. "He felt safe, yes." A pause, and Lionel tilts his head. "You have a son of your own, do you not? Adopted, I'm told."

His eyes drift to Clark on the door step. Goosebumps raise on Lex's forearms. "So you understand — forgive me, this is delicate — that there is a difference between a child you have made and a child you are merely sheltering. One is yours by nature. The other is yours only so long as no one with a better claim comes up the drive."

It takes a second to land. When it does, Mr. Kent's jaw goes tight, and for a second Lex thinks he is going to cross the last few feet and put Lionel flat in the mud — and Jonathan is a big man, and Lionel is a man who pays other people to be big for him, so Lex thinks he'd win. He does not ask himself how that would make him feel.

Mr. Kent doesn't. He has a son on the step to think about, and Lionel knows it.

He nods, turning back to Lex, and he does not need to say anything else.

Lex stands up, and Clark stands up with him, instantly, like they're strung on the same wire. Lex turns and looks at him — the too-old eyes already brimming, the bottom lip going unsteady — and the cord behind his sternum pulls so hard his throat click.

"I'm coming back," Lex says, low enough it will only reach his ears. "You said it — we don't let go. So I'm coming back."

A tear gets loose and slides down Clark's face. He nods, jaw clenched against the rest of it.

Lex lets go of Clark's hand and walks down the steps past Mr. Kent, then past his father. The leather of the seats is cold against the borrowed jeans.

Lionel says nothing for a moment. Then, settling back: "That boy. You're fond of him."

Lex says nothing.

"It's all right to be fond of things, Lex. Only remember who keeps them for you."

Through the rear window, as the car turns around, Lex watches Clark go small and then smaller and then gone.

Somewhere past the city limits where the cornfields begin to thin, the chest-tug starts again. He has not had it like this since October, and he had forgotten what it felt like — the string pulled taut behind his sternum, hauling up his lungs after it and then reaching for his heart. He presses a hand flat to his chest and makes himself breathe in measured counts, the gesture familiar.

The funeral is in Metropolis, four days later. Lex wears the suit his mother bought him in May, which he didn't know about. It does not fit him in the shoulders anymore, so he stands very straight not to feel the seams pulling, and decides this is fitting, that he should be slightly the wrong size for his own mother's last gift. The ceremony he mostly forgets, beyond his father's hand on his shoulder and the dryness of his own eyes.

That night Lex throws up twice, the second time not in the bathroom. The housekeeper doesn't comment. She brings him a glass of water and strips the bed around him while he sits shaking in the armchair, and she does not touch him, which he is grateful for and also not.

(In Smallville, Clark has been up in the loft for three days and will not come down. Martha brings food up the ladder and leaves it on the floorboards, and in the morning it is there where she left it. On the second night she climbs up to find him at the round window, and she sits down behind him in the straw and does not try to make him talk. She has worked out months ago that her son is grieving two people he has never named to her, but that night there is a third, alive and a hundred miles away.)

In the morning he cannot get up.

The doctors come back and put their cold instruments to his heart and lungs and find, again, a remarkably healthy boy. They tell his father that he is grieving, that grief sometimes presents physically in children of this age.

Lionel's lip curls, and Lex, watching from the bed, can hear the thought behind his father's face as clearly as if it had been spoken aloud — Luthors do not grieve. We do not have that luxury. What Lionel says, in front of the men he is paying, is, "He did precisely this nine months ago, and nobody had died yet."

Some people did die, Lex thinks, in Smallville, and in the dark patch of sky to the south. The doctors say they are sure it will pass, and Lionel hires new ones. He does not pass by Lex's room.

Lex stops eating. Then he stops standing because the room goes gray at the edges every time he tries. He measures the days by the light on the ceiling and by the dreams, which are always Clark and always not enough of him. He wonders, sometimes, whether his mother would be saddened his son would wipe her away from his mind, rather than bear the weight of her memory.

At the end of the week, his father comes to him. The bedroom, in the apartment Lex had vacated for months, is entirely impersonal beyond the slight smell of vomit the maid has not managed to air out, and an old teddy bear with one eye that belonged to Lex's mother. Lionel stands at the foot of the bed, his face smooth and his arms crossed.

He stares at Lex for a long moment — the gaunt face, the wheezing breaths. Lex wonders if he sees someone else in his place.

"Stand up."

Lex blinks, then tries. Half of it is his own, the bird in his chest who calls for rivers and fields, and the other half, like the other half of his entire self, belongs to his father. Not twice, he thinks, and he will be alone. He still tries his hardest. His heart goes frantic against the inside of his ribs, a trapped animal throwing itself at the bars, and his arms tremble like twigs in the wind before they let go. His body sinks in the pillow.

Lionel breathes out with him, slow and deep over Lex's whistling gasp.

His father, who did not wait to catch him the first time he learned to walk, takes him by the elbows and hauls him upright, the grip hard enough to leave marks. Lionel's face comes down close to his. Lex does not look away from those eyes, the cold of them Lex knows by heart and a grief underneath them, a thing that has nowhere acceptable to go and so has turned itself, like the rest of the house, into a thing to be controlled.

"You are a Luthor. You will not lie in a bed and waste away over a dead woman and a —" He cannot say it, his mouth creasing as though the mere thought of it, the farm boy, refuses to take shape. "You are mine, Alexander, do you understand me — not hers, not theirs. Mine."

Lex's mouth opens, and his throat clicks. The words scutter across his tongue — yes, Dad, only you, I'm sorry —, the words that will chew through the rope around his heart, and his father might, possibly, finally, be happy.

It would be so easy, he thinks. And he is not going to do it.

He does not entirely understand why, only that Clark is at the other end of the rope and the rope is the first thing that was ever Lex's and not his father's, and that giving Clark up to be loved would be a kind of dying he would not come back from.

His father lets go of him after seconds of silence, and Lex crumples to the rug and is sick again, on his own front this time, and stays curled there on the floor with his hands over his head a long while before he understands that the room is empty and has been for some minutes.

That night his fever goes to a hundred and four. The housekeeper, against instruction, calls one of the dismissed doctors, who comes in slippers and puts an IV in Lex's arm.

Lex, like every other night, dreams of Clark. Clark sitting at a kitchen window with his forehead pressed against the glass, looking for a star or a boy in the driveway. Clark on the riverbank in April with cottonwood in his hair. Clark small against a blackness with no bottom and no walls, his whole frame coming apart with sobs Lex can feel in his own chest, the lone shape of a boy against infinite blackness, and Lex wakes with both thin arms stretched out, reaching for nothing. He retches pale yellow bile onto the duvet and the doctor wipes his mouth without a word.

(A hundred miles away, Clark will not stay in his bed and cannot stay out of it. He drifts up and down the loft ladder at all hours, he sits too long by the window. He does not eat. The memories he had been slowly, mercifully losing, come flooding back at once, sharp-edged, as though the cord pulling has dragged the whole gone planet up with it. Some nights he is back in the ship, the long dark and the small window. Martha learned, the first time, not to shake him away, when her arm had kept the shape of his hand, blue as the sky, for a week. She had not let Jonathan see it. Now she sits in the corner chair through the worst of the nights and talks to him, Clark, honey, you're home, you're at the farm, it's Tuesday, the cow had her calf this morning, until the boy surfaces gasping, and reaches for her. He is careful now, to be gentle with his hands.)

In the morning Lionel orders the car.

His father drives it himself, which Lex cannot remember him doing since — he cannot remember it at all, in fact and the strangeness of it is the last clear thought he holds before his head lolls sideways against the cold leather, his breath coming thin and whistling.

For a long while Lionel stays silent. He glances over, now and then, at Lex's shape crumpled against the door, and Lex, drifting, watches the glances change. He thinks he sees anger still, at first, when the landscape outside the windows still paints gray with cement and steel. It melts with the green of the corn, and Lex uncurling in the chair, sitting up on his own for the first time since the funeral.

Resignation, Lex thinks at first.

"They say the meteors changed you."

Lex watches Lionel's fingers tighten around the wheel, the knuckles going white, and doesn't say anything.

"Lucas will come live with me in Metropolis."

He has never heard that name before.

His father tells him, in a flat voice, about a woman in Edge City, and a boy of seven, healthy, in Metropolis already, and — his father does say it but Lex hears it — a boy who does not get sick when he leaves a town whose only exports are corn cream and high-school quarterbacks.

"You will stay at the manor." His father's eyes flick to him in the rear-view mirror, then back to the road.

Grief, he realizes. The red-rimmed thing Lex saw that morning on the farm, its acceptation, and the walls coming right back up to seal the bleeding heart behind them. Lex, who has turned ten years old less than a month ago, who has spent all of them reading his parents from the inside out, reads it without trying: it is mercy, and it is being given away, and he bites the inside of his cheek until he tastes copper.

Lex thinks, or wishes, that his father might say something else, like This is not what I wanted, or Be well, but he doesn't.

When they pull up to the manor, his father does not come inside, and Lex stands on the gravel with his bag as he watches the car turn and go back down the drive.

(At the Kents' farm, Martha has shaken Jonathan awake at five to tell him he is coming, Clark says he is coming, and Jonathan has stopped asking how Clark knows the things he knows. Today he gets up and puts the coffee on.)

He waits until dark to go to the farm, the cicadas buzzing in the background as he walks. Proper shoes this time, and his head out of the water.

Mrs. Kent answers the door and her face shows — relief, he thinks, and underneath a worry. She crouches down to his level, her arms open. "Oh, Lex, honey. Come here, come."

"Mrs Kent — Martha," he says, correcting himself, bearing her embrace with a stiffness he has not managed to overcome.

Except Mr. Kent comes up behind her, and when he looks at Lex his jaw sets like it did when Lex's dad drove up the farm's alley. Lex, over Martha's shoulder, notices the new things in his face — the bruised hollows under his eyes, the stubble grown past the standard accepted in town.

"You can't be here right now," Mr. Kent says, flat.

Martha lets go of Lex with a sigh. "Jonathan, please."

There is recognition — Martha pleading for him, facing her own husband. But the rope in his chest pulls harder, past them and into the kitchen, where Clark stands in the doorway with both hands gripping the frame. Thinner than Lex has ever seen him.

"Lex," Clark says, and Lex can't help the smile that breaks over his face, the knot behind his sternum coming undone for the first time in two weeks.

Mr. Kent plants a hand on the doorframe, between them. "Son. Go back inside."

Clark does not move. He does not come closer, either, simply standing exactly where he is and looking at his father, but Lex sees Mr. Kent's face twitching.

"He can come back in the daytime," Mr. Kent says, the words coming out of him like they're being pulled with pliers. "With his father's permission."

Lex tilts his head. His mouth says, "My father has left Smallville," but to Clark, silently, he asks Are you okay?

Clark's face softens. Yes. You?

Mr. Kent doesn't say anything, but his teeth come together hard enough that Lex hears it. Martha folds her arms across her own chest.

"It's all right," Lex says, to Clark, only to Clark. "I'll come back tomorrow."

He goes home with his calves aching and lies in his bed without sleeping, watching the ceiling go from black to gray. At dawn he gets up, puts his coat on over his pajamas and his good shoes over his bare feet, and walks down the drive, then across the road and into the corn.

It is mid-July, and the corn is taller than he is. The leaves slice thin lines into his hands and his scalp, which makes him feel he belongs to this land more than cream corn ever did. He walks until his tired legs and his empty stomach give out together, and then he sits down between two rows where the dirt is soft and cool. He lies back and falls asleep from one second to the next.

(A mile off, Clark is not sleeping. He lies on his back on top of the covers with the dead planet bright behind his eyes and the boy alive in his chest. At dawn, he hears the gravel beneath Lex's feet and gets up. He goes to his parents' room and shakes his father by the shoulder, with the gentleness he has had to learn. If you do not come with me, he says, I will go to him alone.)

Jonathan Kent drives the truck along the back roads for a long time, slower and slower, Clark in the passenger seat with both hands flat on the dash and his nose up in the air like a hound. Jonathan does not let himself think about that.

"Here," Clark says, his eyes too wide and the second half of the world rolled like a different language.

Jonathan stops the truck. Through the windshield he sees the cornfield by the south road, the same field they pulled Clark out of in October. The crater is long since plowed under and grown over, but the shape of it is still there if you know where to look. He remembers, against his will the hour after that: the smell of scorched earth, the bald, half-conscious rich man's boy he had had to pick up himself because his father hadn't wanted to touch him. His hands close on the wheel until the knuckles go white.

Clark is already out of the truck and into the corn, not looking back. Jonathan follows.

Lex is in the old crater, asleep, curled like a fetus with his bald head catching the early light and his school shoes caked with mud. Clark drops down to his knees beside him, the gesture too fluid for human joints, and lays a hand on Lex's cheek. Jonathan stands three feet back and remembers it, again, can't not remember it: ten months ago, this same boy, his son reaching out to touch the face of the person who'd been broken open by the sky that night.

Lex's eyes drift open. His voice is cracked and dry when he says, "Kal."

Clark smiles, the open face one. The one Jonathan described to Martha, late and unguarded, as the one where he looks almost like an ordinary boy, and Clark had not met his eyes for a week afterward.

"You came back," Clark said.

"I said I would." Lex's eyes are wet.

Clark says something then, low and fast, four or five words in the language Jonathan has tried not to hear, and whatever it is makes Lex laughs, a real laugh, and answer in the same tongue, the consonants in the wrong places, and Clark laughs too.

And Jonathan, watching, sees at last the thing he has been refusing to see for the better part of a year. He sees his son haul the Luthor boy up by both arms, half-carrying him, the two of them never once letting go of one another. He sees the color come back into Clark's cheeks, watching Lex. He sees that the brightening he has been so grateful for, all these months — the boy learning to laugh, to want breakfast — has had this name on it the whole time, and he hadn't let himself read it.

He thinks: I could still send him away. I could put this boy back in his castle and drive my son home and forbid it, and Clark would obey me, this once, because he loves me.

He thinks: And he would never look at me the same way again. And in five years, or ten, he would go anyway, and he would not tell me.

Clark turns to look at him over Lex's shoulder, his small face expectant, certain. The boy is not afraid his father will say no.

Jonathan crouches down to their level.

Lex's face freezes, the wariness slamming back into it. "Mr. Kent, I'm sorry to—"

"None of that now." It comes out gentler than Jonathan means it to. He gets an arm behind the boy's knees and another behind his back and picks him up without asking, like picking up his own.

The boy weighs nothing. Jonathan carries him through the corn the way he carried him out in October — same field, same boy gone lighter — and lays him in the bed of the truck on the folded blanket Clark has put there himself. Clark climbs in after him and settles Lex's head into his lap.

Jonathan drives, his eyes on the road.

"You were sick," Lex says, muffled and certain. "I felt it."

"I felt you too." Clark's hand moves over the curve of Lex's skull, slow. "I looked for your heart, in all the hearts. I found it, even far."

"That's not possible," Lex says, with enormous satisfaction, his hand reaching up to smack Clark's arm, lightly.

Clark hums, unbothered, which Lex has learned means yes, and?

"I have a brother now," Lex says to the sky scrolling past the window. "Lucas. I've never met him. He gets to live in the city because he doesn't get—" he stops, and starts over smaller. "Because he works right."

Clark says something in the other language.

"What does that mean?"

"It means you work right." Clark's jaw is set. "He is wrong about you."

Lex doesn't answer that, his throat tight. After a moment he says, "What did you do, while I was gone? Besides moping."

"I did not mope. I broke the fence, and the cow was angry with me."

Lex laughs, helpless, and Clark grins down at him, and over the noise of the engine Jonathan hears his son say, in plain English so there will be no mistaking it:

"I won't let anyone take you again."

Jonathan turns the truck up the farm drive. Martha is on the porch with the screen door propped open behind her, and through it he can see the table laid for breakfast — four plates — and he understands his wife made the choice he has just finished making months ago, and had the decency to let him get there himself.